The Culture Of Tile New Suburbia

...The suburban point of view is rather different...

...The result at worst would be another generation of uncreative consumers for whom being cultured is simply part of the universally accepted social role to which they conform...

...It is conceivable that expatriate suburbanites will move to vestigial bohemias in the city and come to terms with themselves through art...

...At present some writers and artists are residents of suburbia, but even these were either born in the South or in the slums and the hinterlands...

...Its authors came to suburbia late in life...

...It is the final irony that our last best hope lies with the rebellious youth who may save us all from suffocation by suburban culture...

...Men like Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Jacob Epstein and John Dos Passos were not interested in art as an abstraction or in art as an article of consumption...

...it seems to spring rather from a socially induced need to exhibit prestigeful symbols...

...This is all the more remarkable because it flies in the face of a wellestablished American tradition according to which art is unserious, effete, suitable only for women as a pastime and an expression of their subordinate status...

...The extraordinary pervasiveness of culture presents a number of novel phenomena...

...Yet as recently as 1920 high culture was available only to the really rich...

...Their characters are "suburban" only in a pre-war, and therefore obsolete, sense...

...But where in suburbia can we expect rebellion...

...We all know how deeply sex roles have been revolutionized and homogenized, how many "feminine" tasks men perform and "masculine" tasks women have usurped...

...Insofar as this kind of rebellion is directed by gifted youth against their parents and against their parents' environment, but not against art itself, a new source of creativity may be discovered...

...It offers culture to everyone, with approval for those who earnestly acquire some and prestige for those who acquire the most...

...Whether such rebellion can be translated into art is an open question, but we see a glimmering of hope in, say, one or two stories of Phillip Roth—who is incredibly facile, richly corrosive and unbelievably young...

...This volte face does not seem to spring from any inner need to express a vision of life...

...Any answer would at present be premature...

...One can imagine a literature in which hostility to the suburbs will then be the most significant cultural outcome of suburban life, just as hostility to the town was the most significant cultural outcome of life in the American small town of several decades ago...

...Conformist art is at present a contradiction in terms...

...It is a force that imposes its reality on the inner man, whereas earlier culture more frequently originated in an internal motivation and sometimes expressed itself very awkwardly...

...and if that bent was pronounced, sooner or later his masculinity was bound to be questioned...

...A serious account of the suburbs does not yet exist inside or outside of fiction...

...John Hersey's Marmot Drive and Granville Hicks' Small Town are earnest efforts to treat exurbia...

...Until approximately the First World War (and excluding Boston, which was a special source of official culture), urban slums had for some time been a major seedbed of cultural production...

...This leads to an apparent paradox: the more culture there is, the less intrinsically meaningful it becomes...

...To a considerable extent, writers trade on the emotional and intellectual capital of their youth...

...Culture in the suburbs pervades our furnishings and our talk and is at the same time, and by the same token, far removed from the core of our personality...

...Space is put to unaccustomed use: not only the Merry-Go-Rounders for the kiddies in their own high school auditorium, but the same auditorium for their parents' amateur symphony orchestra in which a man may be a soloist...

...Sensitive young men may be able to see through the posing and posturing of their parents and neighbors...

...Crazy kids" from the most depressed sections of large cities, marginal types who lived on various sociological and psychological peri pheries of the Eastern seaboard, disturbed young men who might alternatively have become gangsters or businessmen, joined with "freaks" from small Southern or Midwestern towns to supply a steady flow of writers, painters, sculptors and musicians...

...The community center and the YMCA offer programs in painting, lessons in music and lectures twelve times a year for those who wish to be informed on politics and the Sex Question...

...If this nightmare comes fully to pass, the art world will not be much different from the industrial world...

...With payments to be made on the washing machine—and then on the drier, the garbage disposal and the second car—a middle class suburban parent is often willing to pay from seven to ten dollars an hour, four or five times a month, for his son's piano lessons...

...Given its transparency, the suburban milieu could some day yield art...

...Middletown was never like this...

...Artiness, and artsy-craftsiness, if not estheticism and erudition, are de rigueur...

...Indeed, their insight should be better than that of the professional sociologist who is as likely to be charmed by the "gentility" of suburban society as the bona fide suburbanite himself...

...For young and old there are concerts, craft, service, and even "egg head" courses, lectures and dance recitals...

...Culture is not an intrinsic part of suburban life...

...Considerable odium was once attached to the man who showed an esthetic bent...

...Since the modern world is being rapidly suburbanized, that question has to be faced wherever we happen to reside...

...Suburbs are too new and too various—despite a certain sameness— for us to do more than speculate about them...

...Leaders of suburban society are still concerned with making their communities still more cultured...

...At best, there may be a whole hoard of people who will have absorbed the techniques of culture without having first developed the capacity to use them in original ways...

...Modern art has always been rebellious...

...O'Hara, Marquand and Louis Auchincloss locate much of their work in what are now suburbs and exurbs, but they deal with the older upper classes...

...The problem for suburbs today is not whether they can consume culture— their appetite is voracious and perhaps insatiable—but whether they can produce it...

...He may also help to succor his young daughter's dream of becoming an accomplished ballerina at slightly lower, but still spiraling, cost to himself...

...These people, as young parents and total consumers grievously pinched by inflation and taxation, feel obliged to lay out significant sums of money for their own edification and for the artistic instruction of their young...

...Neither Lewis nor Sherwood Anderson nor the silent movie makers could have envisaged the present situation...

...Above all, the sources of culture production, like the character and background of culture producers, are being radically altered...

...We have the-man-in-the-gray-flannelsuit, crack-in-the-picture-window expose— which is merely a first attempt to capitalize on the shock value of dealing with a new phenomenon...

...When the moderately well-to-do exurbanite and suburbanite seeks social approbation from his neighbors by purchasing an "original" or fondling a first edition, a transformation of some magnitude has taken place...

...The suburban Babbitt knows that he had better appear to be a cultivated man—by whatever lights and cues his new environment provides him...

...The present preoccupation with art goes beyond that change...

...The central city and the provincial village gave us a whole generation of culture producers, but the suburbs have only given us a new generation of culture consumers...

...Culture will continue to expand...

...In this respect Malamud, Algren, Williams and Kazin are entirely typical...

...Could they have foreseen a population nearly strapped by the high cost of living whose upper middle classes for the first time do without domestic help chiefly to maintain their heavily mortgaged homes and the mechanical appliances they contain...

...For that, however, we shall still have to have cities to which young refugees from the suburbs can flee...

...However, there is a real possibility that in any environment which not only lacks an authentic Bohemia or anything like the old ecological basis for artistic production, but also lacks performing centers, the atmosphere will continue to stifle creativity...

...Culture is becoming a norm in the strict sense that its possessor is subject to effective social sanctions...

...They were for the most part devoid of any direct contact with—let alone immersion in—high culture, These were the principal producers of art who worked from within any tradition they could find...

...Nor was Prairieton nor Plainville nor Winesburg nor any of Thorstein Veblen's country towns nor the provincial communities so savagely and lovingly satirized by Sinclair Lewis three or four decades ago...

...it is more like a badge or a garment to be worn on public occasions...

...In the suburbs culture has taken on a meaning quite different from any that would have been intelligible to the so-called lost generation...

...There it is above all an item to be owned, something the individual possesses as a symbol of his life style...

...The normative determination of such culture means that philistines can no longer live blameless lives, nor artists unselfconscious ones...

...It further means that we have got to be cultured whether we like it or not...

...All ages and both sexes are encouraged—indeed they are gently coerced by the same kind of social pressure that makes most of them church members—to avail themselves of these "rich opportunities...

...however, both these writers matured before the middle class really fled the city...

...The widespread practice of child psychology notwithstanding, there is already evidence that suburban children frequently rebel against the gentler forms of parental domination, just as their forebears broke out against cruder and more vulgar inadequacies and misunderstandings...

...Their emphasis is misplaced...

...Instead there are potboilers...