Culture in the Age of Publicity

...Because he has been able to do just that, Mr...

...It is the way we live when we are free to live as we choose...

...Kronenberger is really concerned with is "culture"??not in the narrow sense of the schoolmarm and not quite in the almost meaninglessly broad sense of the anthropologist, but in a sense somewhere between...

...Names" rule not only the movies and TV but also the supposedly less vulgarized theater, where the glossiness of an advertisement in a "quality" magazine is more important than originality...

...Kronenberger says: "If we spend an appalling number of hours witnessing, analyzing, forecasting and second-guessing baseball, what a safe and decent national sport: We are no Prussians brandishing sabers, or Latins slaughtering bulls...

...Since Mr...

...The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy...

...Actually, we are not by any means always and in every respect any of those things...

...Kronenberger says, not so much the Age of Anxiety as it is the Age of Publicity...

...What Mr...

...Explain them as you will, the less admirable aspects of our manners remain unamiable nevertheless...

...Kronenberger gives a convincing demonstration of the good use to which the eighteenth century can still be put...

...Where criticism is concerned, ours is an age of "attacks" and "exposes...

...Unfortunately, there are few who can adopt this approach and method without adopting at the same time the "art-stopped-short-in-the-cultivated-court" attitude...

...The very word "manners" suggests something so superficial that we hardly have time to bother with it...

...the third rule was explained by an illustration: "If you write about a famine in China, be sure to end by saying: 'Thanks to our form of government and our technology, nothing like that could happen here.'" The fact that the magazine in question has probably the largest circulation on earth suggests why books even mildly critical of our character or civilization seldom get very high on best-seller lists...

...as in any civilization, the forms taken In materialism, conformity and vulgarity are interesting and significant...

...What is more important, he assumes that we can understand and enjoy an amiable conversation about some of those less ingratiating aspects of our mores of which we are all more or less aware...

...It includes everything which we do or think or feel within that margin of our existence not devoted primarily to making a living...

...He knows that we enjoy many advantages and he credits us with many virtues...

...The rules," he was told, "are three: 'eight to eighty,' "you can do it, too,' and 'it makes you feel good.' " The first rule defines the age group to which all articles must appeal...

...In this sense of the word, our manners are the end-product of our civilization and it is highly profitable as well as interesting to focus for once upon that end-product rather than upon all those "underlying causes" to which we pay such persistent attention...

...It is an odd fact, as he remarks in another place, that a country which began with Pilgrims facing "maximum hardship has ended in maximum comfort...

...And the forms which these things lake is sometimes more innocent in our culture than it is in others...

...Kronenberger is well known as a student of eighteenth-century literature, it will no doubt be remarked many times that his approach and method are those which the eighteenth century would have recognized as valid...

...Louis Kronenberger, however, has a higher opinion of his fellow-citizens than did the editor...

...We seldom pay attention to anything which cannot be described as either an outrage or a catastrophe...

...the second means that whenever a remarkable man is described, the reader must be made to feel that he is just as good...

...As Mr...

...But the most original aspect of his present book is the approach suggested by the title...

...The art of puffing and the use of "Men of Distinction acting as decoy ducks" was not unknown before our day, but no previous age was so well equipped to publicize or so inclined to think of everything from culture to patriotism as best promoted by publicity...

...Yet, when the word is understood to mean everything which manifests itself in the everyday conduct of our everyday lives, it actually includes nearly every visible result of our political and economic system, our moral and intellectual ideas, our aims and our values...

...author, "The Modern Temper," "The Measure of Man" In his recent Six Nonlectures, E. E. Cummings tells the story of an acquaintance who conferred with one of the editors of a prodigiously successful magazine...

...Those who refuse to conform end by conforming to rigid patterns of non-conformity, like the highbrow critics who stick as closely to the "names" recognized in their world as the vulgar do to the recognized names in theirs and would no more speak slightingly of Kierkegaard than a bobby-soxer would of Bing Crosby...

...During the course of the last century and a half, several hundred foreign travelers have told us that we were, first of all, materialistic, conformist and vulgar...

...In so far as we are all of them, we differ from others more in the way in which we are each of them than in the degree to which we are each...

...As he has demonstrated before, Mr...

...Kronenberger has a remarkable gift for that kind of witty phrase which is only distantly related to the wisecrack and stands out from the page principally because it says so much in so few words...

...From the special standpoint of our manners, this is, Mr...

...Yet, the transition was made, and our curious tendency to exalt simultaneously comfort and relentless effort is perhaps explicable if we think of it as a tendency "to hail business, under its maiden name of hard work, as the seat of all the virtues...

...NOTE The reviews by James T. Farrell and Gregory Zilboorg, announced for this Spring Book Number, will appear in future issues of The New Leader...