Here and Now

...With much at stake—for Anastasia, the recovery of her identity and of the Graustarkian grandeurs of a court in exile...

...Although as a patriotic exhortation nothing could have been cruder than this star-spangled climax, both my friend and I admitted that our spines had tingled...

...With all our political sophistication, we could either of us have matched goose pimple against goose pimple with anyone in the audience...

...Anastasia is recognized by her Empress grandmother...

...It intends only to notice the many disavowed points of similarity in the responses to certain efforts of the arts on the part of relatively simple people and very unsimple people, and to raise the question of why we are afraid to deal with this aspect of our shared humanity...

...The Nude, the author's belief that "no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow —iand if it does not do so...

...That literature alone among the arts seems to be without the capacity to provoke a response which is in contradiction of our intellectual authority is not only interesting in itself, but perhaps suggests the reason why criticism has done so poorly with this whole matter of our susceptibility to forbidden esthetic responses: It may well be that it is because criticism is a branch of the literary effort that it has not yet thrown off the attitudes which naturally develop in a study of literary responses...

...The most competent musicians I know boast, as no literary person ever does, the catholicity of their musical tastes...

...Was it not evidence, as well, of large areas of genuine feeling which we would do well to recognize and honor...

...I doubt that I was the only member of the audience who, when Bergman chose Brynner instead of a duchy, secretly plotted that she should have the best of both worlds as reward for her courage, both love and her rightful kingdom, once the scandal of her unsuitable alliance had died down...

...If one is in the business of cultural analysis, one may project one's own response as a mass response—last night, 350 women imagined themselves Ingrid Bergman and 307 men imagined themselves Yul Brynner in love with her...

...In other words, I had a very good time at Anastasia, in a way that it is the habit of serious-minded people to disavow...

...Anyway, the purpose of this piece is not to emphasize differences among the arts or between expert and inexpert responses in the arts...

...Inevitably, her choice of love as against a kingdom counts for far more today, when we know the decision she made in real life, than it would have when she was Hollywood's most cogent argument for the progressive virtues...

...If this is progress, I deplore it...

...And, if real, they deserved better of criticism than lo be judged unworthv of our educations and suppressed or relegated lo some dim region closed off from the atlcnlion we regularly turn upon those of our responses to art which have the approval of our educated artistic consciences...

...it is bad art and false morals...

...But the climax is not this easily foretold...

...Although, over the last years, these painters have gradually been given place among the accredited objects of even the purest artistic appreciation, it is still for their technical accomplishment that they are recognized, not for their appeal to feeling...

...they have neither the time nor the requirement...

...It was my point that criticism had to take this response of ours into account in a way it had not yet done—not as an irony but as an assertion of right and useful feelings which we ignored only at the cost of a diminished response to all of life and art...

...then, on the brink of restoration, she trades position and wealth for love of the general...

...They have a healthy scorn for the so-called lover of music, not trained in music, who will protest that he cannot listen to Carmen or who condescends to a Caruso or a John McCormack...

...One iTiust try to find acceptable intellectual terms in which to deal with one's natural receptivity to the emotions generated by meretricious, spurious or inadequate art...

...There was a time, before the war, when even the most high-minded of intellectuals went to the movies as a fairly regular thing...

...If the American flag could be this much of an emotion-provoking symbol for people of our political education, surely this was more than a sad lesson in our availability to techniques of mass propaganda...

...Anastasia is precisely the sort of film one always hoped to escape to, or by, or with—about a syndicate of White Russians in Paris which sets out to recover the lost younger daughter of the Tsar...

...A similar situation prevails in relation to the graphic arts...

...Indeed, in the graphic arts where abstraction holds the firmest sway, our refusal of the readier emotional responses is by now so orthodox in our intellectual culture that it comes as something of a revolutionary statement to read in Sir Kenneth Clark's remarkable book...

...But there has been no time in my recollection when criticism has undertaken to accept and evaluate those responses to art, often to very bad art, of which even the most highly developed intellects are capable, quite in spite of their esthetic discipline...

...most certainly, they must not be written about as if they were a decent subject for serious examination...

...An intellectual is not supposed to enjoy easy emotions such as Anastasia was designed to arouse...

...The gambit was refused then, as it is always refused, whether it is the movies one is discussing or certain kinds of music or certain examples in the graphic arts...

...Myself, I happen to think one is always the loser by the denial of any emotional truth, and in particular by denying a truth on the side of one's common humanity...

...The aloofness of intellectuals from certain responses generated in their own emotional natures may be steadily increasing in this cold-war period, for reasons I hope to go into in a future column...

...The French painters of the 18th century are a case in point...

...Delighted by both, but especially by Anastasia, I was suddenly reminded of how much had gone out of life since one stopped going to the movies regularly, as an anodyne, as an escape, as a compulsion, as anything so long as one went...

...I am not speaking of a problem merely of our immediate present day...

...Even pornographic writing demands an extraordinarily high degree of artistic integrity in order to make its biological effect on a person of literary cultivation...

...The kidnaped man acts with courage and skill, he outwits the enemy, and the picture ends with a burst of patriotic music and the American flag flying in the wind...

...As a matter of fact, among the arts only literature seems to be exempt from the ability to make its effect on any but the level of its own esthetic merit...

...If one does experience them, one is supposed to leave them quite behind when one departs the theater...

...From being embarrassed by Puccini to avoiding Puccini altogether is but one short step, but it is a step which puts miles between the intellectual and the full pleasure in music to which criticism should aid him...

...The movie had been made to warn Americans of the danger of spies, and it was about a factory worker who is kidnaped and tortured by enemy agents trying to extract information from him...

...HERE AND NOW By Diana Trilling The Lower Arts and Higher Mind: Some Matters Evaded by Criticism Recently, such is the possibility of miracle, I saw two movies in a single week—real movies, big, in color, shown in a real moving-picture theater, not on TV...

...He turns up an amnesia victim who has her moments not only of looking and acting like the Grand Duchess but also of conviction that she is the Grand Duchess...

...Why this should be so, what it is that accounts for the closer and more natural fusion of mind and feelings in our experience of literature than in our experience of the movies or music or painting, I do not know...

...the first and final capitulation to their invitation to erotic fantasy which, if you will, is the most facile of the many responses these painters excite in us—these are the feelings we either must dismiss in any critical study of their worth or which we compromise with our ironies...

...In music, for instance, we have a vocabulary for dealing with the powerful erotic emotions aroused by The Marriage of Figaro or by the love music of Berlioz, and we can even countenance the erotic possibilities of a Rosenkavalier—though I discover something of a risk of disrepute if one pauses too long over the "Presentation of the Rose...

...It doe-not go without saving, however, that the ability of even a second-rate picture to stimulate erotic feeling is at least by that much a justification of its existence as an object of critical attention...

...The brains of the enterprise belong to a former Imperial general, now the owner of a Paris cafe, a role played by Yul Brynner, that gritty, slightly mongoloid Charles Boyer who wears his cruelty with a difference and his baldness like a perversity suddenly made permissible...

...My stress, of course, was on the word "genuine...

...One was Wee Geordie, a British film, full of wonderful Scottish landscape and the sort of gentle, patient humor of which the British movies seem to have an inexhaustible supply...

...In addition, we know how much Ingrid Bergman is capable of sacrificing now that she is no longer the girl wonder of sexual wholesomeness that she used to be, but a Woman desirably tainted by experience...

...certainly they must be given no place in one's emotional economy except as an occasion for irony...

...for I insisted that, whatever the meretriciousness of this specific occasion, the tinglings of our spines had been real...

...It is when we come to a Madame Butterfly or a Tosca that the superior listener has only embarrassment with which to handle a response whose legitimacy has not been esthetically validated for him...

...for the general, a great deal of money—the pair move toward the denouement of their story...

...A large and simple emotional truth about oneself—that, whatever one's intellectual training, one is not proof against hokum—must be socially suppressed, without thought to whether one is the gainer or the loser by such a stern act of self-falsification...

...It is difficult to conceive that a novel whose perception of life was of the sort we find in Anastasia or which projected itself on such a low level of intensity could do anything except bore or disgust an educated reader, just as it is almost impossible to imagine that a patriotic poem as primitive in its chauvinism as my flag-flying movie could give my friend or myself goose pimples...

...I only know that it is so in every intellectual I have been able to observe...

...I am far from implying, by this, that literature is the most elevated of the arts or esthetically the most self-contained...

...But it doesn't do to be pious about the life of feeling...

...Nor do I mean to suggest that the general, if discredited, availability of intellectuals to the easier emotions of music or painting or the movies should be understood as a function of their relative ignorance in arts other than the literary arts...

...The other was Anastasia, with Ingrid Bergman...

...I remember, for instance, talking with a friend who is a very good literary critic about a patriotic film we both saw during the war...

...I deplore any society, with or without parks of culture and rest, in which seriousness is supposed to preclude such feelings as we once honored at least in the escape from them...

...But one must exercise caution not to reveal that one was oneself engaged on an equally low level of participation, and with equal enjoyment...

...For it is, of course, not alone at the movies that we are confronted with emotions which have their source and expression on a level of artistic experience which is so manifestly inferior to that on which we exercise our usual esthetic preferences...

...Anastasia is just the kind of fantasy the public wants...

...But this, of course, becomes always more difficult in a culture where the very concept of naturalness is increasingly suspect, where in all departments of art the lines between the worthy and the unworthy are being drawn with more and more scrupulousness, and where, indeed, the impulse to protect ourselves against the common emotional responses is ever more clearly dramatized in our impulse to abstraction...

...There has always been the chance, right up to the last and especially if one has not been keeping track of the movies and is worried about how things like this are going nowadays, that social advantage and family responsibility will be allowed to triumph over romance...

...It is my impression—I could hope I am wrong—that this is no longer true, and not because they have substituted television for movie-going, but because in our present view of life people who think of themselves as "serious" or "mature" no longer admit a need for this kind of refuge from themselves or each other...

...The emotional immediacy of our experience of a Boucher or a Fragonard...

...The grandmama Empress, played by Helen Hayes with her usual claustral competence, is a formidable instance of familial rectitude and security...

...Obviously, it goes without sav ing that the ability of any given picture or statue to stimulate erotic feeling doc-not make it an absolutely good picture or statue...