The Highbrow as Radical

...He assumes that the political and the literary intelligence combine in a single avant-garde as a radical force...

...But it is difficult not to believe that his own dialectic is too academic, too artificial, too personal to carry many "thorough malcontents" with him against the culture of our time...

...Reviewed by Lewis Dabney Department of English, Columbia College This is a book that raises vital issues that it does not resolve...

...Professor Chase draws together the central themes of his essays, his book on Whitman and The American Novel and Its Tradition...

...it is anti-middlebrow in Chase's loose series of equations: "Our writers have been great as highbrows (Eliot, Wallace Stevens), lowbrows (Dreiser, Anderson, Frost), or as combinations highbrow-lowbrows (Faulkner and Hemingway-like Melville and Whitman before them)" High and lowbrow, Ralph admits, are hard to define in changing contexts...

...The Democratic Vista is a valuable book, for its synthetic cultural critique is one which sharply calls our attention to the dilemmas of the literary intellectual who no longer directly influences his society or its literature...

...His companions, spokesmen for different "generations," are contrasted sharply...

...If he assumes that the "radicalism" of our writers is a relevant one, Chase also assumes that these older American cultural patterns are immune to change, even when what he sees is that a middle way is taking their place- Like Whitman in Democratic Vistas, he imposes American values upon American culture...

...Professor Chase directs his interpretation of American writing toward diverse ends, popularizing "highbrow values" while he tries to reshape the liberal imagination toward more active involvements...

...As one might expect, Ralph's politics, if intense, are rather unclear...

...through Ralph's discourse with the others and with George, he turns his critique of reconciliation on the modern scene...

...would provide, he thinks, for most Americans fairly well, though elsewhere he calls for thorough reform...

...His polemic sets him, somewhat mechanically, against everything from the new emphasis on citizenship in colleges to the disuse of the patched inner-tube kids once swam on...

...Confronted with the call for a radical avant-garde, Huck Finn would get out of town...

...yet what it asserts is that society is a trap, per se...

...in Chase's case, however, they are taken from a narrower source, though generalized in the same indefinite way...

...Though Chase's primary concern is with his thesis, his dialogues gain dramatically from their view of the lives of bis literary intellectuals...

...Chase's terms have their own share of foggy middlebrow appeal-he uses the weapons of a critic of modern American culture in a holding action against the drift that George Middleby represents to him...

...George, an intelligent younger man, would like to teach literature but may go into insurance to give his family a "better" life...

...The discussions themselves have most force when the conflict of ideas is clear...

...But today the frightened philistines are supporting research into their sins, and politics and literature have gone in opposite directions...

...any abandonment of the avant-garde position is thus a violation of the "highbrow's" role...

...When George suggests that the Adams-James-Stevens tradition will support a conservative politics, Ralph demonstrates that for all their care for form these men were not conservatives in thought...

...In a day when good writing, avant-garde protest and politics are very far apart, Richard Chase has tried to construct a cultural radicalism based on American literature and its traditions...

...An overt clash, Ralph's argument with George Middleby, carries the central theme...

...What Chase does is to apply his critique of the middle culture to the "end to innocence and to radical moralizing" outlook of many liberals...

...The Democratic Vista sums up this attempt...

...He is handicapped in doing so because Ralph and George are so alike...

...Chase gives us a confused view of the confused politics of literary liberals...

...He represents the author's targets in a way that lets Ralph attack them upon largely literary grounds, which simplifies his case though it makes it less strong...

...With Maggie Motive, 1920ish neighbor and "life force," he talks about tragedy and myth, emphasizing their projection of emotional conflicts...

...Rinaldo, conceived as a Tocqueville in reverse, thinks that democracy in America is a matter of lip service today...

...The liberal virtues-moderation, countervailing forces, the vital center, the mixed economy" (which of these are virtues to Professor Chase...

...Literary radicalism is more than a compensatory stance, since behind it lies the close relationship of the novel to individualism and to social protest...

...In a sense, this may have been true in that misty time when the two were unified against the frightened philistines...

...His hopes that the vitality of the past can be revived should be seconded...

...Chase is addressing himself to a problem last year's New Leader symposium on youth stressed, the tension between the bourgeois academic and his cultural traditions...

...But it is to Chase's polemical purpose to challenge the conventional image of Whitman as mediator of extremes...

...If Ralph seems ambivalent about the political scene, Rinaldo Schultz, a pragmatist and European democrat brought onstage to offset his limitations, is more so...

...This image, used by Van Wyck Brooks when he set up this broad dialectic of "brows," clashes with Chase's concept of the literary intellectual, whose virtue is "intransigent distinctiveness" rather than capacity for reconciliation...

...Ralph, though he knows that sweeping and "naive" commitments may be gone for good, looks back toward the Twenties and Thirties and on to another such expansion...

...He also tells us much about critics like Emerson, Whitman and Brooks, in whose line he stands, and includes good ideological discussions of American writers...

...Chase's polemical purpose does not conflict with his literary analysis, but it is questionable whether American literature will support his own argument against contemporary culture...

...Chase attempts to rebuild their alliance against the pervasive disengagement which he admits has been balanced by a new maturity of domestic life...

...The world in which their conflict is absolute is a parochial one...

...They can also be imposed on a writer, as the example of Whitman may suggest...

...At its center is his attack on the softening of liberal intellectuals' values...

...Professor Chase offers support to the younger generation of the New Leader series, placing their problems in the perspective of this tradition and of American literary culture...

...The tradition of dissent in our fiction is undeniable...

...He presents his thesis in the form of dialogues between Professor Ralph Headstrong and his friends, against the background of a summer weekend on the Massachusetts coast...

...But today it is a tradition to emulate, rather than a formula for vitality in an otherwise bleak situation...

...As the characters move from scene to scene, his subject moves from Emerson to the decay of democratic institutions...

...His rhetoric moves from fin-tailed cars to Nixon to the war economy, but is undercut by his way of seeing politics in abstract terms, and by his feeling that it is culture that really needs radical action...

...Our writers, Ralph thinks, often express conservative impulses through radical ideas, which is a useful way of regarding work as different as that of Faulkner, Whitman and Mark Twain...

...In conversation with the wives, Ralph contrasts Freudian psychology with adjustive living, and wonders how the life of the mind can compete with family pressures today...

...The result is a loose dialectic held together as a critique of "the middle way," a phrase which relates intellectual rejection of the avant-garde to the sterile moderation of the Eisenhower Age...

...yet, in the contrast of Eliot with Frost, in the case of Faulkner's contradictions, these concepts come alive...

...Professor Headstrong is the author's spokesman...

...The deepest tensions are implied, however, in the contrast between Ralph Headstrong's "radical" assertions and the domestic decor-the wrought-iron tables, the diapers and the drinks which set oft the conversation...

...both are academic and married, are intellectuals who compress broad interests into a literary frame...

...yet he is optimistic about the long run, which he thinks will bring a humane welfare state, when the defeat of Communism eventually occurs...

...Yet the author makes George a symbol of the dilution of high culture in the Fifties...

...yet their interests and vocabularies are so alike that their conflicts are not really lived...

...Ralph tells George that our literature is radical by nature, in that it values contradictions and rejects the middle way...