The Silent Minority

...The fault is almost as much that of the intellectuals as that of the forces aligned against them, however, and deserves to be examined from that point of view...

...I am not sure what exactly all the sources of this attitude among intellectuals are...

...But, alas, all three of them almost never had...

...The consequence of this attitude is that the intellect, to earn its keep, must become the handmaiden of such things as the popular arts...

...But let the person on television (or elsewhere) be a leading intellectual, and everything changes...

...I once remarked on a TV talk show that the one minority being steadily short-changed, indeed ignored, by television at a time when it is bending over backward for all others is the intellectual one...

...There was once a show on network television where people like Dwight Macdonald and Susan Son-tag debated works of art they had recently seen...

...or in debate, which is also a spectator sport...

...If a golf tournament or tennis match is televised, we see the performers in their full area of expertise, and they are allowed to show off their skills at great length and in minute detail...

...Underlying this was the absurd assumption that true knowledge was the amassing of facts, that the crowning intellectual achievement would be to memorize an encyclopedia...

...And observe that so-called before "contributions to Western culture"—everything is arbitrary, relative, and pretty soon Midler, too, may end up so-called...

...if we watch or listen closely, we can even pick up some useful pointers from him...

...For the successful contestants tended to be either cobblers who had (or were supplied) all the answers about opera, or psychologists who seemed to know all about boxing...

...So the most beloved figure on that TV program got to be a postal clerk performing breathtakingly in the general information category...

...That it hasnt been, and won't be, is a solid tribute to American anti-intellectualism...

...Because she is the culture of our times...

...On opening night, the sell-out audience appeared to be roughly two-fifths homosexual, two-fifths counterculture, and one-fifth miscellaneous, but mostly members, or aspiring members, of the "in" crowd...

...and indeed, if Midler is classical, why shouldn't the Baby Snooks buffs be scholars...

...Jean can swim 20 laps at a tidy clip...

...Poirier, who is a scholar and critic of repute, a professor of English at Rutgers and a former editor of Partisan Review, here acts the rabid eulogist for Midler's—to put it kindly—mediocrity...

...Would he apply it to the paintings of Landseer or the novels of Martin Tupper...

...She is perhaps less good and satisfying, but must be taken as seriously and studiously...

...Because the young, whom Poirier has been assiduously courting over the years, love her...

...The structure and format of such shows is, to begin with, questionable...

...They have come up with various ways of selling out, of joining the other camp...

...Of the three experts, one, though knowledgeable, was hardly outspoken (the composer Ned Rorem, who might yet need those he would have attacked to perform his works), and another, though outspoken (the journalist Alexander Cockburn), was an ignoramus...

...She gave us either nostalgia or camp, undistinguished singing, and a barrage of gags tossed out at the audience: some funny, many more witless, most of them written for her, a few improvised...

...After which it seems only right that we buy our teammate's shaving cream or vote for his political candidate...

...resentment of, or exasperation with, the limitations of one's ever-shrinking intellectual circle...

...With intellectuals like Poirier around, we hardly need anti-intellectuals...

...They all purport to be service shows: Here is a play, movie, ballet you may soon be seeing, and our discussion, dear viewer, should help you make up your mind about it...

...This has never even been considered, and might not have a ghost of a chance of survival...

...And more than a way of life: a doctrine, a religion, a badge of honor...

...Here she was the absolute star, backed more or less marginally by a few other acts that included Lionel Hampton...

...And again: "It is easy to be misunderstood in these matters by high cultural illiterates [i.e., highbrows who don't know pop culture...

...This without a trace of irony...

...Yet it seems to me that no American school, and few if any colleges, dare to, wish to, would know enough to place a premium on the intellect...

...I have in this column ("Pop Goes the Word," NL, June 19, 1974) previously attacked an essay of Poirier's, "Learning From the Beatles," but this new performance far outstrips the earlier one...

...Since then she has made all kinds of recordings and appearances, including a one-woman engagement at the Palace, and climaxed it all with a spectacular, expensively mounted and, in my opinion, atrocious revue at the big Minskoff Theater, Clams on the Half Shell...

...The lack of "direct personal feeling" has nothing to do with classicism, and everything with camp, one of whose strategies is doing emotionally charged things with a poker face—outlandishly exaggerated dissociation of sensibility...

...The popularity of spectator sports continues to grow in this country, along with the increasing fame and riches to be gained from athletic excellence...

...Leaving such questions unanswered, Poirier goes on to "the great change by which anyone coming to consciousness after 1950 (like Midler herself) could become scholars [note the incorrect agreement], so to speak, of everything from Bogart to Baby Snooks...

...racing ahead of one's peers into the realm of pop culture, and so becoming the fore-sighted pioneer and exegete of this brave new world...

...Do they, in fact...

...The man's presumable corruption by the program's fraudulence strikes me as less bad than that an apparent idiot-savant with a photographic memory should have become the country's intellectual hero...

...The experience—or, at least, the assumption—of television people is that we do not want to be reminded of how little we know, how little we think and how little we know how to think...

...There may be some emphases on scholastic achievement, but that is a lesser thing, and only rarelv and coincidentally corresponds with intellectual prowess...

...The expertise is in a field where everyone has some endowment: Joe has quite a fast serve...

...After all, which stadium could house it, and how much admission could one charge...

...In this piece, while acknowledging that pop culture deals with ingredients "seldom as deeply rooted" in the imagination and myths as those of high culture (actually, that is the one thing that they might be, I would say), Poirier nevertheless proceeds to obnubilate the boundaries between the two even as he jesuitically denies what he is doing...

...Why does the public adore a baseball or football star to the point of buying the products he advertises and hanging on his pronouncements in areas totally outside his competence...

...Much has been said and written about the decline of standards of excellence, of the very striving for it in America, yet the issue is not that simple...

...As a review of her show, Clams on the Half Shell—and judging from the constant references to how it changed every week, Poirier must have returned to it over and over again (itself a frightening thought) —it is both emblematic and appalling enough to provide a fitting demonstration of how intellectuals go about wooing mass culture and, concomitantly, undermining the prestige of genuine culture...

...Because we must all be sociologists...

...And if presumed highbrows could be animated by a passion for boxing, then surely we were all intellectuals under the skin...

...Midler, then, though not the qualitative equal of Eliot, structurally (a fine, modish word) sometimes does the same things as he...

...Although the proper approach would seem to be maintaining the dignity of the intellect, its prerogative not to make compromises in view of the ultimate usefulness of its elitism, the prevalent attitude is that intellectuality is just another mode of operation, certainly no better than any other, and quite possibly worse: Anything that the great majority hasn't got must, in a democratic society, be adjudged inferior to what it has got...

...What television begins from below, they finish from above...

...What caused all the fuss about the corruption of that program, however, was surely the lesser evil: the cheating at the game, rather than the dismal game itself—the fact that the knowledge being rewarded was trivial and sterile, but that, even so, what made it acceptable was its deliberate deintellectualization...

...when, very rarely, she sings something straight, it is middlingly done...

...Bette Midler is a mediocre musical-comedy actress who was catapulted into stardom through a performance at the Continental Baths in Manhattan for a mostly towel-clad homosexual audience that screamingly took her to its collective bosom...

...still, shouldn't it have at least been tried...

...Well, yes: a child's piling up of building blocks is structurally the same as a construction crew's—or is it...

...Well, a man who is a champion swimmer or tennis player is no threat to the masses...

...In any case, the bracketing of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Midler, with whatever strictures added, must result in a leveling of values...

...we ourselves, if we only took a little time off from listening to the Hit Parade and our albums of popular favorites, could conceivably become just as expert at it...

...Educational television had another show on last season on which three recurrent experts in the arts discussed something all three of them were supposed to have seen...

...it disappeared faster than you could say anything more esoteric than Jackie Robinson...

...How, I ask, is one "impersonally aware" of one's "place in a tradition,' and where, if the performance is brash exhibitionism, does "critical awareness" come in...

...Even radio, in its now buried day, had such things as the Quiz Kids, Information Please, the 64-Dollar Question...

...But the show never had full national exposure, and, though somewhat longer-lived, died in its early adolescence...

...Educational TV, for a while, had Critique, hosted by Stanley Kauffmann, where anything from a recent sculpture exhibition to a new movie, was first discussed with its author or some authorized mouthpiece, then debated among three or four experts...

...Even so, it seems to become de-creasingly important with every passing academic—or should I say antiacademic?—year...

...The only equivalent television came up with, the 64,000-Dollar Question, showed that whereas easy money and escalating greed had upped the ante by $63,936, lack of integrity had lowered standards to the point where popular contestants were given the answers well ahead of the questions...

...one or the other chap neither knew nor cared about one particular art form, and, in any case, each subject got only 10 minutes out of a fortnightly half-hour show...

...To wit: structurally (not in quality, not in so-called contributions to Western culture, not in what it does to the traditions of art) but structurally [note the incorrect use of parentheses], there is no difference between the juxtapositions of style in sections of 'The Waste Land' and the juxtapositions that occur in sections of Clams on the Half Shell...

...Rather it is meant to reveal her place in a tradition of which she is fully, critically, impersonally aware...

...some profound psychic maladjustment, which one blames on one's own, or one's fellows', intellectuality...

...But, clearly, that is not how non-intellectual activities are presented on television...

...so let it be said carefully...

...It would seem to follow that if a group of intellectuals are placed around a table, they too should be allowed to talk about a full range of issues (rather than about one play visible only in New York, or a movie that the rest of the country may not see for months) and they should be given enough time to show the public the intellect at free play, which is also its work...

...None of these proposed shows ever materialized...

...In the last few years, I have been approached by about a dozen different people, each of whom wanted to recruit me for a TV show he was readying, where a panel of intellectuals or wits or conversationalists would not have to channel their real or presumed abilities into guessing what somebody's line is, or which of several nonentities is telling a perfectly unimportant truth...

...So then what have our intellectuals begun doing—out of despair or opportunism or sheer weakness and cowardice...

...Almost all of her act is outre and vulgar...

...This individual's expertise is in thinking, and whereas we can live with the idea that someone can beat us at golf or basketball, how can we accept that someone up there can defeat us at thinking and knowing...

...And why should the free play of the intellect be encouraged...

...inside, it is entitled "Mass Appeal: Bette Midler...

...Is Samuel Smiles a classical writer on self-help...

...Would Poirier have used it, say, in a description of 19th-century pornography or Victorian music-hall songs...

...Here is Poirier again: "Midler's particular way of expressing nostalgia needs to be taken as seriously, as studiously as some of the other literary manifestations [e.g., Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Pynchon] I've mentioned, though this does not mean that we need to think of it as equi-valently good or satisfying.' Note the obfuscatory equivocations: though Midler is a literary manifestation—an egregious enough assertion in itself—we need not think of her as the equal of Joyce, Eliot, etc., but, apparently, may do so...

...But some of them must be: wanting to please the crowd and become popular, beloved, in short, successful...

...because though some song may bring "tears down her face, most of what she does is not a direct expression of personal feeling...

...For one thing, he calls Midler "a pop artist whose whole tendency is classical...

...I strongly urge all those concerned with our culture to read this article (after reading it, even the unconcerned might well become concerned) rather than just take the following excerpts as revealing its full horror...

...But whereas we cannot expect very much from parents, who in the last analysis are amateur teachers all, we should expect more from the schools, whose teachers are supposed to be professionals...

...the rest consists of feeble takeoffs on things beneath parodying...

...Some such motives must surely have triggered Richard Poirier's essay on Bette Midler in the August 2 & 9 issue of the New Republic...

...Insistently and scornfully, Poirier keeps dismissing the notion that Midler is camp—as if someone who looks outrageous, dresses preposterously, makes her first entrance on a half clam shell (a homely Aphrodite on a homelier kind of mollusk), and lets her first-act curtain come down on herself in King Kong's palm, could be anything but camp...

...So this person on the TV screen is better at it, but still belongs to our family of swimmers and servers...

...The problem begins in the schools and in children's home environments...

...that term "classical...

...On the cover, it is called "The Midler Distance...

...This meant that opera couldn't be such highbrow stuff, after all, since a shoemaker could be such an expert at it...

...The problem of intellectuality is related to two others: that of equality, and that of excellence...