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done with once for all, but a permanent threat to the intellectual and
literary condition in a society whose main drives are exhausted in the
prestige and accumulation of money and which will permit culture to
exist only as a polite and decorative display on the margins of. its own
existence. The way things are now going, with everyone sweating
so damned hard to be genteel, it will soon be impossible to insult any–
one in print. And when the Resistance has turned genteel, it is already
part of the Collaboration. The review that wishes no leash upon its
independence will probably find itself existing on the same thin shoe–
string as in the 'teens and twenties--and against persistently mounting
costs of printing and paper, such as those happier decades never knew.
As
it is, the printer who puts out your review will have-with his
union card and his trade recognized by society-a much better and
more assured living than your writers or editors.
While the avant-garde retreats into the academy, the metropolis
itself loses its old character as a cultural center.
If
we are to have
a cultural center anywhere in America, presumably it would be New
York. But what do we find? New York has become the great Philistine
Capital, at the center of whose island fittingly stands, several acres in
area, the vast Temple of the Soap Opera, Radio City. And the aliena–
tion in New York
is
so great that between Greenwich Village and the
center of town there is not even a possible medium of communication,
while between the smaller groups in the Village there are no common
presuppositions or mutual subordination. Mr. Dwight Macdonald
manages to publish from the heart of New York a magazine, which
for its crackerbox bluster, wide-eyed idealism, and ingenue dogmatism
might just as well be put out at some tiny whistle-stop in Oklahoma.
Without wishing in the least to minimize Macdonald's extraordinary
accomplishment in this, I do think it must be clear to anyone that
if
there were such a thing as a New York climate, a New York intel–
lectual atmosphere or current of ideas-if, that is, the metropolis
really functioned as a cultural center-even he might find it immense–
ly more difficult, perhaps impossible, to pull off such a trick. And as
long as the big money keeps pouring into New York and sloshing
about, the swamp of Broadway, the radio writers, the sleek publicity
men, are going to spread all over the island, choking, gagging, and
submerging the smaller groups, which will become ever more "splint–
ered off" from one another.
Such are some of the main points in the sociology of the Amer–
ican writer as he tries to pick himself up in the mid-decade of the
