PARTISAN REVIEW
failure of consciousness as to what has also persisted,
if
only we would
recognize it, in the culture of society; and indeed one would think
the future of culture (the state of American letters) hopeless did
not the writers so well express its present disrepair. They see the
risk of spiritual fellaheen everywhere, and, rightly, they see it in
the proliferation, in America already, and shortly in Britain, of a new
intellectual proletariat; and in their writings they make dramatic
prophecy.
I do not know about new literary figures, but it seems to me
that there is a new literary tendency and that it comes under the
head of this notion of spiritual fellaheen and may be explained
(in the sense of diagnosis) as a consequence of inadequate relation
between culture and society. What else in their various ways and with
the varying degrees of consciousness in their authors are the recent
novels of Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Saul Bellow–
what else are they about? Why does Robert Lowell call his verse
Lord Weary's Castle,
Randall Jarrell his
The Losses,
John Berryman
his
The Dispossessed?
Why do the young rejoice in-seeing analogues
in themselves-all those aspects of William Faulkner which cheat
or deprive the intelligence? Why is the negative mysticism of T. S.
Eliot's
Fout Quartets
satisfactory poetry to those who have no posi–
tive Christianity at all? Why are the alternatives Ernest Hemingway,
Evelyn Waugh, Kenneth Patchen, and Aldous Huxley, if not that
each of them, in his own way, reduces the human figures to a mus–
cubr, or authoritatively sinful, or apocalyptic, or magical-mystical
jelly of principles without values: they are all of them easier to
take, than those who hold on to their values no matter what else
they let go.
If
American middlebrow culture has grown stronger in this
decade, I would suppose it was because the bulk of people cannot see
themselves reflected in the adventures of the elite, or only so as a
pastime, not as a touching possibility. The middlebrow does not want
to be dragged thro1,1gh the adventures of his culture; he wants to
enjoy it, to escape from it, and to be given the cold dope. His en–
joyments and escapes, but not his hankering for cold dope, probably
rather bolster than threaten serious writing; his needs keep alive a
kind of mechanical competence in the old modes of drama and narra–
tive for the hand of the master when mastery again becomes pos-
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