PARTISAN
REVIEW
best, he is convinced of the unity of his vocation from conversation
to creation.
In
this
mediation to be sure, the great exiles, James and Eliot,
and the Southern Agrarians have preceded the writer of our genera–
tion, but our situation is perhaps closer to the center than their special
cases of expatriation or regionalism.
In the recent migration of writers into the universities this
unifying tendency is being sealed. The possible meanings of teachings
in a college are, of course, many- and the writer may be quite simply
trying to earn a living, but in most cases there is something more:
an impatience with the concept of freedom in the term "free-lancer";
an attempt to close the gap between criticism and creation, to make
of the teaching of literature a discipline for discriminating readers;
a stratagem to mitigate the alienation of the writer by attacking
middlebrow culture on its most sensitive flank. For the writer as an
individual there are many compensations (though he pays a desperate
price in an accommodation to routine and what has been called
the 'black vacuum' of his students' minds, an accommodation which
he fears always may become habitual ) ; he finds an adequate com–
munity and the possibility of making himself a better one. For the
University, it has been a redemption from historicity and scientism
in the study of literature and the arts. And for literature?-it is diffi–
cult to say. The average American university is not at all, as the
word is conventionally understood, 'academic'; there is, I think, little
threat from that direction, but much from the appalling and profound
weariness, the occasional despair that accompanies the spiritually
expensive pursuit of teaching.
The writer in the Lansings, Madisons, Moscows, and Lincolns of
America schools with his own hand his own audience on a periphery
he could not even dream in the centers of New York or San Fran–
cisco. We are entering a period, I feel, in which successful strategic
raids into middlebrow territory
will
be increasingly profitable. The
decline of experimentalism, and the re-institution of the plot as a
concomitant of new notions of freedom and responsibility make
possible an extension of the serious writer's audience (Robert Penn
Warren is a notable example in this country and Graham Greene
in England) ; and there is the further factor that the production of
middlebrow literature can no longer keep pace with the demands
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