PARTISAN REVIEW
Clement Greenberg:
It seems to me that the most pervasive event in American
letters over the last ten years is the stabilization of the avantgarde, ac–
companied by its growing acceptance by official and commercial cul–
ture. It has modified that culture to a limited extent and has in return
been granted a recognition and place that do not dissatisfy it. The
avantgarde has been professionalized, so to speak, org.anized into a
field for careers; it is no longer the adventure beyond ratified norms,
the refusal in the name of truth and excellence to abide by the cate–
gories of worldly success and failure. The avantgarde writer
gets
ahead
now, and inside established channels: he obtains university or
publishing or magazine jobs, finds it relatively easy to be published
himself, is asked to lecture, participate in round tables, etc., writes
introductions to the classics, and can even win the status of a public
figure.
There is nothing inherently wrong
in
all this (after all, who is
best fitted to write introductions to the classics? and why shouldn't
serious writers be rewarded with material security?), but so far this
accommodation has produced liabilities that outweigh the assets.
Whether these liabilities are inevitably connected with social accommo–
dation here and now, I cannot say. The relation of cause and effect
is very involved. But it is a fact that there has been a certain regiment–
ation of the avantgarde, a standardization of its attitudes, which–
whether the attitude be Henry Miller's or John Crowe Ransom's-–
threatens to impose a new academicism on us.
Academic because predictable. It has become possible lately
to
pigeon-hole and predict almost everybody. There is the literary quar–
terly critic with his "method"; there is the fulltime poet; there
is
the
all-around "creative man" or aesthete (interested in the movies, paint–
ing, poetry, old almanacs, architecture, etc.); there is the ex- or dis–
abused Marxist (in which category I put myself); there is the "or–
gast"; there is the neo-saint (socialist, anarchist or otherwise) with
his
moral exhibitionism; there is the Hemingway or Western "intel–
lectual"; there is the Kafkan pseudo-philosopher and pseudo-poet;
there
is
the survivor of the Left Bank; there is the man who listens
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