PARTISAN REVIEW
To take account of the conditions of literature in the way of shop–
talk and with the expectable bitterness and malice-that seems quite
right. But I
think
it is useless and even harmful to spend time in
formulating a clear and distinct idea of the literary weather--either
you're embarked or you're not embarked.
If
you are embarked, the
weather report can only tell you you're a fool. But what good does
that information do you? And would you be any better off on shore?
In modern times what we respond to in a writer is not literary power
alone but literary power
in
conjunction with the ability to overcome
and outwit the worldly situation. It's perfectly possible, as you sug–
gest in the course of your questions, that things may come to such a
pass that the writer
will
not be able ever to win. But he isn't helped
to do what still remains to
him
to do by thinking about the deplorable
conditions of his work.
If
he
is
to vanish, it
is
appropriate that he
vanish in maledictions rather than in a self-commiserative sociological
analysis of the discrepancy between his function and his fate.
With this said, I feel rather more able to go on to answer some
of your questions. I'll begin with Question 2, under which, I think,
Question 1 is subsumed.
2. We will only deceive ourselves if we continue to talk about
contemporary culture
in
terms of highbrow and middlebrow. These
detestable words suggest a cultural situation in which a small group
deals with ideas and artifacts whose integrity
·is
bound up with their
difficulty, while another and much larger group deals with the dilu–
tion of these ideas and the facile simulacra of these artifacts. In such
a situation we see the operation of intellect-prestige and sensibility–
prestige, which are quite consonant with the other prestige notions
of our civilization, the belief that there is an absolute, high-priced
cultural best which can be acquired in cheap imitation. The result
of this is the diminution of the common fund of middling responses
to life, the depletion of the general stock of ordinary good sense and
direct feeling. It may thus be said that the idea of highbrow culture
as held by the middlebrow abets commercialized culture in its cor–
rupting influence.
But this is only a residual situation, not the developing one.
To understand the developing situation we must see that, while of
course there still are partisans of a high and exigent culture, the mass
of educated people-of intellectuals indeed-are becoming increas-
888
