STATE OF AM'ERICAN WRITING
ingly suspicious of culture and even hostile toward it. They don't
know
this
and certainly they wouldn't admit it, for culture still has
honorific meanings for the middle-class. Yet the fact is that in their
hearts they more and more reject the traditional methods of
art,
the
methods of imagination, of symbol and fantasy.
This
is true of the members of my own generation, who, it
seems to me, grow increasingly indifferent and even antagonistic to
the cultural monuments and heroes and qualities that the literary
reviews celebrate as a matter of course. It is also true of the young
of about the same intellectual standing. I recently gave a course in
certain modern classics to some fifty undergraduates, most of whom
were
to
enter the practical professions. They were remarkably intel–
ligent young men, and, what is more, remarkably warm-hearted
and decent. They worked with good will and enjoyment, and they
were more than tolerant of my own commitments and enthusiasms;
but as for themselves they were profoundly suspicious of Blake and
Melville and Henry James, of Proust and Joyce and Yeats, of Wil–
liam James and Freud. They found these men-! noted down the
adjectives-too indefinite, too aristocratic, too paradoxical, too remote
from reality, not sufficiently understanding and sympathetic.
It must be observed that the rejection of the
method
of art
extends to the
qualities
of art when these appear, as they do,
in
abstract or practical thought. Hence the suspicion of William James
and Freud, which exists, in the degree that these men show in their
work the qualities of art-in the degree that they are creative and
spirited, and not
literal.
It is no doubt very easy to say that what I have been describing
is
simply Philistinism. And it is the easier because certain Philistines
have undertaken to speak for
~
cultural group and to attack high–
brow culture as pretentious or irresponsible or corrupt or insane.
It is also possible to call it Stalinism, for Stalinism becomes endemic
in
the American middle class as soon as that class begins to think;
it is a cultural Stalinism, independent of any political belief: the
cultural ideas of the ADA will not, I venture to say, be found ma–
terially different from those of the PAC; Farrington is the essential
arbiter of the literary views of our more-or-less intellectual middle
class, Farrington who so well plows the ground for the negation of
literature.
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