OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
315
ist, essayist, or journalist, must constantly fight the feeling that
he gains access to the facts he criticizes by what amounts to espion–
age. (By defining himself as "alienated," he acquires an easy alibi:
they hit first; they exclude him.) Even if we praise what we are
writing about, we are still, in some senses, exploiting it. And when
we read ruthless comments about our country and
its
culture, we
are in the position of the person who listens to a tale about his
friend, attacked for faults he undoubtedly has--but do we deny
the justice of the portrait, or attack its creator for lack of charity?
The varieties of satire are ways of resolving these dilemmas cre–
atively.
Once we realize that these problems of stance are more broadly
human than otherwise we may become less insistent on an imme–
diate solution, and on the necessity of finding it in
American
life,
rather than in life itself. We may be able to see that the assur–
ance we have admired in the European intellectual has had its
roots in certain class conventions which are by no means unmixed
blessings to the artistic life. The British intellectual
in
Fry's
A
Sleep
of Prisoners,
for example, is allowed to torment the consciousness
of a less gifted soldier, but not vice versa: the soldier is physi–
cally strong enough to choke the intellectual but not humanly im–
pressive enough to shake him morally. "Abel" in other words only
takes account of "Cain" as either a useful or a dangerous thing,
whereas American versions of pastoral are more complex and less
patronizing: democracy implies that intellectuals, whatever their
social class position, can be not only choked but also shaken by
non-intellectuals and their ways of life. While this delays our achiev–
ing the assurance whose absence now makes us so intemperate with
our country, our culture, and ourselves, it also means that, once we
gain it in our more difficult setting, we will
also
have gained a
somewhat broader understanding and a wider gamut of topics for
art and thought than has been characteristic of our models either
at home or abroad.
