OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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probably the final barrier to the intellectual or, at least, the writer,
who, in some dim way, might otherwise have hoped to adapt
him–
self to the media of mass culture in order to achieve something like
a popular art. One can imagine a compromise with the forms of
these media, made in the hope of ultimately giving them a directed
dignity; one cannot imagine a compromise with the moralistic cliches
and the political falsehoods that they propagate and by which they
are strangled. And this restrictiveness, which is surely not forced
upon us by international circumstance however desperate that may
be, nevertheless would seem to suggest, as your questions suggest,
the desperate makeshift of our time. One
is
reminded of an ad–
monition from Simone de Beauvoir, that "Life is occupied in both
perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is main–
tain itself, then living
is
only not dying."
"
A separation should be made between "intellectuals" and
"writers," even between these two when they appear in the same
person. Intellectuals observe and theorize and exhort; writers ob–
serve and create, and the creation exhorts. Intellectuals, for example,
analyze the mass media, viewing them as neutral expressions of cul–
tural patterns, and finding in them both the culturally destructive
(explicit) and the culturally constructive (implicit) potentials; but
writers, choosing these media to work in, have to give their lives to
them, and, being then incapable of sociological neutrality, lose
their lives.
If
poets ever were the unknown legislators of the world,
they can under these circumstances (or at least in this sense) no
longer attempt to be.
It is possible that our most brilliant intellectuals are our un–
known legislators; one hopes so. Certainly it is they who are making
the enormous strides in exactly the direction that your questions
really describe: showing us the structure and the potential struc–
ture of our lives as participants in the social traditions, past and
present, of the United States. A book like
The Lonely Crowd
(per–
haps a great book), announcing in its final pages that,
"As
against
the brilliant morbidity with which community surveys have ex–
posed the evils of industry and the banalities of our leisure, I have
concentrated on some of the economic richness of our middle–
class life"--such a book specifies, in the hard actualities of our
culture, both the attractive and the unattractive psychological gen-
