OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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discovered that they could no longer live on Main Street, speak to
their families, or follow a profession. They must write, paint or
compose, that is to say, criticize life and find freedom in creating aes–
thetic order.
As
it happened, the rates of exchange favored the im–
pulse. Bohemia, which had never really made a place for itself at
home, was an inexpensive sanctuary abroad, affording its citizens
not only a good many satisfactions of sense as yet unknown to Kansas
City, but also the spectacle and benefit of several thousand years of
non-Bohemian European civilization.
In this time of discovery and delight, no distinction was pos–
sible between the enjoyment of culture and its creation. The two
seemed synonymous, and surely they were contiguous. Bohemia's
traditions encouraged the hope that the externals of artistic life would
engender art. Because Verlaine had haunted the Closerie des Lilas, it
was supposed that nightly attendance at the Deux Magots would
produce comparable verse. Nothing in the new freedom suggested the
deep and necessary relation of culture to the despised bourgeois so–
ciety that had been left behind.
Suddenly, bourgeois society drew attention to itself by seeming to
go to pieces everywhere at once. The crash of '29 made plain to the
enjoyers, and even more frighteningly to the working artists, that the
production and distribution of goods necessarily came before their
own pleasure or their particular type of work. The acknowledgment
was bitter and it redirected the initial passion for culture into the
channels of social reform. Home again, the expatriates and the many
others who had unpretentiously savored Europe for a season were
faced with calamities and threats they had never associated with
America: silent machinery, closed banks, starvation and possibly
revolution.
This only increased the power of European ideas, for during
these Marxist thirties the American intellectual began to learn some–
thing about Europe's history. Many new names and doctrines, no
longer artistic but social, political, economic, engrossed his attention
and changed his perspective on the culture of the past. Seeing,
moreover, the old continent paralyzed equally with the new, watching
the rise of Hitler and Franco and the break-up of the old empires,
the repatriated American began to question the worth of the "civ–
ilized existence" he had lately been praising, and to dream of a
