OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
431
American yearning for sophistication will automatically second
his
efforts, and changes comparable to those of the last quarter-century
will result.
Adherence to these three principles will not, I repeat, insure the
rise and triumph of genius, but they will give him breathing room
while affording his fellow craftsmen freer play and the comfort of
serving true culture. The intellectual committed to the unwritten
code here implied will not find himself on a bed of roses. His America
will still seem to him greatly improvable and his physical existence
will still seem less than his deserts. But for the very liberty of
grumbling he will be grateful that America is as it is. And as he casts
into lasting form the substance of his discontent, he will remember
that it is the destiny of the artist to be dissatisfied with life, the self–
same life he is enamored of.
JOSEPH FRANK
1. I think there are two questions involved in defining the
attitude of American artists and intellectuals toward "America and
its institutions." These two questions are illustrated by the quota–
tions from various writers that PR has furnished the contributors
to its symposium: sometimes these quotations refer to the status
and achievement of the American artist, sometimes to the dominant
values of American society taken as a whole. Depending on which
of these questions one chooses to reply to, the answer will be dif–
ferent.
In the last fifty years, American artists and intellectuals un–
questionably have gained for themselves a creative freedom that
equals their European contemporaries. American books, to obtain
a hearing, no longer have to deal with "the smiling aspects of life,"
or be permissible reading for well-brought-up young ladies. On the
contrary, they now horrify and fascinate Europeans, as Zola once
horrified Americans, by their sadism, violence, and brutality. Nor
is there any doubt that we are now at the tail-end of the greatest
flowering of American arts and letters since New England Tran–
scendentalism-a flowering that far surpasses the earlier one in force
and originality. So far as this is recognized, and I see no evidence
that it
is
disputed, it is certainly true that American artists and
