OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
443
portance. This highbrow attitude strikes me at times as born of the
most flagrantly middlebrow impulse: it worships "major" art exactly
as America, generally, worships size. And the point is not just how
pretentious this may he, but also how ill-considered: surely any
sound cultural tradition must be kept alive and in good order by its
minor art-great artists are too few, great artists
manques
too faulty.
Sound lyric poetry, sound comedies of manners, sound domestic
architecture, humor with the right salt, language with the right sup–
pleness and vigor-such things are the constants of any creditable
culture; and they guarantee not only a certain amount of good art,
but also a certain number of people who can appreciate it. Not only
can a highbrow concern for these things influence mass culture for
the better; a lack of highbrow concern leaves mass culture not just
more arid, but infinitely more aggressive. Yet there seems to me shock–
ingly little interest in minor art among literary intellectuals-partly
because they are often more intellectual than literary; partly because
when they do show interest-in somebody like Scott Fitzgerald-they
must instantly convert
him
into a major figure, discounting and
ignoring whatever won't fit into their scheme. For the same reason,
our intellectual life frequently fails in the most rudimentary percep–
tions, as for example of the enormous inferiority of satire- as a form
-to comedy. Only as a weapon is satire superior, and today it is a
weapon far oftener used to wound than to reform. The greatness of
comedy rests on its
not
taking sides, on its sparing nobody but includ–
ing everybody; and on its being, as much as anyone thing can, a
cultural unifier. One of the good things about American culture has
been its abundance of native humor, yet it is our humor that seems
almost the vulgarest aspect of America today. Our highbrows, to be
interested in humor at the folk level, have to encounter it in some–
thing like Faulkner's
The Hamlet;
and finding it
there,
over-praise
it a little. Despite the sovereignty of flip Broadway wisecracks and
brassy radio gags, there is still a good deal that could promote a com–
mon laughter in America. But the tendency is away from such
laughter, toward a purely literary satire that is a badge, in the end, of
aloofness.
Which raises the question whether our literary intellectuals are
not more aloof than alienated. And surely a number of them are;
though that needn't
be
either a tragedy or a fault. Those who are
