OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
565
dition, the American intellectual must realize the great wave of
decentralization occurring in America itself. The real day of the cities
is over, together with the era of passive "appreciation" of the arts.
The art centers and "creative writing" courses at state universities,
from which untapped creative forces must come; the steady piling up,
on the level of the informed and practicing amateur, of various kinds
of artistic
expertise;
the renewal of regional romanticism, folklore
feeling, and pre-industrial custom, in many localities where the
imitation of the urban was once usual- all this points to a steady
working away from provincial as well as industrial limitations. The
American people are rapidly leaving behind them a set of outworn
mores. The bohemianization of the outlands has begun. All this
points to a time when our present mannerist art and literature
will
become obsolete, in a natural renewal of romantic idealism. For it is
only in periods of idealism that order and integrity come back to
thought; that the life of a people is washed over with emotional and
spiritual release; that the restrictions of either/or thinking disappear;
that a time of abundance is at hand.
4. American art and thought must become awkward once
more. The time of the pure virtuoso in any field of endeavor is
drawing to a close; virtuosity in thought is particularly useless at
present. Americans must start working away from the abstract toward
the real, the organic and the humane. We must rediscover America in
relation to the entire human scene, and under the eye of eternity.
Artists capable of feeling the emotion of joy, philosophers without
fear-all gifted with living powers of improvisation-wiIl finally
"outwit hell with human obviousness."
RICHARD CHASE
My sense of things is that the
PARTISAN REVIEW
is right
in saying that many writers "now regard America and its institu–
tions in a new way"-that is, with a new readiness to be reconciled
to "our country and our culture." There is certainly a new hos–
pitality to serious writing which speaks confidently and even lov–
ingly of America and her future. There is a new disinclination to
dismiss writing which expresses these attitudes as merely provincial
or chauvinistic. And there is a readiness to suspect that writing
