578
PARTISAN REVIEW
affirmations about America which many of them, in their hearts
and bones, do not feel.
What affirmation there is, is largely confined to political ideo–
logues. The creative writers and artists remain, if not "alienated,"
then profoundly withdrawn from official American life, from its
politics, its business institutions, social arrangements, and favored
recreations. One finds little direct criticism of society in current
writing, but no enthusiasm either. For negativism in our age is not
a whim, it is a necessity of hygiene.
America has entered the stage of kitsch, the mass culture of
the middle-brows; literature and art have become estimable com–
modities; but this is a problem in sociology, not aesthetics. Art can
be
smothered by public curiosity as it has been starved by philistine
meanness. There is culture-hunger, culture-talk, culture-guilt, most
of it dry, dead and dutifully obedient to each twist of the
Zeitgeist.
The vast culture industries are parasites on the body of art, letting it
neither live nor die. When the thousands who stared at the Berlin
and Vienna art shows help living American artists live, when the
659 American symphony orchestras provide their audiences with
music by composers not yet comfortably dead, when serious novelists
and poets can live off their royalties-then, and only then, will there
be cause for dancing in the streets. Meanwhile, the problem of the
young writer or artist is quite as difficult as ever, and it is only the
bureaucrats of the intellectual world, condescending toward their
troublesome constituents, who would dare deny this.
Where is one supposed to find the evidence that American
society has become more hospitable to serious culture during the
past several decades? In the fact that the
Saturday Review
grows
steadily, while the few erious literary journals, teetering on the
edge of subsidy, can neither support themselves nor break out of
their isolation? In the readiness of the fashion magazines to print a
quota of high-brows? In the reading taste of the book-buying
public? In the recent effort of academic critics to house-break our
great writers, Hawthorne being transformed into a nimble rotarian
and Melville into a good burgher suffering not from spiritual agonies
but from an inability to meet his bills? In the suspicion with which
some of our sustaining institutions look upon the writer who, by
handicap of birth, is a solitary person rather than a "team"? In
