OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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can make a start toward understanding, which
15
a step toward
meaning.
As
for what the writers can do with this material, no good
writer really has to ask. He either feels it in his marrow or he doesn't.
I think however of Tom Wolfe's insight into America as "the only
fabulous country." Great literature has always been based on great
fables.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
The changes in American life and in the attitudes of ar–
tists and intellectuals to their country have so obviously taken place
under our very noses that I cannot understand how anyone could
have failed to see them-certainly anyone whose business it is to
observe such things. Whether these changes have been for the better
or worse is another question. It
is
not easy to decide the fate of our
culture, or to pin down the many subtle connections between art,
politics and national feelings. But I cannot see what purpose, other
than smugness or obscurantism, is served by blinding oneself to the
fact that most American intellectuals do feel more at home in
America today than they did twenty or thirty years ago, or that, at
least, they are not obsessed with the theme of estrangement as, say,
J
ames, or Eliot, or Pound was.
If
I look back at the last two decades I become aware of how
much these changes have been part of my own experience; and I
refer to
it
because I think it is quite typical. My direct experience
includes only the '30's and '40's, but in a way that I suppose par–
allels the process of cultural continuity, I seemed to have brought
with me into the '30's some of the earlier attitudes of aesthetic lone–
liness and revolt. Along with many other people, most of them more
mature than myself and including many of the contributors to such
magazines as
Hound and Horn, The Symposium, Pagany, Blues,
I
felt that art was a temple and that artists belonged to a priesthood
of the anointed and the dedicated. I had very little interest in the
rest of society, and though it is hard to reconstruct my state of mind
at the time, I think I regarded journalism as the medium of social
affairs, which included the American scene, while
art
was reserved
for deeper and more universal concerns. Nor did I question the
