THIS AGE OF C ·ONFORMITY
31
cautions and moderate amendments. But this hardly makes the de–
fense of those standards that animated the
avant garde
during its best
days any the less a critical obligation.
It has been urged in some circles that only the pressure of habit
keeps serious writers from making "raids" upon the middlebrow
world, that it is now possible to win substantial outposts in that
world if we are ready to take risks. Perhaps. But surely no one de–
sires a policy of highbrow isolation, and no one could oppose raids,
provided that is what they really are. The pre-condition for successful
raids, however, is that the serious writers themselves have a sense–
not of belonging to an exclusive club-but of representing those cul–
tural values which alone can sustain them while making their raids.
Thus far the incursions of serious writers into the middlebrow world
have not been remarkably successful: for every short-story writer who
has survived the
New Yorker
one could point to a dozen whose work
became trivial and frozen after they had begun to write for it. Nor
do I advocate, in saying this, a policy of evading temptations. I advo–
cate overcoming them. Writers today have no choice, often enough,
but to write for magazines like the
New Yorker-and
worse, far
worse. But what matters is the terms upon which the writer enters
into such relationships, his willingness to understand with whom he
is
dealing, his readiness not to deceive himself that an unpleasant ne–
cessity is a desirable virtue.
It seems to me beyond dispute that, thus far at least, in the
encounter between high and middle culture, the latter has come off
by far the better. Every current of the
Zeitgeist,
every imprint of so–
cial power, every assumption of contemporary American life favors
the safe and comforting patterns of middlebrow feeling. And then
too the gloomier Christian writers may have a point when they tell
us that it is easier for a soul to fall than to rise.
6
6 Thus Professor Gilbert Highet, the distinguished classicist, wntlllg in
Harper's
finds Andre Gide "an abominably wicked man. His work seems to me
to
be
either shallowly based symbolism, or clsc cheap cynicism made by inverting
commonplaces or by grinning through them. . . . Gide h ad the curse of per–
petual immaturity. But then I am always aware of the central fact about Gide–
that he was a sexual pervert who kept proclaiming and justifying his perversion;
and perhaps this blinds me to his merits ... the garrulous, Pangloss-lil,e, pimple–
scratching, self-exposure of Gide."
I don't mean to suggest that many fall so low, but then not many philistines
are so well educated as Mr. Highet.
