32
PARTISAN REVIEW
Precisely at the time that the highbrows seem inclined to abandon
what is sometimes called their "proud isolation," the middlebrows
have become more intransigent in their opposition to everything that
is serious and creative in our culture (which does not, of course,
prevent them from exploiting and contaminating, for purposes of
mass gossip, everything that is serious and creative in our culture).
What else is the meaning of the coarse attack launched by the
Satur–
day Review
against the highbrows, under the guise of discussing the
Pound case? What, for that matter, is the meaning of the hostility
with which the PR symposium on "Our Country and Our Culture"
was received in the popular press?
It
would take no straining of texts
to see this symposium .as a disconcerting sign of how far intellectuals
have drifted in the direction of cultural adaptation, yet the middle–
brows wrote of it with blunt enmity. And perhaps because they too
sensed this drift in the symposium, the middlebrows, highly confident
at the moment, became more aggressive, for they do not desire com–
promise, they know that none is possible. So genial a middlebrow as
Elmer Davis, in a long review of the symposium, entitled with a char–
acteristic smirk "The Care and Feeding of Intellectuals," ends upon
a revealing note: "The highbrows seem to be getting around to recog–
nizing what the middlebrows have known for the past thirty years.
This is progress." It is also the best possible argument for the main–
tenance of the
avant garde,
even if only as a kind of limited defense.
Much has been written about the improvement of cultural
standards in America, though a major piece of evidence-the wide
circulation of paper-bound books-is still an unweighed and unana–
lyzed quantity. The basic relations of cultural power remain un–
changed, however: the middlebrows continue to dominate. The most
distinguished newspaper in this country retains as its music critic a
man named Olin Downes; the liter.ary critic for that newspaper is a
man named Orville Prescott; the most widely read book reviewer
in this country is a buffoon named Sterling North; the most powerful
literary journal, read with admiration by many librarians and profes–
sors, remains
The Saturday R eview;
and in the leading American
book supplement it is possible for the head of the largest American
museum to refer, with egregious ignorance, to "the Spenglerian ster–
ility which has possessed Europe for the past half century and [has]
produced Proust, Gide and Picasso. . . ." Nothing here gives us
