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Mr. Kronenberger's book is quite another matter. It is compact,
shapely, crisp, elegant, wicked and often genuinely funny. American
life, as he sees it (he really confines himself pretty much to life on
Manhattan Island), is essentially a triumph of technique over purpose.
Americans are demoralized by speed, obsessed with gadgets, concerned
not with the product but with the package, empty of basic intent or
direction; the goal is not fulfillment but adjustment. The Age of Anxiety
is the signpost of our interior dissolution; the Age of Publicity suggests
the unrelenting assault from without. The double pressure has destroyed
privacy, corrupted manners, wrecked standards and ushered in the
wholesale triumph of vulgarization.
Culture, in such circumstances, is doomed. The film of
Henry V
or a Stokowski transcription of Bach, far from toning up popular taste
to
a demand for the original, destroys taste; people will "not resist or
reject the adulteration, will soon, in fact, come to prefer and eventually
to
require it." In these terms Mr. Kronenberger casts an exceedingly
cold eye on the theater, on television and on other aspects of culture,
coming up with indictments which are barely saved by his remorseless
urbanity from turning vulgarly into diatribes.
More than this, the very values of living itself have been hopelessly
degraded. Our young men and women, instead of starting as poets and
becoming advertising men or film writers at forty with a sense of defeat
and betrayal, bypass the youthful period of aspiration and crisis and
learn right off how to fabricate television scripts or advertising copy.
Slick, calculating, career-minded, "they don't compromise, as so many
people must, or capitulate, as so many finally do, or become obvious
victims of economic pressure. They don't sell out; they are exultant
volunteers."
And, if vulgarization is bad, the countervulgarization of the coterie
highbrows is no better-the "reversible raincoat of American culture,"
one side as smooth and as sterile as the other. The academics, the
literary critics concerned with microscopic vivisection rather than with
human response, the intellectuals whose pride is their nonconformity
and their alienation-"they are frequently as hostile to art, to the broad
free spirit of culture, as are the philistines themselves." America is thus
a "network of conformities," a crisscross of orthodoxies, "a rigidly blue–
printed dream, a series of set, established visions." And so between the
philistine and the prig, the vulgarization that makes things palatable and
the countervulgarization that makes things parched, the individual is
starved and flattened; and "culture-in the old-fashioned, well-rounded
sense of something civilized and civilizing alike-has not simply failed
as a reality in America, but is fast fading as an ideal."
