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PARTISAN REVIEW
For Mr. Kronenberger, the base line is evidently the 19205, when
people were gay, exuberant, outrageous, anti-bourgeois, anti-puritan,
anti-pedagogical, and overflowing with creativity. Men might pass out
over the soup or women strip during the fish course; but,
if
more
people stole one another's wives, fewer stole each other's jobs. For all
the frivolity, drunkenness and waste, the young men of the '20s (in
Mr. Kronenberger's nostalgia) "were lined up squarely on the side of
art and not on the side of money." Thus Mr. Kronenberger's golden
age, against which everything contemporary is to be measured, and
nearly everything to be found wanting.
His book, indeed, not only invokes the '20s, but exemplifies it.
If
at times Mr. Kronenberger seems to be rattling off his epigrams with
the mechanical imperturbability of a Bob Hope, he represents at
his
best, a return
to
an older tradition-to the verbal pyrotechnics of
Mencken and Chesterton. How freshly and wittily he does it too, most
of the time, and what a pleasure it is to laugh aloud! And what a
pleasure too it is to read a book so delightedly, passionately and care–
lessly contemptuous of contemporary verities. We have had too much
in recent years of reverence.
Mr. Barzun and Mr. Kronenberger thus end up by describing the
same culture in much the same terms; but, where Mr. Barzun has a
faith in the American capacity for self-correction, Mr. Kronenberger
sees little hope of improvement. Instead of grossness purging itself, it
will only breed more grossness; "however revolted most people of sensi–
bility may still be by all this, they are no longer, certainly, much shocked;
and what people begin to expect, and then come to accept, of others
they must gradually begin to adopt for themselves." There is no easy
way out any longer. "The conflicts go too deep; the governing impetus,
the ruling force, has by now too much momentum." In such language,
Mr. Kronenberger rejects the whole consoling view that mass society can
be counted on to generate the antidote to its own ills.
This is substantially Mr. Barzun's view; and its most brilliant and
influential representative these days, of course, is Mr. David Riesman,
whose
The Lonely Crowd
is greatly admired by Mr. Barzun (as well
as by the writer of this review). But, if the Kronenberger attitude often
seems ungenerous and defeatist, clearly the Riesman attitude has its
perils too. Indeed, one has (or, at least, I have) recently begun to
wonder whether Mr. Riesman, in recoiling against the complacent alien–
ation he ascribes to the typical intellectual, is not risking an equally
dangerous acceptance of his own. Mr. Barzun, it should be noted, does
not go so far; but, when Mr. Riesman offers the dictum that contem-
