BOOKS
431
porary America is producing "one of the great cultures of history," he
is surely indulging
in
hyperbole which is not needed
in
an age so self–
congratulatory as our own and not justified in an age so uncreative.
In a recent set-to in the
American Scholar,
Mr. Riesman poured much
scorn on Mr. Archibald MacLeish for suggesting that freedom of mind
and conscience might be under serious attack in the United States. But
surely Mr. MacLeish's old-fashioned liberal outrage, so banal in Mr.
Riesman's eyes, was perhaps closer both to truth and to therapy in the
situation than what seemed Mr. Riesman's attempt to wave away the
attack as just an optical illusion epidemic among self-pitying intellectuals
(though, one must add, that is certainly a factor in the situation too).
Mr. Riesman, of course, was in part the victim of the problems
of communication in a pluralist society: what he said to an audience
of American scholars gave a gratification he did not intend to the con–
servatives who were enabled through
Time
to overhear his remarks.
Mr. Riesman has made clear enough elsewhere his recognition that, if
the dangers of mass society are self-correcting, it is
in
part because men
like MacLeish rise to denounce them. Similarly the relationship between
Mr. Barzun and Mr. Kronenberger is far closer than their contradictory
diagnoses of American culture would suggest: it is precisely the Kronen–
berger fury which justifies the Barzun optimism.
If
Mr. Barzun turns
out to be right (as I believe he will), it will be, to some degree, because
the Kronenbergers make him so. In short, to achieve the objectives of
the Barzuns and Riesmans-that is, a society which will continuously
resist and revise its dominant values-we cannot do without the indig–
nations of Mr. Kronenberger and Mr. MacLeish.
We need them all, and which to salute at any given time is so
much a matter of mood. In the '20s,
Company Manners
would have
been routine, and
God's Country and Mine
an act of affirmation and
liberation. Today
God's Country,
for all its charm and intelligence and
understanding, seems almost an act of supererogation; it is most valu–
able when least ecstatic. In our present mood,
Company Manners,
for
all its flipness and smartness and shallowness, is, if the more wrong–
headed, still the more invigorating and liberating work, as much per–
haps in its wit and style as in its substance. As Mr. Kronenberger con–
stantly suggests, nothing will save us except the revival of direct human
responsiveness. He contributes to this, if only by making his readers
laugh.
Arthur
Schlesinger Jr.
