THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE
367
ously patterned itself on the English model, and has thus funda–
mentally misunderstood and feared the really definitive characteristics
of American culture.
1
Mr. Rahv says that the avant-garde tends to develop "a tradition
of its own" and to cultivate "its own group norms and standards."
And herein lies the paradox, for like all traditions and standards,
these are subject to calcification and are therefore in need of perpetual
change and renewal. Indeed, one must admit that the cultural van–
guard is more subject to calcification than are other traditions. Its
necessary extremism and its intensely articulated polemical attitude
not only give it dynamism but lay it open to rigidification and sterility,
whereas the very aimlessness of conventional culture saves it from
these extremes.
The insurgent movement in this country which defended
"modernism"-that
is,
the aesthetic experimentalism and social pro–
test of the period between 1912 and 1950--has expired of its own
success. Until recently the avant-garde writer, who made it his mission
to promote "modernism," could feel that he was (in Van Wyck
1 I am well aware that this will sound to some readers too abstract and
willful, too gratuitously intransigent. I am aware too of the genuine middle–
brow virtues which were articulated and defended by Howells, pale and derivative
as they are compared with English middlebrowism. It is true that enlightened
publishers and professors are for the moment hospitable to talents of high
order--<>f the sort which formerly in this country they would take seriously
only after resisting a long avant-garde campaign. For example, Dylan Thomas
quickly gained such popularity as comes to serious poets without much inter–
vention by avant-garde critics. The paperback classics, old and new, appear
really to have discovered a fairly large audience of discerning readers. The
general complacency that most people feel these days about the middle culture
and the favorable situation of the writer and artist in America may actually
turn out to have some justification. It is possible that history has in store for
us a more organic and continuous culture than we have had in the past. Perhaps
the new suburban, totally-populated, bureaucratized, and other-directed America
is already rendering historically archaic the kind of culture critique which,
following writers like Tocqueville and the early Brooks, I have been bringing
to bear on the problem of the avant-garde. Perhaps there has already evolved
a fundamentally new situation which has brought to a conclusion not only the
modernist phase but the whole history of our culture from the seventeenth
century down to 1950. It may be, in short, that the kind of critique suggested
in these p ages applies only (to go on with Riesman's handy terms) to the older
Calvinist, production-oriented, inner-directed America. In the new America
there may be no need for the avant-garde spirit-or for culture. Meanwhile,
although the future is obscure, we have one clear option before us: we can at
least try to understand the past and the present.
