THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE
375
this image of the versatile, or as Mr. Phillips says, "suspended" man
is the proper and inevitable image for this interim period of our cul–
tural history. Shouldn't one be able to enjoy
both
Whitman and Eliot,
both
Pound and Brooks,
both
Faulkner and
J.
P. Marquand,
both
Wallace Stevens and Sherwood Anderson?
What has happened to the avant-garde in our "suspended" cul–
ture of the 1950s is a psychological equivalent of what has happened
to it sociologically. Sociologically it has been institutionalized by the
universities and the publishers, which by definition means that in its
modern phase it has to come to an end. At the same time, it has been
internalized, so to speak, in the flexibly dialectical mind of con–
temporary criticism. In this withdrawal from the field of action it
finds a possibility of continued life. The resiliency of the best critical
minds must be counted on to keep the avant-garde attitude alive
during periods which have no immediate task for its polemical mission.
Yet the task of the temperamental or born avant-garde critic is
not limited to the polemical purpose of converting the philistines to
art. He is also perennially the disinterested student and historian of
culture, looking into the past and the present for the radical and not
merely the contingent and incidental facts. The past convinces him
that discontinuity and contradiction have always been of the essence
of American culture. The present convinces him that among critics
only the most powerful and resilient of "suspended" minds are capable
of keeping alive the avant-garde spirit, or any spirit, or of embody–
ing cultural contradictions of any sort without collapsing under the
great strain into a formless middle way of feeling and thought. Who
can doubt that this formless middle way of feeling and thought, with
its increasing moralism and conventionality, is hardening into the
new "cake of custom"? As for the future, one can only believe that
the end of the present interim period will be marked by a new re–
surgence from the uneasy subliminal depths of our culture, in the
classic manner of avant-garde action-provided, that is, that 1950
marks the end of a phase of American culture as we have known it,
and not the end of that culture itself.
