276
and it would be better
if
each man spoke for himself. But did
ever have the gruesome masochism to pour quicklime over
before they began? To lay them out in advance--"first
despair, the flirtation with failure and the commitment to radical
then all the savour of slow disenchantment"-with such perfect
I think not. I hope not. We were not so innocent then and we
so wise now. Nor can we now "proceed to become grandfathers
in
since if all these people had anything in common it was an
respect for their vocation and hence for the quality of their
and a belief that the "success" which you now pin on our geller.atial
a yellow armband, was something more difficult than the
clusion of professorships, editorships, government service, and
* * *
Fiedler's symbolic suicide is, of course, a sort of joke.
may think of the taste displayed in such a performance, we
he can always take his tongue from his cheek, the rope from
his
and show us by trotting briskly to his next class that he is not
at all. He is in fact a clever young critic with long years of
fatherly activity before him. But these macabre games that he
has
playing with our lives-the only ones we havel-recall me to
the
tion of our language and to those raised by W. P. and PRo It
how they have all become related in my mind.
* *
*
The February issue of
Commentary
has just arrived, very a
for it has a perceptive article by Robert Brustein on the
speechlessness of what he calls "America's New Culture Hero";
Brando's Stanley Kowalski in his numerous reincarnations.
says is rarely important but he has mesmerized his auditor by
the
he takes to say it. He has communicated not information but
has revealed an inner life of unspecified anguish and torment."
traces this hero back to O'Neill's attempt, in
The Hairy Ape,
to
dramatic expression for the man of lower birth," and generally
his analysis to the evolution of the ape-like species in the
cinema. "In Elvis Presley, the testament of Stanley Kowalski
iJ
realized for, besides the physical resemblances and the explicit
they share, both prophesy the ruin of culture. . . . In the hero'.
ticulacy, we find represented the young American's fears of
for to speak out-to be a speaker-is to be a man."
But why should young Americans fear maturity more
than
people anywhere? Can it be that they lack a clearly defined
