AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT
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as Chase does, Whitman's use of certain democratic myths with middle–
browism today. And Chase also weakens his argument when he invokes
the standard idea of pluralism in American thought as a source of
vi–
tality for serious criticism and advanced art.
Another flaw is the loose way in which Chase brandishes the terms
highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow. He even goes so far as to characterize
all of English culture as middlebrow. It is true that lowbrowism in
England has been mostly restricted to the popular level, while bo–
hemian extremes have been delegated to the French. But this has very
little to do with the idea of the false and the fabricated usually asso–
ciated with the middlebrow. Chase also creates some historical confusion
when he refers at one point to Stephen Crane as a middlebrow; an·d
in speaking of writers like Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, he
uses the term lowbrow as a synonym for "anti-intellectual" or "primi–
tive." In all fairness, however it must
be
said that there is wide dis–
agreement over the usage of all these terms; and differences over their
meaning often provide a convenient argument for those who are out to
prove that the phenomena themselves have been invented by discon–
tented critics. In this regard, the chief value of Chase's book is that
he keeps his eye on what is happening, on the reality of the culture, how–
ever faulty may be the description of it.
Many terms are imperfectly defined, many questions unanswered.
Perhaps one of the most important is the relation of cultural to political
radicalism, of an avant-garde to other forms of rebelliousness. This
question is most pertinent today because there is very little political ra–
dicalism that commands respect and almost no inclination among
in–
tellectuals to press in that direction. Chase offers the conjecture that in
the long run "any sort of cultural radicalism separated from politics
will grow bloodless and irrelevant to the perennial human questions";
but for the present "the point is that radicalism is a method, a polemical
attitude, an attack. ... A revolutionary politics or economics makes no
sense as applied to contemporary America." Here again we seem to run
up against verbal distinctions. In the strict sense of the terms, serious
and experimental works in the past did exist without benefit of a revo–
lutionary politics, and there is no reason to believe the two must go
together. In fact, the one attempt to connect them in the 'thirties, un–
der the slogans of a vulgarized Marxism, was disastrous, and its chief
effect was to give radical sanction to the most conventional forms so
long as they were earnest and comprehensible. (Even Leon Trotsky, it
will be recalled, believed that in modern society the radical impulse
naturally takes the form of bohemianism in art.)
It
is in a more fun-
