HIGHBROWS
AND
THEATER
561
to reflect on them. It made them, surely, parochial, if not in their
backgrounds, then in their interests; but more crucially, it exposed
something a little impurely intellectualized and not genuinely esthetic
in
their tastes. Moliere and Marivaux did not mean enough for them
to go and see because, plainly, they did not mean enough in them–
selves. They lacked "significance," they had no particular cerebral
content, no
-?,eitgeistish
flourishes or sociological facets. They merely
offered rather simple works of art-the kind of thing that a talented
French theater group might render to perfection.
I suppose what interested me most, however, was neither what
was parochial in my friends nor what was too modern-minded, but
what seemed naive : their not grasping in advance that they would
feel let down; their not knowing that adapting novels for the stage–
beyond resembling the very kind of vulgarization that highbrows are
the first to decry-means involving two media that, whatever their
surface likenesses, are naturally alien and hostile to each other. But if
the incident gave me a certain mild
Schadenfreude,
it gave me cause
in the end for reflection as well. For in the end what stood out was
how, owing to the theater's own general thinness and patness and
vulgarity, highbrows had so lost the sense of the theater that when
they did go to it, it seemed for the wrong reasons-even at the par–
ticular moment when they might have gone for the right ones.
I don't want to generalize too broadly; but among intellectuals
in America, and in particular among what I can most conveniently
call literary highbrows, the theater has come to occupy little if any
place. By that I mean that they do not go to the theater in anything
like the same spirit, or with anything like the same regularity, that
they go to concerts or art shows, to the ballet or the opera. (This
perhaps varies somewhat in inverse proportion to how far away they
live from New York.) And when they do go, it is hardly ever for
purely theater reasons: it is for what else matters, as much in John
Osborne as
in
Shakespeare; or because a poet like Eliot or a novelist
like Graham Greene has turned playwright; or because a foreign
theater name-Lorca, Sartre, Brecht, Beckett-has traveled up to
them along literary channels. My point, at any rate, is that, whether
or not they take an occasional swig of Tennessee Williams or Arthur
Miller, there is no more personal incentive to "keep up" with the
theater than there is a cultural obligation; there is no "new" work
