562
PARTISAN REVIEW
by anyone writing primarily for the stage that corresponds to a new
Faulkner or Eliot or Stravinsky or Balanchine. Equally there has been
no new theater movement to capture their interest, any more at the
level of beatnik literature than of abstract painting. (Perhaps Method
acting has aroused a certain casual, rather amused curiosity.)
This
general attitude was well manifested, right in
PR,
by Saul
Bellow when, as a for-the-nonce drama critic, he took the good–
humoredly dismissive squint at the theater that he might have taken
at penny arcades-except that penny arcades would very probably
have interested him more, as examples of mass culture or of sexual
Americana. And just this is the rather interesting reverse side of the
situation: that literary highbrows, equally with excluding the theater
from the world of art and high culture that includes belles-lettres,
music, painting or ballet, dismiss it from the world of sociology and
mass culture that includes TV, science fiction, comic-strips and jazz.
For intellectuals generally, the theater has no more of a crude fas–
cination than it has serious interest; it no more disquiets than it re–
assures them; it no more seems part of the problems of society than
of the satisfactions of art. They don't even jeer at its trashiness or
guffaw at its artiness; they are not even, in any overtly hostile or
indignant sense, anti-theater. They are simply, all in all, non-theater–
going. They show apathy toward Broadway rather than .antipathy;
it is bracketed in their minds less with the sort of fiction or music
or painting they dislike than with a kind of bourgeois culture they are
miles removed from-Womrath's or Westchester, Town Hall lectures
or bridge. My literary friends don't say to me, "Should I go see
This–
or-That?": they say, all too hopefully, "I don't need to see This-or–
That, do
I?"
And except on rare occasions, my answer is "No." There is
very little that, in terms of artistic merit or even social or intellectual
value, they need to see. There is a little more-but not really very
much-of which I might say, "0 reason not the need-go for the the–
atrical excitement, or the production qualities, or the sheer fun of it."
But in a frighteningly large number of cases there
is
no need, almost no
reason, to go at all. Surely they needn't-what with what sitters and
taxis will cost-pay twenty dollars for an engrossing first act, or for
frissons
and fireworks, or even for some scattered good wntmg or
observation. Too often, moreover--even
in
the course of one of
