148
RICHARD CHASE
ventiorial bilt -exceptional girts for social observation and narrative.
I expect that in six or seven years Mailer will write a story
, called "The Man Who Studied Yoga,
II."
The plot will be simple.
On a depressing Sunday afternoon, several prosperous and now
riiiddle-aged former hipsters will meet for quiet conversation. A
little wistfully, they will remember the excitements of their youth
and' how, with time, these have gradually evaporated. Nothing can
n()~
ree'reate for them the kicks of the past, neither drugs nor orgy,
vi~lence
nor promiscuity. By chance one of them will pick up a
volume of that forgotten writer Marx and read a few apocalyptic
pages-which, as people not accustomed to reading, they will find
cthnost as stimulating as a pornographic movie would be for squares.
B~'t·
soon the electricity in their souls will start to flicker, and the
story will end with the central figure entering "the universe of
sleep .. . . What a dreary compromise
is
life!"
~.'
.:;
.
".
"
,
"
Irving Howe
WHAT' IS CULTURE?
CULTURE AND SOCIETY: 1780-1950. By Reymon"d Williems. Co–
lumbio University Press. $5.00,
Traditionally Americans have been made uneasy by the
word "culture." They suspect s.!,lobbery or some high-toned moral
prescription, and ,they grow 'self-defensive, as was Ezra Pound when
he spelled it "Kulchur;" But if the word
is
,understood not as a
prescription but as a desC!'iption of the national way of life and
therefore of- oneself, it is more acceptable. And in, fact during the
last few 'years, encouraged ,by a
:~eluge
of books ,explaining America
to'Americans" people of
all
intellectual and non-intellectual hues
have been talking abOut "culture,", especially "our culture." Amer–
ica and its native spirit turn out 'anew to be somewhat bewildering
