SEX, SOCIOLOGY AND CRITICISM
547
partially economic, is primarily intellectual-esthetic. It was first
used in a very suggestive and stimulating fashion by the early
Van Wyck Brooks who said that American culture was divided
into
high~brow
and low-brow. But since then a "middle-brow"
has been added, and then variations on that-"upper-middle,"
"lower-middle," and so on, endlessly fluid. Added to this, more
recently, has come a "U"-"Non-U" or "In"-"Out" game which
is played with these phantom counters and which itself is always
changing. Thus just when the "middle-brow" gets enough money to
visit a psychiatrist, so that he can have this badge of distinction,
he finds that psychiatry is "Out." Critics like Mr. Fiedler use the
phantom counters as a kind of blunderbuss to demolish anything
they do not like. The logic here is simple:
if
you can pigeon-hole
anything, it is done for. Cozzens and Salinger are "upper-middle–
brow"; Kerouac is "bohemian-kitsch"; Shirley Jackson is "middle–
brow." But live people, flesh and blood, cannot escape Mr. Fiedler's
Procrustean bed, and we are told that "the fear of the Jewish
intellectual as seducer ... troubles the sleep of lower-middle-brow
Anglo-Saxon maidens...." Now all of this is a far cry from
Marx; in fact it sounds like Russell Lynes.
The real influence here is Lawrence's
Studies in Classic
American Literature;
in fact Mr. Fiedler's entire book was pre–
dicated by one sentence of Lawrence in his essay on
The Scarlet
Letter:
"You
must
look through the surface of American art,
and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning." Lawrence's
book is a brilliant one, certainly one of the most suggestive ever
written on the subject. It is also erratic, repetitious, and often
downright wrong, as any such prophetic book must be. In any
event it is
sui generis,
the product of a unique mind whose utter–
ances were always an expression of that uniqueness. To attempt
to move your standing-point to his is an impossibility. We forgive
his fury, his lapses of taste, his stupidities because the glow of his
genius enfolds them all. Furthermore, we know that what he had
to say was completely original: he read, and spoke. But nobody else
can speak like him, and thus his apostles always constitute, or verge
into, a lunatic fringe. Furthermore his views on sex were, as he
himself kept repeating, often misunderstood. He was attacking
Puritan repression which in
his
early days in England was still a
