MAS sell LTAN 0
t\4
IDe U L T
Dante's
Purgatory).
[The "merely"
is
a master-touch.-D. M.]
It
is
an attempt to find a value above all pricer for the smallest
events in our daily life."
This
is
a half truth, which means
it
is
mostly false. Not that Mr. Wilder
is
in any way insincere.
Had he been, he could no more have written a Midcult master–
piece like
Our Town
than
Norman Rockwell could have painted
all those
Post
covers. But
if
one compares with
Our Town
a
similar attempt to find a value "for the smallest events in our
everyday lives," namely Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg,
Ohio,
one sees the difference between a work of
art
and a
sincere bit of
kitsch.
What Mr. Wilder is really doing is nothing
either so personal or so universal as he thinks it is. He is
constructing a social myth, a picture of a golden age that is a
paradigm for today. He has the best of both tenses-the past is
veiled by the nostalgic feelings of the present, while the present
is' softened by being conveyed in terms of a safely remote past.
But 'what a myth and what a golden age! Here one does get a
little impatient with the talented Mr. Wilder.
,The stage manager is its demiurge. He
is
the perfect
American pragmatist, folksy and relaxed because that's
jest
the, way things are and if anybuddy hankers to change 'em
that's their right only (pause, business of drawing reflectively
on pipe) chances are 't won't make a sight of difference (pipe
business again) things don't change much in Grover's Comers.
There is no issue too trivial for
him
not to take a stand 'on.
"That's the end of the first act, friends," he tells the audience.
"You can go smoke now"-adding with a touch of genius,
"those that smoke." Don't do any harm, really, one way or
t'other.
XIII
The special threat of Midcult is that it exploits the dis–
coveries of the avant-garde. This is something new. Midcult's
hiStorical predecessor, Academicism, resembled it in being
kitsch
for the elite, outwardly High Culture but really as much
