6.16
DWIGHT MACDONALD
"writers' conferences."
As
Wallace Markfield put it in the
New
Leade1'
of March 18, 1957 : "No other generation . . .
has
pursued the
Good
Job quite so wisely and so well. This is
not
to
say that they have consigned themselves to the gas
chambers of Madison Avenue or Luceland. Far from it: their
desks are more likely to be littered with
Kenyon Review
than
with
Printers Ink.
To their lot fall the foundation plums, the
berths with the better magazines and book-houses, the research
sinecures. They are almost never unemployed; they are only
between grants." Similarly, Greenwich Village bohemians now
make a comfortable living selling leather sandals and silver
jewelry to the tourists just like the Indians in New Mexico.
Nowadays everybody lives on the reservation.
So
much for the positive side of our current boom in
culture. The chief negative aspect is that so far our Renaissance,
unlike the original one, has been passive, a matter of consum–
ing rather than creating, a catching up on our reading on a
continental scale. The quality paperbacks sell mostly the Big
Names already established in hard covers. The records and the
1100
orchestras play Mozart and Stravinsky rather than Elliott
Carter. The art museums show mostly old masters or new
masters like Matisse, with a Jackson Pollock
if
they are very
daring. The new theaters present almost entirely old plays :
off-Broadway has done well by Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, O'Neill,
Brecht, Beckett, and Shakespeare, but except for
The Connec–
tion
and
The Zoo Story,
it has had
almost
nothing of signifi–
cance by hitherto unknown playwrights. We have, in short,
become skilled at consuming High Culture when it has been
stamped PRIME QUALITY by the proper authorities, but
We lack the kind of sophisticated audience that supported the
achievements of the classic avant-garde, an audience that can
appreciate and discriminate on its own.
For this more difficult enterprise, we shall need
what
we
very well may not get for all our four million college popula–
tion: a cultural community. The term is pompous but I can
