VARIETY
87
There is some evidence that by fits and starts the United States
is
achieving a civilization. Our record so far has not been distinguished,
no doubt because we had a bad beginning. Yet it is always possible
to make things better-as well as worse. Various groups are now at
work trying to make sense of the fifty state codes. New York and
California are expected to have improved codes by the end of this
decade. But should there be a sudden renewal of legal moralism, at–
tempts to modify and liberalize will fail. What is needed, specifically,
is a test case before the Supreme Court which would establish
in
a
single decision that "sin," where it does not disturb the public order,
is not the concern of the state. This conception is implicit in our Con–
stitution. But since it has never been tested, our laws continue to punish
the sinful as though the state were still an arm of Church Militant.
Although a Great Society is more easily attained in rhetoric than in fact,
a good first step might be the removal from our statute books of that
entirely misplaced scarlet letter.
Gore Vidal
TEXT AND THE COLLEGE STUDENT
Twenty-five years ago the teaching of literature in America
was virtually revolutionized by a single textbook:
Understanding Poetry
by
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Brooks and Warren, as
the book came to be called, was an adaptation for students of the criti–
cism of Graves, Richards, Empson, and Ransom, a codification and
demonstration of the so-called New Criticism. The resistance was loud,
often vulgar, seldom articulate, both in the academy and in its journals,
and no English department was without its split between New Critics
and an Old Guard of "scholars" and "historians." Merely
to
take sides
was
to
earn a title--of "critic" without writing any criticism, of "scholar"
