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ROBERT COLES
of campus activism as a sort of benevolent and pardonable
trahison des
clercs,
but otherwise he is content to write about an abstract idea of the
university rather than what is actually happening.
Moreover, he demands a similarly abstract disinterestedness from
art, and seems willing to emasculate it if he should detect impure
gestures of advocacy. He is confident that the "reactionary and
anti–
social attitudes" of so much of modernist writing will lose their force
when turned into course assignments:
... [W]hen contemporary authors are assigned for compulsory read–
ing, and when they are taught in a way that relates them to their
cultural heritage, a certain detachment comes into the attitude
toward them. Not all the detachment is good, but one thing about
it is: the social attitude of the writer is taken over by the social
attitude of education itself, and loses its crankiness by being placed
in a social context. Study, as distinct from direct response, is a cool
mediulll, and even the most blatant advocacy of violence and terror
may be, like Satan in the Bible, transformed into an angel of light
by being regarded as a contribution to modern thought.
Here the message of Frye's style becomes his explicit message as well.
It
is
a bad but not an uncharacteristic moment, when Frye seems
to
embody so much that is complacent and devitalizing in our universities
and in the liberal culture to which they belong, so much that the modern
writers set out to destroy. How chillingly ironic that they themselves,
trimmed of their "crankiness," should now be skewered and served up
to the next generation as "contributions to modern thought."
Morris Dickstein
MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND
STOP-TIME. By Frank Conroy. Viking Press. $5.95.
I recently went through the heartache of committing a
young man to a mental institution in Boston. He is twenty-two, and last
year graduated from Harvard. I had known him as a student, not a
patient. Once, in a paper, he scorned psychiatrists and the cliches they
peddle to America's middle class: "Psychiatrists offer people with
diplomas, but no real education, a pleasant, good-tasting stew - a dash
