442
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
of course, were made: wrong riders rode wrong horses through the
wrong fork of the road. However, the extension of the national prosperity
of the 1950s and 1960s to encompass these two endeavors - stepchil–
dren of the 1870s and 1880s and the 1920s - was, in the immortal
phrase of
1066 and All That,
a "good thing."
But every gain carries with it certain losses. ( I'll leave aside the
losses in education, which are not the subject here. ) And in the arts it
has been my uneasy feeling that for the past two decades the book
publishers, the journals, the movie industry, the university, the museums,
art centers, drama centers, have been subsidizing a good deal of mere–
tricious art, verbal, visual or whatever. To deal only with literature:
beginning in the 1950s, and culminating in the 1960s this elevation of
the meretricious reached its zenith. And it reached its zenith because it
happened to coincide with three other aspects of American culture which
appear to be permanent constituents but are intermittent in their
manifestations: the systolic-diastolic movement within the zigzag of the
evolutionary pattern. They are: ' antiintellectuafism (or, as it was known
historically, "Know-Nothingism" ) , egalitarianism (or antielitism) and
"youthism." It was this constellation, joined to material prosperity,
that engendered the Beats, the Hippies, the whole "Now" movement.
The movement was not without its vigor and fresqness and it certainly
constituted a "culture" in the anthropological sense, but it was not
culture in the sense that I employed the word in my opening paragraph.
It had its day and has now faded, as is always the case with "pop art."
What has happened in the cold reality of the dawn of the early 1970s
is that the "Now" movement has succumbed to that most terrible and
implacable and irresistible of enemies: boredom. "Now" is never for–
ever; it is only "Now." And I cannot see how this perfectly under–
standable human phenomenon can be graced or decorated with the
appellation "The New Cultural Conservatism."
Now there were, and are, a lot of good individual writers, novelists
and poets, around and about. They know who they are. And a lot of
fakes too, and they know who they are. But wha t we are addressing
here, I take it, are the general litera ry manifestations of the past couple
of decades. LOc>king at the gener'al tenor of the literary 1950s and
1960s, I would say that it had the following generic characteristics: it
was mindless, "trendy," antiintellectual, unhistorical, boring and often just
plain stupid. Its satire " trended" to be heavy-handed, witless and dull.
Its ego-outpourings were self-indulgent and embarrassing to the reader.
Its attempts at new forms were both artless and uninteresting. The
whole episode was brief, comprehensible, understanda ble, thin, transi–
tory and ephemeral. Let us consign it to that enormous dustbin or
compos t heap tha t is filled with the bric-a-brac and the debris of his–
tory. Everybody these days is quoting John Reed in the reverse, so one
more instance will not hurt: "We have seen the future and it does
not work."
