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values. I need not remind you that the serious art of this period has
been critical and detached.
And in your dismissal of the art scene today I think you make the
mistake of lumping fashionable versions of the avant-garde, tailored
to the popular market, with work of genuine talent by writers and
painters who have resisted. the pressures of the time . Most poets, for
example, perhaps because of the intractability of the medium, have
kept their distance from pop taste . And a number of novelists might
even be said to have become too eccentric in their effort to stay out of
the entertainment business. Thus, in failing to distinguish between
the conformist and noncomformist part of the culture, you are con–
fusing the cure with the disease . I am sure you have no such political
motives, but you must be aware that a favorite gambit of conservative
critics is to blame the cultural slump on the radical sensibility, that is,
on the sensibility that is opposed to all the things you are against.
What more can I say-except to deplore the situation in which
people who have the same values and goals find themselves on oppo–
site sides of the fence. In the "old days," which you refer to ap–
parently with some nostalgia, there was plenty of nonsense, but one
felt closer to those one was able to argue with. One can argue fruit–
fully only with those who share one's assumptions, but in the frag–
mentation and confusion of thinking today differences become
barricades.
W.P.
