BOOKS
The sensibility of the fifties was largely a literary one. In the
writings of such representative critics as Lionel Trilling, Yvor
Winters, and John Crow Ransom, the emphasis was on complexity,
irony, ambiguity, and paradox. These are properties peculiar to the
mind. They foster a critical attitude, a detachment and distance
which guard one against any overwhelming involvement, absorp–
tion, immolation in a creed or an experience. At worst a form of
quietism, at best a mode of self-consciousness, this attitude is
essentially moderate in tone. The sensibility of the sixties rejected
that mood in savage, even mindless fashion. In its fury with the
times, the new sensibility was loud, imprecatory, prone to obscenity,
and given to posing every issue, political or otherwise, in disjunctive
correlatives.
281
Now, aside from its evident bias for the tepid and the respectable, this
passage illustrates the kind of distortion that comes from over–
generalizing and lumping together things that have only the remotest
connection with each other. To begin with, Trilling, Winters, and
Ransom had very little in common: Trilling was a historical and social
critic, Winters a moralist, and Ransom the father of the new criticism,
which tried to make a theory of poetry out of the principles of irony,
paradox, and ambiguity, in keeping with a return
to
the sensibility of
the seventeenth century. Second, the implication that detachment from
involvement and experience is a mark of high art has more to do with
the esthetics of the genteel tradition than with the making of fiction
and poetry. One has only
to
think of Robert Lowell, who, by the way,
was admired by most of the new critics. Furthermore, the characteriza–
tion of the sixties as an incoherent and vulgar babel mixes up the worst
part of the counter-culture and pop-art, with the serious poetry, fiction
and criticism of the period, which had none of the distasteful qualities
Bell associates with an ignorant and noisy rabble. I must say that one
simply does not recognize the novels, poems and criticism of the period
in these dismissive and sweeping generalizations. In addition, Bell
accuses the sixties of a "concern with violence and cruelty; a preoccu–
pation with the sexually perverse; a desire to make noise; an anticogni–
tive and antiintellectual mood; an effort once and for all to erase the
boundary between 'art' and 'life'; and a fusion of art and politics."
Again, this is polemical fantasy. Violence and cruelty were to be found
mostly at the extremities and in the packaged versions of contemporary
art for mass consumption; they were not the main concern of much of
the serious fiction and poetry. And the so-called anticognitive and
antiintellectual mood was a staple of romanticism-perhaps of all
