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Thomson:
Our connection was as colleagues, and they were nice
fellows. As a matter of fact, for thirty to thirty-five years I've been
sitting on boards and committees with those popular writers in
ASCAP and having a wonderful time, because they are loyal col–
leagues and intelligent people, and we are all in show business. They
respect me, I respect them.
Trilling:
In other words , you never had to make the kind of conscious
effort that has had to be made among writers to bring into some kind
of coherent association the ideas of high and popular art?
Thomson:
I don't know. The writers were very early to like Ring
Lardner. And before World War I, George Ade.
Fables in Slang
had a
high repute in literature.
Trilling:
Well, Mark Twain wrote in the tradition of the folk humor–
ists, and of course Constance Rourke was very powerful in establish–
ing the concept of American folk humor. But I think there's a slight
condescension involved in this. I don't think there was an easy
acceptance even of Ring Lardner among intellectuals.
Thomson:
The idea of a group of intellectuals who are liberal in
politics and presumably tolerant in art has an integral and impor–
tant connection with art and music as well as with literature. It has a
connection with literature because they are all writers, it's all words.
But the magazines that you mentioned have never had very much
space for music or a very professional approach to it.
Trilling:
What I am trying to say is that, from where I'm sitting, music
was peripheral, it wasn't a concern of the intellectual community in
the way that literature was. Neither was painting, though painting
was more connected.
Thomson:
Not necessarily. Both eye people and ear people were
separate.
Trilling:
Many writers whom I've known in this community which
I've lived in most of my life have been so ignorant about music that
it's absolutely appalling. They're often more intelligent about
painting, but about music they're ignoramuses. They'd be ashamed
to be that ignorant about anything else.
Thomson:
Joyce considered himself a musician and he could sing. He
used to come to my concerts. Gertrude would come to my concerts
simply because they were mine. Gertrude didn't enjoy music or have
any particular sense of it. Brought up in a well-to-do Jewish family,
she had gone to symphony concerts and the opera as a girl , but it
didn't take. And afterward she always said music is for adolescents.
Alice Toklas was a musician. She had a real education , and she
played a piano concerto once with an orchestra. She could read a
