BOOKS
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the nervous energy of the New York streets into their work - out of their
lives but into their work.
Today, in Rockwell's words, "the city leads rather than commands."
Since our culture is more decentralized, we can look back to the mid-century
era of New York's unchallenged hegemony with a fondness untinged by
fantasies of a golden age.
As
a recreation of the period,
New York: Culture
Capital ofthe World,
despite occasional excesses ofretrospective enthusiasm,
is a model ofits kind. It's hard to imagine an individual author doing justice to
so many branches of the arts. The editor hasn't tried to lash his contributors
to any single style or posture; like the arts they describe, the essays com–
plement each other without fusing or dissolving.
The same can be said of the relation between text and pictures. The
extended captions, written with care and attention, are laid out beautifully in
the book's extra-wide margins. Often they read like capsule essays that
boldly condense the essential viewpoint of the authors, even amplifY it. Some
of the illustrations are simply pendants to the text; others dazzlingly illumi–
nate it. In the chapter on intellectuals, we turn from reading about Lionel
Trilling and Norman Podhoretz to be assaulted by a lurid full-color
reproduction of the original Ace cover paperback of
Junkie: Confessions ofan
Unredeemed
Drug
Addict,
by William Burroughs ("William Lee"). No words
could so forcefully convey this antinomian mutation at the heart of the intel–
lectual culture of the 1950s.
This is finally the story told by Leonard Wallock's well-conceived and
beautifully designed book: not the saga of a tranquil era before the onset of
our present troubles, but the story of how the culture of the forties, which
helped make New York a world-class city, an imperial city, was gradually
transformed into the culture of the sixties, which turbulently brought so much
ofour buried anger, hope, and discontent to the surface.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
CULTURAL HIERARCHIES
HIGHBROW/LOWBROW: THE EMERGENCE OF CULTURAL
HIERARCHY IN
AMERICA. By
Lawrence
W.
Levine.
Harvard
University Press. $25.00.
Every critic, I suspect, is afflicted now and then by the itch to
meddle with his subject's work. Not necessarily to improve what's on the
