666
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Trilling are talking about the same phenomenon: a secular spiritu–
alism that holds art sacred while it scorns bourgeois life as profane.
Both Benichou and Trilling, I think, make too much of this enthusi–
astic clerisy. Just as there are many currents in Enlightenment thought,
so there are many currents in post-romantic and modernist thought, and
not all romantic and post-romantic writers regarded themselves as
sages. Even if many writers did regard themselves in such an exalted
way, they were not necessarily hostile to bourgeois society. Yeats and
Rilke are in the hostile camp, but Whitman and Stevens are not.
Are writers still consecrated in France and elsewhere? I rather doubt
it. In the English-speaking world, it seems clear that the enthusiastic
clerisy is a diminished thing. Far from consecrating writers, whatever
clerisy we do have seems less interested in the wisdom of writers than in
their lives. We want to know about their sordid or dreary lives, which
is why lengthy biographies of very minor writers-Anne Sexton for
example-sell well.
But if writers are not consecrated, secular spiritualism is alive and
well, for it is found not only in motivational books that promise the
reader health, wealth, and longevity if he or she becomes a spiritual per–
son, but it is also found in the innumerable writing programs that exist
in the United States. "Poetry offers a spiritual core for society that seems
to lack one," the director of a California writing workshop said
recently. In the U.S. there are more than
300
degree-granting programs
in creative writing and more than 359 writers' conferences, seminars,
and workshops. So write a poem or short story or memoir about how
your father was a bastard and your mother was...whatever, and you
will be transformed into a spiritual person . In the romantic period, as
Benichou suggests, art was taken too seriously, becoming a substitute
for religion; now art is fast becoming a trivial activity-weekend ther–
apy for aging baby boomers.
Stephen Miller
