WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
619
and con. (Mary McCarthy's pro among them.) Some are old enough to
remember the contentious excitements that surrounded the publication
of Norman Mailer's
Advertisements for Myself,
a personal assessment,
like
Shop Talk,
of contemporary writers. Mailer's book was far less seri–
ous, far less well-intended; it was mainly a noisy, nasty, competitive dis–
play of putdowns; an audacious act of flashy self-confessed
self-aggrandizement. But like
Shop Talk
it was, after all, about
writers,
and there was a zealous public for it, a public drawn to substantive lit–
erary commotion. In contrast, when
Shop Talk
appeared in the first year
of the twenty-first century, its reception was nearly total muteness.
Pub–
lishers Weekly,
taking obligatory notice, denigrated this large-hearted,
illuminating, selfless work of cultural inquiry and fiercely generous admi–
ration as fresh evidence of the Rothian ego-a viewpoint false, stale, and
impertinent in both senses. Perhaps there were other reviews, perhaps
not. What is notable is that
Shop Talk
was
not
notable. It was born into
silence.
It
attracted no major attention, or no attention at all-not even
among the editors of intellectual journals. No one praised it; no one con–
demned it. Not a literary creature stirred in response-not even a louse.
These observations are hardly new; but familiarity does not lessen the
shock and the ignominy of a pervasive indifference to serious writing.
Fifty years ago, it was still taken for granted that there would be serious
discourse about serious writing by nonprofessionals, by people for whom
books were common currency. These people also listened to Jack Benny
on the radio and went to the movies. I am reminded of The Reader's Sub–
scription, a book club presided over not by an early counterpart of
Oprah, but by an astonishing highbrow triumvirate: W. H. Auden,
Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling. Fifty years ago, no one spoke so bla–
tantly, so clumsily, of "the high-art literary tradition"-one doesn't give
a name to the air one breathes.
If
the phrase sounds silly today (and it
does), it is because it has the awed, wondering, and adoring tone of the
language Oprah herself would use; or else the tone of someone born too
late, like an antiques-besotted client of limited means whom an interior
decorator will oblige with duplicates of period furnishings. "The high-art
literary tradition"-utter these syllables, and you utter a stage set.
In
1952,
William Phillips wrote of "the attitude of aesthetic loneliness
and revolt," setting the writer apart from mass culture, that had charac–
terized his youth. "Along with many other people, most of them more
mature than myself," he said, "I felt that art was a temple and that
artists belonged to a priesthood of the anointed and the dedicated." The
politics and social commitment of the thirties swept all that inherited
romanticism away, but only temporarily. It reemerged soon enough in
