A Middle Road Between Sterility and Stupefaction/part one

The divorce between liberal arts and educationism in American schools has saddled the English profession with a particularly useless dilemma: A teacher is almost forced to choose between sticking by traditional literature courses (and winning the respect of frequently uninformed professors of literature) or forging off into a wild and woolly blue yonder of mass communication and core and functionalism (getting thereby the sometimes sentimental attention and praise of the extremists among professors of education).

Too often the former high road leads to a kind of snobbish sterility and ineffectiveness with students, who simply don't respond because they can't "dig" tradition unmediated by an informed contemporary intelligence. And just as often the latter low road of popularity leads to much-how-to-do-about-nothing. In effect, students are thrown into the deep end of the pool of criticism. A few learn to swim over to the float of little magazine criticism; most sink to a lifetime of the tepidest TV and the most condensed of all possible book clubs.

It seems to this observer, trained by the professors of literature but with most pleasant memories of public school teaching, that neither extreme is really tenable. What we actually need are traditional literature courses imaginative enough to include the new forms of popular culture. And while it would be nice to have anthologies constructed specifically to bring tradition and the popular arts into intellectually stimulating interplay, we need not wait for the publisher's tortoise.

All a teacher really needs is an old anthology, some reliable and comprehensive sources of fact and analysis about contemporary mass culture, and a new point of view. The new point of view is a via media that not only avoids the sterility of old fogeyism by constantly revealing the relevance of the past to the present but that also steadfastly ignores the stupefaction of contemporamania by judging the present by the wisdom of the past.

Each teacher must find a personal point of view on his own, but it is reassuring to note a growing body of criticism that will give the teacher of literature the needed facts and interpretation about mass culture. Gilbert Seldes pointed out this middle road in 1924 when he wrote the first book on the subject and added a phrase, The Seven Lively Arts, to the language. Sagamore Press (50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, $4.95) brought out a new edition (with many 1957 afterthoughts) to coincide with the premiere last fall of CBS-TV's The Seven Lively Arts.

The essential premise of the book is that one can and should, as the author does, take both popular and elite art seriously. Seldes, after all, found his critical tools at Harvard (A.B., 1914), sharpened them as a drama and music critic for Eastern newspapers, and was one of the three major reviewers of James Joyce's banned novel, Ulysses.

His success as a critic of popular culture then quite directly derives from his broad humane background. And there is a further moral for the teaching of literature in his thesis that the common enemy of good popular and elite arts is bogus ART (the stock in trade of those vultures of culture who circle grimly over the dead bones of the good household poets and their successors in the tradition of pretentious gentility).

What Seldes has to say in praise of Charlie Chaplin, Finley Peter Dunne, Ring Lardner, Krazy Kat, and Irving Berlin will help teachers who need a pedagogical angle of vision on, say, Sid Caesar, Paddy Chayefsky, Leonard Bernstein, and Elia Kazan. And, of course, admirable patterns for a rigorous criticism of contemporary popular culture is as close as a copy of Seldes' The Public Arts (Simon and Schuster paperbound, $1.50) or his latest column in the Saturday Review.

His critical intelligence is exemplary precisely because he cherishes the vitality of the best in popular art without making the sociologist's mistake of taking it as seriously as high culture. This sociological weakness appears in a generally admirable collection of essays edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957, $6.95). "How to Read Li'l Abner Intelligently," for example, encourages the kind of hubris in Al Capp which prompts that admirable cartoonist to make utterly preposterous denigrations of modern painting.

"Card Playing as Mass Culture" brings to a trivial pastime a poker face that fits only the consideration of the most cosmic questions. "Is There a Best Seller Formula?" tends to obscure the basic point that popular books are trivial in the many distinct kinds of fluff perceived on best-seller lists. A second weakness of this collection is the post-Marxist disillusionment which hobbles the approach of most critics of mass culture; this failure of vision is admirably analyzed in the best review the book has received--by a professor of sociology at that, Edward Shils of the University of Chicago, in the Sewanee Review (Fall 1957).

These reservations noted, one must emphasize that Mass Culture is far and away the best compendium now in print of fact and interpretation on paperbacks, movies, TV, magazines, advertising, and other aspects of popular culture. The essays themselves provide the beginner with a beachhead, and the books' bibliographies allow one to penetrate to the heart of our situation as conservers of tradition in the mass society.

This writer has made a more detailed analysis of its value in "The Public Arts and the Private Sensibility: On the Humanities in a Mass Society," the final chapter in Lewis Leary's collection, Contemporary Literary Scholarship: A Critical Review (to be published in April for the National Council of Teachers of English by Appleton-Century.)