Praising not the Hedgehog but the Fox

Hartmann's literary adventures are fascinating, and I regret that my interdisciplinary provincialism in American Civilization kept me from knowing his work. Turning 80, I decided to explore my much less distinguished odyssey as a man abandoned by his father at three, who spent the next ten years in a Catholic boarding school followed by three in a minor seminary, Naval service, three years at a Jesuit University and graduate school Marxism somewhat mellowed by Commonweal McLuhanism.

As I have come to consider the horrorific disparity between humanist hypertheorizing and the imminent collapse of our public school system, I have concluded that the grossest failures of the American clerisy was not their Depression era Marxism but their failure to intellectually energize the public schools. I'm reminded of the Daedalus Conference on Mass Culture in the Poconos in 1961.

Someone had to say something positive about the mass society, and I, as Gilbert Seldes' gofer at the then new Annenberg School at Penn, was the ritual sacrifice. My message was the median: As a Carnegie postdoctoral fellow at Penn, I was charged with creating a new course on "The Mass Society". I urged that we identify creativity in the new institutions--Paddy Chayesky and Edward R.Murrow on television for example. And the likes of Victor Gruen, Albert Kahn, and Saul Bass in the man made landscape. Encourage students from grade one onwards to identify and relish the first class from the trash and hope that the best would create more of the best for the next generation. It was just the old Arnoldian best that was thought and said applied to mass culture.

I was already finishing graduate school when I discovered Raymond Williams, who added the part all my humanist mentors had dropped....so that fresh ideas could be brought to bear on the problems of industrial civilization. So simple to state, so easy for the hyperverbal to avoid. The conference actually ended with Randall Jarrell waggling his prophet's beard at me and intoning: "Mr. Hazard, you're the man of the future, and I am glad I'm not going to be there." Creative humanist thinking.

We, alas, didn't know then how soon he would excuse himself from the crudities of the world he didn't want to deal with any longer. It later gave a painful poignancy to my teaching his poems, which I had always relished. Jefferson believed a democracy could never be any greater than its common schools. Not the few Andovers and Grotons where the aspiring humanist could make a deal to enter the Ivies. But common schools, the ones failing now in my hometown of Philadelphia where the great great grandchildren of slaves are shooting each other in witless anger.

Tell me, if the humanists are not responsible, then who are? They have gone off half cocked to their postmodernist moon, never even acknowledging their responsibilities on the ground. I remember flinching when Norman Podhoretz mocked Paddy Chavesky's work as kitchen sink drama.He should have done half as well in his biased journalism, creating the cadre of New York intellectuals who betrayed the Jeffersonian ideal with their hubris.

Patrick D.Hazard, Weimar Germany.