Part One
The Culture
The Ideal of Culture
(2017)
During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today, wannabe—novelists and poets. Usage, diction, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, irony were some of the subjects taken up in class. Around the sixth week of the eight-week term I passed out a list of 12 or so names and historical events—among them Sergei Diaghelev, Francis Poulenc, Mark Rothko, Alexander Herzen, the 1913 Armory Show, John Cage, the Spanish Civil War, George Balanchine, and Jean Cocteau—and asked how many of these items the students could identify.
The identification rate among my students was inevitably low, which did not much surprise me. I mentioned that, at their age (20 or 21), I should probably not have done much better, and then added:
But if as writers you intend to present yourself to the world as cultured persons, you have to know these names and events and scores of others, and what is important about them. This is not something that one gets up as if for an exam, or Googles and promptly forgets, but that must be understood in historical context—at least it must for those who seek to live a cultured life.
Oddly, no one ever asked what a cultured life was, and why it was worth pursuing. This may have been just as well for, though I believed I was myself by then leading (or earnestly attempting to lead) such a life, I’m not sure I could have answered either question. I’m going to attempt to do so now.
In 1952, the anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn wrote a famous article, “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” in which they specified no fewer than 164 definitions of culture. Culture can, of course, refer to whole civilizations, such as Western culture or Asian culture; it can refer to national, ethnic, or social-class cultures, such as Israeli culture or Irish Catholic culture, or working-class culture. In all these senses it refers to the overarching aspirations and assumptions that underlay the ways that different peoples and groups have of understanding and dealing with the world.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn might today have to expand their number of definitions, for the so-called “culture” of corporations, professions, and athletic teams has become among the leading cant phrases of our time. Princeton University Press recently published a book with the title The Culture of Growth, and the movie star Gwyneth Paltrow not long ago noted that her civilized break with her husband contributed to “the culture of divorce.”
What I mean by the ideal of culture is high culture, as set out by Matthew Arnold in his 1867 essay “Culture and Anarchy.” Arnold described this level of culture as “the best which has been thought and said,” but in our day it has been enlarged to include the best that has been composed and painted and sculpted and filmed. Arnold believed that high culture had its “origin in the love of perfection” and the “study of perfection,” and thought it an idea that the new democracy under the industrial revolution developing in his day needed “more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances.”
Behind Arnold’s notion of high culture was a program for the partial reform of human nature. Attaining the perfection of high culture, Arnold held, would bring about “an inward condition of the mind and spirit . . . at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us.” Properly cultivated, this elevated culture would lead to “an expansion of human nature” and release us from our “inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following.”
One might think Matthew Arnold’s idea of culture is restricted to the well-born. He saw it otherwise. “In each class,” he wrote,
there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are, for disentangling themselves from machinery . . . for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection. . . . And this bent always tends . . . to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their [social origins, wealth, or status], but their humanity.
Make no mistake: High culture, culture in the sense in which Arnold speaks of it as an ideal, is an elite activity—but one potentially open to everyone with what Arnold calls a “bent” for it.
I should never have thought myself to have had this bent, and might never have discovered it but for the somewhat fortuitous event of my having gone to the University of Chicago in the middle 1950s. Neither of my parents went to college, though both were highly intelligent and well-spoken. But anything remotely resembling high culture was simply not on their menu. My father was interested in politics and world events, my mother astute in her judgment of people; ours was a home with lots of newspapers and magazines but no books whatsoever—not even, as I recall, a dictionary. The only performing art of the least interest to my parents and their friends was musical comedy. They and their social set got on well enough without culture, preoccupied as they were with earning a living, raising families, maintaining friendships, and dealing with life’s manifold quotidian matters.
Doubtless I should have, too, but for my having gone to college where and when I did. The University of Chicago was an institution, unlike the Ivy League schools, without the least taint of social snobbery: At Chicago, wealth, birth, good looks counted for nothing. (In fact, I once heard two distinguished professors there, the social scientist Edward Shils and the historiographer Arnaldo Momigliano, in conversation all but disqualify a male graduate student for being much too handsome to do serious scholarship.) All that mattered at Chicago was knowledge and intellect: what one knew, and how deeply and subtly one knew it.
Many of the most distinguished members of the faculty at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s were European; several of these part of what one might call Adolf Hitler’s gift to American intellectual life: that is, European Jews who fled the Nazi and fascist Jewish genocide. Among them were the political philosopher Leo Strauss, the physicist Enrico Fermi (whose wife was Jewish), the historian Karl Weintraub, the historian-philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade. Hannah Arendt was somewhat later a member of the university’s Committee on Social Thought. These people gave a tone to the place—and the tone was that not merely of extensive erudition (merely, indeed!) but of an impressive density of culture probably not available anywhere else. I don’t know about giants, but lots of highly cultured men and women walked the earth in those days.
From the deep abyss of my late-adolescent ignorance, I never for a moment thought I could hope to emulate such men and women. I nevertheless somehow sensed that there was something immensely impressive about them. The philosopher Eva Brann nicely captures my emotional reaction to the cultured men and women I glancingly encountered at the University of Chicago when, about her own students at St. John’s College in Annapolis, she writes:
Those students seem to me most admirable who are captivated by admiration, even adoration—who know what it is to lack and long, quail and emulate—to feel the exultation of being the lesser, bound by love to a greater, the pride of recognizing superiority, the generosity of pure delight in it. You have to be young; with maturity comes a more distant, more mordant view of even the finest of fellow humans. Yet, if moments of being simply overcome by some magnificence or other have ceased altogether, you’re not so much old as wizened.
At their best, these figures at the University of Chicago seemed above the fray, the everyday concerns of moneymaking, partisan politics, crude status gathering. (I would later learn that this was not always—in fact, was sometimes far from—the case.) The world might go about its business, but they were playing the game of life at another, a different and higher level. I yearned to play the game myself; I wondered, longin
gly, what it took to be allowed onto their court.
What it took to pass through the gates into the realm of high culture was years of thoughtful reading, listening, viewing, thinking. This would develop the critical sense needed to discern the difference between serious and ersatz culture, and a receptivity to the sublime in beauty. High culture critics, meanwhile, saw their job as that of gatekeepers, making certain that no inferior works were allowed to pass themselves off as the real thing. In the 1950s and early ’60s, there was much written about highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow art—a distinction first made by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks and, a generation later, expanded by the Harper’s editor Russell Lynes—and the differences and distinctions among them.
The pursuit of high culture came with a price. Once hooked on it, one was no longer entirely at ease with popular culture—the culture, that is to say, most of us we grew up with and that remains the mainstream culture. Once one is devoted to the pursuit of high culture, the best-seller, the Oscar-winning movie, the highest-rated television shows—all uncomplicatedly enjoyed by one’s contemporaries—are, if not of no interest, then thought somewhat out of bounds, with the enjoyment of them tending to fall under the category of guilty pleasures.
I had a friend, Samuel Lipman, a piano prodigy as a child, a student of the conductor and violinist Pierre Monteux, later a teacher at Juilliard, a powerful music critic, and publisher of the New Criterion, a magazine devoted to the arts. In the realm of culture, Sam was an immitigable, irretrievable highbrow. Once, after a meeting of the Council of the National Endowment for the Arts (of which we were both members), I said to Sam that I noted he rarely mentioned movies or television. “Oh, I consider movies and television,” he said, rather casually, “dog shit.” Dog shit, I thought at the time, lower in dignity even than the excrement of bulls and horses.
Another friend of mine, Hilton Kramer, kept a comparably high standard. Hilton was an immensely amusing and witty fellow, but not a man you asked whom he liked in the World Series, or which he thought the best of Herman’s Hermits’ songs. When art critic at the New York Times, he was the only writer on the paper whom, in his exile, the great Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn would allow to interview him. Solzhenitsyn agreed to do so because—a great tribute here—he respected Hilton’s seriousness.
Not everyone can live on the chaste cultural diets of Hilton Kramer and Sam Lipman. Two highly cultivated men of my acquaintance—the political thinker Irving Kristol and the historian of modern France Eugen Weber—were devoted to detective fiction; I only recently learned that Walter Benjamin, the metaphysician of language, was also addicted to detective fiction. And so was Gershom Scholem, the great authority on Jewish mysticism. William Phillips, the editor in its heyday of the intellectual quarterly Partisan Review, was an ardent New York Giants fan. I once saw the baritone Bryn Terfel perform at the Ravinia Festival in what I took to be a United Manchester soccer jersey.
Sam Lipman and Hilton Kramer were the aesthetic and intellectual equivalent of vegans—extremely cautious about what they consumed. As critics, which both men were, they saw their job as separating the serious from the pretentious, the genuine from the meretricious, the life-enhancing from the amusingly and sometimes perniciously trivial. Whence did their authority derive? What gave them the right to sit in judgment on, and find unacceptable, works that others had sometimes put years into making and which many others innocently enjoyed? Their authority came from their having thought about art for decades, and their passionate devotion to it. They were able to impose their views by the main force of the cogency of their arguments.
Culture is continuity with the past: A cultureless person knows only about, and lives exclusively in, the present. Few things are as pleasing—thrilling, really—as reading a classical author and discovering that he has had thoughts and emotions akin to your own. So I have felt, at times, reading Horace, Montaigne, William Hazlitt, and others who departed the planet centuries before my entrance upon it. Edmund Wilson writes splendidly on this point in a brief essay called “A Preface to Persius,” in which he offers his observations on reading a late-18th-century edition of Persius, the first century ce Latin poet and satirist. Wilson read the preface to this edition in an Italian restaurant and speakeasy in Greenwich Village in 1927, and felt himself “warmed by this sense of continuity with the past, with Persius and William Drummond [the book’s editor], by this spirit of stubborn endurance.” This cultural connection put him, Edmund Wilson, however briefly, outside the politics and noisiness of the present, and forcefully reminded him that, for the man or woman of culture,
there was nothing to do save to work with the dead for allies, and at odds with the ignorance of most of the living, that that edifice, so many times begun, so discouragingly reduced to ruins, might yet stand as the headquarters of humanity!
The edifice Wilson refers to is, of course, civilization.
Does all this talk of high culture have a ring of snobbery? If so, I have badly misrepresented it. There is nothing snobbish about seeking out the best that has been thought and said. What it is, as noted earlier, is elitist, a word in our egalitarian age in even worse odor, perhaps, than snobbery. Cultural elitists, as do connoisseurs generally, like only the best and seek it out. But how do they determine what is best? From tradition, from the tastes of their culturally elitist forebears, from their own refined aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities. Along with Longinus, they identify as high culture those works of art and intellect that elevate the soul, stay in the memory, and appeal across different cultures. Elitist the cultural ideal certainly is, but with the difference, as noted by Matthew Arnold, that it is open to anyone who wishes to make the effort to attain that ideal.
Those opposed to the elitist impulse in art make the mistake of confusing the realms of culture and politics. To be a cultural elitist does not eliminate the possibility of one’s simultaneously being a democrat in one’s views politically, or even a man or woman determinedly on the left. The Australian art critic Robert Hughes claimed to be split in this way. Proof that the highbrow and the left-wing radical can live comfortably enough in the same person is illustrated—in fact, highlighted—in the last lines of Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution. Trotsky wrote that it was his dream that, under communism,
man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.
In other words, the end of the class struggle, as envisioned by the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, would be the acquisition of high culture by all.
How, then, does one attain culture? Superior intelligence isn’t the key. I have known high-level physicists and mathematicians—people whose IQs are doubtless stratospheric—who were, so to say, culture-proof. Even the most adroit teachers cannot hope to bestow culture on their students: the best they can do, if they are themselves cultivated, is provide a glimmer of what the real thing looks like. A university education is never sufficient in itself, though it can give its interested students useful guidance about where culture is available. In the realm of culture, as in all non-vocational education generally, we are all autodidacts—all on our own, that is. No approved method for acquiring culture is available: There is no useful list of the hundred most important books, 200 essential musical compositions, 300 significant paintings, 400 hundred best films. So far as I have been able to determine, no Culture for Dummies has yet been published, though one may well be on the way. No guides, no lists, no shortcuts to attaining culture exist; nor will they ever.
The sad truth, the bad news, is that one never really attains culture in the way one attains, say, a plumber’s license or a CPA. If anyone says he is cultured, or even thinks himself cultured, which no truly cultured person ever would, he or she, like th
ose who think themselves charming, probably is not. In striving after the attainment of culture, one invariably falls short. Other people are soon enough discovered who have it in greater depth, and make one’s own cultural attainments seem paltry.
One discovers, straightaway, that earlier eras had a higher standard for culture than our own. In the 19th century, without competence in ancient Greek and Latin, for example, no one could hope to be considered cultured. In the 18th century, George Washington was embarrassed to travel to France because he had no French. One is too clearly aware of the lacunae of one’s own cultural shortcomings, the vast gaps in knowledge of the kind a person claiming to be cultured ought to possess: Knowledge of the history of the Byzantine Empire, of Gregorian chant, of the influence of Bauhaus, and so much more. To be cultured implies a certain roundedness of knowledge and interests. No one, of course, has all these things. No one is fully rounded—which is why no one is fully cultured and why culture, itself, remains an ideal and, like so many ideals, may well be ultimately out of reach, though still worth pursuing.
Let me pause here to mention a few of the people I have known who have come closest to this ideal. The first is Jacques Barzun, who was the figure one immediately thought of when thinking of Columbia University during its great days in mid-20th century America. Born in France in 1907 into a family with serious artistic interests—among his parents’ friends were Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, and Edgard Varèse—Barzun came to America in early adolescence and later returned to remain for the rest of his life. He was a cultural historian, who wrote with equal authority on Marx, William James, Hector Berlioz, Darwin, American university education, French prosody, English grammar and usage, and more. In his nineties, he produced a cultural synthesis called From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. In a dip into popular culture, he also knew baseball and edited anthologies about detective fiction. Jacques was formidable without being stuffy. He taught much of his adult life yet seemed—in his cosmopolitan culture, his metropolitan spirit—so much more than an academic.
The Ideal of Culture Page 2
