Parnassus, U.S.A.
• By RICHARD AFEW weeks ago, the cover of Time, `The Weekly Newsmagazine,' was graced with the agreeable likeness of Jacques Barzun, a staggeringly erudite Columbia professor who can discourse with equal ease and grace on European and American history, European and American literature, music, manners, and the theory and practice of education. On the port side of Professor Barzun's nose was a lamp of learning that burned with a hard, gemlike flame, perilously close to his eyebrows. Across a corner of the cover ran a yellow band announcing a feature on the inside of the inagazine—'America and the Intellectual : The Reconciliation.' Henry R. Luce, the publisher of The Weekly Newsmagazine, is really crazy about intellectuals and has lately been deter- mined to tell his readers that intellectuals are interesting people with interesting ways and that some of them are every bit as good as the sales executives, Congressmen, queens, ballplayers, and other people to be found on his covers. Mr. Luce, of course, has taste. He is discriminating. Naturally, he doesn't think well of all intellectuals—any more than he thinks well of all Congressmen. Some are better than others, and in the article we learn which ones he thinks well of. The article, one is advised in a note at the front of the magazine, was written by Bruce Barton, Jr., but one is always safe in assuming that leading articles in Time reflect the opinions of Mr. Luce.
Mr. Luce, then, doesn't think well of intellectuals who `grumble at America.' He thinks they are 'merely singing a worn-out tune'—though he acknowledges that 'the grumblers have not always grumbled without cause.' Happily, though, there has in recent years been a marked decline in grumbling. In part, this is because more and more intellectuals have enjoyed the favours of the Bitch Goddess—or, as Professor Barzun puts it, 'they have won recognition in tangible ways.' That is to say, more kudos and more scratch, or money. The situation has changed greatly since George Kennan said, 'I can think of few countries in the world where the artist, the writer, the composer, or the thinker is held in such general low esteem as he is here in our country.' In fact, there is grave doubt, in Mr. Luce's mind, if there ever was much truth in Kennan's generalisation, though he points out that to the degree that it was true, it was largely 'the fault of the American intellectuals themselves.' In this connection, Mr. Luce finds useful the wisdom of a French Dominican priest, Raymond- Leopold Bruckberger, who has said, 'Perhaps the American intellectual has failed his country.' How this priest got to be an authority is not explained. And in this connection, too, Mr. Luce's research organisation has made a startling discovery. It has found that the anti-intellectual tradition in the United States was given its original impetus by none other, to use a Lucian locution, than, the greatest of our nineteenth-century intellectuals. 'As they spoke and wrote, they . . . sounded the first notes of the [anti-intellectual] theme . . . that was to run through all US history.' The men cited are Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft and Walt Whitman. Naturally, it will take further investigation, to .settle this question, but the spade-work has been done, and it may turn out that the real inventor of McCarthyism was Herman Melville.
At any rate, if the intellectual ever was 'America's hopeless Displaced Person,' he is not that today. He is doing pretty well; Henry Luce alone employs hundreds of him at splendid wages. There is 'a growing host of men of ideas who . . . have the respect of the nation.' High wages and respect bring about a decline in grumbling; a decline in grumbling results in still higher wages and still more respect. No vicious circle that. Time is able to report that highbrow grumbling is in an even speedier downward spiral than hog prices. 'The Man of Protest has . . . given way to the Man of Affirmation.' The crusad- ing muckraker, the flamboyant expatriate, the dedicated brain- truster --all these convenient tags are gone.' They no longer even fit the discontented: such discontent as there is expresses itself in mere sullenness and withdrawal rather than in dedica- tion or crusading. It is observed, as rather a melancholy fact, that there does not seem to be very much emotional power behind the affirmations—not anywhere near so much as there was behind the earlier protests. But this is not too serious a matter : 'Their tone may be subdued, but their apparent lack of passion does not mean any lack of concern for America's destiny' It is a well-known fact that Nay-sayers always shout. while assent is normally given quietly and with restraint. Any- way, what counts is that assent is on the rise. There are, for example, more intellectuals who believe in God than, there formerly were. One of them, Paul Tillich, the theologian, is `perhaps alone in commanding among his fellow intellectuals something that approaches awe.' (This means that Paul Tillich stands alone in commanding Mr. Luce's awe. Words are more than just words when The Weekly Newsmagazine uses them.) There is also Reinhold Niebuhr, who, according to Time. `proclaims the existence of an Absolute, standing above and outside history, which men can never adequately know but must not ignore? Niebuhr, it is explained, is both an assenter and a dissenter, but he assents to the true and dissents from the false. He is against liberal materialism and for the doctrine of original sin. The theologians walk off with the highest honours at Mr. Luce's Prize Day, but there are plenty of awards for others. There is Crane Brinton, a Harvard historian, who has observed his fellow intellectuals closely and has noticed that 'Many of them, if you catch them unawares, look as if they were enjoying themselves and not merely enjoying their unhappiness. . . . They really share, at bottom, the faith of their fellows.' It is a Good Thing, in Tittle's view, to share the faith of one's fellows, except, to be sure, when that faith is in error. A striking example of a Man of Affirmation is Walter Lippmann, whose most recent work, The Public Philosophy, held that the faith of his fellow Americans in Jacksonian democracy, otherwise known as the Jacobin heresy, is cock- eyed and an absolute menace to the future of Western civilisa- tion. To some of us who read the book, it seemed that Mr. Lippmann wasn't enjoying himself here at all and was filing a powerful protest against the way things are, but this was obviously a misreading, for Lippmann, 'the durable sage of the Potomac,' was protesting error, which is a way of affirming virtue. One must be clear about these things.
The admirable thing about Mr. Luce is that he is broad- minded enough to praise and print the portraits of intellectuals of so many different tendencies, grouping them all as Men of Affirmation. He likes Mr. Lippmann's opposite number, Mortimer Adler, almost as much as he likes Mr. Lippmann. Mr. Adler has said : 'In the long run, the new industrialisation will produce an aristocratic society for the millions. We can produce Rome for the millions or Athens for the millions.' He likes William Faulkner, who has said, 'I ain't no intel- lectual.' He admires Frank Lloyd Wright and Lionel Trilling, and Russell Kirk, who is trying 'to rehabilitate the conservative mind,' and Thornton Wilder, who is not trying to rehabilitate the conservative mind, and Sidney Hook, who is the scourge of fellow-travellers in this country (`down-to-earth defender of academic freedom'), and Daniel Boorstin, who says that `Those who attack US culture are really saying, "Why aren't we more like Western Europe?"' Mr. Boorstin is kin to Emerson, who said, 'Here we are, and if we tarry a little [i.e., cut down on the travelling] we may come to learn that here is best.' But it is above all Mr. Barzun, a Parisian by birth, who has sounded the note of affirmation Mr. Luce likes to hear: 'America is the land of romanticism par excellence. . . . Modern civilisation is something new, incommensurate with the old, just like the character of the American adventure itself.... We [Americans] are innocent because we have been— we still are—too busy to brood.' Mr. Barzun is kin to Mr. Adler. He, too, thinks we can create intellectuals by the mil- lions. Even now, we are doing pretty well. 'Parnassus stretches from coast to coast.' The Weekly Newsmagazine is deeply touched by this sentiment. The entire article runs under the head, 'Parnassus, Coast to Coast.' The essence of its message is that, while a few intellectual soreheads may be moping and grumbling about life here and saying that things are a lot better in France or Russia or England or Burma, the majority of American intellectuals 'have come at last to realise that they are true and proud participants in the American Dream.'
I have not dwelt at such length on this article in order to criticise it. On the contrary, I would say that if one wishes a brief summary of the intellectual situation in this country today and a general idea of the dominant trends of American thought. one may find it here. Making due allowance for some of the odd little ways of The Weekly Newsmagazine, this is a sub- stantially accurate representation of the present state of affairs. I am in an affirming mood, and I think Mr. Luce is altogether right in saying that most intellectuals 'have come at last to realise,' etc. There is only one small cloud on the horizon— if we keep on getting reports like this, Men of Protest will spring up on every hand. Right now, though, there aren't many of them.
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