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By Root 1131 0

than the “Ed Sullivan Show”? Furthermore, there is, though Dr. Gallup forgets to note it, good Entertainment as well as the cheap kind. The works of Homer, Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are Entertainment, in the Doctor’s categorizing—they are certainly not Information. The fault would seem to lie not in the predominance of one genre over the other, but in the low level of both. Finally, may there not be a compensatory relation between Information and Entertainment as practiced in our mass culture, the former being so aridly factual, the latter so tropical, lush, unrestrained? Kitsch and Know-How, soap opera and quiz show—neither of these polar extremes provides the temperate climate in which mind and feelings can flourish; one extreme is the craved antidote to the other, each calls its opposite number into being. As the frontiersman escapes from the excessive factuality of his life, preoccupied with food and shelter, by occasional debauches of raw alcohol, raw sex, raw sentiment (the tear-jerking ballad about Home and Mother being a cultural bender), so we shuttle from extreme practicality to extreme frivolity, from the hard glare of the prosaic to the inchoate mists of daydreaming, either obsessing ourselves with Facts or compulsively escaping from them.

One explanation of our passion for sports, as contrasted with our apathy toward arts and letters, may be that the quality of performance in sports can be determined statistically. It was a Fact, at the moment this essay was written, that Mickey Mantle of the Yankees had a higher batting average than Ken Boyer of the Cardinals—one that could easily have been proved by turning to the figures, which were .388 and .343 respectively—but it is impossible to prove that William Faulkner has a higher batting average than, say, J. P. Marquand. An umpire, like a scientist, deals with measurable phenomena according to generally accepted rules, but the critic works with standards peculiar to himself, although they somehow correspond to standards each of his readers has individually developed. From the purely factual-scientific point of view, the wonder is not that there is so much disagreement in aesthetic matters but that there should be any agreement at all. Agreement is possible, however, because, while Faulkner’s superiority over Marquand cannot be proved, it can be demonstrated. This is a different operation involving an appeal—by reason, analysis, illustration, and rhetoric—to cultural values which critic and reader have in common, values no more susceptible of scientific statement than are the moral values-in-common to which Jesus appealed but which, for all that, exist as vividly and definitely as do mercy, humility, and love.

In short, arguments about sports performances can be settled à l’Américaine by an appeal to The Facts, since quality can be measured by quantity. This is very reassuring and explains why we take sports seriously, art not. Although, as I have already observed, any stock boy—or any vice-president-in-charge-of-production—knows the batting averages of dozens of ballplayers, half our high-school graduates and a quarter of our college graduates did not read a single book in 1955. And 39 per cent of the college graduates, asked to name the authors of twelve famous works—Leaves of Grass, Gulliver’s Travels, The Origin of Species, etc.—could not name more than three. (Time, May 7, 1956, reporting a Gallup poll). For sophisticated literary criticism one must go to the “little” magazines, but for the same thing in sports one merely opens up the daily paper, or turns to the Luce weekly Sports Illustrated, whose savants analyze Ben Hogan’s technique with the scholarship (is he in the Jones tradition? the Hagen canon? or was he influenced by the Sarazen school?) and the subtle discriminations (his backswing is perhaps excessive but his putting is classically restrained) of R.P. Blackmur on Henry Adams.[4] These speculations are reinforced by the kind of interest Americans have in sports. Not only are we, as has often been noted, spectators rather