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By Root 991 0

goes to college, they have a larger and more cohesive cultural community than we do. The sale of a serious nonfiction book by a writer who is not a Name, for instance, is often larger there than here despite our three or four times larger population. Here a book tends to be either a best seller or nothing, as a writer is either a Success or a Failure; there is no middle ground because there is no intellectual class. This may also be the reason more titles are published there; in 1958 it was 16,700 there, 11,000 here; it is the difference between handicraft and mass production, between a number of articulated publics and one great amorphous mass market.

England still has something of a functioning class system, culturally speaking. The angry young men are angry about it. I can’t think why. An American living in London is delighted by the wide interest in art and letters, the liveliness of the intellectual atmosphere, the sense he gets constantly from the press and from conversations of a general interest in what he is interested in. It is, of course, general only to perhaps 5 per cent of the population, but in America it isn’t even this much general; it is something shared only with friends and professional acquaintances. But in London one meets stockbrokers who go to concerts, politicians who have read Proust.[14]

The English amateur scholar—“just a hobby, really”—is a species little known over here. Most educated Englishmen seem to take an interest in cultural matters as a matter of course, and many of them have a personal, nonprofessional knowledge of one or two fields—a disinterested interest, so to speak—which is quite impressive. Our college graduates are not apt to “keep up” with such things unless they teach them. Their hobbies are less likely to be Jacobean madrigals than home workshops equipped with the latest in power tools and their equivalent of the British weekly is likely to be Time or Newsweek. In only one field do we match their amateur scholarship. The sports pages are our equivalent of The Times Literary Supplement; in each case, experts write for a sizable audience that is assumed to understand the fine points. Perhaps our closest approach to a living tradition is in sports. The recent centenaries of Poe and Melville passed without undue excitement in the press, but Sports Illustrated devoted four pages to the fiftieth anniversary of Fred (“Bonehead”) Merkle’s failure to touch second base in a World Series game.

XVIII

It is indicative of the disorganized quality of our intellectual life that, for all the remarkable increase in the consumption of High Culture since 1945, not one new intellectual weekly has been produced. There have been a number of new “little” magazines, such as New World Writing, the Evergreen Review, Contact, The Second Coming, The Dial and The Noble Savage—they should perhaps be called big-little magazines since they aspire to the broader circulation of the quality paperback—but, like the old ones, they are essentially anthologies. They print the best current fiction, poetry, essays and criticism—or at least what the editors think is the best—but, if only because they are quarterlies, they cannot form a center of consciousness as the English weeklies do, since this requires (1) at least monthly topical comment, and preferably weekly; and (2) a regular interchange between writers and editors and readers such as is provided in the correspondence columns of the English weeklies. (The extraordinary development of the latter is one more evidence of a cultural community; the most recondite topic may set off a spate of letters from clubs and manses, bars and offices that is finally dammed only by the editor’s ritual This correspondence must now cease.) The nearest approach to a “center of consciousness” in our magazines is in the Midcult ones like Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Reporter and the Saturday Review, and the trouble with these is that the editors consistently—one might almost say on principle—underestimate the intelligence of the readers.

A great abstract force governing our