I met Arnaldo Momigliano, long deemed to be the leading figure in the historiography of the ancient world, through my friend Edward Shils, who arranged to have him teach half the year at the University of Chicago. He was at All Souls College, Oxford, the other half. Mussolini’s fascist government caused him to flee to England from Turin, where he was born. I don’t know how many languages Arnaldo had, but I once noticed, on the desk in his room at the University of Chicago faculty club, a Dostoyevsky novel—in Russian. He seemed to know everything.
I was having breakfast one morning with Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James, at that same faculty club when Arnaldo came into the room. I introduced him to Edel who, I told Arnaldo, was currently writing a book about Bloomsbury. Had you joined us at that breakfast table, you would have thought Arnaldo had already written the definitive book on Bloomsbury—“The linchpin figure,” he said in his Piedmontese accent, “was of course Duncan Grant”—so complete and penetrating was his knowledge of the subject, even though it was one that didn’t remotely touch on what is called his “field.” I once wrote that if there had been a game called not Trivial but Serious Pursuit, Arnaldo would have been its champion.
Hugh Lloyd-Jones was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and married to Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley and herself an estimable writer on classical subjects. Hugh was a charming man, witty, with a good laugh. Their love for each other, the joyousness of their relationship generally, made it pleasing to be in his and Mary’s company. Hugh once told me that when Mary ironed his shirts, he, to relieve the tedium of the task, read Henry James or Marcel Proust to her—a high-culture version of “American Gothic.”
My candidate for the most cultured American novelist of the past century is Willa Cather. Modern American writers have not been notably cultured. Hemingway wasn’t, nor was Fitzgerald, nor Faulkner. Talented though all were, none could write beyond his immediate ken or milieu. Cather, born in 1873 in the small town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, through self-cultivation became a citizen of a much larger world. As a writer, she was above nationality, above politics and gender, androgynous as all the greatest artists are. Willa Cather, in effect, Europeanized herself: She admired the novels of Flaubert, the poetry of Housman, everything of Henry James, himself an American who had earlier acquired cosmopolitan culture, and had (as T. S. Eliot noted) “turned himself into a European but of no known country.” Cather’s personal culture allowed her to write not only about the Scandinavian immigrants she grew up with, and knew so well, but also about the life of the artist (The Song of the Lark), about late-17th-century European settlers in Quebec (Shadow on the Rock), about the lives of two 19th-century French priests, Fathers Latour and Vaillant, establishing a diocese in the newly formed territory of New Mexico (Death Comes for the Archbishop). Culture cannot make a writer, of course; but as in Cather’s case, by expanding her horizons, it can vastly enlarge her reach.
A small detail from Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop: Father (now Bishop) Latour is served a soup made by his companion Father Vaillant, an onion soup with croutons, upon which, after tasting it, Latour remarks:
I am not deprecating your talent, Joseph, but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
A soup with a thousand-year history—only a writer of deep culture could have written such a passage. Culture itself, one might add, is a soup thousands of years in the making.
For a century, and more, the seat of culture for Americans was Europe. Europe had all the great writers, painters, composers, conductors, musical performers, the most magnificent museums and libraries and churches. Americans with cultural interests went to Europe as pilgrims to Mecca, and some with ample financial resources stayed on as expatriates. To be an American was, culturally, to feel oneself a yokel; and at 20 years old or so, even I, a true yokel, sensed that genuine culture lay on the other side of the Atlantic.
For a period of a few decades in the past century, however, this looked to be changing. In New York, the school of Abstract Expressionism became central in the realm of visual art. The important painters were Americans; so, too, earlier, in poetry, where the generation of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, the American-born T. S. Eliot, rivaled, if not surpassed in importance, the poetry of Yeats, Housman, and Hardy. The Englishman W. H. Auden, the leading poet of the following generation, chose to spend the years of his literary prime in the United States. European conductors led the Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago symphony orchestras. Was culture, itself, crossing the ocean en masse? Was America to be the new Rome to Europe’s Greece? Alas, the hope now seems altogether too short-lived.
Today, high culture in America is in serious decline. (Nor is it doing much better in Europe, let me add, details on request.) Contemporary visual art, for example, scarcely exists—that is, it seems to be more about financial investment than about ideas or significant aesthetic experience. Poetry, once central to high culture, has become degraded to an intramural sport. Although the audience for poetry in America was never large, today even that audience has diminished, and the only people who seem to read contemporary poetry are those who write it or write about it. Are there substantial numbers of people awaiting the next novels of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, or Jonathan Safran Foer as they once eagerly anticipated the next novels of Bellow, Malamud, Katherine Anne Porter, and others? I don’t believe there are.
In 1959, the novelist John O’Hara predicted that “the novel will be dead or moribund in less than a hundred years.” This is beginning to look like a sound prediction. Contemporary American serious music has produced no Aaron Coplands, Virgil Thomsons, Samuel Barbers. The audiences for traditional classical music performance dwindle. The promise of American theater, the theater of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams, now seems moribund, if not flat-out deceased. Contemporary philosophy, which I have seen described as attempting to discover where the flame of a candle went after it burned out, appears more and more (in the words of Michael Oakeshott) “devoted to creating riddles out of solutions.” Theodor Mommsen, writing of culture during the reigns of the emperors Claudius, Nero, and Vespasian, noted that “the mark of the age is tedium.” Might this also be true of the culture of the age we are now living in?
Before attempting an answer, perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves of the promise of high culture. What it offered was an escape from the tyranny of the present. Cicero wrote that not to remember your past—by which he meant “the past”—is to remain a child. High culture, even though it often traveled under the banner of the avant-garde, was always about tradition. A cultured person has a standard, a recollection, through literature and history and philosophy—if not necessarily through personal experience—of greatness. Without such a recollection, rising above mediocrity is difficult, if not impossible.
At the death of Winston Churchill in 1965, Leo Strauss wrote:
The death of Churchill reminds us of the limitations of our craft, and therewith of our duty. We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.
If ours is, culturally, an age of tedium, if the very notion of culture as an ideal is in doubt, how did this come about? Some would say that a digital age cannot be a rich age for culture. In the battle between pixels and print, pixels now seem well ahead. The smartphone, the iPad, the computer, for all their manifold benefits, do not encourage contemplation. They feature information over knowledge, and information is distinctly not knowledge.
The skim, the scan, the tweet, the Wikipedia entry—they cater to, if they do not in fact breed, the shortened attention span. If I were to pass out a list of names and events of the kind I mentioned earlier to students today, they would wonder what the hell I was talking about: “The Spanish Civil War, the 1913 Armory Show—hey, no problem, I’ll Google it.” Google it up, gobble it up, we are in any case no longer talking about acquiring the necessary context, the delight in the power of making connections, that is the first step in acquiring culture.
The politics of the contemporary university, at least in its humanities and social sciences divisions, has not helped the nurturing of high culture. Quite the reverse. Academic feminists and multiculturalists, early in their rise to prominence, declared their impatience and boredom with (and anger at) the dominance of “dead white European males” in the curriculum. They might as well have declared war on high culture itself, for apart from a small number of notable examples—Sappho, Jane Austen, Madame de Stael, George Eliot—dead white European males were, and remain, the substance and pretty much the sum of high culture. In its striving for equality of interest for every culture and ethnic sub-group, the contemporary university has become an intellectual equal-opportunity institution, where the realm of art and intellect has little or nothing to do with equality. The result is that the American university, with a few notable exceptions, is less and less likely to purvey cogent samples of high culture, and provides fewer models of its benefits among its faculty.
In the early 1990s, I wrote an essay with the title “An Extremely Well-Informed SOB.” In it I made the distinction among those who knew about the Now, such as the pundit on television, required to be au courant on everything in the news; the knowledgeable, which included people who knew both about the Now and a fair amount about the Then; the with-it, who prided themselves on knowing about the Next Big Thing and those myriad other things the rest of us are still in the dark about; and finally, the cultured, who insofar as possible, restrict themselves to knowing what is genuinely worth knowing.
Most people today prefer to spend their lives gathering more and more information. This plethora, this plague of information, now available to all—to what, precisely, does it lead? The best I can see, it leads to two things: The illusion that one understands the world, and to the formation of opinions, countless opinions, opinions on everything. Opinions are well enough, sometimes even required; but I have never quite been able to shake the capping remark made by V. S. Naipaul on a character in his novel Guerrillas: “She had a great many opinions, but taken together these did not add up to a point of view.” Culture, true culture, helps form complex points of view.
Some years ago, the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was asked what he thought of England’s entering the European Union. “I don’t see,” he answered, “why I should be required to have an opinion about that.” An extraordinary thing for a contemporary political philosopher to say, or so I thought at the time. But later, reading Oakeshott’s Notebooks, I came across two interesting passages that made clear the grounds on which he said it: First, “To be educated is to know how much one wishes to know and to have the courage not to be tempted beyond that limit.” And second, that culture “teaches that there is much one does not want to know.” I wonder if, in the current age, our so-called Information Age, knowing “what one doesn’t want to know” isn’t among the greatest gifts that the acquisition of culture can bestow.
To return to Matthew Arnold’s supposition that culture holds out the promise of a change in human nature, one has to concede that the results, up to the moment, are not especially encouraging. But then, some people, quite without the aid of culture, have naturally good hearts; others have been brought to a high standard of goodness through religion. As for culture conferring virtue on those who possess it, it is impossible to forget that the Nazis played Beethoven at Auschwitz. Still, by removing oneself from the noise and vulgarities of the present, and lending oneself the perspective of the past, an engagement with high culture makes life richer—and thereby, immensely more interesting. And that, with apologies to Matthew Arnold, seems to me reward enough.
From Parent to Parenthood
(2015)
As with lengths of skirts, lapels on men’s suits, breastfeeding, and other more or less important customs, there are also fashions in fatherhood. The institution changes from generation to generation. As a man of un age certain—if numbers be wanted, mine is 78—my experience of fatherhood, both from the receiving and giving end, is likely to be different from those of much younger men and women.
I had the good fortune to have an excellent father. He was fair, utterly without neuroses, a model of probity, honorable in every way. Born in Canada, my father departed Montreal to make his fortune in Chicago at the age of 17, without bothering to finish high school. Until his forties, when he came to own his own business, he was a salesman, but without any of the slickness or slyness usually associated with the occupation. He made his sales by winning over customers through his amiability, his reliability, and the utter absence of con in his presentation. He was successful, and became rich enough, in Henry James’s phrase, “to meet the demands of his imagination,” which weren’t extravagant.
When, at the age of eighteen, it was time for me to go to college, my father told me that he would of course pay for my college education, but since I had shown so little interest in school, he wondered if I wouldn’t do better to skip college. He thought that I would make a terrific salesman. This, you have to understand, was intended as a serious compliment; one of two I remember his paying me. The other came years later and had to do with my taking care of a complicated errand for him. After I had accomplished what he wanted, he said, “You handled that in a very businesslike way.”
If this sounds as if I am complaining, the grounds being emotional starvation from want of approval, be assured that I’m not. Approval wasn’t an item high on the list of emotional expenditure in our family. (When in my early thirties I informed my mother that I, who have no advanced degrees, had been offered a job teaching at Northwestern University, she replied, “That’s nice, a job in the neighborhood,” and we went on talk of other things.) I cannot ever recall seeking my parents’ approval; it was only their disapproval that I wished to avoid, and this because it might cut down on my freedom, which, from an early age, was generous and extensive.
The not-especially-painful truth is that my younger brother and I—and I believe this is true of many families of our generation—were never quite at the center of our parents’ lives. Their own lives—rightly, I would say—came first. So many in my generation, I have noticed, were born five or six years apart from our next brother or sister. The reason for this is that parents of that day decided that raising two children born too close together was damned inconvenient. The standard plan was to wait until the first child was in school before having a second.
My parents were never other than generous to my brother and to me. They never knocked us in any way. We knew we could count on them. But we also knew they had lives of their own and that we weren’t, as is now so often the case with contemporary parents, everything to them. My mother had her charities, her card games, her friends. My father had his work, where he was happiest and most alive.
My father’s exalted status as a breadwinner was central to his position in our household. The bread-winning function of men in those days, when so few married women worked, was crucial. Recall what a dim figure Pa Joad, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is; the reason is that he is out of work, without financial function, and so the leadership in the novel is ceded to Ma Joad, the mother and dominant figure in the family. Although my father was the least tyrannical of men, my mother felt that he was owed many small services. “Get your father’s slippers,” my mother would say. “Ask your father if he’d like a glass of water.” We were instructed not to “rumple up the newspaper before your father comes home.”
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As a Canadian, my father had no interest in American sports, so he never took my brother and me to baseball or football games. (He did like boxing, and on a couple of occasions he and I went to watch Golden Gloves matches together.) He certainly never came to watch me play any of the sports in which I participated. But then, in those days, no father did; his generation of fathers were at work—my father worked six days a week—and had no time to attend the games of boys. (I’m talking about pre-soccer days, and so girls in those days played no games.) Nor would it ever have occurred to me to want my father to watch me at play. One of the fathers among my friends did show up for lots of his son’s games and was mocked behind his back for doing so; a Latinist among us referred to him as Omnipresent.
Although my father did not take me to sports or other events, or attend my own games, I nevertheless spent lots of time with him. From the age of fifteen through twenty, I drove with him to various Midwestern state fairs, where he sold costume jewelry to concessionaires. I was, officially, his flunky, schlepping his sample case and doing most of the driving. We shared hotel rooms. What amazes me now that I think about those many hours we spent together is how little of that time was given to intimate conversation between us. I never told my father about my worries, doubts, or concerns, nor did he tell me his. We never spoke about members of our family, except, critically, of dopey cousins or older brothers of his who had gone astray. We talked a fair amount about his customers. He offered me advice about saving, the importance of being financially independent, about never being a show-off of any kind—all of it perfectly sound advice, if made more than a touch boring by repetition.
The Ideal of Culture Page 3