The last time we were trawling Walt Disney World's Epcot Center together, I tried telling him that everyone needs education. Education is the prime technology, the prime politics, and the prime defense against exploitation. "I agree," he said. "Everyone needs it. Conservatives need it to tell people what to think, socialists to tell people how to think. Fundamentalists need it to fill up people's heads until they can't think at all, and the market needs it to trick people into choosing one thing instead of another."
"And liberals need it, too," I said, because that's what I am. In England, a liberal is someone who wants a bill of rights to protect individuals against the majority. "Liberals need education because people need it. Without liberal education our beautiful, heterogeneous society, which has taken so much to construct, will dissolve back into tribal strife." He reached for his gun; he always does when I talk like that.
This is about the idea of education as cultivation, the bringing of wild minds to utility. It's an agrarian analogy, which reminds me of the culture dishes in the biology labs--which is agriculture of a different sort--and of Voltaire's gardens. If cultivation is what culture is, I think that means that culture is not something we all share. It means many things and has many modes. So what's my mode? Freethinking, by which I mean trusting my own insights to found my reasoning. Here are three collections of essays, from three sublimely cultivated minds, all of them profound freethinkers.
The first is William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the Enlightenment Age journalist who writes more buoyantly and transparently than any other writer in English I can think of. He describes the enormous 18th-century revolution in thinking as though it were a personal matter. His collected essays are published by Penguin.
The second is Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), the great modernist, whose writing is harder to get used to than Shakespeare's, but whose analysis of what modern thinking was about is astonishingly accurate. Her essays "What Is English Literature" and "What Is a Masterpiece" transformed my understanding of what art is. They can be found in the British collection Look At Me Now and Here I Am (1967), also published by Penguin.
The third is Robin Evans (1944-1992). He writes about material form; the difficulty of which is that the complex relationships embedded in it have to be teased out in sequence. He does this with a measured grace that is a joy to experience. His great quality is that even while he sports an erudition that would blow your head off, there is not a trace of false claims. His collection Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (1997) is published by MIT Press in conjunction with the Architectural Association, London.
Paul Shepheard is an architect in London. He is the author of What is Architecture? (1994) and The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), both available from MIT Press.
Martha Bayles
How do we talk about popular culture? Too often, our praise is sheer self-indulgence and our blame a compendium of intellectual clichés half a century old. Let me illustrate not with examples but with counter-examples: three authors who treat popular culture with originality, intelligence, and taste.
Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience was published in 1954, at the peak of the so-called mass culture debate. Unlike most parties to that debate, Warshow understood that while popular culture is a part of everyday life in a way that elite culture almost never is, our understanding of it cannot be reduced to sociology. For good and ill, popular culture claims our attention in ways that are more or less related to the claims of art. "I have not brought Henry James to the movies or the movies to Henry James," he wrote, "but I hope I have shown that the man who goes to the movies is the same as the man who reads Henry James."
Warshow also understood why so many intellectuals of the World War II generation refused (and still refuse) to acknowledge the artistic dimension of popular culture. Having witnessed the persecution of artists deemed too difficult for "the masses" and the forced imposition of a didactic "people's art," these intellectuals distrust all but the most rigorous aesthetic standards. The great irony, of course, is that "the masses" have never cottoned to the official culture fashioned for them by their totalitarian masters. Given half a chance, they have always gravitated toward the American alternative: a genuinely popular culture shaped not by ideological decree but by market forces.
On this subject I recommend S. Frederick Starr's delicious Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (1985). With a light touch comparable to that of Josef Skvorecky writing about the forbidden jazz bands of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Starr's history of the Soviet regime's efforts to suppress jazz is a case study of how impossible it is for any state, even the most repressive, to engineer the arts in its own image. A genuine art like jazz is no more susceptible to such treatment than is the ebullience of human nature it expresses.
As for the nature of that expression, it has never been described as superbly as by Henry Pleasants. In four impudent and elegant books--The Agony of Modern Music (1955), Serious Music--And All That Jazz! (1959), Death of a Music? (1961), and The Great American Popular Singers (1974)--Pleasants combines a blistering critique of post-Webern serialism with a sophisticated appreciation of jazz as one of the most viable musical languages of the 20th century. Pleasants's argument, written in the peppery style he developed during many decades as the music critic of the International Herald Tribune, partakes neither of the jazz buff's hyperbole nor of the academic's dissection. Instead, it carves out the precise position that jazz occupies in the musical canon of our century.
One cause of today's "culture war," I am convinced, is our abiding misunderstanding of what is good and bad about popular culture. We respect what we do not love and love what we do not respect. We argue bitterly in language fraught with myths and shibboleths. And we forget what these three writers are at pains to remind us: That it is we, the audience, who make or break the arts. Not in the short run, where too often we grasp at fool's gold. But in the long run, where gradually, with the help of our finest critics, we learn to recognize the 24-carat real thing.
Martha Bayles is the author of Hole In Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (1994) which has been re-released in paperback by University of Chicago Press.
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