tenderness." But this is not yet the end of the affair. Mo-ments before his execution, Turner is still dreaming about making love with her—now, at last, on a footing of equality:
. . . with tender stroking motions I pour out my love
within her; pulsing flood; she arches against me, cries
out, and the twain—black and white—are one.
This vision of racial harmony is followed by regret and remorse for the murder, because the prattling Southern maiden somehow (in a scene Styron shrewdly omits from the novel) communicated to the slave preacher a true knowledge of God ("I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known"). What a reassuring dream of a Negro militant, so full of sex and piety even as he is being ex-ecuted—and shortly before his skin is turned into a purse, if not a lampshade. Such people will forgive us our sewage plants.
Wall Street Journal
"WILLIAM STYRON HAS WRITTEN THE TRUE AMERICAN TRAGEDY. . . . THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT, NOW, THAT HE IS THE FOREMOST WRITER OF HIS GENERATION IN AMERICAN
FICTION." Edmund Fuller
The New Statesman
"CERTAINLY HE'S WRITTEN A MAJOR NOVEL. . . . A GAP IN AMERICA'S PICTURE OF ITS OWN EVOLUTION HAS BEEN
FILLED." Ronald Bryden
Organized religion has been overtaken by culture as the most potent force spreading madness in society. And the complaint that television serials, films, magazines or books don't measure up to conventional standards of artistic or social decorum only obscures the ravages they inflict on the brain. In fact, the churches, blamed for so many public crimes and private miseries, never had the stranglehold on people's time, attention, imagination and credulity that organized culture has today.
The absurdities of entertainment and false art are often defended on the grounds that hardly anybody takes them
seriously, but this supposition is belied by the absurd atti-tudes and expectations so manifest in the state of the world.
In the age of leisure, people amuse themselves into the depths of psychosis. So aesthetics becomes a number one mental health problem, and not only or even mainly in relation to the products manufactured for mass consump-tion. The mass fare is but the wide-screen projection of highbrow culture, which is all the more insidious for being less suspect.
Best sellers are Gallup polls on our psychological atti-tudes and—in the sense of what it both reveals and re-inforces—Styron's novel can be justly considered a "true American tragedy." More specifically, it illustrates the tragedy of "serious" literature which, just like the cheapest kind, is used mainly to assuage our fears and anxieties and minister to our delusions. A small if poisonous event in itself, the book exposes the profound vacuity of the literary establishment which so enthusiastically championed it and explodes the myth of an elite and an elitist culture which we like to think are less subject to insensibility, unreason and ignorance than the rest of us. The novel's prepos-terousness casts less shame on William Styron (who had less chance to look at it with detachment) than on the learned critics and journals whose integrity and perceptive judgments we are all inclined to regard as indispensable—
for information, if nothing else. Of course, the awesome badness of Styron's novel is no longer literary news;
friends write from America that there had been a great many second thoughts by the time it received the Pulitzer Prize. The cultural establishment backs away from its
mis-judgments with unseemly haste, covering up the evidence of its incompetence and corruption, keeping its reputation
intact to spread the good news of next year's rubbish.
Politicians can never quite recover from the kind of inde-cent blunders literary experts take in their stride. As the editor of one of the authoritative journals that proclaimed the book a masterpiece wrote to me, "certainly it has been overpraised." They know—there's no need to refer to it again.
But the British quality journals (with The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Times as notable exceptions) reacted with only slightly less enthusiasm; and judging by the rave reviews for other awful books, the difference can be attributed less to British common sense than to the fact that these islands are not immediately threatened by a Negro revolution. Nor would it be diffi-cult to find almost equally bad novels which have won the Prix Goncourt or the Nobel Prize by pandering to some national or international neurosis. It seems that wisdom and even taste in the arts are the prizes of courage—the courage to think unpalatable thoughts and refuse to daydream our-selves out of our predicaments; and since such courage is as rare among the educated caste as in any other social group, both highbrow and lowbrow literature consist mainly of what Stendhal called "universal cant."
Of course simple cant is not enough, and Styron's novel, 1968's annual American masterpiece, had to fulfill both the material and formal requirements of serious rubbish.
The first requirement is a serious subject. Nothing is more self-evident in art than the fact that quality depends on the treatment and not on the theme; anyone can see that Ce-zanne's Still Life with Basket of Apples is a better painting than Holman Hunt's The Light of the World. Yet even in painting, subject has been playing havoc with quality most