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Literature and Manners
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10323 |
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Book World
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12 / 1986 |
2,799 Words |
| Author
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Clyde Wilson
Clyde Wilson is a professor of history at the University of
South Carolina and the author or editor of over thirty books
on American history and literature. |
POISON PEN; OR, LIVE NOW AND PAY LATER
George Garrett
Stuart Wright, 1986
258 pp., $20.00
The conditions of modern culture involve us in painful but inescapable ambiguities. Politics, the noble pursuit of harmony and justice in community, cannot be separated from expediency, greed, fanaticism, and the vulgarities and superficialities of mass communications. Education, a high and essential calling, is entangled beyond recall with a bureaucracy of immense power and dubious social utility. Literature, which has traditionally enjoyed the allegiance of some of our best minds and most human aspirations, cannot be extricated from the imperious requirements of publicity and marketing.
Thus, in a society of immense wealth and population, anything that our forefathers would have regarded as a serious book is, at best, of marginal profitability. Publishing, once both a culturally esteemed and practically useful enterprise, now concerns itself largely with Jane Fonda exercise books, the memoirs of Lee Iacocca, the social reflections of Nancy Friday, and the art of Harold Robbins. A serious literary culture exists, or rather several serious literary cultures, within the increasingly imaginary borders of the United States, but in a fragmented and compromised state.
In fact, what usually passes for our serious literary culture, though it likes to think of itself as in perpetual heroic revolt against commerce and Establishments, prospers chiefly as a function of the business of publicity and itself constitutes
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