Today's Cultural Immaturity

To sum up the current state of American culture, I’d have to say it has a brilliantly glittering surface but no depth, very much like American culture of the 1920s. It took an economic crash and the Great Depression to restore some gravitas to American thinking, which gradually found its way into American society and culture in general.

Let’s look at the reception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender is the Night, as an example. Fitzgerald worked hard on that book for nine years, harder than he had worked on his previous three novels, including The Great Gatsby, and when it came out in 1939 it sold a mere 12,000 copies and was all but dismissed by the critics as lacking in wisdom and maturity. Although Malcolm Cowley has written that it remained in people’s minds “like an unanswered question,” and Hemingway said that it got better and better in retrospect, most readers in the years that followed its publication found it difficult to care much about its wealthy and privileged main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, as they struggle to overcome marital discord while enjoying life on the French Riviera. I wouldn’t completely dismiss the novel as shallow – it does have some emotional resonance – but I wonder if it is about to be rediscovered by readers who don’t care much about wisdom and maturity in the books they read. (The story does reflect the lives of many privileged people today, particularly celebrities and movie stars.)

At the present time, American culture has returned to its adolescence, to the frivolities of the 1920s, and many of us who love and value the seriousness it once had must wait for it to mature all over again. Will it take another global disaster on the scale of the Great Depression to bring that about?

Pulp Culture

Without a doubt, the US is the world’s most outrageous producer of pulp fiction and moronic mass entertainment. That’s a reality I’ve accepted and have learned how to ignore. If the majority of Americans want to veg out in front of the idiot box after a hard day’s work, or take their families to see the latest mindless comedy or hardcore special-effects “product” calling itself a “movie,” or numb themselves to sleep with a romance or crime novel, that’s their business, and who am I to tell them they can’t?

But what gets me really worked up is the inescapable reality that Americans in general are hostile to anything that is serious art, be it a book, a painting or a film, anything, that is, that has a challenging theme, anything that questions their fundamental prejudices. The average American just doesn’t like new ideas. He is fiercely hostile to them because he feels threatened by anything out of the ordinary. Complex works of art undermine his basic beliefs and if he tries to think about them they only end up confusing him. And anything that confuses him is just not worth bothering about. Art must be simple – in the worst sense – it must provide him with an escape from drudgery, from harsh reality, from the meaninglessness of making money, and from the senselessness of convention. It must validate his own ignorance. And most importantly, it must distract him from the emptiness of his life.

Now take a pulp author whose books are still going strong as an example – Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, as well as westerns and science fiction. As a young man with a family to support, Burroughs worked at a variety of low-paying jobs. He read pulp fiction in magazines such as Argosy and decided he too could write such rot (his own words) for money. Yes, for money – that’s the key to it all. How any self-respecting individual could spend a lifetime writing “rot” for money when there are so many other interesting ways to make a living is hard for me to grasp. Burroughs was well educated and came from a family that had fought in the Revolution, He was an American brahmin and his attitude towards his readers was scornful, condescending, patronizing, and contemptuous. No doubt all writers of pulp fiction feel the same way. They hate themselves for writing it and hate their readers even more.

What would people do if there weren’t a pulp culture? If Americans had nothing else to satisfy their need for escapism and entertainment, they would learn to read the classics or go to the opera or the theater. Or they would amuse themselves with games or singing or playing musical instruments with a group of like-minded folks. They would find ways to have fun by using their creative abilities (just like children do) rather than succumbing to mind-numbing mass entertainment falsely identified as “culture.”