[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]
Somerset Maugham said that it was the middle class that created English literature. I think that was in The Summing Up. I was a teenager with ambitions to be a writer, so it has been in my head for a very long time. What was meant by middle class might have been a bit muddled by me. Or circumstances in my case and time left me too little time left to write after trying to keep a law practice afloat.
But I think, on the whole Maugham was right. The rich are too comfortable in their economic status to use their education to create art. The poor are too desperate to create art, that does not help pay the bills.
Reading Hidden in the Bourgeois by Morten Høi Jensen brought all of this to mind. He is writing about Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
...And indeed, what could be more bourgeois — as Thomas Mann understands the term — than Hans Castorp’s celebrated epiphany in the famous “Snow” subchapter, that “man is the master of contradictions.” The coexistence of apparent opposites is characteristic of the bourgeois. Werner Sombart, in his The Quintessence of Capitalism, makes the Faustian claim that “two souls dwell in the breast of every complete bourgeois: the soul of the adventurer and the soul of the respectable middle-class man.” A claim that sounds quite a bit like Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who, in the eponymous novella, cries out: “As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…” Thomas Mann offers the image of the writer as someone who keeps his office hours and dresses appropriately, whose writing is characterized not by the heat and flame of inspiration but by the cold comfort of thoroughness and industry. “There is much to be said for a wife and children,” Thomas Mann wrote in his diary in 1919, “but given my nature, the decisive consideration for me is that it allows me to hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” As the French writer Bernard Groethuysen observed in 1927, “the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” It was Flaubert who originally formulated the contradictory character of the bourgeois when he observed, in a letter, that “one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.” But it was Thomas Mann in whom this dialectic, the yes and the no of bourgeois culture, found its most prophetic repository. “I have become what I am,” Thomas Buddenbrook, the good bourgeois, tells his brother, Christian, the failed artist, “because I did not want to become like you.” Many years after writing those words, Mann described his enemy Adolf Hitler as “a brother, a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother,” by which he meant that Hitler, like himself, was an artist, only he was an artist gone astray, a good-for-nothing who believed himself “reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.” Significantly, Mann titled his essay “A Brother,” as though aware that he and Hitler represented two paths for Germany. I have become what I am, because I did not want to become like you. A few weeks after the war, Mann, ever the conscientious artist, confessed: “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”
We have denigrated the middle class for not being cool. Is that not the heart of The Graduate? But it is the middle that has enough education to grasp the world around them. It is the middle class that has enough stability and enough uncertainty to see the wrinkles and twists of reality to have a reason to act. If memory serves, Lenin and Joe Strummer came from the middle class.
And so let us encourage the middle class to create. Preferably in the arts and not in politics.
SCH 3/26
