In the American Grain

THE WAIST-HIGH CULTURE (275 pp.) --Thomas Griffith--Harper ($4).

Is equality the U.S. opiate of the classes? Does the modern American believe that a man's grasp should exceed his reach, or what's an expense account for? Is the U.S. in danger of being "a waist-high culture"--in which the best as well as the worst aim their arts and products at the middle?

These are not the questions of an Angry Young Man. They are "pebbles at the window" of complacency thrown by Thomas Griffith, 43, TIME'S Foreign Editor. Equable tempered, well wrought and carefully thought out, The Waist-High Culture is more inquiry than indictment, utters its qualms with conviction and its convictions with some qualms. It is not a call to the cultural barricades, but an invitation to ponder and reflect on the occasionally wayward American way.

The Belief in Disbelief. In the first third of the book, Author Griffith offers his autobiographical press pass to American life. Seattle-born, Griffith had a boardinghouse boyhood more apt for the pen of Dickens than the brush of Norman Rockwell. Entering the University of Washington in the Depression year of 1932 as a journalism student, he learned, he admits, precious little about journalism or anything else. In such "vast, endearingly inadequate academic ballparks," Griffith argues, "the indulgent curse of mediocrity in American life begins."

After rising from police reporter to assistant city editor of the Seattle Times, Griffith went east in 1942 on a Nieman fellowship, then joined TIME. When foreign news duties took Griffith to Europe, he, like many another American, fell under the spell of the Continent's ancient glories, but coolly assessed its caretaker, rather than dare-taker, cultures. He admired the well-bred aplomb of knowledgeable Englishmen whose ease of manner gives "the impression of having already lived once," but found "too many reserved seats" in English life. He was drawn to the independent French spirit of live-and-let-live, but noted the spiritual vacuum in which "French intellectuals so often seem to dislike the present, to fear the future and to deny the hereafter. They believe only in disbelieving." As for the prevailing winds of anti-Americanism. Griffith reminds his readers that unfavorable winds have always blown in the faces of the powerful. And many of Europe's phobias spring "not from what is amiss in us but from what is awry" in them.

The Sum of Dreams. As for what is awry in his native land at midcentury, Griffith picks three inter-related targets:

1) Egalitarianism: "That all men were created equal is one of the great fictions," argues Griffith, and has become as absolute as "the divine right of kings." Where excellence is snubbed as undemocratic the second-and third-rate rule.

2) Consumer worship: "The pull of the profitable middle accents the sameness in us all ... out of our riches has come a kind of poverty, the poverty of speed and saturation . . ."

3) Fragmentation of modern man: The interdependent complexity of modern life fosters "fragmented man," who is willy-nilly his brother's keeper and very nearly his brother's nagger. Fragmented man is often a slave to his specialty, "yet no one of us set out to be a replaceable part in life . . . our youthful ambitions were round, like the world."

Author Griffith proffers no ready cure for the distemper of the times. He raises a muffled cheer for a selfless elite that would set high cultural standards and hew to them. But he spurns existing elites as too withdrawn, 'insecure, and narrowly snobbish for the task.

"America," F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, is "a willingness of the heart." It is also a continuing effort of the imagination. To the sum of dreams that have shaped the U.S., Author Griffith has added his of a land "where differences in color and race are not falsely denied but make a competition in being the best . . . where nobility is not mere respectability and virtue does not produce a snigger; where the clang of work and the clamor of play attest to the common health; where enemies cannot reach us because our merit, and not our guns or our propaganda, has won the world to our side . . ."

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