an elite can survive only with external financial support. Occasionally this
happens by bootlegging avant-garde materials into works for the middlebrow
market; this is one reason for the adulation of Dostoyevsky, who unconsciously
carried off this fusion by making his topic the rebellious Russian intellectuals
of his day. Similarly in the 1930s, the admiration of French intellectuals went
to Hemingway, for his amalgamation of adventure story, stylistic severity, and
quasi-metaphysical code of meaning. More commonly highbrow writers sur-
vive by patronage, sometimes the self-patronage of wealthy inheritors (Flaubert
and Proust), reinforcing the self-image of the artist as the true aristocrat. Some
highbrow writers hold alternative jobs (Baudelaire as journalist-critic, T. S.
Eliot as bank clerk), the despising of which usually figures into the theme of
artistic alienation from the ordinary commercial world which fails to support
their art. Another common external niche is an academic job, which bruises
the writer’s self-esteem because its bureaucratic routine contrasts with the
freedom and creative exaltation which the writers’ market holds out as its
ultimate reward. Most common of all is economic failure.^12 This gives rise to
the image of the artist starving in a garret, melodramatically ending as a
youthful suicide rather than be forced back into the mundane world. In fact,
most highbrow writers (perhaps middlebrow writers as well) spend only a
youthful episode in writing, like Rimbaud from 17 to 19, before economic
realities force them back into a conventional career.
The best chances of success for highbrow writers exist where many aspiring
and part-time writers are concentrated in a community. Sheer size is the crucial
variable in making a critical mass which can support at least a few technically
oriented esoteric writers on the proceeds of their works. Paris has been the
modern archetype. Building over several generations, it reached the critical
mass (perhaps already by the 1830s) by the overlap of various intellectual
communities: the concentration of aspiring students not yet funneled though
the selection of the lycées and the competitive examinations; the universities,
libraries, and research institutes; the publishing business; the national newspa-
pers and magazines; professionals and aspirants in music and fine arts.^13 This
concentrated mass of intellectual aspirants, together with failures who had not
yet given up their highbrow identities and their network contacts with the
culture production business, made up a local market supporting viable careers
for a few pure intellectual creators, whose lives became emblems for the rest.
Such was the market structure in which the Sartre circle forged a brief episode
of high-level creativity merging philosophy and literature.Sartre as Movement Emblem
For all its ideology of solitary individual choice, existentialism was a phenome-
non of group success. Once again we witness tight personal connections start-774 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths