Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

A nasty little X-ray of American respectability, this line skewers the way “serious” culture gets smuggled in wearing the same clothes as commerce. Nemerov’s target isn’t the novel so much as the pious temperament that treats art as a moral ledger: if it’s long, diligent, and properly improving, it counts. If it’s playful, decorative, or irresponsibly beautiful, it’s suspect. The joke lands because he doesn’t accuse; he recategorizes. The novel becomes “work,” then “conscientious application,” then, with the twist of the knife, “practically the retail business all over again.” High art collapses into the middle-class habit of earning one’s virtue.

The phrase “Jewish Puritan” is deliberately provocative, a composite stereotype meant to name an American type: upwardly mobile, anxious about legitimacy, disciplined about labor, inclined to turn every activity into an ethic. Nemerov isn’t offering anthropology; he’s staging a cultural tension between art as experience and art as self-justification. The middle class doesn’t just consume novels; it recruits them, making reading a form of industriousness.

Context matters: mid-century American letters were busy professionalizing themselves - the rise of the creative-writing program, the prestige novel, the idea of literature as a vocation with correct seriousness. Nemerov, a poet with a satirist’s ear, hears in that seriousness a familiar register: the voice of the shopkeeper upgraded into the voice of the critic. The subtext is bleakly funny: even our escape hitches itself to the work ethic, and the marketplace always finds a way to call itself culture.