PARTISAN REVIEW
to shape a new movement. The old movement will continue and, to
judge by present indications, it will be reenforced more and more by
academicians from the universities, by yesterday's celebrities and to-
day's philistines. Armed to the teeth with slogans of revolutionary
prudence, its official critics will revive the petty-bourgeois tradition
of gentility, and with each new tragedy on the historic level they will
call the louder for a literature of good cheer. Weak in genuine literary
authority but equipped with all the economic and publicity powers of
an authentic cultural bureaucracy, the old regime will seek to isolate
the new by performing upon it the easy surgery of political falsifica-
tion. Because the writers of the new grouping aspire to independence
in politics as well as in art, they U!ill be identified with fascism,
sometimes directly, sometimes through the convenient medium
of ((Trotskyism." Every effort, in short, will be made to
excommuni-
cate
the new generation, so that their writing and their politics may
be regarded as making up a kind of diabolic totality; which would
render unnecessary any sort of rational discussion of the merits of
either.
Do we exaggerate? On the contrary, our prediction as to the line
the old regime will take is based on the first maneuvers of a campaign
which has already begun. Already,
before it has appeared,
PARTISAN
REVIEW
has been subjected to a series of attacks in the Communist
Party press; already, with no regard for fact-without,
indeed, any
relevant facts to go by--they have attributed gratuitous political de-
signs to
PARTISAN REVIEW
in an effort to confuse the primarily literary
issue between us.
But
PARTISAN REVIEW
aspires to represent a new and dissident
generation in American letters; it will not be dislodged from its inde-
pendent position by any political campaign against it. And without
ignoring the importance of the official movement as a sign of the times
we shall know how to estimate its authority in literature. But we shall
also distinguish, wherever possible, between the tendencies of this
faction itself and the work of writers associated with it. For our edi-
torial accent falls chiefly on culture and its broader social determi-
nants. Conformity to a given social ideology or to a prescribed attitude
or technique, will not be asked of
0/1,1'
writers. On the contrary, our
pages will be open to any tendency which is relevant to literature in
our time. Marxism in culture, we think, is first of all an instrument of
analysis and evaluation; and if, in the last instance, it prevails over
other disciplines, it does
fO
through the medium of democratic con-
troversy. Such is the medium that
PARTISAN REVIEW
will want to
provide in its pages.
