14
PARTISAN REVIEW
classless society, for being self-centered, pessimistic, obscurantist,
and so on and so forth.
But now that this movement has abandoned its social goal, it
can be seen that in reality it was not to the revolution that so many
writers were converted but simply to politics. Yet politics-{)rdi–
nary reformist and parliamentary politics-has nothing to offer to
the literary artist. It was one thing to criticise the individualist
tradition from a revolutionary standpoint, but it is something else
again to criticise it from the standpoint of Stalinist
social-mind~d
ness. In view of what has happened, is it not clear that the older
tradition was a thousand times more "progressive"-if that is to
be our criterion-was infinitely more disinterested, infinitely more
sensitive to the actual conditions of human existence, than the
shallow political writing of our latter days?
4.
Is a· new tendency in literature possible today? Is there a
basis for a new vanguard group whose members, not frightened
by isolation, know how to swim against the current? Mter all, not
all writers have reverted to some safe-and-sane way of thinking,
and among those who consider themselves liberals and even Marx–
ists not all are held on a leash by some pseudo-radical organiza–
tion. The revolution may have sunk out of sight and the intelli–
gentsia may be sticking close to its paymaster-mentors, hut the
impulse to represent experience truthfully still persists. The im–
pulse persists, even though the job of judgment and representation
has seldom been so arduous, so perplexing, so enmeshed in ambig–
uous claims and counter-claims. Yet part of the job is to evaluate
these claims. ·
If
one is to be equal to the contemporary subject–
matter, one cannot shut one's eyes to the unruly presences that
beset it.
I do not believe that a new
~vant-garde
'movement, in the
proper historical sense of the term, can he formed in this pre-war
situation. For obituaries, however, the time is not yet; despite
multiple pressures a literary minority can still maintain its iden–
tity. And even if it cannot look forward to an expansive career,
still what it can do is to warn. We should remember the fateful
words of Wilfrid Owen, spoken during the last war: "All a poet
