4.90
PARTISAN REVIEW
tance it naturally encountered, it believed one of its chief historical
assignments to be the task of erasing the traces of the bourgeois
past. But it is surely ironic that the current appeal to immerse
ourselves in the splendors of the American tradition should ignore
the critical acquisitions and revaluations of these last decades.
In a typically compulsive way, this effort to frame a new
cultural myth has not only made a clean break with the Marxist
outlook, but
in
its special concern with the indigenous, it is patently
a negation of everything the twenties stood for. Thus we have the
astonishing phenomenon of a writer like Van Wyck Brooks now
forsaking his earlier studies
in
creative frustration for a gayer–
and more successful-version of the literary life in America. One
cannot find, it seems to me, a surer sign of the lack of a
felt
tradi–
tion-of one that
~an
be assumed-than in such a wilful endeavor
to invoke it into being. In a recent address Brooks, who is appar–
ently intent on carrying the quest for a native heritage to the most
comic and painful extremes, ce,lled for a purge of such figures as
Joyce and Eliot-of the truly characteristic works of the modem
tradition. As for a "usable past"-Brooks has finally discovered
it in the humanitarian pieties of none other than Whittier.
Our concern at the moment, however, is not with the career
or the latest views of VanWyck Brooks, but with the current epi–
demic of literary nationalism in which Brooks is simply an ad–
vanc.ed case. And what is this nationalist revival-this militant
provincialism-if not a new phase of self-abnegation on the part
of the intelligentsia? Once again they are renouncing the values
of group-detachment as they permit themselves to be drawn into
the tides of prevailing opinion. In a complete reversal of role, they
have come .to echo all the stock objections to the complex and
ambiguous symbolization of modem writing: and the improvised
tradition they now offer in its place-is it not the popular, Sunday
version of our history? The immediate effect is bound to be some
kind of creative disorientation. But even more important, from
the viewpoint of our culture as a wh9le, it is evident that this con–
stant fluctuation between dissidence and conformity, this endless
game of hide-and-seek with the past, cannot but thwart the produc–
tion of a mature and sustained literature. And the intelligentsia
in America, for all its efforts to preserve its intellectual identity,
seems to have a deep-seated need to accept as its own-if only
periodically-the official voice of society.
