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PARTISAN REVIEW
cause, writers have withdrawn
into the private imagination,
,which cannot but lag behind the
pace of events.
With some of Cowley's diagnosis
one is bound to agree. But it seems
to me that both the causes and the
effects of the present crisis go
much deeper. What we observe
today is not so much a lull in the
literary life as an utter breakdown
of values and distinctions and a
failure of the will to independent,
radical expression. Nor can one ac–
count for this cultural degenera–
tion, as Cowley tends to, simply–
by the political disappointments of
the last decade, for in the past
the vitality of art has never been
known to depend on the realiza–
tions of any radical hopes. On the
contrary, the measure of vitality
has been the ability of intellectuals
to maintain their identity and their
traditions regardless of the politi–
cal situation.
In the last few years, however,
most American writers have done
nothing so much as display their
capacity to conform, by draping
themselves in the official doctrines
of All-American anti-fascism and
knuckling under to the chest–
thumping nationalism now ram–
pant. There is, perhaps, as much
native talent at work today as
in
the past, but apparently it has
been drained off by the pieties of
the war spirit, leaving any against–
the-stream creative effort to a few
lonely figures content to remain
outside the sway of literary opinion.
The rediscovery of America has
become practically an occupational
disease not only of popular writers
and reviewers but also of people
who once had at least one foot in
the movements of literary revolt.
The phenomenon is actually too
widespread to cite, but the effects
are evident even in a number of
ostensibly serious studies, such as
Ferner Nuhn's
The Wind Blows
from the East
and Maxwell Geis–
mar's
Writers in Transition,
in
which the worth of American
authors is tested largely by their
devotion to the native land. And
this impulse to boost our national
stock has been accompanied by a
wave of anti-intellectualism that
threatens to destroy the still re–
maining traces of the radical and
modernist spirit that developed
after the last war. True enough, a
guilt feeling on the part of writers
who strayed too far from the pop–
ular mind and a tendency to retire
into the security of the American
past have been ever present
in
our
culture. But today this intellectual
masochism has become almost the
norm of the literary man, so that
the traditional gap
~etween
of–
ficial and disaffected thinking, be–
tween kitsch and literature, is
closing up. Only in such a debased
atmosphere can cash-and-carry
writers like Saroyan and Steinbeck,
for example, be treated with the
respect and attention ordinarily
reserved for figures of genuine dis–
tinction.
Perpaps even more remarkable
is the absence of a younger gene–
ration of writers, sharing more or
less a common dissidence and a
common direction. By definition,
the artist who sets out to advance
the medium or to express new
ideas is a young man at war with
the existing gods and disposed
to
