VARIETY
121
nurse his disaffection and sense of
alienation - a zealot, we might
say, of the advance guard. Thus
have ,new literary movements come
to the fore. Of late, however, the
new talents that have appeared
have mostly presented themselves
in the image of middle-aged lite–
rary men, not too eager to diffe–
rentiate themselves from the al–
ready succesful models, and ripe
for the standard literary markets.
Where in the past most gifted
writers had to suffer their growing
pains in the "little magazines" be–
fore the commercial publications
would come to terms with them,
if
at all, today the young writer
is quite ready to skip the interme–
diate stage. As a result, the young–
.er talent, instead of reaching for
some new forms of the imagina–
tion to generalize its experience -
the experience of a generation
caught between the political shocks
of the thirties and the uprootings
of the war - has taken to match–
ing skills with the more popular
authors. No wonder that immemo–
rial genre, the slice of life, which
proceeds by simple addition of
events to characters, has become
the standard recipe for literary
composition. And as every maga–
zine editor knows, even the pre–
sumably more advanced specimens
of writing are for the most part
but the trophies of modernism,
handed down from the twenties.
There are, to be sure, some notable
ex'Ceptions - offhand one might
mention Karl Schapiro, Randall
Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth
Bishop, Saul Bellow, H.
J.
Kaplan,
Isaac Rosenfeld-but these are iso–
lated figures, lacking the
elan
and
confidence of a movement.
These are some of the more tel–
ling symptoms - all obviously of
a piece :.._ of intellectual disrup–
tion. And while no cultural situa–
tion c'an be defined in purely poli- ·
tical terms, it is clear that Amer–
ican writing has been thrown off
balance by the events of the last
decade. Thus there was the poli–
tical fling of the thirties when so
many established as well as young
writers leaped to the cause of com–
munism and proletarian art, out–
doing each other in the extrava–
ganzas of political writing. Hence
it was almost inevitable that they
should sooh find themselves in the
position of a truly "lost genera–
tion", unable to adjust to a new
climate, once the Stalinists, who
sponsored the new literary move–
ment, removed its revolutionary
props. Some gifted figures simply
lost their bearings, retiring from
both literature and politics, while
those faithfuls who veered left and
right with the Stalinists were tran–
sformed into political automata
who found it just as gratifying to
underwrite the democratic myth
as to agitate for the socialist revo–
lution. And the liberal mind,
which had sustained itself through
the faith and energy of the Stali–
nists, even when it kept its dis–
tance from their more extreme
policies, found itself betrayed at
every turn and crushed between
tlie failures of the radical cause
\
and the false hopes of the new
gospel of compromise.
With the coming of the war, it
was of course to be expected that
some of the earlier radicalism
should be supplanted by a patrio-
