482
PARTISAN REVIEW
flourishes, but it has now fructified
in Ametica itself
as a more strong–
ly developed.sense of the international scene, toward which the Russian
Revolution, as well
.as
the war, have been powerful catalytic agents.
And despite all its intellectual crudities and immaturities, reflected
by Mencken and others, despite Prohibition, ballyhoo, the emergence
of the automobile as a national religion, the twenties nevertheless seem
to announce the promised beginning, the founding of a genuine
literary tradition at once highly American and international. Hence,
The Dial
attains in this period the greatest public success of any
literary review in our history; and there are, besides it,
The Fugitive
(1922-25),
The Hound and Horn
(1927-34),
The New Masses
( 1926- ) , although after 1928 this last quickly ceases to be relevant
to either American intelligence or literature, or to anything very much
except the advancing worldwide degradation of the Left. One very
notable, if small, casualty the decade suffered at its beginning, in the
death of Randolph Bourne before he could take over editorship of
The Dial,
which consequently never possessed a distinct political
direction and helped establish the dangerous American tradition of
the "purely literary" magazine.
But in the passage from the twenties to thirties, and by the middle
of the thirties, the great promise has been killed. The relation to
Europe has slowly changed and Europe itself is no longer a per–
manent recourse. The emergence of fascism has been the first signal
of the long European defeat, until now in the middle forties Europe
has so far ceased as a possibility of expatriation that the very continu–
ance of its civilization has come in question: after passing through
two world wars without showing now the least sign of any politically
creative idea or program which would solve its problems, Europe seems
to have reached that particular stage of history where the great civil–
izations of the past have succumbed-precisely when they have lost
their political creativity. Other poisons that have been developing in–
side the twenties reach their fatal virulence toward the end of the
decade: Hollywood, the Luce publications, the radio, Stalinism,
The
New Yorker
(which exploits the new and rapidly growing audience
of the sophisticated middlebrow zombie). The forties now face tele–
vision, which will make the popular taste for cozy home drama all
the more easily gratified and place another barrier between the Amer–
ican and his reading. The Resistance, of course, goes on during the
thirties, but the occupying armies have changed, grown much more
organized and formidable; and against such forces the older carefree,
lighthearted, and often lightheaded bohernianism of the twenties dis-
