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PARTISAN REVIEW
life, often breeds neurosis out of which may come significant work,
or, as is more general, a pitiful stretching and straining of small gifts.
As an example of the former type there is the life and art of Hart
Crane, whose anguished existence had the implications of an Amer–
ican tragedy Dreiser never conceived.
The bohemians are the vanguard of the ever-moving cultural
frontier. They are the first to feel out the emergent line of sensibility
and consciousness; and though often taken
in
by the spurious or
the merely bizarre they nevertheless fulfill the important function of
bringing to light new attitudes and interests which portend social and
political change.
While the academy is to some extent still in possession of certain
standards of criticism drawn from tradition and acquaintance with
scientific procedures, the bohemians are in the very nature of their
social role deprived of intellectual stability. The defect of their virtue
is to be receptive to charlatanism which has the aura of creative
originality; all too often they admire the grotesque and the startling
regardless of its meaning and content. Thus in the little magazines
one finds genuinely valid material together with a mass of undigestible
jargon. This stuff is often concocted by people who live on the fringes
of the avant-garde and who assimilate the mannerisms of this group
for reasons other than a concern with ideas or values--reasons that
they themselves are not aware of. They are the parasites of intel–
lectualism, who believe themselves to be possessed of originality and
critical q,cumen merely because they consider themselves to be
"different"; their work is no more than a product of their social
and psychological maladjustment-a maladjustment not strained
through any objectifying process.
An
inverted snobbishness compen-·
sates for their alienation from philistine norms, and their bohemian
existence protects them from social pulverization. Actually they are
brothers under the skin of their philistine counterparts.
To be distinguished from them are those bohemians whose neuro–
tic patterns are intertwined with the critically and creatively viable.
Yet even such people, delimited as they are in role and function by
a frustrating social structure, show traces of the deadly blight. To
realize fully their potentialities will be impossible for them under
conditions of the existing social order. For the present, however, the
bohemian intellectuals must continue to live and work as a minority
group, subject to the deprivations which are the lot of minorities
everywhere.
