THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENTSIA
481
The distance from the cold-water flats of Greenwich Village to
the whited sepulchre of the Time and Life Building off Fifth Avenue
is longer than can be gauged from the short subway ride. This does
not mean that it cannot
be
traversed, for the careers of aspiring free–
lance intellectuals standing outside the social order all too often
testify that it can. Not a few of the intellectuals who begin their
careers on the margin of the existing system end up by selling their
services to the .ingenious molders of public opinion of which the
Luce combine is the most typical. (We may again refer the reader
to Mary McCarthy's "Portrait of the Intellectual," in which the
transition from one world to another is skillfully drawn.) Of course,
those who move from the precarious world of the alienated avant–
garde to the high-powered organization of the slick disseminators of
prefabricated ideas pay a price in loss of creative talent and power of
analysis. Frequently, however, the body social of bohemia loses nothing
by their desertion, for they mostly belong to the type whose relation to
bohemia is parasitical. This parasitism serves as an apprenticeship
for their subsequent careers, as it enables them to acquire a glibness
of expression which fits in splendidly with their later efforts. Also,
their usual origin, as that of the Yale man intellectual portrayed by
Mary McCarthy, is in the upper middle class, and thus their shift
to the uptown milieu
is
by way of being a homecoming, a return to
that which was only tentatively rejected. This return is not neces–
sarily motivated in a purely economic fashion, as motives of this order
are often subordinated to the need for relatedness to the dominant
social trends, the compulsion to break away from the desperate sense
of isolation which is the lot of those living on the fringes of the social
structure.
The ex-expatriates who return to the bourgeois fold are but a
minor part of the group which we might describe as the fellow–
travelers of the haute bourgeoisie. Not all types of journalists, how–
ever, should be included in this category. There are some on the big
city
dailies who are nothing more than artisans of the phrase, with–
out cultural pretensions. Then there are honest journeymen who
divorce their journalistic tasks from their existence as a whole, grop–
ing to understand what underlies their obscure conflicts. They nourish
a secret desire to write a novel or a muckraking book, but it seems
as though the time for such independent writing never arrives. So
they drink more than their average fellow-Americans, acquiring a
protective layer of cynicism to prevent their really sensitive skins
from being continually rubbed the wrong way.
