PARTISAN REVIEW
graphs from the concentration camps. They were also influenced by
the war-created prosperity, and the expansion and power of uni–
versities.
But now the political vacuum is filling in with the fight for
Western Europe and for the survival of a western culture, and with
the debates in this country caused by the rise of the Wallace
move–
ment. So far this has been too negative, opposing Stalinism and
Taftism with humanist or socialist abstractions. But now the concept
of the Third Force
is
taking more positive shape both
in
Europe and
America, and acquiring concrete political will. Intellectuals and
writers will be increasingly involved in this struggle, and it is bound
to affect their literary ideas, their sense of both political and literary
possibility, and of the relation between them. This will be something
quite
different from the aestheticism of the academies or the degra–
dation of artistic dogma in Moscow. 1949 may also mark the be–
ginning of a period.
Leslie A. Fiedler:
It becomes easier and easier to
say
these days (we have
known it for a long time) that the writer in the forties is essentially
concerned with establishing alternatives to naturalism. Tlus involves
the re-instatement in his vocabulary of such words as 'freedom,'
'responsibility' and 'guilt', words which a little while ago he regarded
as obscenities, and which even yet he cannot manage without ,un–
easiness. All the better-that uneasiness redeems him from the pos–
sibilities of sentimentality, from the sterile certainty of the New
Humanists, whose impertinent attacks on naturalism delayed for
years the legitimate revolt of creative writers. It was necessary that .
we be able honestly to say of Babbitt and More, "Who the hell are
they?"
before a re-assertion of the autonomy of the individual could
seem anything but a slogan of the White Terror. It is a help, too,
that our leading naturalists have become middle-aged, ripe for ritual
slaughter.
But best of all is that fact that our revolt began, as it were,
against our wills, with technical annoyance, with offended scnsi-
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