PARTISAN REVIEW
it covers everything from a cosmic passion to the meanest wringing
of the hands. The proper anguish of our generation of writers as
writers is compounded chiefly of that social guilt and the uneasiness
I spoke of above at having to re-invent the whole vocabulary of ethical
responsibility, that stubbornly insists, despite ingenuity and patience,
in resembling what our fathers spoke in churches we have foresworn:
apostasy and return, it is a contradictory self-reproach that
will
not
somehow cancel out.
The writer has preferred always a foster-father to a father
(think
of Stephen Dedalus and Bloom) ; fleshly ancestors embarrass
him, but ghostly ancestors he must have even in the periods of
extremest experiment, and
this
is, as everyone knows, not such a
period. The experimentalism of the twenties as it has survived in
a thin academy of revolt seems a tyranny of the Interesting as
perilous as the tyranny of Subject Matter in the thirties. We have
legitimized the word 'tradition,' and though our tradition is open
to the point of eccentricity, we have moved from the mere evocation
of ancestors towards a pious imitation even of forms. Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, Donne, Hopkins, Rilke, Lorca, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Kafka,
James, Dostoevsky-there is scarcely a Culture Hero in the list that
first comes to mind whose vogue does not go back to the thirties,
some even deep into the twenties and beyond. Only Kafka belongs
particularly to us, and behind him the witty anguish of Kierkegaard,
but Kafka in especial, polysemous, obsessive, fragmentary-a Jew.
His Jewishness is by no means incidental; the real Jew and
the imaginary Jew between them give to the current period its special
flavor. In
Ulysses)
our prophetic book of the urbanization of art,
the Artist and the Jew reach for each other tentatively and fall
apart; but in the Surveyor
K.
a unity is achieved, a mystic prototype
proposed: Jewishness as a condition of the Artist. In America in
particular, where the impulse of the Frontier has become the doubt–
ful
strength of cities, a generation of writers and critics whose thirtieth
year
falls
somewhere in the forties has appeared: Delmore Schwartz,
Alfred Kazin, Karl Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, Paul Goodman, Saul
Bellow,
H.
J.
Kaplan, typically urban, second-generation Jews, chiefly
ex-Stalinist, ambivalently intellectual, but for all their anguish inso–
lently at home with ideas and words. Before the advantage of their
long maturity, forced early
in
the Movement, the writer drawn to
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