STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
New York from the provinces feels, in the terms Jean Stafford has
so aptly exploited, the Rube, attempts to conform; and the
almost
parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York
is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.
It is not surprising that Kafka pre-eminently conditions the
revolt against naturalism in a generation with such a core; the
obsessive, the parabolic, the irreducible become defining aims of our
art.
There are other elementi to be sure: from Dostoevsky the under–
ground man, the baptism in evil; from Joyce, Eliot or Mann, the
exploitation of the Myth; from various Christian sources the concepts
of Fall and Original Sin (though in the United States not a full–
fledged Christian metaphysical school like that Charles Williams
and C. S. Lewis in England have developed out of George Mac–
Donald); from James a morality of style, from Hawthorne and
Melville a symbolic audacity and complexity.
It is an unselfconsciously international complex; and indeed the
Jew as writer helps mediate a traditional dilemma of the artist in
America, the conflicting
claims
of an allegiance to Europe and to
the American scene. But having left behind
him
the immigrant's
drive drastically to deny an abandoned past, the second-generation
Jewish writer has learned to be aware of a tradition immediately his,
that is European and American at once; be is
himself
the guarantee
of the singleness of Europe and America, and be escapes completely
the polar tugs of a defensive chauvinism and an embarrassed self–
abnegation before Continental culture.
In a second act of mediation, too, the Jewish writer plays a
role, in the mediation between writer and intellectual. The typical
American author in most periods has been almost aggressively anti–
intellectual. One
thinks
of Twain or even of Melville, and in the
generation just before ours of Hemingway and Wolfe and Faulkner,
and, set against them, the melancholy academicians Spingam and
Babbitt and More. The immense impoverishment caused by that
schism, the creative paralysis of the University, and the comple–
mentary weakness of ideas in our literature is scandalous; and that
strange American invention, the non-academic, non-creative Intel–
lectual, unfrocked, detached, the Comedian of Ideas, is that cleavage
made flesh. The urban Jewish writer moving inward from the
schools of Marxism is at least not contemptuous of ideas, and, at
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