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PA RTIS A N REV lEW
1. To what extent have American intellectuals actually changed
their attitude toward America and its institutions?
2. Must the American intellectual and writer adapt himself to mass
culture?
If
he must, what forms can his adaptation take? Or, do you
believe that a democratic society necessarily leads to a leveling of
culture, to a mass culture which will overrun intellectual and aesthetic
values traditional to Western civilization?
3. Where in American life can artists and intellectuals find the
basis of strength, renewal, and recognition, now that they can no
longer depend fully on Europe as a cultural example and a source of
vitality?
4.
If
a reaffinnation and rediscovery of America is under way, can
the tradition of critical non-conformism (going back to Thoreau and
Melville and embracing some of the major expressions of American
intellectual history) be maintained as strongly as ever?
NEWTON ARVIN
1. A change has unmistakably taken place, though it
could easily be misstated and seen out of perspective. Mere "aliena–
tion" has almost never been the simple clue to the attitudes of
American intellectuals toward their country and its culture; the
polarized emotions have almost always co-existed-alienation from
some of the aspects of that culture, at one pole; at the other, a deep
identification with it and with its meaning for the human future.
This goes for James just as truly as for Thoreau, Melville, Haw–
thorne, Mark Twain, and the American writer in general; the
fact that Ezra Pound is a great and very nearly unique exception
to the rule is full of significance for his career and its melancholy
close. In any case, the sense of alienation did indeed become in–
creasingly acute as the nineteenth century approached its end and
as the twentieth century moved on into the confusions of the
twenties and thirties. The existence of the other pole-of the other
emotional fact, of identification and participation-may well have
