OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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A symposium of this sort I find shocking. One expects a J.
Donald Adams to initiate it, a John Chamberlain to bristle with
editorials in its support, a Bernard De Voto to flex his muscles.
This period smacks of healthy manifestoes. Everywhere the Amer–
ican writer is being dunned to become healthy, to grow up, to
accept the American reality, to integrate himself, to eschew disease,
to re-value institutions. Is there nothing to remind us that the
writer does not need to be integrated into his society, and often
works best in opposition to it? I would propose that the artist feels
most alienated when he loses the sharp sense of what he is alienated
from. In this context, I wonder if there has been a time in the
last fifty years when the American artist has felt more alienated.
He cannot enjoy the old battles against censorship; in lieu of a
Comstock or a Sumner, there is an editorial bureaucracy which
uses the language of taste in the service of repression. He does not
have the naivete of the twenties with its sure pleasure of
epater Ie
bourgeois;
he can no longer believe in the social art of the depres–
sion; he is left only with the warmed-over sentimentality of the
war years. One can agree with Edmund Wilson that the last fifty
years represent a revival of American arts and letters, vigorous and
enthusiastic, but with almost no exceptions it is a literature of
alienation and protest, disgust and rebellion. The writer had a
sense of his enemy and it could nourish him.
Today, the enemy is vague, the work seems done, the audi–
ence more sophisticated than the writer. Society has been ration–
alized, and the expert encroaches on the artist. Belief in the efficacy
of attacking his society has been lost, but nothing has replaced the
need for attack.
If,
then, a number of important intellectuals and
writers now see it as their function to interpret American society
from within (the curious space relations of politics which equates
right to within ,and left to without), must one necessarily assume
that the motives are more serious than exhaustion?
Possibly. What seems never to be discussed are the alternatives.
Every intellectual who is now "within" seems to regard his conversion
as a result of the application of pure thought upon moral purity.
The fact that there is a society outside himself which threatens,
suggests, nudges, and promises, is dismissed as mere mechanical
leftism. It is considered the worst of bad taste to imply that the
