316
PARTISAN REVIEW
MARK SCHORER
Beginning with your final question, which pertains to
"the tradition of critical non-conformism," I should like merely
to ask where it is.
If
there is any di...c;gent, where? It is in the most
trivial places-in the stylistic pretentiousness of the silliest novels,
in the intellectual ellipses of the most linguistically overblown poems.
We have had almost no dissent worth taking seriously 'since the
1920's, when we really had
it;
and that dissent, it now appears, had
very little to do with Europe, only with the United States, or with
both the United States and Europe as part of a larger geography.
In an early and poor poem, Ezra Pound addressed Whistler:
You had your searches, y01lr incertainties,
And this is good to know- for us, I mean,
Who bear the brunt
0/
our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art.
He
did
try, at least, and in that most difficult area, the very words
we use, the words turned back upon us and finally upon him,
wrenched finally into such dissenting folly! Then Eliot, with the hand–
some dissent that runs up to
Ash Wednesday.
The conversion is the
dissent in reverse. And Crane, with the factitious affirmations all
the time being split through, blown up like bridges by the explo–
sions of doubt that we can really trust. All this. And then per–
haps the even more genuine, because more oblique dissent in Mar–
ianne Moore's monkeys and elephants, in Stevens' Quince at the
clavier, in the real stink of the Passaic River: three different ways
of saying the same thing. That was when we last had dissent as
a genuinely cultural expression that was like,-vise artistic. And of
course one could name others who were younger then than they
are now.
You ask your questions at a time when it could scarcely be
more difficult to answer (and therefore more necessary to ask) them.
Supposing that "the United States ... is politically more advanced
than any other part of the world," we are still faced with the para–
dox that the United States has seldom experienced a more restric–
tive political atmosphere than at the present time. Mass culture
submits at once to this restrictiveness, and puts up one more and
