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PARTISAN REVIEW
eralizations to be found in other books, like Fromm's
Escape From
Freedom.
David Riesman really points at the social structure of
life in the United States as it now exists, and so do a number of
other sociologists, as well as certain anthropologists, cultural histor–
ians, psychologists, perhaps a theologian or two. But these must be
separated from "writers," if by writers we mean poets and novelists
and dramatists. Looking among novelists for a critique of the middle
class that is in any way comparable to Riesman's we come up with
someone like John Marquand. Or we find ourselves in the com–
pany of the judges of the National Book Awards, who give us James
Jones;
his
novel, some reviewer (or judge) has claimed, is char–
acterized by the traditional American dissent from authority. Who
is mad?
If
From Here to Eternity
is
dissent in any way important,
we had all better join the Church and leave dissent alone.
Dissent by writers has, alas, been left alone for quite a while
now. There has seldom been such a lag between what American in–
tellectuals can brilliantly analyze and what American writers cannot
reveal at
all.
There would be no justice and less point in abusing
any single writer, but we might at least ask why a social critic in
the novel like the Sinclair Lewis of the 1920's became the apolo–
gist in the 1930's for the very limitations that he criticized ten years
earlier; or why the John dos Passos of the 1930's becomes the un–
recognizable Taft-man of the 1950's. Such reversals will be arche–
typal, one ventures, in the history of our literature when it comes
to be written, and they will dramatize the difference between so–
ciological observation and suggestion, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the imaginative necessities. The writer, of these two, bears
the brunt; and buckles.
LIONEL TR IL LING
It is certainly true that in recent years- say the last ten–
American intellectuals have radically revised their attitude toward
America.
An
avowed aloofness from national feeling is no longer
the first ceremonial step into the life of thought.
A prime reason for the change, and a material and an obvious
one, is America's new relation with the other nations of the world.
Even the most disaffected intellectual must respond, if only in
