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PARTISAN REVIEW
American life, one that excoriated American philistinism and provin–
ciality, that deplored the American want of urbanity and cultivation.
Our daintier intellectual worldlings felt ennui and disgust, our more
responsible intellectuals felt undernourished and hemmed in: all these
people looked to Europe for guidance and sustenance, and many of
them went to Europe to learn, .and in some cases to live. The whole
attitude chimed in with something both fundamental and fashionable,
and did something to enrich America in the very act of boisterously
excoriating her.
Then came the '30s, when most intellectuals, from whatever
impulse, acquired political consciousness or at least a social conscience;
and were variously led to embrace Communism, or flirt with it, or
put' up with its presence; and now by economic, as earlier by cultural,
standards, judged American life not good enough or not good at
all. But increasingly, as the Soviet Union changed from exit to trap–
door, intellectuals felt less and less trapped- and more and more
rooted-in the United States.
It's not yet easy to determine whether our present emotions
about America constitute an attitude or so much as a tendency; or,
even if they do, whether there isn't something of the forcing-house
about it. There is reason enough for our writers and intellectuals to
feel well-disposed toward America; they are far more widely respected
here, far more frequently deferred to, than they once were; culture–
if only at a quiz-program level- is "popular" today; and the scientist,
the sociologist, the psychiatrist are part of every bourgeois community
life. And our intellectuals are not just more respected, they are better
fed. Talent is well paid for nowadays, though oftener at the back
door than the front; and America swears by education, though it
still sniffs at what I would call culture. Thus in terms of both selfish
rewards and disinterested benefits, the intellectual lives in an at–
mosphere that holds out a certain promise, that inspires a certain
hope. He may still be smiled at a little, but it is not with contempt;
so that he himself, however grave
his
misgivings about America,
need feel no personal rancor.
Yet all this offers, at the very most, a mere basis for an attitude.
An actual attitude-the kind of theme song that intellectuals seem
to need, and found so readily in the '20s and '30s--has surely not
yet emerged; and in the absence of any driving conviction or emo-
