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PARTISAN REVIEW
which speaks of America as the abode of alienation, chaos, and
doom
is
either expressing a vain religiosity or has been forced to
express itself in abstractions which remain merely willful or pro–
phetic. This new attitude has its charm, for many people the chann
of novelty. Naturally it contains dangers; it can induce complacency
and the relaxation of intellect rather than, as we might justifiably
hope, relaxation of the nerves merely, or of the will; it encourages
Know-Nothingism, that dull nativism and its accompanying dis–
trust of all critical activity as such to which we Americans so easily
submit ourselves; it may lead us in the blush of new-blown
romance comfortably to ignore those "inner antagonisms and con–
tradictions" which, as Mr. Philip Rahv has made it
his
duty to
remind us, characterize .all modern societies and intellectuals.
As
for myself, I have no new feeling about our country. The
experience of those who have gone in the . last fifteen or twenty
years from a rejection of America to an acceptance of America has
remained unavailable to me. The fact is (for what it is worth)
I have never felt in any definitive or continuous way "alienated"
from my country, nor (to compare great things with small) have
I thought that the great American writers of the past felt half so
"estranged" or "disinherited" as many modern critics have said
they did. I have often been dismayed at perceiving in some of my
friends the extent to which they felt estranged from America and
the extent to which they rationalized their feeling in ideological,
often in Stalinist language. But I have always thought too that
nine times out of ten their estrangement was a merely literary pose
or the product of personal neurosis and was of no consequence–
was at least anything but radical-when translated into cultural
or political terms.
Yet
if
I cannot remember having felt really "disinherited" or
"astray," neither can I remember a time when I did not feel very
sharply the differences between myself and most of the Americans
I knew, nor when I did not detest nine-tenths of the surface mani–
festation, at least, of the life they led. I have never doubted that I
should occupy a dissident position. Thoreau was a hero of mine
from boyhood. But neither have I ever doubted that our democracy
offered me, within its loose confines, a dissident position to occupy.
The trouble with most of the discussion about the alienation of
