OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
567
the individual from his society is that, as applied to America, it
merely restates the assumption on which we have proceeded from
the beginning. One of our indispensable "modernities," as Walt
Whitman might have said, is that at its beginning the country was
founded on and implied alienation- almost everything was assumed
to be alienable except our inalienable rights. The ad hoc nature of
our civilization, its sometimes terrifying thinness and discontinuity,
its disjunction between professed and practical belief, its quality
of violence, these have produced much in human experience which
has been damaging and cruel. Yet the effect of our radical depar–
ture was to slay the dragon Alienation and in fact to solve the prob–
lem by absorbing the poisonous flesh into the body of our civiliza–
tion and accommodating it there.
It
has therefore always seemed to me a failure of the historical
understanding to suppose that an American intellectual can be
"alienated" from his society (I do not speak of other forms of
alienation) in the sense in which this plight is spoken of or exempli–
fied by Hegel, Marx, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, or Kafka. American
intellectuals, from Jonathan Edwards and Cooper down to Hem–
ingway and Fitzgerald, have led lives sufficiently exacerbated and
frustrated. But this has usually been a private, intermittent, "pro–
testant" exacerbation and not a permanent or ultimate estrange–
ment from a culture. Probably the fact is that the idea of alienation
has never had much objective historical content in America. Those
writers who, like Henry Adams and Ezra Pound, but unlike Henry
J
ames and T. S. Eliot, have been most assertive of their estrange–
ment from their country and have tried to make the most intellec–
tual capital out of it have wound up talking about various odd or
occult abstractions. Or, like Van Wyck Brooks, they have flipped
over the coin of alienation (instead of throwing the counterfeit
away) and have discovered that the other side is marked: Perfect
and Unquestioning Love.
As
for whether "the tradition of critical non-conformism go–
ing back to Thoreau and Melville" can be "maintained as strongly
as ever," I am not sure that it can, but I am sure that it must.
This is, fundamentally, our
only
useful "tradition," if by "critical
non-conformism" one means a sustained dissent from and commit–
ment to America. At least it is reassuring to remember that our
