588
PARTISAN REVIEW
Now in America, it seems to me, the writer has always been
uneasy in his relation to his native culture and his owIi experience
within it. Hence even when the writer did not feel estranged from
his country, he found it difficult to identify himself with it. The
idea of patriotism has always been suspect for the American intellec–
tual, who has associated it with reactionary or ignorant flag-waving
and a lack of respect for the arts. The typical European writer, on
the other hand, however much of a dissident or internationalist he
might have thought himself to be, generally identified himself with
the traditions of his nation and only rarely did he find them in con–
flict with his literary ideals. Nor has the word, patriotism, had the
unpleasant connotations for the European writer that it has had in
this country.
It
will be recalled that even in the autocratic Russia of
the last century, when writers like Turgenev turned to the cultural
life of the West, such nationalists as Dostoevsky insisted that the
Russian writer was inseparable from the experience and destiny of
his people.
It
is true that
art
is international. But it is also true that
all
modern art, especially literature, is rooted in the life of a nation, just
as it has often been rooted in a class, an outlook, and an intellectual
tr.adition. In this respect, I think American literature has played hide
and seek with American experience. For one thing, there has not been
an image, or cluster of images, of the national experience available
to literature--of the kind that European writers have been able to
draw on or take for granted for centuries. The earlier sprawling char–
acter of the country and the more recent commercialization of art
have kept the writer, who needs some sense of a stable culture, off
balance and uncertain about his tradition, his audience, and his
subject. In place of a national consciousness, the idea of regionalism,
which is meaningless in most of Europe, has flourished here. We have
only to recall that New England was the cultural unit for a long
time, that the South even today has its own feeling of community,
and that any number of regional centers throughout the nation claim
aesthetic autonomy. On the whole I think it can be said that much
of our literature has come from the search for the symbols of our
national experience or from a feeling of estrangement from it. James,
Eliot, Pound, and most of the exiles of the '20's, for example, looked
for a subject outside America; Melville tried to find a central al-
