162
PARTISAN REVIEW
are forming their pack. And, as usual, a few intellectuals who
would like to have been bullies are running out in front, snuffling
along the ground to uncover the trail, ready to rush back to their
new masters, wagging their tails, whenever they find an egghead
track. Mr. James Burnham and the
Freem.an
(or
ex-Freeman)
set
are convenient examples.
Today, as a consequence of the election, the American intel–
lectual finds himself in a situation he has not known for a generation.
The
Partisan Review's
symposium in reconciliation, "America and
the Intellectuals," celebrated the end, and not the beginning of an
epoch. For twenty years, the government of the United States, while
often one which the intellectual has found confused or mistaken,
has nevertheless been one which has basically understood, respected
and protected intellectual purposes. Now business is in power again;
and with it will inevitably come the vulgarization which has been
the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy. American
writers have already been denounced for not providing favorable
portraits of businessmen in their novels, as Communist writers are
ber.ated for not doing justice to the new Soviet man. And, while no
modern equivalent of Bruce Barton's
The Man Nobody Knows
has
yet been produced, Harry
A.
Bullis, chairman of the board of
General Mills, a director of the National Conference of Christians
and Jews, a Legionnaire, a Republican and .a Methodist, has already
written an article entitled "God is my Senior Partner" (with full
immunity from suspicions of blasphemy; think what would happen
to an intellectual who wrote an article entitled "God is my Literary
Agent"!) .
A position of alienation is, of course, normal and essential for
an artist. Indeed, no other position is possible; for no society can
ever satisfy all the subtle scruples and needs of the individual sensi–
bility. The artist must be a lonely man. (When Simonov writes,
"If
you ask me what the Soviet system has done for the writer I should
answer that, first of all, it has erased from his inner self all sense
of loneliness, and given him the feeling of complete and absolute
'belonging' to society," he gives the whole Soviet show away.) But
there is a difference between the normal alienation of any artist in
society, and the organized official hostility which puts the artist
on the run and obsesses him with the necessities of self-defense.
