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PARTISAN REVIEW
poet.
The New Yorker
is horrible, but its writing is good.
Partisan Re–
view
is typical of all that is worst in modern intellectual life, but it's
a fine magazine with the highest standards. Pragmatism is the arch-enemy
of culture, but Dewey was a great thinker, Sidney Hook is a wise man,
and Mr. Viereck admits that he cannot understand the technical writings
of pragmatists. What then is he opposing? Perhaps only the filtering
of these through second-rate minds which don't understand them. And
what of the filtering of the Judaeo-Christian tradition through the minds
of the Bruce Bartons? I suppose the enemy is the second-rate mind.
But if that is so why pick out garbled versions of pragmatism and rela–
tivism to attack? Why not the entire garble?
Mr. Viereck's creation, Gaylord Babbitt, George F.'s son, the arche–
type of the muddled intellectual liberal, is unrecognizable. Parts of him
conceivably make a pattern: the cliches of the fellow-traveler, the
French tags, the right names in modern art. But the rest of Gaylord
can't even be forced into the whole. He likes Rockwell Kent and goes
to dinners at $50.00 a plate. Maybe Mr. Viereck knows suc.h people; 1
don't and I don't know where they are found. As for the new
trahison
des clercs,
it's difficult to know who the traitors are. One of Mr.
Viereck's too few definitions only makes confusion worse confounded.
"I define intellectuals as all who are full-time servants of the Word or
of the word. This means educators in the broadest sense: philosophers,
clergymen, artists, professors, poets, and also such dreamy and uncloudly
[sic]
professions as editors and the more serious interpreters of news."
Most of us would regard only a few people in any of these professions
as intellectuals: the average clergyman or professor of chemistry is about
as intellectual as a shoe salesman. As for the best of them: is Faulkner
an intellectual? was Whitehead? or for that matter, is Einstein? Russell
Lynes knows very much better than Mr. Viereck what a highbrow is.
He would know at a glance that Gaylord Babbitt is a middlebrow, at
best upper middlebrow, but never for a moment a highbrow, even of
the second class.
Mr. Viereck makes much of the notion that the ideas about value
held by relativists and pragmatists could be endorsed in toto by totali–
tarians who are honest enough to draw the Dostoevskyean inference:
if
values are relative then everything is permitted. Somehow the company
their ideas keep is supposed to damn the relativists and pragmatists com–
pletely. But what of the company this idea of Mr. Viereck's keeps?
Bishop Sheen and Mortimer Adler used to say the same thing. And it
isn't even true. Nazis and Communists are very partial relativists: they
believe, respectively, that values are relative to a nation or an economic
