10
PARTISAN REVIEW
the small town into the literary roominess of the city, or from the
provincial immigrant family into the centers of intellectual experiment.
Given the nature of contemporary life, bohemia flourishes in the
city-but that has not always been so. Concord too was a kind of
bohemia, sedate, subversive and transcendental all at once. Today,
however, the idea of bohemia, which was a strategy for bringing ar–
tists and writers together in their struggle with and for the world–
this idea has become disreputable, being rather nastily associated with
kinds of exhibitionism that have only an incidental relationship to
bohemia. Nonetheless, it is the disintegration of bohemia that is a
major cause for the way intellectuals feel, as distinct from and far
more important than what they say or think. Those feelings of lone–
liness one finds among so many American intellectuals, feelings of
damp dispirited isolation which undercut the ideology of liberal op–
timism, are partly due to the break-up of bohemia. Where young
writers would once face the world together, they now sink into sub–
urbs, country homes and college towns. And the price they pay for
this rise in social status is to be measured in more than an increase
in rent.
It is not my purpose to berate anyone, for the pressures of con–
formism are at work upon all of us, to say nothing of the need to
earn one's bread; and all of us bend under the terrible weight of our
time-though some take pleasure in learning to enjoy it. Nor do I
wish to indulge in the sort of good-natured condescension with which
Malcolm Cowley recently described the younger writers as lugubrious
and timid long-hairs huddling in chill academies and poring over
the gnostic texts of Henry James- by contrast, no doubt, to Cowley'S
own career of risk-taking. Some intellectuals, to be sure, have "sold
out" and we can
all
point to examples, probably the same examples.
But far more prevalent and far more insidious is that slow attrition
which destroys one's ability to stand firm and alone: the temptations
of an improved standard of living combined with guilt over the his–
torical tragedy that has made possible our prosperity; one's sense of
being swamped by the rubbish of a reactionary period together with
the loss of those earlier certainties that had the advantage, at least,
of making resistance easy. Nor, in saying these things, do I look for–
ward to any sort of material or intellectual asceticism. Our world is
neither to be flatly accepted nor rejected: it must be engaged, re–
sisted and-who knows, perhaps still-transformed.
