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PARTISAN REVIEW
ternal patterns of conformism in the literary world and intensifies the
yearning, common to all groups but especially to small and insecure
groups, to draw together in a phalanx of solidarity. Then too, those
groups that live by hostility to the dominant values of society-in
this case, cultural values-find it extremely difficult to avoid an inner
conservatism as a way of balancing their public role of opposition;
anyone familiar with radical politics knows this phenomenon only too
well. Finally, the literary world, while quite powerless in relation to,
say, the worlds of business and politics, disposes of a measurable
amount of power and patronage within its own domain; which makes,
again, for predictable kinds of influence.
Whoever would examine the inner life of the literary world
should turn first not to the magazines or the dignitaries or famous
writers but to the graduate students, for like it or not the graduate
school has become the main recruiting ground for critics and some–
times even for writers. .Here, in conversation with the depressed
classes of the academy, one sees how the Ph.D. system-more power–
ful today than it has been for decades, since so few other choices are
open to young literary men-grinds and batters personality into a
mold of cautious routine. And what one finds among these young
people, for all their intelligence and devotion and eagerness, is often
appalling: a remarkable desire to be "critics," not as an accompani–
ment to the writing of poetry or the changing of the world or the
study of man and God, but just critics-as if criticism were a
subject,
as if one could be a critic without having at least four non-literary
opinions, or as if criticism "in itself" could adequately engage an
adult mind for more than a small part of its waking time. An equally
astonishing indifference to the ideas that occupy the serious modem
mind-Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Frazer, Dewey are not great thinkers
in their own right, but reservoirs from which one dredges up "ap–
proaches to criticism"-together with a fabulous knowledge of what
Ransom said about Winters with regard to what Winters had said
about Eliot. And a curiously humble discipleship-but also arrogant
to those beyond the circle-so that one meets not fresh minds in
growth but apostles of Burke or Trilling or Winters or Leavis or
Brooks or neo-Aristotle.
Very little of this is the fault of the graduate students them–
selves, for they, like the distinguished figures I have just listed, are
the victims of an unhappy cultural moment. What we have today in
