ing Professor Howe as one of the Fel–
lows of the School (not yet a Senior
Fellow, to be sure)? Even without
adopting Professor Howe's view of hu–
man nature, perhaps one may legit–
imately ask how he managed to re–
main on comfortable terms with a
magazine like the
Nation
for so long
a time after others of weaker moral
conviction had found the smell of its
pages too strong for their nostrils. But
of course the
Nation
is no "danger
to freedom"; it is just the leading
"respectable" magazine devoted to sym–
pathetic understanding of Stalinism.
Still, as Professor Howe says-really
I am sorry about this continual "Pro–
fessor," but since Professor Howe takes
such pleasure in sneering at "the acad–
emy," I think we should not omit his
professional title; it is boring, but may–
be we can bore him too--as Professor
Howe says, the idea is not to evade
temptations but to overcome them, and
each man must find his own way of
doing that-Oscar Wilde made a fa–
mous contribution to the question. In
any case, there is no particular reason
why the unchaste should not talk about
chastity; in a sense, they are author–
ities on it. Let us ask, then, what Pro–
fessor Howe is saying. Who are these
"conformists" who have put the deadly
stamp of uniformity on our "age"? Li–
onel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Russell
Kirk, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Peter
Viereck, Mary McCarthy, Daniel Boor–
stin, Stanley Hyman, David Riesman,
the editors of
Commentary,
the mem–
bership of the Committee for Cultural
Freedom, Hugh Kenner, Cleanth
Brooks, the New Critics and the
New
Leader,
believers in Original Sin and
graduate students ambitious to become
critics, Robert Cantwell, Jay Leyda,
Mark Schorer, Gilbert Highet . . . the
Jist is endless.
If
these are all "conform–
ists," what an extraordinarily complex
and contradictory orthodoxy it must be
that they are conforming to! For cer–
tainly they are not conforming to each
other.
But the contradiction is only an ap–
parent one, easily resolved if you have
the right instrument. Professor Howe
has such an instrument in Marxism,
an ideology which has beyond measure
both exalted and debased the status of
intellectuals in a kind of parody of
that personal alternation between over–
weening arrogance and self-pitying
abasement which so many intellectuals
have exhibited in their lives. Marxism
has once and for all defined the "role"
of the "intelligentsia." That "role," it
will be recalled, is to support the
status quo.
All the apparent disagree–
ments within the "intelligentsia" are
only reflections of the various ways in
which it subtly performs its single
"role." One intellectual may think he
believes in God; he really believes
in
capitalism. Another may think he is
an atheist; he too believes in capital–
ism. Still another may think he is a
lyric poet; he is really nothing but a
lackey of the capitalists. Some are for
Freud and some are for Yoga, some
write good books and some write bad
ones-lackeys all. Professor Howe is
not without feeling for the pathos of
this situation. We are none of us quite
free, he tells us; it is hard to with–
stand the "impish
Zeitgeist."
Some of
us, however, are partly free-free, you
might say, part-time. How is this part–
time freedom to be achieved, and how
can one know when one has achieved
it?
Marx's answer was simple: the only
true freedom is to be found through
identification with the historic "role"
of the proletariat. For Professor Howe,
the matter is apparently more compli–
cated. The proletariat, in fact, seems
to have disappeared, and one gets the
feeling that the "role" of the prole–
tariat now belongs to the intellectuals
alone, if they would but have the cour–
age to assume it. For we have entered
into a new age, when the capitalists
find the intellectuals not only useful,
but actually
"indispensable"-they
"need us more than ever," Professor
Howe says with grim satisfaction. Let
us but refuse our services, and we may
still-who
knows ?-transform
the
world. The first necessary thing, clearly,
is to be a non-conformist, and one
can discern in Professor Howe's article
the beginnings of a program for achiev–
ing this.
In order to be a non-conformist, the
