the people mentioned in my article and
ask whether all of these good people–
and they are good, most of them–
can be conformists. As if the list, for
this age, were such a long one! As if
my article had not made clear, by re–
peated specification, that I was speak–
ing of various kinds and degrees of
conformism, in various social frame–
works and intellectual contexts!
And that is why, also, he cannot
report my opinions with accuracy. His
sophomoric "summary" of my "pro–
gram"-his mish-mash of my main
themes with secondary arguments and
incidental examples, all declared by
him, but not by me, to be of equal im–
portance-how can one answer this sort
of thing? And there is a rich sprinkling
of misstatement in his "summary" too.
My objection to Lionel Trilling was not
that "You must not be pleased at
any–
thing
in the present cultural situation."
Some things please me, more displease
me; my quarrel with Mr. Trilling con–
cerned the relative valuations to be
placed on the cultural situation of to–
day and that of thirty years ago–
which comes, doesn't it, to a rather
more sensible and significant matter
than Mr. Warshow allows. Nor did I
refer to, and I don't believe in the
likelihood of, "the coming dictatorship
of Senator MdCarthy": that is Mr.
Warshow's contribution. Nor did I say
that anyone who fails to see "the in–
tellectual vocation" as I see it must
be "a knave or a fool." And when Mr.
Warshow says that my
Kenyon Revi&w
essay is "preoccupied with the dangers
to freedom stemming from people like
Joseph Conrad," he has allowed his
malice to run away with him: the essay
is "preoccupied" with admiring what
I repeatedly call Conrad's "astonishing
insights" into political life.
Mr. Warshow has hit upon the
familiar device of trying to demolish
my argument by identifying
it
with
"Marxism" : and what other tag will
work so well these days? Unfortunately,
he writes from sheer lack of knowl–
edge. The role of intellectuals as gen–
erally described by Marxists ("it will
be recalled") is not simply "to support
the
status quo,"
as Mr. Warshow in
his fashionable ignorance asserts,
but
rather to form unstable alliances with
various social groups, to fluctuate and
splinter themselves among the contend–
ing classes, and to seek to elevate them–
selves above the classes. This doesn't
seem to me an entirely adequate de–
scription, but it is certainly a far cry
from Mr. Warshow's simple-minded
version. Furthermore, as Mr. Warshow
has reason to know, I am far from be–
ing a thorough-going or systematic
Marxist (my Marxist friends have re–
cently disposed of me in print as "the
late Irving Howe" which comes, I
suppose, to the same thing as Mr.
Warshow's insistence upon putting
"Professor"-look, boys, it's
irony!–
before each mention of my name). One
need not
be
a Marxist to accept the
main theme of my article. The very
terms of the article are not Marxist;
and deliberately so. I used the rather
loose phrase "conformity" instead of
a more precise political one simply be–
cause I wished to emphasize that my
complaint was not that certain intel–
lectuals had abandoned this or the
other ideology but that they had aban–
doned the traditional idea of keeping
a critical distance from state power,
any
state power. Whether people call
themselves socialists or not interests me
less than the values and standards they
try to maintain in this age of the lo–
custs. (If PR readers will follow Mr.
Warshow's excellent advice to look in–
to
Dissent,
they will see this for them–
selves.) My complaint against
Com–
mentary,
for example, was not that it
had ceased to be socialist: it never had
been that; but rather that it has be–
come an apologist for middle-class
values, middle-class culture and the so–
cial
status quo,
and that on the issue
of civil liberties it has squirmed,
evaded and played possum.
Let me put it another way: Speak–
ing very roughly, there are today two
kinds of intellectuals, those who hold
jobs and those who identify with them.
Very often, those who identify with
their jobs are soon identifying with far
more than their jobs. I wrote in behalf
of that attitude which permits one to
be partly-indeed, unavoidably-in the
world and yet not uncritically
of
it.
Does Mr. Warshow have any opinions
