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PARTISAN REVIEW
meant by saying that the radical "will have a taste for spiritual ad–
venture, and for sinister imaginative excursions." Don't you think
that, properly employed, these may be valuable activities of the mind?
-I have never thought so. But it interests me and I will think it
over. But tell me, Professor, what does the radical do with his
dialectic?
-In our time the radical's chief task is to bring both ends
against the middle. Even if temperamentally he would like to be a
middlebrow, he finds himself unable to breathe in that musty atmos–
phere of turgid emotions and irritable, shapeless ideas.
-Isn't playing both ends against the middle a bit of a shell
game?
-Perhaps, but for creditable purposes.
-You mean a radical must use irony, must seem to contradict
himself?
-Yes, unhappily, he must. And not only as a critic but as .an
American. America is a culture of contradictions. One does not
speak with assurance of
the
American mind or imagination. But both
our thinkers and our imaginative writers have been .at their best
and, it is possible to wager, at their most characteristic when they
were mindful of contradictions.
-What would you say are the sources of this habit of mind?
-That is a question I have been trying to answer at length
on various occasions, and cannot go into now. A full answer would
merely be an elaboration, on historical principles, of what Brooks,
in 1915 in
America's Coming-of-Age,
called the "split" in American
culture-the split between spirit and instinct, intelligence and action,
art and reality, theory and practice, the highbrow and the lowbrow.
Nearly all perceptive observers have noticed this cleavage, from
Tocqueville on down. Nearly all have recommended, in all depart–
ments of our civilization, a healing attitude of mediation, reconcilia–
tion, and middle-of-the-wayism.
It has never been possible until our time to say with conviction
that such an attitude is healing in some areas of our civilization but
damaging in others. To be radical now is to be able to respond to
the "skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood" that prepares one
to affirm the cultural virtues of this very cleavage that haunts the
moralists and distresses the middle-of-the-roaders. Mter all, irony, wit,
