THE NEW NIHILISM
579
can do no better than go to Mr. Bellow's celebrated novel. Both in its
attempt to create a new idiom that could express the intellectual's joy–
ous sense of connection with the common grain of American life and
in its assertion that individual fulfillment is still possible in this fluid
and rootless society of ours
("1
may well be a flop at this line of en–
deavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent
him back in chains, which didn't prove there was no America"),
Augie
speaks for that period, roughly between 1948 and 1955, that some have
called the age of conformity and neo-Conservatism and others the era
of "intellectual revisionism." But in its failures as a novel-the willed
spontaneity of the writing, the abstractness of the hero--we can also
detect the uncertainty and emotional strain that lurked on the under–
side of the new optimism. The elation in the discovery of America was
indisputably sincere, but it was a temporary mood, as deceptive an indi–
cation of the feelings within as the surface texture of Mr. Bellow's
prose. Not nearly enough conviction stood behind this mood to sustain
it against the slow inexorable grinding of the years of atomic stalemate,
the grinding and the anxiety which would not
be
denied. Mr. Bellow
himself went on to the agonized gloom of
Seize the Day
(in my opinion
the best thing he has so far written), and the rest of us dispersed on
our separate ways, a few crying for a return to radicalism, a few once
again hawking the wares of the church. Surely the reception accorded
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, whose work combines an appearance
of radicalism with a show of intense spirituality, testifies to the hunger
that has grown up on all sides for something extreme, fervent, affirma–
tive, and sweeping; five, or even three, years ago the Beat Generation
would simply not have been noticed. On another level altogether, there
is the magazine
Dissent.
When you consider that it speaks largely in
the tired accents of an old-fashioned central European socialism, you
can only conclude that its growing influence indicates a nostalgia for
the grand passions and the selfless dedication that democratic socialism
once had no trouble breeding in its adherents.
1
imagine that many
American readers of
Dissent
regard it with a kind of envy and perhaps
even with humble reverence, much as a sin-stricken man in quest of re–
ligious faith might look upon the inhabitants of a monastery. And
finally, there is Richard Chase's exciting book
The Democratic Vista,
the first truly relevant, if not altogether convincing, effort to redefine
the need for a cultural radicalism and to argue that avant-garde atti–
tudes are still worth passionate support. Chase is the first writer who
has tried to bring the 1930's up to date, but as things are going, he will
almost certainly not be the last.
