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'ARTISAN REVIEW
been born in an earlier generation it would surely have been the
Stewart Cafeteria in the Village that he and his friends would have
hung out at instead of the West End, that
dim
waystation of under–
graduate debauchery on Morningside Heights - and the Stewart
Cafeteria was a well-lighted place and one of the funniest places in
New York; at least, at every other table it was funny, and where it
was decadent or even conspiratorial, this had its humor too, or at
least its robustness.
As
for Gide - the Gide of the '30's was the
"betrayer of the Revolution," not the Gide of the
acte gratuite
and
homosexuality in North Mrica. One didn't use pathology in those days
to explain or excuse or exhibit oneself and one never had to be lonely;
there was never a less lonely time for intellectuals than the Depress–
ion, or a less depressed time - unless, of course, one was recalcitrant,
like Fitzgerald, and simply refused to be radicalized, in which stub–
born case it couldn't have been lonelier. Intellectuals talk now about
how, in the '30's, there was an "idea" in life, not the emptiness we
live in. Actually, it was a time of generally weak intellection -
SO
many of us who put our faith in Marx and Lenin had read neither
of them - but of very strong feeling. Everyone judged everyone else,
it was a time of incessant cruel moral judgment; today's friend was
tomorrow's enemy; whoever disagreed with oneself had sold out,
God
knows to or for what, maybe for $10 more a week; there was little
of the generosity among intellectuals which nowadays dictates the
automatic, "Gee, that's great" at any news of someone else's good
fortune. But it was surely a time of quicker, truer feeling than is
now conjured up with marijuana or the infantile cameraderie of
On
The Road.
And there was paradox but no contradiction in this double
truth, just as there was no contradiction in the fact that it was a
time in which the neurotic determination of the intellectual was
being so universally acted out and yet a time in which, whatever
his
dedication to historical or economic determinism, personally he had
a unique sense of free will. In the '30's one's clinical vocabulary was
limited to two words - escapism and subjectivism - and both of
them applied only to other people's wrong political choices.
Well, the "beats" weren't lucky enough to be born except when
they were born. Ginsberg says he lives in Harlem, but it's not the
Harlem of the Scottsboro boys and W. C. Handy and the benign in–
sanity of trying to proletarianize Striver's Row; their comrades are
