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PARTISAN REVIEW
dangerous protest looks like, and it doesn't look like Ginsberg and
Kerouac. Clearly, there is no more menace in
Howl
or
On The Road
than there is in the Scarsdale PTA. In the common assumption of
~ffectlessness,
in the apparent will to rest with
.a
social determination
over which the individual spirit and intelligence cannot and perhaps
even should not try to triumph, there merege any number of the
disparate elements of our .present culture - from the liberal in–
tellectual journals to Luce to the Harvard Law School, from Gins–
berg to the suburban matron.
But then why, one ponders, do one's most relaxed and non–
square friends, alongside of whom one can oneself be made to look
like the original object with four sides of equal length; why do one's
most politically "flexible" friends, alongside of whom one's own
di–
vergence from dominant liberal opinion is regularly made to look so
ungraceful, so like a latter-day sectarianism, even a fanaticism, feel
constrained to dispute Columbia's judgment in giving the "beats"
a hearing on the campus and my own wish to attend their poetry–
reading? Why, for instance, the dissent of Dwight MacDonald, whom
I happened to see that afternoon; or of W. H. Auden, who, when
I said I had been moved by the performance, gently chided me, "I'm
ashamed of you"; or of William Phillips who, although he tells me
yes, I may go ahead with this article, can't hide his puzzlement, even
worry, because I want to give the "beats" this kind of attention? In
strict logic, it would seem to me that things should go in quite the
other direction and that I, who insist upon at least the assumption
of free will in our political dealings with Russia, who insist upon
what I call political responsibility, should be the one to protest a
university forum for the irresponsibles whereas my friends whose
politics are what I think of as finally a politics of victimization, of
passivity and fatedness, should be able to shrug off the "beats" as
merely another inevitable, if tasteless, expression of a
Zeitgeist
with
which I believe them to be far more in tune than I am. I do not
mean, of course, to rule out taste, or style, as a valid criterion of
moral judgment. A sense of social overwhelmment which announces
itself in terms of disreputableness or even criminality asks for a differ–
ent kind of moral assessment than the same emotion kept within the
bounds of acceptable social expression. But I would simply point to
the similarities which are masked by these genuine moral differences
