BOOKS
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intellectuals." There is apparently to be a "new breed of intellectuals"
corresponding almost to each graduating class, a new barricade thrown
up every year or so catching the heels of the aging youths on the far side
and transforming them into the middle-aged.
Podhoretz's own preoccupation with distinguishing himself and his
contemporaries from, say, the contemporaries of Lionel Trilling, reveals
by its very insistence not a strong sense of the characteristics of a new
generation so much as a frightened suspicion that it has no characteristics
at all, that maybe it can't have any. The ways in which this phenomenon
is analyzed-that, for example, we live in a time "when the only con–
ventions in existence are anachronistic survivals of a moribund ethos"–
seem to me, in their use of Big Think vocabulary, less an explanation
than a cause of our concern for generations. Many people in their thirties
are absurdly analytical of what they and their juniors are up to,
pathetically anxious to be "in on it," less, I think, because of anything
truly revealing in the various changes of fashions and fads than because
of the sociological and psychoanalytical conditioning that prompts us to
squeeze a generalization out of every sign of life, to look at every event
or book as interesting not in itself but only as part of an "issue." So
is it any wonder that no one has achieved in the 'fifties or 'sixties the
intellectual and emotional poise that allowed Edmund Wilson to give to
Podhoretz and others "the kind of guidance it was once his particular
glory to give"? Podhoretz's brilliant and fastidiously admiring portrait
of Wilson is of a man who could confront within the political and literary
life of the 'twenties and 'thirties confirmations that his own inward
tensions were historically consequent. Wilson's conviction that "all forms
of human expression on all levels of literacy exist in a tangible con–
tinuum" gave him the further advantage of letting him deal with his
personal, even idiosyncratic tastes in classical literature, music, dance,
and painting as if these could be of as much general contemporary and
ideological interest as were, say, the writings of Eliot or Marx.
By contrast, Podhoretz feels so beset by the incoherence within
our culture that instead of writing history he finds himself composing
what can only be called bulletins. Thus, in 1958, he reports rather
breathlessly that "five, or even three years ago the Beat Generation
would not have been noticed." He ascribes the reception they received
to "the hunger that has grown up on all sides for something extreme,
fervent, affirmative, and sweeping." This isn't a very adequate explana–
tion in view of their being no evidence other than the Beats themselves
(helped by a lot of free publicity in the Luce publications) of any such
hunger, nothing- so little was there hunger "on all sides"-in politics,
