MAKING
IT
24'1
in literary cntlcism, and attracted more or less nonradical literary
scholars and critics of special stature like Trilling and Kazin and Dupee
only when their politics - isolated from both the Left Wing and support
of the American war effort in the forties - became so encysted, that
it was politics literally of the cyst, it nourished nothing without, it was
a politics without price, danger, or engagement - except for such
extremes of pacifism and anarchism as provided by Lowell and Mac–
donald. Later, in the late forties and early fifties, the Establishment was
to run - we may hope unwittingly - as sweepers for the CIA. From
some unclassifiable brand of Trotskyism, the Family had pushed on to
more or less total anti-Communism as a political position. It was a
position of much empty power and much empty polemic, a literary
equivalent of Congressional junkets, and left the Establishment on
sterile ground after twenty-five years of existence - no major critic and
no major novelist had developed from their influence. Of course,
Trilling was quite possibly a major critic if one did not pose him too
comparatively against Wilson, but he would have been that kind of
major critic without the Family, he was a literary man first. Others–
Macdonald, Kazin and Howe most notably - were first-rate but they
did not grow over the years, no schools of criticism developed from
them, no seminal ideas, no ferments - jllst an endless series of brilliant
but tactical papers. They were guardians rather than catalysts. Any
number of members of the Family were enormously impressive in frag–
ments, and Harold Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro and Clement Green–
berg all in quite separate ways had large even commanding effect on
the New York art world, Paul Goodman wa s later to have as much to
do with the formation of the New Left as any writer about, but in the
fifties he was alienated from the Family - their only poet, Robert
Lowell, was a poet without them and before them; their house novelist,
Mary McCarthy, had fled to Newport in search of real stimulation, and
their big novelist, Saul Bellow, who was later to justify his reputation,
had been advanced to glory in the mid-fifties on the basis of
Augie March
which was absurd in its parts, unconvincing along its whole, overcooked,
overstuffed, unfelt, heaps of literary buH-bull.
If
the Establishment had
been wiped out in the late fifties by a bomb, the verdict of history might
have found them destructive of more talent than they liberated.
I t was in the sixties that much began to happen. Kennedy's desire
to weld the separate establishments of America's cultural, social, and
political life together, gave the Family opportunity to inherit new
power - the vertices of their plots were found now in parties at Plimp–
ton's and forums with Schlesinger - after the birth of
The
New Yark
Review
the Establishment had real power which ran to many a connec-
