PARTISAN REVIEW
II
can't refute the new conservatism the way you would a legitimate argu–
ment. In a recent review in
The New York T imes,
Christopher Lehmann–
Haupt, who is a very intelligent reviewer, made the point that respon–
sive people are bound to be in the middle - between the new and the
old - because we have something of each in our thinking. This is, of
course, true, except for the new conservatives, who, like the most ex–
treme of the new radicals, are concerned with only one side of the
equation. For, despite their protestations that they are attempting to
restore the balance between the past and the present, the new con–
servatives are actually using earlier positions and ideologies to assault
the very idea of change and experiment.
For example, one of the symptoms of the new cultural conservatism
is the argument that today's avant-garde is really a perversion of "mod–
ernism." But arguing this way is just clinging to
earlier
forms of mod–
ernism, unless - and this would mean hiding literary differences be–
hind a verbal quibble - we limit the term "modernism" to the earlier
period. There should be no difficulty in granting the monumental work
of figures like Joyce, Kafka, and Eliot, whom we identify with the mod–
ernist surge of the early part of the century, without being fixated on
them, without, that is, assuming that no further experiments or develop–
ments can come out of the modernist spirit. No one who lives in the
present but has a sense of the past argues that everything being written
today is as good as the great works of the earlier period, or even that
everything being written today is good. Nor does anyone with a historic
sense deny that the contemporary scene, like every period, is full of
mindless, disruptive, arrogant, futile postures and works. But there are
intelligent younger writers and thinkers; and there is a genuine concern
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of the younger people; and the issue is really whether they too are to
be dismissed in a wholesale condemnation of the "post-modernist era,"
that is, of everything going on today. As always, the critical job is to dis–
tinguish between genuine talent and experiment and those who trade
on novelty and dissidence.
To use the past as a club against the present" is to freeze the values
of the past, to transform the achievements of modernism into historical
showpieces, putting them out of reach of those to whom they might
be live forces and examples for their own work.
If
figures like Joyce,
Kafka, Eliot, Picasso have a meaning for us, it is because of their pe–
culiar combination of restlessness, morbidity, and playfulness, of general–
ization and fragmentation, that we associate with the quality of modern
life and art. They are certainly not the models of balance, moderation,
saruty, and structural solidity they are made out to be by those who
regard a change of sensibility as a sign of cultural barbarism. Of course,
there is a more complex aspect of the question: namely that an older
writer cannot authentically assume a younger sensibility. But that is no
reason for him to assume that history stopped the minute he was born.
It is certainly discouraging to argue these questions over and over
again. Has everyone forgotten that the innovations of the twenties were
thought to be nihilist and that the abstract expressionist painters were
