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PHILIP
ROTH
norms, tending toward a refined estrangement from reality ... at
his
highest level the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere, at
his lowest he is gented, snobbish, and pedantic." Whitman and
Twain - and after them Anderson, Wolfe, Farrell, etc. - Rahv
identified as redskins: "Their reactions are primarily emotional, spon·
taneous, and lacking personal culture ... In giving expression to the
vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the reds!cin is at his best;
but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression
with conformity, reverting to the crudest forms of frontier psychology."
Now what happened in postwar America is that a lot of red–
skins -
if
not to the wigwam, then to the candy store and the Borscht
Belt born - went off to universties and infiltrated the Departments
of English, till then almost exclusively the domain of the palefaces. All
manner of cultural defection, conversion, confusion, enlightenment,
miscegenation, parasitism, transformation, and combat ensued.
This
is not the place to go into all that studies in English and American
literature meant, in personal and social terms, to that tribe of red–
skins like myself, from the semiliterate, semiassimilated reaches of urban
Jewish society, or, for that matter, all that such J ews signified to
those directing their studies (what a novel that would make! ) ; the
point for the moment is that the weakening of social and class con–
straints that was accelerated by World War II, and the cultural
exchanges thus encouraeed, has produced a number of writers, many
of them now
in
their forties, who have to some degree reconciled what
Rahv described as this "disunity of the American creative mind,"
though undoubtedly not in any way that is necessarily congenial to
Philip Rahv, or even to the writers themselves. For what this "recon–
ciliation" comes down to often is a feeling of being
fundamentally
ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds,
though, hopefully,
ill
at
ease with style, alert to the inexhaustible number of intriguing pos–
tures that the awkward may assume in public, and the strange means
that the uneasy come upon to express themselves. In short : neither
the redskin one was in the days of his innocence, nor the paleface
one could never be
in
a million, or, to be more precise, 5,733 years,
but rather, at least in my own case, what I would describe as a
"redface."
To my mind, being a redface accounts as much as anything
for the self-conscious and deliberate zig-zag that my own career has
