40
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Schwartz's theme has more than a personal dimension. He is
sounding a note that goes back 150 years to the first stirrings of
romanticism in Europe: the alienation of the artist from middle–
class society. This was an especial dogma in the wake of the
modernist movement of the 1920s, whose difficult art, addressed
to a purified elite, was sometimes built on an attack on modern
life in toto, and in the wake of the radicalism of the thirties, which
identified the middle class as the special villain of contemporary
society. A staggering number of contemporary writers were
strangers in a strange land: Americans in Europe, Poles
writin.~
in
English, Anglo-Irishmen living by their wits, self-exiled ques(ers
like Lawrence, hunting for a new spiritual home. Such deracina–
tion could be a source of strength. As Isaac Rosenfeld argued in
1944, "marginal men" could have a perspective on modern society
unavailable to the insider. Delmore Schwartz echoes this theme in
an essay on Eliot: "Modern life may be compared to a foreign
country in which a foreign language is spoken. Eliot is the inter–
national hero because he made the journey to the foreign
country."
Where this view of modern life prevails the Jew, especially
the secular Jewish intellectual, becomes the quintessential modern
man: doubly alienated, from the prevailing national culture and
from his own traditional culture, uprooted from the European
pale and yet cut off from his own uprooted parents. But the artist
who is truly interested in other human beings -- and has some
concern for his own sanity -- soon comes to the limits of aliena–
tion as a viable ground for his work. (This is why so many modern–
ists, like Eliot and Yeats, like Lawrence in Mexico, fell eventually
into eccentric nostrums of pseudo tradition in religion or politics.)
This is what Shenandoah recognizes as he hears his mother telling
the story of the Baumanns, and surely no writer has inserted a
more crushing insight into the strengths and limitations of his own
work: "Shenandoah had thought of this gulf and perversion be–
fore, and he had shrugged away his unease by assuring himself that
this separation had nothing to do with the important thing, which
was the work itself. But now as he listened, as he felt uneasy and
sought to dismiss the emotion, he began to feel that he was wrong
to suppose that the separation, the contempt, and the gulf had
