PARTISAN REVIEW
43
license to drop out, adheres to no adversary community of the
alienated, finds no salvation in "acts of the imagination": "I have
no talent at all for that sort of thing. My talent, if I have one at all,
is for being a citizen, or what is today called, most apologetically,
a good man. Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute
for the imagination?" Bu t this is precisely the talent Joseph never
uses, the effort he can never make. Compared with Fuchs Bellow
is deeply involved in the moral and communitarian strain of the
Jewish tradition. Joseph claims to seek a social equivalent for the
profound commitment of the artist. But the final gesture by which
he abolishes his alienation is ominous: he puts himself up for in–
duction. Of course this is no Vietnam but a "just" war, one Joseph
says he believes in, but the satisfaction he expects is quite dif–
ferent from that of defeating the Germans. The bittersweet last
lines of the book make clear that the dream of freedom has given
way to an equally absolute dream of adhesion : "I am in other
hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom cancelled. Hurray
for regular hours! And for the supervision of the spirit! Long live
regimentation! "
There is a good deal of self-irony in these lines , and Bellow
could hardly be said to endorse their vision of the good life. But I
call them ominous for they anticipate a great deal in Bellow's later
work, from Augie March's opening chant that "I am an American,
Chicago bred," to Herzog's polemics against "the Wasteland out–
look, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation," to Mr. Samm–
ler's tract against the moral and political radicalism of the sixties,
his defense of "civilization" against the "petted intellectuals" who
attack it "in the name of perfect instantaneous freedom." Bellow's
tum in the fifties toward accommodation with American society
and his increasing hostility toward intellectuals who criticized it
are quite well known, though few have noticed that the pattern of
self-immolation goes back as far as his first book. This would be of
little importance except to students of Bellow's development were
it not representative of the whole intellectual climate of the fifties.
The
Partisan R eview
symposium on "Our Country and Our Cul–
ture" in 1952 is only the most famous indication of this new
mood, which spread at just the time our country was prosecuting
its most dubious adventures: the Cold War and its domestic
correlative, the mania of internal security.
