PARTISAN REVIEW
45
IV.
What makes all this heartbreaking is the simple fact: though
the intellt::ctuals lost interest in politics, politics itself went march–
ing on, shamefully -- desI.erately in need of critical scrutiny and
principled antagonism. In exploring the climate of opinion of the
fifties I don't mean to blame America alone for the Cold War or to
slight the terror of the Stalinist monolith and the fatuity of its
American apologists. I don't mean to suggest that intellectuals
should have made common cause with the Party, as Sartre did for a
brief period in France, a party that was at once servile and
manipulative, philistine and morally and politically bankrupt. Yet,
as the historian Allen
J.
Matusow has written, "the great irony of
McCarthyism is that it developed in the absence of any real
internal Communist menace; for by 1950
Communism
in America
had lost whatever influence it once possessed."
However true this may be for the country at large it does not
quite apply to the intellectuals. For them the internal menace was
real, within the culture, within themselves, like their
J
ewishness,
always threatening a return of the repressed. This fear helps
explain the vengeful confessional tone of some political writing
during the period ("couch liberalism," as Harold Rosenberg dubbed
it). Behind the guilt and animosity looms a burning memory
of the thirties, the inculpation in a Great Lie. Even those who
were still in knee-pants then felt that they had somehow been
taken in, that all radicalism, all politics, had been tainted irrevo–
cably by Stalinism, and that all intellectuals were potential dupes
unless ideology gave way to "realism" and complicity were ab–
solved by confession.
It would be hard to find more vicious examples of serious
political writing than the first three essays in Leslie Fiedler's
An
End to Innocence
(1955), devoted in tum to the Hiss case, the
Rosenberg case, and to "McCarthy and the Intellectuals." Fiedler's
involvement in the political life of the thirties was practically niV
yet he endlessly harries his subjects with their failure to confess
3. Though in a later book,
Being Busted
(1969), written in a different political climate,
after he himself had fallen victim to an official frame-up, he fondly wheels out some
schoolboy adventures in radicalism.
