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PARTISAN REVIEW
the right tone.) Apparently we'll have to wait another generation
until the Chinese dissenters begin to appear in order to change this
attitude.
Fellow-travelling appears to be a permanent part of modern life,
a condition of the modern spirit.
It
is "aesthetic" politics, "literary"
Marxism, the lure of utopian thinking on the part of those who feel
secure enough in their liberty to play around with it; a surrogate for
the religion they have lost. In a back-handed way, Dostoevski was
right: the socialist question is above all the religious question .
Anyway, everybody else seems
to
be doing the old-fashioned
fellow traveller's work for him. The democracies are going through
an orgy of self-destruction just as the Greek historians and philoso–
phers described the process in the ancient world. We seem to have
lost the sense of liberty as something connected with the continuing
life of liberal institutions, which we have all been engaged in under–
mining in recent years. At this turn of history mankind (the intellec–
tual most of all) seems hell-bent on enslaving itself. Sometimes I get
the impression that nobody is really interested in liberty today except
the Russian dissidents.
On the cultural scene: there is an awful lot of talent knocking
around, but much of it, I'm afraid, goes
to
waste on the trivial and
aimless. We've been in the midst of a cultural inflation for some time,
worse in its way than the economic one. When we ftrst knew De–
Koorung, he hadn't yet had his ftrst one-man show, and was just
scraping along. It was you-just to get the record straight on this–
who opened the pages of
PR
for Clement Greenberg to push the
Abstract Impressionists (the name didn't exist then). That was a ftrst
step in what later turned out to be a whole revolution in the artist's
ftnancial status. The artists who formerly had trouble getting galleries
began to have income-tax problems. It's nice that with all the money
flowing around, some of it should drain off to the artists . Still, afflu–
ence has brought other problems-the commercial conniving of
dealers, the bandwagons of taste, public relations promotions, etc.,
etc. In shon, a cultural inflation, with its consequent debasing of real
values. It's nice that Pollack's estate should have been able to get two
million dollars for' 'Blue Poles," but is the picture really worth that
much?
