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PARTISAN REVIEW
Irving Howe
Nineteenth-century American culture, making of its
distance from Europe a claim to a special destiny, was obsessed
with the search for its essential character.
In
Emerson it found
the voice that would bring to high articulateness its romanti–
cist moralism, its detheologized religiosity, its transformation
of democratic politics into a quasi-sacred creed, and its inner
struggles between overreaching individualism and an ethic of
mutuality.
But self-exploration has a way of slipping into self–
admiration. The provincialism of nineteenth-century American
culture-its illusion of self-sufficiency, a leap beyond Europe
and out of history-became a badge of pride. This provincialism
broke down in the post-Civil War years, a notable sign being
Whitman's "Democratic Vistas," where the poet struggles to
discover the reasons for his growing discomfort with Emerson–
ian America.
From that point onward, American culture moves toward a
reunification, by no means frictionless, with classical and mod–
ern European culture: e.g., Henry James's long odyssey to
Europe, William Dean Howells's championing of Tolstoy and
Ibsen, Van Wyck Brooks's effort
to
make a "usable [American]
past" out of cosmopolitan values and revisions, and the turn of
our major writers and artists after World War I to the insurgent
modernism of Paris and Berlin.
If
we now see the rise of the New York writers in the thirties
not as an accidental event but as part of a continuous develop–
ment within American culture, we may avoid parochial tire–
someness. That the appearance of the New York writers must
also be regarded as a consequence of the mass migration of east
European Jews to America and the subsequent improvization of
a Yiddishist culture in the major American cities-this, I think,
reinforces the point. For the penetration of large numbers of
immigrants into our cities during the years between 1880 and
