IRVING HOWE
175
1930 is a major factor in shattering the utopian fantasy of an
American cultural autarchy.
What we are talking about is the steady Europeanization of
American culLure, occurring simultaneously with the emergence
of America as a world power. That may help explain the
seeming oddilY lhat an important agency for bringing to Amer–
ica the great nineteenth-century Russian writers, like Tolstoy,
Turgenev and Chekhov, was the parochial Yiddish intelligent–
sia of the immigrant quarters. Or the linked oddity that among
the first major disciples of modernism in American painting
were figures like Walkowitz and Weber, who only a few years
before their pilgrimages to Paris had been mere novices on the
East Side studying with worthy minor American artists like
Robert Henri. "The introduction of modern art into this coun–
try," remarks Meyer Schapiro, "has depended largely on the
foreign-born or their immediate descendants. Its point of entry
was the port of New York."
If
we now ask, what did the New York writers contribute to
American culture, one preliminary answer is: they contributed
Europe, they helped bring back the old world to a country that
in part had fled from it. The New York writers were neither the
first nor the last to do this, but the theme of return figured
significantly in their work-in the dissemination of Russian
moods and styles, the explication and advocacy of modernist
masters like Kafka, the popularization of Marxist ideas, the
insistence that in our time literature can only be international.
If
all this seems utterly familiar today, forty years ago it was not.
To help make European culture, both that of nineteenth–
century realism and that of twentieth-century modernism, avail–
able to America was part of the New York writers' conscious
intent.
It
gave them a feeling of pride, a sense of role in the midst
of deracination. They saw themselves as part of an international
community of intellectuals rising above the narrowness and
meanness of national boundaries.
Far more ambiguous, however, was their relalion to the
immigrant Yiddish culture from which many had recently
emerged. Denial and suppression, embarrassment and shame–
these terms would not be too harsh to describe their experience.
