IRVING HOWE
177
ascendency of the New York writers distressing and soon were
hinting darkly-how else could they hint?-that American
purities were being contaminated by alien intrusions. (And let
us be honest: a little anti-Semitism, genteel but persistent, was
visible here. When I tell my students that only fony years ago
people like Lionel Trilling had difficulty in getting jobs as
professors because they were Jewish and therefore judged by
fuddleheaded academics to be inaccessible to "the Anglo-Saxon
spirit" of English literature, those students look at me with
disbelief. Their disbelief was made possible by an earlier genera–
tion's discomfort.)
The Europeanization or internationalization of American
culture had, in fact, begun decades before the New York writers
appeared on the scene; but the New York writers gave it a
decisive push and a distinct accent. They introduced a new voice
into American intellectual and literary life: a roughening of tone
and language, a burst of demotic and plebeian speech. Here,
perhaps, they had a certain kinship with American writers like
Whitman and Melville who had also brought plebeian strains
into American writing; but because of their general uneasiness
with the American cultural tradition it took the New York
writers a little time to discover this. The gentility against which
novelists like Dreiser had rebelled was quite beyond the reach or
even interest of the New York writers as they clawed their way
out of the immigrant streets. Gen tility seemed comic, a gentile
fraud or delusion. The immigrant Jewish writers brought
inherited vulgarities, both bracing and damaging, to American
literature; brought a keen , undeluded street realism, a wariness
before the traps of the world.
I think the New York writers can be regarded as the first
intelligentsia in American cultural history-which is a shade or
two different from a gathering of intellectuals. The writers
grouped around Emerson in Concord formed a group of intel–
lectuals, but not an intelligentsia, if by the latter we mean a
circle of writers who think of themselves as deeply cut off from
the society in which they live while nevertheless tied
to
it by
bonds of criticism, a circle of writers drawn from or desiring to
attach itself to plebeian segments of society and thereby tending
