178
PARTISAN REVIEW
to see cuI ture and politics as all bu
t'
inseparable.
If
America ever
again has this sort of intelligentsia, it will probably come from
the blacks.
Influenced by figures as diverse as Eliot, Trotsky and
Wilson, the New York writers gained a collective definition
through the idea of an alliance between culture and politics: the
defense of the modernist avant garde and the advocacy of anti–
Stalinist radicalism. For a moment it came to seem as if the life
of the mind-assertive, speculative, freewheeling-could be
envisaged as a " permanent revolution," a ceaseless dynamic of
motion and change, and infatuation with the new and untried,
allowing neither rest nor retreat. Today we can see the flaws in
this vision, but this is hardly the first time that a cultural
misunderstanding has been productive. Modernism was not
going forward along a necessary line of progress: it was quite
prepared, at least in relation to politics, for a backward reaction–
ary spiral. The state of crisis that had provided the matrix for
modernism might persist toward the very end of the twentieth
century, but this did not guarantee that modernism would be
able
to
respond to, or even represent, that crisis with undimin–
ished strength . Nor could one have foreseen forty years ago the
public "success" of modernism, with the philistines and publi–
city people stripping it of every external trait. Whatever has
remained of authentic modernism, say, the work of Beckett,
came
to
seem like a Wandering Jew of cultural life: weary,
exhausted from its own restlessness, yet unable to die.
As for the politics of the anti-Stalinist left, that too was not
the beginning of a new upsurge.
It
had done a work of enormous
moral value in undertaking the critique of Stalinism at a time
when a good number of conventional radicals and liberals were
blind or obtuse or stained with bad faith. But in itself, it had no
resources for growth .
It
came at the end of a Marxist line, hoping
at best that it might serve as a bridge to an unforeseen future.
And the union between cultural modernism and independent
radicalism, as we now can see, was neither a proper marriage nor
a secure liaison: it was a meeting between parties hurrying in
opposite directions, brief, hectic, a little messy.
The New York writers were latecomers. Latecomers to
