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PARTISAN REVIEW
Kunitz, but it would be hard to specify its exact nature, other
than a few tag lines, a reaching after urban worries, and a
wising-up that didn't always end in wisdom. In poetry, too, I
think the main action continues to be in the line of individualist
self-scrutiny and rhapsody: the curse or blessing of Emersonian–
Ism.
In one branch of writing, however, the New York writers
have had a major influence, and that is the essay. The form has
flourished in America since at least the 1830s: one thinks of
Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Chapman, Brooks, Bourne, Wilson.
What the New York writers added was a sense of the essay as
in tellectual hand-wrestling, a display of brilliance, the very face
of which spoke for its intentions. A few years ago I described this
kind of essay as "writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an
unashamed vibration of bravura and display. Nervous, strewn
with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions, and
other concessions to dullness, wilfu ll y calling attention to itself
as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking
pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle. " Such, in unbearable
purity, was the New York essay. I would guess that it had a
considerable influence on some later writers like James Baldwin.
But, like the modernist literature that was one of its main
subjects, it also suffered from the sticky embrace of journalism,
so that in reading some magazines today one feels the discomfort
of recognition brought on as by the distorting mirror of an
amusement park.
If
we look back with some objectivity at the experience of
the New York writers, it becomes clear that the issue dominating
their thought and feeling was Stalinism. And with good reason:
this issue has dominated the political experience of our time.
Most of the disputes that arose among the New York writers
derived from the difficulty of understanding this new phenom–
enon: a totalitarian state employing the language of Marxist
liberation and having its origins in what some believed was a
proletarian revolution. Not only did this throw socialist thought
into deep crisis, it presented the most severe moral and analytical
difficulties for every variety of serious political thought. Having
come together, in part, through a repudiation of the ghastly
