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this was merely to register painfully the truth that Stalinism is
a-perhaps the-central intellectual challenge of our time.
Finally, I suppose, what the New York writers left to or with
America was a tone of voice, a sensibility of urban complication
and dismay, an expert slant of irony. The positive elements of
this I have mentioned, so let me add that it was not always so
admirable. Perhaps it is in the nature of an intelligentsia that it
must be quarrelsome, aggressive, overreaching. When one turns
to
the later years of the New York writers-I assume, of course,
that there has been no coherent group for the last fifteen years or
so- there is a certain pall of sourness and ill feeling. Perhaps
this was the result of everything in their experience that made
them driving and ambitious; perhaps the result of the fact that
politics touched their nerves more than anything else and
political people, especially ideologues, are necessarily conten–
tious; perhaps the result of carrying over uncritically the styles of
Marxist and Russian polemic. Whatever the reasons, it has to be
admitted that this world was not notable for sentiments of
fraternity.
Still, if nothing else, the New York writers gave the idea of
the intellectual vocation a passionate vibration that has few
precedents in American literary culture. I'm reminded here of a
story, perhaps apocryphal, about the visit that a famous literary
man, New England nativist by decision, paid to Meyer Schapiro.
The visitor complained that "you New York fellows are too
ratiocinative, too intellectualistic," and Meyer answered, "You
know, Mr. X, when you use your mind, you don't use it up."
Well, even at this late date, perhaps, we still have not used it up.
Morris Dickstein
During the fiscal crisis of 1975, when their city was
hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, New Yorkers were shocked
but not surprised at the ill-disguised glee their plight evoked
