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PARTISAN REVIEW
writer knows because he was there, and because his boyhood
remains so vivid to him. Regional life has lost its vitality and
distinctiveness and has become material for nostalgia.
From this point of view the intellectual culture of New York
in the thirties-the culture that gave birth to
Partisan Review–
was but one regional culture, quite marginal to the national life.
New York has always been a more inviting terrain for thinkers
and talkers than for artists, as intellectuals are usually more
gregarious than creative writers. Though many artists were
galvanized by urban life, even when they loathed it and directed
their imaginations elsewhere, it was more the intellectuals who
were stimulated by the talk, the pressure, the interchange that
the city could supply. Artists do need connections and a market
if they are to earn their bread, but intellectuals thrive in proxim–
ity to money and power, whether it sharpens their sense of purity
and alienation or gives them illusions of influence beyond their
social status.
Needless to say, no such influence was available to a
European sty Ie intelligentsia in the thirties and forties. Their
quarrels over Marxism and modernism were parochial to the
society at large-even to its cultural life, whose middlebrow
organs were dominated by the last vestiges of the genteel
tradition. What was exciting to me as an undergraduate about
the New York intellectuals was the passion for ideas, the
attention to questions of morality and personal destiny, the
mingling of literature, politics and social thought, the relation
to modern writers and the avant-garde, in other words, the
attachment to a broad tradition in the arts, not to a parochial
national one. Yet these were just the preoccupations which made
intellectuals useless and impractical to a bustling philistine
culture. Thus the cult of alienation made a virtue of necessity,
for the hostilities between the intellectual and society were
decidedIy mu tual.
But the intellectuals of New York had one thing other
regional cultures lacked, which would decisively alter their role
after World War II, and especially after 1960, as American society
lurched through such visible changes. The writers and intellec–
tuals of the South were conservative and backward-looking:
