190
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hilton Kramer
Perhaps I had better begin this evening by prefacing
my remarks with a confession of uncertainty. This I know is a
highly uncharacteristic thing for an intellectual to do, particu–
larlya "New York intellectual," and especially in the presence of
other intellectuals. Yet it is precisely about the existence of this
class of minds-the "New York Intellectual" that forms half or
more of our subject this evening-that I harbor some serious
doubts. I know well enough what the term once meanLIt meant
the writers who contributed more or less regularly to
Partisan
Review,
plus the writers who had either broken with
PR
or been
banished from its pages. These were the people that Norman
Podhoretz, in
Making
It,
called " the family," the people that
Irving Howe dealt with retrospectively-as history, and as
history that had come to an end-in his well-known essay on
"The New York Intellectuals." But what can the term possibly
mean today? A decade has passed since Irving Howe's valedic–
tory appraisal of this group appeared in the pages of
Commentary-a
decade that has brought the demise of several
more distinguished members of "the family" without producing
anyone who can seriously be regarded as their rightful heir. So
what does it mean, in 1976, to continue to speak of the "New
York Intellectuals" as if they constituted a significant and
identifiable cultural force? I confess I don't know. So if I speak
here, as I suppose I must, of the "New York Intellectuals," I use
the term in quotation marks to signify the degree of doubt I
harbor about a phenomenon that is now largely a pious fiction.
It
is difficult to abandon this term, however, it is so
beautifully imprecise, and it so conveniently masks so many
unappealing, disappointing, and, as yet, unmeasured realities of
our cultural life. Intellectuals are no more immune to the
appeals of nostalgia than anyone else in our culture, and this is
the real function that is served by the term, "New York Intellec-
