HILTON KRAMER
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tual," today: to provide us with a false sense of tradition that
might soften and otherwise render more agreeable the actual
cultural tasks we perform in our society and for the description
of which we seem to have no fresh language of our own.
Foremost among the pleasures this term, "New York Intellec–
tual," affords us, surely, is the illusion that those who are in
charge of our cultural life still somehow function as rebels
against it.
Take
Partisan Review,
for example. It was
Partisan Review,
as I have already indicated, that defined the very notion of what
the "New York Intellectual" was . But
Partisan Review,
though
it still speaks in the name of intellectual values, is no longer
itself a New York journal, and has not been for some time.
It
is a
Rutgers joutnal, a journal of academic suburbia, and the change
in its status is not without significance, and certainly not
without relevance to the topic of the evening.
If
we are going to
speak about "New York Intellectuals and The National Cul–
ture" under the sponsorship of
Partisan Review,
then it is of
some importance, surely, that we keep clearly in mind what the
social history of
PR
itself has lately been. The best way to
understand that history, I believe, is to see it as part of the larger
pattern of middle-class life in this country, for the move from
New York to Rutgers was exactly parallel to the exodus of the
middle class from the problems of city life to the comfort and
safety and dullness of the suburbs. There is this difference,
however, that whereas people in the suburbs frequently com–
plain, often bitterly, about the intellectual dullness of the
situation in which they are obliged to live (and I speak here as
someone who lives in such a suburb),
Partisan Review
has never,
so far as I know, ever openly acknowledged a similar problem.
This ichas left for its readers to do.
That distinguished alumnus of New York intellectual life,
Saul Bellow, has given us the only frank discussion of this
situation I have seen. In the course of an interview that appeared
last year in
Salmagundi,
another organ of academic suburbia,
Bellow made the following observations in comparing the 1940s
with the 1970s:
"There was a literary intellectual life in New York in the
