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PARTISAN REVIEW
anyone is nostalgic, just hang on a little while. OK. Now..
.!
want to
return to the Kristol remark that was fought over earlier. I think that
the key word in that Kristol sentence-and Kristol is a man who is
very careful about his use of words-is " unambiguously." That is,
he was not saying so much that the problem is that the intellectuals
aren't anticommunist-you know, certainly many of them aren 't,
many of them are. But probably none of them who are, are so
unambiguously, and that's what Kristol's American public is wor–
ried about, and I think it's just this sense of ambiguity that
to
me has
always made New York intellectual life so attractive. The ambiguity,
the uncertainty, the anxiety, the kind of embattled quality. I think
that New York intellectuals are basically nineteenth-century Rus–
sian intellectuals, right? Now, one of the things that made Russian
intellectuals attractive, although sometimes
unb~arable
to intellectu–
als from other countries, was the sense that they felt that politics, art,
everything that might be going on posed some immediate and
desperate moral problem. And this sense of life as being desperately
problematical and therefore how to live as a moral person
evoked endless anguish. I think that when people from other parts of
the country talk about New York intellectuals with both affection
and exasperation that's one of the things that they have in mind.
Now, apropos of that, I was disturbed by Hilton Kramer in that I
felt he was speaking as if somehow he knew all the true ways to live
and I or we or somebody out there just didn't and that was the point
of my sarcastic remark ...which was probably concealed in the
question. I know in the 1960s and among many people in my
generation there was a kind of complacency as if we knew, you
know, the right life and all you squares out there, forget it. And I
think that that's always been part of the avant-garde movement. But
I feel in Mr. Kramer's talk a kind of opposite complacency, you
know, as if
he
knew the ultimate values once and for all , and there
was just no problem about them, except for this perversity and
corruption of others. And that he himself didn't seem to experience
any of those problems at all.
KRAMER: Well, as the last question has been addressed to me, I take the
opportunity
to
answer it, I don't think there is anything in my paper
that suggested that I had come h ere this evening believing that I was
in posession of all the wisdom of the universe. What I was really
talking about was something far more modest than that and that was
just some elementary recognition of ideas that are being dissemi–
nated through intellectual journals that have the power
to
kill
us... have the power
to
destroy our lives if we do not acknowledge the
