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PARTISAN REVIEW
Rahv's best work came as a product of his rejection of proletcult.
He and other editors of
Partisan Review
earned from American
intellectuals a lasting debt of gratitude by exposing the totalitarian
character of Soviet communism; attacking the sentimental nationalism
associated with the culture of the Popular Front; analyzing the Ameri–
can literary tradition with a rare combination of sympathy and
detachment, neither ignoring nor exaggerating its accomplishments;
and, not least, helping to introduce American readers to the classics of
European modernism. No other critic wrote more perceptively than
Rahv about the "cult of experience" in American literary thought or
understood so clearly-and so far ahead of his time-the ideology of
personal liberation it encouraged. His essay, "The Cult of Experience
in American Writing," published in 1940 at the height of his own
season of reappraisal, remains one of the most suggestive studies of our
literature ever written. Noting how slowly nineteenth-century writers
threw off the influence of Puritanism, Rahv argued that the American
novel-as distinguished from the " romances" of Melville and
Hawthorne-could emerge only when the triumph of secularism had
brought about a more "positive approach
to
experience." The diffi–
culties of establishing suc.h an approach, however, left American
literature in a state of arrested development, fixated on the "little
world" of personal experience. Even the ostensibly political fiction of
the 1930s perpetuated the "experimental mode," treating the class war
merely as a " new and exciting" personal experience. The "ambition of
the literary left to create a political art was thwarted by its failure
to
lift
experience
to
the level of history."
These remarks apply with equal force, it is now clear,
to
the failure
of the Left in the I960s, when the radical impulse once again deterio–
rated into a suit of personal liberation, sexual freedom, and cultural
primitivism. In this period Rahv once again found it necessary to
dissociate himself from leftist fashions, without qualifying his under–
lying commitment to socialism. He remained unimpressed by the cult
of pornography, the vogue of black humor, and by the "outrageous
puffery" surrounding such a llegedly subversive authors as Norman
Mailer. Mailer's
American Dream,
with its "yea-saying
to
instinct, " in
Rahv's view exemplified the celebration of experience combined with a
continuing attempt, characteristic of American writers, to "evade its
multiple consequences." Far from "protesting against a genteel, con–
ventional, and conformist activity," Mailer and lesser "swingers," in
Rahv's opinion, merely hoped
" to
make the scene,
to
be 'in,'
to
be 'with
it.' ... What they are doing is expressing the fickle moods of a certain
