CHRISTOPHER LASCH
187
literary modernism testifies to his own obtuseness, but it also reflects
the failure of Rahv's editors to include material that would illustrate
the cultural and political developments that
PR
attempted to combat:
the simplifications of proletcult and of the Popular Front that followed
in short order; the literary celebration of Americanism; the accommo–
dation, both cultural and political, between the CP and American
capitalism; and the ideology of folkish progressivism that disguised
this accommodation and legitimized not only Stalinism but the
American warfare state as the latest expressions of the democratic
spirit.
In
deriding Rahv's attempt to "reconcile" socialism and modern–
ism, Crews may intend to suggest that literary modernism itself has
now congealed into cliches. But he could have made this point without
simultaneously arguing that the "seeming paradox of combining more
or less left-wing socio-political commentary with lofty discourse" can
be understood only by seeing both as expressions of the intellectual's
pathological hatred of the middle class. The ideological drift of
Crews's essay becomes unmistakable when he argues, in further
criticism of Rahv, that we owe our civil liberties to "liberal capital–
ism"; that these liberties can never flourish in a "state founded on the
victory of one former underclass" (a curious description of the Soviet
Union or any other socialist society today, none of which have been
distinguished by over-representation of the "underclass"); and that we
should "thank the class enemy" for such freedoms as we enjoy-as if
those freedoms had been conferred by a benign capitalist class instead
of largely wrested from them against their will. The solicitude of
capitalists for civil liberties does not leap out of an attentive reading of
their history.
Crews's one concession to history, as opposed to sophisticated
folklore, is the reminder that in the thirties, Rahv and his colleagues at
Partisan
"were sufficiently close to their leftist past for their devotion
to literature to
be seen
as a courageous break with the party line." Even
here, he cannot resist the sneer contained in the words I have italicized.
It took not only courage but an enormous expenditure of intellectual
energy to break with Stalinism at a time when Stalinism could
plausibly claim to represent the last hope of checking fascism and
when Stalinism had managed to associate itself, moreover, not only
with resistance to Hitler but with the recovery of America's cultural
heritage and democratic traditions. The pity of Rahv's career is that his
double rejection of both Stalinism and American literary chauvinism
left him with little intellectual energy for anything else. His thought
