550
PARTISAN REVIEW
world. Dissatisfied or bored with Marxism, many
Partisan
writers
started to shake off the very idea of system. In spring 1946 the maga–
zine put out a remarkable issue, "New French Writing," that
included Sartre's powerful essay on anti-Semitism, Camus's reflec–
tions on the myth of Sisyphus, and the work of other French writ–
ers-some, like Malraux, already famous and others still unknown,
but all testifying to the upheaval caused by war, captivity, and resist–
ance .
What now began to absorb the New York writers was a search
for some principle by which to order the world after Hitler, culture
after the Holocaust. The idea of centrality replaced the ideology of
Marxism, though the idea can be seen as a stepchild of the ideology.
To be central meant to engage with questions that gave our time its
peculiarly terrible character. T.S. Eliot in his poetry had been cen–
tral; Trotsky had for a time been central; and in the postwar years
Kafka seemed central, if only in the purity of his desolation. The
idea of the central was slippery-that was what made it attractive.
In the late forties Lionel Abel wrote a piece challenging the
older assumption of the centrality of modernist culture and radical
politics; that was no longer true, he said, though what had replaced
them he did not know. No, said Harold Rosenberg. He believed the
historical crisis that had spawned modernism was so persistent, so
unrelenting, "there is no place for art to go but forward." Why so?
Hadn't we been saying the same thing about politics, and didn't
political life somehow not go "forward?" Still, if (as I now believe)
Abel was right, the question remained: what might come after
modernist culture and radical politics? No one quite foresaw the
benefits of several decades of relative affluence and reconsolidated
democracy in Western society. No one foresaw it until the Marxist
lenses, or blinkers, were lowered . So a race broke out, some of the
Partisan
sprinters heading straight for the castle of centrality while
others were distracted by sideshows of novelty.
A year or two after the war one began to hear about existential–
ism, associating it mainly with the names of Sartre and Camus and
thinking of it not as a formal philosophy but as a testimony springing
from the ordeal of Europe.
It
seemed more attractive in voice than
doctrine.
It
swept aside the rigid ities of deterministic systems, the
Left ' s traditional reliance on "historical forces ." It sought to
implant a new strength in the
sentiment
of freedom, not by claiming
for it transcendent validation or even historical grounding, but by
