IRVING HOWE
555
torical sport, a singular event caused by an overflow of energies
from the children of Jewish immigrants. So of course it was. But
now I also see this "singular event" as embedded in the deeper
rhythms of American culture, rhythms of shock, break, and intru–
sion by alien roughnecks.
Suppose we agree provisionally to look upon the history of
American culture as a grudging retreat from visions of cultural
autarchy. The appearance of the New York writers should then be
seen not just as a rude, alien intrusion-though it was that, too–
but also as a step in the "Europeanizing" of American culture.
Among
Partisan
writers there was a conscious intent, not without
touches of grandiosity, to capture the idea of Europe for America.
That meant above all the idea of
another
culture, an older culture,
one richer in moral possibilities, steeped in bloodier experiences,
and closer to the tragic than ours could ever be. Other American
writers had reached out toward Europe, from Henry James and
William Dean Howells to T.S. Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks. The
New York writers were coming at the end of a line, but even at the
end, the idea of Europe gave them a renewed energy. Themes of cul–
tural return figure strongly in their work: in the dissemination of
Russian modes and sensibilities, in the championing of the great
modernists, in the popularizing of Marxist ideas, in the insistence
that, to be serious, literature must now be international.
Their international perspective came from a provincial experi–
ence. Most of the New York writers stemmed from the world of
immigrant Jews , having come to articulateness at a moment when
there was a strong drive both to break out of the ghetto and to leave
the bonds ofJewishness entirely. The New York intellectuals formed
the first group ofJewish writers coming out of this immigrant milieu
who did not define themselves through either a nostalgic or a hostile
memory of J ewishness. By the late thirties J ewishness as sentiment
and cultural source played only a modest part in their conscious
experience. What excited them was the idea of breaking away, of
willing a new life. They meant to declare themselves citizens of the
world and, if that succeeded, might then become writers of this
country. ...
The Jewish immigrant milieu had branded on its children
marks of separatism while inciting fantasies of universalism.
It
taught them to conquer the gentile world in order finally to yield to
it. By the twenties the values dominatingJewish immigrant life were
