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ragtail poseurs trying to shimmy their way to elite status, found the
modest fame of the New York writers insufferable . Soon they were
mumbling that American purities of speech and spirit were being
contaminated in the streets of New York. (When I first met John
Crowe Ransom and heard that lovely man speak of "Toid" Avenue ,
I was stunned: had his speech also been contaminated in the streets
of New York? It turned out that some Tennessee speech sounded, at
least to my dull ear, like that of Brooklyn. But Ransom said "toid"
without worrying about
goyim.)
Anti-Semitism had become publicly disreputable in the years
after the Holocaust, a thin coating of shame having settled on civi–
lized consciousness; but this hardly meant that native writers prid–
ing themselves on their toughness would lack a vocabulary for pri–
vate use about those New York usurpers, those Bronx and Brooklyn
wise guys who proposed to reshape American literary life. When
Truman Capote later attacked the Jewish writers on television , he
had the dissolute courage to say what more careful gentlemen said
quietly among themselves.
A sprig of genteel anti-Semitism was also entwined with the ivy
of our more notable departments of English. When I tell my stu–
dents that only forty years ago so distinguished a literary man as
Lionel Trilling had trouble finding a job in the Academy because he
was Jewish and therefore judged by his "peers" to be deaf to the
"Anglo-Saxon spirit" of English literature, those students stare at
me in disbelief. Their disbelief was made possible by an earlier gen–
eration's discomforts .
The New York writers introduced a new voice in American lit–
erary life : a roughening of tone, a burst of demotic speech. Here per–
haps they did have some kinship with earlier writers like Whitman
and Melville, who had also brought a plebeian strain into
American writing, though because of their discomfort with native
traditions the New York writers were slow to discover this (Alfred
Kazin was a notable exception). The gentility against which writers
like Theodore Dreiser had rebelled was quite beyond the reach of the
New York writers clawing their way out of immigrant quarters .
Gentility seemed comic .
It
was a device for making us squirm,
reminding us of our uncouthness. And we repaid with contempt, as
well as a rather ungenerous suspicion toward those of our own, like
Trilling, who had mastered the art of manners-not, after all, so for–
bidding or impossible.
