COMMENT
THE LAST GENERATION.
Four towering European intellec–
tuals, the best and last of the generation, are now gone. Manes Sper–
ber and Raymond Aron died in the last few months; Arthur Koestler
a year ago; Ignazio Silone just a few years before. They were also
personal friends, and friends of
Partisan Review.
Each in his own
way, and in his own medium, was enormously gifted. Three of the
four, Sperber, Koestler, and Silone had been antifascist exiles from
Austria, Germany and Italy; and only Silone returned to his native
home. Aron was, for a long time, a lonely and minority figure in
France. Each one's achievement was larger than could be measured
by the books they wrote.
Important as their accomplishments were individually, this is
not what distinguished them and makes their passing so sad. What is
significant is that it marks the end of a distinctive European intellec–
tual generation .... Except for a few remaining figures such as Czeslaw
Milosz and Stephen Spender, they were the last of a generation that
embodied the central modern experience of fascism and commu–
nism. Hence their writing and what they stood for was informed by
a sense of political and cultural fate. They knew more than their con–
temporaries. They were wiser. They had no illusions, either Utopian
or of
Realpolitik.
Having seen the Medusa's head, they had no truck
with the ideologies of right or left. They were not seduced by na–
tionalist creeds. And they were not deceived by popular fronts, Euro–
communism, emotional peace movements, third world slogans, and
other such contemporary crusades. They were tough-minded as
anticommunists and antifascists. But they never wholly embraced
the one just in order to combat the other. They were genuinely inde–
pendent in their thought, committed to a liberal society as the basis
of freedom.
Manes Sperber, whose loss is freshest in our minds, was the
most "rounded" of the four. Perhaps because I was closest to him, I
feel that loss most keenly. He had a personal warmth, a capacity for
friendship, an elementary decency, and a lack of malice. He enjoyed
being an old-fashioned patriarch, and acted that way to those he
'One can note, too, the sad passing in London this year as well, of Leonard Scha–
piro, the foremost historian and analyst of Soviet Communism.
