EDITORIAL STATEMENT
495
to shape a new movement. The old movement will continue and, to
judge by present indications, it will be reenforced more and more by
academicians from the universities, by yesterday's celebrities and
today's philistines. Armed to the teeth with slogans of revolutionary
prudence, its official critics will revive the petty-bourgeois tradition
of gentility, and with each new tragedy on the historic level they will
call the louder for a literature of good cheer. Weak in genuine literary
authority but equipped with all the economic and publicity powers
of an authentic cultural bureaucracy, the old regime will seek to iso–
late the new by performing upon it the easy surgery of political falsi–
fication . Because the writers of the new grouping aspire to indepen–
dence in politics as well as in art, they will be identified with fascism,
sometimes directly, sometimes through the convenient medium of
"Trotskyism." Every effort, in short, will be made to
excommunicate
the new generation, so that their writing and their politics may be re–
garded as making up a kind of diabolic totality; which would render
unnecessary any sort of rational discussion of the merits of either.
Do we exaggerate? On the contrary, our prediction as to the line
the old regime will take is based on the first maneuvers of a campaign
which has already begun .
Already,
before it has appeared,
Partisan
Review
has been subjected to a series of attacks in the Communist
Party press ; already, with no regard for fact- without, indeed, any
relevant facts to go by- they have attributed gratuitous political de–
signs to
Partisan Review
in an effort to confuse the prilllarily literary
issue between us .
But
Partisan Review
aspires to represent a new and dissident
generation in American letters; it will not be dislodged from its inde–
pendent position by any political campaign against it. And without
ignoring the importance of the official movement as a sign of the
times we shall know how to estimate its authority in literature . But
we shall also distinguish, wherever possible, between the tendencies
of this faction itself and the work of writers associated with it. For
our editorial accent falls chiefly on culture and its broader social de–
terminants. Conformity to a given social ideology or to a prescribed
attitude or technique, will not be asked of our writers. On the con–
trary, our pages will be open to any tendency which is relevant to lit–
erature in our time . Marxism in culture, we think, is first of all an
instrument of analysis and evaluation; and if, in the last instance, it
prevails over other disciplines, it does so through the medium of
democratic controversy. Such is the medium that
Partisan Review
will
want to provide in its pages.
