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PARTISAN REVIEW
was put forcefully by Eugene Debs in a speech in 1941: "I have no
country to fight for ; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the
world;" and personally by E. M. Forster in his famous remark about
finding it easier to betray his country than a friend. The cultural side
of the question is also whether one feels at home in the culture or
alienated from it.
The 1952 symposium was led off. by an editorial statement ,
written by Delmore Schwartz and myself, and a number of writers
were invited to comment on it. The issues seemed clear at the time,
but in the recent revival of the subject, a part of the Left and some of
the neoconservatives have misconstrued the meaning of the sym–
posium and the questions it raised.
These questions are complex and cannot be reduced to the
cliched Left-Right formulations . Nor are the concepts of country
and culture the same thing.
If
they have been coupled, it is because
the shift in attitude toward one sometimes has been coupled by a
shift in attitude toward the other.
In the thirties and forties, many intellectuals felt they had tore–
ject America as a "land of capitalist reaction" and to regard its culture
as politically and esthetically alien. The mystique of Marxism, which
then was at its height, lay in its power to transform man into man–
kind , national experience into an international utopia.
If
you were a
Marxist, it was possible to hate your neighbor, but to love humanity .
As Ignazio Silone put it, somewhat cynically, a fascist had to be deaf,
a communist had to lack a sense of smell. The uplift of Marxism was
reinforced by a theoretical definition of America as capitalist , im–
perialist, reactionary, and repressive . Its freedom was bourgeois
freedom. It was, as Anatole France said, the freedom to starve.
But the radical view of the country and, particularly, its cul–
ture was planted in fertile soil. America had had a long tradition of
dissent and a feeling by writers of being disinherited by a spiritually
barren culture. One has only to think of Thoreau in an earlier
period, and of Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra
Pound, who exiled themselves from the "crude and garish climate,"
as Henry James put it, to immerse themselves in the ripe culture of
Europe . Of those who did not take to exile, one thinks of Mencken's
characterization of the country as the land of the "Booboisie" and of
Sinclair Lewis's portraits of middle American philistinism.
The adversary ethos of Marxism absorbed the native critical
tradition. But the Marxists took it a step further, advocating a "pro–
letarian" literature and dismissing existing culture as bourgeois. And
