GERALD GRAFF
851
concluded that literature and politics don't mix. Literature stood for
-absolute values above time and place. At the same time, there were
suggestive historical and cultural implications in Winters's critique
of the anti-rationalism of Emerson, Whitman, and the European ro–
mantics and symbolists.
Winters provided something no teacher had given me, a
challenging and worked-out point of view against which I could
react and define myself. But for some time I didn't so much react
against as adhere. Taking over Winters's critique of romantic and
modernist ideas, I was suddenly able to have articulate views about
subjects which previously I would never have assimilated. This was
highly necessary in the competitive climate of graduate school in the
early sixties, where it was important to be able to give at least the ap–
pearance of intellectual self-assurance .
I still saw little reason to incorporate politics into this program
of intellectual self-manufacture. This aloofness lasted until about
1963, when I began my first teaching job at the University of New
Mexico. By the time I moved to Northwestern University in 1966, I
had become a convert to the new Left. My new leftism was more
theoretical than activist, though I took part in the usual teach-ins
and demonstrations and signed the usual protest petitions. I read
Marx, Lukacs, and Noam Chomsky's articles in the
New York Review
of Books,
and I started calling myself-when anybody asked-a
democratic socialist. In matters of literature and culture I remained
a student of Winters, except that I began to look for ways to unite
politics with literature and teaching. I still think the sixties notion of
"relevance" was basically a good idea; Morris Dickstein has rightly
pointed out that it was actually an echo of Matthew Arnold's ideal of
culture. But it was a notion that was quickly and fatally perverted by
those who defined it too parochially.
My new leftism stopped abruptly at the portals of the counter–
culture and its new sensibility. I was too old, too Midwestern, and
perhaps too square to want an "alternative lifestyle." But matters of
temperament aside, I didn't see why the cause of peace and social
justice needed to be linked with psychosexual nirvana. In fact, there
seemed patently to be dangers in such a linkage: working-class
Americans who might have been open to radical political arguments
were left cold by the politics of ecstasy. Middle class people, on the
other hand, were all too eager to take up swinging personal styles as
a form of consumption while divorcing them from political com–
mitments.
