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PARTISAN REVIEW
such endeavors. Hence I was attracted to the main line of French
novelists extending from Stendhal and Balzac through Flaubert and
Zola to Proust. Their successive novels could be correlated with a se–
quence of revolutions, the emergence of middle-class democracy, and
the spirit of scientific inquiry. My lengthy study convinced me that
the cycle had run its course; our epoch did not breed such powerful
individuality; our culture did not foster such incisive self-criticism.
The recent "non-fiction novel" is more journalistic than realistic. The
"media," while devising new modes of their own, have irreversibly
undermined the old ones. Technology, while regimenting life, has
augmented the odds against literature.
What a difference from the first three decades of the century!
Whether we view ourselves as heirs of all the ages or as bearers of the
burden of the past, we are likely to be self-conscious about chronol–
ogy. In the eighties it seems quite natural that we should begin to
think, as they did a hundred years before, of approaching a world–
weary
fin du siecle.
But, for those who had been born into the
bourgeois humanism of the late nineteenth century and had greeted
the year 1900 as a landmark of their youth, the incoming twentieth
century must have held a millennial promise. Many of them found a
brilliant fulfilment in the high modernism that would attain its apo–
gee during the twenties. This had a geographical as well as a his–
torical dimension, which for American talents often meant an in–
cubation in Europe, most often in Paris . America had drawn heavily
on that source from the very beginning. But the intercultural tides
were reversed when the great diaspora of leading European intellec–
tuals, expatriated by the totalitarian regimes, boundlessly enriched
the arts and sciences in the United States.
Ever since the Second World War we have ceased to live in a
Eurocentric universe, which I am provincial enough to miss. As a
fledgling middlewestern intellectual, moving east to Harvard and for
a while abroad, I would have drawn modest encouragement from the
illustrious precedent ofT. S. Eliot, even if! had not heard him lec–
ture and he had not accepted my first article for his
Criterion.
Ad–
mirers of his poetry could regard him as a revolutionary modernist.
As a critic, he was deeply engaged in revising traditions. Later on,
when I came to enjoy the privilege of his friendship, it was upon a
basis which permitted us to joke about our differences in politics . Yet
one could hardly look back at that elder persona, which he was creat–
ing for himself, as anything other than neoconservative- a word
which, his example taught us, could be used without irony. Histori–
cally, to apply another neologism, one could look upon his tradi-
