BOOKS
FATHERS AND SONS
PRODIGAL SONS: THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR
WORLD. By Alexander Bloom.
Oxford University Press. $24.95.
Reading the latest history of the New York intellectuals
gives one the strange feeling of reliving one's life. "I should have
done this, I shouldn't have done that," I kept muttering to myself.
If
only one could have another chance, it might be better than an after–
life.
But aside from the afterglow of the lived life, certain less per–
sonal questions press upon one . I had to wonder how history can
ever be written objectively, or accurately - or whether, as historians
have argued for years, there is such a thing as objective history . Cer–
tainly, as I read Bloom's account of the New York intellectuals , I
was constantly aware not only of Bloom's persistent bias, but of the
fact that everyone of the so-called prodigal sons, including myself,
had his own bias , his own notion not only of the "facts" but of the
meaning of events and of the motives and ideas of the central charac–
ters. No , I thought, as I was reading about our exploits , our hang–
ups, our successes, our failures, our saintliness, our vileness, this
isn't right, this is not exactly the way
it
happened . History is ob–
viously in one's head: in this case, in my head .
Then there is the perennial- and unresolved - argument over
whether archives are more dependable than memory and whether a
consensus of the prejudices of the survivors, drawn from interviews ,
is better than a memoir. Still, one thing is clear: memoirs may be
distorted, but they convey the flavor, the live sense, of what it ac–
tually was like, while scholarly accounts frequently miss the fact that
we were often responding to specific situations or acting spon–
taneously, and not enacting a tightly woven plot, a historical drama .
Retroactively, people and events are flattened out as historians have
to hang a narrative on an ideological scheme. T . S. Eliot made the
now-famous observation that every new work of art transforms the
art of the past. But he had in mind new works which themselves be–
come part of the created history of art.
If
we are to draw a parallel to
historical writing, it is clear that Bloom's point of view toward the
past comes from his views in the present. And the question then is
how original or sound these views are.
