BOOKS
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can be understood without being aware of the meaning of the events
and the ideas to which we have been responding. Taken out of this
context, our views could be made to appear self-propelled and even
capricious. Thus, for instance, if one takes a neutral stand on the
question of the guilt of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, as Bloom does, it
would seem that we thought them guilty not on the basis of the evi–
dence and our personal knowledge of Stalinism but mainly because
of our anti-Stalinism .
But there is also another kind of distortion, perhaps inevitable
by one who has not had the same experience. By overmotivating and
schematizing our lives, a scholarly historian tends to ignore those
aspects of our thinking, particularly in literary matters, that could
not be reduced to political considerations. The fact is that some of
our ideas were quite personal, even though there was a kind of col–
lective consciousness, for many of us were essentially literary, not
political, intellectuals . Hence we were sometimes almost as much in–
terested in being original and interesting as in being correct. And I
believe it is this combination of political and literary sensibility that
has enabled us to have had an intellectual as well as a literary influ–
ence - which most students ofthe period, including Bloom, think we
did . We were charged up, excited by incessant arguments, by new
ideas, by new works; and for those of us who edited
Partisan Review,
there were the triumphs of creating a new intellectual atmosphere.
At the same time we were leading intense personal lives, and to tell
the truth, we also were not above being fascinated with x-rated gos–
sip . We were not simply the agents of history, to which we often
have been reduced by academic or one-sided political portraits.
Though a history cannot have the qualities of a memoir, when
Bloom's biases do not interfere, his book is quite valuable. And it is
always interesting as a documentary, however flawed, of the ideas
and events that shape our thinking today. Bloom is a professor of
history at Wheaton College, whose prodigious research has produced
the first full-scale portrait of an era, and his zeal in combing every
pertinent record and speaking with every person involved with the
subject is quite impressive. Perhaps it is some measure of the worth
of the book that I learned many things from it that I did not know .
But, after all, I was only a participant. Still, as a participant, I must
say that in the future, students of the period cannot accept
Prodigal
Sons
as the definitive record of the so-called "New York intellectuals."
Unfortunately, I should add, the book has been badly edited: it
