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PARTISAN REVIEW
may be tempted to go behind the given and invent something better, to
find a more advantageous arrangement. In America that is common, and
we have all seen it done, and done with great ingenuity. But the
thought of such an attempt never entered my mind. Thus I may have
been archaic, but I escaped the horrors of an identity crisis.
Sixty-odd years ago, as a high school student reading Spengler's
The
Decline oj the West,
I learned that ours was a Faustian civilization, and
that we, the Jews, were not Faustians but Magians, the survivors and
representatives of an earlier historical type, one incapable of apprehend–
ing the Faustian spirit that had invented the great civilizations of the
West; aliens whose adaptive mimicries were supplied by a will to survive
and rested on stratagems and deceits. Thus Disraeli, one of the greatest
statesmen of his century, was seen by Spengler as a man who couldn't
have known what he was doing, a Magian throwback who couldn't
possibly enter into the English or European Faustian spirit. Reading this,
I was deeply wounded. I was educating myself for a civilization in which,
if I was to believe Spengler, I could never hope to thrive. Spengler was
highly esteemed in Chicago. The insurance agent who called every week
to collect a quarter from my mother, carrying a fat, many-pocketed
leather file fastened with leather bands, was a devoted Spenglerian and
maddeningly serious. So we had a clumsy discussion in which I withheld
the information that I was a Magian . Later I discerned a kind of
Darwinism in Spengler's outlook - mankind advancing by evolutionary
stages. In the Spenglerian museum I was among the Ammonites or the
Pterodactyls.
I was familiar with street anti-Semitism Oew-hatred, in plain words),
but I had not expected this from a high-powered intellectual like
Spengler, whose pockets were full of civilizations, ancient and modern.
And in the end, I got out of the whole thing - the prospect of being
stalled forever on an historical siding - by reasoning that none of this
applied to the U .S.A. Everything was different over here. Our enlight–
ened liberal order was a new venture in civilization, leaving all societies
in the rear, so that what Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might well
be to Americans. Our skyscrapers were not at all like their Gothic cathe–
drals. As for high culture, I was too young to have developed such am–
bitious or heroic ideas about it.
The condition I am looking into here is that of a young Jewish
American who in the late thirties finds that he is something like a writer
and begins to consider how to combine these three ingredients. Not ev–
eryone agrees that this is feasible.
Remember that in those remote times one still spoke about
Brahmins and the Genteel Tradition. Below the Mason-Dixon line in-