Comment
I cannot disagree with Robert Boynton's lavish praise of the New York
intellectuals in the
Atlantic Monthly
of March 1995. But his article, which
compares the New York intellectuals with the new black intellectuals,
raises some questions of fact and interpretation.
1. Boynton tries to draw a comparison between the New York in–
tellectuals and the new black intellectuals that does not hold up. And
though he admits there are differences, he keeps emphasizing the similari–
ties. However, there is a basic difference . The New York intellectuals
were not generally concerned with race and ethnic problems. They were
writers and critics and social thinkers with large achievements mainly in
their fields . To give only a few examples, Mary McCarthy was a novelist,
Hannah Arendt a political philosopher, Sidney Hook a philosopher,
Meyer Schapiro an art historian, Clement Greenberg an art and literary
critic. The new black intellectuals have been, with few exceptions, al–
most exclusively occupied with questions of race and specifically with the
relation of blacks to Americanism. This is not just a difference of subject
matter. It is a difference of role and of the nature and importance of
their intellectual contributions. In fact, many of the black intellectuals
are not intellectuals in the same sense that the New York intellectuals
were.
2. To maintain the symmetry of his argument, Boynton refers to the
New York intellectuals as Jews - as compared with the blacks. But only
some of the New York intellectuals were Jews, and they considered the
question of their Jewishness mostly after the Holocaust, and not in rela–
tion to their Americanism. If the Jews among them thought about
Americanization, it was chiefly in terms of their immigrant parents.
3. Boynton misreads the connection of the New York intellectuals
to American culture. And he gives an ethnic twist to the famous sympo–
sium that appeared in
Partisan Review
in 1952, "Our Country and Our
Culture." As the statement that was sent out for comment at that time
indicated, we were making clear that we were no longer, as we had
been as Marxists, separate from and hostile to our culture. But we still
were critical, we maintained, of mass culture in this country.
4. Another important difference is the sympathetic interest in mass
culture on the part of many of the new black intellectuals. Again, this is
not simply a question of subject matter.
It
involves a totally opposite re–
lation to various aspects of the culture and perhaps a different concept
and definition of the intellectual.
5. The generally civilized tone of the piece is marred by Boynton's
