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the best literature majors yearn to write film scripts or TV sitcoms, it
was a fairly widespread phenomenon during the heyday of literary seri–
ollsness. To know about Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, Delmore
Schwartz and Philip Rahv, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg
was
to
feel oneself part of an important cosmopolitan club. Everything
that smacked of the parochial-whether it be the restrictions of norma–
tive Judaism or the suffocating mundaneness of middle-class jewish
life-was gleefully chucked for worlds at once more serious, more
demanding, and, not least of all, more attractive.
In retrospect, the ethos that once swirled around the
Partisan Review
crowd turned problematic. Take, for example, the curious alliance
between anti-Stalinism and modernist experimentation that defined
Partisall Reuiell"s
original mission. The case of the late Irving Howe is
representative. A committed Trotskyist, he embraced the journal's inde–
pendence from a Communist Party line, just as he felt that modernism
represented yet another version of radicalism. The rub came when a
sense of common cause no longer seemed as trouble-free as it once was.
With the notable exception of james joyce, most of the high modernist
writers one rightly admired for their aesthetics-
T.
S. Eliot, William
Butler Yeats, and (most notoriously) Ezra Pound-were drifting
steadily, or speeding full bore, toward the hard Right. The same Irving
Howe who was extraordinarily sensitive to literary textures was also
quite emphatic about the socio-political consequences of art. Thus,
when he was asked what he would do if he were a judge for a literary
prize (as indeed he sometimes was) and discovered that one of the
candidates-and an especially strong one to boot-was a Nazi, he shot
back, as only Howe could, ''I'd throw the book across the room!"
On the other hand, when the same proposition was put to LB. Singer,
he was equally insistent-albeit on the opposite side of the coin:
"If
this
novel turned out
to
be the best submission, I would vote for it." Given
the fractiousness of Yiddish culture-something that Singer knew with
an intimacy that Howe, for all his effort, did not-the remark is less
startling than it might seem at first glance. After all, not only had Yid–
dishists long regarded Singer much less favorably than did his American
critics, but there was also a sense-now largely confirmed in the English
translation of
Shadows
Oil
the Hudson-that
he was never entirely com–
fortable with his public image as the genial grandfather who was, at one
and the same time, a chronicler of the pre-World War II
shtetl
and a
man on a first-name basis with
dybbuks,
demons, and the sexually
obsessed. "I would not have been a different writer," Singer often
insisted, "if had l been born in japan." This is because the questions
