Intellectuals and Writers Then and Now
Edith Kurzweil:
Norman Podhoretz is well known to all of you. I don't
believe he needs any introduction at all. You probably have read his
most recent book,
My Love Affair with America.
His upcoming book is
called
The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are,
and next year a
Norman Podhoretz Reader
is coming out.
Norman Podhoretz:
Thank you. To my own surprise, when I went to
reread the original symposium it was called "Our Country and Our
Culture," not "Our Country, Our Culture," but that was fifty years ago.
I'm going to be reading a paper, because the older I get the more docile
and obedient I get. Although I prefer speaking from notes, Edith asked
me to write a paper, so I did. It's much less interesting than when you
talk spontaneously, but that's her fault, not mine. The title of my talk is
"'Our' Country? 'Our' Culture?"
I have always believed that the publication of "Our Country and Our
Culture" in
1952
represented a major turning point in American intel–
lectuallife. But what, in my judgment, was more important than any–
thing the contributors to the symposium said was the use of the pronoun
our
in its title. By stating that America was
our
country, and that its cul–
ture was
our
culture, the editors of
Partisan Review
were making a rad–
ical declaration.
In
a spiritual sense, at least, this declaration was
probably more radical than any they may have made when, in its first
incarnation in the early
1930S,
the magazine had been published by the
John Reed Clubs, an organization controlled by the Communist Party.
A little later, at the height of the Popular Front period, communists
could hardly find enough American flags to wrap themselves in. But when
Partisan Review
first appeared on the scene, to be a communist was still
to be
convin~ed
that this country and its culture were rotten to the core
and would inevitably give way, through a combination of internal decay
or contradictions and revolutionary force, to a system modeled on the one
in the Soviet Union. My favorite illustration is an author's note that was
appended to a short story in PR by Tillie Lerner (later better known as
Tillie Olsen). Lerner, we were informed by the youthfully exuberant edi–
tors of the old
PR,
had recently taken "a leave of absence from the Young
Communist League to produce a future citizen of Soviet America."
