508
PARTISAN REVIEW
But it was not only such political ideas that came under challenge by
the symposium. There was also-to borrow a word used by several con–
tributors-the "pathos" of the artist scorned or neglected by bourgeois
society. Into this familiar picture, imported from nineteenth-century
France, many American writers and intellectuals of the
1920S
painted
themselves in even more garish colors than those of the original.
For these Americans, the situation here was even worse than it had
been for Flaubert and his fellows . It was so bad, indeed, that they had
to emigrate to France itself. There, at least, the bourgeoisie, pernicious
though they thought it was, had failed to destroy a thick and living cul–
ture or to marginalize the life of the mind and the spirit. Alternatively,
they came flocking, often from the Midwest, to Greenwich Village.
Bohemianism, so to speak, became the functional equivalent of emigra–
tion for those who could not afford the fare of a ticket across the
Atlantic.
At this juncture, I can no longer avoid the tiresome term
alienation.
An idea borrowed by Marx from Hegel, it was then subsequently
applied to a feeling of estrangement from America. Yet in strictly Marx–
ist terms, the genuinely alienated members of bourgeois society were
factory workers who had no personal relation to the products of their
work, whereas artists, who did have such a personal relation, were the
least
alienated of all. True enough, conceded Irving Howe, one of the
few intransigent Marxist contributors to the symposium, but he dis–
missed th is as "a scholastic point."
Be that as it may, Howe and a few other recalcitrant holdouts like
Norman Mailer and
C.
Wright Mills were rather lonely in this particu–
lar crowd . The vast majority of the contributors to the symposium
agreed with the editorial introduction that things had indeed changed,
both in the world out there and among the intellectuals.
Whatever may have been the precise situation in the past, this coun–
try, they admitted, was now much more hospitable to intellectuals and
artists. People like them could even make a living! Of course, to Mills,
Howe, and their ilk, that any intellectual making a living should consider
this the mark of an improvement in society only showed that he was seIl–
ing out (in the words of one symposiast) to "Hollywood and the slicks."
To be sure, where politics, as distinct from culture, was concerned,
even some of these dissenters acknowledged that, as the sole obstacle to
the spread of the totalitarian communism threatening it from without,
the United States had to be supported. Yet among most, if by no means
all, of these contributors, political support was also engendering a new
appreciation even of the country's cultural virtues.
