INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
509
The consensus-again with some exceptions-was that the old sense
of inferiority to European culture had lost its validity. Europe had
declined and America had progressed. And as to the past, looking back
with a fresh eye at the American culture that had once been patronized
as provincial and thin, critics were discerning a richness and a vitality to
which so many had previously been blind . A few contributors even dar–
ingly ventured the heretical thought that there were more things in mass
or popular culture than Ortega or the Frankfurt School-or they them–
selves-had ever dreamed.
One of the questions posed by the editors was whether this "reaffir–
mation and rediscovery of America" could provide "artists and intellec–
tuals" with a "basis of strength, renewal, and recognition ." On that
issue most of the contributors waffled. But an affirmative answer would
be found in the work that was already being done and would continue
to be produced in the next few years.
Now, derision of the
19 50S
has been so widely accepted as well
deserved that in order to perceive how much of great intellectual and
aesthetic value came out of the rediscovery of America in that period,
one needs a special set of critical fog lights to cut through the politically
tendentious obfuscations promulgated by the Left. "0, my America, my
Newfoundland," sang John Donne as he gazed at the body of a woman
whose wonders he was about to explore; and something of that spirit–
albeit absent the erotic charge-infused the artists in every field who
shared in the newly positive attitude toward this country. Even if we
restrict ourselves to writers and intellectuals alone, as I am doing here
throughout, the roster is impressive.
It
includes novelists like Saul Bel–
low and Ralph Ellison, poets like the early Robert Lowell and John
Berryman, literary and social critics like Lionel Trilling and David Ries–
man of
The Lonely Crowd.
But there was a catch. The fourth and last question posed by the sym–
posium was whether "the tradition of critical nonconformism" that the
editors assumed to be the central feature of American literary and intel–
lectual history could "be maintained as strongly as ever" while "a reaf–
firmation and rediscovery of America [was] underway." To this
question, virtually every contributor to the symposium declared that it
must
be maintained, and was perhaps more necessary than ever before.
Why? Because to just about all of them, the greatest danger of the new
ethos was that it would lead to complacency about American society.
However much that society might have improved, it was still beset with
grievous faults, and pointing to them was, as it had supposedly always
been, the primary duty of the intellectual class.
