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PARTISAN REVIEW
So powerful was the grip of this simplistic and historically parochial
assumption about the function of the intellectual that it held back the
rediscovery and reaffirmation of America and kept it within defensive
limits.
Take Saul Bellow's
The Adventures of Augie March,
published a year
after the symposium. In becoming a bestseller, this novel by a highbrow
writer associated with the milieu of
Partisan Review
and
Commentary
provided persuasive evidence both of the very changes in American atti–
tudes to which the symposium had pointed and the reciprocal develop–
ment among the intellectuals themselves. "I am an American,
Chicago-born," Bellow's hero proclaimed in the very first sentence; and
the entire novel, in its prose style no less than in its substance, repre–
sented a conscious effort to refute the idea that the American way of life
was culturally impoverished and that ordinary Americans were all
boobs, buffoons, and Babbitts.
Yet admirable though Bellow's intention was, and despite the many
marvels of his new style, I felt then, and I still feel, that the affirmation
was more a product of his will than an organic exfoliation of a fully
realized conviction. That is, even Saul Bellow, for all his immense talent,
intelligence, and originality, was held in check by the "tradition of crit–
ical nonconformism" from which he clearly wished to liberate himself.
Much the same problem afflicted most, perhaps all, of the other writ–
ers and intellectuals who, each in his own way, shared Bellow's ambi–
tion. Which helps to explain why, as the decade wore on, and the
"tradition of critical nonconformism" picked up a new head of steam,
one after another of them caved to its ever-increasing pressures. Bellow,
by contrast, courageously stuck to his guns, which is surely one of the
reasons his creative energy never slackened.
It
is worth noting that a few contributors to the symposium rightl y
insisted that the "tradition of critical nonconformism" had never
involved a wholesale repudiation of America. For many novelists and
poets, they said, and for them personally, as well, this tradition had
often coexisted with a love of country. Yet from the advent of the Beats
in the late
1950S
and until September
II, 2001,
most American writers
and intellectuals were infected with an attitude toward their own coun–
try that ranged from distaste to outright hatred .
Among the new crowd of anti-American intellectuals and artists were
some of the symposiasts, who had, however warily, welcomed the reaf–
firmation of America in
1952.
One of the editors of
Partisan Review
itself, Philip Rahv, later went so far in his embrace of the New Left
(though not of the accompanying counterculture) that he was once, not
