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PARTISAN REVIEW
apparent fact that American intellectuals now regard America and its
institutions in a new way. Until little more than a decade ago, America
was commonly thought to be hostile to art and culture. Since then, how–
ever, the tide has begun to turn, and many writers and intellectuals now
feel closer to their country and its culture." After providing a thumbnail
sketch of opinion from Henry James and Ezra Pound to Van Wyck Brooks
and Edmund Wilson, participants were asked to what extent American
intellectuals actually changed their attitude toward America and its institu–
tions; whether or not they ought to adapt to mass culture; where artists and
intellectuals might find the basis of strength, renewal, and recognition now
that they no longer could depend on Europe as a cultural example and source
of vitality; and whether or not the tradition of critical nonconformism (going
back
to
Thoreau and Melville and embracing some of the major expressions
of American intellectual history) could be maintained as strongly as ever.
Writing about the intellectual legacy of
Partisan Review
has become
something of a cottage industry, producing hundreds of articles and a
healthy handful of book-length studies; but with regard to "Our Coun–
try and Our Culture," most of the commentary focuses on the
our
of its
title, as Norman Podhoretz so brilliantly told us. After all, to align one's
fate as a writer-intellectual with America was to break ranks with an ear–
lier generation that had invested a lifetime in trying to turn certain (lower)
Manhattan neighborhoods into a semblance of downtown Moscow.
America was not the country of choice for with-it New York intellectuals
of the 1930S and early 1940s, and American culture-high-, middle-, or
lowbrow-was most assuredly not their culture. As members in good
standing of the alienated, adversarial culture, such folks knew which pos–
tures were expected and which stands to take. America, it was safe to say,
did not playa significant part in the arithmetic, except as a punching bag
for exercises in haughty disdain. To twist a maxim long associated with
Marx-Groucho, that is-whatever American culture stood for, they
were "against it."
Accommodation to the new postwar condition was fraught with risk.
To move from the certainties of alienation to the fat gods of accommo–
dation cast nearly everything in which one had believed into doubt. How
strange, then, the words of Lionel Trilling must have seemed to ears
grown accustomed to dissent as the intellectual's sole
raison d'etre.
For
example, he no longer considered "an avowed aloofness from national
feeling" as the "first ceremonial step into the life of thought." Indeed, he
mentioned that, for the first time in memory, the intellectual associates
his native land "with the not inconsiderable advantage of a whole skin,
a full stomach, and the right to wag his tongue as he pleases." Moreover,
