INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
515
the new affluence, spreading its tentacles everywhere, had created a con–
dition that might yet benefit the arts and intellectual life generally.
Trilling, being Trilling, had a fair share of doubts ("no cultural situation
is ever good," he intones), but as against the state of culture thirty years
ago, he remained convinced that "we are notably better off." There
were, after all, Fulbright grants and other opportunities parceled out by
the government, along with an increasing chance for steady work in col–
leges and universities. True enough, American intellectuals did not
always feel that they were accorded the same respect as their counter–
parts in Europe (America, after all, remained suspicious of its eggheads),
but there was no gainsaying that they were now able to afford summer
stints in Nantucket or apartments on the Upper West Side.
To some participants, most notably Norman Mailer and Irving
Howe, even baby steps toward accommodation were met with stiff
resistance and howls of derision. "I think I ought to declare straight–
away that I am in an almost total disagreement with the assumptions of
this symposium," Norman Mailer began, making it clear that he was
not about to number himself among the sell-outs . Irving Howe, ever the
socialist booster long after the party of Norman Thomas peaked and
then slid by slow degrees into obscurity, held fast to memories of the
thirties, a time when the only good capitalist was a thoroughly dis–
graced one. Two years later, Howe published a thinly veiled attack on
Trilling's position entitled "This Age of Conformity" in the
January-February issue of
Partisan Review.
(Some thought the essay a
brave denouncement of intellectual appeasement; others found it essen–
tially silly. In any event, it precipitated a falling out between Trilling and
Howe that lasted for years.) In the same year
(1954)
he launched a lit–
tle magazine of his own whose name said it all:
Dissent.
Others-including David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
C.
Wright
Mills, Jacques Barzun, and Sidney Hook-took positions somewhere in
the moderate middle. Looking back on the distinguished list of contrib–
utors, one realizes how politically incorrect the bunch was: only one
woman (the poet Louise Bogan); no blacks; no out-of-the-closet homo–
sexuals (James Baldwin, whose essays had appeared in earlier issues,
could have been double-counted as black
and
gay had the editors been
so inclined); and perhaps most telling of all, no representatives from
outside the tightly wound
Partisan Review
circle.
This, of course, is the cultural blindness that comes with the territory
of
20120
hindsight. To talk about the state of American culture today is
to go in search of a headache. For example, in
1952,
there was some–
thing very close to a consensus about
T.
S. Eliot as the most influential
