INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
519
essentially bloodless characters have tongues that wag but not hearts
capable of cracking. Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska are,
of course, the sole exceptions to this social rule, and it is their story that
makes us see just how soul-robbing high society can be.
Is it heresy to ask whether the same conditions can, with a snip here,
a tuck there, apply to the insular world of New York intellectuals dur–
ing the time when
Partisan Review
defined who did, or did not, pass
intellectual muster? Certainly there were important differences: ideas
mattered to the
Partisan Review
crowd in the way that proper attire and
conspicuous consumption were essential to Wharton's band, but scrape
away the external details and what both groups shared was a sense of
tribal loyalty and a penchant for mean-spirited gossip. A remark
dropped at a party could not only "cut" but kill-and this is as true for
Wharton's after-opera galas as it was for certain
Partisan Review
cock–
tail parties. People stayed home from both at their peril. To be sure,
Wharton took some pains to thinly disguise her models, and the passage
of time has done the rest; but figures such as Philip Rahv, Harold Rosen–
berg, Mary McCarthy, and a host of others may well be remembered
more for the quips they fired off than for the pages they actually wrote.
This fate is something that did not seem even remotely possible in
1952.
Gossip has become an industry unto itself. James Atlas's
Saul Bellow
is filled with letters chosen because they chop a laundry list of intellec–
tuals-including, of course, Bellow himself-down to size. At one point,
Atlas describes an entry in Edmund Wilson's journals in which he makes
catty remarks about a swank dinner for Andre Malraux held in the
Kennedy White House. In attendance were, among others, Robert Low–
ell and Elizabeth Hardwick, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Leonard Bernstein. The extended foot–
note concludes with this telling remark: "How tireless writers are at
putting each other down!" The observation, perhaps, says even more
about a biographer grown weary of keeping track of who, when, and
where X took a swipe at Y.
As such very different intellectual types as Norman Mailer and Nor–
man Podhoretz have pointed out recently, one's relationship with Ameri–
can life over the decades might best be thought of as a marriage, and as
with most marriages, it has its bad patches, ups and downs, reconcilia–
tions, and even a measure of hard-won satisfaction. Throughout all of it,
what America offered its writers and intellectuals was an extraordinary
amount of freedom, despite the gnawing sense that, as Philip Rahv once
pointed out, one could, of course, say whatever one wanted because noth–
ing one said finally mattered, whereas in more constrained situations, you
