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PARTISAN REVIEW
couldn't say anything and therefore everything you said mattered deeply.
Still, when idealism of whatever -ism was squarely in the saddle, America
had a nasty habit of not living up to utopian ideals; but when the culture
as a whole had absorbed enough soul-battering instruction in the ugly
directions that grand schemes to make a better world can turn, a certain
amount of realpolitik (call it a sense of limitation) began to creep in.
By 1952, the full story of how totalitarianism had produced oceans
of blood and very little increase in general human happiness had yet to
be told in full detail. To retain one's credentials as a modern intellectual
meant that you were prepared to live with uncertainties, doubt, and
most of all, a pervasive skepticism that looked at the world reflected in
Life
magazine with hackles up.
This
is not my America, no less a figure
than Edmund Wilson reportedly announced.
Small wonder, then, that I reread the 1952 symposium with such fas–
cination, not because I was there but because I wou ld have liked to have
been counted among its numbers-not necessarily as a participant but
simply as one of the tribe of readers who followed the proceedings with
rapt attention and then argued about them over coffee at the Automat.
It
must have been, in its own way, a grand time. Fifty years later it's hard
to find enough people who have read enough of the right books to make
such an intellectual donnybrook worth the trouble. I fear the next fifty
years will be far worse, if I'm reading the signs everywhere on our cul–
tural walls correctly.
Edith Kurzweil:
The next speaker is Jack Diggins. He is Distinguished
Professor of History at the Bradford Center at City University. He is
known for his book on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. His book on Eugene
O'Neill is coming out shortly, and he is writing another one on the
Enlightenment and John Adams.
John Patrick Diggins:
Perhaps Karl Marx needs to be revised by Ortega
y Gasset and George Santayana, because both of them thought that all
history was not necessarily the history of class conflict but generational
conflict. Gasset thought that a generation defines itself once every fif–
teen years.
If
we take the date of the
Partisan Review
symposium, 1952,
and go to the height of the sixties political rebell ion, 1968, that is six–
teen years, so Gasset is off only by one year. But if we look at the con–
tent of "Our Country and Our Culture" and compare it to the later
"Port Huron Statement" of the Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), do we find ourselves in two different worlds, or might there be
some common concerns and even some continuing anxieties?
