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then to the bohemian one, as "the most popular conception of the alien–
ated artist in America and the shallowest."
The concept of alienation, as well, underwent a change. The Beatniks
would, of course, express the bohemian version of it, and the New York
intellectuals had little sympathy for the
On the Road
generation. But in
the academic world the word
alienation
fell from the lips of many pro–
fessors in the sixties and seventies, because Marx's
Economic and Philo–
sophical Manuscripts of
1844
had been discovered. With Herbert
Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School, who taught this
from Brandeis to Berkeley, students went wild about Marxism and par–
ticularly about Hegel's idea of the dialectic. Sidney Hook had a twelve–
year debate with Max Eastman over the status of Hegel. They
concluded, as did Edmund Wilson in
To the Finland Station,
that
Hegelianism was not a science or a method, but a religious mystique.
But the New Left fell head over heels for Hegel.
Just as the Old Left and the New Left each had their own version of
Marx, so too, do we find two Freuds. Back then, Freud was the "mind
of the moralist," the thinker who used reason to plumb the depths of
unreason and opened our eyes to the perplexities of human nature as a
subject of psychoanalysis as well as literature. Now, however, Freud is
seen as the therapist of the establishment, the theorist who falsely led us
to believe that repression was a necessity and control an imperative.
If
the earlier text was Freud's
Civilization and Its Discontents,
the newer
one is
Anti-Oedipus,
which had professors of literature teaching students
that we are endowed with desires that are meant not to be disciplined but
to be completely fulfilled, a message that appealed to coming-out gays
and lesbians who felt that they had remained in the closet too long. In
the
Partisan Review
symposium I don't recall the word "sex" mentioned
once. Now sexuality is everywhere: homo, hetero, bi, multi, trans,
tantric, a smorgasbord of pickings, a "polymorphous perverse." Years
ago Nathan Glazer, in the
New York Times Magazine,
claimed that the
New York intellectuals were so caught up in politics and ideological dis–
putes that they seemed never to have given much thought to love and sex.
I asked him: "Are you sure about this?" Because what I call the Lyrical
Left of the Greenwich Village Rebellions of the World War I years, that
was all they could think about. Max Eastman titled his memoirs
Love
and Revolution.
They were into free love and so forth, and I asked: "Do
you think it might be a coincidence that the generation you're referring
to are all Jewish?" He wrote back: "Professor Diggins, you're right, it's
a Jewish thing." The final statement of the Old Left occurs in a wonder–
ful passage in Daniel Bell's
The End of Ideology
(1960)
where he says:
