168
PARTISAN REVIEW
that conflicts, tensions, and neuroses of the literary man have become
symptoms of the fate of culture in the West and are connected with at
least one side-perhaps the most important one-of the modern
sensibility."
In
his quest to better understand this sensibility, William alternatively
kept analyzing what appeared to be changes in acceptable behavior of
people to their responses in the culture at large. Shortly after the Cuban
Missile Crisis, for example, he wrote, in a "Letter from New York"
(Quest,
1963),
that, at least on the surface, not much was going on in
politics, but that:
In
the so-called cultural sphere, things have been changing quite
radically if not dramatically, but it is difficult
to
write about this,
perhaps because the change has been creeping up on us for years.
It is hard
to
define or to evaluate just what is happening and where
we are heading, or even to be sure that one is observing correctly.
Perhaps the main difficulty lies in the fact that one must think
about new things partly in terms of old traditions and categories.
But some confusion also comes from the fact that some people,
particularly those who are addicted to innovations, find it easier to
think about new things in their own terms.
Is this a premonition of the increasing challenge to serious criticism?
In
1963,
William was about to take the magazine to Rutgers University
and to teach there. He was not thinking about jobs in literary criticism,
but foresaw the cost for future generations who would live in a culture
deprived of its traditions.
In
1965,
in his "Notes on the New Style,"
William fully anticipated the consequences of what David Herman
recently summarized in "Silence of the Critics"
(Prospect,
December
2002) :
the conditions that allowed for the ascendance of academic crit–
ics who used arcane jargon and spoke to each other at the expense of
literary criticism
a
fa
F.
R. Leavis, Empson, Trilling, and Auerbach,
et. al. William had stated:
It's all anti these days: anti-literature, anti-art, anti-morality, anti–
society, anti-ideology, anti-matter. Some people, mostly those with
one foot in the past, are
for
something, but the young, and those
who have jumped on the bandwagon of youth, are busy inventing
new forms of rejection and secession. It's called cooling it or cop–
ping out-depending on whether you're in or out.
This is the new sensibility.. . a new life style [that] is so strong
that it has taken over the functions of art.
