EDITH KURZWEIL
169
From there, William went on to exemplify-historically, via Joyce,
Mann, Kafka, and Proust, to Hemingway, Faulkner, Kingsley Amis, Iris
Murdoch, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud,
and Saul Bellow-that novelists used to be "committed to a genre in
which the writer stakes out his claim in a society that is taken for
granted." Saul Bellow's Augie March, for instance, even though
announcing his new sensibility, is "still an adventurer within his own
time and country," an outsider who becomes an insider. Norman
Mailer, by contrast, and despite his preoccupation with politics and
social causes, is straining to get beyond conventions by increasingly
focusing on personal life while cutting down on involvement with soci–
ety. William then names another slew of novelists who expected to set
the tone of the new style-only some of whom succeeded in making a
complete break. And he found that "the old development of character,
which takes for granted that it is possible to grow up, is out [and] we
now have instant realization, and instant destruction ."
I
WAS STRUCK
when rereading William's
1984
essay that bemoaned the
passing of "four towering European intellectuals"-Manes Sperber,
Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, and Ignazio Silone-that William
probably was (unconsciously) writing about himself. He pronounced
these writers the best and nearly the last of an intellectual generation
that "embodied the central modern experience of fascism and commu–
nism." William had been their friend. He, too, "was informed by a sense
of political and cultural fate, ... was wise, and had no illusions, either
Utopian or of Realpolitik." He, too, "was not seduced by nationalist
creeds, was not deceived by popular fronts, Eurocommunism, emo–
tional peace movements, third-world slogans, and other such contem–
porary crusades." He, too, was a tough-minded anticommunist and
antifascist-without "wholly embracing the one just in order to combat
the other." Of course, William also was strongly "committed to a lib–
eral society as the basis of freedom." And he, too, had the courage to go
against the grain, not on principle but after carefully and deeply exam–
ining whatever were the issues at hand.
In his book of essays,
A Sense of the Present
(1967),
in "What Hap–
pened in the '30s," which originally had been published in
1962,
William noted that ideas that had been written off and forgotten sud–
denly were making a comeback. He foresaw a rise in radicalism that
indicated a return to the left of the political pendulum--caused by the
confusion created by authentic and inauthentic elements in both the
political Right's advocacy of "deterrence" and the political Left's advo-
