The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  . . . the revolution in poetic taste which was inspired by the criticism of T. S. Eliot . . . has established itself in power so completely that it is taken for granted not only in poetry and in the criticism of poetry, but in the teaching of literature.

  Once a literary and poetic revolution has established itself, it is no longer revolutionary, but something very different from what it was when it had to struggle for recognition and assert itself against the opposition of established literary authority.77

  Confronted with what he regarded as the vulgar “new sensibility” of the counterculture of the 1960s, Rahv once more affirmed the alienated modernist as a role model for dissident intellectuals and was unable to appreciate such new, exciting, and positive developments as the growth of literature depicting the life experiences of blacks, Chicanos, and Native American Indians; challenging the sexual oppression of class society; or illuminating the rise of liberation movements in the Third World. Ironically, as Rahv drew back into a dubious mode of rebellion, a renewed interest was just emerging in the work of Marxist cultural theoreticians such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin.

  If the New York intellectuals initiated and won the good fight to liberate modernist culture from vulgar political coding, they were less successful in their efforts to develop a relationship between Marxism and modernism, other than housing both in the same journal for five or six years. Despite the gloss of theory that appears in the writings of the group, it is difficult to locate a sustained and consistent theoretical statement about the origins and political significance of modernism that justifies their dogged valorization of the genre above all others. Their writings never seriously answered the question of whether modernism is an authentic antibourgeois tendency or, in fact, a decadent phase in bourgeois culture. Nor did they offer a cogent explanation as to whether modernism is to be defined primarily by its experimental form or by its ideological content—or by some complex relation of the two.

  By the 1940s, the New York intellectuals were partisans of more than just literary modernism; with the rise to prominence of the writings of Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, the group became known as the primary champion of artistic modernism as well. Born in New York City in 1906, Rosenberg attended City College in 1923–24 and graduated with a law degree from St. Lawrence University in 1927. By the early 1930s he was contributing to the Symposium on literary criticism.78 In the mid-1930s he wrote for the New Masses and the first Partisan Review but was soon drawn to anti-Stalinist Marxism, although a brother, David, was an active member of the Communist Party. During 1938–42 he was national art editor of the American Guides series produced by the Works Projects Administration (WPA), and during World War II he worked in the Office of War Information as deputy chief of the domestic radio bureau. His first Partisan Review contributions were mainly poems and literary essays, but later he began to focus on abstract expressionism in the 1940s. In these years he and Greenberg developed the critical apparatus for rendering the new art form accessible to analytical discussion, although two earlier essays by Meyer Schapiro had pioneered the terrain.79 Rosenberg and Greenberg differed about the importance of tradition and the significance of the painting process, but in the end their writing became so devoid of Marxism that they are now held responsible by some critics for the institutionalization of abstract expressionism in a form that blunted the very critical edge they once celebrated. By the end of the 1940s, the new style had become transformed from what originally appeared to be a vehicle of antibourgeois revolutionary consciousness to the “ornamental decoration of established society.”80

  The incomplete character of the cultural theory of the New York intellectuals is also revealed in their one-sided critique of mass culture. The writings of Dwight Macdonald, who was almost the only member of the group who deigned to talk about the subject at length and to propose a theory, present an analysis that more or less parallels the Frankfurt School view of the “culture industry” as a one-way, monolithic medium of indoctrination: “Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying. The Lords of kitsch, in short, exploit the cultural needs of the masses in order to make a profit and/or to maintain their class rule.”81

  As Jurgen Habermas and others have pointed out, this type of interpretation fails to take into account that the messages of mass culture are ultimately dependent on the way in which they are assimilated by the viewer, reader, or listener, who can respond critically as well as passively.82 Moreover, other theorists have pointed to evidence of an emancipatory potential in mass culture through the expression of popular sentiments, longings, and hopes.83 By and large, Macdonald’s point of view was shared by those of the group gripped by modernism, who also saw “mass culture” as the vehicle by which Stalinism manipulated public opinion through the medium of the Popular Front.

  The primary statement of opposition from within the anti-Stalinist left appeared in James T. Farrell’s pamphlet, The Fate of Writing in America (1945). Farrell simply rejected the bifurcation between high culture and low culture, and other variants of the categories, as a viable method of analysis. Instead, he proposed the concept of the “commercialization of culture.” Farrell perceived this commercialization as creating a struggle between the desire of the artist to present an authentic vision of the world and the desire of filmmakers and publishers to make art marketable. Marketability was achieved by adapting to what filmmakers and publishers believed to be the taste of the masses, and they achieved this marketability by using methods of standardization and repetition and by promoting already-established authors rather than new and innovative ones.84

  During the 1940s, Edmund Wilson began to march to the beat of a drummer entirely different from that of the Partisan Review editors and their coterie of contributors. Wilson had been among the few who opposed World War II, although from an isolationist rather than a Trotskyist perspective. At its outbreak he simply turned in upon himself, contemplating the same problems that had concerned him during the 1920s. His major critical work of the war years, The Wound and the Bow (1941), elaborated on a theme from I Thought of Daisy—that creative genius and personal maladjustment are intertwined. In 1946, Wilson released a sexually explicit collection of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County. The book sold 50,000 copies in four months before it was declared obscene by a Court of Special Session and banned. After the war he toured the ruined cities of Europe, writing a series of articles that became Europe Without Baedeker (1947).

  By this time Wilson had altogether abandoned the search for the historical, moral imagination that he had begun in To the Finland Station and that he sought in such figures as John Jay Chapman and in his own father. As World War II was supplanted by the Cold War, the New Criticism with its focus on textual analysis came to power in the universities, and Wilson’s critical credentials were subjected to a barrage of attacks, forcing him toward the periphery of American letters throughout most of the 1950s.

  In 1958 Wilson received a notice to appear before the Internal Revenue Service to explain his failure to file income-tax returns between 1946 and 1953. This futile protest, which one admirer likened to the Copperhead resistance, netted him a fine with interest of $60,000, which Wilson, who frequently made as little as $2,000 a year during these difficult times, was unable to pay.85 He responded with a controversial indictment of the U.S. government, The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963). A moralistic tract with some reactionary implications, the book described the United States as “self-intoxicated, homicidal and menacing.”86 Wilson charged the government with committing many crimes ranging from executing the Rosenbergs to conducting biological warfare. He declared, “I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.”87 This declaration was actually the capstone of a long-since consummated process. In the 1950s Wilson had begun to spend an incre
asing amount of time in Talcottville, New York, in his old family home, which his father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., had used as a retreat after he began suffering from mental illness in his early thirties. At the same age, Edmund Wilson, Jr., had also suffered a severe nervous breakdown.

  Wilson no longer concerned himself with the central political or cultural questions of American life. His best work centered around his family, himself, and the American past. His literary criticism discussed little-known or insignificant writers, while he ignored the most important contemporary writers: Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Albert Moravia, Günter Grass, the work of the later Faulkner, Saul Bellow, the French nouveau roman, and others. Cloistered in his “pocket of the past,” as he called Talcottville, Wilson increasingly resembled a modern Nathaniel Hawthorne, rejecting the beliefs of his ancestors yet eternally ensnared by their conflicts. Patriotic Gore (1962), despite its literary merits, carried Wilson’s search for his roots in the American past almost into the realm of absurdity, with its idealization of Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy under Jefferson Davis, and the antebellum South.

  In the spring of 1965, Wilson’s name appeared with six hundred writers, editors, painters, sculptors, and actors on a full-page advertisement entitled “End Your Silence,” published in the Sunday New York Times.88 The text denounced the interference of the U.S. government in the affairs of Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Yet this protest was only a faint echo of Wilson’s revolutionary socialist past. He had already traveled to the outer reaches of individualism. He now promulgated a mélange of ideas that combined pacifism with a view of war as a product of biological determinism.89

  Wilson’s literary reputation, however, was significantly restored during the 1960s. Despite his crotchety antagonism toward the universities and his rancorous attacks on government bureaucracy, Wilson was again read in academe and was awarded several honors. In old age he was hallowed as a Diogenes of American letters by some, while others regarded him as a literary curmudgeon. With the resurgence of social consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, it appeared that Wilson might be remembered not so much for his enervating works of disillusionment and frustration as for the three masterpieces of the Red Decade: Axel’s Castle, The American Jitters, and To the Finland Station.

  Refusing for eccentric reasons to permit the insertion of a pacemaker to assist his heart, Wilson died in the spring of 1972. An echo reverberated from his revolutionary past even as the sand was being shoveled over his ashes in the grave at Wellfleet on Cape Cod. The funeral oration was delivered by Charles Rumford Walker, a comrade of those many battles that Wilson fought long ago as a Communist sympathizer, as a partisan of the anti-Stalinist left, and as a literary radical who sought to direct his scholarship and cultural sensibility in service to the humane cause of social emancipation.90

  Chapter 8. The New York Intellectuals in Fiction

  All through life, mind limps after reality.

  —Leon Trotsky Literature and Revolution1

  LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY

  By the end of World War II the deradicalized New York intellectuals had established a distinct tradition in culture and politics. They had entered the mid-1930s as dissident revolutionaries influenced by Leon Trotsky; as universalists and internationalists in spite of (or, perhaps in some cases, because of) the Jewish backgrounds of many; and as partisans of modernism, which they had embraced as an avant-garde cultural rebellion against the whole of bourgeois society. By the later 1940s, they had moved politically (and unevenly) away from their distinctive current of communism toward an equally distinctive current of anticommunism, although a few who had remained opposed to World War II—such as Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Dwight Macdonald—did not become as deradicalized as the others. In cultural orientation they had drawn back from a perception of modernism as a means of sweeping aside bourgeois falsehood and hypocrisy in alliance with the proletarian revolution. In fact, by the 1950s, the impact of avant-garde literature in America had been significantly tamed. This change was due to the emergence of academic modernism at the center of the elite culture of the intellectual establishment, in the universities and in publishing circles, a development in which some of the New York intellectuals themselves played an important role.

  The 1940s is in many ways the critical decade in the transformation of the New York intellectuals. Most of the writers advocated the need for an individualistic regeneration different from their former program of social action based on a class analysis of society. However, as individuals their respective trajectories varied markedly. The evolution of writers such as Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson signified a genuine discouragement with what they considered to be outmoded Marxist strategies as they moved toward what would be a phase of erratic and personalized dissidence. The course of writers such as Lionel Trilling turned to what appeared to be individualism but was part of a larger project: the construction of a “New Liberalism” that enshrined anticommunism as one of its highest principles. In the 1950s the political practice of those who took Trilling’s course would be reflected in part by the activities of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The fiction of these and other New York intellectuals written during the 1940s constitutes a literary record of their complex ideological migration.

  Virtually all of the imaginative writing by the New York intellectuals is unambiguously political in its intent, a point sometimes missed by cultural historians. Some suggest that the New York intellectuals disdained the Communist Party’s “proletarian” literature movement because of their desire to depoliticize art or else ingenuously accept at face value the many declamations of the New York intellectuals against the evils of ideology. Lionel Trilling states forthrightly in the 1975 introduction to his The Middle of the Journey (1947) that the book was largely intended as a political intervention: “From my first conception of it, my story was committed to history—it was to draw out some of the moral and intellectual implications of the powerful attraction to Communism felt by a considerable part of the American intellectual class during the Thirties and Forties.”2

  In addition, during the 1930s and after, several of the New York intellectuals claimed that imaginative literature might play a special role in exploring and validating political ideology. For example, in his influential 1939 essay, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” Philip Rahv argued as follows:

  There are certain forms of demagogy, however, which a medium as palpable as faction—unless it degenerates to the level of pulp propaganda—excludes by its very nature. Thus the media of art, if only by that fact alone, prove their superior humanity to the media of politics. The kind of casuistry which may easily pass for truth within the pseudo-context of a political speech or editorial, will be exposed in all its emptiness once it is injected into the real context of a living experience, such as the art of fiction strives to represent. The novel is the pre-eminent example of an experiential art; and to falsify the experiential terms in which it rationalizes itself is infinitely more difficult than to falsify abstract reasoning. Whereas politics summarizes social experience, the novel subjects it to empiric analysis.3

  Rahv’s argument—that the demands of representation are such that it is more difficult for authentic art to falsify life than it is for strictly “ideological” discourse to do so—appears to be a sophisticated Marxist literary formulation. Rahv alludes to Henry James as a genuine artist who achieves critical distance from propaganda by following the “law of art,” which requires that ideas developed in imaginative literature of the first rank be vivified through the convincing recreation of human experience. This view of the literary medium is an early example of a similar view expressed by Lionel Trilling in his more well-known statement in The Liberal Imagination (1950) that “literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”4

  But Rahv and Trilling were not immune to
the siren songs of Sidney Hook’s Marxist-instrumentalist Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx, or, at least, to the cultural forces that shaped it and indeed permeated the whole of American radical thought. Underpinning their argument about the relationship between art and experience is a line of reasoning that engages rather simplistic, non-Marxist assumptions about ideology and epistemology that can only be called pragmatist. The crux of Rahv’s statement counterposes what he perceives as the concrete and the abstract, the former embodied in the fictional grasp of experience and the latter inherent in the treacherous rationalism of political discourse. What renders this perspective essentially pragmatist is its suggestion that fiction’s virtue derives from its necessary exclusion of “ideology,” implicitly defined in the manner that pragmatists rather than Marxists would understand the term. Moreover, Rahv’s statement refers almost directly back to a passage in John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934): “In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.”5 In other words, aesthetic experience is the paradigm of experience, experience freed from factors that would impede and thwart its development. Trilling’s The Experience of Literature (1967), a collection of fiction that he edited, reflected the continuity of this theme.

  Pragmatists hold that ideology corrupts political discourse because it stems from abstract, deductive reasoning based on fixed and final principles and categories. That is, ideology is thought divorced from, and hence by its nature falsifying, social experience as really lived. Thus for Rahv, Trilling, and other New York intellectuals who came partly under the influence of pragmatism, great literature, inasmuch as it captures and expresses experience, simply cannot be “ideological.” As a result, they never considered the argument that art might perform the function of critically distancing the reader from the inherent ideology of the text, which several European critics have come to regard as central to the Marxist aesthetic.