By a journalistically happy coincidence, Edward Grossman’s “Henry James and the Sexual-Military Complex” (p. 37) appears at a time when James is, as it were, in the news again. The immediate occasion for this latest flurry of interest is the completion of Leon Edel’s biography of James, the publication of whose fifth and final volume has provoked not only a debate over its own merits but a controversy of sorts over the merits of Henry James himself. Now James may or may not be the greatest of American writers, as Hilton Kramer for one continues to insist,1 but Kramer is certainly right in saying that he is the only American writer ever to have produced “an oeuvre on the scale and quality of the European masters.” Yet for one reason or another James has always had detractors, more perhaps than any other great writer has ever been forced to put up with. It is, then, neither surprising nor especially noteworthy that a new effort is now being made to denigrate his immense achievement and to damage his still apparently unsettled reputation. What is surprising, and what is noteworthy enough to amount to a minor cultural event, is that the ranks of the detractors and denigrators of James should have suddenly been swelled by the intellectually bulky presence of Philip Rahv. For Rahv is one of the critics who in the 1940’s and 50’s was, as he himself describes it, “engaged to some extent in helping to restore James’s reputation after its long decline.”
But even more to the point if we are talking about the shift in the literary winds which can be sniffed in Rahv’s latest piece on James2 is the fact that Rahv is also one of the critics who in the 1930’s helped to establish the principle of the autonomy of art in opposition to the doctrine that art was subordinate to politics and subject to judgment on political grounds. Indeed it was on this very issue that Rahv, along with several other young literary intellectuals of that period who like him were associated with the then newly founded Partisan Review, broke with the Communist party. Since that time Rahv’s political wanderings, in which many of his contemporaries joined, have taken him from revolutionary socialism of an anti-Stalinist cast in the late 30’s, to liberal anti-Communism of a pro-American cast in the late 40’s and 50’s, to anti-Americanism of a New-Left cast in the middle and late 60’s.3 Throughout these various shifts, however, he has remained steadfast in his fealty to the idea that works of literature, although invariably swarming with political implications, are nevertheless subject to laws of their own and are not to be measured on the basis of politically inspired criteria.
Thus while Rahv has been nothing if not “trendy”—to use one of his own favorite pejorative epithets—in his political views during the last few years, he has been just as consistently resistant to the cultural manifestations of the political tendencies he has supported with an enthusiasm tempered only by the self-protectingly guarded manner which has always marked his writings on politics. So passionate in fact has he been in his opposition to the counter-culture that he has even gone to the veritably lunatic length of trying to prove that “this degeneracy,” as he does not hesitate to name it, “masquerading as the boldest and bravest spirit of experiment and liberation,” has no connection whatever with his beloved New Left.4
This absolute refusal to see any connection between the New Left and the counter-culture perhaps explains why he resorts to the vulgar accusation of careerism in attacking Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, and all the other aging celebrators of “the exemplary attractions of the hip youth-scene” for their treachery toward the most fundamental standards of the modernist tradition in the name of that tradition itself. Actually, however, the critics in question are moved mainly by the same political considerations that are moving Rahv. The junky and trashy fashions for which they have regularly produced apologetic lucubrations are not just any junky and trashy fashions; they are junky and trashy fashions in the service of the revolution in sensibility which goes hand in hand with the revolution against the American political system and the American social order. Rahv has made it abundantly clear that he too would like to see that order and that system destroyed—not reformed, destroyed—but it is to his credit that he has been unwilling on this account to applaud any correlative debasement of the arts. He has thus been less coherent than Fiedler or Sontag and not nearly so committed to the revolution he affects to support as fervently as they. But he has also been more committed than they to literature and to what is best in the intellectual tradition by which all of them were shaped.
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Or so, at least, it would have seemed before his latest piece on Henry James appeared. It is not merely that Rahv has gone over to the detractors of Henry James in this piece; it is also that his change of mind about James is blatantly political in inspiration. And this—given the role he has played up until now in resisting the politicization of literary standards—is what makes the article a cultural event.
Rahv, of course, would repudiate both charges. As to the first, he explicitly states that it is not he who has changed but the context. In the past he stressed James’s greatness, although never without due acknowledgment of his faults, because James’s work had failed to gain the recognition it deserved. Today the limitations of that greatness have to be stressed because James has become the object of a “cult” of uncritical adulators of which Leon Edel, whose book he is after all discussing, “is now the leading hierophant.”
This may all be true, but the animus Rahv manifests against James in his article is so fierce, and the wish to belittle James is so relentlessly in control of his argument, that the one lonely concession he makes to James’s greatness serves more to bewilder the reader than to qualify the attack. “In the literature of the world,” Rahv declares, James “is not a figure of the first order.” For “Fundamentally he belongs to the American 19th century,” which is to say that he was too parochial and too Victorian in his ideas and attitudes to transcend “the determinate circumstances of his culture and background.” Surely, however, the power of a writer’s work to transcend the circumstances with which it is at the same time “indissolubly at one” is the main thing we mean when we call him great. If James is lacking in this power, why call him a great writer at all? One begins to suspect that Rahv only does so in order to claim a false consistency with his past opinion of James—a habit to which he is also given in speaking of the changes in his political views over the course of the years.5
However he may try to deny it, then, Rahv has cast his critical lot with the denigrators of Henry James; and however he may try to disguise it with talk of prose and plots and narrative shape, the decisive reasons are political in character. If we look carefully at his charges against James we find them centering on two related complaints. One is that James “took the social order of his time too much for granted,” that his “sense of history [was] static,” that he had no awareness of “the crisis of values by which the modern world is afflicted,” that he was snobbishly “inclined to equate the sensibility of culture with aristocracy.” Leaving aside the question of how any knowledgeable or disinterested critic could use such terms in discussing the author of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima—to mention only the two most obvious works that spring to mind as evidence in refutation—what is Rahv saying here but that James had a conservative temperament and that his political opinions are enough to condemn him to a relatively inferior status as an artist?
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Rahv’s other complaint against James is that he was too American—this despite the fact that he was, as Rahv himself indicates, an “outsider” to the America of his time and that he had to become an expatriate in order to nourish his genius. Rahv is fuzzy on the nature of James’s putatively excessive Americanness, which he almost seems to equate with sexual reticence. He also tells us by way of demonstrating his point that even “the more cultivated Europeans” are unable to appreciate James. I cannot say whether this is true, but assuming that it is, what does it prove? There are, for example, French critics who think that Horace McCoy is a great American writer, and if they are simultaneously unable to make anything of James, this is surely a reflection on the perversities of the Gallic mind and not a reflection on James. Similarly with the young of our day. Rahv has generally derided their taste in literature, but he suddenly calls them to the witness stand against James, as though the fact that James is “patently deficient” in the qualities “young people” allegedly want from literature represents a judgment on James rather than on them (and as though there were no young people with different standards and tastes: it is to the point that Edward Grossman, to whom James speaks with such vivid contemporary force, has yet to reach the age of thirty).
Worse still from Rahv’s point of view than the Americanness of James’s temper is the favorable opinion he entertained of the American character, an opinion bodied forth in the contrast between New-World innocence and Old-World corruption James was so fond of setting up in his novels. Rahv once saw this theme as the vehicle of deep and lasting truths.6 But today, he says, the whole idea strikes him as “preposterous—a transient historical fantasy generated by an exaggerated sense of national security and a buoyant self-interpretative grandiosity from which at this late date one recoils with bewilderment.” At this late date. Am I reading too much into this entire rant when I understand it as excoriating James in effect for having failed to predict the Vietnam war or even for failing to register a protest against it? If this is indeed what Rahv is hinting at, it would not be the first time a dead writer has been condemned on the suspicion that he would not have taken the right position on Vietnam if he had lived to see the war: Mary McCarthy, whose political wanderings over the years have closely paralleled Rahv’s, attacked George Orwell on precisely these grounds not very long ago.7
In short, it is the politics of anti-Americanism which has led Rahv to reconsider and downgrade the work of Henry James. There is, I must admit, a certain neatness in this development, if only because the restoration of James’s reputation in the years following the Second World War owed much to the new interest so widely felt in those days in the “complex fate” which James himself had once said it was to be an American. On the other hand, there are unfunny ironies here. After all, it was for being critical of America that James was for so long scoffed at by “all those critics and historians who, . . . at the service of some blindly nationalistic or social creed,” customarily derided him as “a self-deluded expatriate snob, a concocter of elegant if intricate trifles, a fugitive from ‘reality.’ . . .” Yet here we have Philip Rahv, who wrote those angry words in characterizing James’s detractors,8 coming very close to leveling much the same indictment against James, but in the service of a blindly anti-nationalistic social creed rather than a blindly nationalistic one. In this Rahv is as unjust to Henry James as he is disloyal to the principle of the autonomy of art.
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Like many other members of his generation who had been youthful revolutionary socialists in the 1930s, Rahv rediscovered radicalism in the 1960’s. No doubt this presented itself to his imagination as an opportunity to revive the classical Partisan Review synthesis of an independent radicalism in politics and “highbrow” intransigence in the arts. The trouble was that whereas the anti-Stalinist radicalism of the old Partisan Review had been critical of prevailing sentiment on the Left, this new radicalism was itself the dominant current of its time in the world of ideas and attitudes—more dominant even than Stalinism had been in the 30’s—and could therefore offer no independent political perspective of its own. It was, moreover, an uncritical and irresponsible radicalism which spoke of replacing the American “corporate system” with a socialist order while disavowing any liking for or commitment to any socialist order actually known to man, whether of the Communist or social-democratic type.
Rahv was no different from those of his contemporaries who dishonored the more serious radicalism of their youth by their frivolous flirtation with this fashionably nihilistic new variety. Yet he was for a spell different in refusing to dishonor the courageous assertion of the freedom of art from politics which he and some of his contemporaries had made in breaking with the Communist party, and in remaining faithful to which they had done their finest work. Now he has finally betrayed even that. Thus, having groped his way back to a radicalism which in key spiritual respects resembles the Stalinism of the early 30’s, he has also found his way back to an ethos in which writers are valued in accordance with their conformity or usefulness to the “correct” position of the moment and are otherwise abused or shunted aside.
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Henry James will survive all this, as he has survived before. But so far as Rahv himself is concerned, the ultimate irony is that his own position of the moment has already been left behind. The strident anti-Americanism to which he continues to give expression in Modern Occasions (the quarterly he has been editing since terminating his long association with Partisan Review a couple of years ago) is no longer modish in the radical circles he so belatedly rejoined as soon as he saw them acquiring real power in the literary and intellectual communities. Just as a “Popular Front” succeeded the revolutionary militancy of the early 30’s, so today a “New Populism,” as it styles itself, is succeeding the New-Left revolutionism of the recent past. And just as the Popular Front promoted a benevolent attitude toward America, so the “New Populism” declares that hating America is a mistake for American radicals.
One wonders whether Rahv, when once he realizes what is happening, will provide us with yet another minor cultural event by accommodating his rhetoric and his literary opinions to this latest shift in the winds of political fashion.
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1 “Henry James,” New York Times Book Review, February 6, 1972.
2 “Henry James and his Cult,” New York Review of Books, February 10, 1972.
3 I have described all this in some detail in my book Making It, where I refer to the group of intellectuals of which Rahv has always been a leading member as “the Family.”
4 “Cultural Malaise & Ultimate Culpability,” Modern Occasions, Fall 1971.
5 See, for example, his contribution to the symposium “Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited,” in COMMENTARY, September 1967.
6 See “The Heiress of All the Ages,” in Image and Idea, a collection of Rahv's essays.
7 Her piece on Orwell can be found in her collection, The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays.
8 “Attitudes toward Henry James,” also in Image and Idea.
