Intellectuals’ Homecoming
America And The Intellectuals. A Symposium.
Partisan Review Series, Number Four. 118 pp. $1.00.

This collection of essays evokes immediate surprise. After all, moderation and good sense are not what we have come to expect of intellectuals writing about America. The last few decades of alternate embrace and repulsion leave us ill prepared for the seriousness of the treatment here.

The papers here assembled, originally written for Partisan Review, deal with the timely theme of the relation of the intellectual to his country’s culture. Certainly, at a moment when the struggle for world dominance is fought as bitterly in the minds of men as on the battlefields, it is well to reconsider the nature of the civilization we have upheld against the threat of successive totalitarianisms.

On the whole these contributions are thoughtful and thought-provoking. They recognize the value of the democratic context of life in the United States, yet they show no disposition to affirm that it is illicit to prefer American political institutions to those of the Sovet Union without being ready to laugh with Milton Berle, honor Thomas Wolfe, and drink cokes. There is furthermore no inclination to minimize the gravity of the problems our society poses for the creative personality. Indeed the treatment is so common-sensical, it verges on the matter-of-fact, and often the dull.

On second thought it may be our surprise at the obvious that is really surprising. I suspect, in our own thinking, we have given too much weight to the ideas of the generation of intellectuals that flourished in the first three decades of this country. These were the self-proclaimed “disinherited of art” who felt “the soil of American perception is a poor, little, barren artificial deposit.” With Henry James, these writers proclaimed that in the United States “unlovely circumstances are . . . void of all that . . . prompts . . . the artist.” Our heritage from that generation is the suspicion that the intellectual has always been at odds with our culture, in fact, that American society is inherently antagonistic to art.

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Yet in the long retrospect of history, this suspicion is altogether unfounded. The American intellectuals always occupied a defined, and a creative, place in their society. The Puritan divines of the 17th century, the political thinkers of the 18th, and transcendentalists of the 19th had this in common, that they stood in a vital and rewarding relationship to the dominant trends of their times. None of them labored under the necessity of escaping their milieu; none of them was aware of an impassable gulf that cut them off from the masses among whom they lived. On the contrary, they accepted the obligation of communicating with those masses, and thought their work deeply involved in, rather than detached from, their society. This was as true of Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville who did not succeed in establishing a continuing rapport, as it was of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson who did.

The notion of a deep division between American intellectuals and their society is recent and has been short-lived. It is a product of an interval in our history in which some sensitive men preferred to evade the necessity of dealing with the rapid changes about them. Their failure will discourage only those tempted by similar evasions.

That most of the authors represented in this volume are not so tempted is heartening. The intellectual in America occupies a situation unlike that of his counterparts elsewhere. But the very newness of his position is his opportunity; for it holds forth fresh possibilities for the creative exercise of his intelligence.

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