To the Editor:
The only real point in Harold Rosenberg’s article “The Herd of Independent Minds” (in the September COMMENTARY) is a truism: that all men are different, and that therefore any general statement about human beings necessarily misses the essential truth about any individual. In order to use this undeniable fact as a stick to beat the intellectuals, Mr. Rosenberg makes a distinction between “common experience” and “the common situation.” In the context of Mr. Rosenberg’s article, this distinction is purely verbal. If a number of men have lived through “the War” or “the Plan” or “the 30’s” and speak of themselves as having had a common experience, they probably do not mean that their lives are interchangeable. Mr. Rosenberg may be right in feeling that it would be better for them to speak of having been in a “common situation,” and thus to express more sharply the separateness of their personalities. But this is merely a point of language; the peculiar confusion of Mr. Rosenberg’s article arises from his attempt to make it something more. The final effect of this confusion, taken seriously, would be to deny the possibility of all expository and analytical writing.
In discussing Partisan Review, Mr. Rosenberg makes the vulgar assumption—typical of “middle-brow” culture—that to say Dostoevsky and Kafka were neurotic implies a condemnation of their art. He then takes three sentences in three book reviews (badly misinterpreting at least two) as representative of what he chooses to call “the” Partisan Review; apparently, though I am not to be permitted to say “we,” it is Mr. Rosenberg’s privilege to say “they.” Then, in writing of a poem by Stephen Spender, he commits precisely the fault that he has objected to in “the” Partisan Review: he raises moral objections to a work of art, castigating Spender for having feelings that he disapproves of, just as earlier in the article he condemns all those who conceive of the sense. of alienation as a form of pathos. (Apart from its irrelevance to Spender’s poem, this attitude is surprising in so great an admirer of Kafka.)
I am particularly at a loss to discover Mr. Rosenberg’s grounds for criticism of my own article, “The Legacy of the 30’s” (December 1947). I rejoice that Mr. Rosenberg is interested in the Old Testament and the Gospels, Plato, 18th-century music, Poe, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Gide, Miró, Klee, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings. I didn’t say he wasn’t. It is also interesting to learn that he finds Finnegan’s Wake more communicative than Memoirs of Hecate County. Since I find Memoirs of Hecate County extremely communicative, and since I have not said anything about Finnegan’s Wake, it is possible that I am one up on Mr. Rosenberg. But all this has little to do with my article, which was an attempt to show that the intellectual atmosphere created by the Communist movement in the 1930’s was one of the latest, and in some ways one of the more important, in a chain of causes that has had a paralyzing effect on American culture.
I believe Mr. Rosenberg failed to understand my article; this seems the only possible explanation for the fact that he appropriates the ideas of the article and tries to use them against me. Thus, in attempting to demonstrate that I am wrong in saying that the experience of Communism was “crucial,” Mr. Rosenberg writes: “. . . Marxism in the United States became a renunciation or negation of experience, a plunging of the individual into mass inertia, precisely because he yielded himself up to the general intellectual ‘climate.’” This is a fairly clear restatement of the main point of my article. Again, in discussing the creative artist’s relationship to experience, Mr. Rosenberg writes: “. . . to penetrate through the common experience to the actual common situation requires a creative act—that is to say an act that directly grasps the life of the people during, say, the War or the Plan, that grasps the War from the inside, so to speak, as a situation with a human being in it.” In that portion of my article which dealt with Lionel Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey, I wrote: “. . . the novel as an art form rests on particularity: the particular becomes universal without losing its particularity—that is the wonder. Mr. Trilling might have come closer to the ‘essence ’ of the experience he describes if he had been more willing to see it as the experience of particular human beings in a specific situation; perhaps this means: if he had been more willing to face his own relationship to it.”
This apparent failure to understand seems even to verge on disingenuousness when I observe that Mr. Rosenberg writes most of the time as if I had insisted that everyone should read Lionel Trilling’s novel because it is about Communism in the 30’s. The fact that I did not like the novel is buried in a subordinate clause, and readers of Mr. Rosenberg’s article who have not read mine are hardly likely to suspect that I devoted about one-third of it to a criticism of Mr. Trilling’s novel precisely on the ground that it dealt with the Communist movement as a moral abstraction rather than as “a situation with a human being in it.”
Robert Warshow
New York City
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