Intellectuals and Their America

The editors’ question about how intellectuals should “participate in American politics” highlights (for me, at least) how the meaning of the word “intellectual” has expanded since 1952, when the editors of Partisan Review organized the famous symposium that has inspired this new one.

In that peak year of the cold war, intellectuals were presumed to be people who trafficked in language—“the more articulate members of the community, more particularly those who are professionally or vocationally articulate, in church and in school, in journalism and the arts.” At least that is now Reinhold Niebuhr described them in “Liberals and the Marxist Heresy,” an essay published in 1953.

The editors of Partisan Review began with the same premise. The nation’s small class of intellectuals consisted of the quarterly’s own contributors and also its readers, who must now acknowledge their misreading of the previous decades—the death struggle of competing tyrannies, the specter of a war-ruined Europe—and overcome their estrangement from “America and its institutions” and perhaps even embrace “Our Country and Our Culture.”

But there was work to be done. Estrangement was a habit of mind rooted in a legacy of disenchantment that predated the economic and political crises of the 1930s. It originated in an earlier protest, the Modernist rebellion against “the genteel tradition” that disgusted heartland Americans—Pound and Eliot, Hemingway and Dos Passos, all of whom fled to Europe—and also gave us the comic fury of Mencken and the cosmopolitan literary researches of Edmund Wilson. But art, first preceding politics, was soon engulfed by it: Pound by fascism, Eliot by royalism, Hemingway and Dos Passos by communism. These giants, antiromantic in their aesthetic, succumbed to a destructive romanticism in their politics. Tellingly, it was apolitical practitioners of the word—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Stevens—who helped revive an authentic literary romanticism despite the debility of their presumed “false consciousness.”

These facts, so familiar today, were not yet quite visible in 1952. Nonetheless, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, presiding over the period’s premier “little magazine,” sensed a new era of reconciliation. Not that the old alienation could simply be whisked away. America might be potentially embraceable, could become “Our Country and Our Culture”—and not exclusively theirs (that is, the philistines’)—but only if its hidden virtues could be uncovered or reimagined. This had already become the project of the most fertile minds associated with PR—in novels like Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, with their mythic homeland quests and demotic city-sidewalk prose; in the poetry of W. H. Auden, wedging Anglo perspective into American idioms (the celebrated “dives” on Fifty-second Stre...