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Militant Minorities (1965)

[Among my first extended published essays, this generated more controversy than anything written by me before and most since. Often misrepresented by people who wrote better than they read—most notoriously, Irving Howe, who often misread—it is nonetheless often cited. Indeed, some booksellers offering the issue of Hudson Review in which it appeared feature it, even though my text appeared not in the front of that book but at its very end. Here, incidentally, is the nucleus of the opening chapters of my book The End of Intelligent Writing (1974). Needless to say, Hudson Review, not particularly noted for respect for itself, never published me again, though it did invite me to its 20 th anniversary party in a boat that went up and down the Hudson River. Since my reply to those who wrote letters to the Hudson Review is never cited, I reprint it here as well.]

Irvin Malin’s Jews and Americans (1965) is, as criticism, a bad book, practically worthless—the sort of scholarly work that finds its natural habitat buried in a bibliography. Its major failing is no different from that of Irving Malin’s earlier New American Gothic—a critical method that disorganizes rather than coheres his materials and directs oblique rather than penetrating lights. Instead of presenting whole portraits of an individual writer’s style or achievement, Malin takes a corpus of literature, defines common characteristics, makes these characteristics his chapter headings, and then dredges up the requisite traits out of each book. To fit into the scheme, books are fragmented almost beyond recognition. As for the overarching categories, they are often not as inclusive as Malin would wish, for Jewish writers, even the seven American ones Malin chooses to treat (Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Leslie Fiedler, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth) hardly hold the monopoly on “Exile,” “Fathers and Sons,” “Time,” “Head and Heart,” “Irony,” “Fantasy,” “Parable.” Even worse, Malin bandies these abstractions in such an uncritical, insensitive manner that the book reads more like a reshuffling of diligently compiled note cards than something written out of one’s head. One inevitably gets the impression that almost any intelligent child could do as well; a machine, surely, could do better. Once more, the mechanical method of thesis & example, drummed into all of us from an early age, runs amok.

The anthology Breakthrough (1965) is as a work of celebration (“A Treasury”) only as good as the material it selects, and this in many cases is not as fine as it could be. It’s hard to discern why the editors chose just another chapter from Bellow’s Augie March and not the brilliant story “Looking for Mister Green,” which, now that the Popular Library paperback is out of print, is no longer readily available; or why they preferred the Joey Goldstein portrait from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to the superior (and more relevant to the anthology) “The Man Who Studied Yoga.” And for reasons of personal taste, I would have favored stories by Irvin Faust, Jerome Charyn, and Tillie Olsen to any included here. The larger problem in the criticism section is the restriction to essays on Jewish themes; and in the case of Norman Podhoretz, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, the work selected was hardly representative of their best nor does it demonstrate how or why these critics contributed to the “breakthrough.” Conspicuously absent from the criticism section is Stanley Edgar Hyman, whose essay on David Daiches would have been particularly appropriate.

Although these two volumes are inadequate books that trivialize their subject rather than enhance it, their appearance should put a cap on current notions of the rise of the Jewish-American writer. As the anthologists put it: “For the first time in history, a large and impressively gifted group of serious American-Jewish writers has broken through the psychic barriers of the past [but weren’t they really economic and social?-R. K.] to become an important, possibly a major, reformative influence in American life and letters.” The notion has gained international currency; for in the poshest of London’s Sunday papers this past spring, Herzog is hailed as a reflection of the glories of American-Jewish culture and another Sunday magazine supplement plans a feature on Jewish-American writers.

Why, one asks, do critics identify an American writer by his minority affiliation? The French don’t (imagine Proust defined as the “Jewish-French” novelist!), nor do the English (although they occasionally use the less prejudiced geographical identifications such as Welsh, Northern, Dorset, etc.). The reason, I think, is that unlike these countries, America has no real cultural unity. One could say that Boston-Harvard was the closest we ever came to a cultural establishment; but its heyday was in the second half of the nineteenth century and it is significant that the last unquestionably eminent Harvard literary alumni—Eliot, Cummings, Dos Passos, Damon, Lippmann, etc.—all graduated before World War I. Nowadays, despite the claims that one group or another represents a “literary establishment,” our culture is comparatively plural and mobile; and since the American writer is not part of a reigning group or Establishment, for the sake of convenience he is identified by extra-literary connections.

However, the fact of basic pluralism, either in business or intellectual life, does not prevent the possibilities of merger and collusion; and if one were to investigate the social history of the American literary scene since 1920, he would notice that numerous groups, all in effect minorities, have made claims either to represent the mainstream of American culture or its most viable current trend. As what defines these groups are common social origins or adopted allegiances—Beat, Jewish, Southern, academic, Chicago, San Francisco, etc., etc.—the social history of American literature could be interpreted as the successive ascendancy (or failure of ascendancy) of these various minority groups.

In the post-WWII period, the Southern writers first dominated the scene. The movement started in Vanderbilt in the early twenties and slowly spread outward through other Southern colleges and then into the north, achieving its peak in the late forties. It had its hard core of critics and propagandists; its system of ideas formulated in an early work (I’ll Take My Stand) and extended in later writing; a practice of measuring writers against an established ideology with a preference for literary values that stemmed from or related to the ideology; its hierarchy of reputations, both critical and creative; its network of magazines sympathetic to each other, with overlapping lists of editors, contributing editors, contributors, reviewers-magazines in which the master critics were frequently quoted, both in the essays and the ads; its attempts to make writers of similar background into the masters and prophets of the age; its reinterpretation of the intellectual and literary tradition to emphasize appropriate predecessors for their present idols; its connections in publishing which culminated in textbooks propagating the ideology and taste to the young.

As the literary Southerners’ movement succeeded, the critics became established as professors at the most eminent American universities, all in the heart of the northern enemy’s territory, need it be said; the textbooks became best sellers; the most-touted novelist got the Nobel Prize; former students of the seniors won lesser prizes, etc., etc. The ascendancy of the movement was capped by the appearance of anthologies like A Southern Harvest and critical books about the Southern writers, uncritically tossing off terms like “Renaissance” (hardly appropriate for a movement that produced, as far as the outside world cared, only one truly great author), recording anecdotes about the masters and their off-hand comments about trivial things, and still puffing the reputations of minor writers who embodied values, attitudes, and birthplaces similar to the major talents in the hierarchy. Of course, history was never as neat as the historian can make it appear; and what resembles, in retrospect, a systematic invasion may have been, in fact, the result of little more than semi-conscious common sympathies and the fortuitous accident of a concentration of talent in one place. Few, however, would still innocently proclaim that everything in the emergence of the Southern literati was pure chance.

The skeptical literary-social historian should have no trouble identifying precisely the same pattern duplicated some fifteen years later by another minority, American-Jewish writers. Again, there were the core of critics and propagandists; the common ideology in this case of Marxian liberalism which branched off into two streams of democratic socialism and neo-liberalism; the inclination to test writers against these dominant beliefs; a system of literary values which discounted form and experiment in favor of theme and intelligent rendering of social experience; a phalanx of magazines ranging from a quarterly through a monthly down to an occasional weekly (with a slew of ambitious young men willing to do tasks for which the elders no longer had time); a hierarchy of reputations, almost synonymous With a critic’s or writer’s apparent ability to win favor in the world at large; minor universities to which the group gravitated, often to jump from them into the major institutions; an attempt to make one of their number into the greatest writer of his time (in England, christened “The-Saul-Bellow-shall-be-our-Greatest-Writer-or-bust movement”) which has so far conquered one international prize and has another to go; and the responsive connections in publishing and the media. What at first may have deceived people was how vehemently this group disclaimed any alliance with religious Judaism; but they were still what Arthur A. Cohen defines as Jews “out of loyalty to the Jewish state or Jewish people”—i.e. secular Jews. Just as the Southerners claimed universal, or at least national, relevance for their program, so did the Jewish critics. They, too, set out en masse to rework the intellectual tradition, a change described by Leslie Fiedler as a fait accompli:

Through their Jewish writers, Americans, after the Second World War, were able to establish a new kind of link with Europe in place of the old paleface connection—a link not with the Europe of decaying castles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor with that of the French symbolistes and the deadly polite Action Française for these are all Christian Europes; but with the post-Christian Europe of Marx and Freud, which is to say, of secularized Judaism, as well as the Europe of surrealism and existentialism, Kafka, neo-Chassidism ...

Only on the textbook front did the Jewish literary critics seemingly fail to engineer this sociological revolution, but the pioneering quality paperback line, Anchor Books, revived many of their earlier, often neglected works at a time when quality paperbacks, especially in literature courses, are slowly replacing the textbooks. As this Jewish group is dominant at the moment, the appearance of the books under review is among the conclusive signs of its ascendancy.

Both the Southerners and the Jews, then, capitalized upon our lack of cultural continuity to invade the scene from a minority position. In the intellectual free-market which is American culture, where the loudest and most insistent voice so often wins, both groups developed the capitalist techniques of production, division of labor, product differentiation, organization, distribution, advertising, merging, interlocking directorates, and selling. Each group, too, has had its mavericks who emancipated themselves from the clan and drew individual followings sufficient to warrant their public ex-communication; and as Robert Penn Warren did with Thomas Wolfe, so more recently has Philip Rahv exiled Leslie Fiedler.

More important, both Southerners and Jews rebutted the popular stereotype of their cultural sterility. The Southerners felt obligated to dispel H. L. Mencken’s much-popularized image of Southern decadence; the Jewish writer fought against the anti-Semitic stereotypes so fashionable in the literature of 1920-1940 in which, Fiedler notes:

The Jew [either] stands for the pseudo-artist; [or] as merchant-tourist and usurious millionaire, he desires now to appropriate what he never made, to buy and squat in the monuments of high Christian culture, fouling them by his mere presence.

It was a powerful two-fold image, one that obsessed the Jewish writer coming of age during this period; against it he measured himself, as he also denied his traditional religion.

Nowadays, whereas the southern movement is an anachronism, the Jewish-American push continues unabated, encountering surprisingly little protest, often distorting standards of literary value and fair argument (as in the attacks on Hannah Arendt) by its double insistence on group innocence and importance. Perhaps nowhere else does it reflect its excesses more strongly than in the inflation, invariably by Jewish critics, of minor reputations. It is as though the Jewish critic recognized that the ultimate success of the movement was not the world-wide recognition of one man but what Irving Howe, speaking of Yiddish literature, once called, “The only subject truly worthy of a serious writer ... the problem of collective destiny, the fate of a people.” Several magazines almost lie in wait to hail the arrival of another promising Jewish talent; certain respected figures seem almost indiscriminate in distributing blurbs; one of the most conspicuous examples was the unbounded praise that greeted Philip Roth’s first book (not at all bad by any means; but just not that good), for here was a young man like his elders, critical of the Jewish middleclass and yet still Jewish. In addition, it would not be unfair to say that certain critics, such as Theodore Solotaroff, have built a respectable reputation solely upon intelligent essays about Jewish experiences and/or Jewish authors. From time to time, one comes across embarrassing, almost desperate puffs, invariably by Jewish critics, of writers as various as Bernard Malamud, Harvey Swados, the late Isaac Rosenfeld (posthumously deified totally out of proportion to apparent talent or achievement), Diana Trilling, Lionel Abel and Irving Howe; and the publication of the late Robert Warshow’s collected essays, The Immediate Experience, was supposedly delayed so that Lionel Trilling could certify that, yes, Warshow (the author of only a handful of significant essays) was among the best minds of his generation.

Other signs of distortion include numerous confessions by patently gentile writers of part-Jewishness (Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy), as though the ounce or two of blood really mattered; and the installation as chief Negro intellectual-and-spokesman of James Baldwin, whose essays on Jews long ago differentiated between the idealists and the businessmen, and who was first discovered by largely Jewish magazines probably because, one could suggest, he cast his “alienation” in Jewish terms (by discounting the blues tradition) and has lived his adult life more among Jews than Negroes (as, say, Ralph Ellison has not).

The legend of Jewish greatness makes the most unlikely and uncritical of converts, producing gentile critics who are as embarrassingly ignorant of the realities of Jewish culture as Jewish critics have been of the Negro. A long review of Herzog in Encounter, by a Cambridge (one assumes gentile) don, Tony Tanner, suggests that Bellow’s intellectually rich style has its origins in Yiddish; in fact, Yiddish is decidedly anti-philosophic, full of words designed to cope with the dirt (dreck) of existence.

Often, too, this Semitic preference masks itself behind seemingly objective criticism. A scorecard reading of Norman Podhoretz’s collection of essays, Doings and Undoings, finds the following major decisions: sharp praise for Saul Bellow (as our greatest contemporary), Joseph Heller, Paul Goodman, Nathanael West, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Rosenfeld, Herman Kahn, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Edmund Wilson (who is philo-Semitic); equally blunt dumps of Mary McCarthy, John Updike, Dwight Macdonald, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg (an exception !), William Burroughs, and Hannah Arendt (whose crime, you see, is being too critical of Jews). Rarely has the world of modern literature and thought been so neatly divided.

To explain this phenomenon of Jewish emergence, the Jewish critic points to symbols of gentile admiration—often unconscious—of essentially Jewish culture, ranging from Jules Feiffer and sick jokes to Mogen David wine and Herman Wouk, Natalie Wood and Eddie Fisher; and the reasons offered by Leslie Fiedler in Waiting for the End-in brief, guilt and sympathetic alienation—are about as good as any I’ve seen. While this is not to be discounted, one should not minimize, as Fiedler does, the Jewish movement into high powerful positions in the communications industry and, more recently, higher education. First, so many of the media, especially the movies, are owned and run by Jews. Secondly, there is good reason to believe, as Arthur Wang suggests, that a majority of the book buying public today, particularly of hardbacks, is Jewish; and this, rather than the gentiles’ philo-Semitism, may better explain the preponderance of Jewish authors and subjects on the bestseller lists. Thirdly, to my mind most important, now that the Jews are economically comfortable in America, they are turning to what has always been a major, but sometimes neglected, dimension of the Jewish tradition: the acquisition and dissemination of culture and, further, the creation of it. A glance at the list of winners of any freely administered national graduate fellowship reveals a proliferation of Jewish names. Although only three to four percent of America is Jewish, I would estimate that 40 percent of the Fulbright scholars in England this past year were Jews. If the selection were not geographically distributed, the percentage surely would have been higher. The mammoth roster of Woodrow Wilson Fellows discloses only a slightly smaller percentage. There is, in short, among American Jews a drive towards higher education, which is surely nothing but admirable. Nonetheless, as the importance of a certain “WASP” background was once inflated beyond its true importance, so nowadays Jewish ancestry, I fear, may have acquired more intellectual prestige than it really merits.

Perhaps this success will end Jewish group-aggrandizement. Exclusion was surely evil; and whereas self-inflation was once perhaps a necessary minority strategy, I should hope (and this may be just wishful thinking) that the younger Jewish intellectuals will avoid this pattern. If so many of the older generation came from slum backgrounds and were, as poor boys, very much concerned with “making it,” sometimes confusing literary value with personal and group success, the members of the younger generation invariably come from the suburbs and are thus the children of parents who have already secured social and economic success in America; and, especially if they were born after 1940, the young have never encountered any seriously debilitating discrimination here. These younger intellectuals realize that following their literary inclinations lowers their station in life—they will earn less than their parents did, spend most of their lives in shabbier neighborhoods and houses, probably be less respected by the community. As they become writers or teachers largely because they would rather write or teach than anything else, they have no reason to look upon the intellectual life as a stepping-stone to assimilation or social success. Although they have hardly forsaken the critical tradition, they are a less aggressively competitive, a less inclined to sneer and “put down,” a less intolerant group.

What they believe, again in contrast to their elders, is that social origin is not really very important. They marry gentiles and still remain Jews; and there is much truth in Mordecai Richler’s statement that assimilated Jews “seem tame to be doing the most to perpetuate living Jewish culture. They also appear to be wholeheartedly, happily Jewish, without being aggressive about it.” These young intellectuals recognize that our best writers and critics—the ones mast worth admiring and emulating—have either remained aloof or straddled minority movements. They believe that what an artist or writer achieves is nine-tenths the result of his own imaginative efforts. These are all hopeful signs, but hardly all-pervasive ones as yet.

Now that the Jewish literary movement has “made it,” Some suspect that the Negroes will be the next minority group to push themselves upon the cultural scene. I think not, for various reasons. For one, many of the Negro’s cultural aspirations were tied to the Jewish rise, and the acceptance of the Jews brought with it, at least in respectable northern circles, the acceptance of the talented Negro.

No, the next minority group will be the homosexuals, this time coming to the fore unashamedly as such. Whereas the homosexual writer up to now has always suppressed his homosexuality or hidden it behind another kind of programme, in the future we should expect to find it more and more flaunted as a minority affiliation and claims made for it as a minority sensibility. I would surmise that in twenty years that same reviewer (or his son) in the poshest of London papers will describe a new novel as reflecting “the glories of American homosexual culture.”