Literature
Art
Life

Responding to Rejoinders (1966)

As one of the few literary critics in America without academic affiliation (and, thereby, a ready audience of eager students) and as the part-author of one outrageously unreviewed hardbound book, I am, of course, grateful to discover that someone reads quarterlies and that my remarks have merited such close attention from a writer I respect. I find it ironic that George P. Elliott should be my antagonist here, for the article grew out of a question posed to me by an English novelist I know. “Why,” he asked, “are good writers such as William Styron and George P. Elliott so rarely talked about?” With this in mind, I trust I can address the author of a classic critique of New York intellectual life wittily titled “Who Is ‘We’?” not as an enemy but as a possible friend. Instead of aiming at my heart, Mr. Elliott fires wildly, with a semblance of desperation, only wounding with a few of his shots. Mea culpa, the reference to Lionel Trilling’s introduction [to Robert Warshow’s essays] was unfair without further evidence, and I should have referred to a published source, William Pechter’s article on “The Art of Film” [Contact (III, 4), p. 65]. Also, I should have mentioned what occurred to me soon after submitting the piece, that Norman Podhoretz’s notion of the essayist blends with what he conceives to be a truly Jewish intelligence (alas, inherited by less than all Jews). Mr. Elliott is correct in criticizing my imprecise assertion that, “Many of the Negro’s cultural aspirations were tied to the Jewish rise.” I should have said what has often been noted by others, that many Jewish intellectuals have tied Negro cultural aspirations to their own, as the pattern of critical response to James Baldwin, among other examples, would surely indicate. Indeed, the underlying theme of Irving Howe’s notoriously paternalistic attack on Ralph Ellison was the implication that Negro writers were not, metaphorically, Jewish enough in their devotion to group-advance. Among other symptoms of such projection of Jewish aspiration upon other minorities (and criticism for their failure to act as the Jewish minority did) I would put Nathan Glazer’s chapters on Negroes and Puerto Ricans in Beyond the Melting Pot. However, on many other points I must disagree with Elliott’s criticisms. The military metaphor of “invade” is not inappropriate; nor was invasion unjustified, considering how, as I pointed out, the world of culture had previously been partially closed to both Southerners and Jews. Also, in a magazine whose audience is as knowledgeable as The Hudson Review’s, I assumed there would be little need to document the charge of “collusion”; and I am sure that Elliott knows of many more examples than his posture of innocence would suggest—surely more than I do. Third, the fact that one Jewish critic happens to write severely of another is no sign of general dissension. Indeed, one criticism I would have of Jewish-Jewish intellectuals is that they discuss primarily each other, whether favorably or not. I have been told, on good authority, that last year at the New York YMHA symposium on the contemporary novel, a panel of critics, largely Jewish, discussed only Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow—a range limited and boring at best, dangerous at worst. As Elliott surely knows, “making it” in America depends more upon being discussed widely (notoriety) than upon receiving favorable reviews in a few discriminating journals (respect). Then too, that Harvey Swados should have received a fellowship from The Hudson Review I find evidence of nothing, absolutely nothing except Hudson’s generosity. My point against the Encounter reviewer was that he allowed the myth of Jewish intelligence wrongly to persuade him that Yiddish was a philosophic language. Instead, I would trace the philosophic preoccupations of Herzog largely to Bellow’s interest in philosophy. In my remark on Theodore Solotaroff, I wrote that his more “intelligent” essays were on Jewish subjects—Schwartz-Bart, Malamud, Philip Roth, Harry Golden, the state of Jewish-American letters (the unsigned survey in the TLS, 1959), memoirs from concentration camps, etc. (I know of no one who found his essays on Porter, O’Connor or Elliott especially perceptive); and I did not suggest his taste was as narrow as Podhoretz’s. Furthermore, read that Do-Do book once again, Mr. Elliott; man, those “dumps” of McCarthy, Macdonald, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and O’Hara are pretty “blunt”; and Robert Alter’s sniping attack on Irvin Faust’s “Jake Bluffstein and Adolf Hitler” fails to confront a major theme of that story, perhaps a notion too distasteful for a Commentary contributor to mention: the possibility that the Jew may sometimes invent imaginary anti-Semites to explain his own unease, just as the anti-Semite creates imaginary Jews—the ghosts who screw up the machine. (My own article, I trust, talked about real Jews.) In retrospect, Alter’s strategy toward Faust is not dissimilar from Elliott’s toward me—by discrediting an author’s acquaintance with peripheral matters, they hope to discount both the core of his (my) argument and his (my) right to authority. Finally, I nowhere suggest that Saul Bellow does not deserve his reputation. What I said was that the impetus, on the part of certain critics, to establish him as our greatest contemporary novelist has some suspicious motives and a kind of mad enthusiasm, both of which are inappropriate to true literary discrimination. As Norman Podhoretz himself wrote in 1959, “There is, indeed, a sense in which it may even be said that the validity of a whole new phase of American culture has been felt to hang on whether or not Saul Bellow would turn out to be a great novelist.” May I allay Mr. Elliott’s suspicions, and reveal that the reason why I did not mention the editors of Partisan Review is, quite simply, that I find no conspicuous evidence in their writings of what I decry; and let me add that I have elsewhere reviewed Philip Rahv’s essays in less than sycophantic language. Elliott may have spent too much time among careerists to believe what I shall now say; but I happen to be a writer not particularly affiliated with any point-of-view, magazine, or clique; and I can easily escape from any pigeonhole he would use to confine me. Although I have contributed to the Partisan, Sewanee, Hudson and Kenyon reviews, as well as Midstream and Commonweal, and other magazines besides, I find it rather difficult to get my dearest pieces published and impossible to develop any continuous arrangements. I enormously resent the cliquish character of the American literary scene and, to judge from my recent mail, so do many of my contemporaries. Indeed, an antipathy to all exclusive and self-aggrandizing coteries, rather than to the Jewish-American movement alone, was the ultimate origin of my attack. Got it?