Prisoners of Culture

...Initially, they wrote about the Yiddishkeit one sacrificed for the dubious benefits of becoming an "alrightnik...

...But given the nature of Delmore Schwartz and his fellow-prisoners, given their devotion to culture and their notions of seriousness and aesthetic purity, there was no real alternative...

...And whether it was the cigar-chomping Blaustein of Eliot's poem, the unloved Robert Cohn of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises or the serio-comic Leopold Bloom of Joyce's Ulysses, Jewish characters were of—and probably for—Modernist literature, but they were not created by Jewish authors...

...Nor did the ironies stop there...

...There was Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-1956) and Paul Goodman (1911-1972), the first, tormented, anxious, leaping from one panacea to another like a crazed Nijinsky, the second, biding his time in the literary underground until Growing Up Absurd(1960) would transform him into a sixties guru...

...One of literary Modernism's favorite subjects was the Wandering Jew, the alienated, cosmopolitan figure who haunted the gentile imagination...

...I can think of no better image for the bulk of American-Jewish writing and no better proof that some of its power still manages to survive...

...In short, they had lost the capacity to think Jewish...

...Memory has quite another dimension for those of us with no personal stake in who said what, when...

...Like Janus, one face looks back retrospectively while the other dreams about a world more attractive...

...At best, American-Jewish writers were consigned to a rearguard action, one that would attempt to fuse New Ideas with Old Concerns, a taste for high-brow Art with a street-wise bravado...

...He would never come to believe in the "absurd" that filled the decade [i.e...

...They toss in the nightmare of a History from which they can never fully awake...

...And, of course, there was Lionel Trilling (1905— 1976), a man whose very demeanor connoted sensibility, refinement, culture...

...Excess became his final truth...

...For Alfred Kazin, New York Jew is a way of reliving those exciting days when he was young and starting out...

...Modernism began, according to Pound, because "the age demanded a new image...

...That much said by way of overview, let me be more specific about what an aesthetic like this implies...

...To tick off the names is to realize just how dazzling that generation of New York Intellectuals was...

...In my opinion Humboldt had too long a list of them—Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, A lienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious...

...In a novel like Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), success's ashy taste is pitted against a longing to become, once again, the younger, unspoiled David Levinsky who swayed over a Talmud folio...

...By that I mean, David Schearl, the novel's "sensitive" (read: literary) initiate, suffers from a wide range of textbook maladies: angst, alienation, a whopping Oedipal complex, the whole psychoanalytic works...

...Granted, Schwartz had no monopoly on the belief that Culture and Power were synonymous terms, but he brought a giddy excitement to the New York scene that was hard to match...

...In this sense, analysis of the salad days of the American-Jewish renaissance can be a sobering experience...

...As Delmore Schwartz put it in one of his poems: . . . Perplexed, still wet With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold...

...And, for once, American-Jewish writers seemed well-placed...

...reading makes all of us New York Jews...

...I was too haughty to bother with Marxism, Freudian-ism, Modernism, the avant-garde, or any of those things that Hum-bolt, as a culture-Jew, took so much stock in...

...Moral obligations are forged in the fires of History...

...The great philosophers and poets were always on his mind, training him into a victim of logic he loved more than himself...

...Granted, the itch to exchange one set of circumstances for another or, as some might put it, a new prison for the old, may be a universal condition, but Jews, as a people, seem to have a greater capacity for equating memory with collective experience...

...To sit by the waters of Babylon and weep for Zion became a shared burden...

...Other New York Intellectuals were not...

...Those public values so dear to the heart of the nineteenth century novelist—marriage, property, class—chained literature to the tangible and external...

...In an age when certain words dripped with seriousness and only capitalization could instill them with the proper aura, Schwartz had a longer list than most...

...There may even come a time when regret will not dominate American-Jewish writing, when plumbing the depths of memory will yield as many joys as pains, when messianic fervor will seem more than a sad reminder of simpler, unassimilated days...

...Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934) changed this formula dramatically...

...their visions, bookish...

...Twentieth century authors were convinced that the private sphere mattered more...

...In this sense David Schearl and Stephen Dedalus are brothers under the skin...

...Certainly a growing fascination with urban life and with versions of moral seriousness accounted for a large measure of popularity...

...He wanted, desperately needed, more...

...Saul Bellow, on the other hand, preferred to think of his own abilities as blue-chip stock...

...Myself, I've always held the number of sacred words down...

...Later he adds a telling remark about the crucial differences between himself and Humboldt/ Schwartz...

...His books include The Schlemiel As Metaphor and An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth...

...Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's Remembrance ofThings Past, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom), but, then again, difficulty was one of the identifying features of Modernist literature...

...But even Cahan realized that secularist Yiddish culture could be, at best, only a way station toward something else, that its destiny was inextricably linked to its demise...

...In many respects Schwartz may have been a Romantic poet, but he would never have been content to number himself among Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world...

...In this case, however, Kazin's ambitions are larger than his book...

...Which is to say, these writers were an unashamedly elitist bunch...

...A neat turn-of-phrase, the right image, could cover every cultural phenomenon...

...Very often this conviction led, ine-luctably, to densely textured books (e.g...

...Or, at best, they formed what seemed to be a collective voice, one which issued pronouncements on Literature & Politics in the pages of Partisan Review...

...What Eliot had done for England and the Anglican Church, Schwartz would do for America, for New York, for cultural Jewishness...

...Given these ground conditions, it is not surprising that American-Jewish writers should come to Modernism "late," but also that they would find it fatally attractive...

...If too many of his friends became enthralled with a particular Idea, he tended to become suspicious...

...What else can result from the capitalization of such nouns...

...Naturally he died a Failure...

...It is also a way of settling old scores, of repaying real—or imagined—snubs with interest...

...This is especially true as the darker implications lurking underneath all the high-brow talk come clearer...

...If too many people understood your novel too easily, something very drastic must be wrong...

...For a Lower East Side version of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, these are de rigueur conditions...

...The suffix—ism meant a great deal to Schwartz...

...At bottom, Schwartz was confident that metaphor could take on and beat the best modern life had to offer...

...The Holocaust and the State of Israel were perplexing events which called their Jewishness and their metaphors into question...

...A sense of being at odds with the world still remains, but now it generates from New—rather than Old—Ideas...

...As Alfred Kazin shrewdly observes: "Saul was the first Jewish writer I met who seemed as clever about every side of life as a businessman...

...Deeper memories kept nagging, but they found it increasingly difficult to connect emotion and Idea, thought and word...

...No doubt Delmore Schwartz would be wryly amused at all the attention he has been garnering of late: in Kazin's reminiscences, in James Atlas's recent biography and, most significantly, as the model of Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift...

...They had an itch for polemics and the yeshiva bocher's passion for abstract ideas...

...He had begun his career with a brilliant dissertation on Matthew Arnold and, later, Professor Trilling presided over matters of taste with an elevated style and an Arnoldian assurance...

...there was the flinty Sidney Hook (1902-) and a very young, very precocious Irving Howe (1920- ); there were brilliant art critics like Meyer Scha-piro(1904- ) and Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978...

...For Cahan, the Lower East Side was the fulfillment of a great Jewish migration and he plunged into the work of being the Yiddish world's ever-patient teacher, socialist guide, moral conscience, resident mythographer...

...been markedly different had Levinsky remained behind in Antomir...

...there was Leslie Fielder (1917- ), Philip Rahv (1908-1973), Lionel Abel (1910- ) and dozens of other immigrant sons who also found public libraries more congenial than kitchen tables...

...Such is the stuff of which survival—or at least Jewish survival—has been fashioned...

...Delmore Schwartz and his crowd were not only "prisoners of culture," but captives of a particular sensibility, a special posture...

...No doubt the second condition mattered more to most of them than the first, especially since it suggested that their definition of "culture" might have been too limiting...

...But it is also to romanticize what they accomplished and what those accomplishments meant...

...Nonetheless, American-Jewish writing persists and in the backwash of Saul Bellow's Nobel Prize, there are those (Cynthia Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Arthur Cohen, etc...

...They came late because Modernism's formative years (roughly, 1900-1922) coincided with the period when East European Jews streamed into the United States by the hundreds of thousands and their writers began to sink the foundations of Yiddishist culture on the beachheads of New York's Lower East Side...

...The consciousness they forged, we have inherited...

...As Charlie Citrine (surely a reflection of Bellow himself) puts it: Humboldt, that grand erratic handsome person with his wide blond face, that charming fluent deeply worried man to whom I was so attached, passionately lived out the theme of Success...

...He need not be that guilty either...

...However much David dabbles, unknowingly, in Jewish mysticism or his saga tells us much about the grit and noise of ghetto streets, it is David's desperate attempts to transcend this world, to achieve some higher consciousness, that is at the heart of Call It Sleep...

...No single figure embodies this fiery, combative spirit more than Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966...

...Given this, one might argue that the widespread appeal of American-Jewish writing in the fifties and sixties was built on shaky foundations...

...Ironically enough, the cunning of History which occasioned Levinsky's plaintive regret now torments nostalgic suburbanites...

...So, so O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven...

...who can imagine ways in which it will not only endure but continue to prevail...

...from "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave...

...Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, it was clear that transoceanic voyages were sending the disillusioned in one direction and the desperately hopeful in another...

...That the latter was always a specious argument (notions of Judaic "suffering" were generally inflated and confused) and the former was an indicator of changes in our national—rather than our "Jewish"—character seems true enough...

...the sixties] in which he died...

...It is his special fate to be uncomfortable in the quotidian world...

...Their cells were, in a word, book-lined...

...It was a time when the adversary culture yearned—sometimes secretly, sometimes less so— for the levers of Absolute Control...

...as the past receded, the Forties began to be valuable to people fabricating cultural rainbow textiles...

...America merely raised the ante, writ the problem large...

...When a collection of Schwartz's poetry was published in 1959, W. H. Auden greeted it with the following quip: "A poet shouldn't be that unhappy...

...In our own time a certain restlessness about Yiddish culture remains, but it would be foolhardy to equate the holding action which is with the messianic fervor that was...

...To be sure, Cahan had an instinctive grasp of the immigrant condition that eluded his fictional creation...

...And, at bottom, it is David's specialness, his "difference," that the novel celebrates...

...The tensions are, presumably, between the tugs of Old World Jewishness and the pulls of Americanized assimilation...

...And, of course, Manic and Depressive, always capitalized...

...He was in touch...

...By the time World War I would change everything—political structures, social orders, traditional values, etc.—and the excitements of expatriation would claim the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S...

...Finally, it is a way of making it publicly clear that he has had at least as much trouble with women as Saul Bellow and, furthermore, that he can be every bit as hassled as Professor Moses Herzog and still write damn good stuff...

...Modernist writers saw themselves as opponents of the conventional, the middle-class, the status quo...

...And, yet, nothing in Cahan's portrait suggests that things would have Sanford Pinsker is Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College...

...And if the result was a prison of the diaspora, a messianic inclination that placed Higher Worlds and lower ones into an uneasy conjunction, it also served to create a space shared by writers and the Jewish masses alike...

...now it required theoreticians, muscular essays...

...In the prisons of a highly cerebral—and non-Jewish—culture, writers fall victim to that dead-end known as solipsism...

...After all, hadn't Eliot already proved the point with The Waste-landl Between chaos and meaningful pattern fell the poet's voice...

...Thus were the stereotypes— the guilt-ridden sons and morally anguished protagonists—of later American-Jewish literature born...

...Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift By now it is a truism: Memory dominates the imagination of American-Jewish writers...

...In New York Jew, Alfred Kazin's memoir of that time, that place where the American-Jewish renaissance began, he remembers Schwartz as "a prophecy of the last literary generation to believe in the authority of culture, the logic of tradition": He was [Kazin continues] a terrifying and terrified rationalist, a prisoner of his superb intellectual training...