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3 1 What’s This Cat’s Story? When someone finally writes a book about New York’s Jewish anti-intellectuals, “What’s This Cat’s Story?” should get top billing. There has been so much written about New York’s Jewish intellectuals—and so much written by them—that the very existence of an anti-intellectual trend among Jewish writers in post– World War II New York is hardly recognized. But in addition to the writers of Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary there were Jewish novelists and journalists who found that these intellectual stomping grounds only brought out their desire to stomp intellectuals. Norman Mailer felt that his “deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics” (1968, 26). Saul Bellow loved the life of the mind but felt that “the intellectuals one meets are something else again” (1976b, 57). And the great New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling loved to sneak in swipes at intellectuals. In one of his boxing pieces he wrote how attending a prizefight and remarking that “[t]hey don’t make fighters like Al anymore” marks you as the kind of guy who “enjoys what the fellows who write for quarterlies call a frame of reference” (1982, 17). This Krim essay is an attack on the bloated language and thinking of New York’s Jewish intellectuals, “self-chosen brillianteers.” He recalls how he was bullied into adopting that intellectual style until he “sounded and sometimes wrote like a bastard encyclopedia.” This essay is Krim’s good-bye to all that. It appeared almost simultaneously in 1961 as the opening essay to Krim’s Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer and in Saul Bellow’s journal, The Noble Savage. Forty years later Bellow included it in a collection of the best essays he ever published (Bellow 2001, 367–87). 4 . Missing a Beat T he publication of this book of pieces—actually grapplings with life, desperate bids for beauty and truth and the slaking of personal need, hot mortal telegrams from writer to reader however disguised by subject matter which seems to be at a remove—marks the end of a long shipwrecked journey for me and the beginning of a new one. I am going to try and devote the writing time left to the more openly and explicitly creative expression that I always wanted to do from the age of 17 to 37. After literally 20 lousy years of doubting, agonizing, poeticizing, speculating, criticizing, fantasying, I still do not know whether this work will be the traditional novel or play or a necessity-inspired homemade form of my own invention—yet I must bring it into being or my tumultuous days will have been wasted in cowardly amateurism. But I had to live through two decades of the wildest confusion to reach this firing-line of commitment. I traveled all the byways and intellectual traps of contemporary literary life to arrive where I should have begun—and that is by coming on with every ounce of everything you’ve got—but I hope to put the experience of this nightmarish pilgrimage into my work. Not hope to. I have to (and since it is now part of me it will come out regardless) for my mess was not unique and is almost a typical blood-specimen of what the majority of us late 30ish, serious and intense artist-types have gone through in an effort to define ourselves and our way. Let me start at the beginning. I had always wanted to write ever since the age of 13 and followed the usual pattern gone through by a dozen of my friends in the same line. Namely writing for the highschool magazine (in my case the DeWitt Clinton Magpie up in the Bronx), coediting a mimeographed literary sheet called expression (man, were we swingingly lowercase back in 1939!) because of the kid-stuff in the official one and getting temporarily kicked out of highschool for selling it in the john, then going on to college (I deliberately followed Thomas Wolfe’s big romantic boots to the University of North Carolina) and writing for the magazine there. Then after quitting college I returned to New York and had the usual erratic round of uptown editorial jobs: editing a Western pulp magazine, working as a snotty silly kid reporter on The New Yorker, ducking the war in the OWI writing publicity for Paramount [18.221.187.121] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 06:33...

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