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37 P A R T T W O The New York Intellectuals The New York Intellectuals were an amorphous and contentious group of midcentury cultural critics and thinkers associated with Partisan Review magazine, City College and Columbia University. Emerging as a coherent group in the late 1930s, the New York intellectuals inherited a dual tradition. The centrality of modernism had been established by Jazz Age writers and the importance of political engagement by the radicalized generation of the early 1930s. Uniquely, the writers gathered around Partisan Review and a few allied magazines would try to link this double tradition of cultural and political radicalism. In attempting to create a fusion between modernism and Marxism, the Partisan Review group set itself against the dominant cultural tendencies of the American left in the 1930s and 40s which involved a romantic celebration of populist political art and folk art (for example, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the songs of Woody Guthrie). Indeed, one of the main reasons Partisan Review was created in 1937 was to challenge the “proletarian realism” aesthetic promulgated by the American Communist Party. Yet in rejecting the didactic and simple minded art of the popular front, the New York intellectuals still distinguished themselves from the opposite tendency of liberals and conservatives to disengage art from its social and political context. Thus, the New York writers tended to dismiss the New Criticism, a formalist tendency in literary criticism that was gaining increasing academic respectability in the 1940s, as aridly ahistorical. Giving the darkening political climate of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the New York writers also inclined to give short shrift to the optimism of Jazz Age writers like Gilbert Seldes, Although admired as a pioneer, Seldes was also condescendingly regarded as a naïve liberal too confident about the possibility of finding a common ground between astringent modernism and mass-produced popular culture. In writing about comics and other popular art forms, the New York writers tended to strike a pessimistic note, especially during the Second World War and early years of the Cold War. Instead of the “lively arts” or “popular culture” they wrote about “mass culture,” usually defined as an impediment to the development of a genuinely autonomous and democratic culture. This bleak vision was, of course, widely shared. Especially after witnessing the success of Joseph Goebbels as propaganda minister for the Nazi regime, many intellectuals came to see the general population as being easily manipulated by those who controlled the mass media. Two famous dystopian novels of the era, Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1948), both give vivid expression to this fear. Also contributing to this dark view of contemporary life was the formidable critique of the cultural industries developed by Frankfurt School writers such as T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, then in exile from the Nazi regime. Irving Howe’s “Notes on Mass culture” registers the postwar mood. In his thoughtful (if overly defensive) retrospective essay “The New York Intellectuals” (1968), Howe would later note that the writers of this group started using cultural criticism as a substitute for politics during the Cold War. Seen in this light, cultural criticism served as a refuge during a politically barren era. While there is a grain of truth to this theory, especially in describing the career of a writer such as Dwight Macdonald, it would be more accurate to say that for the New York intellectuals politics was always intermixed with culture, including popular culture. Even a writer like Clement Greenberg, who is often facilely described as a purely formalist critic, was always careful to situate a work of art within a social context. In his brief and pointed articles on William Steig and David Low, Greenberg examines how these successful artists relied on the expectations and assumptions of their audiences. In a parallel move, Harold Rosenberg, Greenberg’s great rival as an analyst of modern art, writes about Saul Steinberg by describing the cartoonist as an artist alert to ideas about representation. What interests Rosenberg is the way Steinberg plays with the mind of his reader/viewer. A serious effort to grapple with the audience response to mass culture can also be seen in the essays of Delmore Schwartz and Robert Warshow, although these writers are noticeably out of sympathy with both comics and their readers. “A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man,” was THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS 38 [18.221...

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