The New York Intellectuals, Again

A lot of people don’t read Comment, a magazine published by the Work Research Foundation in Mississauga, Ontario. For that matter, it has frequently been brought to my attention that a lot of people don’t read this magazine. Maybe more will be reading Comment now that it is turning itself into a website. In any event, the last print issue of Comment includes a provocative article by Daniel Silliman of Hillsdale College, Michigan, “The Failure of the New York Intellectuals.” The New York Intellectuals included figures such as Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and, toward the end, Nathan Glazer and Norman Podhoretz. The “community” generated and gravitated around publications such as Partisan Review, Commentary, The Public Interest, and Dissent. Today’s talk about “public intellectuals” is a faint echo of what the New York Intellectuals were, writes Silliman.

“The New York Intellectuals were a movement that ought to have continued, one whose lack of an heir is frustrating and discouraging. They were different from the other political movements in two respects: the occupation of a position between pundit and academic, and their attention to culture, especially the literary.” With them, politics and art were “cyclically informed” by each other, and that is very different from today’s “political magazine including three or four short book reviews in the back.” Silliman writes:

It is here that we find the hope and potential of the New York Intellectuals. Here they were poised to change everything. Here they had a chance at genius and the mark of individuality. It is here that we find the most heart-rending failure: they were unable to be more than products of their time and never embraced their literary focus as the essence of their potential. It was never seen as the definition, either by the New York Intellectuals or by the observers of the New York Intellectuals. The New York Intellectuals themselves embraced the literary but never saw it as what they were, failing to get past the historical accidents of context from which they rose. It is here, too, that we find their final failure, their lack of heirs. It is on this point of a political movement informed by and informing the aesthetic that the end of the New York Intellectuals is felt most dearly, perhaps in the subtlety of echoes half heard, but felt as an absence. This breadth has not been replaced and, looking, one finds political movements designed for political men with political souls. And, for some of us observers, the landscape feels bereft of something that was great, or, at least, something that could have been great. The New York Intellectuals never saw themselves predicated on this point, and those movements hoping to be heirs to the New York Intellectuals didn’t see it either.

That’s very beautiful, in its way, but is not, I think, the whole story. The New York Intellectuals were a phenomenon of very particular time and place and sensibility: the sons and daughters of immigrant Jews assertively making their debut in the intellectual public square; City College, the Old Left, intra-Marxist ideological battles; proving their mastery of the high—meaning mainly literary—culture, and fading out into definitional contests over evolving meanings of left and right. How could they have left heirs? The concatenation of circumstances is not repeatable. And Mr. Silliman fails to appreciate how much they were writing and arguing for themselves and among themselves, as the many and sometimes romantic accounts of the New York Intellectuals make clear.

Numerous writers, editors, and think tank scholars understand themselves to be heirs, to a greater or lesser degree, of central figures in the legend of the New York Intellectuals. Unlike them, however, they do not have the advantage of being one or more steps removed from direct public influence. They are in the thick of it, and, being in the thick of it, cultural tone is compromised for the sake of effectiveness, alliances are made with those of different sensibilities, and the “cyclically informed” relationship between politics and art tends toward giving way to the triumph of politics. So I suppose I do not have a substantive disagreement with Mr. Silliman, except to suggest that he might have titled his article, “The Success of the New York Intellectuals,” recognizing that, in a fallen world, success is the forerunner of failure, usually for reasons quite unexpected.

New York Intellectuals, Comment, Winter 2004. Torture at Abu Ghraib, Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2004. Good as New Bible, WorldNet Daily, June 24, 2004.