SEYMOUR KRIM says at one point in this extraordinary volume: “I was as wrong as you can be, and still live to tell about it.” He was, indeed, and so were all of us; not many of us lived; and most of those who lived and tried to tell the tale soon found themselves choked in attitudes, mystiques, and dictions which were not theirs. There is observable, I think, in the work of most of this generation a desire to tell what actually happened—or what it actually feels like to be an American, now; but this desire is perpetually defeated by the spiritual obligation of being an American, which obligation is, simply, never to accept that evil is in the world. I am struck by the variety of ways in which the actual spiritual state of Americans is denied by people who have every reason to know what that state is: our educators, artists, and politicians. It is hard for me to believe, for example, that educators do not know the sorry truth behind the lack of real education here. It seems very clear to me that until the educators themselves believe in what they teach, there is no hope for their students. But the educators cannot accept this, because in order to do so they would have to overhaul every aspect of their private lives, which effort would hurl them forever beyond the bounds of the academic life. It would hurl them, in fact, into that search and that danger which Krim has endured and to which he bears witness. I myself believe that it has never been more difficult to become an individual than it is now, in the middle of the twentieth century, in the richest and most bewildered country in the Western world, the country which has inherited all the follies and crimes and contradictions of the West at the very moment that the moral assumptions of the Western world are proving themselves bankrupt. What is demanded, if we are to redeem our history, is an unprecedented and violent assault on reality, an overhauling and overturning and undermining of all the standards by which we imagine ourselves to live. The reason that this is necessary is that we really do not live by these standards; we cling to them because we are shipwrecked, and have no other spare, but the awful gap between our public expectations and our private settlements has precipitated spiritual disaster. To save ourselves, we must re-examine ourselves; and it is probable that never before has so heavy a burden fallen on so many or been shouldered by so few.
Among these few, alas, most of our elders cannot be included, and Krim makes this stonily clear in his report on the literary avant-garde life of the forties (“What’s This Cat’s Story?”). It is the most candid and truthful record of that time that I have ever read, and I suppose part of its dry effectiveness to come from its total lack of malice. It took perhaps one or two cocktail parties—those cocktail parties which, since one was present, signaled one’s entry into this fabled world—to recognize that one had been “had.” The people with whom one was dealing, so far from being giants, appeared to be in the literary professions principally because they hated literature. I concluded this from the fact that they placed no more trust in life than the weariest button merchant, and their timidity, respectability, and ignorance were made all the more obvious and appalling by the formulas they adopted to hide these. Their prejudices were precisely those of the class to which they aspired, or from which they sprang: the property-owning class (in fact or desire); and I, of course, since I had forced myself to expect so much more, found it very difficult to forgive them for the nightmares of tolerance I endured at their hands. But the thing for which I most scorned them may have been, after all, the most important: they did not know how to raise their children. They did not trust their own instincts, or authority, or love, and raised them, as it were, by the book. And the ill-mannered, tyrannical, anchorless children proved, even more authoritatively than did the aridity of so much of their elders’ work, or lack of conviction when the chips were down, the elders’ real vacuity.
Krim is the first person, as far as I know, to bring up, in any responsible fashion, the prevalence of the Jewish intellectual in what we like to call the literary life. I have never really written about Jews, because both culturally and socially, and for better and for worse, I have been too close to them. It is possible that I am afraid of examining whatever tension exists in my mind between the Jewish pawnbrokers and landlords of my childhood, and my friends; though, to tell the truth, in the beginning, for me, all Jews were in the Bible, and all I knew or cared about landlords was that they were white. In short, I think that my hatred of all white people was too incandescent to allow me to see their features. In any case, since the Bible had always been so crucial to me, I concluded that the reason for the prevalence of the Jew in intellectual activity simply resulted from the fact that he was the only American who had behind him anything that could be called an intellectual tradition—by which I mean, simply, the knowledge that thought and the interior, private life are real. But I did not consider the price that was paid for this—for reasons which are, I suppose, all too obvious; nor did I consider the implications of the fact that the Jewish tradition retained such force because the world did not allow the Jew to escape it. Krim opens up in this book a momentous speculation on how the dreadful Jewish past is yoked to the dreadful American dream, and the dues paid in the Jewish personality. It illuminates for me many of the disasters endured by friends of mine—and also illuminates some of the darker corners in the minds of my present-day friends—and I can only hope that Krim will dig deeper into this question one of these days.
He is also, God bless him, almost the only writer of my generation who has managed to release himself from the necessity of being either romantic or defensive about Negroes. His “Anti-Jazz” essay ought to be required reading by every hipster who can read (on the evidence, there are not many), and its last sentence ought to be engraved on the walls of every jazz point in this country: “It comes from something further down and wayer out than I think you dream of… man.” Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, King Oliver, and my mother and my father thank you, baby. Not one of us ever sat in an orgone box, and we’ve yet to hear any singing coming out of that cage.
“Ask for a White Cadillac” is more painful and goes much further: but the only hope for the reestablishment of human relations in this country, let alone race relations, is for the truth to come out. It can only come out if those who have been there will dare to tell the truth about where they’ve been—and why.
I have reservations about this book, of course, but I don’t know how important they are. Krim’s supercharged, locomotive style sometimes drives me mad—I hope he will soon retire from active duty all those monotonous variations on the verb “to swing.” I disagree with his estimate of the “Beats,” from which so many of his stylistic affections come. On the other hand, since, as Krim says, they “opened me up,” I feel that my ground there is rather shot from under me. He has gone far beyond them just the same, in passion and clarity and responsibility, just as he has gone far beyond most of us into that chaos out of which we shall have to rebuild our homes.
(1961)