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they are at a low intellectual level; their facts are often wrong, their
theories crazy: they are special pleaders of causes and don't take rational
arguments into account. If I may make an analogy, it is to the struggle in
the thirties and forties. There are differences of course - anybody can
point them out - but there are some similarities. We were in a fight
against the control of the media and the publishing houses, not so much
the academy, against the Stalinists and their followers. We pointed out
that we were superior - in our writing, in our thinking, in our fidelity
to facts, and that we were not part of what they called us - agents of
imperialism, literary snakes, reactionaries, conservatives. You can't
be
afraid of being called all those things.
But, to get back to my main point, it was an intellectual struggle.
Obviously this isn't Stalinist Russia or Hitler's Germany. Of course you
can write books, of course you can continue to teach. Not everyone's
getting fired. But the dom.inant tendency, it seems to me, is the tendency
that has been labeled, correctly or incorrectly, politically correct. I think
there's only one way of fighting it: to define it as a general position and
to
argue against its specific manifestations. For example, you have to
show that some of the people who are writing about Columbus, such as
Stephen Greenblatt and Kirkpatrick Sale, are writing nonsense. You
can't fight it any other way. There may be a sufficient number of people
who are able to recognize the distinction between sense and nonsense,
between higher and lower levels of thinking. So I'm arguing really for
intensifYing the intellectual aspects of this struggle.
Edith Kurzweil:
I was going to say this somewhat differently. I think
most of us are academics and intellectuals and, to put it somewhat
bluntly, not all academics are intellectuals. And we want to differentiate
between writing for scholarly, narrow journals and for publications like
Partisan RelJiew, The New Criteriorl, Society,
and all of the others. The
other thing I wanted to say, which came to mind while you were talk–
ing, Celeste, is about the upcoming battle. It started long ago. I recall a
meeting of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, which
William had started. I was there, not as a participant, but as an observer
who was kept outside the official meeting. We were all going to the
movies afterwards, and a couple of people were chanting, "We've won.
We've won. We've got fifty-one percent." Since then, that organization
went to the point of not even considering
Partisan Review
worthy of the
max.imum ten thousand dollar grant because we were called the estab–
lishment, even though , like
all
little literary magazines, we're always los–
ing money. In other words, what has happened more and more is really
a struggle for victims. And whoever is the victim is going to win.
Just one more point. I spoke to Eugene Genovese. He told me why
