Dybbukism and the US Intellectual
SIR,—My -book Starting Out in the Thirties, so crudely made an excuse for an attack on 'New York Intellectuals' by Mr Arnold Beichman of New York. is not—as the unwary reader of your columns might think—a political tract; nor is it a defence of the old left or the new left. Least of all is it an attack on what is positive and hopeful in American life. It is an autobiography. based equally on the fortunes of an immigrant Jew ish family and on my astonished and liberating discovery of literary voca- tion. I ha* tried to be honest and expressive about my human- experiences. I am not an ideologue, not a superheated ex-leftist propagandist for the Ameri- can Way of Life. My book is about the extra- ordinarily feeling people I grew up with. It deals, in very large part, with the agonies of a Jew in the age of Hitler, of a democratic Socialist in the age of Stalin.
In one small passage. recounting the illusions of certain isolationist American socialists that lasted as long as June 1940 (and no longer). I describe ruefully 'the efforts of Mr Beichman's good friend, Mr Bertram D. Wolfe, to keep some very old socialist anti-wall slogans alive. How long ago all that was, and how little any of us continued to believe them in the face of Hitler's terror and Britain's unfor- gettable struggle! Yet Mr Beichman falsely, out- rageously. turns my literary-historical account into evidence of unending political irrationality on .my part. Mr Beichman does not understand what writing is. He is excited only by the smell of pos- sible political heresy. He lives in a world of ideology and ideologists. Who, I ask, is possessed of 'dybbuks'? -
ALFRED KAZIN
440 West End Avenue. New York, NY 10024
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