When Victims Rule (pdf)

LITERATURE - “INTELLECTUALS” - “THE FAMILY”
one connected with his organization in a financial control sense is Jewish?”
[GOULD]
Alas, Dreiser was securely marginalized by the American literary-cultural
establishment by the early 1960s. “The decline of Dreiser’s reputation,” notes
Irving Howe, “has not been an isolated event. It has occurred in the context,
and is surely a consequence, of the counterrevolution in American culture during
the forties and fifties … Dreiser became a symbol of everything a superior
intelligence was supposed to avoid … He represented the boorishness of the
populist mentality, as it declined into anti-Semitism.” [HOWE, p. 168]
Likewise, notes Ann Douglas, prominent Beat author Jack Kerouac eventually
became “ever more paranoid,” thinking that “the New York Jewish critics
were plotting against him; he joked bitterly about titling Big Sur (1962), ‘Another
idea for the Jews to Steal.’” [DOUGLAS, A., 19-99] In 2001, Jim Irsay (whose
father’s original name was Robert Israel), owner of a professional football team,
bought Kerouac’s original manuscript for On the Road, at auction, for $2.2 million
dollars. (Jewish author Franz Kafka’s The Trial had “held the previous
record for an original manuscript sold at auction.”) [HERMAN, J., 5-22-01]
“[There is] a Jewish Mafia in American letters …, “said popular writer Truman
Capote, risking censure and the inevitable charge of anti-Semitism in
1973, “There is a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control
much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual
magazines … All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular
coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or
withholding attention … Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, and
Isaac Bashevis Singer are all fine writers, but they are not the only writers in the
country as the Jewish Mafia would have us believe.” [FORSTER, p. 109]
The Partisan Review crowd, for instance, is generally acknowledged to have
“made” Saul Bellow. “From the first,” says Alexander Bloom, “Bellow established
a recognizable and, ultimately, uneasy relationship with the New York Intellectuals,
as friends and patrons. Yet he has resisted any notion that they made
him famous.” But, says Leslie Fiedler, “[Bellow] really owed a big debt to them,
because they did help introduce him to the world. Rahv thought of him as one
of their boys.” [BLOOM, p. 291]
Early in his career, from 1941-1951, Bellow published six short stories and
two novels; five of the short stories first appeared in Partisan Review. [BLOOM,
p. 291] His second novel, was reviewed in Partisan Review by Family member
Delmore Schwartz and favorably compared with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn, Henry James, and Walt Whitman. “Bellow’s success,” says Alexander
Bloom, “was more than just personal. whether or not he was ‘made’ by the Partisan
writers is less significant than the degree to which his success and the history
of the achievement of the New York Intellectuals in general intertwined …
Lionel Trilling … made it clear that a Jew could be a great literary critic; Meyer
Schapiro, a great art historian; and Saul Bellow a great American novelist.”
[BLOOM, p. 293]
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