ABSTRACT
THERE has been an attempt recently to resuscitate the fifties, which for some time had been given up to the conservatives. It had been commonly assumed, at least by writers leaning to the left, that the literary side of the fifties paralleled the McCarthyite swing to the right. This was obviously too crude a view, too literal a connection of literature to politics—a hangover, perhaps, of the Marxist formulas in the thirties about the grip of politics on culture. As Hilton Kramer and other conservative critics who have been polemicizing against the new left version of the fifties as a conservative era have pointed out, the fifties produced a new generation of writers with an enormous wealth and variety of talent. As one looks back, the fifties seem less constricted than they did at the time. But despite the emergence of many good writers, there was a loss of the earlier focus, a lessening of the critical attitude toward existing society—in general, a shift from a radical sensibility to a more purely literary one. This shift was noted, and lamented, by a number of critics, including Irving Howe, Richard Chase, Philip Rahv, and me. However, the conservative literary spirit itself was deceptive insofar as it did not take an explicit and aggressive 214form, exhibiting itself mainly in a recoil from politics. And there were contradictions and such notable exceptions as Allen Ginsberg and the group around him, who actually were the forerunners of the freewheeling, anarchic, communal, self-indulgent, leftish mood of the sixties. There was also the beginning of a black consciousness that was later to take more militant forms in novelists like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, even though they were later put down for not having extricated themselves from the dominant “white” literary traditions.
