ABSTRACT
INTELLECTUAL communities are held together generally by their disagreements as well as their agreements—that is, by the feeling that these disagreements are important enough to pursue, and that, however difficult they may be to define, they stem from common aims and premises. However, the New York intellectual community that was created in the thirties was particularly quarrelsome and tom by personal and political differences—by vanity, temperament, and conviction. With some notable exceptions, it was also not known for its loyalties. Compared, for example, with the New Critics and the writers associated with them, who were always praising each other and who, when they disagreed, did so with the utmost gentleness and gentility, the New York writers often acted as though they were in a primitive struggle for survival. One can only speculate about the forces that added a jungle morality to a sense of community. But two factors stand out. For one thing, the core of this community was political; not only was its thinking political, but it grew out of the idealistic impulses, the factional wars, and the disillusionments of the radical movement. And political groups are notoriously 56sustained by infighting and ruthless competition. In addition, much of this community was made up of newcomers, of second-generation Americans who had not yet acquired the gentilities that come with the security of a long tradition and were overconcerned with the idea of making it. When one thinks of the divisions and the quarrels, one is tempted to call the idea of a community a myth; still, one would have to say it was a myth that worked, and one that has been endowed with a historic reality by critics and historians of the thirties and forties.
