Let us see just how typical Krim is.
He is New York-born and Jewish.
He spent one year at the University of North Carolina because Thomas Wolfe went there.
He returned to New York to work for The New Yorker, to edit a Western pulp, to "duck the war in the OWI", to write publicity for Paramount Pictures and commentary for a newsreel, then he began his career as critic for various magazines.
Now he has abandoned all that to be A Writer.
I do not want to quibble about typicality;
in a certain sense, one manner of experience will be typical of any given group while another will not.
But I've got news for Krim: he's not typical, he's pretty special.
His may typify a certain kind of postwar New York experience, but his experience is certainly not typical of his "generation's".
In any case, who ever thought that New York is typical of anything?

Men of Krim's age, aspirations, and level of sophistication were typically involved in politics before the war.
They did not "duck the war" but they fought in it, however reluctantly;
they sweated out some kind of formal education;
they read widely and eclectically;
they did not fall into pseudo-glamorous jobs on pseudo-glamorous magazines, but they did whatever nasty thing they could get in order to eat;
they found out who they were and what they could do, then within the limits of their talent they did it.
They did not worry about "experience", because experience thrust itself upon them.
And they traveled out of New York.
Only a native New Yorker could believe that New York is now or ever was a literary center.
It is a publishing and public relations center, but these very facts prevent it from being a literary center because writers dislike provincialism and untruth.
Krim's typicality consists only in his New Yorker's view that New York is the world;
he displays what outlanders call the New York mind, a state that the subject is necessarily unable to perceive in himself.
The New York mind is two parts abstraction and one part misinformation about the rest of the country and in fact the world.
In his fulminating against the literary world, Krim is really struggling with the New Yorker in himself, but it's a losing battle.

Closely related to his illusions about his typicality is Krim's complicated feeling about his Jewishness.
He writes, "Most of my friends and I were Jewish;
we were also literary;
the combination of the Jewish intellectual tradition and the sensibility needed to be a writer created in my circle the most potent and incredible intellectual-literary ambition I have ever seen or could ever have imagined.
Within themselves, just as people, my friends were often tortured and unappeasably bitter about being the offspring of this unhappily unique-ingrown-screwedup breed;
their reading and thinking gave an extension to their normal blushes about appearing 'Jewish' in subway, bus, racetrack, movie house, any of the public places that used to make the Jew of my generation self-conscious (heavy thinkers walking across Seventh Avenue without their glasses on, willing to dare the trucks as long as they didn't look like the ikey-kikey caricature of the Yiddish intellectual)."
At other points in his narrative, Krim associates Jewishness with unappeasable literary ambition, with abstraction, with his personal turning aside from the good, the true, and the beautiful of fiction in the manner of James T. Farrell to the international, the false, and the inflated.

Krim says, in short, that he is a suffering Jew.
The only possible answer to that is, I am a suffering Franco-Irishman.
We all love to suffer, but some of us love to suffer more than others.
Had Krim gone farther from New York than Chapel Hill, he might have discovered that large numbers of American Jews do not find his New York version of the Jews' lot remotely recognizable.
More important is the simple human point that all men suffer, and that it is a kind of anthropological-religious pride on the part of the Jew to believe that his suffering is more poignant than mine or anyone else's.
This is not to deny the existence of pogroms and ghettos, but only to assert that these horrors have had an effect on the nerves of people who did not experience them, that among the various side effects is the local hysteria of Jewish writers and intellectuals who cry out from confusion, which they call oppression and pain.
In their stupidity and arrogance they believe they are called upon to remind the gentile continually of pogroms and ghettos.
Some of us have imagination and sensibility too.
Finally, there is the undeniable fact that some of the finest American fiction is being written by Jews, but it is not Jewish fiction;
Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, through intellectual toughness, perception, through experience in fact, have obviously liberated themselves from any sentimental Krim self-indulgence they might have been tempted to.

Krim's main attack is upon the aesthetic and the publishing apparatus of American literary culture in our day.
Krim was able to get an advance for a novel, and time and opportunity to write at Yaddo, but it was no good.
"I had natural sock", he says, 'as a storyteller and was precociously good at description, dialogue, and most of the other staples of the fiction-writer's trade but I was bugged by a mammoth complex of thoughts and feelings that prevented me from doing more than just diddling the surface of sustained fiction-writing".
And again, "how can you write when you haven't yet read 'Bartleby The Scrivener'"?
Krim came to believe that "the novel as a form had outlived its vital meaning".
His "articulate Jewish friends" convinced him that education (read "reading") was "a must".
He moved in a "highly intellectual" group in Greenwich Village in the late forties, becoming "internationalized" overnight.
Then followed a period in which he wrote reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The Commonweal, Commentary, had a small piece in Partisan Review, and moved on to Hudson, The Village Voice, and Exodus.
The work for Commonweal was more satisfying than work for Commentary "because of the staff's tiptoeing fear of making a booboo".
Commentary was a mere suburb of Partisan Review, the arch-enemy.
Both magazines were "rigid with reactionary what-will-T. S. Eliot-or-Martin Buber-think?
fear."
Partisan has failed, Krim says, for being "snob-clannish, overcerebral, Europeanish, aristocratically alienated" from the U.S.
It was "the creation of a monstrous historical period wherein it thought it had to synthesize literature and politics and avant-garde art of every kind with its writers crazily trying to outdo each other in Spenglerian inclusiveness."
Kenyon, Sewanee, and Hudson operated in an "Anglo-Protestant New Critical chill";
their example caused Krim and his friends to put on "Englishy airs, affect all sorts of impressive scholarship and social-register unnaturalness in order to slip through their narrow transoms and get into their pages".
Qui s'excuse s'accuse, as the French Jewish intellectuals used to say.

Through all this raving, Krim is performing a traditional and by now boring rite, the attack on intelligence, upon the largely successful attempt of the magazines he castigates to liberate American writing from local color and other varieties of romantic corn.
God knows that Partisan and the rest often were, and remain, guilty of intellectual flatulence.
Sociological jargon, Germano-Slavic approximations to English, third-rate but modish fiction, and outrages to common sense have often disfigured Partisan, and in lesser degree, the other magazines on the list.
What Krim ignores, in his contempt for history and for accuracy, is that these magazines, Partisan foremost, brought about a genuine revolution in the American mind from the mid-thirties to approximately 1950.
The most obvious characteristic of contemporary American writing, apart from the beat nonsense, is its cosmopolitanism.

The process of cosmopolitanism had begun in earnest about 1912, but the First War and the depression virtually stalled that process in its tracks.
Without the good magazines, without their book reviews, their hospitality to European writers, without above all their awareness of literary standards, we might very well have had a generation of Krim's heroes -- Wolfes, Farrells, Dreisers, and I might add, Sandburgs and Frosts and MacLeishes in verse -- and then where would we be?
Screwed, stewed, and tattooed, as Krim might say after reading a book about sailors.
When Partisan and Kenyon set up shop, Mencken was still accepted as an arbiter of taste (remember Hergesheimer?
), George Jean Nathan and Alexander Woollcott were honored in odd quarters, and the whole Booth Tarkington, Willa Catheter (sic) ,) Pearl, Buck,, Amy Lowell, William Lyon Phelps atmosphere lay thick as Los Angeles smog

over, the, country --.
Politics, economics, sociology -- the entire area of life that lies "between" -- literature and what Krim calls experience -- urgently needed to be dug into.
The universities certainly were not doing it, nor were the popular magazines of the day.
This Partisan above all did;
if it had never printed a word of literature its contribution to the politico-sociological area would still be historic.
But it did print good verse and good fiction.
If, the editors sometimes, dozed and printed pretentious, New, York-mind, dross, they, also printed, Malraux,, Silone,, Chiaromonte,, Gide, Bellow,, Robert Lowell, Francis Fergusson, Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz, Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eleanor Clark,, and a host of, other good writers.
Partisan Review and the other literary magazines helped to educate, in the best sense, an entire generation.
That these magazines also deluded the Krims of the world is unfortunate but inevitable.
It is a fact of life that magazines are edited by groups: they have to be or they wouldn't be published at all.
And it is also a fact of life that there will always (be youngish half-educated people around, who will be dazzled by the glitter of what looks like a literary movement.
(there are no) literary movements, "there are only writers doing their work.
Literary movements are the", creation of pimps who live off writers.
) when Krim says mine was as severe a critical-intellectual, environment as can be imagined, he is off his rocker.
He indicates that he has none of the, disciplines that criticism requires, including education;
the result was his inevitable bedazzlement through, ignorance.
He wasn't being, "educated in" those Village bull-sessions, as he claims.
No one was ever educated through bull-sessions in anything other than, to quote him again, "perfumed bullshit.
Only" a New York hick would expect to find the literary life in Greenwich Village, at any point, later than Walt Whitman's day.
The highly intellectual minds that Krim says he encountered, in the Village did their work in spite of,, not because of, any Village atmosphere.
But Krim's complaint is important because not only in New York, but in other cities and in universities throughout this country, young and not, so young men at

this moment are being bedazzled by half-digested ideas.
Those who have quality will outgrow "the experience;
the", rest will turn beat, or into dentists, or into beat, dentists.
For the sad truth is that while one might write well without having read Bartleby The Scrivener, one is more likely, to write well if one has "read it, and much else.
The most appalling aspect of Krim's piece is his reflection of the beat aesthetic.
He mentions the beats only once", when he refers to their having revived through mere power and abandonment and the unwillingness to, commit death in life some idea of a decent equivalent between verbal expression and actual experience,, but the entire narrative, is written in the tiresome vocabulary "of" that lost "and" dying cause, "and in the" "sprung syntax that is supposed to supplant, our mother, tongue.
Krim's (aesthetic combines anti-intellectualism, conscious and unconscious naivete)", and a winsome reliance "upon the", natural and upon experience.
Ideas are the thruway to nowhere.
My "touchstones, had, been strictly" literature and, humanly enough, American literature (because that was what I wanted to write).
He alludes to something called direct writing, and he finds that criticism gets in the way of his truer, realer, imaginative bounce.