Shakespeare)
it may seem untrue, that almost all
great art is a dramatization of the artist's values.
When the artist does not live under great pressure
from outside, these values may safely (though not
too wisely) float in an atmosphere of speculation
and theory. But during any period of stress, art by
not taking sides must inevitably serve the side it less
honors; and the artist, far from asserting his values,
parts with them. Surely no one will state that the
artist should be impartial:
indeed, he must
not
be
impartial in exactly the same sense that he
must
be
disinterested.
Thus those largely unsocial-minded
people who groan that the age of the machine has
killed men's souls, would do better to stop weeping
over the corpse and turn a sharp eye on the mur-
derer.
Our social consciousness,
for the moment,
must replace our souls-the more so if we ever hope
to get them back again.
All this is not to argue that because Society itself
has become, both critically and creatively, the major
concern of literature in our time, it has so far either
critically or creatively yielded up much fruit. So far,
we all know, there has been too much sectarianism,
too much hysteria,
too much bad blood and wasted
heat and guerrilla warfare,
too much propaganda
seeking to exploit art rather than direct and stimulate
it. Most important
of all, whether literature means
to acquire or impose values, it must remain realistic:
it cannot indulge in wish-fulfillments or juggle facts.
N either can literature hope to be all things to ail
men. The writer or critic who aims at simultaneous-
ly communicating on several planes is doomed to
waste his ammunition;
a writer must not only know
what he wants to say, but to whom he wants to say
it. So far, social literature has thrown off too much
heat in the writing still to retain very much in the
reading;
so far the imagination has been trapped
by over-simplified symbolisms in subject-matter;
so
far the preservative qualities of irony-which I need
hardly say has nothing to do with writing in an
ironic style or tone-have been too greatly lacking.
In our search for orientation we must guard heavily
against these defects, and know just how far we can
trust any novelist or critic to lead us. But if, in a
different spirit, we put our backs up, we are no
longer discounting the writers,
we are discounting
what they represent.
There is really no fundamental
dilemma: it is more necessary to interest ourselves in
an important
subject treated without much merit
than in an unimportant
subject treated with con-
siderable merit.
Culture herself
demands that we put
the right social values ahead of the right literary
values; and whenever we encounter people who want
to keep art dustproof,
who bewail the collapse of
'esthetic values,'
it is our duty to ascertain just how
far their indignation is a screen for reactionary and
unsocial thinking.
The obverse of this-which is the cultural coar-
sening inevitable to a period of stress-is
on the
PARTISAN
REVIEW
other hand a very serious problem for the critic. As
men of thought tend increasingly to approximate the
psychology of men of action; as the business of sav-
ing civilization increasingly ousts from their minds
the idea of enriching it, there must follow all along
the line a relaxation of standards,
both ethical and
esthetic. The amenities decline, the non-utilitarian
aspects of culture decrease,
tolerance ceases to be
feasible, and reason to be altogether sufficient. It is
less important that the search for truth should sur-
vive than that the cancers of society shou'ld be cut
out; but it is important enough. The critic therefore
must act with a full sense of authority and respon-
sibility toward what, when the crisis is over, we
shall want to come back to; culture of that kind is
like a cathedral
where, just now, we cannot often
pray but which we must preserve from bombard-
ment. And culture of that kind has its uses in any
program of protest.
It must not stop men from
fighting to restore order to the world, but it may
give them a sense of what order signifies and stands
for.
The Enemy
JOSEPHINE HERBST
THE ROAR of the explosion came in the middle
half of the picture. It was an American film with
inserts tagged on in Spanish and the American voices
coming steadily from empty smiling faces not now
distinctly heard were a long way off. A harsh smell
of smoke stung the lazy cigarette bogged air. Several
men in the back rows bolted up the dark aisle. Two
from the front fumbling with pocket flashlights
stumbled against one another and brushed by Mrs.
Sidney as she started from the aisle seat.
"Senora, sit down," said a man rapidly thrusting
his flashlight
toward the American lady. She sat
down. The picture went on in the dark house. Amer-
ican college kids played a ukelele and a big ca r
bulging with boys in white pants and blazers and
girls in fluffy dresses rolled before her eyes as in-
credible in the sudden tenseness of the picture house
as Fiji Islanders dancing around a mess ·of cannibal
flesh. She sat strained to the noises of the street, on
edge, alert and waiting. A machine gun splattered
into the boom of a second explosion and then the
iron shutter at the entrance of the theater rang down
with a loud chatter.
People sat back in their seats
stiffly as if an order had come for "Hands up." No
one spoke. A single thin scream pierced the iron
shutter and the frail building and then it was dead
quiet.
7
