72
PARTISAN REVIEW
Briffault thinks, that is the object of his hatred, but rather the human
spirit and its whole career. For Julian and his Zena are vocally con-
temptuous not so much of the clear oppressors and the patent ob-
scurantists. They do hate these, we gather, but their most articulate con-
tempt is rather for some of the more energetically humane and decent
examples of humanity. D. H. Lawrence is a controversial figure, so we
need not instance the slander of him, but a man's opinions on Mozart,
Goethe and Spinoza are an excellent clue to his sensitivity; Mr. Brif-
fault, through the hero and heroine of
Europa
m
Limbo,
passes on all
three. Mozart? The very essence of stuffy bourgeois decadence-makes
free people want to open windows. Goethe? An inflated reputation.
Spinoza? Our hero does not scruple to borrow where he has cursed:
"There is but one liberty," he says, "that is of vital worth: ... the liberty
to think honestly." But Spinoza? A coward and a cheap liberal whose
home is now quite aptly a brothel.
All this is, of course, downright vulgarity and expectable from the
man who, in his
Breakdown,
advocated a post-revolutionary period of
fifty years in which the cultural .tradition of Europe would be locked
away from the new society. But Mr. Briffault, I take it, is supposed to be
a Marxist and this makes the vulgarity doubly culpable. If there is one
thing the dialectic of history teaches it is an attitude on cultural matters
the very opposite of this splenetic one. But that attitude is difficult and
complex, while the attitude of spleen and vulgarity is simple and easy.
And dangerous: because it is indiscriminate, irresponsible and ignorant
of the humanity it seeks to control; because, rejecting all history, it be-
lieves that all good was born with itself. It wants not so much a liberated
humanity as a sterilized humanity and it would gladly make a waste-
land if it could call the silence peace.
LIONEL TRILLING
NEW ATTITUDES
NEW LETTERS IN AMERICA.
Edited by Horace Gregory. W. W.
Norton. $2.00.
Here is volume one, number one, of a new semi-annual 'periodical';
it is an exciting book. To begin with, it does not suffer from that dreary
virtue, promise, which new letters so frequently depend on to cover a
multitude of sins. Nor is it one of those collections which attempts to
compensate for its inadequacy as literature by hinting broadly at every
turn the impiety of being bored by righteousness. The literary competence
of these writers is such that they do not have to depend for interest either
on our professional concern with literature or on our political piety.
What's more, this competence is not simply a matter of the technical
ingenuity which can grind out slick rehashes of familiar and consequently
blurred apprehensions. It is not even a matter of technical ingenuity
wedded to the ability to define dramatically a fresh apprehension; the
bat-like flights from the familiar to the private and eccentric so frequent
in the serious literature of the 20's showed too clearly how ineffectual
