SEVEN QUESTIONS
29
exist.
In certain ages writers may assume that they have an audience of a
certain size; but that is very different from "aiming at a definite audience",
on a definite level of intelligence and interest. There are always ideas,
issues, problems; a writer may bring all his equipment to bear upon them;
but again that is not aiming it at an audience, it is grappling with a
problem.
3.
In
the fifteen years that I have been writing I have had three reviews
and one essay that I learned somethiDg from. I have learned a great .deal
from conversation and
correspo~dence.
The corruption of the press, both
right and left wing, has made our
public
literary criticism an isolated cult;
but that does not mean that it is eccentric criticism; the central literary
tradition
is
being fostered today by three or four journals whose combined
circulation does not exceed three thousand.
4. To the first part of this question: No. To the second part: our situ–
ation, in which the writer is ignored by the big public, is better than the
Russian and German situations, in which the traditional respect once paid
to
the prpfession of letters is perverted. The Europeans have always recog–
nized
the importance of literature; they are recognizing it now, even in
Russia, by using press-gang methods to enlist men of letters in the army of
socialist realism. It is better to be ignored.
5.
I cannot see in my writing any
allegiance
to group, class, organization,
region, religion, system of thought; it is profoundly
influenced
by all these
aspects of "culture". I will not attempt to discuss this questioq systemati–
cally. I dislike Marxism, industrialism, finance capitalism, proletarianism,
nationalism and internationalism; I like as
ideas
(I have not the privilege
of participating in them as realities) producers' capitalism, peasants, the
religious community (known today as regionalism) replacing both
utionalism and internationalism, which are economic, not moral and
religious conceptions) ; but I am not concerned with the question of realiz–
ing these preferences. As an imaginative writer looking for realities, I do
not care to
be
either inside or outside a movement that is likely to succeed,
or for that matter to fail. The success or failure of a political idea is none
of my business; my business is to render
ht
words the experience of people,
whatever movement of ideas they may
be
caught up in.
An
artist who gets
into a political movement because he thinks it is the coming thing, is a
weakling; he has neither character nor intelligence.
6.
The failure of proletarianism in literature and the rise of the Popular
ront have doubtless accelerated the shift towards "literary nationalism";
the literary
nation~lists
of the twenties are added those Communists who
whooping it up for Democracy-and who are, of course, helping to
"quidate themselves by also whooping it up for war. I am wholly unsym-
thetic towards literary nationalism of either the older or the newer
