SEVEN QUESTIONS
31
fertile to writers. In certain particulars, he is more of our time than
Whitman: thus the psychological relativism in his characterizations, and
the more sophisticated conception of Time in his work. Whitman should
always have a profound and salutary moral value. He emphasized many
of the right things, comradeship, positive science, materialism, freedom
from pruriency, naturalism and spontaneity in the human being. But he
was the victim of his own breadth. His all-inclusiveness left him undis–
criminating. Thus, one often gets the impression that he did not know when
he was good and when he wasn1_ as a poet. He was indiscriminate in the
values he often places on objects in the world and experiences which he
described in his poetry. At times he seemed to he all for experience, and
too little for the organization of it. His mysticism is untenable. The
democracy of which he wrote was already being washed into the historic
past during his own lifetime. His ideology as a whole is now only a his–
toric curiosity. It is interesting to observe that present day poets who
reveal a strong Whitmanesque influence are limited in scope and outlook.
They cannot take over his ideology and develop it further because it has
been- cast aside by history. In consequence, they must confine themselves
to folk details, and when they generalize, they seem sentimental and often,
they even descend to bathos. We cannot blame Whitman for his disciples,
but at times, his disciples have found in
him
a justification for indiscipline,
and even for the Philistine anti-intellectualism whch they cling to. Whit–
man has already been retroactively admitted to the Communist Party, and
the People's Front, and such a business merely constitutes an abortion on
both history and literary critcism. It is as silly as the efforts of the Dala–
diers to drape themselves in the mantles of Rohespierre and Danton.
2. It is fatal for an ·author to conceive of himself as writing for a definite
audience when he seeks to create literature. I think that he should try to
tell the truth. I think that the audience for serious writing was growing
at the beginning of the present decade, hut that it is now shrinking. The
present is an intensely reactionary period. Reaction, the influence of
Hollywood, the existence of political and religious pressure groups, the
many confusions of the present, such are the causes tending to narrow
down the audience for serious literature today.
3. Yes, I think that the practice of "serious literary criticism" has become
"an isolated cult". The influence of Commerce is of course a basic cause,
and part of that influence is manifested directly or indirectly through
Hollywood. Taste is corrupted. More and more, there is a tendency to
insulate hooks that are too truthful from the public. The liberal weeklies
have abandoned their function in literary criticism as in politics. The
editorship of both
The Nation
and
The New Republic
is in the hands of
renegades from liberalism, and the literary editor of
The New Republic
is
a triple renegade: from liberalism, from socialism, and from literary
values. At times, there are contributions to this section which can only he
