SEVEN QUESTIONS
33
tendency toward a cultural nationalism threatens to destroy that spirit.
The present wave of literary nationalism does not merely demand a
renewed emphasis on the specifically American elements in our culture.
It falsifies the meaning and background of these elements, and it twists
our history to fit partisan political needs of the present. It demands
thinking in shibboleths and catch words which is not thinking at all. The
best of twentieth century American literature describes American life, and
it is many-sided. But it is critical in spirit. And that critical spirit is
under attack; it is being poisoned and perverted, turned into the hand·
maiden of political interests, and bankrupt political programs. In con·
sequence some writers who have been engulfed in this wave are turning
themselves into literary cops. They seem, in certain instances, to
he
well
on the way toward constituting themselves a self-appointed F.B.I. of the
spirit of man, and of the spirit of a free modern literature.
7. It is difficult for me to 'answer your last question because the real
estate business has never been my
metier.
Personally, I have no economic
interests in Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, the Argentine, Cuba,
Haiti, San Salvador, Tunisia, Corsica, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tientsin,
Singapore, the Yangtze-Kiang River, the Road to Mandalay, Mongolia,
Teschen, Budapest, the Ukraine, Danzig, Iceland, Finland, Greenland,
Nova Scotia, Constantinople, Alsace Lorraine, or Guam, not to mention
the Suez Canal, Ethiopia, or the Island of Yap. Of course, many tell us
that the British Navy is required to protect our freedom. But this is one
joke that the Farrells, the Brennans, the Kellys, the Sullivans, the O'Tooles,
the Sweeneys, the Gannons, the Bannons, and the Murphys could never
get
the point of. It all reminds me of the story that Max Nomad tells
about the Albanian. During the last war, someone asked an Albanian how
he
felt about the war. He replied: "What? Two dogs are fighting for a
bone, and you ask the hone how it feels?"
Kenneth Fearing:
Some of these questions are certainly pertinent to the times, and are
well
formulated. Others, though sufficiently provocative, seemed marked by
a
sort of Wodehouse redundancy. And still others, part of three, and pos–
sibly seven, are so framed as to arouse the suspicion you may he attempting
to
extend and further confuse one or another of those familiar political
achisms
that are, to most writers, so overwhelmingly dreary and fruitless.
I hope not; hut
if
you are, my answers are not intended to abet the effort.
To reply, then, in detail:
I. I am conscious, in my own writing, that I avail myself of a cultural
