SEVEN QUESTIONS
35
6. At the risk of being banal, I will have to say that American literature
since 1930 has been marked as a whole by an increased economic aware·
ness which has expressed itself, politically, in a heightened partisanship
for one or another organization, vogue, or tradition favoring the cause of
the economically exploited and insecure. I believe that although a good
deal of such writing staggered and all hut fell beneath the burden of its
message, this by-now familiar battle was a necessary and healthy one, with
results that are satisfying at the present .date. As for contemporary trends
toward literary nationalism, critical or uncritical, I am not aware of any,
apart from the tendencies, traditional today, implicit and explicit in the
work of Walt Whitman, and possibly expressed before him.
If,
though,
you mean by "specifically American elements in our culture" the larger
principles of American democracy, which most of us fondly believe (I
know it's an illusion) to
he
America's unique and exclusive contribution
to social evolution, then I think that recently there has been still more
emphasis placed upon them, and I am very much in favor of both the
principles and this trend.
7. I have considered the possible entry of the United States into the next
world war. And I have tried, often, to calculate what sort of a war it will
be-whether along the lines of 1914-18, or along the course it is taking
now, and that is a series of civil wars, wars of the type by which the ruling
class of all Europe succeeded
in
the conquest of Spain. Either course is
possible, and if it is the latter, it seems likely today that France has been
selected as the next arena. Should it become so, most American writers
ought to and will duplicate the aid they gave to loyalist Spain.
If,
on the
other hand, a 1914 war should eventuate I would, personally, urge that
the U. S. give every material aid to any and every enemy of the axis powers,
without, at the same time, omitting any opportunity to call attention to the
cockroach nature of the present British and French governments.
In any event, although it is certain that there is no reliable Ouija
board in my family, that the fate of the world does not hang upon what·
ever word comes from my typewriter, that no one knows precisely where
wishful-thinking leaves off and realistic possibilities begin, and that these
abstract speculations are in the end little more than a nuisance, it is clear
that the writer's responsibility is to tell the truth as he sees it. And that
means, today, that
if
democratic processes are to he preserved and extended
(there is no guarantee that they will he) writers and artists are the decisive
factor
in
their defense and development. The literature of today controls
at least some of the guns of tomorrow. And finally, any writer who pro·
motes the concept of freedom of thought and action for larger and still
larger masses of the people is loyal to the democratic idea, while any who
distorts, disrupts, or denies it is a traitor to it.
