38
PARTISAN REVIEW
his choice, with a kind of confidence in his way of life that has some
merit, certainly.
Literature as a profession? It
is
a profession, and the professional
literary man is on his own as any other professional man is.
If
you mean, is there any place in our present economic system for
the practice of literature as a source of steady income and economic secur·
ity, I should say, no. There never has been, in any system, any guarantee
of economic security for the artist, unless he took a job and worked under
orders as other men do for a steady living. You simply cannot secure
your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic
of society and expect society to feed you regularly. The artist of the present
day is demanding (I think childishly) that he be given, free, a great many
irreconcilable rights and privileges. He wants as a right freedoms which
the great spirits of all time have had to fight and often to die for.
If
he
wants freedom, let him fight and die for it too,
if
he must, and not expect
it to be handed to him on a silver plate.
5. I find my writing reveals all sorts of sympathies and interests which I
had not formulated exactly to myself; "the expression of myself as an
individual" has never been my aim. My whole attempt has been to dis·
cover and understand human motives, human feelings, to make a distilla·
tion of what human relations and experiences my. mind has been able to
absorb. I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have
never known two alike; there are broad classifications and deep si.ffiilar·
ities, but I am interested in the thumb print. I am passionately involved
with these individuals who populate all these enormous migrations, calam·
ities; who fight wars and furnish life for the future; these beings without
which, one by one, all the "broad movements of history" could never take
place. One by one-as they were born.
6. Political tendency since 1930 has been to the last degree a confused,
struggling, drowning-man-and-straw sort of thing, stampede of panicked
crowd, each man trying to save himself-one at a time trying to work out
his horrible confusions. How do I feel about it? I suffer from it, and I
try to work my way out to some firm ground of personal belief, as the
others do. I have times of terror and doubt and indecision, I am confused
in all the uproar of shouting maddened voices and the flourishing of death·
giving weapons.... I should like to save myself, but I have.. no assurance
that I can, for if the victory goes as it threatens, I am not on that side. The
third clause of this questiOJt-1 find biased. Let me not be led away by your
phrase "largely uncritical" in regard to the "emphasis on specifically
American" elements in our culture.
If
we become completely uncritical
and nationalistic, it will be the most European state of mind we could have.
I hope we may not. I hope we shall have balance enough to see ourselves
plainly, and choose what we shall keep and what discard according to our
own needs; not be rushed into fanatic self-love and self-praise as a
