40
PARTISAN REVIEW
who have not been subjected to the same thing can know. Besides, critics
are perhaps the most important part of one's audience. I doubt
if
business
and political pressures influence the criticism of poetry to any consider·
able extent. The Marxist point of view is exclusive, and I suppose that
extremists encounter a good deal of opposition, but that there
is
anything
corrupt about the opposition is something else.
-4.
I have not tried to make a living by writing. However, the fact that
writers commonly take advantage of "such crutches as teaching and edi·
torial work" is nothing that entitles writers to indulge themselves in spasms
of self-pity. Most people avail themselves of crutches of one sort or
another: lawyers promote business enterprises; doctors marry rich women
and buy and sell securities. I think that there is a place in the present
economic system for literature as a profession.
5. Unquestionably and notwithstanding the fact that I indulge in a good
deal of abstraction, I do not regard my poems as mainly an expression of
myself, nor as modern in the sense in which that unpleasant commonplace
is so frequently used. Still, some time ago, when I sent one of my books to
an honest man in England, he wrote to me saying that he found it personal
and modern, and that these qualities were not his dish of tea.
6. I don't believe in factitious Americanism.
An
American has to be an
American because there is nothing else for him to be and also, I hope,
because it would not matter if there was. Even so, I believe in forgetting
about it except as a quality, a savor.
7. I don't think that the United States should enter into the next world
war, if there is to be another, unless it does so with the idea of dominating
the world that comes out of it, or unless it is required to enter it in self·
defense. The question respecting the responsibility of writers in war is a
very theoretical question respecting an extremely practical state of affairs.
A war is a military state of affairs, not a literary one. Conceding that the
propagandists don't agree, does it matter that they don't agree? The role
of the writer in war remains the fundamental role of the writer intensified
and concentrated.
Gertrude Stein:
I am afraid the questions are not the kind that interest me a lot but I
have written down an answer to each one anyway.
