44
PARTISAN REYIEW
sion and declaration in the only world it can know, that under its nose.
When it has succeded in knowing what it is talking about in those terms
it may possibly begin to interest the man ·of alert senses (Henry Adams)
who already knows the world but would be glad to see it correlated by the
artist (the writer) in some new sort of creative composition. "Literary
nationalism" is a confusion in terms due to bandy-legged and cross-eyed
witnesses to what is before them. It hides under its blatancies the very
much neglected fact that when a man sees and apprehends with his mind
what is before him in America that which he sees there must perforce
be
American. Give stupidity any name you please, call it American, British
or even German, it's still stupidity. We're not talking about that. A renewed
interest in specifically "American" elements in our culture (provided they
are related in the mind to general culture) would be the beginning of any
basic understanding of literature among us.
7.
If
war comes we've got to fight. Writing would be secondary. The one
thing to guard against would be the tendency to become a liar for propa·
ganda's sake. That difficulty always faces a man.
If
I had to be shot, I'd
hope fervently that the guys at the other end would make an artistic job
of it by shooting straight. The value always comes out, in one form or
another, if we stick to our guns. Meanwhile, long live in America
the
memory of Eugene Debs!
John Peale Bishop:
I.
I am conscious of a usable past, though whether the use I have made
of that consicousness is one\ of which others
can
approve is more
than
I
ought to say. In so far as this past is a part of my own memory, it is, of
course, American. Because I was born and brought up in a portion of
the
border South which had had complete experience of Civil War, but which
had partially escaped Reconstruction, I have had access to an older Amer–
ica than most of my contemporaries. I have known, not through docu–
ments, but through sight and touch and smell a way of living that belonged
to the early Republic. Indeed, when I remember certain people I have
known, old when I was very young, and recall all I have heard them say,
it seems to me that I can stretch, not only my mind, but my body as well
into the eighteenth century. But aside from these recollections, which are
important only because they are personal, it can also he said that for me,
as for any American, the past of America is as long as that of modem
Europe. It should not be forgotten that, though America was settled by
Europeans, Europe as we know it could never have come into existence
