48
PARTISAN REVIEW
frontiersmen, tillers of soil, and builders of towns have been for the main
part neither Americans nor non-Americans in the cultural sense--because
their culture has been a home made, transitional folk mores, without
national scope, or they have had no culture at all, except for racial or
sectarian remnants (Pennsylvania Germans, Huguenots, Mexican, Scandi–
navian, Negro, Mormon, Quaker). These lower case americans have been
and remain "aliens". Their culture exists in the future not in the past.
Because the cultured Americans have been, almost exclusively, mem·
hers of the upper class, while the americans are workers and farmers,
storekeepers and country doctors, many writers today believe that the
"soil" and the folk is more Revolutionary, as well as more American, than
the library, the museum and the idea. This is a very serious mistake. The
most brutal and philistine american executive-type is also opposed instinc–
tively to European art and literature, and likes to stage himelf as a plain
guy, a member of the cultural rank and file. And in literature itself the
"people's writers", from Mark Twain to Sinclair Lewis, merely
start
with
the soil; they climb in the direction of the Academy, which, as the anti·
thesis .of the real but uncultured folk, is also neither American nor Euro·
pean but merely an upper class sublimation of unreality.
On the other hand, writers like Poe, Whitman, or James, who take
off from the contrast and tension between Europe and America, remain
equally relevant, whether they move East, West, or up and down. America
can be known only through the perspective of international culture. Con–
versely, it can understand world ideas only if it applies them to itself.
Every writer today who js worth anything shows in some way the
influence of the overturn that took place in American prose and poetry
via Gertrude Stein and others. I wish to characterise this movement as
essentially an aristocratic (European-minded American) aping of ameri·
can proletarian speech. (Examples: Stein, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Moore,
Cummings.) This writing, which at its best goes much farther in the direc·
tion of both aural accuracy and literary associations than Whitman's pri–
vate lingo, represents a synthesis, a new era in American self-conscious–
ness and consciousness of the world. Our living language is brought into
focus with the living literature of the past; it need not fear that looking
hack to the masterpieces of Europe and antiquity will turn it into a pillar
of salt.
On
the other hand, American letters need strive no longer to
shape every experience into a plaster of Paris model of a European
original. Through bringing its major social element into play, American
culture has begun to develop an identity of its own.
Already, however, in novels, Hollywood, Broadway, this experimental
"cultural-proletarian" language is being academicised, cleaned up, made
"natural" (example,
Abe Lincoln in Illinois),
made 100% American,
i.e. zero.
2. A writer remains alive so long as he postulates the existence of a sec·
tion of the population whose cultural dynamism
is
at least equal to his
