4
PARTISAN REVIEW
bellicose orators neyer allude to: and this is the fact that not a
single work of art grew out of the ordeal of 1914-18 which is not
filled with a spirit of loathing of the war. Every one of these works,
revealing the duplicity of the ideals that promote such wars,
is
essentially an indictment of the society that begets them. And, like–
wise, let us note the further indisputable fact that the moral,
if
not
the esthetic, origin of nearly every significant movement in post·
war European and American writing has been traced to the opposi–
tion the war aroused among the people and the dissident intellec–
tuals, to the exposure of its counterfeit idealism, to the virulent
reaction against its predatory motives and aims.
The war novels of Barbusse, Remarque, Cummings, and Dos
Passos are still remembered, but who remembers, who prizes, a
single novel, poem, or play that applauded or vindicated the
w~r?
Plainly if literature is to survive another such experience it will
do so not by concealing but by disclosing the real nature of the war,
not by affirming but by negating it. What is Zweig doing, then,
when he denies the truth his art told in his war novel? Denying
the tangible and irreducible human values that alone can sustain
literature, he is making common cause with the exponents of politi–
cal alibis and mystifications. The better to defend literature in the
abstract, he is renouncing it in the concrete. Such are the uses of
bourgeois anti-fascism-for inevitably the theory of maintaining
the cultural heritage by means of supporting our decrepit social
system, including the wars it gives rise to, cannot but lead in prac–
tice to the same consequences as fascism itself.
2.
What is Zweig's recantation if not a symptom of hysteria, if
not an expression of the present demoralized condition of letters?
And it is not merely a question of peering into this or that writer's
face for signs of political depravity. In reality it is the total func–
tion of the writer in this period and the meaning of his work which
are involved here.
As the tide of patriotism and democratic eloquence rises, one
observes an ebb of creative energy and a rapid decline of standards
in all spheres of the intellect and of the imagination. Everyone
knows that though books are still being printed in the totalitarian
