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PARTISAN REVIEW
epilogue he endeavored to furnish his anti-modernism with a
theoretical framework by appealing to Spengler's systematization
of the celebrated antimony between "culture" and "civilization".
But Brooks' latest utterances suggest that a further shift has
occurred and that in his mind the antithesis between New England
and the megalopolis may have been replaced in importance by an
antithesis between America, conceived as a politico-cultural total–
ity, and fascist Europe. He has recently published the transcript
of an address delivered to the Connecticut chapter of the League of
American Writers. "We are Americans," he assures the Connecti–
cut writers, "and Americans are born free." We have a national
tradition and it is intrinsically democratic, and as for collectivism:
of course Americans are collectivists! Franklin and
J.
Q.
Adams
.'were collectivists. Our revolution was fought in the name of col–
lectivism. And isn't the League of American Writers a collectivity?
Needless to say, by the time Brooks has finished playing on the
word it has shed all historical meaning. "We are prepared to show
that this country can do something better than fascism or com–
munism," he boasts, and he concludes: "It is something to win the
proletariat, but the writers of this state have got to win the swells,
who are the farmers. . . . In order to win them, you have got to
learn their language, for theirs is the sacred language of this coun·
try, as difficult for outsiders to learn as Hebrew or Sanscrit."
The "Flowering", orderly and elevated in its temper, has not
prepared us for the incoherence of these remarks, the bellicose
resonance of the allusions to
"this
country", the snobbish mystifi–
cation involved in the appeals to a secret Yankee language. Trans–
lated into current politics, the nostalgia of the "Flowering" turns
out to resemble the speeches at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon
-a combination of gala rhetoric and inscrutable reasoning.
There is an element of the comedy of mistaken identity
in
Brooks' rapprochment with rural Connecticut (one had supposed
that region to be monopolized by Polish farmers and contributors
to
The New Republic);
and even more in his collaboration with a
latter day brand of democratic-communism which, although he
underwrites its democratic professions and rejects its communist
ones, is in fact neither democratic nor communist. But in other
respects the later phases of this career are matter for serious regret.
The writer who began by calling into question the prevailing
