THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
l07
"services" and the dreadful hymnody of the Protestant churches. There
was a Celtic gift for language, and talent in the form of a remarkable
excess of energy, op the maternal side of my family. And I was handed out,
as I have said, a thorough secondary classical education, from the age of
twelve through the age of seventeen, in the public schools of Boston. I did
not know I was a member of a class until I was twenty-one; but I knew I
was a member of a racial and religious minority, from an early age. One
of the great shocks of my life came when I discovered that bigotry existed
not only among the Catholics, but among the Protestants, whom I had
thought would be tolerant and civilized (since their pretentions were always
in that direction) . It was borne in upon me, all during my adolescence,
that I was a "Mick," no matter what my other faults or virtues might be.
It took me a long time to take this fact easily, and to understand the situa–
tion which gave rise to the minor persecutions I endured at the hands of
supposedly educated and humane people.- I came from the white-collar
class and it was difficult to erase the dangerous tendencies-the impulse to
"ripe" and respect "nice people"- of this class. These tendencies I have
wrung out of my spiritual constitution with a great deal of success,· I am
proud to say. - Beyond these basic influences, I think of my writing as the
expression of my own development as an individual.
6. The political tendency of American writing since 1930 is, I believe,
more symptomatic of a spiritual
malaise
than is generally supposed.
Granted that the economic crisis became grave; it
is
nevertheless peculiar
and highly symptomatic that -intellectuals having discovered that "free–
dom" is not enough, and does not automatically lead tG depth of insight
and peace of mind, threw over
every scrap of their former entJhusiasms,
as
though there were something sinful in them. The economic crisis occurred
when that generation of young people was entering the thirties; and,
instead of fighting out the personal ills attendant upon the transition from
youth to middle age, they took refuge in closed systems of belief, and
automatically (many of them) committed creative suicide.... "Literary
nationalism" has valuable elements in it; it opened the eyes of writers,
superficially at least, to conditions which had surrounded them from
childhood, but which they had spent much effmt "escaping." But when
this nationalism took a fixed form (when it became more fashionable to
examine the situation of the share-cropper, for example, than the situation
of slum-dwellers
in
Chelsea, Massachusetts, or Newark, New Jersey) its
value dwindled. And the closing of one foreign culture after another, tG
the critical and appreciative examination of students, is one deplorable
result of thinking in purely political terms. Any purely chauvinistic enthu·
siasm is, of course, always ridiculous.
This is the place, perhaps, to state my belief that the true sincerity
and compassion which humane detachment alone can give, are necessary
before the writer can pass judgment upon the ills of his time. TG sink one–
self into a party is fatal, no matter how noble the tenets of that party may
