THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
109
ity in any true sense; and perhaps-indeed, most likely-the post-war
political situation will discontinue the culture of the past and prevent the
culture of the future: there is every likelihood that the writer will he
either silenced or enslaved. This possibility of war must he sitting like a
raven on many a literary desk. But it is not sitting on all the desks and
that, now, is almost a worse fact than that it is sitting on some.
I conceive that in the event of war the writer's responsibilities are: to
survive, to remain undeceived, to keep others from being deceived.
6. This last question may he followed most appropriately by the penul–
timate one, for the willingness--even the eagerness--of so many intellec–
tuals to accept war seems to me to he the direct outgrowth of the political
tendency which has dominated American literature since
1930.
This ten·
dency began as a furious romantic revolutionism and is continuing as an
angry self-righteous reformism of which war is to. he an instrument. The
literature dominated by this tendency has been enormously influential; for
a large and important part of the intellectual middle class it has provided
what is nothing less than a culture and an ethics. It has given these people
"something to live for," a point of view, an object for contempt, a direc–
tion for anger, a code of excited humanitarianism. Perhaps this literary
movement, politically effective rather than artistically successful, cannot
he
wholly reprobated, for
it
has stimulated a kind of moral sensitivity.
But this is a moral sensitivity which seems to me dangerous in its insuf–
ficiency. The subject is too complex and too delicate to be treated briefly
but what I feel about this literature of social protest is that, however legiti·
mate and laudable is 1ts intention of arousing pity and anger, in actual
fact, because of its artistic failures, it constitutes a form of "escapism,"
and offers a subtle Battery by which the progressive middle-class reader
is cockered up with a sense of his own virtue and made to feel that he lives
in a world of perfect certainties in which critical thought or self-critical
feeling are the only dangers.
The literary nationalism we are at present experiencing is of course
an intensification of the ideology I have just commented on. All national–
ism, like all conscious virtue, stands on the edge of vulgarity, and by
nationalism I do not mean the love of one's land, language and literature;
nor do I even mean patriotism; hut I do mean these emotions employed to
prove that there is an intrinsic and nearly exclusive rightness in one's land,
literature and language. No doubt there are some political situations--not
so many as we suppose, however-where nationalism serves truly good
ends. I think the present American leftist nationalism, so much of it the
reaction to the cold contempt of American life which was current a few
years ago, so much of it the calculated policy of a party line, cannot be
anything but vulgar and, in the end, downright chauvinistic.
I.
This leads, of course, to Question
1,
about the "usable past." I think
it can no longer he said, as Henry James said in his biography of Haw-
