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PARTISAN REVIEW
thorne, that the American writer lacks tne sense of a rich past. There is a
superb "thickness" about the feel of American life; and in any such
"thickness" there must be a strong, even though unformulated, sense of
the past. And part of this is a sense of a
literary
past. I do not mean by
this a special consciousness of the canonical American writers. In my own
case, for example, though I have great admiration and affection for the
American classics and an increasing interest, I know that they have been
far less important to me than the traditional body of European writers.
What I do mean is that I have a fortifying sense that there is, simply, a past
of literature which makes a present all the more possible; and this is some·
thing that, at various times in our history, our writers have not felt. As for
the traditional body of world literature, I find that it becomes, for me,
more and more "usable" and seems less and less in the past at all.
If
I answer the question about Henry James and Walt Whitman by
saying that I think James likely to he the healthier influence upon Ameri·
can writing, I must disclaim meaning any derogation of Whitman himself.
For Whitman is a very great poet and subtler and more beautifully modu·
lated tban most people care to discover. But his influence is likely to be
that of a mood and a manner and likely to encourage the simplified social
emotions and the nationalism I have just spoken of. On the other hand, any
influence that Henry James may have will be through the suggestiveness of
his method. James is essentially critical and moral and therefore more
energetic than Whitman. He is concerned with upsetting preconceptions
and cliches; he sees the difficulties and dangers of the moral and social
life; he is interested in the shadings and contradictions-in drama
in
the
old sense, which is what I feel lacking in contemporary American fiction
-~d
he stands against the black and white, the
de haute en bas,
simpli·
fied morality now so common. Clearly the complexity of the kind of judg·
ment he uses and suggests will not be attractive to the group that puts John
Steinbeck among the American classics and that is preparing for the
"action" of war.
5. In Question 5 the' disjunction is obviously not a valid one. I think of
my work as the expression of myself as an individual
and
(not
or)
as
revealing an allegiance to a group and to a system-or, rather, a tradition
-of thought. It seems to me necessary to conceive one's work ·in this way.
The vulgar-but not ineffective-attack on "individualism" a few years
ago accounted for the dullness, the lack of distinction (the word is signifi·
cant here) of so much of the creative and critical writing that was done
when the idea of the collectively written novel was seriously discussed. I
suppose that one does not have to explain that,
in a certain limited sense,
there is no such thing as an individual-that a mind or a talent, almost by
definition, is a social thing. But once we illegitimately extend that certain
limited sense we run into confusion in morality, in politics, in literature.
As for literature, I am quite willing to say that it is absolutely essential
for the writer to cultivate his individuality to the top of its bent, and to
