THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
lll
resist all attempts to thwart it.
If
his "social consciousness" requires him
to give a social reason for this, he can say that it is only as he varies from
the usual that he has any social usefulness. And exactly because there is
such a thing as an "individual" there is such a thing as an "allegiance."
My own literary interest-and I suppose that in a writer this is an
allegiance-is in the tradition of humanistic thought and in the intellectual
middle class which believes that it continues this tradition. Nowadays this
is perhaps not properly pious; but however much I may acknowledge the
historic role of the working class and the validity of Marxism, it would be
only
piety for me to say that my chief literary interest lay in this class
and this tradition. What for me is so interesting in the intellectual middle
class is the dramatic contradition of its living with the greatest possibility
(call it illusion) of conscious choice, its believing itself the inheritor of
the great humanist and rationalist tradition, and the badness and stupidity
of its action.
2. By and large, it is for this intellectual class that I suppose I write. It
is a class that has grown enormously in the last decade. And no doubt the
market for serious writing has grown with it. Naturally, a great deal of
this writing is serious only in the sense that ·its publishers consider it to be
serious or only because moral earnestness and intellectual pretension pass
for seriousness. But then real seriousness is at all times a very rare·quality.
4. Perhaps I am not qualified to answer the first part of Question 4,
because I have never tried to make a living out of writing. I have little
doubt that it would be for me next to impossible. I should like to say,
however, that I have found teaching · something more than a "crutch."
Perhaps I have been exceptionally lucky, but I have found it not only a
pleasant but an exciting and instructive kind of work despite its bad repu–
tation. For criticism, at any rate, it seems invaluable to have to deal, on
the one hand, with freshmen who are relatively intelligent but either
ignorant of literature, or naive about it or even inimical to it, for it forcibly
reminds the critic how small a part literature plays in our world and it
makes him bring his assumptions out of their professional cave; then, on
the other hand, it is very salutary to have to face talented seniors who will
give one no quarter; and the subject matter, the most interesting work of
the past, is always a refreshment.
The problems of literary economics are too complex to be written
about briefly. When we remember how the best writers of an age are some–
times commercially the most successful, how, again, they are sometimes
the most obscure, or think of themselves as hacks, or depend on inherited
wealth or position, or do their best work when they are fashionably taken
up by a "decadent" society, or when they are neglected-when we consider
all these contradictions and many more, we can speak of the ideal situation
for the writer only with the greatest diffidence. I find it hard to imagine
a condition in which literature will not be (in one sense, in the sense that
