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PARTISAN REVIEW
medicine, say, need not be) a most competitive profession and one always
forced to face social resistance. This seems to me to be in the nature of the
literary activity; any artist in the degree that he is notable must always
be making minor revolutions or supporting them, revolutions in taste and
feeling. He is therefore always going to he rejected and resisted both by
some
part of his profession and hy
some
part of society. No doubt this
entails a certain amount of social waste. And no doubt the present social
system wastes far more literary talent than other conceivable systems
might; it wastes everything. On the other hand, it must he confessed that
it allows and even encourages a great deal too.
I think I should he more willing to attack the literary waste
in
our
present system (I mean apart from the general waste of human life and its
best possibilities) if I had a clearer notion of how I should like to see the
economic life of the writer organized. But whenever an alternative to
literary
laissez faire
is put forward which undertakes to
be
more rational
and thoroughgoing than WPA, it contrives to theorize literature into being
more important than it is and should be, to make it into a form of religion
and to bring it into the service of the state and eventually under the control
of a bureau. It is hard to imagine a condition in which, as someone said,
the state will pay the piper and the piper will call his own tune.
Robert Penn Warren:
I simply haven't had the time to do a proper set of answers to your
questions. They are good questions, I think, and being good, they are not
questions which can he answered in an hour or so. But I may give you a
few jottings now, which, possibly, may have some statistical interest
for you.
I.
Yes. Or rather, after a thing is done, I can see its relation to a "usable
past." In poetry, this "usable past" is not American, for I feel that Ameri·
can poetry has very little to offer the modern writer-except some of Emily
Dickinson and a very little of Emerson. But in fiction the picture appears
very different. Certainly, I feel that the work of James is much more rele·
vant to the present and future of American writing than the work of Walt
Whitman. On the technical side, the work of Whitman has, it seems to me,
been exercising a very destructive influence.
2. I suppose that every writer wants an audience, but I could not under·
take to describe the audience which I want at the time when I am actually
