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PARTISAN REVIEW
tions, a presumption which I think you should regret. I should like to
take up No.
l
at some length and the others more briefly.
I.
"Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a 'usable'
past?" The trouble with this is that it does not call for an answer; it con–
tains an answer, and worse, it contains two or three answers.
If
it had been
merely, "Are you conscious of the existence of the past?" there would
have been only one possible answer. In that case the interrogation would
have been merely rhetorical; you would in fact have been stating a prop–
osition. I will not go into the ambiguity of the phrase "in your own writ–
ing" further than to point out that if it means "as you write" it is super–
fluous. But the words "a 'usable' " introduce confusion. They imply that
there are pasts and pasts; that one sort is "usable" and another sort is "not
usable"; and further that by "usable" we must understand some other
quality, since the word is in quotation marks and therefore does not mean
what it says.
Well, but this is literary shop talk, as everyone knows. Precisely; but
let literary shop talk remain where it belongs, in the literary shops, and
not be made the language of serious discussion. For if you are using
"usable past" in the sense in which literary businessmen understand it, no
writer of devotion can accept your terms. But I take it that the quotation
marks are marks of deprecation; that what you mean to ask is something
like this: "Is your consciousness of the past such as to enrich your writing,
or are you merely helplessly conscious of it?" Confronted by these alter–
natives (and you make no suggestion of degree) no writer this side of
sterility can return any answer but one; the self-answered question dis–
solves. You knew it would, else you would not have asked:
"Is this [past] mostly American?" Now we come to the point, which
is again not a question but a proposition, since it is American writers whom
you are addressing. How can the past which nourishes them be anything
but "mostly American" if America has been their home? And in the rare
event that it has not been their home, is not the answer likewise implied?
But now something happens:
"What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say,
for example, that Henry James' work is more relevant to the present and
future of American writing than Walt Whitman's?" Up to this point we
have been considering the past, that past whose infinity of charm and
action and unhappiness each man inherits and remembers. Now as exam–
ples of "Figures" in that mostly American past you propose two writers
and two bodies of literature. Without warning the midnight lamp is lit;
the topic narrows down to that of literary presences and models. This
seems strange to me; it seems strange that you should be thinking of the
American past in terms of Whitman and James instead of Calhoun and
Hanna and Gould and Gary and Debs. And it appears now that by the
"mostly American" past of the second question you meant past literature.
I do not think it would be wilfully naive to expect you to say so.
