THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
115
The litP-rature from and about which a man may generalize must
consist of the books he has read, and for an American those are commonly
books in English, of which there is a. longer line by English writers than
by American. In this sense the past is less likely to be "mostly American"
the more literature a given person has read. I do not see what purpose
would be served were I to confide my own range of reading. To designate
any (especially valued) elements in it would be to trot out a list of no
particular interest beyond the fact that it happened to be mine. As for
Henry James and Whitman, it would require more critical mastery than I
possess over present and emergent writing in America to analyse their
respective relevancies. It seems to me rather a pedantic task to do so, and
I'm damn well tired of hearing the two of them built up into Antithetical
Forces in American literature. That isn't what they wrote for; it certainly
isn't what they wrote
as;
and in an English-American literature which
likewise accommodates Chaucer and Yeats, Shakespeare and Pope and
Hardy, it seems to me fruitless to fence up a couple of 19th Century cate–
gories and herd every American writer into one or the othex: of them.
Finally, "the present and future of American writing" is a pompous mout!J.–
ful which sounds empty to me.
2. Whatever I am able to write as an artist is responsive to the known
existence of minds sensitive to language and capable. of imagination. I
have written little or no verse deliberately to gratify or affect any one per–
son or group of persons. On the other hand, I believe it is impossible to be
a writer without being conscious of possible readers; indeed, an exact idea
of how different people read is part of a writer's necessary knowledge of
his predicament. It seems to me certain, however, that the sense of life and
the sense of art, when they exist together at full intensity, leave little room
for consideration of any but the abstract, loved-because-all-potential,
reader. I put this down because it is a permanent truth which your ques–
tions lead away from, not toward. Such writing as we are here engaged in
is obviously directed at a very palpable "audience" of Americans versed in
literature and disposed to think their way through current political and
social obsessions. This must be the audience for serious American writing.
As to whether it has grown or shrunk in the last ten years, that is a
question to which nothing that anyone would say could provide an answer,
failing purely statistical research.
3. You must realize how heavily baited this question is. Writers com–
monly affect amusement or worse at the public observations of their critics,
and it is certainly true that unless criticism is technical, personal and fairly
frequent it is not likely to engage a writer's enthusiasm. One reason is that
the public kind of criticism is usually concerned with finished work in
which the writer no longer has much interest. Another reason is that if the
writer is a scrupulous one he has usually, in the course of writing, threshed
out as best he could every issue raised by the critic and a great many more
