THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
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whole" with any sense of knowing what I'm talking about. It seems to me
healthy that good intelligences should be focused on political issues, and
certain political and social writing has interested me a great deal. So far
as I am concerned, however, salvation lies neither in political action nor
in indifference to it. I would not admit sympathy for uncritical emphasis
on anything, but I am certainly sympathetic to Americans who wish to
articulate as much as possible of their own environment. It is necessary as
usual to discriminate between the pure discoverers and those who vulgar–
ize what has been discovered.
7. For at least seven years the question has been inescapable. As a burn–
ing question it is now about as dismal as "Have you considered the ques–
tion of your attitude towards jazz?" The general wrong which burdens the
world must be fought and suffered in each individual life; it is an evil
inclusive of but immeasurably greater than war; .its manifestations are
more constant and closer to home. As we understand, condemn and weep
for private wrongs, by the same token we condemn, though we may have
to live through, the mass denial of life which is war. Writers who have
access to the knowledge of the world now know much more than ever before
about the causes and characteristics of war; it is their responsibility to
write what they know and to keep on writing it, not with delusions of
power but with respect, war or peace, for the truth.
R. P. Blackmur:
I.
It is only when asked that I am conscious of a Usable Past; when I
feel that it exists, and that I am its product. When not asked I do not dis–
tinguish it as a separable question; and even when asked the distinction
seems artificial, made for purposes of discourse, and not otherwise ger–
mane to any
problem
in any writing I have done or expect to do. In short,
I believe that the Past is Usable and is Used without regard to my precise
consciousness of it but just insofar as it is available to me. As it happens,
Henry James is more available to me than Walt Whitman, not because of
a difference in magnitude which might be unfavourable to James, but
because James got more of his intention on the page than Whitman did; at
least for me. On the other hand, I know that for many, intentions are more
useful than actualities; and I do not mean to be invidious: I should say
that intentions predominated in the New Testament. What is actual is very
