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PARTISAN REVIEW
far from motivating thought or action; it is only their result; so it may he
that what we mean when we say Whitman is more relevant as motive power
for American writing, present and future, than what we mean when we
say James.... As to the part of your question which asks whether or not
the usable past is mostly American, I should say that it ought to be so
in
history and that it ought not to be so, and cannot be so, in other allegiances.
I cannot imagine John Bunyan and Mark Twain as not thoroughly English
and American; but I cannot imagine either of them without the Greek and
Hebrew Testaments. As for myself I should not like to feel that I could
only use
Hawthorn~
at the expense of Dostoieffsky or Melville at the
expense of Shakespeare or Emerson at the expense of Montaigne. Is not
the Past an institution like the Common Law?-intricate, devious, desul–
tory, confused?-yet shaping the patterns by which we act and feel and
itself modified by the patterns it newly shapes?
2. I should like to think of myself as writing for a wide audience in all
of my imaginative work; I know that as a. fact I write for a limited, scat·
tered, largely accidental audience. I believe that it is due to my own
defects-of style and sensibility and scope--that my audience is so lim·
ited; I have no personal justification for complaint. On the other hand I
know that most of my contemporaries whom I admire suffer from neglect
through no p·ersonal defect; the lack of deep interest and performance is
the readers' not the writers'. I assume that this condition has always pre·
vailed; that it is due in our day partly to the money cost of reading, partly
to anthology-minded teaching of literature, and partly to plain incapacity.
I suppose-thirty or forty thousand persons a year may read Moby Dick or
Tom Jones; that is an accident of education. A hundred and twenty odd
thousand copies of Santayana's Last Puritan were sold in the year .of pub·
lication; that is an accident of fashion. The potential audience for serious
reading
if
money and the anthology-mind are ignored should be some·
where between those figures: say seventy-five thousand readers of imag·
inative literature--hardly enough to support fifty writers at the rate of a
book every other year. Fortunately for the writers, the meretricious audi·
ence r·eads serious books for the wrong reasons; like voters. In my own
case, and for the record: most of what I publish is literary criticism: it is
deliberately addressed to a small audience. I do not see how aside from
journalism serious and technical literary criticism can command more
than an audience of a few thousand, unless it is taken up in the colleges.
3. I have been unusually lucky in the criticism my own work has received
both in magazines and in the New York newspapers; over half of it
hh.
been honest and helpful. I should say that the corruption of the literary
supplements by advertising-which is conspicuous-is no more damaging,
and perhaps less so, than the damage due to the selection of ignorant or
patronising reviewers and the lack of editorial discipline, applied before·
