THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
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hand, as to what constitutes a fair review. Political pressure in the Liberal
weeklies is something I have surmised and heard about; I have never expe·
rienced it, although I have contributed to three off and on for some years.
Corrupt or not, political pressure is to be expected; I think most of it is
honest and convinced; the corruption is of taste and the critical faculty
itself: bigotry and hope-worse evils to combat, by far, than intellectual
venality.... Whether these corruptions have made serious literary criti·
cism an "isolated cult" I do not know. I should doubt it. Being on occa·
sion a serious critic myself, I find it hard to tell whether I am isolated and
part of a cult, or working cooperatively and a functional part of a culture.
One varies in sentiment to different reactions.
4. I have never fow1d it possible to earn a living entirely by writing what
I prefer to write. Except for a few successful novelists I know no one of
my generation who has. I don't know any painters or composers or sculp·
tors who have either. Journalism, lecturing, teaching, and edito.rial work
seem to go with being an artist in any sort. Part of the rub comes not in
the structure of society but in the weakness of the individual. The average
man who thinks of himself as a writer wants to live like his betters in
money, and so far thinks he ought to that he deserts his own profession for
theirs; that is the great reason why the average writer does not count much
as a writer. The bums of the literary world, who do no work at all, seem
to me better examples of the profession than that. This is another way of
saying that Americans have not yet tried writing as a profession except on
the lesser levels. But so far as the economic system goes it gives a place
to the writer exactly as precarious as to the lobster-fisherman, and with less
investment, or any man of odd jobs. I do not mean that I think this situa·
tion laudable or comfortable; I mean that the writer who has talent and a
little recognition has a pretty good chance of getting along as well as the
lobsterman with only a few odd jobs thrown in. The writer without talent
or without recognition has no chance at all.
5. I do not believe that I feel any allegiance to a group, class, organiza·
tion, region, religion, or system of thought. I do not conceive my writing
as expressing myself as an individual. It may be one or both; but I
neither believe nor conceive, and
if
I did I should try to change my habits.
I try to express what I am writing about. The attempt at objective expres·
sion naturally involves all sorts of personal attitudes and allegiances-–
they may be the skeleton of the work, even-but these are never of primary
concern during the exercise of the craft.
6. I suppose the leftist tendency in writing since the depression began is
partly due to emphatic and unavoidable observation of the insecurity and
confusion of the individual and the group in our society: social aware·
ness; and partly due to the inoculation, variously reacted to, of one con·
