312
PARTISAN REVIEW
In this column, I will not say one word for culture. I advise everyone
to adopt with me the profession of being a baseball fan. To be sure, I
used to be a novelist. And that is not in my favor with Archie. Archie has
demonstrated that all of our leading post-war novelists have been sub–
versive, and that they have undermined the morale of youth. One of these
dangerous fellows, Ernest Hemingway, influenced my own writing at a
critical time. His writing suggested to me many possibilities in subject
matter and the use of dialogue which I had not perceived clearly before
I read him. And since his work is so dangerous, it must have undermined
my morale. And I fear that the corruption must be not only in me but
also in my novels. So God bless the mark, the less I say about novels the
better. I am skipping the question entirely.
That saves me from MacLeish, but there is still Waldo. I once told
Waldo a lie. He asked me if I had read his book,
The Rediscovery of
America.
I said that I had, but did not understand it. However, I really
did understand what he was saying. He said that the way to rediscover
America was for everyone else to become like Waldo Frank and to get a
"sense of the whole." Well, the trouble with me was that I was under the
influence of John Dewey. And Waldo has just written to prove that John
Dewey is very dangerous, and an ally of totalitarianism. For John Dewey's
espousal of scientific method is a shallow rationalism which only encour·
ages the fascism within us. Waldo thinks that if you are influenced by
Dewey, you may wake up in bed with Hitlerism and Stalinism. And Waldo
must know something about these questions, because he was pretty close
to the bedroom of Stalinism himself. I am further exposed to Waldo
because not only have I defended many of the ideas of Dewey: I have also
defended logical positivism. Well, it was all a mistake. Waldo is right,
and it is aiding the totalitarians to be intelligent. So, I am not going to
discuss these matters any more. I am a baseball fan. I am going to
tell why.
Now, I have safely eluded the clutches of Archie and Waldo, but
what can I do about Lewis Mumford. He doesn't like Dewey or Charles
Beard, and I once wrote a letter to
The Saturday Review of Literature
in
which I was foolish enough and sufficiently unpatriotic to declare that the
reason that Lewis Mumford did not like John Dewey was because Mumford
did not understand Dewey. And Beard has influenced my entire conception
of history. Whenever I read history, his
flabby
influence affects my inter–
pretations. All I can do here is to make a bargain with Mumford.
If
he
won't punish me for my crimes, I will let him be the clean up man on my
ball team. His recent writings indicate that he is able to clean up his
betters anyway, and so, he would be an excellent man batting fourth on
the Studs Lonigan A. C.
Now that I have confessed and saved myself from culture, I am
ready to get down to business. I am a baseball fan. I once wrote a book
review in which I pointed out that the charm of baseball lay partly in the
fact that it is the most scientific of sports. I suggested that in baseball,
