KULTURBOLSCHEWISMUS
449
with which Brooks is concerned. What blindness to see in
Ulysses,
a work overflowing with genial delight in the richness of human
life, a
rejection
of life. What is rejected is a specific historical
social order, and it is only by making that rejection that Joyce was
able to survive as an artist and to preserve and defend those gen–
eral human values on which culture depends. Brooks does not
mention a single contemporary "primary" writer, because to do
so would have given the whole show away. For there
are
such
writers today, plenty of them. They put into practice what Brooks
preaches, they accept modern society, they are positive, construc–
tive, optimistic, popular, and they are firm believers in progress.
Their work, however, turns out to he worthless as literature and
also profoundly anti-human. It is printed in, among other period–
icals,
The Saturday Evening Post.*
Where have we heard all this before? Where have we seen
these false dichotomies: "form" vs. "content", "pessimism" vs.
"optimism", "intellect" vs. "life", "destructive" vs. "construc–
tive", "esthete" vs. "humanity"? Where have we known this con–
fusion of social and literary values, this terrible
hatred
of all that
is most living in modern culture? Where have we observed these
methods of smearing an opponent, these amalgams of disparate
tendencies; this reduction of men's motives to vanity and pure love
of evil? Not in the spirit of abuse but as a sober historical descrip–
tion, I say these are the specific cultural values of Stalinism and
the specific methods of the Moscow Trials. Brooks' speech could
have been delivered, and was in essence delivered many times, at
Stalinist literary meetings here and in Russia during the crusade
against "formalism" and for "social realism" which began with
the Popular Front turn in 1936 and remains the characteristic
Stalinist approach to esthetics. Proust to him is a "spoiled child,"
•In
Letters and Leadership
(1918), Brooks quotes these words of a popular writer
of the day: "'Modem life is full of problems, complex and difficult. ... The news·
paper poets are forever preaching the sanest optimism. ... That's the kind of poetry
the people want, and the fact that they went it shows that their hearts and heads are
all right.'" Brooks commented: "This doctrine is that the function of art is to turn
aside the problems of life from the current of emotional experiences and create in its
audience a condition of cheerfulness that is not organically drived from the experience
but added from the outside." Brooks' evolution mi:J;ht be summed up thus: up to 1920
he urged American writers to
be
more critical of bourgeois society; in the twenties
they followed his advice, found society rotten, said so; today, although (or perhaps
because) society is incomparably more rotted, Brooks wants the verdict reversed.
