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PARTISAN REVIEW
Joyce "the ash-end of a burnt-out cigar," just as Radek could de–
scribe
Ulysses
as "a microscope focussed on a dunghill." And
aren't we right at home in that poisonous atmosphere again when
we read that John Crowe Ransom's literary criticism "suggests the
joy of Bruno Mussolini hunting out the Ethiopians"? Or when
Brooks retorts to Mann's "toleration" ofT. S. Eliot: "Dr. Mann is
not tolerant of Hitler, and there are certain people about whom I
am not tolerant."? Is it far-fetched to bring in the Moscow.Trials?
Their stage-managers, like Brooks confronted with unanswerable
historical objections to their frame-up, also had to seek motivations
for the accused in personal vanity and sheer diabolism. And just
as they found it convenient to amalgamate fascists, Bukharinists,
Trotskyists, and bourgeoisie into a single block, so Brooks makes
no distinction between the critical values of Eliot, Richards, Tate,
Pound and-actually-Logan Pearsall Smith. We are only just
beginning to appreciate the terrible significance of the Trials for
our age. The more closely integrated Stalin's Russia becomes into
the Anglo-American war effort, the more threatening will be a
recrudescence of its cultural values. We may have to fight the old
fights of the thirties all over again. On the basis of this paper,
Brooks is the logical successor to Dashiell Hammett as president
of the League of American Writers.
But this outburst by an eminent American critic suggests even
more than this. Here we have that
official
approach to culture
which has spread far beyond the confines of the Stalinist move–
ment. Brooks' thesis is essentially an amplification of the attack
· on the "irresponsibles" made a year ago by Archibald MacLeish,
Librarian of Congress and intimate of the White House. ·And
would not Goebbels, the foe of "degenerate" modern art, applaud
not only the particular cultural tendency attacked but also the very
terms of the argument: "Primary literature somehow follows the
biological grain; it favors what psychologists call the 'life-drive';
it is a force of regeneration that in some way conduces to race
survival." "Kulturbolschewismus", "formalism", "coterie writ–
ing", "irresponsibles"-the terms differ for strategic reasons, but
the content-and The Enemy-is the same.
The official approach to art has for its aim the protection of
a historically reactionary form of society against the free inquiry
and ·criticism of the intelligentsia. It is an attempt to impose on
