KULTURBOLSCHEWISMVS
451
the writer
from outside
certain socio-political values, and to pro–
vide a rationalization for damning his work
esthetically
if it fails
to conform to these
social values.
The mechanism is exposed with
particular crudeness in Brooks' paper, which simultaneously
damns coterie writing in social terms because it has a
bad
content
("pessimistic", "negativistic", etc.) and also damns it esthetically
because it has
no
content ("mere artificers of words ... for whom
only the manner exists and not the substance"). We may also note
that the official critic, since he is attempting to defend what is his–
torically indefensible, is forced at every turn to attribute petty and
base motives to the serious writers of his day, and to elevate pure
theological
wickedness
into a historical principle.
· The recent growth of this tendency over here is an ominous
sign of the drift towards totalitarianism.
It
is a matter of cultural
life and death to resist this tendency, regardless of one's specific
political beliefs. Looking over back issues of this magazine, I am
struck with how continuously we have. been fighting a rear-guard
action against this growing official esthetic, first as it manifested
itself in the Stalinist writers' front, then, after the Nazi Pact dis–
illusioned the main body of American writers with Stalinism
(unfortunately, purely on the political level, without raising the
broader cultural issues at all), as it has cropped up in the swing
behind the government in the war crisis. The irony is, of course,
that it
is
a rear-guard action, that the new social and political forces
which alone can bring into being a new esthetic tendency are still
frozen and impotent. Eliot, Joyce, Proust, James, Valery-these
represent, as Brooks says, an end and not a beginning. Their
school had done its work, fought and won its battles by the end of
the twenties. But it is still the most advanced cultural tendency
that exists, and in a reactionary period 'it has come to represent
again relatively the same threat to official society as it did in the
early decades of the century. The old battles must be fought
again, the old lessons learned once more.
"
'Well, in
our
country,' said Alice, still panting a little,
'you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a
long time, as we've been doing.' 'A slow sort of country!' said the
Red Queen. 'Now
here,
you see, it takes all the running you can do
to keep in the same place.'
"
