KULTURBOLSCHEWISMUS
attack on socialism which Wendell Willkie implores every good
American to read and which is the low-water mark to date in such
affairs for vulgarity and just plain silliness
(Readers Digest,
June,
1941).
This tendency is nothing new, nor is it of itself especially
dangerous, since the values these writers are trying to revive are
quite beyond the aid of their oxygen tanks. In this article I want
to analyze the other and newer and much more ominous tendency,
which seems to me most significantly expressed to date in a recent
paper of Van Wyck Brooks-the tendency to rally to the concepts
of Hitler's (and Stalin's) "new order." Another manifestation is
James Burnham's book,
The Managerial Revolution,
on which I
shall have something to say next issue.
VanWyck Brooks' speech* was a Dadaist gesture in reverse.
Dadaist in the furious invective, the wild statements, the general
air of provocative hyperbole; only the madly ringing alarm clocks
to interrupt the speaker and the stench bombs to drive out the
audience were lacking. In reverse because the apparatus was turned
in defense of
bourgeois-Philistine values. The comparison is un–
fair to the Dadaists, whose antics were both logical and deliberate.
Brooks was apparently serious in his clowning.
The paper is built around an antithesis between "primary"
and "secondary" writers. The former is "a great man writing,"
"one who bespeaks the collective life of the people" by celebrating
"the great themes . . . by virtue of which the race has risen–
courage, justice, mercy, honor, love." He is positive, constructive,
optimistic, popular. He believes in "the idea of progress." Above
ll h .
.
Th "
d
"
"
. "
"t
tl
a , e
IS
pnmary.
e secon ary, or cotene, wn er, on 1e
other hand, is a thin-blooded, niggling sort of fellow, whose work
reaches "a mere handful of readers." His stuff has brilliant
"form" but lacks "content." He is "a mere artificer or master of
words," who perversely celebrates the "death-drive" instead of the
"life-drive." He is a doubter, a scorner, a sceptic, expatriate!
highbrow and city slicker. His work is pessimistic and has lost
contact with The People and The Idea of Greatness. He is, above
all, secondary.
---;;;-Primary Literature and Coterie Literature,".
a_
paper
delive~ed
at. the. Second
Annual Conference on Science, Philosophy and Rehgwn, at
Colu!"bi~ Umve~s1ty,
New
York City, on September 10, 1941. I am indebted to D;. Louis Fmkelstem, of the
Conference, for a copy of the paper and of Thomas Mann s letter of comment.
