PARTISAN REVIEW
aware it
is
crucial, and that writers can be expected to exhibit his
"primary" virtues only in a "primary" historical period. Here his
historical illiteracy stands him in good stead. For he is actually
able to believe that the specific values of the last century are eternal
values, and that Homer, Rabelais, Erasmus, Milton and Dostoiev–
sky all wore the spiritual costume of Victorian humanitarianism.
"Tradition," he states flatly, "implies that mankind is marching
forward." And: "This mood of health, will, courage, faith in
human nature is the dominant mood in the history of literature."
"Thirty years ago, when I began to write," remarked Brooks
wistfully in his Hunter College speech, "the future was an exciting
and hopeful vista. Everyone believed in evolution as a natural
social process. We took the end for granted. Mankind was march·
ing forward." Facing a world in which such beliefs are violently
in conflict with reality, and unable or unwilling to change them,
Brooks is forced to denounce as somehow responsible for this
reality those writers whose work most truthfully reflects it. It is
a
particularly neat example of how an originally progressive ideol–
ogy becomes reactionary when it is carried over into a later period.
Van Wyck Brooks has become, doubtless with the best intentions,
our leading mouthpiece for totalitarian cultural values. For the
spirit in which such great creative works as
Ulysses, The Golden
Bowl, Death in Venice, Swann's Way
and
The Wasteland
are con·
ceived is that of free inquiry and criticism, and it must always and
in every instance result in exposing the overmastering reality of
our age: the decomposition of the bourgeois synthesis in all fields.
The final tum of the screw is that Brooks, like MacLeish, in attack–
ing those whose work exposes this decomposition, himself expresses
its farthest totalitarian reach. We can now understand his close
relations with the Stalinist literary front, his chauvinistic leanings
of late years, and his famoqs proposal that "committees be formed
in towns to make house-to-house collections of objects made in
Germany, which might be destroyed in public bonfires....
If
these
mass-demonstrations were on a scale sufficiently large, they would
suggest that democracy has something to say." (Letter to
Time,
Dec. 5, 1938) Hitler also has something to say, in these terms, and
has said it.
To explain how it is that the greatest writers of the age don't
possess the "sense of the age," Brooks constructs the theory that a
