KULTURBOLSCHEWISMUS
447
clique of mediocrities have somehow seized control of modern
literature and imposed on it a set of "secondary" values which
effectively prevents any one (except VanWyck Brooks) from per–
ceiving that they themselves are just not up to the "primary"
standard. "That certain minds are dominant does not mean that
these are the minds which possess the sense of the age. They may
be only the most articulate. . . . These coterie writers have ex–
pressed a moment in which they have caught humanity napping."
It is all a tragic historical
accident-like
an automobile smashup.
In an incredibly venomous and silly passage he calls James and
Eliot "little Jack Homers" who sit
in
a corner and gloat over their
little plums of style. "Meantime they forget that they are in a
GOmer, while the center of the room is occupied by some one else.
But the some one in the center sits in the place of humanity, and he
has the final word." The object of the grand conspiracy-he
actually refers to "James Joyce, who conspired with Eliot to de–
stroy tradition"-is to "cut away the standard by which they can
be measured as the .minor poets and novelists they most assuredly
are." Elsewhere he refers to "international mystagogues"-this
note of xenophobia recurs throughout the paper-"concerned,
above everything else, for their own prestige; for, as maladjusted
persons they are insecure, and, being insecure, they develop a
morbid will-to-power." This is an eminent literary critic writing
in the year 1941!
*
At one point in his tirade, Brooks recalls, a bit uneasily one
suspects, that his subject matter is after all literature. "But are
not some of them beautiful writers? Who can deny this? I enjoy
their artistry as much as any man living." But what shall we say
of the sensibility of a literary critic who reacts to the playful and
wonderfully skillful parody section in
Ulysses
in these terms:
Has he not in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode run through
the whole of English literature, depreciating with his parodies its
greatest authors, deforming every one of them-Gibbon, Burke,
Goldsmith, Lamb, De Quincy, Dickens, Ruskin, Burns and a
*In the same Chamber-of-Commerce spirit, Brooks asks: "What was Proust's sick–
ness
if
not an excuse for dropping out of the common life, to wihich he was not supe–
rior but unequal?" Cf_ Eastman's
R eaders Digest
article on Marx: "While telling a
planet how its future business was to be run, he threw up his hands at the compara–
tively simple task of earning his own living. He had to be supported throughout life
like a baby, and as though to compensate he grew an enormous beard." Such judg–
ments tell us nothing pertinent nbcut Proust or Marx, but much about their critics and
even more about the state of our culture today.
