448
PARTISAN REVIEW
dozen others? What fool s he makes them seem as he fills his
travesties of their styles with trivial and salacious implications!
- and all for the glorification of James Joyce. For what a big
boy he must be to put all these authors in their places!
Here we haye the accusation of petty vanity-so often re–
peated as to appear to be an obsession-and the insensibility to
specifically
literary
values already noted, combined with a Vic–
torian squeamishness {"salacious implications" ) and a feeling that
any adverse criticism of the great writers of the past is
irreverent
and a blow at "tradition." Brooks is shocked by Joyce's para–
phrase of Newman's hymn, "Lead, kindly foul!" and his: "Greater
love than this no man hath than that a man lay down his wife for
a friend. Go thou and do likewise." He is shocked by the freedom
with which Pound and Eliot comment on established authors.
When, after the lecture, some one asked him whether Wagner and
Dostoievsky were "primary," Brooks replied in all solemnity,
according to
theN. Y. Times,
"that although Wagtter had streaks
of meanness in his character and Dostoievsky was morbid, their
other qualities entitled them to be termed great men." Shades of
Edmund Clarence Stedman! *
Everything is reversed in the looking-glass land Brooks men–
tally inhabits. He objects that Eliot and Joyce are destroying
"tradition," but he himself would kill the living tradition of our
age for the sake of a sapless respectability. He scolds the coterie
writers for their "negativism" and " death-drive" but what could
be more Nihilistic than his own rejection of the whole body of
significant writing of our time? This apostle of the positive, the
"life-drive," recommends to the contemporary American writer
that he nourish his art on ... Whittier. No, the shoe is decidedly
on the other foot. It is true that the approach of the coterie writers
to the specific historical values of modern society is negativistic,
cynical, sceptical, destruCtive, etc. But in an age of social decay,
it is only by rejecting the
specific
and
immediate
values of society
that the wr:iter can preserve those
general
and
eternal
human values
*The Brooks of 1941, in fact, has joined hands with that vestal guardian of the
bourgeois
convenances
he so acidly depicted in his
Ordeal of Mark Twain:
Olivia
Clemens, who made her husband delete from his manuscripts such words as "stench,"
"offal" and ''breech-clout." Brooks quotes one of her marginal notations: "P. 1038--1
hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy." "It's out, my father is
whitewashed," noted Twain. He also took out the offending words, protesting, "You
are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy." Isn't all this just the operation
Brooks would perform on modern writing?
