On The "Brooks-Macleish Thesis"
Editors' Note: We asked some twenty writers to comment on
Jl
an
Wyck Brooks' theory of modern literature, as discussed in Macdonald'$
"Kulturbolschewismus Is
if
ere" in the last issue. We print below tht
replies received.
ALLEN TATE
With most of Mr. Macdonald's criticism of Van Wyck Brooks I fully
agree; but at two points I believe that it is seriously at fault. Mr. Mac·
donald seems to feel that the great writers of our time were consciously
exposing the evils of capitalism; yet I believe that the most we can say, if
we are not going to succumb to special pleading, is that they have written
out of a vision of life in our time, or out of a vision of the evils of life
which are common to all times; and it is this tragic view which Mr.
Brooks cannot understand, because he holds the moralistic and didactic
view which can be extended, as he has extended it, into the nationalist and
patriotic view. And this view can believe in the dignity of man only by
sticking its head in the sand. It is a very old view, and there is nothing
novel or abstruse, except in the tangled misconceptions of Mr. Brooks
remarks on his contemporaries, in Mr. Brooks' revival of it. We may let
him have Whittier if he wants him.
Yet the trouble is that Mr. Brooks and the "school" for which he
stands are probably going to make us like Whittier too. Nobody who fol·
lows the drift -'" :Jpinion in this country can fail to see the parallel
between the Brooks-MacLeish school and Dr. Goebbels' Hitler-inspired
attack on "modern" art.
It
is wholly irrelevant whether a nationalist·
patriotic censorship of the imagination is set up in the interest of democ·
racy or of totalitarianism; the results may turn out to be the same. The
best defense of democracy, or of any other political order, in terms of
the creative imagination, is no defense at all; and the worst defense of
democracy, or of any other political order, in terms of the imagination,
is
the effort to prove that the arts prefer any one political system. Censor·
ship and repression of the arts are possible under any system; they are
not impossible under a democracy, particularly at that moment when
democracy begins to change, as ours is now beginning to change into some
kind of functional state.
As an old reader of Mr. Brooks' works, I cannot share Mr. Mac·
donald's surprise that Mr. Brooks has come round to his present views. He
has always seen literature as chiefly a symptom, and if you see it that way
you are going to prefer Whittier to Henry James because though tame and
pious and limited Whittier is safe. I have also an uneasy suspicion of Mr.
Macdonald's defense of the moderns: are they not a symptom too? After
the triumph of Mr. Macdonald's socialism, will they not become unneces·
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