"BROOKS-MACLEISH THESIS"
39
sary, perhaps even d-ecadent, and make way for the socialist Whittier?
Meanwhile we had better keep an eye on Mr. Brooks. His large audience
and his great powers of persuasion, most of all his facile assumption of
the role of the defender of democracy, will bear close watching; it may
already be too late to do anything about the influence of a man who joins
these powers with a bourgeois preference for the inferior in literature: a
preference which permits him to make even Tolstoy and Goethe sound
second-rate, as if they were well within the reach of the whole American
public. Perhaps it is this gross flattery implicit in Mr. Brooks' views
which is the saddest sight of all.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Dear Mack:
You were never more picturesque or correct in your indignation
than when you voiced your astonishment, in "Kulturbolschewismus," at
what Brooks had said in his now notorious ·pronunciamento. To me there
was something too ludicrous in it to make me feel like taking it seriously.
But you may be right, such things should be noticed, as when a locomotive
goes off the track. I suppose someone has to clear the way again. I prefer
to drive by.
The thing that impresses me most though about the affair is that any·
one should be moved by it one way or the other. Isn't such an attitude as
Brooks displayed just the very ordinary one of all bad writers and editors?
What else have I been facing all my life? You can't expect me to give it
a tumble now. The only interest, and that a mild one, is that the name of
Brooks should be involved in it.
Men like Brooks ought to be digging around the young coming up,
to see what they are made of. They ought to realize that, as creators, they
themselves are wearing it pretty thin and that, logically enough, the new
litter will probably have the yeast in it somewhere. Go out and discover
that. Discover it and learn. But no, these potential dotards can't believe
their eyes. They can't read anything unless it is in some old lingo they
learned when they themselves were brats.
What the heck does Brooks think the boys are talking about these
days in the poorly heated rooms? Does he think it is anything different
from what he was thinking, at his best, when he was young? It's different,
all right, because the age is different but in its essence it is just as "right"
as
his highest conceptions. The only difficulty is he has lost the power to
recognize it.
Let him go to school again-to the young. He's stymied. And how
many others of his ilk along with him. Only, I say, there's nothing par·
ticularly unusual or interesting about it. Just an ignorant sap, the world
running away in new and brilliant colors under his nose and he is bewil–
dered. It's too bad.
