40
PARTISAN REVIEW
JOHN CROWE RANSOM
There would be an irony if the writers whom Mr. Brooks has abused
should find in PARTISAN REVIEW's invitation the occasion to form a chorus
and-abuse Mr. Brooks. They would be supporting his charge that theirs
is a coterie mentality.
There is a good deal of substance to Mr. Brooks's generalization as
Mr. Macdonald reports it. He finds that the modern writers do not have
the rating of 'primary" or "great" writers; and that is generally correct
as
I .
see it. Our literature with its brilliance is less creative and positive
than other literatures have been.
Documenting that a little, I do not know how many of Mr. Brooks's
academic strictures I shall be repeating, and it does not matter. Suppose
we look at fiction. It is the literary mode in which production has been
most prodigious, almost displacing the other modes, and that itself is
significant; for fiction is the mode closest to non-literary prose, the one
in which a writer can carry on most successfully without much creative
imagination. So we get mass production of fiction that is in good form
but without any power. We also get fiction that is tractarian and topical,
writing out satire and case histories; and though this may achieve real
power, it is power that is not literary but secular and practical. (The fie·
tion that is openly Marxist or Social Revolutionist, for example; and, if
the fiction is not that, the Marxist "criticism" which is prepared to show
that it must be working then for the dread Bourgeoisie.) Then, as if not
to serve in any man's army, there is the fiction so "pure" that it is richly
detailed to the point of being without direction, and fantastic or obscure.
The poetry of our age is also brilliantly unsuccessful. The lyrical
note is a tinkle without resonance, and we take no note of it, or else it
employs its orchestration so wildly that it produces mystification. It is
horn in mystification. The artist has lost the approach to his art.
I should argue bitterly in defense of the greatness of a few moderns,
5uch as James, Yeats, and Proust; though confessing that there is not ·one
of them but bears witness to his age by the desperateness of his way of
escaping the common frustration.
When Mr. Brooks blames the tendency of the literature upon the
vanity of its writers, or their misanthropy, that seems to me as incredible
as it is cynical. More likely it is due to a scruple of conscience, holding
the writers sternly at home in their actual contemporary world and not
permitting them to lapse back into the inadequate forms and immature
affirmations of the last century. What Mr. Brooks should indict is not the
writers but the age which bore them. That would be more heroic. They
will not really evade their difficulties by denying them, and Mr. Brooks'•
idea of doing so is dogmatic, and in fact it is Christian Science.
What is the matter with the age? Something profound and still
obscure. I cannot think the difficulties are social, or economic, or material,
for these difficulties are perennial. It is true that we have plenty of
trouble adjusting to an Age of Machines, but it hardly paralyses us. I find
