Vol. 9 No. 1 1942 - page 43

"BROOKS-MACLE/SH THESIS"
43
great power of enlightenment, truth-telling and release goes on, as some–
one has said, behind history's hack. It cannot be manufactured to order.
We do not need worry about its future in America. In ways and forms
unforseen and unimaginable by Brooks and others, it will occur. Eliot,
Stein and James are stages on the way.
JAMES T. FARRELL
Dwight Macdonald's article on Van Wyck Brooks was very good. I
should like to add two points to it, and to offer some additional comment.
First, the "primary" writers of the past listed by Brooks were attacked
in their own days for the very same reasons that Brooks cites in his casti–
gations of modern writers. Dostoevsky was accused of nihilism. Whitman
was treated almost as if he were an immoral scoundrel. Victor Hugo was
driven into exile. The Philistines looked on Ibsen as if he were the devil.
And Socrates was driven to his death for the "crime" of having demoral–
ized the youth of Athens. Brooks is pirating the reputations of great
writers of the past while he speaks the language of their bitterest enemies.
Second: While it is proper to defend the writers whom Brooks attacks
so shamelessly, it must be pointed out that they do not all belong to the
same tendency, and it does noi mean that valid criticisms of many of them
are not appropriate. The recent critical writings of T. S. Eliot, for in–
stance, emphasize religious values. While it is impossible for Eliot to be
as critically immature as Brooks, he is in many ways closer to him intel–
lectually, than he is to Macdonald.
It was pertinent to mention the Moscow trials. We are not done with
them politically, or in terms of their influence on cultural matters. As
Trotsky pointed out, there is nothing new in their basic character: the
amalgam is familiar in political and literary frameups. And we can now
see a pattern that is unfolding. First, destroy the intellectual and artistic
backgrounds of contemporary writers and thinkers : discredit them by
attacking Marx and Joyce; then, ruin their artistic and intellectual reputa–
tions; finally, call in the cops and put them in the clink ai subversive
ideological Fifth Columnists.
Macdonald says that P.R. is fighting a rear-guard action. I think
that since it was re-established on the new basis in 1937, it has done far
less than it might have done. It has already lost many opportunities. Now,
when the situation is rapidly worsening,
it
has to make up for these lost
opportunities. Something better than the Zabel article, for instance, should
have been printed on MacLeish. Zabel's politeness appeared almost like
hedging. To him, MacLeish is inconsistent. But he did not seem to know
what deductions to draw from the specific character of MacLeish's
inconsistency.
Many lines of cultural life are now coalescing. Just as the govern–
ment is becoming the main customer for the products of heavy industry,
it is also becoming, more and more, a major employer of intellectuals,
artists, and writers. (Parenthetically and apropos of the managerial revo-
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