44
PARTISAN REVIEW
lution, it is clear that to date the only trust that the government had really
been able to control is "the brain trust.") Because of the economic plight
of writers, government institutions, political movements, and commerce
provide many of them with the sole means of making a living. Thus, the
New Deal, Hollywood, the Stalinist movement play such important roles
in the cultural life of America. The result of this tendency has been
restrictions on artistic production and on thought. Now, with the world
crisis becoming more increasingly severe, an ideology to justify this
process is in a state of formation. Even the sordid purchase and misuse
of talent will be justified, not as an unpleasant necessity, but as something
good, progressive, a means of furthering culture. Brooks, in
On Contem·
porary Literature,
declares that our "cynical" writers, imbued with a
drive-toward-death, do not want to become public figures. And this notion
also intrigues Lewis Mumford (who, along with Brooks, has succeeded
in
raising obscuranticism to a higher level).
In
Faith for Living,
Mumford,
too, says that writers should become public figures. The idea seems to be
that we should all imitate Archibald MacLeish and Robert Sherwood.
Behind such manifestations, there is a simple historic fact: the hour·
gcosie cannot stand its own culture and its own past. Ill the 18th century,
the writers found a common interest with the merchants. The latter wanted
to be free of feudal restrictions in order to sell on a free market: the
writer wanted to sell his works on a free market instead of being forced to
depend on the patronage system. The significance of Samuel Johnson's
famous letter to Lord Chesterfield is that it is a public document which
date-lines and drives home the
coup de grace
of the patronage system. But
now, a new patronage system is developing. In the heroic days of democ–
racy, the bourgeoisie was pro-scientific and anti-clerical. Its sponsorship
of science, and its struggle with the church helped to create the material
and the cultural basis which permitted the great development of modern
realistic literature. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, it became
clear to more and more writers that bourgeois culture, which once prom·
ised so much to the artist, was beginning to crush him. This is the basis
for the profound despair of men like Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud. In
their way, they questioned the whole moral sensibility of their times-that
is, of bourgeois culture. It is this profound despair which is the founda–
tion for the personal aesthetics of Joyce's character, Stephen Daedalus.
And
Finnegans Wake
is, in a sense, the final word of Joyce on the brutality
of bourgeois culture. He turns his whole intellectual past into a grandiose
and scholarly joke. To repeat, since roughly the middle of the nineteenth
century, we have been witnessing a process whereby bourgeois culture
is
destroying its own artistic sons, and the artist has sought, in various ways,
to find the means of preserving the integrity of his own being as an artist,
and to combat this crushing weight. This is part of the significance of
l'
art pour
l'
art.
Brooks has made himself part of the process of destroying the artist.
He has advanced it one more stage.
Ex-post-facto,
he justifies every Philis·
