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PARTISAN REVIEW
edly setting the basis for staging a kind of Moscow Trials of American
culture. It is to be observed that they do not ask--do the writers we dis·
agree with try honestly to tell the truth, do they try to give us true pictures
of life? It seems that this question is as important to them, as was the
question of truth to Mr. Vishinsky. As Macdonald states, we are seeing a
repetition of the thirties: rather, it is a continuation of tendencies that
were set in motion in that decade. Although the vocabulary is now some·
what revised, the attacks on serious writers are of the same calibre as
those which made dreary so much of the literary polemics of the thirties.
In those days, many writers penned
mea culpa
articles for
New Masse3
declaring that they repented the sin of having "bourgeois origins": now,
different writers are busily engaged in a new series of confessions, as
follows: I confess that I once tried to think, that I once tried to write
decent articles, decent books, decent novels. Forgive me, I will not write
any more such articles, books, novels.
To all these penitents, I wish to offer some advice. I have culled it
from a book entitled
The Flowering of New England.
It reads: "Literary
men indulge in humbug only at a price."
LIONEL TRILLING
As I read Brooks's address to the Conference on Science, Philosophy
and Religion, I thought: "And Shakespeare-whatever will he do with
that man of negation, questioning, disgust, verbalism? So disillusioned
a man and often so very difficult a writer- will Shakespeare turn out to
be
Primary?" And as I thought of Shakespeare it occurred to me that
Brooks had quite made up his mind that literature was divided between
Iago and Othello, the base lago representing negative intellect, the noble
Othello representing the Affirmation of Values. And the more I read the
more precise the analogy grew. I remembered that Othello, though he
is
much concerned with sight, is so preoccupied with his Affirmation of
Values that he cannot see what is before his eyes, just as Mr. Brooks can·
not see what is in a given book: it seemed to me that Othello listening to
Cassio talk about Bianca and thinking Desdemona was the subject was very
like Brooks reading Henry James or Proust or Joyce. And as I watched
Brooks's savagery grow, the Othello connection grew clearer still: in order
to affirm his Values, Brooks must kill off the Desdemona of moral sensi·
bility. Honor triumphs, and stupidity and cruelty with it; the nobility of
Othello masks a destructiveness rather greater than !ago's.
Literature, I suppose, has not recovered from the decay of religion.
For it is certainly clear that what Mr. Brooks wants is religion and not
literature at all. This is a perfectly respectable desire, but Mr. Brook!
ought to name it properly. He ought not make Primary Writers into
Church Fathers carrying the Torch of Life in a Pageant of Progress.
Macdonald's article on Brooks is very just so far as its literary judg·
ment gl?es. I do not share his feelings about the political importance of
Brooks's recent attitudes; it seems to me that people will not willingly
