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PARTISAN REVIEW
As for his "science," he has never done any scientific work: his discussions
of science are utterly inadequate: at best, they are contemporary with the
ideas of Francis Bacon. In essence, Eastman is a compound of crude
empiricism and shallow rationalism.
Eastman objects to my drawing a parallel between recent writings of
his and those of Van Wyck Brooks. And I repeat, I drew a para1lel
between them, and did not put the two men together in any amalgam. Nor
did Macdonald's article make the amalgam Eastman's letter complains
a.bout. For a devotee of scientific method, Eastman is extraordinarily
careless about his facts: Macdonald's article did indeed describe Eastman
(along with Corey, Hacker, Hook and Dos Passos) as expressing "a swing
back to bourgeois values"; but Brooks (and Burnham) were quite ex·
plicitly put in another category, as exponents of "the other and newer and
much more ominous tendency ... to rally to the concepts of Hitler's (and
Stalin's) 'New Order'." I was far from unmindful of Max Eastman's
well-known views on art when I described him as a Philistine. In the field
of !iterature, he has been consist.ently conventional in theory, in taste, and
in practice. A number of his literary ideas are too banal to merit dis·
cussion. He has been continually unsympathetic to most new work. He
has written of literary radicals in the same kind of abusive language that
one always finds in the "criticism" of literary Philistines. Eastman's
rambunctiously literal-minded attacks on "the cult of unintelligibility"
(such writers as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings and Hart
Crane) pave the way for the later moralistic abuse which Van Wyck
Brooks ·has poured on these men. Disagreeing with much of Brooks' book,
The Opinions of Oliver Allston,
Eastman nevertheless described Brooks'
strictures on modernist writers
(The American Mercury,
March
1942)
as
"enjoyable insults." He agrees with Brooks, in brief, concerning this kind
of writing. Personally, I consider the attacks of both Eastman and Brooks
on important modern writers as unworthy of literature. Eastman's Philis–
tinism more and more saturates his writings. I again remark that he wrote
that Karl Marx could not earn a living, and that he grew a beard in com–
pensation. In
The Atlantic Monthly
for December,
1941,
Eastman wrote an
article on John Dewey. One of his major emphases was that Dewey had
made "philosophy pay." Here, the facts were on his side: he cited
the
rising income figures in Dewey's academic life. Writing about America's
greatest philosopher, this is one of the main points he stresses. By so
doing, he actually reduces pragmatism and instrumentalism to the level on
which it has been condemned by its most vulgar critics. I described him
as a Philistine because I felt that this is the best word that I could use: if
I knew a better one, I should have used it.
Eastman's letter and his recent attacks on Marxism remind me of a
sentence in Chekhov's note-books: "You won't become a saint through
other people's sins."
April
14, 1942
New York City
JAMES
T.
FARRELL
