LETTERS
351
the detachment of art, which they manage-which they
~e!!
!-is
nothing but Victory, not without despondency and madness, m a per-
manent war.
I
am
reminded of Schumann who in the days of
'48
(there
was a
war!) stole off to another town to escape the firing; and in his "detach–
ment" he
wrote-Manfred.
New York City
June 1942
Letters
ON SOCIALISM
Sirs:
Will you permit me to clarify some–
what my position on socialism, which
was left obscure in my article, "Cagli–
ostro and the Charlatan State"? I am
profoundly socialist in my convictions
and I do not care, especially now, to ap·
pear to be on the other side.
An example of true anti-socialist sen–
timent was shown in this city at the time
sugar ration cards were being issued here.
At that time the people in the Capitol
Hill
section, the well-to-do conservative
elements, gave the completest and most
ugly expression to their bourgeois hatred
of Roosevelt and the New Deal . . . in–
sulting and humiliating the state's clerks
and revealing throughout their instinctive
reaction to anything smacking of social–
ism.
It
was a rehearsal of what must in–
evitably follow in the country if the work–
ers do not put these people where they
belong.
Now I am not defending the present
capitalistic government of this country.
The "socialism" involved in the New
Deal is strictly neutral, blood brother to
the Mazzianism of certain Italian social
reformers. (Mazzini instinctively oriented
hia
ideas toward Rome, i.e., as far away
u possible from Milan and Naples, the
two capitals of modern Italy.) This point
wu clearly realized by the Capitol Hill
conservatives, and was beautifully ex–
pressed in the slogan they shouted at the
barused sugar-ration clerks: "We'll
write to Washington!" In the next period
it
will be: "We'll
march
to Washington!"
Ia
other words, the only kind of state
10eialism they will accede to is a fascist
.....
There are many people here who ap–
frOVe of socialism as long as it remains
II Russia and in the Post O.ffice, but who
PAUL GooDMAN
view with terror its extension to other
fields. I am emphatically not one of
these. The chief strength of fascism has
been its
socializatwn
of the defects of
capitalism. But that no more causes me
to reject socialism than the exploits of
the Luftwaffe and the RAF have made me
lose sight of what it was the Wright
brothers really invented.
EGIDIO MATTINA
READING,
p
A.
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Sirs:
I have found some of the contents of
recent P.R.'s extremely interesting. How–
ever, I think on your "Brooks-MacLeish
Thesis" symposium, none of your writers
really hits the nail on the head. The
phenomenon you rightly deplore is the
inevitable consequence of the subordina–
tion of "Culture" to "Civilization." There
is an element of truth, in a debased form,
in Brooks's contention, but of course that
is no justification whatever for an attack
upon modern creative writers. The attack
~hould
be delivered upon modern civil–
ization.
The situation in reality is this: with
the progressive separation of the outer
husk of social relationships from the in–
ner core of personal activity-the me–
chanical framework of Society from the
human Community - creative activity,
which is necessarily personal in its orig–
ins, finds it impossible to bridge the gap
between the private life of the artist and
the social life of the public. Private and
public values are driven further and
further apart, and the artist is forced to
cultivate always more deeply his own
private personality. With no nexus in
society, no lighthouse to steer by, he has
to find his pole-star in himself.
If
he
ceases to do this, and throws aside his
personal integrity (as he will increasingly
tend to do if his work begins to be popu–
lar) in favour of exterior, social stand-
