VARIETY
469
The Politics of
W. C.
Williams:
An Editorial Note
The remarks offered by W. C.
Williams strike us as pretty hectic.
He has apparently succumbed to
the anti-intellectualism that has
long played fast and loose
wi~
the American literary mind and
IS
today more blatantly expressed
than ever before. But what makes
his argument significant is its
typicality.
We think that it is typical, first,
as an example of the irresponsibil·
ity of literary men who, with dubi–
ous haste, promQte themselve;; to
the position of experts on subJects
by which their deeper curiosity has
never been aroused and whose real
reference mostly escapes them. (In
this respect the fate of Ezra Pound
ought to serve as an object-lesson
for all time. That hapless man
recklessly assumed an expertness
in political and economic matters
about which he actually knew next
to nothing, and all on the strength
of his reputation as a poet and
·analyst of literary effects.) Sec–
ondly, Williams' argument is typi–
cal of the present state of mind of
American writers, many of whom,
under the pressure of the war and
reactionary opinion, cannot seem
to do enough to prove their con–
foi1Il)i.ty. Thus John Chamberlain
has of late discovered that capital–
ism is the sole guaranty of human
liberty; and Clifton Fadiman has
embraced the Vansittart thesis of
the innate and permanent guilt of
the German people-a thesis which
being nothing more than an inver–
sion of Nazi racial doctrine, obvi–
ously has its uses in preparing the
ground for an imperialist peace.
It is in the light of these and other
instances of the same kind that the
statements made by Williams be–
come politically intelligible.
For only in a debased cultural
situation such as we are now ex–
periencing could a writ_er like
W~l
liams whose accomplishments m
his
o~n
medium are unquestion–
able undertake to reject outright
the
~ultural
functions peculiar to
the intellectuals. Against them he
unlooses a rhetoric of innuendo
and logical amalgam, interspersed
with familiar anecdotes about the
heroes of American history. But
what, one may ask, is the exact
connection between any given at–
titude to Soviet Russia and the
fact that Washington and Lincoln
were not "the brightest men of
their time"? Maybe it
take~t
an
intellectual to notice that no such
connection exists. Whether he
knows it or not, Williams' linking
of the two is a mere device enab–
ling him to invoke the national
pieties of America as a sanction
for the extra-national pieties of the
Communist Party and its mob of
"friends" and sympathizers.
If
it
is nationalism that Williams puts
his faith in, then he would be bet–
ter advised to stick to his own.
Williams appears to take great
pride in the fact that Washington
and Lincoln were not intellectuals.
Well, Hitler and Goering are not
intellectuals either; nor Stalin.
Mussolini, on the other hand,
might ·he said to be an intellectual
of a sort; also Goebbels and Ros–
enberg. But Jefferson
was
an in–
tellectual, and so was Lenin.
~
what? Nothing follows from all
this. For Williams, however, such
combinations, doctored to suit
himself, seem to hold a kind of.
devious meaning that permits him
somehow to connect intellectuality
with fascism. In this fashion,
though perhaps we are not meant
to take his words too seriously, he
plays the game of the philistines,
whose stock-in-trade has always
