Variety
The Progress of Cultural
Bolshevism {cont'd)
T
HE NATIONAUST
reaction in
American writing is of course
part and parcel of the world-wide
campaign against cultural Bol–
shevism-that is to say, against all
cultural forms of dissidence and
experiment. This campaign has
been dealt with in
PARTISAN
RE–
VIEw
again and again, and in the
last issue Alex Comfort reported on
its progress in England. Now Ber–
nard DeVoto has come along with
his book
The Literary Fallacy,
as
vicious and mindless a tract as any
so far produced by those who have
set themselves the task of subver–
ting the critical spirit of modern
art and thought. It deserves to be
noticed, if only to keep the :record
straight.
First, as to the reactions to De
Voto. Some counterblows were
struck, but the most widely-read
reply-that of Sinclair Lewis in
The
Saturd~y
Review of Literature
- turned out to be little more than
a lively exercise in vituperation.
Fo:r what is Lewis doing if not
playing possum when he denies
that the literature of the nineteen–
twenties was dominated by any
specific movement or tendency?
And what point is there in his
dragging in the names of people
like Booth Tarkington and Edith
Wharton? Such names in no way
prove that the creative work of the
twenties is without unity and that
DeVoto is therefore attacking
something which has no real exist–
ence. The representative figures of
that decade are well known to
everyone. Lewis's strategy shows
him up as belying his own past,
as repudiating the very move–
ment in the absence of which it is
inconceivable that he could have
written either
Main Street
or
Bab–
bitt.
He rejects implicitly what his
seeming antagonist, DeVoto, re–
jects explicitly. Like Van Wyck
Brooks and, for all one knows, De
Voto too, Lewis is a fugitive from
an earlier self.
But for sheer brashness in
proclaiming bourgeois - philistine
values, DeVoto beats all comers;
and he is a terrible show-off be–
sides. He is familiar with a great
many details of American history,
and he insists on exhibiting his
knowledge, regardless of its degree
of relevance to the subject at hand.
Thus he writes a really incredible
chapter-and that in a book of six
short chapters-in which he goes
on page after page telling us with
a straight face all about the ad–
vances made by American medical
men in the treatment of burns and
about John Wesley Powell, a
geologist who helped develop the
Forest Service, the National Park
Service and several learned so–
cieties, and who wrote, among
other books, a
Report on the
