362
PARTISAN REVIEW
Lands of the Arid Regions of the
United States.
"Mr. Brooks has
not heard about it," gloats DeVo–
to, "nor Mr. Mumford, Mr.
Stearns, Mr. Lewisohn, Mr.
Frank, Mr. Farrington, or Mr.
Hicks, not even Mr. Edmund Wil–
son or Mr. Kazin."
Perhaps none of those ill-assorted
gentlemen ever "heard a:bout it,"
but if DeVoto had any sense of
method in handling ideas he would
have kept the treatment of burns
out of it, and Powell too.
If
his
point is, however, that ours is a
great and wonderful country
precisely because of such pheno–
mena, then he must be laboring
under the delusion that America
has a monopoly on medical scien–
tists and public-spirited geologists.
Furthermore, neither Brooks nor
any other critic of American life
has ever complained of our insuf–
ficient progress in applied science
and technology. On the contrary.
It is DeVoto, also, who gives
us the true-blue American version
of the reactionary fantasy that
Proust caused the fall of France.
He declares that it is the "descrip–
tion of the United States as a
pluto-democracy and its people as
degenerate" in the writing of the
twenties which "forms the basis of
Hitler's understanding of America
in
Mein Kampf
and elsewhere,
and of countless millions of words
broadcast for many years by the
propaganda agencies of Nazi Ger–
many. . . . The correspondence is
so so obvious, so often an identity,
that there must be a causal rela–
tionship between them." Here you
have the essence of what our re-
trograde times have produced–
the
amalga:nn
palmed off as the
leading argument and as the
answer to all questions. And as
usual the main ingredient of the
amalgam is the charge of aiding
the enemy, a charge indispensable
in any attempt to ban independent
thought and all criticism of things
as they are. As for the "literary
fallacy"-defined by DeVoto as
the overvaluation of literature as
against life-who holds to
it
more
than he does, when he attributes
to the work of literary men so
much political weight and power?
Among the writers he belabors
is T. S. Eliot, whom he accuses
of having written disrespectfully
about such "little people" as the
young man carbuncular and the
typist home at teatime. He asserts
that since people of that sort
stood up to the blitz, the author of
The Wast e Land
ought to hang
his head in shame! But suppose we
grant DeVoto his morale-division
test of poetic truth. He still must
account for the fact that the Ger–
man young man carbuncular and
the German typist also stood up to
the blitz-a fact which, in his
terms, would tend to prove that
fascism is as good as democracy.
Where his worst philistinism
comes out is in his attitude toward
the war. He sees the war as a
spiritual triumph that once and
for all gives the lie to the criticism
of modern life contained in mod–
ern literature. It never occurs to
him that the virulence and pessim–
ism of that literature have been
completely justified by this war.
