VARIETY
363
No wonder he m·aintains that
whereas American society was
"rugged, lively and vital" in the
twenties, American writing "be–
came
increasingly
debilitated,
capricious, querulous and irrele–
vant." Writers repudiated their
country and shut themselves off
from its realities. Now a charge of
this kind could be substantiated, it
seems to me, only in one way, and
that is by analyzing some of the
typical and outstanding works of
that period (say
Babbitt, The
Great Gatsby, The Triumph of
the Egg, Beyond the Horizon, The
American Tragedy,
etc.) so as to
show that there is no correspond–
ence between them and the na–
tional life, that their revelation of
the national character and con–
duct is either false or irrelevant.
Yet this DeVoto fails to do. For
the most part he is content merely
to hurl accusations and "to glow
belligerently with his country," to
borrow a phrase aimed by Henry
James at the DeVotos of a past
age. And whenever DeVoto does
come down to cases he unknowing–
ly proves the reverse of what he set
out to prove.
This
becomes
particularly
clear in his dealings with Brooks.
The latter is an obsessive theme
with DeVoto and a rather gratu–
itous one, as he and Brooks are
now comrades-in-arms. For De
Voto locates the source of the
literature of the twenties in the
early work of Brooks-a notion
patently nonsensical. A literature
of such dimensions and variety can
hardly be characterized otherwise
than as an organic expression 0f
American society. To be sure, the
early Brooksian thesis influenced a
good many writers, but DeVoto
falls into sheer twaddle in blaming
Brooks for the faults of novelists
like Lewis and Hemingway. The
truth is that it is exactly the
Brooksian thesis which best ex–
plains those faults. The lack of
"maturity of mind, maturity of
emotion, complexity of character
and experience" in both Lewis and
Hemingway is not to be explained
in terms of the "literary fallacy,"
for no two authors are less ad–
dicted to making literature the
measure of existence; it can be
adequately accounted for only in
relation to those forces in Amer–
ican life, charted by Brooks in such
studies as
Letters and Leadership
and
America's Coming of Age,
which frustrate the artist and ar–
rest his development. These forces
are still dominant in American
civilization, and a critic like De
Voto is helping to perpetuate their
dominance when he attacks the
writers who at one time tried to
overcome it.
When it comes to evaluating the
literary art of the modern age
Brooks and DeVoto now see eye
to eye. Brooks, looking to poor dear
old Whittier for his salvation, is
more archaic in his approach. De
Voto is not quite so predisposed in
favor of the past. In his judgment
the best American writers of our
time are Carl Sandburg, E. A.
Robinson, Willa Cather, Stephen
Vincent Benet and Robert Frost.
The real trouble with him, one
suspects, is that he hates literature.
PHILIP RAHV
