VARIETY
belief" generally, but, specifically,
religious unbelief. What he is doing
is to make use of one technique of
confusion quite common among
second-rate religious apologists–
from whom he may unconsciously
have picked it up: to speak of
"Belief" and "Faith" in this vague
and absolutely enveloping way
so that our specific unbelief on
one point is to be covertly saddled
with the guilt of total skepticism.
The inconsistency of Shapiro's
attitude towards modern literature
is more significant than the various
inconsistencies of his argument.
He admires the literature he de–
plores (an attachment, which, if
logical, would itself be a personal
conflict) but he is unable to draw
the necessary conclusions from the
work of writers like Joyce or Eliot.
Apparently, he has never asked
himself why
The Waste Land
is
written as it is, whether it could
express all that Eliot meant it to if
it had been written according to
"the layman's confidence in a
plainer art." Apparently he has
never reflected over Eliot's critic–
ism, and, in particular, the state–
ment that modern poetry must be
complex because modern life is
complex. Shapiro seems to think
that the difficulty and complexity of
modern literature are something ar–
bitrarily chosen in a vacuum rather
than something forced upon the
writer as soon as he tries to exist
in his time and make his art ade–
quate to his time. Which is not to
deny, of
cours~,
that plenty o£
fake-modern literature is written
in which the difficulty is arbitrary
127
and forced. But there is something
suspiciously over-squeamish in the
flutter of alarm over the bad
writing done by second-rate fol–
lowers, who have always been, in
any case, the price we must pay
for the great: one suspects that the
real uneasiness is directed towards
the great figures themselves. Thus
Shapiro persistently attacks Freud
while professing to attack only his
influence and followers, the fact
that his ideas "have leaked out /
Into the street." But if one knows
anything at all about the ideas of
Freud, one knows that they involve
basic motives and modes of human
life, and the pity is that they have
not penetrated the general con–
sciousness enough, that not enough
of them
have
leaked out into the
street. The important point, to
come back to the literary again, is
to examine the time from its great
not its second-rate. And if we con–
sider the great figures themselves–
Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Valery, Proust,
Gide, Rilke, Kafka, Mann-some
very pertinent questions immediate–
ly oppose themselves to Shapiro's
diatribe. Is it at all sure, in the
first place, that these figures, or
the age which produced them,
need to be apologized
for~by
Mr.
J.
Donald Adams, Mr. Van Wyck
Brooks, or Mr. Karl Shapiro? And
if, examining these figures, we
find that, though in different ways
and on different levels, the dif–
ficulty is always there and per–
sistent, can anyone avoid the simple
induction that this difficulty has
something to do with the time?
