PARTISAN REVIEW
concrete sensuous experience rather than by abstraction; an arrange–
ment which was sensitive to the illogical, to dissociations of thought
and suggestion, and which above all, returned always to the force of
the single word related to other words rather than to the paragraph
or the stanza in which the words were lost. The modern movement
reconsidered the word as the basis of all form. The modernists were
prepared to break down the stanza pattern, and even the order of
grammar, in order to intensify the force of single words.
My admiration of the moderns, as the list of writers I have
given will show, was rather undiscriminating. I was fascinated by the
implicit logic of this literature which seemed to me then to undermine
all other writing, even perhaps all the subject matter of literature by
its extraordinary concentration on verbal technique as an end in
itself, just as abstract painting seemed to undermine the aims of all
other painting. Yet experimental writing was often divorced almost
entirely from subject matter: and this made it extremely difficult to
criticize, any more than one can easily criticize one abstract painting
as better than another. In my own mind, despite the fascination
which experimentation exercised on me, I felt that a divorce from
subject matter (such as one finds in the writing of Gertrude Stein)
was a divorce from critical standards, from the values of natural
truth. This prevented me from experimenting greatly when I was
young. My attachment to subjects was my attachment to truth, and
I could not tum a subject into a verbal experiment. In fact, experi–
mental literature tends to become purely verbal : literature with a
great subject matter tends to be expressed in the easiest form at
the writer's hand, like a letter to a friend. The literature of the nine–
teen-twenties and nineteen-thirties tended to fall between two stools.
On the one hand there was the verbalism of the experimentalists: on
the other hand there were books such as Aldous Huxley's novels, writ–
ten intelligently and with a certain ease, but which were hammered
together according to the pattern of the conventional novel. When
the experimenters wanted to say something, they themselves tended to
abandon their experiments: witness the .autobiographical books of
Gertrude Stein.
Today after a decade of experiments, the impulse of modernism
seems to be exhausted. But the problem of creating styles in our
modern art is not solved by what are essentially compromises such as
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