NEW ROADS , NEW ROUTES , NEW LINES
OF GOODS: AN IMAGINARY REVIEW
Smith, a struggling young writer, enters the study of Brown,
who has give<n up the struggle.
S: Hail to thee, blithe critic! Bored thou never wert!
B: Oh, dear. Is that from your new novel?
S: No, just a flash of ge11ius, inspired by your expression. What
have you been up to?
B: Reading a book. Imagine, with books the way they are nowa–
days! This one has wafted me back to magic atmospheres. But what
brings you?
S :· A new chapter. Here it is. Let me know what you think of it.
B: Thanks. May I ask how old you are?
S: Twenty-four.
B: Ah, yes, the war generation. Ten years after mine, the depres–
sion generation. I wonder if any group ever felt so much older than
one almost its own age. But after all, what a gulf! A depression is a
nuisance; a war is an opportunity. Our generation rebelled against the
status quo;
yours fought for it. And some of us got mixed up in your
fight, too. What a life! At least your crowd went into the war without
disillusion.
S: That didn't help much.
B: No, but you're still resilient. You can believe that there were
heroes before Agamemnon and good writers after Scott Fitzgerald. You
don't go snatching at any writer, dead or alive, who seems to have
stood for the integrity of literature in this century. You aren't plagued
by our absurd fear that that integrity is gone forever.
S: What do you mean by the integrity of literature?
B: Something like sovereignty, I suppose. Not being governed by
anything, even the
Zeitgeist.
Being able to use the
Zeitgeist,
transcend
it, impress it, by creating something vividly individual and independent.
By the way, are you an experimental writer?
S: I'm not sure what you mean by that either.
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