PARTISAN REVIEW
much larger than Cummings'? Is Katherine Anne Porter so very much
more firmly established than Paul Goodman?
S: I suppose not, but who's to blame for that? Surely not the
advance party?
B: No, the enemy, of course: the commercial publishers, the big
magazines, the book clubs. But that situation is extraneous to authorship;
and the effect of harping on it, the way the vanguardists do, is to in–
ternalize it-to put a chip on the shoulder that guides the pen. That's
what makes vanguardism dangerous as well as inappropriate. A man
sits down to write and says to himself:
"If
this is good, only the little
magazines will publish it; therefore I will only write for the little
magazines." And what does he write? As often as not, self-conscious
pluckings at the reader's nerve ends. "Heart and soul go bare, go bare,"
if
I may misquote a folk song.
S: You people are certainly obsessed by greatness. You want
everything you read to be a spiritual earthquake.
B: Well, I did expect to be a bit more shaken by ten years'
choice work of forty bold writers, all brandishing spears and uttering
war cries, than I was by
Spearhead.
People will always be hungry for
greatness, unless we stop bringing them up on Shakespeare, and maybe
even if we do. And why should the positive answers to that need come
chiefly from the non-modernists, with their Great Books programs and
such diversions? Do not we, the advanced, the speculative, merely com–
plicate the situation, adding a cleavage to the hunger, when we canonize
potentially great writers as "different," as "nonconformists"? As though
those names had meant anything since the death of taste!
S: When was that, 0 sage?
B: It came after a long agony, which lasted from about 1937 to
Hiroshima. Taste finally went out with confidence. Even in the first
post-war period, people were confident that another war would mean
the end of civilization; now, having seen that it didn't, they're not so
sure that it would matter much if it did. Concurrently with this upset,
people were positive, until quite recently, that surrealism was a threat
to culture; but now they're uncertain whic.li of the two is preferable.
S: Fascinating. How do you discover these things?
B: Tentacularly. But it's really quite simple: if you don't trust
your taste, you haven't any. The "ghastly good taste" of our fathers,
when still rampant, was a positive stimulus to creation. Gide revolted
against Maurice Barres, and there was a vanguard. Pound revolted
against the Georgians, and there was a vanguard. Why? Partly because
Barres and the Georgians stood for something: they had standards, and
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