NEW ROADS, NEW ROUTES
trusted them. Nowadays people trust neither their fathers' taste nor their
own: they're "confused," as they call other people. Therefore they have
no taste at all. And how can one revolt against a vacuum, or nonconform
with a blank?
S: But there's still bad taste, isn't there? A man can always revolt
from Hollywood.
B: True. But would that be original?
S: All right, staying out of Hollywood isn't a new direction
either. Then what is?
B: Taking advantage of that very absence of taste, which has
created a fluid situation. Writing as if the public's very uncertainty
indicated that it- has more intelligence than it realizes. Being original
without seeming to be: applying the spearhead subcutaneously, as it
were. Writing a "conventional" novel, maybe, that the man in the
street could read as a good yam, and that the more perceptive would
see as a revolutionary document, subtly presaging an era of truth rather
than frankness, fraternity rather than friendliness....
S: What grotesque optimism. The public, my foot! Do Williams
and Cummings appear regularly in
The Saturday Evening Post?
How
often do you hear Bartok on the Sunday Evening Hour? Was
Time
pleased when Gide got the Nobel Prize?
B: No, but would you like that kind of thing to happen?
S: Well. ...
B: Spoken like a man! And can we of 1948 get it to happen
by packaging our products as novelties and notions? Think what might
result if we eliminated the words "modem" and "experimental" from
the critic's vocabulary! What vistas arise before me! Literature liberated
from literary history! Elegant obscurity and modish irony siphoned out
of poetry into the
feuilletons
of the literary dailies! Poets projecting
visions, serious and unashamed, as in the eighteen-thirties! Oh, I can
sniff
the salt air of it-the new joy, the new fervor, the new aspiration!
S: Romanticism, yet. Before you begin to levitate, will you please
explain, once and for all, why you prefer those four writers to the other
thirty-six? I am hungry for your definition of greatness.
B: Damn it, that makes two reveries you've smashed this morn–
ing. And I thought I'd explained that already. Williams, Stein, Cum–
mings, Pound were original to begin with, and they had the added in–
centive of something formidable to rebel against: the overstuffed ethos
that produced Kipling and the First World War. Nowadays, a writer
who wants to rival their achievement might do well to begin by re–
belling against rebellion as well as conformism, fear as well as confi-
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