PARTISAN REVIEW
6.
In recent decades serious literary criticism has shown a special bent
for the analysis and interpretation of poetry. What
is
the signifi–
cance of this concentration at a time when poetry itself has had
an ever-diminishing audience? Would literature benefit from a
critical concern, equally intense, with other genres of writing? In
our time, when the fate of culture as a whole is called into question,
does the basic meaning of the literary effort stand in need of re–
examination?
7.
What is the effect on American writing of the growing tension be–
tween Soviet Communism and the democraitc countries? How are
cultural interests affected by this struggle and do you think a writer
should involve himself in it (as writer? as person?) to the point of
commitment?
John Berryman:
The questions are interesting, and I take them all, with
one or two prefatory remarks. The forties are, of course, not over
yet, and are not comparable anyway, as a "postwar" period, with
the twenties; in relation
to
the end of open warfare, 1948 is only
1921-to say nothing of the sluggish influence of what is called the
"cold war."
If
therefore we do not see flashing about us yet the
novelists we would like to set against Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitz–
gerald, we needn't weep with chagrin. Since the story has in general
to be very gloomy, it is worth remembering also an inevitable lag;
a number of the poems, for instance, with which Eliot raised hell
in the twenties, were written by 1910. And the country is a big one,
no one can know what is happening everywhere. With these qualifi–
cations, and without argument, a few opinions:
1, 2, 4, 5.
It
has been a bad decade so far.
If
the twenties were Eliot's
decade, and the thirties Auden's, this has been simply the decade of
Survival. Wider military operations, their prolongation, their in–
volvement of civilians, above all the preceding and accompanying
genocide, distinguish wholly
this
war from the last. Everybody lost
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