STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
years, and many seem to have lost their nerve. There is a political,
perhaps a moral, paralysis. The one movement of interest has been
foreign, existentialism, and shows little artistic effect in America. The
chief cultural phenomenon of the decade here has probably been the
intellectuals' desertion of Marxism. What they have replaced it with,
I cannot discover; nihilism is more articulate and impressive than
in any other period of which I have knowledge.
In parenthesis, I would remark what seems to me to be a wide–
spread, violent condition of
bad conscience.
Under the patent name
of "guilt" we are familiar with this, but then, of course, everybody
is
"guilty"
of everything, and that is that. Bad conscience is more
serious. Few men of reflection can be satisfied now with their actions
and attitudes during the recent war. Well, we put that aside: the
Enemy was clear, and moreover what happened (producing what is
happening now) would have happened anyway, "It was done for us"
-your modem intellectual is astonishingly fatalistic. This is the view
generally taken, with a gain in uneasiness, of the use of the atomic
bomb. But few men of reflection can be satisfied with their actions
and attitudes
now.
Well, again the Enemy is clear (Stalin for Hitler),
what is happening cannot be influenced by us, and so on. That is,
men of reflection are reconciled, in their degree, to their past and
to their present. The trouble is the future: what they-or what
They
for them-are going to be doing in the months and years and
days to come. This is the trouble. In order to be reconciled to
this,
one would have to learn to be reconciled beforehand to an atrocious
crime one might well soon commit without having the slightest wish
to commit it; and that, I suppose, is out of the question. So that
men who can think and are moral must stand ready night and day to
the orders of blind evil. What has created this is an usurpation which
is not complete: usurpation of individual decision, which yet leaves
the individual nominally free-and of course actually free
if
he
happens
to
be a hero. But literary men are seldom heroes, and heroes
of
this
sort, at present, as soon as they announce themselves, cease
anyway
to
be literary men. It is not a state of mind,
this
readiness,
favorable to writing.
Literary prostitutes and
milksops
feel it less acutely, and they
are thriving.
Of course
American middlebrow culture has grown
more powerful in
this
decade.
Of course
American writing has grown
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