PARTISAN REVIEW
increasingly academic since the twenties. But my terms were extrava–
gant-! have nothing against prostitutes, not knowing any, and
professors, many of whom are very manly indeed, drink whiskey not
milk.
No doubt the meretricious in upper-middle-class popular writing
(as it apes serious writing), and the spineless in professorial imita–
tions of serious writing, may invite these old-fashioned epithets. But
all I intended was an instant's emotion, sign of a conflict that really
must be held to exist between serious writers and these other groups.
Whether anything can be done about it or not, it is necessary to
recognize the conflict.
It is necessary because it is sometimes difficult. Although Author–
ity is one of the two or three points at which literary criticism
is
just
now feeblest, we see in the public, even in its most attentive section,
a pathetic over-reliance upon what it conceives to be "authority"–
the eagerness for guideposts of a badly educated and swamped-with–
writing audience. Among the most influential of these is mere con–
tiguity: what writing is published where. But good writing may be
published anywhere at present, and trash may, in a degree of con–
fusion not yet reached in the thirties and not approached earlier.
Several things have produced this state of affairs: the death or
decline of magazines useful ten years ago, an absence of serious new
magazines, inadequate hospitality to new talent by the best con–
tinuing magazines, and their inability (until recently they were all
very poor) to retain or to print all the work of some of their best
contributors as these became well known. The sudden avidity of some
high-paying popular magazines, however, for serious writing or what
will look as much like it as possible, is what counts most. In the
thirties we saw Hemingway in
Esquire.
But he was world-famous.
Now they get writers earlier, indeed they try to get them at once,
and a brave new talent may be corrupt in the fashion magazines
before it can vote. These things arc confusing to the young, and
not to the young only. Then there is the matter of temptation-which
would be merely every writer's own business, if talent were not in
truth what it
is
sometimes called, a "gift," for which one has some–
how to be responsible, as best one can.
The alternative to journalism, for most American writers, is
teaching, and the dangers from it are similarly complicated. They
range from pure slump to pure irritation. To write is hard and
tak~
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