STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
R. P. Blackmur:
It appears to me that your first three questions have to do
with that fraction of the self-elected who write and criticize literature
in its relation
to
the whole society; that your fourth, fifth, and sixth
questions have to do with the inner doings of that fraction in relation
to their work, when they can get to it; and that your last question,
as put, is the swindling chasm which lies between all of us and our
work. At any rate, such a division gives a practicable shape to
discussion.
My initial assumption is that the elite of writers in America,
and so far as I know in other countries, is il-t present not only self–
elected but is also without adequate relation to the forces which
shape or deform our culture. (Malraux is only an apparent excep–
tion: he represents something that will only be obliterated by the
success of the forces with which he allies himself.) There is not
even an adequate relation of rebellion. We have instead a vogue
for the terms anxiety and euphoria; and we have a growing literary
expertness in the techniques of expressing the experience of dismay,
and the general techniques for creating the conditions of trouble.
With us the role of hero is taken by the impotent, the defective,
the psychotic, or by the artist himself. All these are inadequate forms
of rebellion. It is neither divine madness nor diabolic; neither inspired
nor destructive; it is the anguish of letting go, the agony of the
hellish drop, expressed as a kind of taking hold, a struggle in flight.
It is as if one's private hysteria were the matrix for public disorder.
It is as if we believed the only possible unity and enterprise were
those of crisis-against any enemy, for survival. We have a secular
world stricken with the mood of religious war. That is an aggravated
way of saying how the literary elite responds to its feeling of the
actual momentum of society.
Its feeling- its works of art- is what has happened to its cul–
ture, not what has happened to society; perhaps only what has hap–
pened to the elite itself. In point of fact, society persists- in America
with extraordinary buoyancy, in Europe with the ancient tenacity.
I see no fellaheen . In the elite (whether literary or not) there is a
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