STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
sible. Neither O'Neill nor Hemingway by themselves have enough
strength. We need the whole ruck of competents besides. Somebody
someday will see what the commitments of our society really are, and
will make them actual, and so illuminate much that is now doing
iil relative dark; he will have found what survives and what has
been added and what the resultant new aspect is of our culture.
Meanwhile there is the adventure of the intellectual proletariat.
Meanwhile there is also the literary revival in its various forms.
It seems to me that James had the subject of the intellectual prole–
tariat beautifully in hand before it existed; almost by himself he
invented the artist as hero in defeat and made up the conventions
by which his heroism could be expressed. That he had also the vision,
and the courage to use it, of the Medusa-face of life, has little to do
with the success of his revival. That, representing an older elite, he
yet makes an excellent bridge between the present elite and the
middlebrow, is the whole secret of what is genuine in the revival.
I do not see that either Forster or Fitzgerald serve any similar pur–
pose. Forster
is
up a little, as he should be, in the cycle of reputation.
Fitzgerald, I expect, is a kind of backwards prophecy: as a charac–
teristic figure of the twenties he ought to mean something-some
incompleted threat, perhaps. My prejudice is sharp; as I can see
little ever .alive
in
his
work, I see only his figure to revive.
If
these remarks carry any weight at all, it ought to seem the
natural sequence of things that the writing of the late forties should
be less experimental in language and form than that of the twenties.
The job of
what the writing is about
has become the job of ex–
periment and form; or, let us say, form and experiment in language
have become attractive at a deeper set of levels than in the twenties:
those levels where the substance of the thing expressed has to be
created into form. Experiment
in
language requires more of a
culture safely assumed than we seem to possess; and, on the contrary,
when a writer
is
responsible for much more of the substance of his
culture than the profession is accustomed to, he
will
tend to submit
as much as possible to the controlling aspect of executive form. I
imagine this has something to do with the formal influence of Henry
James-quite apart from
his
revival. Certainly, also, it has something
to do with the renewed sense of prosody and the re-a.<:Sertion of the
magical-architectural values of metre. The shift
in
emphasis is not
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