PARTISAN REVIEW
at all because experimentatiQn came to a dead end, and it will
be
a
great pity if in the effort to make a poetry of statement, reaction
should lead writers to make statement without poetry-which seems
to me to have happened already in some painting and some music.
It is not unlikely we might have an intensifying warfare in the arts
where on one side you got insistence on unmediated perception and
on the other insistence on the absolute matrix of form. This would
result if, freed from both tradition and purpose, the impulse to
experiment came to a dead end. But
this
could only come about
if–
to remember an earlier PR symposium-there were a real failure of
nerve: a loss of the real delight in imaginative risk.
What is ominous about the agglutination of writers in the uni–
versities is just that it declares such a possibility, especially if you
look at it from the point of view of the old free-lancing risk those of
my age grew up with as natural. But I do not know that the mortal–
ity of talent need be any higher in the universities than in other
possible situations; it is merely that different precautions-different
measures in public literary health- need to be taken now from those
needful at an earlier time. Principally, these are measures of reso–
lution that the leisure that exists for scholarly work shall also exist
for literary work, and that the temptation to do more teaching-to
make more money-and the other temptation, to lead more than
two kinds of social life, both be resisted. This is a matter for the
individuals concerned; some will fail all round, some will become
wholly teachers, some will succeed. In any case, the writers will be
in the universities. The economic, political, and cultural drifts of
our society are towards the institutionalization of all the professions;
their special freedoms will lie
only
in their own work, which to those
with the American experience seems too little. As a people we are
unused to taking our risks in our work. But even if society did not
push writers into the universities, the enormous absolute and relative
growth in the number of writers-a by-product of the geometrical
progression of college graduates in the last fifty years--would do so.
No form of free-lancing in the old sense could take care of them;
and what room there is will naturally be taken up by the less serious
writers, who make better free-lancers. It is also of course true that
with the growth of the academies there has been an increase in
the number of academic writers moving into serious fields.
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