PARTISAN REVIEW
Robert Gorham Davis:
The Versailles treaty of 1919, the stock-market collapse of
1929, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement of 1939, marked off
historical decades for us in America so neatly, and those decades
seemed to have such distinctive literary character, that we have been
unduly disappointed in the apparently indeterminate character of
the literary forties. Here it is 1948, and the decade has not yet
declared itself! Actually I
think
it has had a consistent character.
But there .are explainable reasons, besides the fact that the war
lasted until 1945, why
this
character has not been expressed in as
many fresh imaginative works,
in
as many substantial poems, novels
and plays, as were the characters of the twenties and thirties.
Of course, the total literary production of any period defies
simple and exhaustive definition. In giving names to periods, we are
really thinking of certain ideas which a number of writers consciously
shared, and which in retrospect seem most significant, historically.
Granted this sense of a period, clearly a number of writers of the
twenties were rediscovering America with the help of the great con–
tinental realists, and in a spirit which was anti-Puritan, anti-philistine,
anti-provincial. And clearly in the thirties that spirit was transformed
by the depression, the New Deal and the opposition to fascism, into
a positive social-literary program. Though mQSt of the writers, at
different points in the decade, broke rather quickly with directly
Communist affiliations, they caught an organic, dynamic, historical
sense of literature in society and of the poet as hero, that went back
through Marx to the Romantic theorists, especially in Germany, to
Herder, Fichte,
Heg~
and the rediscoverers of Vico.
It is in terms of the sharply different theories of art and society
now influential in the United States that we can best understand
many features of the present literary situation, including the weakness
of our fiction.
If
the imaginative writing of the forties is less ambitious
and interesting than that of the twenties and thirties, it is partly
because of the inhibiting effect of current aesthetic and academic
theory. No theories can determine or even foretell what new genius
is likely to appear, what Swift or Blake or Poe, or foretell whether
866
