STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
purpose of a majority of great writers, have helped to determine their
literary forms.
.
In the forties in the colleges Marxist and Freudian ideas have
been assimilated more and more intelligently and critically in the
social sciences where departmentalism is disappearing. Sociologists
in their study of American character types have turned up
all
sorts
of ideas and relationships which should be extremely interesting
to novelists. But in the literature courses
sociologic
is nearly as abu–
sive a term as
relativism, positivism
or
psychologism.
Literature can
deal with ethical or religious problems, but only
if
these are immu–
table problems, independent of the time spirit or the Protestant spirit,
and if their solution
is
a supernatural one.
The influence of T. S. Eliot was very strong all during the
thirties, of course, even among academics who were liberal or com–
munist in their political sympathies. But in the forties the principles
of
After Strange Gods
have triumphed in the schools. Liberalism,
progressivism and naturalism are not only dismissed as false and su–
perficial, but they are said to make impossible literary understanding
and even the maintenance of personality.
Current academic ideas are favorable to a difficult, fragmen–
tary, highly subjective poetry in which there is little dramatic action
or fable, and in which characters appear
only
as masks of the poet.
They are favorable to the social, philosophic or even religious novel.
As
early as 1923 Eliot said flatly that the novel ended with Flaubert
and James, and that the future belongs to myth. Critical excitement
about myth rose steadily until about 1946, but no one has written
myths in this country, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, the
novel or epic has gone through so many changes, so many successive
simplifications and complications, so many different relationships
to social groups, that there is no reason to suppose it has ended. There
are hundreds of ideas available for novels
if
only writers had the
creative will to use them.
There
is
every reason to suppose that this creative will may
appear. The academic attitudes I have described were historically
conditioned. They were a very predictable result of the reaction
against Marxism after the Moscow trials and the Ribbentrop-Molo–
tov pact, of the political vacuum in which the war was fought, and
of the flight from history after the atom bombing and the photo-
869
