STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
bilities-rather than with a program. It was, for instance, the relent–
less blur of Farrell's style, the failure of
his
ponderous honesty; Stein–
beck's shameless extortion of sentiment; the shapelessness of the
Proletarian Novel, that moved us, protesting, toward the central
recognition that failures of style and feeling were signs of the in–
adequacy of a tyrannical subject-matter, a systematic reduction of
meaning, a 'scientific' equation of the individual with the sum of
his
environmental causes. It was good for us
as artists
that our dis–
covery of the need to re-establish focuses of moral responsibility, to
be done with the featureless passive sufferer as hero was a function
of our desire to write a good sentence and our resolve not to exploit
indeterminate feeling. There is for the non-writer, I suppose, something
trivial, even offensive in such a point of view, but the writer is
convinced of the ultimate humanity, the essential morality, the
neces–
sity
of the practice of his
art,
and he is tempted to trust
his
metaphors,
his meters more than himself. There is, after all, on his shelf that
monument to an opposite approach,
momento mori
and souvenir
of
his
beginnings in one,
Proletarian Literature in the United States.
Our generation is haunted by the memory of the profane
mystique which created that drab memorial; when we were kids
becoming a writer seemed,
if
not synonymous with, at least an
aspect of becoming a Communist; abandoning oneself to the prole–
tariat and finding oneself as an artist seemed a single act-and there
was a covert moral satisfaction (we did not have those words then, of
course) in what was at once a self-sacrifice and a self-assertion. Our
awakening was gradual, though a little faster than our political disen–
chantment, toward a realization of the enormous
contempt
for art
just below the culture-vulturish surface of the John Reed Clubs. In
such a critic as Edmund Wilson, the old heresy still persists, that
art
is a solace of exploitation-ridden societies, a second-best expedient
that
will
disappear with Socialism; and scarcely one of us with such
roots is entirely free of the suspicion that in coming to terms with
our craft before righting the world, we are guilty. That concept,
battered and despised, nags at us a little, whispers from underground
'traitor!' because we do not spend ourselves utterly or, at least, first
of
all
in political action; its prick is one of the many despairs of
varying magnitudes we call these days 'anguish.'
'Anguish'-I have avoided the word so far precisely because
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