STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
of its audience. The opening of the super-slicks to more serious
writing, the flirtation of the
Cosmopolitan
with belle-lettres, the
association of large commercial publishers with little magazines, the
frantic excursions of editors up and down the countryside are not
so much tokens of some radical chm1ge of heart, as of an incipient
panic at a growing discrepancy between mass production methods
of distribution and the low supply of popular literature; publishers
and editors, abhorring a vacuum, turn in desperation, if not in love,
t.o the more serious writer. This mild revolution will doubtless in–
crease the pressures toward accommodation as well as opportunities
for publication, and we must proportionally increase our wariness
and our devotion. War, in all its senses, is the condition not the
crisis of our lives; this at least we know in the late forties.
It is a dreary and tiny sector from which we as writers fight, and
I suspect it is not even marked on the maps of the General Staff;
but there are moments when our struggle to preserve the integrity
of play on the adult level, to defend the necessity of ambiguity and
irony, to assert the morality of form and
to
specify feeling, seems
to merge with a political conflict, with a
real
(as they say) war.
It is not tl1en our duty
as writers
to deny our vocation for a gun or
the O.W.I., or to impugn the autonomy of our fictions with dogmatic
assertions or pledges of allegiance. A poem or a story, after all, solves
the problem it poses; the war successfully subsumed in a fiction,
ends with the fiction; a successful poem is a complete and final act;
if
it leads outward to other action, it is just so far a failure.
But the absolute
claim
to freedom in the creative act, in
going
on writing
as we understand it, challenges many political systems and
is challenged by them, most spectacularly these days by the Soviet
Communist world-view.
An
honest devotion to writing
hypothetically
(is it a Giant or a windmill?) attacks Stalinism, tests its pretensions
and our own analysis at once; what cannot endure the practice
of
the most human of activities is the Enemy. Tlus is our sufficient task
as writers; as men, as citizens, though we are required by no iron
law to be consistent, we may choose to defend our status and our
vocation against the Enemy they have defined, with what weapons
come to hand.
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