STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
idea of controverting that, though "the world"
is
a very big affair.
Perhaps beauty
is
waiting for better cultures, better times. Does it
seem in our habitual rage that beauty
is
the merest tidbit of positive
value, a queer satisfaction that must be rated in the class of luxuries
and
is
not very nutritive, therefore unsuited to these times and not
much missed anyhow?
The current "existentialism"
is
an importation from France,
but we know that in part its data were the impressions taken from
a lot of recent American writings that had been translated into the
French. The doctrine should be at home when it comes back to us
here. To put it much too briefly, our literature
is
"existentialist" in
the sense that existing environment seems to the American artist too
harsh for the response of gentleness and beauty. Would not the artist
be a
simpleto~
if
he made the response anyway? But the fact
is
that
he could not. Environment
is
both nature and society; and where
the social adjustments arc oppressive they affect our attitude even to
nature, and produce a general nausea and/or violence. On the con–
trary the sense of beauty, translated into naturalistic terms,
is
some
sort of creature satisfaction in the achieved way of living, an "all's
well" pronounced in the flush of successful adaptation to environment;
it leads the creature into the strangest behaviors, so ¢at he embraces
this
environment, is "in love" with nature and society, rushes into
the "sweet excess" of sensibility, and even commits himself to an
"acceptance" that is almost sacramental or religious in the degree
of its confidence. Clearly an age of animal anxiety is no time for
an experience which. puts the last stamp of approval upon a given
healthy adaptation. But our artists have not an affection but a
dis–
affection to celebrate. As for the forms of their art, they find plenty
of occasion for ironic and satirical effects, and for a
saeva indignatio
which is sometimes frontal and rhetorical though preferably disguised
under the false gaiety of sophistication. Distinctly, these are literary
strategies of rejection, of attack, and there are no better strategies
for the purpose. Poets share in them with fictionists. I can testify
that many young writers whose manuscripts pass over an editor's desk,
in verse as well as fiction, are full subscribers to the mode, by reason
of their unconscious time-sense if not by benefit of instruction. Their
career
is
initiated in an age that
is
brilliant in the hateful or halfway
arts and almost unacquainted with the full effect.
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