STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
dently they mean to work out a stable living and to have an art for
the complement and affirmation of the life. Who is going to reject
them? Theirs will be the artists,
if
we are to have any at all, who
will
take the places left empty by James, Forster, and Fitzgerald, and
make the revivals less peremptory.
It
will
occur to some readers that I should have to regard the
art of fiction very much along the lines formulated by the tough
Spanish thinker Ortega, whose remarks are just
this
moment Englished
in the book,
The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel
(Princeton University Press) . I mention this text with the more
satisfaction because Ortega is powerfully motivated against any
cultural product which is "middlebrow"-though I think he might
squirm under the locution. In America there have long been hostil–
ities between such organs of critical opinion as the
Partisan Review
and a great tribe of more popular writers including Van Wyck
Brooks, H. M. Jones, Donald Adams, and Bernard DeVoto. These
writers are certainly in support of a "middlebrow" literature, but
theirs is an ambiguous position which we might very well break
down into two separate positions before we oppose them without
reservation. They want a literature which is in affirmation rather
than attack, and they are temperamentally not inclined to suppose
that the human creature's biological destiny lies in the revolutionary
attitude. In this respect they have made a good fight for the second
category of artists which I have indicated above. But they have an–
other position which is not so good. They are contented with a litera–
ture which is "middlebrow" in the sense that it is commonplace and
technically undistinguished. It is clear they do no good to young
artists
who need instruction more than they need praise. Perhaps
there are not enough critics of great technical competence who can
dissociate technical artistic achievement from existentialism and poli–
tics. But in conclusion I find a modest comfort in my impression that,
on
this
second ground, the
Sewanee
and
Kenyon Reviews
are as much
opposed 'to the "middlebrow" critics as is the
Partisan.
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