STATE OF AMERICAN WRITING
justify preservation; the revivals you speak of contribute to
this
serious
delight.
4. Nowadays we are inclined to equate experiment in literature
with the complicated apparatus of scientific experiment, or of quasi–
scientific experiment such as is done with rats and mazes: for us
the preeminently experimental is the contrivance of mechanical de–
vices of form. These may succeed in themselves, but in literature–
the other arts may be different-they are seldom usefully commu–
nicated; it is hard for the continuator of a device or a method not
to become a mere imitator-! can't see that Joyce's inventions have
been used to any very good effect and I can think of many examples
in which their use has crushed and obscured the writer's real quality.
And our preoccupation with this kind of experiment
has
made us less
sensitive to the less spectacular experiment that goes on whenever a
writer of any originality is at work, the innovations in
style
without
which nothing of value is done. There is in English what might be
called a permanent experiment, which
is
the effort to get the language
of poetry back to a certain hard, immediate actuality, what we are
likely to think of as the tone of good common speech. One sees
this
in Skelton, in Chaucer, in the later Shakespeare, in Donne, etc. It
was what Pound was after in his early days; it is what Yeats was
after and what he achieved. Dante's middle style-the simplicity of
speech of women at the market-and Stendhal's prose formed on
the Code Napoleon, were analogous experiments. I like to think that
our cultural schism may come to be bridged with the aid of a litera–
ture which will develop the experiment of a highly charged plain
speech.
5.
If
American literature has grown more academic since the
twenties it isn't because of the entrance of the writer into the univer–
sity. One branch of writing has grown academic, in a neutral sense
of reward, but at the behest of the literature of the twenties, which
required and got a highly informed criticism. It seems to me that the
university is a perfectly appropriate base of operations for the critic,
though less so for the poet and even less for the novelist. Its disad–
vantage for the latter two does not lie in any antagonism that exists
between the intellectual life and the creative life but rather in the
antagonism between the pedagogical life (good enough in itself) and
both the intellectual and the creative life. Yet with no desire to
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