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PARTISAN REVIEW
so important to American culture and parodied in Forest Lawn
Cemetery, fmds its Soviet counterpart in the mummification of
Lenin or the touting of Bogomolets; while our faith in progress and
achievement finds an
ersa·lz
in the Five Year Plans and the statis.–
tics doctored to assist belief. In its Russian form, what is possible
in America has become compulsory, an unofficial rite has been
made an orthodoxy. And even in our own country there have been
occasional attempts to impose optimism (and eventually, one can
only suppose, youth and naivete) by law.
Yet for us, hope has never become just official, a mere camou–
flage for actual exploitation, though indeed two generations of
writers just before us believed so; and it was their sense of having
alone penetrated our hoax of prosperity and happiness that nour–
ished their feelings of alienation. The error of such writers was
double (such errors, naturally, do not preclude good writing; being
right
is, thank God, optional for the writer). Not only was the
American
myth
os
real and effective, the very opposite of the hypo–
critical and barren materialism it seemed; but also everywhere,
down to the last layer of babbitry, there existed beside this belief
its complement: an unspoken realization of the guilt and terror
involved in the American experience. In his sense of lonely horror,
the writer was most one with everyone else.
Precisely the uncompromising optimism of Americans makes
every inevitable failure to accomplish what can only be dreamed an
unredeemable torment. Among us, nothing is winked at or shrug–
ged away; we are being eternally horrified at dope-addiction or
bribery or war, at things accepted in older civilizations as the facts
of life, scarcely worth a tired joke. Even tax evasion dismays us!
We are forever feeling our own pulses, collecting statistics to demon–
strate the plight of the Negro, the prevalence of divorce, the fail–
ure of the female organ, the decline of family Bible reading,
be–
cause we feel, we
know
that a little while ago it was in our power,
new men in a new world (and even yet there is hope), to make
all perfect. How absurd of our writers to have believed they only
they were pained at the failure of love and justice in the United
States! What did they think our pulp literature of violence and
drunkenness and flight was trying symbolically to declare? Why
did they suppose that the most widely read fiction in America asks
endlessly, "Whodunnit? Where is the guilt?"
