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In any case, I cannot accept the implicit opposition Europe–
America as valid in any sense. The greatest cultures have not been
those who shut themselves off from others, but those whose capacity
for assimilation and transmutation were most all-embracing and
most powerful. Moreover, I think that now more than ever, with
the United States a dominant world power on the international scene,
it would be disastrous to retreat into a narrow and self-satisfied
cultural nationalism. Paradoxically, perhaps the best way for Amer–
ican intellectuals to achieve some sort of integration with other areas
of American life would be to try and make the Goethean concept
of
Weltliteratur
a reality-as American foreign policy is trying to
make a reality of the hypothetical unity of Western Europe.
4. The more I read this question, the less it seems to me to
make any sense-so far as we are talking about art, not political
propaganda. I believe that every genuinely creative art by an Ameri–
can is a reaffirmation and rediscovery of America in the true mean–
ing of those words, regardless of whether such acts result in works
that happen to jibe with the reigning political needs and shibbo–
leths of the moment. Did Thoreau and Melville discover and affirm
less about America than Whittier or James Whitcomb Riley?
Moreover, still talking about art, I should like to point out that
conformism and non-conformism are very slippery terms. Who could
seem a more perfect conformist than Mark Twain? But we now
realize that Huck Finn's ' voyage down the Mississippi is the classic
symbol for that great evasion of the implacable realities of Ameri–
can life that so many Americans after Twain have attempted. And
who could seem more critical and non-conformist than Henry James?
Yet where can we find a more perceptive portrayal than in James's
Isabel Archer of all that is most touching and admirable in the
American character? For this reason, I think the categories of con–
formism and non-conformism entirely irrelevant to anything an
artist actually
does.
On the other hand,
if
we are talking about politics, I think the
first job for every American intellectual right now is to protest against
the intellectual witch-hunting and the drive for conformist thought–
control that is making our country the laughing-stock-as well as
the bugaboo--of the rest of the civilized world. I can imagine no
better way of reaffirming the American tradition at the present time.
