PARTISAN REVIEW
happiest or function best in a particular atmosphere, in a world of
their own choosing and landscaping, may certainly do so. Only there
should be no cant or sanctimoniousness about it, no cry of being re–
jected when it is they who withdraw, no personal distaste calling it–
self spiritual dislocation. We all have to guard against creating moral
positions out of temperamental desires. It seems to me perfectly
moral, on the other hand, to live whatever life best harmonizes with
one's serious nature; and granting a measure of financial security,
that can be done as well in America as anywhere else. Even in the
'20s, didn't people go to Europe not just because it was so much
more civilized, but because it was so much cheaper?
An
intellectual, in
those days, had nothing like his present opportunities to make a
decent living in America.
If
he can now-through leading a double
life of well-paid journalism or the like by day, and his own creative
work by night-isn't this relatively a very good arrangement? It is
less corrupting, than most other methods, to a writer's actual creative
work; and it need be no more corrupting to the writer. The Eliza–
bethans could only survive by catering to the groundlings with low
humor or blood-and-horror plots; the heroic drama of the next age
indulged in comic subplots (to which Dryden, late in life, cried
mea
culpa).
The great English novelists, forced to serialize their novels,
worked under villainous pressure, improvising and padding as they
went. Dr. Johnson wrote parliamentary speeches, Smollett ran a
factory. Where there was need among writers for patrons, there
was an even greater need for flattering them. Today's Guggenheims
and Fulbrights are infinitely better than the patron's capricious gold
pieces; today's Yaddos and Macdowells are infinitely better than the
lackey-life of country houses and courts. This isn't to approve, let
alone glorify, the existing situation; but it is far better than most
that used to exist; and it is one to which, with a little luck, intel–
lectuals can become reasonably well adjusted. Whoever seeks more
than that for the intellectual in an overpoweringly commercial civ–
ilization can no longer claim to think as a realist; he must then
frankly be speaking as .a radical.
Yet just because ours is so plainly a money civilization, we must
make as uncanting and undisingenuous an adjustment as we know
how; we must stop at adjustment and avoid self-justification. More–
over the America of the moment, menaced by a totalitarian assault
