OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
589
legory fer his moral loneliness; Hawthorne and Anderson were torn
between belonging and alienation; while writers like Dreiser and
Dos Passos set out to create, by naturalistic detail or montage, a
total sense of America. Faulkner, on the other hand, is a writer of the
South, which has some of the cultural bonds of a nation, and I think
his
power, as well as his limitations, come largely from his roots in
a regional experience.
The present rediscovery of America is mainly political in origin.
Unless it is translated into attitudes pertinent to art, or to the more
serious social questions, it is bound to be extreme and superficial-just
another instance of intellectuals running with the pack. Merely to
call for a celebration of the American scene can lead only to chau–
vinist platitudes, some of which have already been produced by the
new philosophers of Americana. Nor can our literature or our politics
profit by the new trend to go native at all costs, with its surrender
to the primitive and the anti-intellectual, and its fostering of the
myth that the healthy impulses of America are to be found in the
hinterland, unspoiled by the over-ripe culture of New York.
For those American writers whose new sense of country has not
gone to their heads, the defense of Western democracy against the So–
viet threat should not present any special problem, since the recogni–
tion of one's roots does not preclude the free play of the imagination
or the dissident spirit either in literature or politics. I, for one, do not
see why the American writer need yield to any of the academic or
philistine pcessures in order to define either his national identity or
his
anti-Communism. It is true that there has been a tendency lately
to make anti-Stalinism the sole content of one's thinking, that is, an
end in itself, and to accommodate oneself to any form of thinking
so long as it is anti-Communist. But this is simply another way of
losing one's identity, for even alliances on the grounds of expediency
cannot be substituted for one's own ideas or feelings.
In his ideal form, the artist keeps a balance of opposing forces,
which gives him the appearance of a suspended man. He seems to
be suspended between tradition and revolt, nationalism and inter–
nationalism, the aesthetic and the civic, and between belonging and
alienation. Hence any movement to line him up on one side or another
oversimplifies his role and limits
his
creative function.
If
the artist in
this country is to become an American, it is to correct the earlier
