366
to follow."
That is to say, the code of
manners ignored or did not take ac–
count of certain situations in which
friendship may be more important than
going to dinner. For another example,
he is guilty of a demonstrable inaccur–
acy when he speaks of T. S. Eliot's re–
mark about Boston as a "witticism," as
if to say
merely
a witticism. The ser–
iousness of the remark can be examined
by regarding the context in which I en–
countered it, in F. O. Matthiessen's
The Achievement of T.
S.
Eliot.
But it would be wasteful of PR's
valuable and limited space to show,
point by point, how inaccurate Mr.
Ramsey is and how much he misunder–
stands or misinterprets. His main point,
however, does make some sense. He
says that Mr. Aldridge's communica–
tion formulated a critical theory which
deserved serious consideration. I would
certainly have given it serious atten–
tion if I had not heard the same
theory, in a variety of versions, hun–
dreds of times during the last twenty–
two years, coming upon it for the first
time in the pages of T. S. Eliot's re–
view,
The Criterion,
where it impressed
me very much and made me feel that
civilization had been declining since
the age of Louis XIV and since the
French Revolution, if not before. But
since the theory is indestructible and
irrefutable in any final sense, being
a function of the values of the critic
who maintains it, I might as well join
in the vicious and endless argument for
Mr. Ramsey's sake.
Mr. Aldridge says, and Mr. Ram–
sey quotes his analogy with approval
(finding the argument "subtle and lu–
cid"), that "Manners stand to values
precisely as religion stands to personal
belief in God ..." But this is precisely
untrue in every respect. Manners stand
to values as religious ceremonials stand
to religious belief. I t is moral action
and moral attitudes which stand in re–
lation to values as religious attitudes
and behavior stand in relation to per–
sonal belief in God. Mr. Aldridge's er–
ror lies in his failure to see that values
are prior to manners and that unless
our values have a direct and sincere
relation to our manners, we are abys-
mal hypocrites at best or we are
like
the Duc and Duchesse de GuermanteL
The values of American life at its
best
are embodied in the frankness, open–
ness, and friendliness which can
be
observed at first hand all over America,
including the Middle West from which
Mr. Ramsey writes, the deep South,
and New England.
I should say now, as perhaps I
should have said in my essay, that
Mr. Aldridge's Communication seemed
to be a temporary aberration such
II
often occurs when an author has pub–
lished his first book and been praised,
justly, for many admirable and cour–
ageous statements and perceptions. The
reason that I did not make this addi–
tion was that I could find little if any
connection between what is admirable
and valuable in Mr. Aldridge's
Aft"
the Lost Generation
and his Com–
munication of last May.
As for Mr. Ramsey, I suspect that
he shares my values, whatever he may
think of my literary manners or my
use of logic. Or at any rate, he cer–
tainly shares Proust's values and not
the ones Mr. Aldridge stated in his
Communication. Certainly some kind
of hallucination is necessary to main–
tain that I distrust the profession of
literature "and wish to govern liter–
ature by political standards," or some–
how resemble Senator McCarthy. Since
Mr. Ramsey raises the question of what
my attitudes are, I would like to say
that I am an author and an American.
I believe in literature as the most ex–
alted, and debased, expression of con–
sciousness and the depths of conscious–
ness, whether in the Bible, the works
of James Joyce, or in
Mein Kampf
and
the writings of Mickey Spillane. As an
American, I must hope that it is true
that the Constitution formulates a
s0-
cial ideal which, however unfulfilled or
as yet unrealized is at present the sole
hope of civilized humanity against Sen–
ator McCarthy and Mr. Malenkov.
My chief reason for writing as I did
was, I think, because I do believe in
literature and in the social ideal pro–
posed in the Constitution, and often
violated or unrealized. And also I
be–
lieve that the future of literature, as
