180
PARTISAN REVIEW
shall we call the moral implications of his concern with the truth
of one's own being? Is
Death in Venice
a study of degeneration or
a parable of a modem writer? In each case I suppose we would
have to say the content was both normal and abnormal; but that is
the same as saying it is neither; or perhaps, to put it more pre–
cisely, there has been in each case a conjunction of iIeurotic ex–
perience with experience that we assume to be normal-by which
we apparently mean an experience shared by a sufficient number
of cultivated people to make it seem objective, general, and typical.
If
some such combination of the objective and neurotic is char–
acteristic of modern writing, we can only speculate about the way
the two have been brought together.
It
has been suggested at various
times, particularly when our political morale has been low, that our
civilization is neurotic; this would, of course, make it unnecessary
to explain any single neurotic strain in our art or culture. I suspect
that describing an entire culture as neurotic is nothing more than
a juggling of terms to make all art-what about our philosophy and
our science?-neurotic by definition.
If
our civilization is neurotic,
then everything and everyone is neurotic, and we have no way of
judging it or knowing whether a re-creation of it is distorted or not.
The collectivization of neurosis transforms the neurotic artist into
a psychological conformist.
One simple explanation of the way neuroses legitimately find
their way into any of the arts would be that the writer's world has
been created mainly by
his
intelligence acting on what he has in–
herited from his culture, and that his neuroses are then brought into
playas he personalizes his experience. Another might be that only
writers endowed with certain kinds of neuroses, along with their
imaginative gifts, can thrive, in the Darwinian sense, at any given
time. Someone like Hemingway, who has put his adolescent ideas
to literary use, might not have been so successful in a classical period
that put a premium on intellectual order and maturity. Or, perhaps,
a process of natural selection takes place even earlier, before creation
begins, and only certain kinds of neurotics are able to make the
break with the community necessary to enter the unstable world of
the arts. Surely, there must be some significance in the large number
of homosexuals peopling the intellectual and artistic professions, es–
pecially the dance and the theater, today. We know that the faculty
