274
DAVID BRONSEN
gret that now. Had I kept the autobiographical material about Harlem
it might have provided me at some later time with renewed motivation.
When a writer gives up what is most vital to him, the work
in
which he has placed his greatest hopes and which was going to be the
object of his greatest efforts, he is undercutting his creative gifts and
abilities. I was through. For a long time I thought that I was afflicted
by some peculiar curse. But I have come to believe that there was some–
thing deeper and less personal
in
my misfortune, that what had hap–
pened to me was common to a whole generation of writers in the
thir–
ties. One author after another, whether he was Gentile or Jew, stopped
writing, became repetitive, ran out of anything new to say or just plain
died artistically. I came to this conclusion because I simply could not
believe that anyone with as much discipline, creative drive, inbred feeling
for the narrative and intense will to write as I had, could, after such
rigorous efforts, still be baulked.
Looking about, I saw the same phenomenon manifesting itself in
practically every writer I knew. They became barren. Daniel Fuchs
decided after his third novel that he would write for Hollywood. He
maintained that he had arrived at his decision clearly and rationally,
but I do not believe that. James Farrell is another example. He had
exhausted himself by the time he had written his third novel, and every–
thing he wrote after that consisted of variations on played-out themes.
Steinbeck is not radically different, as far as his real contribution is
concerned; nothing else he ever wrote came up to
The .Grapes of
Wrath.
And Edward Dahlberg - what did he write after
Bottom Dogs
and
From Flushing t,o Calvary?
There was Hart Crane and Leonie
Adams, both of whom ran
into
the stone wall of noncreativity. Crane
committed suicide, and Nathanael West for his part conveniently died.
I have to get a cigarette - this works me up!
[Mr. Roth lit his
cigarette deliberately, abruptly changed the subject and bantered
fOT
several minutes before resuming his train of thought.]
How does one explain this peculiarity?
It
happened often enough
that I began to reflect on it, and I have continued to reflect on it ever
since. I do not have the training to make a scientific or sociological
analysis, but it seems to me that World War II, which was already in
the making, was a dividing line between an era which was coming to
an end, namely ours, and another, which was coming into being. I
think that we sensed a sharp turn in historic development. How do
writers sense these things? We sense it in our prolonged malaise, and
in our art - in the fact that, having been fruitful writers, we suddenly
grow sterile. The causes are personal, but they are also bigger than any
