274
PARTISAN REVIEW
Inteviewer:
Do you think that there's a relationship between the
change you describe taking place-toward a consumer society–
and the fact that a number of the novelists you mention have
been, in effect, great but forgotten?
Farrell:
I'd have to think that there probably is, to some extent.
There are writers who came to tragic ends or who showed great
promise and then dropped out . This is true in every generation,
of course . One of the most promising writers of the twenties was
Glenway Wescott. Today he is a sort of Oxford-accented member
of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and his promise is
something lost. But if one reads Wescott's early books,
The Apple
oj the Eye, The Grandmothers-or Goodbye, Wisconsin,
stories about
his past and about going from the farm to the city-it's obvious
they were very good books.
Interviewer:
Aren't the twenties a high point in American art?
Farrell:
Not as much as they should have been. I really did expect a
great development of American letters, and I did expect it to
come out of earlier writing, that of the 1900s and of the 1920s
also. I've been expecting a cultural renaissance. I don't have
much longer to go, and I don't think now that I'll see it if it's ever
going to come.
Inteviewer:
What would be the cause of this " failure"?
Farrell:
I actually think that the way that business has developed into
the consumer-goods industry has probably crushed what could
have been a great American cultural development for forty or fifty
years. The movement toward the cities was a natural develop–
ment because of the richness, the economic excess of America. It
is the twenties that we see now as the source of many attitudes of
our own time. In a way somewhat different from what Karl Marx
meant, one of the factors of our social and economic life today is
the making of fetishes out of commodities, which is an extension,
a continuation and development, out of these tendencies that
began in the twenties. The relationship of the twenties to the
present is that we can see the beginnings of a consumer orienta–
tion toward.life that is now quite widely pervasive .
Interviewer:
Have intellectual pursuits suffered generally in this
process?
Farrell:
You notice , for instance, there is a lot of writing about James
Joyce, but there is no
criticism
ofJoyce. Outside of France, there's
not much intelligent work on Proust done in French; there would
