716
PARTISAN REVIEW
Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind?
Well, in these
bad days , I have to tell you, not many. And why do I call them bad
days at all when every morning as I pick up my
Times
I can see on
the front page my charming, utterly courteous president smiling,
smiling- when neither I nor my children need stand in that long
long queue for stale bread outside the bakery on Broadway and 99th
Street that reminds me so much of the 1930s? When there is so much
ready intelligence around to work computers, get men to the moon ,
explain schizophrenia, extricate and picture DNA that I truly
believe, as H. G. Wells did at the confident beginning of the cen–
tury, that whereas literature is the work of the exceptional and
isolated individual, science, taking in all its steady progress, is "the
mind of the race?"
I call these "bad days"
not
because science and technology are
now greater myth-makers than literature, and have a deservedly
wider resonance and appeal. Darwin was a far more patient and lu–
minous writer than many literary people today. The propositions
laid down in
The Origin of Species
and
The Descent of Man
became ir–
resistible to educated people because Darwin's sense of plot, his
mastery of detail, his concern for man in our friendless universe
have not been equalled since the great nineteenth-century novelists .
I call them "bad days" not just because of the obvious contempt in
high places for the poor and their suffering, but because they and
their like, even in low places, add up to what Nathalie Sarraute called
"the Age of Suspicion ," and what Solzhenitsyn graphically and in–
deed heartbrokenly emphasized in the last volume of
The Gulag Ar–
chipelago.
He noted that where in Czarist times a prisoner escaping
from confinement in Siberia was usually given shelter by the peas–
ants (who felt themselves equally at the mercy of the Czar and the
tundra in winter), under Soviet rule the escaping prisoner was
routinely returned by the craven populace.
The days are bad, the times are bad and will get worse because
our old belief in the unity of the human race now hardly exists. Of
course the Elizabethan slave traders, like Sir Francis Drake, favor–
ites of the court who chose as their emblem a manacled Negro, did
not believe in this unity. Those who were regularly burned at the
stake for their religious differences were no great testimony to this
unity. But the slave trade and even slavery more or less yielded, over
excruciatingly long periods of time, to the still potent ecumenicism
of Christianity . And a significant number of Catholics troubled over
colonialist oppression- see only Robert Stone's
A Flag for Sunrise-
