the new talents warm until the commercial publisher with his custhis energy may not be permanent. It could, of course, become tomary air of noble resolution is ready to take his chance, except
permanent. There are circumstances that suggest it might become
that they make the official representatives of literature a little unso. After all, the emotional space of the human mind is large but not easy, except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps
infinite, and perhaps it will be pre-empted by the substitutes for
no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.
literature-the radio, the movies, and certain magazines-which are
Among these magazines, these private and precarious ventures,
antagonistic to literature not merely because they are competing
Partisan Review does a work that sets it apart. Although it is a
genres but also because of the political and cultural assumptions that
magazine of literary experiment, it differs from the other little magacontrol them. Further, the politics with which we are now being zines in the emphasis it puts upon ideas and intellectual attitudes.
confronted may be of such kind as to crush the possibility of that
And to understand its special role in our culture, we must further
interplay between free will and circumstance upon which all literaparticularize the cultural situation I have described; we must beture depends. These conditions can scarcely encourage us. On the come aware of the discrepancy that exists between the political beother hand, they must not be allowed to obsess us so that we cannot liefs of our educated class and the literature that, by its merit, should
properly belong to that class.
2 This seems to be borne out not only by the great example of Lincoln's prose,
In its political feeling our educated class is predominantly liberal.
but also by the assumptions of the humorous writers, by the style of the newspapers
of the day, by the letters of people who read very few books-see
Attempts to define liberalism are not likely to meet with success-I
: for instance, the
letter which Mark Twain's father wrote his son to give him the gist of a course he
mean only that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness
ha<l taken with a traveling professor of grammar and rhetoric. The command of
language was believed to be one of the means by which one could become a person
of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation,
of standing and effectiveness. The tradition of American oratory is now only comic,
planning, and international cooperation, perhaps especially where
yet perhaps the verbal ritual of the Fourth of July was the tribute paid by simplicity
to intellect.
Russia is in question. These beliefs do great credit to those who hold
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them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of
literature of our time has of course been noted before. And certain
holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to
critics have been eager to attribute the lack of connection to the
deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with
literal difficulty of the writers themselves and to blame this difficulty
them, in a great literary way.
on the writers' intellectual snobbishness and irresponsibility; as the
Our liberal ideology has produced a large literature of social and
war approached they even went so far as to regard as subversive to
political protest, but not, for several decades, a single writer who
democracy all writers who did not, as one of them put it, "turn away
commands our real literary admiration; we all respond to the
from the preferences of the self-appointed few, and toward the needs
flattery of agreement, but perhaps even the simplest reader among
and desires of the many." One might be the more willing to accept
us knows in his heart the difference between that emotion and the
this diagnosis if the critics who made it were more adept in their
real emotions of literature. It is a striking fact about this literature
understanding of what, after all, a good many people can underof contemporary liberalism that it is commercially very successfulstand, or if they were not so very quick to give all their sympathy at the behest of the liberal middle class, that old vice of "commercialand all their tolerance to works of an obviously inferior sort merely ism," which we all used to scold, is now at a disadvantage before the
because they are easy to read, and "affirmative," and "life-giving,"
"integrity" which it once used to corrupt. Our dominant literature
and written for the needs and desires of the many. If tolerance is in
is profitable in the degree that it is earnest, sincere, solemn. At its
question, I am inclined rather to suppose that it should go to those
best it has the charm of a literature of piety. It has neither imaginawriters from whom, whatever their difficulty, we hear the unmistaktion nor mind.
able note of seriousness-a note which, when we hear it, should sug
And if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the gengest to us that those who sound it are not devoting their lives to eral consent of the most serious criticism, by consent too of the very
committing literary suicide.
class of educated people of which we speak, are to be thought of as
It would be futile to offer a diagnosis which would go counter to
the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the
the one of literary snobbery and irresponsibility, a diagnosis which
liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust,
would undertake, perhaps, to throw the blame for the cultural situ
Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann (in his creative work), Kafka,
ation upon the quality of the education of our educated class, or
Rilke, Gide-all have their own love of justice and the good life, but
upon the political intelligence of this class. The situation is too comin not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and plex and too important for so merely contentious a procedure.
emotions which liberal democracy, as known by our educated class,
Neither blame nor flattery can do anything to close the breach that I
has declared respectable. So that we can say that no connection exists
have described.
between our liberal educated class and the best of the literary minds
But to organize a new union between our political ideas and our
of our time. And this is to say that there is no connection between
imagination-in all our cultural purview there is no work more
the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the
necessary. It is to this work that Partisan Review has devoted itself
imagination. The same fatal separation is to be seen in the tendency
for more than a decade.
of our educated liberal class to reject the tough, complex psychology
It is of some importance that Partisan Review began its career as
of Freud for the easy rat
ionalistic optimism of Horney and Fromm.
an organ which, in the cultural field, was devoted to the interests
The alienation of the educated class from the most impressive
of the Communist Party. Considering it for the moment quite apart
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from politics, the cultural program of the Communist Party in this
is not the question which should first come to mind in thinking
country has, more than any other single intellectual factor, given
about literature. Quality is the first, and perhaps should be the only,
the license to that divorce between politics and the imagination of
consideration. But in our situation today, when we think of quality,
which I have spoken. Basing itself on a great act of mind and on a
we must ask what chance a particular quality has to survive, and
great faith in mind, it has succeeded in rationalizing intellectual
how it can be a force to act in its own defense and in the defense of
limitation and has, in twenty years, produced not a single work of
those social circumstances which will permit it to establish and
distinction or even of high respectability. After Pa,·tisan Review had
propagate itself in the world. This is not a desirable state of affairs.
broken with the Communist Party, some large part of its own in
"Art is a weapon" and "Ideas are weapons" were phrases that a few
tellectual vitality came from its years of conflict with Communist
years ago had a wide and happy currency; and sometimes, as we
culture at a time when our educated class, in its guilt and confusion,
look at the necessities of our life, we have the sense that the weapon
was inclined to accept in serious good faith the cultural leadership of
metaphor all too ruthlessly advances-food is now a weapon, sleep
the Party. In recent years the political intensity of Partisan Review
and love will soon be weapons, and our final slogan perhaps will be,
has somewhat diminished, yet its political character remains.
"Life is a weapon." And yet the question of power is forced upon us.
As it should remain, because our fate, for better or worse, is po
At least let us not fall into the temptations it always offers, of
litical. It is therefore not a happy fate, even if it has an heroic sound,
grossness and crudeness. The critics to whom I have referred yield
but there i5 no escape from it, and the only possibility of enduring
to these temptations when they denounce the coterie and the writer
it is to force into our definition of politics every human activity and
who does not write for "the many." The matter is not so simple as
every subtlety of every human activity. There are manifest dangers
these earnest minds would have it. From the democratic point of
in doing this, but greater dangers in not doing it. Unless we insist
view, we must say that in a true democracy nothing should be done
that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination
for the people. The writer who defines his audience by its limitaand mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like. Partisan tions is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must
Review has conceived its particular function to be the making of
define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is
this necessary insistence, and within its matrix of politics it has
gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right
wished to accommodate the old and the new, the traditional and the
audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to
experimental, the religious and the positivistic, the hopeful and the
his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie.
despairing. In its implicit effort to bring about the union of the
The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy
political idea with the imagination, it has drawn on a wider range of
that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served
human interests and personality than any other cultural periodical
is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.
of our time. And yet it has its own clear unity: it is the unity con
The word coterie should not frighten us too much. Neither should
ferred on diversity by intelligence and imagination.
it charm us too much; writing for a small group does not insure in
But if we grant the importance of the work, we are bound to ask
tegrity any more than writing for the many; the coterie can corrupt
how effectively it can be carried out by a magazine of this kind and
as surely, and sometimes as quickly, as the big advertising approof similar circulation. We are dealing again with power. The quespriation. But the smallness of the coterie <lees not limit the "human"
tion of power has not always preoccupied literature. And ideally it
quality of the work. Some coterie authors will no doubt always be
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difficult and special, like Donne and Hopkins; but this says nothing
the moral condition of the world" if literature did not continue in
of their humanity. The populist critics seem to deny the possibility
existence with its appeal to limited groups, keeping the road open.
of broad humanity to those who do not have a large audience in
This does not answer the question of a period like ours when a
mind, yet the writers they would cite as exemplifying breadth of
kind of mechanical literacy is spreading more and more, when more
humanity did not themselves feel that the effect of their imagination
and more people insist, as they should, on an equality of cultural
depended on the size of their audience. "Very bookish, this housestatus and are in danger of being drawn to what was called by bred man. His work smells of the literary coterie"-this is T. E.
Tocqueville, who saw the situation in detail a century ago, the
Shaw's opinion of the author of the Odyssey. Chaucer wrote for a
"hypocrisy of luxury," the satisfaction with the thing that looks like
small court group; Shakespeare, as his sonnets show, had something
the real thing but is not the real thing. A magazine with six thouof the aspect of the coterie poet; Milton was content that his audisand readers cannot seem very powerful here, and yet to rest with ence be few, although he insisted that it be fit. The Romanticists
this judgment would be to yield far too easily to the temptations of
wrote for a handful while the nation sneered. Dostoevski wrote for
grossness and crudeness which appear whenever the question of
a journal that considere
d that it was doing well when its subscribers
power is raised. We must take into account what would be our
numbered four thousand. And our Whitman, now the often unread
moral and political condition if the impulse which such a magazine
symbol of the democratic life, was through most of his career the
represents did not exist, the impulse to make sure that the daemon
poet of what was even less than a coterie.
and the subject are served, the impulse to insist that the activity of
This stale argument should not have to be offered at all, and it
politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of mind.
is a grim portent of our cultural situation that, in the name of
democracy, critics should dare attempt to make it the sign of a poet's
shame that he is not widely read.
When we try to estimate the power of literature, we must not be
misled by the fancy pictures of history. Now and then periods do
occur when the best literature overflows its usual narrow bounds
and reaches a large mass of the people. Athens had such a period
and we honor it for that. The nineteenth century also had this kind
of overflowing. It is what we must always hope for and work for.
But in actual fact the occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties. Most people do not like the loneliness and the physical
quiescence of the activity of contemplation, and many do not have
the time or the spirit left for it. But whenever it becomes a question
of measuring the power of literature, Shelley's old comment recurs,
and "it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been
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57G004
Huckleberry Finn
IOI
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freshed the idea of Huckleberry Finn. Now at last the book was not
only ready but eager to write itself. But it was not to receive much
conscious help from its author. He was always full of second-rate
Hucklebe