Today I am posting one more of the writers who answered the 7 questions set by the editors of Partisan Review: these are Harold Rosenberg’s responses, the art critic and art historian who for many years engaged in a critical debate with Clement Greenberg in the pages of Partisan Review, and later in The New Yorker. Rosenberg was the art critic for The New Yorker from 1967 until his death in 1978. Rosenberg is famous for coining the term, ‘Action Painting” to describe the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic.

1.  Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a ‘usable past’? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James’s work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman’s?
2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years?
3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary supplements by advertising — in the case of the newspapers — and political pressures — in the case of the liberal weeklies — has made has made serious literary criticism an isolated cult?
4. Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want     to,  and without the aid of such crutches as teaching and editorial work? Do you think   there is any place in the present economic system for literature  as a profession?

5.   DO you feel, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organisation, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?

6.   How would you describe the political tendency of  American writing as a whole since 1930?  How do you feel about it yourself? Are you sympathetic to the current tendency toward what may be called “literary nationalism” — a renewed emphasis, largely uncritical, on the specifically “American” elements in our culture?

7. Have you considered the question of your attitude towards the possible entry of the United States into the next world war? What do you think the responsibilities in general are when and if war comes?.

Harold Rosenberg’s Replies:

1. What is a ‘usable past’? The phrase seems to me most intelligible if it is taken to mean a literary tendency to which a writer deliberately attaches his own work in order to modify it, Thus Thomas Mann consciously uses the romantic movement of the 19th century, and Eliot French symbolism and English metaphysical poetry. For an original artist this is a very peculiar orientation, not far removed from that of the academicians.  The writer stands outside his work and builds it up from carefully selected materials. His posture implies a readiness to regard himself as a representative figure, a literary landmark. It implies also that the professional literary practice  has been raised to the level of a philosophy — a philosophy of the practical value of Art. One sets out to use (and change) the art of literature in the interests of its future; and through this one hopes to change the world. Merely to imitate, even to imitate persistently certain selected models is not to ‘use’ the past in this sense. Imitation is more naive than such using, has a closer resemblance to life itself. Long before we have culture or even conscious aims, we imitate.  And the writer who does not seek primarily to affect the history of literature tends to live in his work rather than use it. Baudelaire establishes himself inside of Poe as a base of operations; he apes him but does not use him.Through Poe he achieves a heightened sense of himself, whereas the ‘users’ are always talking of the ‘self-abnegation of the Artist.’  I still find much human appeal in the writer who is conscious by means of the past though not of the past as a means.  Another distinction is that imitation is always of individuals, while to elect a section of the past as usable indicates an intent to capture and exploit, for the sake of special interests, a specific historical area. In short, the whole idea of “usable past” is shot through with the politics of art. The American cultural past consists of the total results of a combined official using, and inspired individual aping of the European past. Beginning with Independence, American writers and artists have behaved in the native tradition by exchanging in rotation the following masters: British and French classicism, Rhenish romanticism, the Great of All Ages (Transcendentalism), Italian classicism (mainly in sculpture) French realism (social and psychological), French symbolic, etcetera. In America, though not in Europe, to be an American has always meant to be a properly dated European. Today, for instance, some people believe it means to be a Russian or German patriot. Outside this American culture — always under two or more flags — have lived the millions of native and immigrant americans who missed the chance to study with Thorwaldsen or at the Ecole des Beaux Arts or to enjoy the regulation Wanderjahe at Gottingen and Montmartre. These frontiersmen, tillers of soil, and builders of towns have been for the main part neither Americans or non-Americans in the  cultural sense — because their culture has been a homemade, transitional folk customs, without national scope, or they have had no culture at all, except for racial or sectarian remnants (Pennsylvania Germans, Huguenots, Mexicans, Scandinavian, Negro, Mormon, Quaker). These lower case Americans have been and remain ‘aliens.’ Their culture lies in the future not in the past.

Because the cultured Americans have been, almost exclusively, members of the upper class, while the americans are workers and farmers, storekeepers and country doctors, many writers today believe that the ‘soil’ and the folk is more Revolutionary,  as well as more American, than the library, the museum, and the idea. This is a very serious mistake. The most brutal and philistine american executive-type is also opposed instinctively to European art and literature, and likes to stage himself as a plain guy, a member of the cultural rank and file. And in literature itself the ‘people’s writers, from Mark Twain to Sinclair Lewis, merely start with the soil; they climb in the direction of the Academy, of which, as the antithesis of the real but uncultured folk, is also neither American nor European but merely an upper class sublimation of unreality.

On the other hand, writers like Poe, Whitman, or James, who take off from the contrast and tension between Europe and America, remains equally relevant, whether they move East, West, or up and down. America can be known only through the perspective of international culture. Conversely, it can only understand world ideas only if it applies them to itself.

Every writer today who is worth anything shows in some way the influence of the overturn that took place in American prose and poetry via Gertrude Stein and others. I wish to characterise this movement as essentially aristocratic (European-minded American) aping of american proletarian speech. (Examples:Stein, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Cummings). This writing, which at its best goes much farther in the direction of both aural accuracy and literary associations than Whitman’s private lingo, represents a synthesis, a new era in American consciousness and consciousness of the world. Our living language is brought into focus with the living language of the past: it need not fear that looking back to the masterpieces of Europe and antiquity will turn it into a pillar of salt. On the other hand, American letters need strive no longer to shape every experience into a plaster of Paris model of a European original. Through bringing its major social element into play, American culture has begun to develop an identity of its own.

Already, however, in novels, Hollywood, Broadway, this experimental ‘cultural-proletarian’ language is being academicised, cleaned up, made “natural” (example: Abe Lincoln in Illinois),  made 100% American, i.e. zero.

2. A writer remains alive so long as he postulates the existence of a section of the population whose cultural dynamism is at least equal to his own, and whose influence is or will become dominant. Into this lively soluble mass he drops his own work, with the hope that it will cause a coagulation of taste and thought. . .The number of people who understand the International -American rhetoric is definitely growing, This, as noted above, also increases the rewards for, and consequently the chances of vulgarisation, which has started to drain the meaning out of the movement.

3. The newspapers and liberal weeklies have never been serious about literature; seriousness has been confined to the reviews and ‘little magazines’.  It is easy to see why: these publications, orienting themselves on ‘American interests,’ have assumed a smug proprietorial defense of ‘our literature’; while all serious efforts in American letters have been directed more or less humbly towards the European-American equation. More directly, however, liberalism assumes that all questions can be solved through ‘moderation’ — even lies and vulgarity must be treated moderately; and there is here a definite hatred and fear of ideas and acts carried through to their conclusion.  Whereas literature tends, especially in modern times, towards exaggeration and finality (its moderation, too, is exaggerated) , and this has been congenitally distasteful to the liberals. In addition, there is outright individual dishonesty and log-rolling constantly at work in that ‘social-minded’ atmosphere.  When the liberal weeklies are moderately hospitable to experimental critics like Burke or Schapiro or to poets like WIliams or Fearing, at the same time surrounding their contributions with those of all sorts of publishers’s bootlickers and editors’ boys, they show even less concern for values that the reactionary supplements who attack a thing merely because it is new. Thus, whatever is good in The Nation or The New Republic, and there have been many good pieces and excellent writers presented there, has been forced to cling with its teeth to a slippery intellectual surface.

4. Sure there’s a place for literature as a profession. In fact, it’s one of the few professions that has a future — along with military aviation, demagogy, patriotic preaching, spying, etc. The worse society gets the more professional it becomes, and the greater the demand for this type of intimate service.

5. See my review elsewhere in this issue of  Democracy and Socialism. Arthur Rosenberg, Knopf.

6.See above.

7. In time of war the writer has at least the obligation not to find the ‘good side’ of it.

Next Week: Desmond Hawkins, London Letter

2. John Dos Passos

The 7 set of questions listed below were those that the Editors of  Philip Rahv’s piece on “This Quarter” sent out  to various US writers about the state of writing in the nation.  There were 7 questions:

1. Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a ‘usable past’? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James’s work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman’s?
2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years?
3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary supplements by advertising — in the case of the newspapers — and political pressures — in the case of the liberal weeklies — has made has made serous literary criticism an isolated cult?

4.  Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want     to,  and without the aid of such crutches as teaching and editorial work? Do you think   there is any place in the present economic system for literature  as a profession?

5.   DO you feel, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organisation, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?

6.   How would you describe the political tendency of  American writing as a whole since 1930?  How do you feel about it yourself? Are you sympathetic to the current tendency toward what may be called “literary nationalism” — a renewed emphasis, largely uncritical, on the specifically “American” elements in our culture?

7. Have you considered the question of your attitude towards the possible entry of the United States into the next world war? What do you think the responsibilities in general are when and if war comes?

Last week I posted Gertrude Stein’s rather barbed answers. Here are the answers given by John Dos Passos:

 John Dos Passos

1. In relation to style and methods of writing, I hardly think of the past in chronological order. Once on the library shelf Juvenal and Dreiser are equally “usable.” The best immediate ancestor (in Auden’s sense)for today’s American writing is I think a  dark star somewhere in the constellation containing Mark Twain, Melville, Thoreau and Whitman.
2. The audience is probably the people who read books other than best sellers. I doubt if it has expanded much in the last ten years, though in the preceding  five years it certainly expanded. It may very well be shrinking now.
3. The critics for the daily press, and all the newspaper writers live in a very special world. I think they are more influenced by the ebb and flow of headlined fashions, and by the varying standards in social prestige of the world than by any direct advertising pressure. Advertising probably determines the space given a book, and in the long run, I think it will be found that various publishers’ lists get respectful attention in direct relation to the financial positions of the concerns. After all, what do you want for three cents? Current newspaper criticisms are interesting to the social historians just as fashion notes are interesting. I doubt very much if they will take their place in the “usable” past. There’s not enough, but there is some first rate literary criticism around that, naturally, is very useful to a writer.
4. I’ve managed to do it so far but its nip and tuck.
5. isn’t an individual just a variant in a group? The equipment belongs to the society you were brought up by. The individuality lies I how you use it. My sympathies, for some reason, lie with the private in the front line again the brass hat; with the hod carrier against the straw boss, or the walking delegate for that matter; with the laboratory worker against the stuffed shirt in a mortarboard.; with the criminal against the cop. When I try to use my head it’s somewhat different. People are you and me. As for allegiance; what I consider the good side of what’s been going on among people on this continent since 1620 or thereabouts, has mine. And isn’t there one of history’s dusty attics called the Republic of Letters.
6. On the whole I’m all for the trend toward American self-consciousness in current writing. Of course any god thing gets run into the ground. I think there is enough real democracy in the very mixed American tradition to enable us, with courage and luck, to weather the social transformations that are now going on without losing all our liberties or the humane outlook that is the medium in which civilisations grow. The reaction to home-bred ways of thinking is a healthy defence against the total bankruptcy of Europe. As I have come to believe firmly that in politics the means tend to turn out to be more important than the end, I think that the more our latent pragmatism and our cynicism regard to ideas is stimulated the safer we will be.
7. My attitude towards a war would entirely depend on what I thought its internal results would be, though its hard to conceive of a war that would have good results anywhere. But how would I know when it began? We live in a very odd period in human history and it’s very difficult to make broad generalizations about events or to label them beforehand.  Practically, I’d probably try to get back my old job driving an ambulance.

Next Week: Another Writer Looks at the Situation of American Writing.

The theme of the Summer issue of PR, 1939 was somewhat insular. As Europe became the ground for WWII, American isolationism had its chance to appear again. Philip Rahv’s piece on “This Quarter” was matched by the results of a questionnaire posted to various US writers about the state of writing in the nation.  There were 7 questions:

1. Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a ‘usable past’? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James’s work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman’s?
2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years?
3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary supplements be advertising — in the case of the newspapers — and political pressures — in the case of the liberal weeklies — has made has made serous literary criticism an isolated cult?
4. Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches as teaching and editorial work? Do you think there is any place in the present economic system for literature  as a profession? 
5. DO you feel, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organisation, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?
6. How would you describe the political tendency of  American writing as a whole since 1930?  How do you feel about it yourself? Are you sympathetic to the current tendency toward what we may be called “literary nationalism” — a renewed emphasis, largely uncritical, on the specifically “American” elements in our culture?
7. Have you considered the question of your attitude towards the possible entry of the United States into the next world war? What do you think the responsibilities in general are when and if war comes?  

Many writers replied and I will include the most interesting in the next weeks of Reading Partisan Review. But I thought it might be most amusing to start out with Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde and bleakly comic and caustic replies:

   1. Usable for what, cannot worry about the future of American Writing.  The present is enough, and any American is American.

2. An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience, you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.

3. After all, if it is written and presumably what you write is written before it is criticised then criticism is bound to come too late always. To the rest of the question it is the same.

4. I suppose if I had to make a living I should have, I do not know, how can you tell?

5. I am not interested.

6. Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.

7. It does not seem possible for any of you to realise that  most probably there will not be another general European war, the more Americans thinks there is going to be one, the more suspicious the continent gets and the less likely they are to fight.  Anyway, they are not at all likely to do so but if they were to then the writers would have to fight too like anybody else some will like it and some will not.

Readers might want to read this book by Janet Malcolm, which addresses the reality of the European War to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Part II:

Now Rahv turns to the reasons for the decline in American literary success, and begins with the pressure of the Left on contemporary writers:

“For a long time now, it has been held almost as an axiom by left critics that in entering the political world the artist improves both his mind and his art. The reverse of this was held to be true by the conservatives, so that in the controversy about “proletarian literature” that raged in the early ‘thirties they uniformly urged artists to shun politics and retain their aesthetic purity. But no, paradoxically enough, it turns out that it is precisely politics which has become the medium of a new, of an unprecedented affiliation of literature to ideas historically transcended  generations ago and highly congenial to the present order of things.

“Obviously in this era, politics has played a contradictory role on the literary scene. If at first it drew the literary imagination closer to social reality, enabling it to assimilate a series of  fresh phenomena, it is now, conversely, despoiling this imagination and provoking its self-destructive impulses.

Rahv goes on to criticise Hemingway’s ‘silly’ The Fifth Column; Louis Aragon for writing novels about WWI, at the same time as he propagandises  preparedness for the  war that is coming; Aragon is also defending the French Empire as well as Stalin’s ‘totalitarian’ state. Rahv is even more wrought up about Malraux’s Man’s Hope. “It should be recognised, by even the most obtuse for what it is — an invention out of whole cloth. This glamour novel of the People’s Front is a work of empty heroics, devoid of a single real character. A cleverly composed pamphlet in the guise of objective fiction, its consummate rhetoric serves only to sell an illusion. And the lesson of all this is not that people were mistaken to interest themselves in social causes and or that they should stay out of politics. The lesson, rather, is that politics, qua politics, as the ivory tower qua the ivory tower, is neither good nor bad for literature. But they become meaningful insofar as they are modalities that each historic situation fills with its own content, with its own time-spirit. “

Rahv is clear that the politics have a place in the writing, but that, “The real question is  more specific: what is the author actually doing in politics?  What is he doing with it, and what is it doing to him?  How does his political faith affect him as a craftsman, what influence does it exercise on the moral qualities and on the sensibility of his work?”

“Yet in our time, literature, in its characteristic  aspects, is no longer at liberty to decide for itself whether to spurn or to enter politics. For better or worse, politics is shaping its destiny. As the chronic crisis of capitalism extorts from every human being greater and greater sacrifices of the will, consciousness and individuality, depriving people of whatever  independence they may have had and of whatever power was their’s to act upon and determine their own lot the literary themes of private life lose more and more the interest and significance they once possessed.”

And here Rahv’s argument resonates, it seems to me, with the current high-flying genre of memoir and of non-fiction more  generally. A fashion that eschews much of what had been political in the 1960s and post 1968 years for data, factoids, and a miserable picture of the ‘body’ as the substitute for critical thinking.

He goes on to criticise a new ‘gentility’ in American writing, ‘this so-called”rediscovery of our democratic past”, which is, if not a futile effort to solve the problems of today with the solutions of the past?… “We are now entering an epoch in which thought images history in the reverse.  Its most voluble oracles, in art and in politics alike, have forgotten or are unable to learn that the grand and vital truths of of the past are often transformed into the superstitions, into the lemurs and vampires of the present.”

Rahv now rises to the meta-voice of the writer:  “To speak of modern literature is to speak of that peculiar grouping, the intelligentsia, to whom it belongs. The intelligentsia too, is a modern product, created by the drastic division of labor that prevails under capitalism.” The argument Rahv presents here is that the  intelligentsia’s concern with aesthetics, private emotion, even “the bent towards the obscure and the morbid,” — these qualities are not derived from a limitless  confidence that the artist has in himself, but from the group-ethos, from the proud self-imposed exile isolation of a cultivated minority. And these French writers created a whole range of what might be called idealised negations of the society they scorned.”

Rahv is really good at showing a genealogy of why and how the situation in writing is, in the summer of 1939, without any truly revolutionary tendency in writing. Yet….

“The dissident artist, if he understands the extremity of the age and the voices what it tries to stifle, will thus be saved from the sterility and delivered from its corruption. Instead of deceiving himself and others by playing with the bureaucratised visions of the shining cities of the future or else by turning his  art into a shrine for things that are dead and gone, he would be faithful to the metamorphosis of the present. And every metamorphosis, it has been said, “Is partly a swan song and partly a prelude to a great new poem.”

Next Week: Writers on Their Situation.

Like other posts about the “This Quarter” essays, this one will be in two parts.  Part I:

The quarterly reports on the state of literature and politics served to orientate the reader to the pieces that shape the issue at hand. This issue’s central topic is the state of American writing as the summer of 1939 demands an editorial reckoning with the tensions of 1939. This time it falls to Philip Rahv to make the case for the issue, and he does it with his usual fierce analysis. I have discussed Rahv in a number of other posts, and you can find them in the archive of this blog.

 Philip Rahv

His name for the essay is “Twilight of the Thirties,” echoing Nietzsche and Wagner and the Germanic voice.
Rahv begins by describing the way in which the current literary situation reflects the rise of the ‘democratic’ at the cost of the ‘revolutionary’ current in literature. He takes the example of Anton Zweig, whose The Case of Sergeant Grischa, narrated the trauma and losses of the First World War. But in an interview in the New York Post, Zweig ‘repudiated’ his novel and declared in favour of ‘democratic’ literature.  Rahv sees this as a function of Zweig being drawn into a general tendency to turn down the burner on revolutionary polemical satiric and anti-popular front works.

 Anton Zweig

“Only a few years ago such a revolting about face by a writer of Zweig’s stature would have been universally cited as a piece of  demented reaction. In this retrograde period, however, the majority of writers who formerly  would have challenged Zweig are actually of one mind with him. For aren’t they all, nowadays, true-blue democrats together?  Don’t they assemble at literary congresses — such as the recent PEN Congress and American Writers Congress — where the war drive is spiritually organized, where celebrities of such diverse and unequal talents as Thomas Mann and Dorothy Parker, Jules Romains, and Dorothy Thompson, parading their loyalty to the status quo, solemnly engage themselves to provide the coming world-conflict with the required cultural unction and humanity appeal.”

SO, Rahv goes on to say, that Zweig’s remark is one of the symptoms of the “expression of the present demoralised condition of letters.”

“As the tide of patriotism and democratic eloquence rises, one observes an ebb of creative energy and a rapid decline of standards in all spheres of the intellect and of the imagination.”  The depictions of WWI were indeed more powerful because they showed the terror and horror and senselessness of it. Now, it seems that everything is coated with a kind of cowardly irreality.

And the ‘younger generation’ has ceased to produce exciting new things. “no avant-garde movement exists any longer, and he goes on,

“For more than a hundred years literature , on a world scale, was in the throes of a constant inner revolution, was the arena of uninterrupted rebellions and counter-rebellions, was incessantly reviewing itself both in substance and in form. But at present it seems as if this magnificent process is drawing to a close.”

The world that Rahv had thought would result from the knowledge gained from WWI, and from the Russian Revolution, would be made with fewer costs, until the Moscow Trials, the Popular Front, and Fascism twisted it all into errors and lies.

“Only one idea promised to re-vitalise literary expression is this decade. It was the idea  of the social revolution in its specific application to culture, and it gave rise to a radical school of creative writing and to a Marxist literary criticism. This movement, however, turned into its very opposite after a brief span of life that was as blundering as it was exciting. From the start it was held in pawn by the Stalinists. AT first devised for revolutionary ends, it has now been converted into a means of forcing literature into the harness of the old society. This movement has pulled a great many writers into the orbit of politics. But this only means that a great many writers who were previously politically indifferent, and hence relatively immune to certain rabid notions, have been led to accept and even to idealise bourgeois values at the same time as catchwords of “progress ” and “democracy” delude them into imagining themselves to be still radicals. Yet having dedicated themselves to society, society rededicates itself to them. Never have the literary lions of the “left-wing” enjoyed such lavish hospitality from the world at large as at present, never have they received such bounties, such whole-hearted recognition, from the very powers they profess to abhor. As for those writers who refuse to accompany the Comintern on its travels from one pole of the class struggle to the other, their works are placed on the expurgatory index and their persons committed to Satan. And The New Masses these days denounces John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson as “enemies of the people” in the same issue in which Hollywood is saluted as a centre of culture.

Rahv has set the scene now for what will have to be his “lesson about politics to literature to be from this experience.”

come back next week to read  part II.

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