The Partisan Review, 9 (Mar–Apr 1942) 115-16
I have been shown the text of a lecture by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks on “Primary Literature and Coterie Literature” and invited to comment upon it. 1 As for Mr. Brooks’ judgements on particular authors I am impressed by the catholicity of his distaste: but I have no comment to make except that his description of Dr. I. A. Richards as “a neurological psychologist who lives in England” does not suggest a very intimate knowledge of that author’s work. 2 It is not in Mr. Brooks’s literary appreciations but in the social implications of his point of view that I am interested: and in these for the reason that I detect a similarity with a point of view which has recently been expressed on this side of the water also. It is a point of view which may be called reactionary, so long as we remember that reaction may move in more than one direction and to different distances; to a more, or to a less civilized condition than that of contemporary society. I hope I am not influenced by the newspaper rumour that my own writings have been condemned by the Vichy Government, as well as by Mr. Brooks: I mention this so that the reader may not suspect that I have any concealed grievances. 3
The similarity that I find is between Mr. Brooks’s point of view and that of a leading article in The Timesof London on the 25th March, 1941. This article is entitled “The Eclipse of the Highbrow.” 4 It has, like that of Mr. Brooks, a warmth of feeling puzzling to those who come under its condemnation, and goes farther than Mr. Brooks in its disapproval of the morals of contemporary writers and artists, whom it characterizes as “often impatient, self-indulgent, intolerant and touchy,” as well as possessed of “a weak and arrogant contempt for the common man.” (The “common man” of a paper like The Timescan hardly mean the proletarian – it must mean the man of the educated upper classes.) The Timesarticle complains that modern literature is one of “clever triviality,” that art is brought down to “the level of esoteric parlour games,” and it draws the now familiar comparison of modern poetry to the cross-word puzzle. Though it does not use the term, it holds up exactly the same picture of “coterie” art as does Mr. Brooks.
The reason for the violence of the Times’s writer’s feelings, as of those of Mr. Brooks, must remain unknown. If either of them was anything of a sociologist, he might have been interested in not merely denouncing modern art, but in enquiring whyit is what it is. 5 The attack is not made precisely on literary grounds, nor precisely on moral grounds, but upon grounds which are a confusion of the two. For the Timeswriter the virtues despised by the highbrows are “such as endurance, unselfishness and discipline”; for Mr. Brooks “the great themes are those by virtue of which the race has risen [ what race?], courage, justice, mercy, honour and love.” 6 I do not like to be held to underrate or despise these virtues: but (unless by “love” Mr. Brooks means charityin the theological sense) they are the natural, rather than the Christian virtues; and justice, we now know, can mean very different things to different people. Mr. Brooks further employs terms – “the biological grain,” “the life-drive,” “race-survival” – which are depressingly reminiscent of a certain political version of biology: his literary criterion seems to be conduciveness to race survival “on what might further be called the best possible terms” – what these terms are is not stated.
Literature has at some times and in some places been condemned for infraction of laws of religious orthodoxy; 7* in some places at some times it has been condemned for infraction of laws of political orthodoxy: but in such a situation we can at least know...
