[incomplete opening pages]
.....
Regarding the low or eccentric literary standard of today—I believe they are chargeable to several more or less dissociated factors, social & intellectual, which unhappily operate simultaneously & in the same direction. It may be that these separate factors all have an ultimate philosophic connexion, but for the purposes of a brief survey they may well be regarded as independent. The major factors seem to be three in number—two affecting serious non-commercial creation, & the third touching the frivolous & negligible (though quantitatively overwhelming) morass of commercial slop including both "slicks" & "pulps". These do not include the special elements you mention—the speed of living which you say "must" be pursued "in accordance with the tempo of the times"—because I regard that as a decadence-phenomenon touching at least two of the basic factors. That is, two of the three great factors involve this principle. Over-speeded living is the reaction of sheep-like ninnies to certain commerce-fostered ideals too cheap to be worth spitting on. No one "must" meet the conventional "tempo of the times", & the independent spirit resolutely refuses to conform, no matter how great the material cost. Actually, I believe fewer people grovel to this vulgar speed fetish than is commonly supposed. Young persons, if not philosophically mature, succumb for a brief period; but I fancy most of them develop out of it as they mature. The cheap gadgets—aeroplanes & all that—persist, but it is not always the same people who keep using them. And the great bulk of the people are going to fight to the finish before they will allow coarse slave-drivers like the motor magnates to chain them to a speeded-up industrial peonage. Times are going in more directions than the one leading towards increased speed! Nevertheless, of course, the fetish of speed is an active present influence affecting both the sincere artistic decadent & the cheap commercial hack—& its results, divided equally between the output of these two types, may or may not involve permanent harm.
The serious, non-commercial aesthetics of today suffers, as I have suggested above, from two distinct maladies—the irrational & solipsistic freakishness of the subjective decadent, & the prosaic propagandism of the social theorist. The decadent concedes the existence of such a thing as disinterested art, but allows the futilities & absurdities & paradoxes & contradictions of the dying capitalist culture to disorganise him to such an extent that he can reflect nothing but chaos, paradox, hallucination, & ironic contrast. The theorist, on the other hand, refuses to admit that any such thing as art exists as an independent entity. To him (& he is usually an orthodox Marxist who reads an economic motive into everything from the motions of binary stars to the sighing of the wind in the trees), every human activity must have a direct bearing on the technical problems of organising human society for the optimum fulfilment of the majority's physical needs; & art is justifiable only so far as it promotes the successful operation—or hastens the adoption—of a rational social order. Betwixt the two types, we get a sorry enough mess of nonsense & mediocrity. One gives us the diagrams of scrambled conic sections or nightmares with locomotives floating in the sky over landscapes of skyscrapers twisted into spirals & dollar-signs, whilst the other gives us undistinctive photographic likenesses of Lenin & Stalin, educational posters urging children to brush their teeth, or grotesquely ironic murals shewing the triumph of machinery or the woes of the Mexican peon. To me, both of these attitudes seem essentially absurd. Each grows, I think, out of an excessively literal & exaggerated application of the idea that an artist should (or necessarily does) reflect something of his environment ..... although the Marxist position is part of a more elaborate maze of theory. This idea itself has always struck me as only loosely & partly true—& I certainly think that any attempt of the artist to keep it constantly in mind is ruinous to his work. We can produce real art only when we forget all about theory. It may be that our spontaneous results will indeed reflect something of our period & of our social sympathies in an unconscious way—but if we start out consciously with the idea of reflecting the period or airing our economic doctrines, we shall not get very far as artists. Of course, a person is now & then so naturally gifted with artistic genius that he cannot help producing real art as a by-product even when his conscious theories are of the most ridiculous & arid kind. Thus a surrealist crank or commercial hack or social propagandist may, by accident, evolve many a thing of undoubted power & authenticity. But even in such a case as this, the amount of waste is cruelly great. No matter how often the theory-handicapped or commerce-crippled artist manages to produce something good, we are always aware of how much better his results would be without the handicap. The real fact is that no artist ought to tie himself too completely or definitely to any particular period or aera. After all, the environment in which he develops is not merely that of one brief point in the time-stream. It is, rather, the sum of all that the ages have contributed to his civilisation. To the modern European, the sculpture of Phidias & Scopas & Praxiteles, the architecture of Ictinus, Callicrates, metagenes, Dinocrates, Polyclitus, Hippodamus, & Apollodorus, the painting of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, & Raphael, & the music of Handel, Bach, & Beethoven, are just as vital & immediate & personally present as are the latest creations of his own chronological period; & any attempt to erect a new art without reference to such foundations must necessarily be hollow, barren, & fallacious. Our particular age is indeed one of decay & chaos & transition, so that it can probably contribute less fresh material to art than can most others—but why should this force all artists either to devote themselves to the job of portraying decay & chaos, or to forswear self-expression & become social & political propagandists? Are the existence & presence of the past annulled by the momentary disturbances of a readjustment-period? Is a Gothic cathedral less beautiful because we have ceased to believe what the builders of Chartres & Lincoln & Salisbury believed about the governance of the cosmos? Are the landscapes of Ruysdael & Hobbema ugly or meaningless because they were painted amidst a bourgeois-capitalist civilisation whose social & economic values we no longer accept? Suppose we do have our grain harvested by machinery & ground in complex mechanical plants with tangles of tall smokestacks? Does that alter the fact that over a great part of our racial history we used scythes & wind & water mills, or annul the powerful appeal of pictures laying stress on these ineradicable cultural landmarks? Up to a relatively recent time, no one thought of questioning the equal artistic value of themes pertaining to our past (no matter how outmoded) & themes pertaining to our present (which will soon enough be merely another phase of the outmoded past!)—both forming equal influences in the shaping of the long cultural stream. Though we did not use Egyptian pyramids or Greek galleys or Roman chariots, or believe in centaurs & mermaids, we found all these things of vital significance in art—as bearing on the life & beliefs of those ancestral ages which moulded & gave rise to ours. Why, then, must we suddenly proceed to claim that a painting of a windmill is alien & meangingless because we no longer depend on windmills—or aver that we must depict a placid meadow or woodland as a jumble of cubes & cog-wheels because (a) we feel that the chaos of a dying social order & (b) are more used in an urban-mechanical culture to seeing cubes & cog-wheels than to seeing trees & kine & hedges & distant spires? To my mind, the ultra-moderns have (as in the surrender of some of the less sensitive & courageous & determinedly individual spirits to the now-tottering Golden Calf of Mammon) simply flown off the handle—letting their heads become turned by admitted rapidity & completeness of certain current mutations which really do not differ in kind from dozens of mutations of the past. Certainly, our daily lives (assuming that we have many contacts & employ the various useful or useless devices evolved by machinery) differ from those of their grandfathers. What if the gap is quantitively wider in our case? Where is the radical cleavage in essence betwixt the one gap & the other? Suppose our ideas of society & religion & property do differ from those of the 19th century? Did not the 19th century's ideas of these things differ nearly as much from the corresponding ideas of the 13th century? Yet did the 19th aesthetically repudiate the 13th as completely as our ultra-moderns would aesthetically repudiate the 19th & all preceding? The extremists forget that the mere phenomenon of change does not necessarily abrogate the principle of continuity. There are no basic eternal things—but there are always sources & antecedents & mnemonic deposits which cannot lightly be disregarded.
Commercialism forms the third aesthetically degrading factor of the present age, but is a parallel evil of different origin & nature. Instead of vitiating honest efforts at self-expression, as do decadence & social propagandism, it simply removes human energy altogether from the field of honest expression, & shackles it to a greedy & aesthetically & intellectually dishonest sort of charlatanry having no connexion with art. It is an older disease than chaotic decadence & systematic propagandism, & will persist as long as bourgeois capitalism remains a factor to be coped with. It was not so marked in the agrarian aristocratic age, because at that period the most unimaginative, phillistinic, & under-educated elements did little or no reading or conscious artistic contemplation. When they did reach out aesthetically, they copied educated gentlefolk. Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a deathblow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society staved & crushed into sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercial-satellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify—& they so outnumbered the remaining gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. Hence the Saturday Evening Post, the Hearst press, the "art" of Maxfield Parrish, the fiction of Robert W. Chambers (after his King in Yellow period!) & Kathleen Norris, the happy ending tacked on to the cinema version of Winterset (to say nothing of the aimless mess of flickers which I drowsed through while waiting for Winterset to come on!), the heterogeneous pseudo-Colonial & pseudo-Tudor villas of our smart real-estate developments, the persistent sale of the late O. Henry's collected charlatanries, &c. &c. &c. And when bourgeois capitalism found it profitable to reach down to the still-submerged elements & cater to their crippled, repressed, & grotesquely unformed tastes with tabloid news rags, pulp "confession", "spicy", "love", "western", "horror", "scientifiction", "9-man" magazines, & the like, the opening-up of this huge market merely aggravated the trend away from real excellence towards showmanship & charlatanry. The suave bosses of a business "civilisation" have no wish to improve the masses—rather the reverse. Certainly, the spineless clod who sells himself into a pulp editorship under the present degenerate set-up cannot attempt to educate his circle of yokels & halfwits, or seek to cram meritorious literature down the reluctant gullets of people who simply continue buying trash from others. If he has chosen a cheap showman's job, he must stick to the pandering standards of his underworld or get out & make an honest living at some really constructive job of another sort if he can find such in a bourgeois world. Capitalism says, work the poor devils as cheaply as possible (throwing 'em out to starve when they're superfluous), & cash in on their present dwarfed tastes & faculties by selling 'em all the tabloids & Macfadden rags their decreasing store of pennies can pay for. Thus the noble cultures of well-mannered bank presidents, of Messrs. Hoover, Mellon, Mills, Al Smith, &c., & of other idealistic & disinterested upholders of our Sacred Constitution of the Founding Fathers. No wonder the Marxists exaggerate a trend or influence into an immutable law, & proclaim the eternal linkage of art & economics!
Actually, the aesthetic outlook is not quite 100% hopeless. Let us grant that most profit-motivated writing & other forms of creation must be counted out. Also, that much of our sincere aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic endeavour becomes sidetracked through the decadent & propagandist tendencies previously noted. Nay, more—that the restricted area of non-eccentric, non-propagandist material still aimed at gentlefolk (Harper's*, Atlantic, Alfred Noyes, Edith Wharton, Frank Brangwyn, Boston Symphony Orchestra, &c.) is increasingly lifeless, sterile, mannered, preoccupied with form, & obviously linked with obsolescent attitudes & interests & perspectives. Does this indeed mean the death of all normal & vigorous self-expression for its own sake? I hardly think so. The human instinct for creation—manifest from Cro-Magnon times onward—is too hardy & powerful to be downed by even as formidable a combination as that of all the forces here mentioned .... & this duly allowing for the ever-increasing diversion of human energy from imaginative synthesis to scientific analysis as brought about by new light on the universe. Counting all handicaps, I think there will always be a residue of honest & powerful aesthetic expression—some of it from unhampered & undeluded artists, & some from naturally gifted creators who cannot help evolving beauty despite various conscious fallacies & handicaps. There are great living novelists—Rolland, Mann, Dreiser, Undset, Lagerlof, &c.—& with Masefield, MacLeish, & others poetry is not dead. O'Neill & Maxwell Anderson give really substantial drama, & in painting Matisse & Zuloaga are still on deck—whatever one may think of Dali or Picasso or Diego Rivera. In architecture, despite all the "functional" horrors, Cram still holds the fort for Gothic, whilst the classic shade of Cass Gilbert may yet outlive Frank Lloyd Wright. This continuing body of soundness cannot be wholly without effect on the younger generation; & despite the lure of eccentricity, the dogmata of Marx, & the death-struggle of a blind & doomed commercialism, there will surely be a strong minority conscious of their heritage & determined to express themselves. And the more private commerce, industry, & finance become curbed & absorbed—as they must if civilisation is to survive without an explosion—the less mighty will bulk the cheap ideals of speed, quantity, ostentation, surface amusement, &c., which form one of the worst influences. Under a better controlled economic system, with Federal encouragement of mass-education (even if the first few sets of government adult-instruction commissioners lack perfect drawing-room manners), an appreciable rise in public taste may well be expected. It is probably as non-profit projects of some sort—governmentally subsidied or otherwise—that really meritorious magazines in fields as narrowly specialised as the weird will exist .... if they ever do exist. Capitalism has no place for this kind of thing—& in pre-capitalistic ages such special products depended upon the caprice of royal or other powerful patrons. The war between honest human expression & the profit motive is eternal & truceless.
As you may see, I disagree totally & violently with your belief in making concessions in writing. One concession leads to another—& he who takes the easiest way never comes back. They all say they mean to come back some day—but they never do. Belknap is gone. If Sultan Malik ever pulls out of charlatanry it will be purely the individual & non-representative triumph of a singularly keen objective intellect. Abe Merritt—who could have been a Machen or Blackwood or Dunsany or de la Mare or M. R. James (they never gave in & truckled to the Golden Calf! .... why should one if he can get food & decent clothing & warmth & shelter in any less ignominious way?) if he had but chosen—is so badly sunk that he's lost the critical faculty to realise it. And so on—& so on. The road does not lie through any magazines .... that is, the road for a fantastic writer. The "slicks" are just as tawdry & insincere as the "pulps"—with merely a different kind of tawdriness & insincerity—& the reputable magazines (Harper's, Scribner's, Story, &c.) virtually never handle fantasy. The road to print for the serious fantaisiste is through book-publication alone—save for those incidental magazine placements which lie along the way. And if one can't make the book grade in the end, he is better off with his work largely unpublished—able to look himself in the face & know that he has never cringed nor truckled nor sold his intellectual & aesthetic integrity. He may go down, but he'll go down like a free & unbroken gentleman with sword untarnished & colours defiantly flying. Britons never shall be slaves! Actually, all technical training for the popular magazines is in precisely the wrong direction so far as aesthetic expression is concerned. The better magazine hack one is, the less chance one has of ever doing anything worth doing. Every magazine trick & mannerism must be rigidly unlearned & banished even from one's subconsciousness before one can write seriously for educated mental adults. That's why Merritt lost—he learned the trained-dog tricks too well, & now he can't think & feel fictionally except in terms of the meaningless & artificial clichés of 2¢-a-word romance. Machen & Dunsany & James would not learn the tricks—& they have a record of genuine creative achievement beside which a whole library-full of cheap Ships of Ishtar & Creep, Shadows remains essentially negligible. It is much better never to have anything published than to cringe to cheap tradesmen—yet in practice the determined anti-concessionist often lands a story. True, he doesn't land as many as the truckler lands—but that was never his object. He wrote what he wrote because he wanted to write it—& the feat of mood-crystallisation itself was its own reward. If he had merely written what some grasping editorial clown wanted, where would his satisfaction have been? When it comes to a question of industrial production to suit a market demand, it's rather more dignified to let the commodity be something staple & useful—wheat, oranges, coal, furniture, & so on—than to let one's production-programme mock & parody the basic human impulse of aesthetic creation. However, as I have said, an enormous percentage of honestly & uncompromisingly written material can often be professionally & remuneratively placed. Many cases on actual record prove it. Klarkash-Ton's period of concessions was very brief, yet he has landed story after story—the real stuff, & no tailored-to-measure shoddy mixture. Then, too, we note with tragic wistfulness the readily-published sincere early stories of writers who later sold themselves & slid down the toboggan to commercial success & rabble popularity. God! What Burks could have done if he'd stuck to the mood & manner of his early Haitian stuff & his Bells of Oceana! But human psychology is a complex & devious thing—& the influence of a dying but still greed-breeding capitalistic order is what it is. I'll cut my evangelical career short in its infancy, & let the dysoptic world go to hell in its own divinely-condemn'd way. But for commerce & all its ideals & conditions & ramified consequences—one lingeringly thumbed nose & one reverberant Bronx cheer! ..........
Thanks immensely for the return of those pages with social & political arguments—though I don't know whether I'll ever have occasion to use them after all. Events more swiftly, & the smashing victory of last November has so routed the enemy that I do not believe the barbaric Republican point of view will ever be seriously regarded hereafter in the United States. Civilised goals will have become so thoroughly taken for granted by 1940 that the bulk of the people will never again be bamboozled into voting for injustice, famine, & misery. It is not merely that they would revolt if Hooverism were put over on them. It is that they will nevermore allow Hooverism to be put over on them. The only way the handful of defeated greed-worshippers could ever regain power would be through a shrewdly organised fascist movement based on primitive emotional appeals of the religio-hysteric type(waving the flag, rousing nominal Christians against "Jewish intellectualism", exciting native-Americans against "Catholic-Irish-Jewish [or whatever foreign element predominates in any particular section] democracy", exciting Catholics against "materialistic communism", exciting provincial pride against "decadent European innovations" &c. &c.), or through an armed revolt with foreign backing like that of Gen. Franco in Spain. Granting the scant probability of a Franco-like revolt of the Hoovers & Mellons & polite bankers, & conceding that—despite Coughlinism, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, & the K.K.K.—the Soil of America is hardly very fertile for any variant of Nazism, it seems likely that the day of free & easy plutocracy in the United States is over. It has taken the people generations to discover how they have been fooled; but once disillusioned, they are much less likely to be fooled again. Republicanism of the old type is out for good—though of course its confused & embittered remnants will long constitute a more or less harmless muttering minority like the Royalists in France & the Jacobites in 18th century England. The real issues of tomorrow lie betwixt the adherents of a controlled capitalism (Roosevelt; La Follette) which may or may not [it probably will, though present liberals deny it] evolve into rational socialism, & the adherents of a sudden violent move towards some form of orthodox Marxian communism. A tremendous amount of the best thought of the younger generation is on the side of a communist move since sociologists of a certain type believe that the abstractionist element of the dying order will always form a fatal barrier to permanent progress unless violently deprived of mischief-making opportunities. I, however, do not agree with this position; for I believe that a slow, peaceful revolution in thought & perspective is already under way amongst the majority, so that the obstructive reactionaries will never gain more than the horse-laugh which they gained last November. They will be a nuisance & drag, but hardly a danger—& meanwhile it is the part of wisdom to choose a peaceful & gradual evolution instead of a culturally destructive upheaval. Better let the capitalists hang on (under proper governmental control & taxation) a generation or two more than to plunge the nation into bloodshed & risk the destruction of the many sound factors in our hereditary culture. Industry should be socialised by degrees, & only as soon as the mass of the people are ready to back up the various absorptive moves. The government must dictate hours & wages, & see that employment is universally spread. If private industry can meet such rigidly enforced demands, well & good. If not—& it probably can't—absorption will be in order. And after it has been proved that nothing but absorption will perpetuate endurable conditions, the masses will so overwhelmingly endorse absorption (as they would not today) that no amount of private greed can obstruct its peaceful adoption. It will come, no doubt, in various ways. Now & then a private industry will be purchased by the government at a reasonable price—now & then a socially & legally culpable industry will be seized after a due trial—now & then the government will find it advisable to enter a certain field as competitor & eliminate private industries through non-profit sales at lower prices. One at a time—& without any disruption of the normal stream of American life. No seizures of homes or any private non-industrial holdings of reasonable amount [investors in private industries can be properly compensates in government bonds when absorption occurs], no interference with free scholarships & research & intellectual & aesthetic tradition, no official inculcation of grotesque & fallacious scientific theories, no invasions of personal dignity or impositions of arbitrary punishment, no attempts to dissociate extent of recompense from extent of service, no campaign against the refinements of civilisation [instead, a dissolution of the fallacious linkage of the concepts of cultivation & economic advantage, aided by mass education of unprecedented scope, thoroughness, & discrimination], & above all, no wasteful slaughter & widespread misery of the sort lately prevailing in Russia & still prevailing in Spain. There will be plenty of corruption & routine friction—but the net results can't help being better than either the crazy orgy of moribund capitalism (where the chief corruption is actually legalised under the name of private profit) or the sanguinary shambles of a regulation Marxist revolution. it is towards such a goal that I prefer to work—& I believe the odds against achieving it are not insuperably great.
..........
The attitude which you outline—of a blind clinging to whatever immediate conditions give one the most luxuries & the most congenial social contacts in business hours, irrespective of the consequences to the bulk of the population—is indeed a very typical one, but I don't think it is of much ultimate significance because the immediate needs of most people (not merely most nice people or most smart people) are not on the side of reaction, but are on the side of rational change. For every well-fed Caspar Milquetoast whose personal advantage is served by the prosperity of the utility company which gives him a fat salary, there are a thousand or two John Smiths whose personal advantage (indeed, whose endurable existence) depends on governmental regulation of the company's hours & wages & rates .... & perhaps on the government's absorption & non-profit operation of that company. Now that John Smiths are beginning to know where their advantage lies, they will act just as Caspar does—blindly upholding what will personally serve them best—& when their millions of votes are counted against those Caspars, the result is not hard to predict. The trend is further promoted by the fact that not all fat-salaried beneficiaries of capitalism are Caspars. A few can reason, & can see that capitalism is automatically doomed by the natural course of economics unless upheld by fascist bayonets (although of course some of these reasoners merely shrug their shoulders cynically & cry après nous, le deluge) ; a few realise that their expert services will be just as well recompensed under government operation (even if the officials wear jarring neckties & have uncultivated accents) as under private profit-grabbing operation ; whilst a few possess real social vision & share the disgust of the scholar & aesthete & gentleman at a tottering, unstable equilibrium founded on lies & delusions & hypocrisy & involving the equal negation of common human decency & long-range common sense. The number of these last is not to be sneezed at—for despite the complacent position of the typical bourgeois the ranks of social thinkers are constantly recruited from all the comfortably-situated classes .... gentry, plutocracy, professional, salaried commercial, official, & so on. The whole policy of Harper's—a magazine of frankly aristocratic appeal—is slanted at an intellectual type of about the New-Deal degree of political leftness, whilst the real thinkers of all collegiate classes since 1930 are overwhelmingly liberal. Virtually all the reputable authors & critics in the United States are political radicals—Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Eastman, O'Neill, Lewis, Maxwell Anderson, Macleish, Edmund Wilson, Fadiman—but the list is endless. It would be shorter & easier to compile a list of first-rate writers who are not leftists! In the ranks of gentry & plutocracy & officialdom one young thinker after another comes out for social change great or moderate—Corliss Lamont, Oliver Baldwin, the son of Pres. Justo of Argentina, &c. &c. &c.—here again one has only to pause for recollection in order to fill a page with illustrious surnames. The cream of human brains—the sort of brains not wrapped up in personal luxury & immediate advantage is slowly drifting away from the blind class-loyalty towards a better-balanced position in which the symmetrical structure & permanent stability of the whole social organism is a paramount consideration. What happened just before the French & Russian revolutions is happening now—the thinkers & artists & scholars are changing sides, abandoning their support of a dead order, & preparing to be the leaders & guides & administrators of the people in a general struggle for desperately-needed readjustment. When the plutocrats make their last stand—assuming that they have enough vitality remaining to make a last stand—they will find that their old-time advantage is gone. No more will a horde of helpless, uneducated, disorganised mental children be at their mercy. Instead, they will be faced by an increasingly awakened army of determined citizens, encouraged, supported, & officered by the best brains & executive ability of the nation—by a staff of socially-conscious leaders sprung from & trained amidst the governing gentry & plutocracy & professionaldom.
I cannot accept your point about natural reluctance "to destroy the system which sustains us", because no rational reformer wants to destroy any system which sustains any honest worker. As I see it, your mistake lies in assuming that it is the dying plutocratic set-up which sustains you—a very basic & crucial mistake, when one comes to think of it. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. So far as your own individual case is concerned—if I judge correctly, you are an expert in certain forms of finance & accountancy & administration, whereby your services are important in any enterprise involving the receipt, disbursement, exchange, or comparison of commodities, or the maintenance of complex industrial or administrative operations. Now do you suppose that such services are any less necessary, or that they would be less reasonably rewarded, in a government-controlled or government-owned enterprise than in a private profit-grabbing scheme? What difference would it make to you whether your just return for high-grade mental work came from the American government or from a courteous private financier? The only losers in a move towards rationalisation would be the dividend-drawers who now get something for nothing, & the few top executives whose present salaries are disproportionately padded beyond all relationship to the extent of their actual services. Would such a rationalisation form an "overthrowing of the system which provides you livelihood"? I can't see that it would. I can't see that socialism would hurt anybody who is willing to work & who expects a just return from the work he performs—including guarantees of proper security in old age & in times of necessary unemployment or disability. Then, of course, it must be remembered that the moderate road avoids even the principal minor ills of readjustment. Communism would mean some rather disconcerting bumps—but there is nothing of destruction or violent dislocation in the orderly progressivism whose various stages are represented by the New Deal, the La Follettes, & Norman Thomas.
But the real joke of course is, that all this isn't a matter of choice anyhow! Capitalism is dying from internal as well as external causes, & its own leaders & beneficiaries are less & less able to kid themselves. I'm no economist, but from recent reading I've been able to form a rough picture of the dilemma—the need to restrict consumers' goods & to pile up a needless plethora of producing equipment in order to maintain the irrational surplus called profit—which has caused orthodox economists like Hayek & Robbins to admit that only starvation wages & artificial scarcity could stabilize the profit system in future & avert increasing cyclical depressions of utterly destructive scope. Laissez-faire capitalism is dead—make no mistake about that. The only avenue of survival for plutocracy is a military & emotional fascism whereby millions of persons will be withdrawn from the industrial arena & placed on a dole or in concentration-camps with high-sounding patriotic names. That or socialism—take your choice. In the long run it won't be the New Deal but the mere facts of existence which will be recognised as the real & inevitable slayer of Hooverism. Nobody is going to "destroy the system"—for it has been destroying itself ever since it evolved out of the old agrarian-handicraft economy a century & a half ago.
All this from an antiquated mummy who was on the other side until 1931! Well—I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today ... & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections. Flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with the humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well .... I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showings-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ..... except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all. Here's hoping that Henneberger (quite a get-rich-quick Wallingford in his way) won't try to blacken me with the letter!
[incomplete ending pages]
* I refer only to the fiction in Harper's. In its articles. H's shews admirable vitality as contrasted with the well0-bred vapidities of the smug & anile Atlantic.