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THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT

Northwestern University Press

Contents

Introduction, by Leon Wieseltier...................................................ixThe America of John Dos Passos.....................................................3Hemingway and His Critics..........................................................11T. S. Eliot's Politics.............................................................21The Immortality Ode................................................................33Kipling............................................................................62Reality in America.................................................................71Art and Neurosis...................................................................87Manners, Morals, and the Novel.....................................................105The Kinsey Report..................................................................120Huckleberry Finn...................................................................137The Princess Casamassima...........................................................149Wordsworth and the Rabbis..........................................................178William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste.................................203The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters.............................................224George Orwell and the Politics of Truth............................................259The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time.....................275Mansfield Park.....................................................................292Isaac Babel........................................................................311The Morality of Inertia............................................................331"That Smile of Parmenides Made Me Think"...........................................340The Last Lover.....................................................................354A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode.......................................372On the Teaching of Modern Literature...............................................381The Leavis-Snow Controversy........................................................402The Fate of Pleasure...............................................................427James Joyce in His Letters.........................................................450Mind in the Modern World...........................................................477Art, Will, and Necessity...........................................................501Why We Read Jane Austen............................................................517AppendixesUnder Forty........................................................................539Preface to The Liberal Imagination.................................................543Preface to Beyond Culture..........................................................549Bibliographical Notes..............................................................557Index..............................................................................561

Chapter One

U.S.A. is far more impressive than even its three impressive parts-The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money-might have led one to expect. It stands as the important American novel of the decade, on the whole more satisfying than anything else we have. It lacks any touch of eccentricity; it is startlingly normal; at the risk of seeming paradoxical one might say that it is exciting because of its quality of clich: here are comprised the judgments about modern American life that many of us have been living on for years.

Yet too much must not be claimed for this book. Today we are inclined to make literature too important, to estimate the writer's function at an impossibly high rate, to believe that he can encompass and resolve all the contradictions, and to demand that he should. We forget that, by reason of his human nature, he is likely to win the intense perception of a single truth at the cost of a relative blindness to other truths. We expect a single man to give us all the answers and produce the "synthesis." And then when the writer, hailed for giving us much, is discovered to have given us less than everything, we turn from him in a reaction of disappointment: he has given us nothing. A great deal has been claimed for Dos Passos and it is important, now that U.S.A. is completed, to mark off the boundaries of its enterprise and see what it does not do so that we may know what it does do.

One thing U.S.A. does not do is originate; it confirms but does not advance and it summarizes but does not suggest. There is no accent or tone of feeling that one is tempted to make one's own and carry further in one's own way. No writer, I think, will go to school to Dos Passos, and readers, however much they may admire him, will not stand in the relation to him in which they stand, say, to Stendhal or Henry James or even E. M. Forster. Dos Passos's plan is greater than its result in feeling; his book tells more than it is. Yet what it tells, and tells with accuracy, subtlety, and skill, is enormously important and no one else has yet told it half so well.

Nor is U.S.A. as all-embracing as its admirers claim. True, Dos Passos not only represents a great national scene but embodies, as I have said, the cultural tradition of the intellectual Left. But he does not encompass-does not pretend to encompass in this book-all of either. Despite his title, he is consciously selective of his America and he is, as I shall try to show, consciously corrective of the cultural tradition from which he stems.

Briefly and crudely, this cultural tradition may be said to consist of the following beliefs, which are not so much formulations of theory or principles of action as they are emotional tendencies: that the collective aspects of life may be distinguished from the individual aspects; that the collective aspects are basically important and are good; that the individual aspects are, or should be, of small interest and that they contain a destructive principle; that the fate of the individual is determined by social forces; that the social forces now dominant are evil; that there is a conflict between the dominant social forces and other, better, rising forces; that it is certain or very likely that the rising forces will overcome the now dominant ones. U.S.A. conforms to some but not to all of these assumptions. The lack of any protagonists in the trilogy, the equal attention given to many people, have generally been taken to represent Dos Passos's recognition of the importance of the collective idea. The book's historical apparatus indicates the author's belief in social determination. And there can be no slightest doubt of Dos Passos's attitude to the dominant forces of our time: he hates them.

But Dos Passos modifies the tradition in three important respects. Despite the collective elements of his trilogy, he puts a peculiar importance upon the individual. Again, he avoids propounding any sharp conflict between the dominant forces of evil and the rising forces of good; more specifically, he does not write of a class struggle, nor is he much concerned with the notion of class in the political sense. Finally, he is not at all assured of the eventual...