The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-11-17
Money Writes

The world war was only fifteen years
away, and anyone but moron could
see it coming; and there I sat, duti-
fully reading elaborate and high
flown descriptions of the efforts of
NEUROLOGICAL monsters to accomplish
rape upon the persons of beautiful
maidens of the medieval Italian
nobility!
And when | rebelled, and sought to
find out about modern books, there
was learned critic, established in
the seat of authority, and equipped
to tell me about the living writer's of
Europe. James Gibbons Huneker was
his name, and the august house of
Scribner published his essays, in
which he discovered a score of new
French and Italian and Hungarian
poets every year. [ don't know how
many years he worked at it, but to
illustrate his method, let US assume
that at a given date he has announced
the arrival of one hundred new poets,
and is writing an essay hailing num-
Der one hundred and one. You then
read; Zone Hundred and One has the
athletic verve of One Hundred, and
the vertiginous elan of Ninety-Nine,
but is lacking in the elegant insou-
cience of Ninety-Eight, and the me-
chante diablerie of Ninety-Seven. He
combines the technical expertise of
Ninety-Six with the atrabiliar full
ginosity of Ninety-Five, and the exc
tic flair of Ninety Four"-and so on
till you had got back, say to Number
Sixty, where you stopped, because
the poets prior to that number had
most of them died of delirium tren-
ors since their discovery by Huneker
ten years previously, and anyhow, old
things are a bore. And if you think
am caricaturing a famous critic,
just look up one of those old essays,
and see how many foreign names he
could manage to drag into one para
graph. You didn't learn much about
his poets, but you learned a great
awe of the critic, and this was the
effect the critic had set out to pro-
duce.
And now we are in the ivory age,
and have swarm of critics who base
their judgments upon the Cabell
thesis, that the purpose of literature
is to find more varied and subtle ways
Of limiting at the approach of the
male and female generative organs.
These critics are learned in the lore
of hundred languages, living and
dead, and they search the legends and
inventions of all time, and compile
essays of vast erudition, which are
published in our most respectable
literary reviews, and it makes me
think Of the ancient tale about the
crowds of people who assembled to
marve! at the gorgeous new robes of
their queen, and all cried out with adj
miration and wonder, until suddenly
one little boy exclaimed, "Why, the
queen is naked!" A little boy critic is
urgently needed now, to say, in plain
everyday English, "Why, this is just
copulation!"
The various schools of professional
lltterateur5 constitute an aristocracy
all their own, q critic-caste They are
not content with looking down upon
the common herd, they even affect to
look down upon the rich and mighty
Of the earth, who have not been able
to spend several years in the cafes of
Paris, learning to pronounce the
names of eccentric poets from two
score nationalities, and to discover
the hidden rhythms of the newest
cenacle of free verse tricksters. Or
maybe the critic has been to Ireland,
and discovered a series of epics about
Cuchulain, written by modern poet