March 27, 1936

Mr. F. O. Matthiessen
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Mr. Matthiessen:

I have enjoyed very much your book on Eliot, which I have just been reading for the second time and which I am reviewing, incidentally, for the OXONIAN. Warren and I want to ask you a favor. We should like to propose that you do an omnibus review of some of the poetry of this quarter for the summer number of THE SOUTHERN REVIEW. I do not know whether or not you have seen copies of THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, but if you have, you will remember that we have been giving the reviewer from four to six thousand words to use as he sees fit in commenting on the more notable books of poetry for the quarter.

By the way, if you have not seen copies of THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, we should be delighted to send you a copy. The advantage of such a review is that it gives an opportunity to place the works reviewed in some sort of relation to each other, with more space for the books which really deserve it and little more than a notice for the books which can be dismissed so summarily.

I hope that this will fit into your plans. If you can undertake such a review, please let us know at once, and we will begin sending the books to you. The deadline is May 1.

ELIOT HOUSE
CAMBRIDGE
MASSACHUSETTS

October 19, 1937

Dear Mr. Erskine:

I naturally have no objection
whatever to your using my sentences
in the form you suggest. Indeed I am
highly gratified that they can be of
some service to The Southern Review.

June 27, 1938

Mr. F. O. Matthiessen
c/o American Express
London, England

Dear Matthiessen:

I am writing in haste and so have had no more than time to glance
hastily through your manuscript. It looks mighty fine. I am writing
principally to give you directions about finding Warren, though I am
afraid that the directions really turn out to be no directions at all.
He expects to be in North Italy most of the time and just possibly for
a little while in Southern France. I have had no letter from him yet,
and the address given before he left is care of the American Express,
Genoa. I do know that he expects to be in Perugia.

It occurs to me, by the way, that you may be seeing Eliot this
summer, and, if you do, I should appreciate very much your using your
good offices for us with regard to getting contributions from him for
the *Review*. Warren and I have written once or twice suggesting various
things and expressing a desire to see anything that he would be good
enough to send. He has been quite cordial in his replies and has in-
dicated that on the principle he was willing to contribute, but he has
never got around to anything specific. I do not know how much he is
interested in American publication now, but we would be very happy to
publish him and, since *The Criterion* and some of the other magazines in
which he publishes have a very small audience in this country, it seems
to me a justified policy for us to publish some material simultaneously
with them. We wrote, as a matter of fact, suggesting that we would
like to see an act or perhaps the whole of his new verse play. I think
we are equipped to publish rather longer selections of work of this
kind than most magazines are.

If the matter comes up naturally, and if you can speak a good
word sincerely, we should appreciate any help that you can give us

Kittery, Maine

September 19, 1938

Dear Erskine,

I am returning my proofs with great gratitude for your remarks on the passage about Dover Wilson. My delay is owing to the fact that I did not get home from a trip into Germany and Russia until the 15th.

As to the point you raise, my chief dissatisfaction with Wilson is his continually exaggerated tone, and consequently I most certainly do not want to meet that by exaggerations of my own. And I guess that my irritation with his methods undoubtedly led me into one in the sentence on which you have laid your finger. I have, therefore, rephrased the passage, quoting an even more far-fetched description of the play scene from Wilson, and toning down my own remarks, or, rather, trying to center them more accurately on the point I was trying to make. I would agree that Wilson does not wholly lose sight of the real dramatic importance of the play within the play; but it also remains true that he lets it slip out of sight again and again. As, for instance, on p. 155: "Yet Hamlet, it is quite obvious, is not thinking primarily about Claudius at all; he is thinking of his lines." He wants full justice done to his essay in the art of the drama." Or again, on p. 194: "Hamlet, however, is not thinking of anything but the play, and the speech to the player is mock-prologue this time." Or again, the concluding sentences of the chapter, "Hamlet's first thoughts are of his amazing dramatic success, exceeding his wildest dreams. It is only afterwards that he remembers his uncle." My contention would be that this is repeatedly to lose the thing of real significance in the trivial. If Hamlet is thinking of his lines---and in most of the passages Wilson cites to prove it, it strikes me as more than unlikely---it is certainly only as an undercurrent that does not interfere with the main dramatic drift. At no point in this scene does Hamlet have to "remember" his uncle. His revenger's thoughts are steadily upon him."

Whether-or not you agree with my reading of Wilson, I hope at least that I have improved the expression of my point.

Are you able to furnish reprints? If so, I should like to buy about a dozen of this essay.

Please tell Brooks that when I saw Eliot in London, I talked to him about The Southern Review, in which he is clearly interested. But when I faced him with your desire to have him contribute, he was fairly cagey and indefinite. But I think you might very possibly get something from him, if you wrote again. On the other hand, it is also true that he has been for the last several months largely taken up with finishing his new play.

P.S. I note that the total list of books reviewed has not been included with the proof. I assume that it will appear, as usual, at the foot of the opening page. Otherwise my frequently fragmentary description of the various volumes in the text would not be adequate.

file

87 Pinckney Street
Boston, Mass.

December 30, 1940

awarded Feb. 20, 1940

Dear Cleanth Brooks:

I am enclosing the section of my
book dealing with Hawthorne and James,
which I hope that you will be able to
use in The Southern Review before the
book's scheduled appearance in May.

It was a great pleasure meeting
you at last, and I am only sorry that
we didn't have a longer chance to talk,
since I wanted to tell you how much I
have profitted from your book, and how
very useful the Brooks and Warren Manual
continues to be in my own teaching.

Hoping that our next meeting will
take place in a more enheartening spot
than the Hotel Statler, I am

September 24, 1941

Dear Brooks:

I was very glad to have your
note. No, you hadn't asked me pre-
viously for a piece on Yeats for the
Memorial Number.

I should be very glad to fol-
low your suggestion of taking Mac-
Neice's book as a starting point and
working from there. You don't state
when the date line for this issue is.
I hope not too soon since I haven't
given any connected thought to Yeats
for some months, and would like to
have a chance to cover the ground
pretty thoroughly again.

It so happens that I haven't
even yet read the MacNeice, so if you
have a review copy, I would welcome
one. Otherwise I will get it myself.

An Indispensable Resource

The announced ending of _The Southern Review_ could hardly have come at a worse time. For the war has inevitably accelerated that tendency of a mass society which Auden, among others, has observed, the tendency of the great majority to prefer opinion to knowledge. We can see the effects of that tendency almost everywhere in our journalistic criticism.

With the death of Joyce following so near upon that of Yeats, and so near also to those of Freud and Frazer, of Trotzky and Bergson, we can realize, as Harry Levin has done in his incisive study of Joyce, how suddenly we are losing the landmarks of a whole cultural age. But the standardized way of manipulating opinion is to regard Joyce's death, in the manner of Van Wyck Brooks, as the end of an era when the artist was in wilful isolation from society, and, therefore, as the harbinger of a more healthy day when the artist is to feel himself in accord with the aspirations of his nation. Such opinion involves a vicious perversion of the knowledge we might gain from Joyce's work. It involves the cardinal fal-lacy of identifying the writer's subject with his intention, of assuming that because Joyce portrayed a decaying Dublin he must himself have been decadent, instead of realizing that we have in _Ulysses_ one of the most moving presentations of a de-based stage of mechanized society. If the function of the artist is to give us the full knowledge that he has acquired of life, without suppressing anything, we can hardly blame

Joyce for his subject. And if, through the integrity of
Joyce's testimony, we see the dead end to which the isolated
artist has come, we have there the kind of living evidence
that art alone can present.

It will do no good -- to move closer to our present
crisis -- for anyone to pretend that art serves society on
the simplified level of a war poster. We may assume that
the healthiest condition is when the artist speaks both for
and to his society, since the great periods of the drama
would re-enforce that assumption. But we can make no single
formula about the relation of the artist to war. In the cir-
cumstances of Athens, the function of Aristophanes was to
satirize corrupt leadership and to work as hard for peace as
he could. Charles Nordhoff, robbed now of his escape to the
South Seas and filled with the right opinions about the war,
finds it impossible, according to *Time*, to understand how Jane
Austen could have written *Pride and Prejudice* during the
Napoleonic wars -- but the common reader would scarcely sub-
stitute her human knowledge for all the stanzas about Waterloo.
Whitman, however, was brought to emotional maturity by the
events of the Civil War, and wrote his profoundest lines on
the theme of reconciliation, out of his rich sympathy for victor
and vanquished alike. As a farther variant, we should remember
that although Joyce's indifference to his age is now being sym-
bolized by his having spent most of the last war in Switzerland
writing about the single day of a Jew in Dublin, many far more

"normal" writers were doing comparable things. Our American poetic renaissance had just started in 1914, and the years between then and 1918 were marked, for example, by much of the best work of Frost and Sandburg, whose main attention was hardly deflected from their own regions, from north of Boston or from the lives of cornhuskers.

If this war is different from the last one, as even a lifelong pacifist like Karl Barth argues, it is so only in the sense that fascism in its violent denial of basic human rights, is immeasurably worse than any of the capitalistic states of 1914. No more than the last is this a holy war, nor a war to determine our superiority over other peoples. The resistance to fascism can recreate the heroic sense, as Malraux proved in writing about China and Spain. But adequate resistance to fascism over a long period demands the continual renewal of the values for which we are fighting. It is not enough to keep open the channels of protest, to make sure that we preserve our right to discuss war aims and peace aims, and to prevent a democratic war against aggression from being perverted into a war for world empire. All these are major responsibilities, but what I am concerned with here is more impalpable, but no less important. It is nothing less than the necessity of the mind and spirit to preserve their health by the variety and scope of their action, by the free play, even the exuberance that only the arts can provide. These may seem strange attributes to argue for in a time of crisis, but we will be no better off for having lost our Ameri-

can humor, or our theater, or our music.

A great danger in our vigorously pragmatic national spirit
is that now, even more than before, we will mistake essentials
for inessentials and cut down on the arts as though they were excess
sugar. We should not forget that even in peace time our bias
has been heavily towards the immediately instrumental. Almost
any further push in that direction, either in our universities
or our general thought, would so weaken the humane cultural
tradition that in a few years we would be producing narrowly
trained technicians whose state of mind was almost indistinguish-
able from the hard efficiency of the fascists. At such a time
all modes of free communication should be encouraged, so that
the artist will know that he continues to have an audience,
and the critic that his responsibilities remain. The loss of
*The Southern Review* is that of an indispensable resource, like
a vitamin.

F. O. Mattiessen