Writers' Influence

Last month Archibald MacLeish, poet and Librarian of Congress, blamed himself and other post-World War I writers for the cynical pacifism of U. S. undergraduates (TIME, June 3). Such fine and honest writers as Hemingway and Dos Passos, said he, had done their job too well, had left the younger generation immunized not only against phony patriotism but against all moral judgments. LIFE asked a number of writers for comments, this week prints the answers. Samples:

Richard Aldington: "It is typical high-brow delusion to suppose that authors influence anyone but the intellectuals and that intellectuals count for anything in the formation of national policy and the state of the mass mind. Most people in America have never heard of the writers MacLeish mentions and could not have been influenced by them. Most intellectuals make rotten soldiers anyway, so their defection is of small importance -- supposing the defection exists."

Walter Millis: "I believe what MacLeish said to be exactly true but easily misunderstood. Battleships are useless unless armored with conviction; and the books, stressing both the filth of war and the partial falsity of the slogans, did tend to undermine conviction when their intent was to purify and strengthen it. But they ought to have been written. Their humane and rational teaching must be a vital element in forming the new moral purpose to arm a civilization challenged by war deliberately raised to a new height of filthiness and waged with slogans trebly false. . . . The right to think and speak about war as these authors did is one of the things we wish to defend, and if it can be defended only by war, then it is one of the things which will make war worthwhile."

Ernest Hemingway: "MacLeish seems to have a very bad conscience. Having fought fascism in every way that I know how in the places where you could really fight it, I have no remorse -- neither literary nor political. Suggest MacLeish read play The Fifth Column and see again the film The Spanish Earth. If MacLeish had been at Guadalajara, Jarama, Madrid, Teruel, first and second battles of the Ebro, he might feel better. Young men wrote of the first war to show truly the idiocies and murderous stupidity of the way it was conducted by the Allies and Italy. Other young men wrote books that showed the same thing about the German conduct of the war. All agreed on war's vileness and undesirability. If Germans have learned how to fight a war and the Allies have not learned, MacLeish can hardly put the blame on our books. Or do his high-sounding words blame us because we never advocated a fascism to end fascism."

E. E. Cummings: "If you will stand in the supposed fountain at Washington Square, New York City, and look up at the so-called arch, you will find yourself reading 22 words by a man now living." (The words are George Washington's to the Constitutional Convention: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.")

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.