ABSTRACT
When a writer is sufficiently established nowadays he is no longer appreciated by the quality of his work. He enters the realm of higher criticism. Mirsky (I was a Prince!) discusses his attitude to the social revolution. Wyndham Lewis ties an offensive label round his neckFascist, dumb ox, childmind, simpleton-and tries to drown him in a sack. Gertrude Stein accuses him of dark crimes against the spirit and of smelling badly. Only his personal behaviour and the political implication of his books are mentioned, and nobody alludes to the one fact of supreme importance about him: how well he writes. For this reason writers, like music-hall turns, are often mentioned in couples, Hemingway and Faulkner, Firbank and Huxley, Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Stein. Ifpeople realised they were saying Paul and Barnabas it would be all right, but they don't. They confuse a certain specious similarity in treatment with a resemblance in degree. In my opinion America possesses one great writer, Hemingway; another who, if he could resolve some mysterious equation inside him, would be great, Scott Fitzgerald; several others of enormous competence and talent, headed by William Faulkner and Dashiel Hammett, and a tail that produces the most entertaining and readable trick stuff-the postman with his double knock, Bessie Cotter in her shift, the trapeze virtuoso, etc.
