This Ain't A War... It's

Women Hock Their Jewels And Their Husbands' Insurance Policies To Acquire An Unaccustomed Shade In Hair Or Crêpe De Chine. Why Then Is It That When Anyone Commits Anything Novel In The Arts He Should Be Always Greeted By This Same Peevish Howl Of Pain And Surprise? One Is Led To Suspect That The Interest People Show In These Much Talked Of Commodities, Painting, Music, And Writing, Cannot Be Very Deep Or Very Genuine When They So Wince Under An Unexpected Impact.

One Of The Most Extraordinary Things About Industrial Society Of The Present Day Is Its Idiot Lack Of Memory. Tabloids And Movies Take The Place Of Mental Processes And Revolts, Crimes, Despairs Pass Off In A Dribble Of Vague Words And Rubber Stamp Phrases Without Leaving A Scratch On The Mind Of The Driven Instalment-paying, Subway-packing Mass.

A Novel Is A Commodity That Fulfills A Certain Need; People Need To Buy Daydreams Like They Need To Buy Ice Cream Or Aspirin Or Gin. They Even Need To Buy A Pinch Of Intellectual Catnip Now And Then To Liven Up Their Thoughts.

Three Words That Still Have Meaning, That I Think We Can Apply To All Professional Writing, Are Discovery, Originality, Invention.the Professional Writer Discovers Some Aspect Of The World And Invents Out Of The Speech Of His Time Some Particularly Apt And Original Way Of Putting It Down On Paper.

The People Of The United States Have Been Fortunate In Many Things. One Of The Things In Which We Have Been Most Fortunate Has Been That So Far, Due Perhaps To Certain Basic Virtues In Our Traditional Ways Of Doing Things, We Have Managed To Keep The Crisis Of Western Civilization, Which Has Devastated The Rest Of The World And In Which We Are As Much Involved As Anybody, More Or Less At Arm's Length.