The Young Writer In America

As true today or more true than when it was written (1951):

What we need today to give a literature of vitality and significance, in spite of the prevailing inertia and confusion, is a few writers of genius, men who would be able to go on day in and day out, year in and year out, patiently creating out of their own spiritual resources master works of art. They would have to be as strong as Proust and Joyce in order to survive in the midst of isolation and paralysis. They would have to be big enough and dedicated enough to withstand all our efforts to kill them, frighten them, buy them off, or send them to prison. But if we had them and they were able to survive, they might succeed in envisioning for us the reality we seek and cannot find for ourselves. And then all the small, confused, and misguided talents whose troubles concern us now might be impelled to draw close around them and discover, in their example, the means and the desire to create a literature that would be worthy of our time.

--John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation, p. 257.

I would suggest one small amendment to Aldridge's fire sermon: for it seems to me that the writers we have today are indeed "worthy of our time"--and that is the problem. What we really need are artists who can rise above the current malaise and "envision for us the reality we seek and cannot find for ourselves." Without a vision, the people perish. What passes for vision today is religious ideology placed in the service of capitalistic cant.

We need the invisible Whitmanian republic to ascend into visibility and "sound its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." We need the Thoreauvian tariqa of sauntering and "ecstatic witness" to build new Walden-Khanqas next to other ponds. We need a hail storm of Milleresque "happy rocks" to rain down on the White House, the Capital, K-Street and the Pentagon:

There are limits to everything, and so I believe there is a limit to human stupidity and cruelty. But we are not yet there. We have not yet drained the bitter cup. Perhaps only when we have become full-fledged monsters will we recognize the angel in man. Then, when the ambivalence is clear, may we look forward with confidence to the emergence of a new type of man, a man as different from the man of today as we are from the pithecanthropus erectus. Nor is this too much to hope for, even at this remote distance. There have been precursors. Men have walked this earth who, for all they resemble us, may well have come from another planet. They have appeared singly and far apart. But tomorrow they may come in clusters, and the day after in hordes. The birth of Man follows closely the birth of the heavens. A new star never makes its appearance alone. With the birth of a new type of man a current is set in motion which later enables us to perceive that he was merely the foam on the crest of a mighty wave.

--Henry Miller, Sunday After the War, pp. 159-160.