Law Forum Speakers Stand 3-1 in Favor of U.S. Novel

Modern American literature received three encouraging pats on the back and a stinging slap in the face at the hands of four prominent literary figures at Rindge Tech last night before a responsive Law School Forum audience.

During the opening talks and the discussion that followed, three of the speakers attempted to qualify or refute the contentions of Ludwig Lewisohn, German author, critic, and currently professor of English at Brandeis University. The three were: Bernard De Vote '13, Elizabeth Janeway, and Roger Burlingame '13.

Lewisohn, who spoke third on the Forum program, bitterly attacked the modern American novel as something "stone dead" and condemned the entire movement of naturalism in American literature since Dreiser. He claimed that modern American writers had "taken the cast-off rags of James Joyce and tricked out their prose in them" as a last attempt to make their books seem meaningful.

Only Hope

The only hope for American literature, Lewisohn concluded, is to be found in the work of such prose writers as Thornton Wilder, and such modern poets as Frederic Prokosch, Karl Shapiro, and Peter Viereck. He especially commended Vierock, who, he said, has been alone in his attempt to "convey with lucidity and power certain fundamental realities. of the spirit of man-which is the true purpose of all literature."

Burlingame, the first speaker, had maintained that there are "practical reasons" for what he termed the present "lapse" in American writing. He predicted that an approaching "synthesis of science with the humanities will help produce a literature that will better enable man to understand his position in an industrialized society."

Following Burlingame, Elizabeth Janeway, author of "Daisy Kenyon," deplored what she described as a marked tendency among modern writers to fear any kind of power-political or social-and as a result to preach a doctrine of "wilful irresponsibility" in their books. Mrs. Janeway concluded, however, that "we are on an up-curve of talent and ability...and our best writers are, perhaps more than ever, truly concerned with how people live and eat."

Last on the program, De Vote, who was introduced by moderator Harry T. Levin '33 as "the village atheist of Cambridge, Massachusetts," emphasized the danger of "critical imperatives" by others than the writers themselves. But he found the general literary picture today-except in poetry, which he condemned for its "stuttering incomprehensibility"-rather better than ever before. "We are lucky," he concluded, "that the present writing is heterogeneous, and that our best writers will follow their own stars," despite the criticism of orthodox schools of writing