LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

One of the jobs I took on way back before half my listerners were off
milk diet or out of their diapers was the education of the rising American
literature generation as to the contemporary (and anterior) production of
French high class writin’. I held, even in my young days, that a nation’s
literature has a certain importance.
I also had patriotic motives. I also felt for the stranded young inside
America. I clomb out, by fingernails. I only had half a toe hold, but I at
least clomb up to whaar one could see what was what on at least the
writer’s horizon. American boys wantin’ to write started with 20 or more
years as a handicap.
Most of ’em have it still, Gauss down at Princeton for example, doing
quite a serious book, careful study, thoughtful but 20 years late in
startin’. When I got along to be 40 or 45, I thought I could hand over the
job to someone younger.
I think Sam Putnam was ready to take it over, but pore Sam hit an
unlikely moment, 1924–25, French writing was pindlin’.
I had already said that after de Gourmont’s death there was no froggie
whom I could trust to send in a monthly letter about French
contemporary authors: for the Little Review or the DIAL. The French
were biologically fixed and they were losin’ the sense of
RESPONSIBILITY, intellectual responsibility, only a few elderly blokes
like A. Mockel and Valette still it. I mean they didn’t have to think. For
them a good book was a good book; and you didn’t argue, you didn’t
even have to think that it was your duty to the state to boost a REAL
book, and leave the fakes in the discard. And Valette was tired, so tired.
Offered me the American rubric, at a time when I had not time to read 40
American dud books and make little notes on ’em. Printed the first
criticism of Ulysses (mine) in the Mercure that was published in France.
Remy de Gourmont lived in a world in which it was inconceivable that a