LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

a contribution to the world literature of tomorrow, and you pay very little
attention to what happens right thaar under your noses.
I told you once before that this book [ Cummings’ inspection of Russia
makes a trilogy of big books, along with those of Joyce and of
Wyndham Lewis, with Ulysses and Lewis’s APES, Apes of God by ole
Wyndham Lewis, also like Mr. Cummings a painter. That fact has its
bearin’.
Both of ’em used to USING their eyes. Use of the eye assists human
beings in making direct observations. I am not up to comparin’ their
painting, I know very little of Mr. Cumming’s painting, save I saw one
bit that had UGH! I am talkin’ now of his writing. And in comparin’
EIMI, or AMI or however your different Greek professors tell you to
pronounce it, with the other two volumes, I say, or mebbe repeat that
Joyce was writin’ in retrospect. Ulysses dishes up the capitalist situation,
the HELL made in great cities by the usury system. That is a limit. Not a
very new point of view about anything.
Well I dunno as Ole Wyndham’s Apes had a very new point of view
either. Rowlandson, Fielding, Hogarth, all might have seen that boil on
old England’s neck from similar standpoint. Irish, English, and America,
Joyce had no philosophy. Gasps from his chapel parishioners, Joyce had
some ruck end of theology and a VERY conventional outlook. Lewis
had philosophic views.
I nacherly never agreed with either of’ ’em about much of anything. I
agree with my compatriot or ex-compatriot, Mr. Cummings, a very great
deal. But not wholly. I back up damn near anything Mr. Cummings has
said or will say. I have to think back after having reread him, I have to
think back and wonder, now just what was it that I wanted to ask him,
where was it I wanted him to go on a bit further.