LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

Lewis’ limit in that particular hefty volume, inhered in his subject, he
was doing the carbuncle on Johnnie Bull’s neck. Cummings, followin’
ole Hen. James, was doing all Russia, and doing it in the Jamesian sense,
that he was constantly comparing that nation, or state of existence with
the American state of existence, with a peripheric view of countries
adjacent.
Oh, yes, e. estlin was a carryin’ on from his forebears, both James and
Thoreau, and I repeat it, [from] Whitman. That just unfinish, on certain
pages, that weak spot, or what seems a weak spot to the European.
Mebbe three or four paragraphs that I as professor would probably cross
out of his manuscript, or would have crossed out, and said, here bo’, you
rewrite this, 432 or 431 pages. I should have been much more severe on
Flaubert. How is the book greater than Joyce’s volume, or than Lewis’s
Apes? If we must use this terminology or why do I like it better, if I do
like it better. Or say why does it come easier to me, I am hoistin’ up over
questions of technique, Cummings’ neologism, his punctuation. Well I
am American. I perceive his technique, which Jefferson, Tom Jefferson,
would have justified; which is justified by the measure Jefferson applied
to neologism. Namely, new words justified when NECESSARY to
express a new meaning. A great deal of Joyce was NOT new, and a great
deal was needless, was in the do main of experiment, colors being mixed
on a palette. Lewis needed his emphasis, often as EMPHASIS, not
merely as meaning save insofar as emphasis is part of meaning, which is
not always.
Cummings I believe needed EVERY single split word to say what he
was saying. In no other way could he have registered Russia, 1931, and
it was a very great registration. Also you might now take it as psychic
and warnin’. Ulysses was not a warning. It was a certificate of demise.
The Apes of God, was, and HOW a warning, unheeded. There is still
time for the U.S.A. to read Mr. Cummings before worse things happen, I
mean happen TO YOU.