tentious and bad films, as does Ben Hecht, or give up any and
all pretensions of either literary quality or historical truth, as
does Arthur Schlesinger, becoming, as he does in his latest
hastily and badly written tract, The Vital Center, a shameless
and sniveling tool of the right. From Arthur Schlesinger down
the slope of dung to Howard Rushmore, the Journal-American
hatemonger, there is a generous sliding scale of big money pay,
entirely dependent upon the skill of the particular writer and
the degree of shamelessness he is willing to indulge.

Within this dream world, reality must perforce be
shunned; reality is dangerous. Reality prompts restlessness, an
incisive probing for the true nature of forces, a brooding dis-
content that may flare out like a mounting flame--and, above
all, a certain partisanship, since the truth is always partisan,
as will be shown later.

So the creative writer who plays the game is shunted away
from the true nature of things into obscure bypaths which
literally lead to nowhere. This is a process which poses an
alternative to life, but since there is actually no alternative to
life but death, the logical conclusion of this mental illness can
be expressed only in terms of death. As I said, this is a process,
and as with all processes there are many steps along the
way; but the paths converge toward the goal expressed so well
by Mr. Hyam Plutzik, one of the "new poets," who is ade-
quately adored by the "new critics." Mr. Plutzik is one of the
lesser known of the "new poets." I choose him because his new
book has just been received. In his book of poems, Aspects of
Proteus, ⁵ Mr. Plutzik declares engagingly:

Seeking always the word nearest to silence--
For speech is a fever, as life an ague of nature--
One nears the undifferentiated nothing,
The last mask of multiple delusion.

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