Free for All?

Or Is There a "Literary Dictatorship " in New York?

From time to time the charge has been repeated that American literature and drama is controlled by a semisecret cabal of radical young critics residing in New York, but the " exposure" has never been thorough. There were rumors; there were hints; but it remained for The Boston Post to analyze the critical dictatorship with a truly ruthless pen.

The Post asserts, as one speaking with authority, that the youthful intelligentsia, occupying strategic positions in the publicity section of the literary world as editors and contributors to the "highbrow" weeklies, critics of books and the drama, colyumists and readers for publishing houses, have combined to form not alone a mutual admiration society, but also an exclusive literary coterie, admission to which is denied candidates who have not the personal friendship of the charter members. Only thoroughgoing social radicals are welcome. Clearness and cleanness, coupled with a sound belief in American institutions, is a fatal bar.

These charges usually emanate from sources like Boston or Chicago, so far removed from the actual internal quarrels of New York literary life that they confuse dogmatic assertion with evidence. A study of the daily and weekly writings of the " young dictators" and their egregious failures to " put over " or kill certain plays or books reveal, not partisanship, pull and capitulation of personal friendship, but an actual leaning over backward to be honest. In spite of the unanimous condemnation of Abie's Irish Rose and So This Is London by the cult of young critics, these plays are running merrily on to a full year of performances. In spite of the efforts of The Dial and Vanity Fair aesthetes to " put over " T. S. Eliot as the greatest modern American poet, his vogue is vanishing amid an incessant attack and counterblast of the younger literati themselves. The authors of The Forty-Niners (recent dramatic fiasco) eat lunch four times a week with the young critics, but they did not save Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Marc Connolly, and Ring Lardner from a sound critical lashing. Heywood Broun's novel The Boy Grew Older was enthusiastically welcomed by the older and more conventional reviewers, but Broun's friends ridiculed and disparaged it as viciously as if it had been written by Zane Grey.

If the believers in the " great critical conspiracy" want to know just what the younger critics think of one another let them consult the files of Vanity Fair and The Bookman for April, May and June, 1922. Or, better yet, the Bookman's Day Book, written every Sunday by Burton Rascoe of The New York Tribune.