American culture by the
dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races.

My suggestion to Mr. Coppard was that gradually the Anglo-Saxon, to take
the most readily understandable instance, was beginning to absorb large
tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the
experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian, of Polish
and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic, and that
all these widening tracts of remembered racial experience interacting
upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen, and
eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos in many creative
minds. I said that Mr. Anderson and the others, half consciously and
half unconsciously, were trying to create worlds out of each separate
chaos, living dangerously, as Nietzsche advised, and fusing their
conceptions at a certain calculated temperature in artistic crucibles of
their own devising.

Mr. Coppard said that he quite saw that, but added that the particular
meaning in each case more or less escaped him. And then I ventured to
suggest that these meanings were more important for Americans at the
present stage than for Europeans, because American minds would grasp
readily at suggestions that harmonized with their own spiritual pasts,
and seize instinctive relations and congruities which had previously
escaped them in their experience, and so begin to formulate from these
books new intuitive laws. I suggested, moreover, that from the point of
view of the great artist these books were all more or less magnificent
failures which were creating, little by little, out of the shock of
conflict an ultimate harmony, out of which the great book for which we
are all waiting in America might come ten years from now, or five years,
or even tomorrow.

To this he replied that he felt I had supplied the clue which had
baffled him, and asked me if I did not discover a chaos of a different
sort in English life and literature since the armistice. I agreed that I
did discover such a chaos, but that it seemed to me a chaos which was an
end rather than a beginning, a chaos in which the Tower of Babel had
fallen, and men had come to babble with more and more complete
dissociation of ideas, or else, on the other hand, were clinging
desperately to such literary and social traditions as had been left,
while their work froze into a new Augustanism comparable to that of the
early years of the ei