Skip to main content

Malcolm Cowley Learns to Love the Bomb

Malcolm Cowley.

 

From a 1945 letter from Malcolm Cowley, who was born on this day in 1898, to literary theorist Kenneth Burke.

R.F.D Gaylordsville,
Connecticut
August 24, 1945
{NL}

Dear Kenneth:

It’s my birthday and a slow cold rain is falling and in general it’s a good day to write a letter, except I haven’t much to say. The atom bomb. We can’t keep it out of our minds. It gets worse as time goes on and we learn more about its effects. The Japanese say, of course they may be lying, as today’s radio announcer piously suggests, but then again they may be telling the truth, and they say that people in the Hiroshima area continue to die from radioactivity, they lose their red corpuscles and peg out—and the Japanese say they can’t afford to send their doctors to Hiroshima for fear of losing them too—and they say that people just a little burned by the bomb found the burns growing worse as time passed, and pegged out, so that the death toll (what a horrible phrase) was 30,000 in the first week and 30,000 more the second week—and you get a new picture of the way radioactivity will wipe out the world not in a good healthy smash, as you pictured it, with a new sun appearing in this constellation, but rather in a slow leukemia, the world simply made uninhabitable. Some people will certainly get so frightened by this picture that they’ll go off into the jungle of the mountains and live by raising roots, in the hope that when the next war comes it won’t be worth while wiping them out. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred will want never to use the atom bomb again, but there’s always one bad apple in the barrel, always one mad scientist or mad dictator, and in the long run I don’t see much hope—but in the short run we’re living in the great imperial republic of the twentieth century, we’ll be rich, we’ll all have three automobiles, we’ll have to have them, by law, whether or not we want to sleep with Mae West, we’ll have to sleep with her, we’ll have to eat too much and then take expensive cures to be slenderized, we’ll have to eat extensively denatured food expensively renatured with expensive vitamins, we’ll have to have a good time, by God, so we might as well grit our teeth and eat, drink, and be expensively merry, for tomorrow we’ll be blown sky high. 

* * *

I’m more disturbed by certain moral qualities in the American world at present than by the triumph of capitalism. I mean the sudden ending of Lend-Lease, though it means breaking up the machinery by which Europe has been supplied with a little food, and I mean the curt words with which Truman dismissed the French newspapermen. There are a lot of other signs like that, all pointing to the want of sympathy and the want of imagination that are coming to distinguish this country. But we had goddamn well better have sympathy and imagination, for now we’re on top of the heap and all the envy of an envious world is going to be directed toward us—and the world will whoop when the first atom bomb falls on New York. Ah, we have triumphed, we have given the Germans and the Japanese lessons in cold-blooded, abstract, self-righteous cruelty, in the names of freedom and democracy. But people who triumph in this world don’t last long …

And me, as ever,
Malcolm



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2wBSK6b

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more