In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Gilbert Seldes has revived what might be called the classic debate of American culture: Should an American artist stay at home? Mr. Seldes holds that the artist is at home wherever he chooses to settle. And he cites instances in favor of his contention. He is indirectly seconding Edmund Wilson who reproached Van Wyck Brooks for writing an admirable book about Henry James without more than a word about the novelist. Mr. Brooks, of course, was writing about Henry James the exile; and employed him as a symbol in his own thesis which is contrary to that of Mr. Seldes. It seems to me that the considerations and examples presented by both sides have suffered, because they were neither specific nor general enough. Perhaps the exiles of Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, were successful; perhaps the pilgrimage of Henry James meant failure. If a law or a rule is to be sketched from these instances, the elements that enter into them should be essentially understood. One might study the basic idiom of the arabesque which Picasso brought with him from Málaga, or the basic folk voice with which Stravinsky came away from Russia; and plot the intellectual transfiguration of these primary materials by the schools of Paris. Or one might attempt to correlate the chaste designs which Henry James desired to produce, and the American chaos from which he escaped in order to produce them. One might at the end decide that James was a shrewd tactician, saving his art by retreat; or that Picasso was a brilliant culturist, enhancing his art by transplantation. Yet the general and haunting problem of the artist in America, which unconsciously inspires all these arguments, would be as untouched as ever.

This problem of the artist is, after all, not unrelated to the question of his materials. In some manner, the successful creator organizes a fusion between what we call his will, his vision or his experience, on the one hand, and what we call life, on the other. Both the creative will and the workable objective material must exist, else there will be no art. Now with this simple idea to illumine us, let us venture into the specific dilemma of the American artist and the American world.