American writers are not entertainers, so much as witnesses. As Cocteau pointed out, they “no longer envisage art as an amusement, but as a ministry.”
Hence, from Poe to Glenway Wescott, they have dreamed of a book in which the author’s own heart would be fearlessly laid bare, and exhorted themselves to “revelation of man as he appears to himself in his mirror.” And whenever they have even partially realized this dream, has it not been because, from the beginning, they were given, graced by, that aloneness which Auden called “man’s real condition”?
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