{"id":114410,"date":"2017-08-24T13:01:45","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T17:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114410"},"modified":"2017-08-24T12:27:00","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T16:27:00","slug":"malcolm-cowley-learns-to-love-the-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/24\/malcolm-cowley-learns-to-love-the-bomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Malcolm Cowley Learns to Love the Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Malcolm Cowley.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

From a 1945 letter from Malcolm Cowley<\/a>, who was born on this day in 1898, to literary theorist Kenneth Burke.<\/em><\/p>\n

R.F.D Gaylordsville,
\nConnecticut
\nAugust 24, 1945
\n{NL}<\/span><\/p>\n

Dear Kenneth:<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s my birthday and a slow cold rain is falling and in general it\u2019s a good day to write a letter, except I haven\u2019t much to say. The atom bomb. We can\u2019t 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\u2019s radio announcer\u00a0piously 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\u2014and the Japanese say they can\u2019t afford to send their doctors to Hiroshima for fear of losing them too\u2014and 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\u2014and 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\u2019ll go off into the jungle of the mountains and live by raising roots, in the hope that when the next war comes it won\u2019t be worth while wiping them out. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred will want never to use the atom bomb again, but there\u2019s always one bad apple in the barrel, always one mad scientist or mad dictator, and in the long run I don\u2019t see much hope\u2014but in the short run we\u2019re living in the great imperial republic of the twentieth century, we\u2019ll be rich, we\u2019ll all have three automobiles, we\u2019ll have to have them, by law, whether or not we want to sleep with Mae West, we\u2019ll have to sleep with her, we\u2019ll have to eat too much and then take expensive cures to be slenderized, we\u2019ll 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\u2019ll be blown sky high.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

* * *<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019re on top of the heap and all the envy of an envious world is going to be directed toward us\u2014and 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\u2019t last long \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

And me, as ever,
\nMalcolm<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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