MacLeish, Levin Say Modern War Brings No Great Novels

The great war novel will not come in our time, Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, told a large Eliot House audience at a symposium on "War and Literature" last night.

The classical view of the relation of poetry and war, MacLeish explained, was that poetry came afterwards and told the story, justifying was to some extent. But this presupposes that there is a return to peace, and now war goes on and on continually. Poetry can no longer be content to describe war, but must criticize war and give us an image of human perfection for which we can live.

While MacLeish discounted the greater impersonality of present-day warfare as a reason for the demise of the great war novel, Harry T. Levin '33, professor of English, cited it as contributing to the lack of heroes in modern literature.

Modern technology has undermined heroism, Levin maintained. With the conscription of large-scale armies and the development of the airplane and the bomb, the individual has come to count less and less. Defending Norman Mailer's book, "The Naked and the Dead," which in no sense justified war, Levin asserted that the only real relationship between war and literature has been and should continue to be the truth.

Harvard Men "Hectors"

John H. Finley, Jr. '25, Eliot Professor of Greek, discussed mainly the conflict of war and peace as it was to be found in the Iliad. Peace he called "certain things one wishes to held on to out of the flux of change," while war was that which wipes away those things most quickly.

He characterized Harvard students as the Hectors, the men of peace, of the present day, but added that history is moved by the Achilles', the men of war.