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PARTISAN REVIEW
PR

Volume II, No. 8 1935
July-August

© Trustees of Boston University

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PARTISAN REVIEW
A Bi-Monthly of Revolutionary Literature
VOLUME II, No. 8
JULY-AUGUST 1935
MASK, IMAGE, AND TRUTH
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
HOME
CRY OF WARNING
3 Joseph Freeman
18 Richard Wright
20 Jose Mancisidor
24 Francisco Rojas
Gonzalez
GREETINGS, COMRADE
26 Herman Litz Arzuhide
I HAVE INHERITED NO COUNTRY
HOUSE
28 Alfred Hayes
THEY DO THE SAME IN ENGLAND
29 Albert Halper
THE HUNT
37 Ben Field
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT
(review)
52 Alan Calmer
AMERICAN TRAGEDY (review)
57 William Phillips
DIALECTIC OF LOVE AND HATRED
(review)
59 Obed Brooks
PROGRESS OR RETROGRESSION
(review)
61 Edwin Rolfe
THE LOWER DEPTHS (review)
63 Philip Rahv
EDITORIAL BOARD:
ALAN CALMER, KENNETH
FEARING, BEN FIELD, ALFRED
HAYES, WILLIAM PHILLIPS,
PHILIP RAHV, EDWIN ROLFE,
EDWIN SEAVER.
Address all communications to
PARTISAN REVIEW, 430 Sixth
Avenue, New York City. Subscrip-
tions $1.00 for 8 issues. All manu-
scripts must be accompanied by
stamped, self-addressed envelopes.

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PARTISAN REVIEW No. 8

NEW CONTRIBUTORS: ALBERT HALPER has just returned
from a lengthy journey through Europe. While in the Soviet Union he
made arrangements for the translation of his novel, The Foundry, into
Russian.... The three Mexican stories in this issue were translated by
LANGSTON HUGHES during his recent trip to Mexico. They were written
by JOSE MANCISIDOR, delegate to the recent American Writers Congress
and editor of Ruta, published in Veracruz; and by ARTZURIDE and
GONZALES who also contribute to this outstanding Mexican literary
journal.... RICHARD WRIGHT is a young Negro Communist poet of
Chicago's South Side.... Beginning with this issue PARTISAN RE-
VIEW will not be published as the organ of the John Reed Club of New
York but as a revolutionary literary magazine edited by a group of young
Communist writers, whose purpose will be to print the best revolutionary
literature and Marxist criticism in this country and abroad.

FUTURE ISSUES will contain, in addition to the type of contribu-
tions hitherto published, groups of poems and long poems by American
poets, as well as examples of revolutionary verse from Germany, France,
England, and the Soviet Union. PARTISAN REVIEW will publish
several short novels, short stories, and selections from unpublished
novels, sketches by workers and topical reportage by European masters of
this type of writing, literary letters from foreign countries as well as
criticism by the leading Marxist writers in the U. S. .... Announcements
of several literary contests for the best long poem and the best worker's
sketch will be made in a forthcoming issue. . . . In reducing the price of
PARTISAN REVIEW from 25¢ to 15¢ a copy, the editors believe that
this removes the main obstacle preventing the magazine from reaching a
wide audience. If this belief is verified, PARTISAN REVIEW will soon
become a monthly.

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MASK, IMAGE, AND TRUTH
Joseph Freeman

Means not, but blunders round about a meaning;
And he whose fustian's so sublimely bad,
It is not poetry, but prose run mad.

—POPE

A FRIEND WRITES ME: "The pogrom on Marxian criticism con-
tinues unabated. It is said that a well-known author, sympathetic to the
Left-Wing, has written an article in which he assails criticism in general
and the Marxian brand in particular. The other day he harangued a
group of writers on the necessity of defending 'creative' writing against
criticism. The word 'creative' is beginning to reek with the grease of piety.
The other day I was reading in the Literaturnia Gazetta that much the
same situation prevails in the Soviet Union, and they even have a special
phrase for it which, translated literally, means critic-hounding. Further-
more, the Party there is beginning to see that this pogrom on criticism,
aside from certain well-known historical justifications, has its political
meaning."
This news has an ironical side. The author who is said to be lead-
ing the "revolt" against criticism is himself a prolific critic who for several
years has attacked Marxism. And, as is typical of many people who object
mixing politics with literature, he has turned politician. Is not the call
against Marxist critics a political and organizational activity? It smacks
a little of Technocracy, which urged "scientists" of every shade of opinion
to unite against "politicians" of all the social classes.
American literature suffers from strange distortions and confusions.
When a Marxist writer describes facts as he sees them, he is a paid propa-
gandist for the Kremlin. When a bourgeois writer utters the meanest,
most malicious, most barbarous superstitions, he is exercising his right of
free speech, his "intellectual integrity" and his imagined monopoly of
truth. We say, with the best western critics from Prosper de Barante
down, that literature reflects the social struggle. That makes us "artists
in uniform." They say that our poor, hungry, jobless, coatless, foodless,
roomless writers who bum nickles from each other around Union Square
for coffee and crullers—that these are living on Moscow gold. That is
impartial, aesthetic criticism. Archibald MacLeish says some very ques-

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tionable things about Communists, Jews, etc. He breaks up his editorial
into short lines, calls it a fresco, and lo! we have a poem. His prejudices
are now "creative" art, A Marxist reviewer analyses a book in sober
prose that plunges into essentials, and he is "merely" a critic-uncreative,
dogmatic, abstract, the propounder of sterile formulas. The good critic
is one who uncritically ballyhoos the productions of his friends, and re-
writes the publishers' blurbs for people with inflated reputations.
But the dividing line between "creation" and "criticism" is not so
simple. I have just been reading Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River.
It is an extraordinary novel, rich in narrative, observation and feeling,
resounding with strong rhetoric; yet it it also contains a curious section de-
scribing that "dreary, gray and hopeless-looking Jew" named Abraham
Jones: "The whole flag and banner of his race was in the enormous putty-
colored nose." Abe changes his name to "Alfred," and the author roars
that the Jew has "taken violently, by theft and rape" this sacred Aryan
handle. The Jew does not merely grin: he grins "with Kike delight"-
radically different from any other kind of delight. And they say that
Communist writers abuse people and call them names! But this is a novel,
a work of "creative" art. Kike is a "poetic" adjective.
Do not think it clouts Abe Jones only. The great city swarms with
"the faces, cruel, arrogant and knowing of the beak-nosed Jews." The
Hero, Eugene Gant, teaches English at a university; his class consists,
apparently, entirely of Jews; but no one is interested in the course except
Abe Jones, who smiles "wearily, cruelly, contemptuously"; and the "faith-
ful" Boris Gorewitz, who sits "very close, ah fragrantly, odorously close"
to his teacher, turning his "cruel grinning Yiddish face" to the Hero with
a "soft Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! of contemptuous laughter."
There are references to Jewish lawyers that make Theodore Dreiser
look like Theodore Herzl: "the hordes of beak-nosed shysters, poured out
of the law school year by year," who are "adept in every dodge of dis-
honorable trickery, in working every crooked wire"-not as lawyers, re-
gardless of race, color or creed, functioning in a social system based on
fraud, but as Jewish lawyers.
Abe-Alfred's spirit is "gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish
murk"-presumably different from the "nordic" murk that drives the
Hero across hundreds of pages shrieking where shall I go, what shall I
do, what is youth, what is love, what is life; getting drunk, going to the
whores, and beating up his friends until they are senseless.
And the Jewish women!--as "old as nature, and as round as the
earth; they had had a curve in them: they had gone to the wailing walls of
death and love for seven thousand years." No less! The Jewish women
waited for our "faustian" hero a la Spengler "with rich yolky cries":

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MASK, IMAGE AND TRUTH
5
they "pressed around him at his table with insistent surge . . . they pressed
on him their sensual wave."
You understand, of course, that this sensual wave is in the Jewish
women, not in the "faustian" hero; at least not at this point, for otherwise
he rushes up and down the world boiling with gigantic, heroic, epic, un-
fathomable, endless, infinite, eternal, wonderful, unprecedented, unparal-
leled, unique, unheard of, terrible and sacred desire.
You understand, too, the type of Russian who thought the gypsies
were more sensual than the Slavs, the white who thinks so about Negro
women, the Dutch trader who goes into ecstasies about the Polynesians,
the Yanqui who is impotent at home and a Pantagruel in Havana, and
the Jewish Eugene Gant whose emotional antennae respond only to the
"sensual waves" of gentile girls.
Universal race-prejudice fostered by bourgeois civilization, combined
with the sexual taboos and repressions prevalent in the western world,
make such illusions common. But it takes a peculiar mind to generalize
from this as Eugene Gant does. The Jewish boys stand around our
"faustian" Hero with a "sense of acceptance, as if they had known for
thousands of years that their women would betray them with a Gentile
lover, and yet with a kind of triumph, as if they also knew that they would
regain them in the end"-like stolen cows-an image worthy of a culture
that looks upon women as private property and upon love as a "triumph"
of the masculine ego.
Our Hero considers the Jews and he knows-that they would never
be "wild and drunken, or beat their knuckles bloody on a wall, or lie
beaten and senseless in the stews"; but he also knows that "with smooth
faces they would decant the bottle for some man who did, and that they
would read him quietly to his desperate fate with their dark, mocking and
insatiate eyes." He also knows that the Jews can "live completely in a
world of cruel and subtle intuitions, unphrased and unutterable intensitics
of cruelty, shame and horror without lifting a finger or turning a hand."

The Sacrosanct Oracle
So much for Jesus, Spinoza, Marx and the thousands of Jews who
have been imprisoned, executed and murdered for passionate participation
in great social movements which seek to improve the life of man; and for
Freud who specialised in illuminating the "unutterable horrors."
Now if the author had written such stuff directly in an article, he
would have been damned by everybody from the New Masses to the New
York Times. He would have been placed in the same category with Hitler,
Goebbels, Strasser and that Aryan Rosenberg who came by his "Alfred"
honestly, without violence, rape or theft: he would have been given the

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merry ha-ha (or should one say Oh-ho-ho-ho?) which the liberal gentile
hands those who believe that Jews, Negroes and other "inferior" races are
more corrupt, mysterious, cunning, sensual and patient than the "faustian"
hero.

But the author did not directly flaunt the beaked banner of the
race, the Jewish "soul," the Yiddish murk, the "kike" grin. He invented
a character named Eugene Gant and another named Abraham Jones; and,
as we know, an author is not responsible for his characters-even when,
as in this case, it is hard to locate the point at which the character stops
talking and the author begins. He has given us "art," and now the
illusions of the anti-semite, the blind, stupid, blundering confusion of
fantasy with fact, the depiction of subjective "murk" as objective reality,
the babbling about the specific as if it were the general becomes sacred and
inviolate. You may laugh at the "critical" nonsense of Gregor Strasser;
you may not scoff at the "creative" nonsense of Thomas Wolfe.

How careless of Dreiser to write his infantile opinions about the Jews
to Hutchins Hapgood! Why did he speak directly, "critically," in his
own name, and rouse the ire of the Jews, the liberals, the radicals? If he
had only placed those opinions in the mouth of a "character"; if the libel
had only come from "Gregory Butterfiddle," or better still, "Jake Cohen,"
no one would squawk. It would no longer be sentimental confusion, but
"creative writing," holy, infallible, "sincere."

Under the corrupt standards of current bourgeois aesthetics, the
"creative" artist may slander workers, Negroes, Jews, anyone he likes;
he may give way to his most reactionary impulses, yet not be called to
account as he would be if he spoke directly. The "creative" writer is re-
lieved of the responsibilities which, where art is sound, he has always
had from the Greeks to our own day. He is treated as a priest who speaks
from on high, the sacrosanct oracle whose god is "art."

But there is a difference between true art and "murk," whether that
murk be bourgeois or proletarian. There is a difference between character-
drawing and caricature. One does not think of Joyce's Bloom primarily
as a Jew, but as a certain type of intellectual who happens to be a Jew.
Proust's Bloch is offset by Swann. Shylock is not wholly a repulsive
character; he is redeemed by a certain nobility; and Shakespeare does not
editorialize as narrator about the race as a whole.

A writer may dissociate himself from his character provided he does
so in the novel itself. How he does it is the secret of art. But he cannot
dissociate himself from the effect which his work creates. He selects the
characters, the setting, the action, the dialogue; he chooses all,
describes all, evaluates all, consciously and unconsciously. We know that
two authors describing the same character will create two different, even

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7
opposite effects. This is true in the play, where the author as such does
not appear at all; how much more true in the novel, where part of the
effect is created not by giving the words or thoughts of a character, but by
the author's direct intervention. In this sense, the author may be said
to be, willy nilly, a central character in his novel. Abe Jones' grin was
described as Kike not by Eugene Gant but by the narrator.
Perhaps Thomas Wolfe is utterly free of Eugene Gant's prejudices
about Jews, women, Frenchmen, etc. He may say: "I am describing an
imaginary character and I am not responsible for his emotions, thoughts
and actions." He may say this, and we must believe him. It would be
foolish for anyone to accuse Wolfe of race prejudice if he openly and
specifically denied it. But we have the right to say: "Whatever you may
believe in your private life, you wrote this section of the novel so ineptly,
you intervened editorially so often in the story, you so mingled the words
of narrator and character, that, whatever your intentions may have been,
the net effect of that part of your story is anti-semitic."

Reason and Image
This, indeed, is the function of the critic, who is primarily concerned
not with intention but with effect. The author cannot help infusing his
imaginary world, which cannot be separated from the real world, with
his emotions. He may say:
"This is how these people appear to me." Why may not the articu-
late reader who is called "critic' say: "And this is how your book appears
to me? Moreover, I know the kind of people you describe, and you have
falsified their characters, and you have used them as symbols of their race
or class. You may not have intended such a generalization-but in failing
to make clear what you were doing, in failing to dissociate yourself from
the Hero, in echoing his ideas through those passages in which the anony-
mous narrator speaks, you become responsible for the impression you con-
vey. We may not question your intentions, of which you alone have certain
knowledge; we may be sure that some of your best friends are Jews-but
in that case you've done a damn bad piece of writing which is false not
only to the facts but to your own best intentions."
Needless to say, disagreement with Wolfe's treatment of the Jew in
no sense constitutes an evaluation of his work as a whole. Great writers,
whose work belongs to the finest treasures of world literature, have created
images of the Jew distorted by class relationships and literary traditions-
among them Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. It is the business
of the Marxist critic to trace the social and literary bases of such distor-
tions; and six years ago Joshua Kunitz did so in a brilliant little volume
which analysed the changing status of the Jew in Russia and its reflection

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PARTISAN REVIEW
in Russian literature. Such analyses are invaluable, and no serious writer
can object to them. But even if some writers do object to a social inter-
pretation of their work as is the case with those who have been conducting
a persistent agitation against Marxist criticism-why should that deflect
us from speaking the necessary truths? Why should we let any writer
who happens to be called "creative" delude us into believing that chauvin-
ism and self-adulation, hatred, fear and misunderstanding of everything
which lies outside his provincial and class prejudices is either art or Amer-
ican? If a poet may give his views of the revolutionary movement, why
may we not give our views of the poet? Is it any less a "creative" act to
reflect about a work of art than to slander one's friends, lovers and bene-
factors under fictitious names?
We know what happens: the moment the critics stop writing about
a certain kind of poet, novelist or playwright, he stands up in the cafes and
studios and yells to the four corners of the city that he is the victim of a
conspiracy of silence. Citizens, I am being ignored! When the critics do
write about him but fail to declare him the equal of Dostoyevsky, Proust,
Shelley and Ibsen, they are not good critics; they are merely pompous
bigots wallowing in the opium of dialectic materialism. Needless to say,
the best poets, novelists and critics do not do this. Neither do they make
false and invidious distinctions between "creative" and "critical" writing
as if the first were sacred and the second sterile, just as true scientists
do not oppose practical to theoretical science.
The Marxist critic interprets, appreciates and applauds good art, but
he rips the masks off the priests of art. He exposes the propagandist behind
the poet, translates the equivocal images of verse into the lucid concepts of
prose, holds the author responsible for his characters when these actually
do speak for him. The Marxist critic is not concerned with puffing or
blasting reputations, with log-rolling or intrigue. He wishes to promote
the best, the most vigorous, the most illuminating art. He seeks to pro-
pagate the truth.
But every man sees the world from some viewpoint. Because the
Marxist critic sees it from the viewpoint of the revolutionary working-
class, a certain type of "creative" writer, anxious not to be disturbed in
his allegiances, preconceptions and magic incantations, hates the critic, as
the church hates the unbeliever, the industrial baron the labor organizer,
the capitalist politician the Communist.
The "united front" against Marxist critics headed by writers fresh
from the reactionary camp is a "united front" against the Marxist de-
ciphering of bourgeois symbols. Without the Communist, the propertied
classes would unrestricted bamboozle the masses with their "democratic"
images. Without the Marxist critic the "faustian" creative writer would

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unhampered propagate his poisonous ideas in obscure, false but effective
images.
These images are effective because they have three thousand years of
religion, three centuries of bourgeois ideology, the whole culture of capital-
ism to sustain them; because they evoke emotional habits, deep, deep in the
souls of most of us, engraved there from earliest childhood by the priests,
the pedagogues, the journalists, the politicians, the poets of the propertied
classes—and by the day to day relations between classes and individuals
necessarily imposed by the conditions of capitalist society.
Disraeli's Wisecrack
Marxist criticism makes such images less effective. It exposes the
bourgeois philosopher's formulas, the poet's myths, the journalist's "im-
partial" reports for what they are propaganda for the mouldy attitudes
of the dying world. The fact that such attitudes are sometimes uncon-
scious, blind, "sincere" does not make any difference. Perhaps Hitler,
too, is "sincere." Certainly, the Big Businessman "sincerely" believes that
laws, ideas and actions in defense of monopoly capital are in the best in-
terests of "civilization." No one in Russia doubted Dostoyevsky's sincerity,
yet how many of the best writers in the various progressive camps arose
in chorus to damn The Possessed, his libel on the revolutionary movement
—among them the creative writer Maxim Gorki.
For that matter, creation is inseparable from good criticism in mod-
ern literature, as a glance at European and American letters will show.
Dante was a critic, so were Tasso, Ronsard, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Cor-
neille, Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Sam Johnson, Voltaire, Lessing, Diderot,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Landor, Coleridge, Gautier, Poe, Tolstoy;
so are Eliot, Pound, Valery, Yeats, Shaw, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Mike
Gold and John Howard Lawson.
Who sneers at poets? The philistine. Who, ignoring history, said
that critics are men who have failed in art and literature? The very
clever, very cynical, very adroit but not very profound rhetorician Ben-
jamin Disraeli.
Surely it is no more "creative" to caricature proletarian ideas in verse
than to expose bourgeois ideas in prose. When a novel or play or poem
describes everyone as a louse except the Hero, who mistakes his own vin-
dictiveness for poetic observation, we have every right in the world to say:
this is false art. When some one, in all "sincerity" writes a Hearst edi-
torial in free verse, we have every right in the world to point out its
fascist ideas. We cannot permit anyone to bully us into swallowing his
values, creeds, or opinions merely because he uses a form which convention
calls "creative." We reserve the right to think.

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This goes both ways. The critic, no more than the poet, may pretend to be infallible, laying down the irrefutable "line," uttering ex-cathedra the last word about life and art. Let the creative writer, or his critical partisans, take issue with a specific critic on a specific question. Thomas Wolfe may say to me: "You are mistaken about Abe Jones. You have read that passage with an oversensitive regard for the negative sides of Abe, and overlooked the tribute I paid him and his race. The Jew in my novel is, like Shylock, not wholly repulsive; he has his noble side; besides, I am under no obligation in this great and free republic of ours to treat minor nationalities according to a Comintern thesis. My Jewish friends have taken no exception to the portrait."

That, in effect, is what some people said in reply to Michael Gold's complaint against MacLeish's Frescos. They went further and said: "But isn't it true that many of the Communists one meets in New York are Jews who talk English with a foreign accent?" This raises a whole problem of imagery and symbolism in poetry.

Yes, it is true that some Communists are Jews who speak with a foreign accent. But that is no indictment of Communism, Jews or accents. Communism is an international movement of workers, farmers and intellectuals of all races and nationalities, to which Jews have contributed their share of fighters and heroes. There are also Jewish bankers and industrialists whose interests lie with the gentile bourgeoisie as against the workers, Jew and gentile alike. The Communist movement in America, as everywhere else, is not predominantly Jewish. It is no more "disgraceful" for an alien worker to speak English with an accent than for an American tourist to butcher the French language in Paris cafes. The producers of America's coal, iron, steel, automobiles, clothes, the men and women who labor in heavy industry, are predominantly of alien stock—and they are as American as the parasites who invest their "unearned increment" in foreign princes. The interests and aims of the proletariat transcend racial and national boundaries. In a strike, Negro and white workers, Jews and gentiles, the native and foreign-born American fight side by side against the employers, whose greed for profit transcends race, nationality and language.

A poem, play or novel describing "radicals" which would convey that impression—not in the abstract language of sociology which I have used, but in the living images of creative art—would be telling the truth. A poem, play or novel which presents the Communist only as a Jew with an accent; the Jew only with a beak-nose, a cruel, contemptuous, arrogant face, is distorting the truth.

Such a symbol or image is based on a prejudice which the fascists of the world exploit. The German reaction said communists were paid

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11
agents of France; the Russian reaction said they were paid agents of the
Kaiser; the American reaction says they are paid agents of Stalin. Every-
where the reaction paints Communism as an alien movement. It uses the
power of dark, ugly, chauvinist hatred against the organized class-conscious
proletariat. And everywhere the reaction says that Communism is a Jewish
movement. It directs the dark, ugly hatred against the Jew, as old as
western Europe, against the organized, class-conscious proletariat, which
is predominantly gentile. This was the technique of Hitler. The image
Communist-alien-Jew is the fascist image which identifies the "reprehen-
sible" part with the "hateful" whole, which evokes foul, primitive, mur-
derous passions against alien and Jew in order to strike at the proletarian
movement.

Now the poet who symbolizes the Communist by an East Side accent
may not have Hitler's intentions. In that case he is a bad poet. He has
defeated his own ends. He has conveyed a lie when he wanted to convey
the truth.

Lenin and Proust
I happened to have picked on the distorted image of the Jew because
it has cropped up so persistently in recent American literature. But it is
only an example of my thesis, not its core. What is true in this instance
is true in general: the poet defeats his own ends when he uses the accidental
as an image for the essential, or mistakes the part for the whole, or as-
sumes unity where there is profound difference and conflict. One does
not have to be a creative writer, a poet, a genius to understand this. A
good newspaper correspondent knows that you cannot convey a true picture
of a country or region by confining yourself to immediate, accidental im-
pressions. It may be that the people in your hotel- broken remnants of
the old regime-one and all curse Soviet life; but if you cable their com-
ments without saying that they are broken remnants of the old regime, a
negligible and hostile handful, if you conclude that they speak for the
Russian people as a whole, you are falsifying reality. If you do not travel
and meet workers, peasants, engineers, economists, school-teachers, etc. in
various parts of the country, if you do not acquaint yourself with the past
of the old Russia and the aims of the new one, if you do not measure and
compare and analyze and reassemble the contradictory fragments into
essentials, you will never understand Soviet life. That is why the poet
E. E. Cummings, turning reporter, gave us such a distorted picture in Eimi.
The marginal people in the fringe of Soviet life accidentally encountered
on a brief holiday, became for him the image of a vast land, and his own
terror and confusion in the face of something new and powerful became the
"soul" of 160,000,000 people.

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The opposite is also true. The average bourgeois correspondent comes
to Mexico laden with exotic presuppositions, the scion of a "superior" race
in a colonial country. He notes and describes the brilliant landscape, the
serapes, the tequila, the jarabe, the frescos at the National Palace, the
bull-fights, the parading army, the village fiestas, the Aztec legends; he
ignores or misunderstands the life of the workers and peasants, the agrarian
and labor movements, the daily struggle of the peon against the landowner,
of the worker against his native and foreign exploiter. The image of
Mexico which he conveys to his reader is a distortion of the truth; and
though he is "merely" a reporter, he is no different from the average
"creative" artist and writer who ventures south of the Rio Grande. Con-
sider the final effect produced by Upton Sinclair's Thunder Over Mexico.

There is an amazing amount of nonsense about "creative" writing,
anyway. Lenin's writing is a thousand times more creative than Proust's;
Ten Days that Shook the World is more creative than a lot of fiction pub-
lished today. Anyone who doesn't understand this, doesn't know what
creative means. The mere use of such forms as verse, the play or the novel
does not in itself make a writer "creative." There is not a good poet alive
who would not rather have written a single essay by Walter Pater than
all the verse of Edgar Guest, or Milton's political pamphlets rather than
Sam Shipman's plays.

Differences in form are important. We must not fall into the illusion
which speaks both of Shakespeare and Schopenhauer as "poetry" because
either may arouse emotion. But that aura which a man acquires by doing
"creative" work is certainly not to be won by mere external form. Imagi-
nation, perception, insight, intensity, truth and adequate intrinsic form are
some of the things required. Effect upon the audience is also important.
The audience may be wrong; writers have often been rejected who turned
out to be geniuses; but just as often the diamond-studded belt has been
handed to the palooka. If the critic may be mistaken, so may the poet.
Each must say his say and take the consequences; and in an era like ours,
when basic values are being transvalued, the poet is often critical and the
critic creative.

Lenin pointed out that Tolstoy was an "artist of genius" who gave
an "incomparable picture of Russian life" and contributed great works to
the literature of the world. But Tolstoy was also "a landlord playing the
fool in Christ ... a worn-out hysterical mud-wallower called the Russian
intellectual." Tolstoy on the one hand relentlessly criticised capitalist
exploitation, exposed government violence, lashed the comedy of the courts
and government administration, revealed the gulf between growing wealth
and growing poverty, the achievements of civilization alongside the bar-
barism and suffering among the masses. At the same time he advocated

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"one of the most odious things in the world-religion." Lenin further
pointed out that Tolstoy's views were not only "the contradictions of his
personal thoughts, but a reflection of those highly complicated, contradic-
tory conditions which determined the psychology of various classes and
various sections of Russian society in the post-reform but pre-revolutionary
era."

Why may not a Marxist critic, acknowledging the gifts of the poet,
novelist or playwright, point out the manner in which such a creative
writer reflects the contradictions of American life today, the manner in
which he utters the confusions and prejudices of the class from which he
springs? Surely, the rows over Thornton Wilder, Diego Rivera, Archi-
bald MacLeish and Black Fury would never have arisen if only personal,
individual, accidental eccentricities had been involved, if there were not
a clash of social viewpoints.

The Marxist critic not only may but must interpret the image; and
and if he is a real Marxist critic he can give that correct evaluation of im-
portant literature which is possible only from the viewpoint of the revo-
lutionary proletariat with "its supreme devotion to the cause of democracy
and its ability to struggle against the limitations and inconsistencies of
bourgeois democracy."

Urbane and Plausible
America has no Lenins, but neither has it Tolstoys. Heaven knows
there are bad critics. Shall we therefore abolish criticism? There are
bad poets, too; why not abolish poetry? There are bad novelists; why
not abolish the novel? There are quacks; why not abolish medicine?
There are many, far too many, evil men; why not exterminate mankind?
Rhetorical questions. No one attacks criticism as such. On the
contrary, the anti-Marxist critic occupies an honored place in conven-
tional literature. He enjoys the full benefits of the Bill of Rights in
flinging brickbats at straw men whom he calls "proletarian writers." Re-
cently the venerable H. L. Mencken celebrated the tenth anniversary of
a leading literary gazette by "illuminating" what he called "the abyss" of
proletarian literature. He fired all the stale epithets left over from his
civil war with the Babbittry of which he is a learned and distinguished
member and with which he has concluded a peace without victory. Here
are some of the Baltimore Sage's "illuminating" observations:

1. Proletarian literature in this county has not produced "anything
of shining virtue." So much for Stevedore, Waiting for Lefty, The Black
Pit, They Shall Not Die, The Shadow Before, You Can't Sleep Here, To
Make My Bread, Jews Without Money, The Executioner Waits, Those

=== Page 15 ===
14 PARTISAN REVIEW

Who Perish, The Land of Plenty, The Last Pioneers the poems of
Fearing, Hayes, Rolfe, Funaroff, Kreymborg, Schneider, Gessner.
2. Radicals "love money above the common." From an ascetic
idealist who has starved all his life for the sake of sublime and selfless
principles, this is a just accusation. Observe the vast fortunes paid to
editors and contributors by the New Masses, New Theatre, Dynamo, Par-
tisan Review as compared with the miserable little checks handed out by
The Mercury, The Baltimore Sun, Vanity Fair, Fortune and the Saterepost.
You will find the proletarian writers wallowing in luxury while the con-
servative writers starve in Union Square. Or have it the other way: pro-
letarian writers love money but haven't got it; conservative writers have
money but do not love it. Who says the Marxists are vulgar materialists?
The literary reaction. And who discusses important ideas by referring
to money? Ditto.
3. The New Masses is "one of the dullest sheets ever heard of";
there "is no more gaiety in it than you will find in the proceedings of the
Lake Mohonk Conference." That is why the literati fell over each other
trying to discover the identity of the unusually humorous Robert For-
sythe, weekly New Masses contributor.
4. Many of the proletarian writers bear "distinguished albeit largely
bogus Anglo-Saxon names." Abe Jones has taken the name of "Alfred"
by violence, rape and theft! Moreover, proletarian literature "seems to be
a bad translation from the Yiddish"; it is writetn in "shaky English." Let
native, nordic one houdred percent Americans like Kenneth Fearing,
Josephine Herbst, Erskine Caldwell, Meridel Le Sueur, Horace Gregory,
James Farrell, William Rollins, Henry Hart, Malcolm Cowley, John
Hermann, and Robert Cantwell speak for themselves. No Jew, unless
he utters the bourgeois shibboleths, will convince the anti-semite that he is
an American or that he can write English as well as Theodore Dreiser.
In poetry, as in politics, the reaction will continue to manipulate the false
image Communist-alien-Jew.
5. Most of the revolutionary writers "have failure written all over
them, and are engaged in saving the proletariat only as a surrogate for
doing something for themselves." Good examples of this profound ob-
servation are John Howard Lawson, Clifford Odets, John Wexley, John
Dos Passos, Samuel Ornitz, Langston Hughes, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo
Frank and Robert Forsythe. The Baltimore Sage finds that "the so-
called critics of the so-called revolution are even more plainly inferiorities.
Nearly all began on higher levels, trying to do something for themselves."
Noteworthy among these self-seekers are Joshua Kunitz, Oakley Johnson
and Granville Hicks, all fired from university posts, despite their excellent
academic standing, for practicing the "liberation of the lowly."

=== Page 16 ===
MASK, IMAGE AND TRUTH
15

6. The "norm" among Marxist critics is "an apostate from more
urbane and plausible ideas, and he commonly carries with him the rancor
of one who found them unbearably complex and onerous; so he turns to
the childish simplicities that are the essence of all quackery." H. L. Men-
cken's ideas on syphilis, beer, the booboisie, the Star Spangled Banner,
Methodist ministers, and the Superman are unbearably complex and
onerous. The words of Marx, Engels and Lenin are childishly simple
quackery. To abandon Mencken for Marx makes you not only an apostate
but "a man of the congenitally subordinate and third-rate sort." Again:
to disagree with reactionary writers is to be full of rancor. To say that
revolutionary writers are mostly people with bogus Anglo-Saxon names
who write shaky English that seems a bad translation from the Yiddish, to
accuse them of being tools of the Moscow Holy Office, to call them "re-
porters who see what isn't there," muddle-headed failures who love money
above the common—to say this is to be free of rancor. This is urbane and
plausible.

7. Proletarian literature was discovered "probably not more than
two or three years ago." So much for The Weavers, Maxim Gorki, the
early works of Jack London and Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Joe Hill,
Mayakovsky, Martin Anderson Nexo, Berthold Brecht, Erich Mühsam,
Ernst Toller et al.

Does anyone in the bourgeois camp question this kind of "criticism"?
Does anyone accuse the Baltimore Soapboxer of being Hitler's paid agent,
an artist in uniform? Not at all. Malicious, ignorant, illiterate, anti-
semitic slander against revolutionary writers is considered witty and just.
No reactionary claims that all criticism is bad. Only Marxist criticism
is dangerous for the soul of the "creative" writer,—and only the bourgeois
novelist, poet or playwright is really "creative."

When Upton Sinclair was supposed to be socialist, his works were
ignored for years. He was compelled to publish many of them at his own
expense. The reaction howled that his novels had no style and no humor.
Now that he has produced an Epic and spent a sleepless night of ecstasy
because President Roosevelt smiled at him, H. L. Mencken discovers he
is both a stylist and a humorist. This is quackery.

Creator and Critic

But there is the sincere type of creative writer who fears that Marxist
criticism wishes to torture his imagination into the procrustian bed of
communist formula. He believes the reactionary agitators who assure him
that when he supports the proletariat in its struggle for freedom his writ-
ings will have to meet "the specifications of the Moscow Holy Office."
He is ignorant of our reiterated assurances that we consider the abstract,

=== Page 17 ===
16 PARTISAN REVIEW

lifeless, unimaginative, mechanical rewriting of Party theses neither art
nor revolutionary; that we judge the writer artistically as well as poli-
tically.

There, in fact, lies the crux of the matter. The sincere writer who
feels discomfort in the presence of Marxist thought believes he is defending
boundless experience against inflexible logical formulas which narrow ex-
perience. But the truth is that such a writer mistakes the circumscribed
experience of the middle class for the whole of life. He thinks that the
critical picture which the revolutionary writer gives of bourgeois life is
a distortion; he believes that the experience of workers and farmers is an
invention twisted to fit into preconceived formulas. Proletarian life is
strange and unreal to him; bourgeois life seems eternal, natural, alone real.

But neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian writer creates out of
a vacuum. At the moment when the creative writer sits at his desk and
composes his verses or his novel or his play, he may have the illusion that
he is writing his work for its own sake, out of profound, unfathomable
emotion. But without his past life, without his class education, prejudices
and experiences, that particular work would be impossible

Memory, the Greeks said, is the mother of the muses; and memory
feeds not on the general, abstract idea of absolute disembodied experience,
but on our action, education and knowledge in our specific social milieu.
The writer creates out of an imagination colored, in part, by ideas, which
he has picked up from the university or factory, from books, from people.
Experience without ideas which interpret and color that experience is un-
thinkable in an advanced society like ours. When the writer does not
accept Marxist ideas, he accept bourgeois ideas. Such ideas may be uncon-
scious; the writer may think he writes only out of "imagination" and "emo-
tion"; he may fancy himself free of all "preconceptions" and "formulas."
But this illusion does not alter the facts. The "preconception" is there-and
we get an Abe Jones or a fresco for Rockefeller City.

Art varies with experience; its so-called sanctions vary with experi-
ence. The experience of the mass of humanity today is such that social
and political themes are more interesting, more significant, more "normal"
than the personal themes of the previous decade. Social themes today
correspond to the general experience of men, acutely conscious of the violent
and basic transformations through which they are living, and which they
are helping to bring about. Intellectuals sympathetic to the struggles of
the working class (what Mr. Mencken urbanely calls "the woes of the
Chandala") are themselves victims of the general social-economic crisis.
It does not require much imagination to see why they are more interested
today in unemployment, strikes, the fight against war and fascism, revolu-

=== Page 18 ===
BETWEEN 17
MASK, IMAGE AND TRUTH
tion and counter-revolution than in nightingales, the stream of middle-class
consciousness, or love in Greenwich Village.

It was not Marxist criticism which compelled this transvaluation of
values but life itself. Our criticism has only illuminated the abyss of
capitalist existence and tested poetic images by that all-pervading, mon-
strous reality. To attack Marxist critism as a whole is to attack the
attempt of reason to interpret symbols. The image is a bridge between
reality and emotion. Criticism is a bridge between the image and conscious-
ness. The poet intensifies and illuminates life by image and fable; the
critics intensifies awareness by interpreting art in the light of the whole
of culture. The critic loves art because he loves life; the poet welcomes
criticism because he loves truth. Poet and critic nourish each other as
they nourish the culture which nourishes them.

=== Page 19 ===
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon
the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks
and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves
between the world and me . . .

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon
a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger
accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and a
scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat, and
a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a drained
gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow surprise into
the eye sockets of a stony skull . . .
And while I stood my mind was frozen with a cold pity for the
life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by icy
walls of fear—
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the grass and
fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods poured forth
the hungry yelping of hounds; the darkness screamed with
thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into
my bones.
The gray ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into my
flesh.
The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth; cigars and cigarettes

18

=== Page 20 ===
BETWEEN THE WORLD

glowed, the whore smeared the lipstick red upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that my life
be burned . . .

And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth into my
throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my black
wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as they bound
me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from me in
limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into my raw
flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of
gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like
water, boiling my limbs.
Panting, begging I clutched child-like, clutched to the hot
sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in yellow
surprise at the sun . . .

RICHARD WRIGHT

=== Page 21 ===
THREE MEXICAN STORIES
(Translated by LANGSTON HUGHES)

HOME

Jose Mancisidor

HE GROUP STOPPED QUIETLY in the middle of the inter-
national bridge like a herd of cattle in a corral. One of the men
turned his head and stood looking back at the distant houses on
the American side. Then he said to one of his companions,
"Sure, Tony, I'll write you."
The one he spoke to hesitated a moment. Then he ans-
wered, "Don't forget-If there's any chance of working in
Mexico, I'll come down home where you are. Here, it's bad.
Getting worse and worse every day."
His eyes sought those of his friend, which remained in-
sistently fixed on an unknown point that seemed to attract him
against his will. Then Tony repeated, "Let me know as soon
as you get there. They are going to put all us Mexicans out of
here by and by. There's no room for so many."
The children stood at a distance away from the conversa-
tion. Their chatter, like the cackling of hens, came out with less
difficulty, simpler, flavored with childish ingenuousness. But
their eyes too kept turning obstinately backwards as if they had
forgotten something in the city they were leaving behind.
Over their tousled heads the sky shone brightly. Little by
little the shadows of evening began to fall, gliding over every-
thing. It was as if a thin gas came down from the sky and
silently covered people and things. From the half-dead river, in
the vagueness of the twilight, other shadows seemed to rise, ex-
pand, and take form with strange vigor. The lights of the
evening began their restless blinking, all around.
Tony held out his hand and said, "I have to go back now.
Tonight we'll be less. You and your family make fifty from our
neighborhood, all gone home."
He stopped short. The word "home" made him think of
strange things in the back of his mind. Scenes of other days
passed before him in swift succession.

20

=== Page 22 ===
THREE MEXICAN STORIES

"Our country," Juan muttered. "What will it be like down
there? "I don't know if I'll get used to it again. I won't have
any friends-but it's worse not having anything to eat! . . .
Good-bye, Tony," he said. "Tell all the others good-bye to-
night."

His wife repeated, like an echo, "Tell all the others good-
bye."

Juan, seeking out his children with a look, said, "Say good-
bye to Tony, boys."

Again Tony held out his hand, grasped with affection. For
everyone he had a word of courage and a phrase of hope. He
stood a moment looking at those who were going into that other
land, Mexico, that at the end of the bridge became a separate
geographical section with a different name.

The footsteps of Juan and his family, beating an uneven
rhythm on the bridge, echoed in Tony's heart. All around him
the lights spread out in a twinkling circle, as the vague sil-
houettes of his friends were lost in the shadows of the night like
the outlines of a dream. The last thing he saw of them was
their friendly hands waving affectionate farewell.

Although his difficulties were many, Juan kept up hope.
Perhaps it was merely bureaucratic slowness that made complex
that which in reality should be arranged with ease, without com-
plications for official machinery had tangled up everything in
a tiresome snarl of absurd red tape. His rustic brain refused to
accept so many formulas. He couldn't see why one's country put
such a mountain of obstacles in the paths of those who had
come back home. Nevertheless, he and his family, carried along
by the attractions of the unknown, travelled optimistically from
the border into the heart of the land that in former times, they
had left behind them.

Mexico! The stations followed one after another in a kind
of enervating calm. Later came the desert. Arid, dry, without
vegetation. Life giving evidence of itself only through the
whistle of the engine or the unexpected appearance of aggressive
coyotes.

Then again, little by little, the stations became more fre-
quent. The stops less long. Juan and his family did not sleep,
anxious to gather into their eyes all the forgotten landscape.

"Say, old woman, here's the station where we first took the
train, do you remember?"

She waited until the sharp whistles ceased before she ans-

=== Page 23 ===
22 PARTISAN REVIEW

wered, "Gonzales Junction! Sure I remember it." Then she
put her sleepy eyes up to the window glass, misty with the
breath of night, and was silent with her meagre thoughts.

From there, in days long past, they had gone forth toward
the secrets of a new life full of promises of abundance. Now
they were coming back with their lives in a broken frame of
misery. Nevertheless, at heart, she had an obstinate hope in
home, in her country.

Before their eyes now in the dawn, passed the green of un-
ending plains bordered by the monotonous grey of the abrupt
sierras. Every station, like an anthill, swarmed with people.
Farther on, above the high peaks, yellow streaks announced the
return of the sun. The train kept up its crazy race down the
parallel highway. The rails disappeared rapidly beneath the
wheels only to appear anew in front—a prolongation without
end!

The repatriated ones were tireless. Sleepless eyes were
kodaks anxious to catch marvellous visions of their patria.
When their ears heard the voice of the conductor announcing
the end of the day's run they thought they had passed through
the new beauties of a pleasant dream.

Luminous dots stood out in the dark curve of the sky. The
transparent evening permitted one to see clearly the high bell-
towers whose slenderness penetrated the clean blue twilight.

The train stopped slowly. From the platform strange
voices came up to them—but only Juan alone did not know what
to do in the tangle of the night. He watched the other passen-
gers get out, received with open arms by those who awaited
them, while in his own heart, cold as a tomb, their smiles turned
into gestures of irony.

Now three months have gone by since his return to the
patria. New groups of repatriates have been added to those al-
ready brought in. At home, the "old woman" waits with un-
certainty the expected news. The papers cry daily: AID
THOSE WHO HAVE COME BACK TO MEXICO! And
this slogan helps sustain their illusions. But when Juan again
gives utterance to the dismal weight of their poverty and help-
lessness, a deep silence falls upon them like a mortal anguish.

Into the sad hut from the city street comes the noise of the
passing hours. The youngsters come in, too, but no shouts of
joy come with them as they drop into their parents' hands the
shameful crumbs of beggary. Suddenly in Juan's eyes a bloody

=== Page 24 ===
THREE MEXICAN STORIES 23

vision passes. Meanwhile, his wife remembers sadly the foreign
city where they lived; her friends there; their hours of strug-
gle; now their sorry return, and this final defeat. Her mouth
utters a curse and on her thin cheek there trembles a helpless
tear.

Then the darkness covers their defeated bodies. In the
dead of night the red vision passes again in front of Juan's eyes,
and he closes them tightly in anguish. His wife adds the last
touch of desperation, "If only there was a little hope. . . ."

He does not answer for, in his mind worn by weariness, the
red vision has taken possession.

Back in the States, as usual one night, Tony was reading
aloud from the local Mexican paper. The men listened intently.
In his mouth the official measures taken by the patria to help
those who had come back home took on great importance. Mov-
ing and familiar scenes began to live again in every mind. For-
gotten childhoods galloped through their heads. Contentment
shone in their faces with a persuasive force. But suddenly
Tony's throat vibrated with a profane word.

An indefinable fear came into the eyes of his listeners.
Tony's voice broke. His tongue could not utter the brutal news.
But there the paragraph was, clear and complete, and of a
starkness that broke the heart.

Strangely enough, on the same page with the news of
parties and fiestas, the paper said that Juan Ramirez, crazed
with hunger and despair, had assassinated his "old woman" and
their boys.

Nothing more. No comment. No poetry. A simple notice,
without adornment, sent for its meager news value from the
frontiers of the patria.

Tony was struck dumb, overcome by the fact. In his ears
he could still hear their friendly voices of farewell, and before
his staring eyes affectionate hands reached toward his in a last
goodbye.

Then, with hatred, his eyes saw the sky that curved in over
their country. And he seemed to see beneath this same sky,
stuck in the freshly turned earth, a group of rickety, miserable
crosses.

=== Page 25 ===
CRY OF WARNING

Francisco Rojas Gonzalez

THE PIT WAS deep and dark. Like a gigantic mouth open-
ing in a black, eternal yawn, throwing up against the blue sky
its foul breath, it waited lazily, sucking in the human hive that
milled about its edges every morning.

Down the cold damp throat leading perpendicularly into
the belly of the mine, there ran a slender thread of a ladder by
which the men descended, on their way to drill in the hard rock,
to follow with the anxiety of moles the load of gold in the
stratum of a curiously wandering earth formation.

In the spring time, when the fat face of the globe is not
big enough for our comrade sun to drench with its Marxian
gift of light, it creates for the men in the depths another of its
miracles: a sheaf of rays that glances off the muddy walls of the
gigantic throat to pierce that chaos in which the miners hide the
delights of their poverty. Then the workers throw down their
picks and their drills to look up, high up, three hundred meters,
and see the disk of the sun that winks at them; but it is so far
away that some take it playfully for a gold piece.

Then they go on with their task. They draw together in a
bunch until they form a palpitating mass, working, working like
a nest of worms boring into a corpse.

The following dialogue comes out in spurts, impelled by the
uneven jumping of two pairs of lungs swollen with silicosis-or,
in simpler terms, by the digging of other miners-those un-
tiring miners discovered by the exact eye of Dr. Koch.

"They claim the lode runs along here. . . ."
"The lode! . . . Pull back your lantern, will you, I'm suf-
focating with heat. . . . Heat and sweat. . . . Say, listen, man,
did you ever think about a river of sweat? What a river they
could make out of workers' sweat, eh?"

And the rhythm of their digging, syncopated by the blow of
steel on rock, is caught up by an echo and thrown furiously
against the stony wall.

At last an "at last" a long time off-eight hours-the

24

=== Page 26 ===
THREE MEXICAN STORIES
25

men stretch out their arms cross-like in disconnected jerky ges-
tures, the same as a weary jackass scratches its back on the hot
sand, trying to find a decent place to rest. Then, as though
pouring out of the doors of hell, a luminous procession winds
upward from the belly of the mine. They are coming back to
earth after tearing from the rock that transmutable metal which,
at the first touch of light, becomes a trumps of the seven major
sins. Their murmur, half-hearted at first, grows persistently,
steadily, until it turns into a single long lament, unending, knott-
ed in a maze of dull notes.
Hundreds of Mexican voices mingle in chorus, repeating
together a prayer, lifting up their alabado, a nightly chant that
is more than the giving of thanks—a useless complaint, a fic-
titious sedative, a ballast on the way up, a moan of decay, a sup-
plication. . . .
But this song of resignation does not rise of itself, it stays
down, winding like fire-damp, curling around the little sharp
stones that jut out beneath the earth for no other reason than
to wound with their pointed edges the naked feet of the miners.
This absurd prayer, in order to get to the surface at all,
has to knot itself about the necks of the men. Then they drag
it behind them, as if they did not already have enough to carry
on their shoulders.
When the first footsteps touch the bottom rung, the ladder
becomes suddenly tense as these human beings begin to climb and
climb without ceasing to pray, leaving behind a part of them-
selves, like a payment on a bill they cannot escape.
But suddenly their chant of grief and death is pierced by a
cry of warning, "Watch out for the pick!"
And the man from whose hands the tool has fallen looks
down. The whole ladder is lighted by the anemic flames of little
lanterns of gas tied to the belts of a hundred workers climbing up
the shaft. At the cry of warning, the long worm of light con-
torts like a whip.
"Watch out for the hammer!"
"Watch out for the lantern!"
"Watch out for the shovel."
These phrases resound night after night as though welded
to an axle of grief—for in order to avoid tragedy, it is a rule
that a warning must be shouted to those who are ascending.
Meanwhile, the first man has reached the mouth of the pit.
The prayer has completed its mission—it has achieved the earth.

=== Page 27 ===
26 OF WAR PARTISAN REVIEW

It has succeeded in breaking the cruel tranquility of the little city
that rests comfortably on the lap of the mountain.
One night-double night in the heart of the mine-the men
were coming up as usual with their baggage of weariness and
prayer. So far no cry of warning had broken the irritating mono-
tony. The worm of light crept earthward with imposing calm.
Suddenly a man's two hands, cramped from overwork,
could no longer support the weight of his body, suspended there
on the ladder like a tragic puppet. A terrific yell of fear! Then
the required cry of warning fell straight down like a drop of
melted metal:
"Watch out for me!"
The worm of light contracted horribly. Some of the men
turned their heads to the wall. Others, expressionless, saw his
body pass them with the speed of a bullet and go dashing into
the bowels of the mine.
Caught in a momentary shiver, the bourgeois city turned
over in the white sheets of its bed. Prayer, having reached the
earth as an abscess on the lips of the workers, went its way.
But in the eardrums of every miner his last warning cry stuck
like a wedge.
"Watch out for me!"

GREETINGS, COMRADE

Herman Litz Arzúbide

HE HELD OUT a rather dirty hand and said to me gravely,
"Greetings, comrade." Then he added, "I got in last night
from Panuco, beating my way. I organized the Young Pioneers
down there. I'm gonna do the same thing here."
I looked at him in amazement for he was, at the most, only
thirteen years old. Through his torn clothes, you could see
patches of his brown body. He was extraordinarily serious for
his age, and his words held a certainty of conviction such as I
had not heard in years. He stood in front of the picture of
Lenin that hung on the wall and looked at it a long time. Then
he said simply, "I'm going to work." And he went.

=== Page 28 ===
THREE MEXICAN STORIES
27
That night he came back accompanied by a group of boys
of his own age. He sat them down around a table in the room
and, taking out of his pocket a handful of lead type, before the
astonished eyes of the kids he distributed it as though he were
in a print shop. Then he took the forms and, like an expert,
rapidly organized a page of propaganda inviting all boys to join
his organization. Another one of the kids carried a bundle of
cheap paper under his arm. They cut it to the proper size and,
with the aid of a kneeling youngster, in less than an hour they
had a pile of leaflets. He divided them up among the boys
present, sent them off to various sections of the city, and told
them to come back the next day. Then he said, offering me his
hand covered with printers ink, "Greetings, comrade." And
went away.
The next day, true to the time at which he had told the other
boys to come, he arrived followed by a mob . . . forty . . . fifty;
and each moment more. They sat down and waited silently
with a kind of burning expectation. The boy began to talk. His
clean quiet words went deep into the silent eyes of his comrades.
I listened, and the years of my own childhood began to course
through my veins. The harsh panorama of the past crackled
in his accusations; and his voice, shaking the dead dry days,
turned my entrails inside out.
On the kids the effect was otherwise. I saw them clench
their fists and dig their nails into the flesh, panting with fire in
their eyes. When he stopped talking a deep silence filled the
room. They were not child faces now, they were eyes looking
into human tragedy. The boy went on with his work. He had
them name a committee, he gave concrete orders to each who
had a commission to perform, he told them not to lose contact
with the Central Committee, and he let them go.
A group of party comrades, witnessing these activities, and
astonished that the child did not ask for food nor say anything
about a place to sleep or how he was to travel, took up a col-
lection among themselves of ten pesos and gave it to him.
The boy took the money indifferently and when someone said it
was "to buy a pair of overalls," he answered in a matter-of-fact
way, "I need to buy paper first for our propaganda. I'm going
to Villa Cardel tonight, bumming my way on the Inter-Ocean."
Then he picked up his papers, wrote a few notes on them,
shook my hand, and said simply, "Greetings, comrade."
And went away.

=== Page 29 ===
I HAVE INHERITED NO COUNTRY HOUSE

I have inherited no country house
I keep no mistress I never scatter dimes.
You will not find my people's names
Listed or recorded in the New York Times.

Our small catastrophes of life
The sunday editors never print,
My brother crippled in a mine
My sister dying, coughing lint.

A brief notice in some local paper
Is inserted when a dear one dies
I have no ancestors who fought
The English for the seas and merchandise.

The Board of Health records my birth
But not my mother's screams or pain.
My application for relief neglects
The hunger of my heart and brain.

Long forgotten, one with the masses' bones,
A strong man, a mason, in Elizabeth's time,
Broke with his hammer a tax collector's skull.
The land took fire. This ancestor is mine.

ALFRED HAYES

28

=== Page 30 ===
THEY DO THE SAME IN ENGLAND

Albert Halper

I WENT TO A COMPANY DANCE here in London last night. I took with
me a girl who could speak eight languages. "Surely I will be able to get
something out of this," I told myself, buckling on my collar preparatory
to calling on the young lady. Meaning the local scene, the company dance
locale in England, of course. The girl was a German emigre, large, plump
and rather pleasant.

"Please come," she had phoned me, begging me to take her. "I want
to get your opinion, to see if company dances in England are the same as
all over, the same as in America." And, hearing that magic word, America,
which never fails to stir the heart of one of its natives, especially one who
has been away from its "democratic" shores for six or seven months,
I said I'd take her. So we went.

The dance was held in the Covent Garden Opera House, a huge
old pretentious place which has quite a dash of history behind her. During
the opera season it is used for opera, but in the intervals the place serves
as a public dance hall or a theater. It is situated up a narrow winding
street and has fat old pillars near the door.

As we entered, the German girl and I, we saw a sign in the lobby:
"Buy programs, threepence" (six cents) "Each program is numbered,
prizes will be given at the lucky draw." Well, this was like good old
America; who ever heard of a company dance or a company picnic back
in the States without a "draw?" I bought two programs, so that we would
have two chances, and we went in.

The interior! Try to imagine the old dance halls on the West Side
of Chicago, the bigger ones. Or the Midway Gardens, which was on the
South Side. These Chicago ballrooms, which were built about thirty or
forty years ago and often drew crowds of three or four thousand couples
who writhed across the floors were huge draughty affairs, badly lighted
so that one did not look too closely to see the bleak walls, and reminding
one, when the crowds were small, of gigantic threshing floors. The Covent
Garden, however, has balconies. And what balconies! They perch there
like bird-cages, two or three tiers of them, and from their imperial heights
the departmental managers with their guests and women could look down
upon the plebeian domes of the shop boys, girl clerks and other industrial

29

=== Page 31 ===
30
PARTISAN REVIEW
under-studies. First of all, let me say that the company running the dance
was a big concern, operating a chain of what we would call five-and-ten-
cent stores-though they carried merchandise selling up to five shillings
(about a dollar and a quarter)-throughout the country. Last year the
chain did so much business that it was able to give thirty thousand pounds
(about $150,000) to charity. The management of the firm is rather proud
of this plumpish figure.
We checked our wraps, my partner and I, and came upon the scene.
The entrance through which we emerged led past the bar and out upon
a platform, from which a broad winding flight of carpeted stairs led direct-
ly to the dance floor. With a fine loud blare, the music came to us, a first-
class jazz-band playing in the American style. The band was playing upon
a platform in the middle of the floor and its leader was dipping his knees,
smiling idiotically and pecking the air with his stick like hundreds of other
jazz-band leaders I had seen back in the States. From the band-stand I
looked to the floor, which was crowded with couples, and I drew back
sharply, hesitating. My partner, dressed in a long, pale green evening
gown with a tiara upon the dark mass of her hair, asked me if anything
was wrong. It was obvious that there was. I had come in my ordinary
suit, my "lounge" suit, as the English call it, and every man my glance
rested upon was dressed in a tuxedo or tails. And knowing something al-
ready of English "traditions" and "good manners," I had seen I had al-
ready pulled a boner. I stood there with antagonism, frowning. "Do you
mean to say all of these gentlemen on the floor are stock-boys and clerks?
The German girl smiled, assuring me they were. Well, she ought to know,
I told myself. She works in the office as a translator and ought to know
her own fellow workers.
"Anyway, you are an American," she said to me, still smiling, taking
my arm and leading me downstairs. "They make allowances."
"Yes, but how do they know I'm American?"
"They can tell," she smiled. "You have only to open your mouth."
Anyway, we started dancing. At this point I wish to make the
statement that this German girl and I had been having arguments for a
long time about the British working class, their temperament and their
"loyal" morale. She had already been living in England for eighteen
months and so was ahead of me on knowing conditions. Her standard
argument was that the impotency of British labor was due to the ingrained
politeness (consciously ingrained by the upper class, of course) with which
the English people were stamped and trained. And this politeness, primarily
instigated by the employers to give "efficient" service, is in reality meant
to be carried over from the work-shops to the privates lives of the people;
and thus you have their patience and docility.

=== Page 32 ===
THEY DO THE SAME IN ENGLAND 31

An interesting theory. Anyway, as we started dancing, no one looked at me, so I gathered that my lack of a dinner jacket was not a fatal blunder. Or else people were being polite. As we waltzed over the floor, my companion, who was busy nodding to right and left because she knew everybody, said: "If you want to ask me questions, do. You look bewildered. Well, go ahead and ask, I work in the inner office and know a lot about the bosses." She spoke with a thick, German intonation, and her vowels were very broad.

"Well, first of all," I said, "I know too much about England already to believe that your company is paying these boys and girls decent wages. And still the fellows are wearing tuxedos—"

"Rented," she smiled.

"And look at the girls. I'm no judge of silks and satins, but their evening dresses look downright swanky, if I may say so."

A wrinkle appeared upon my partner's brow. "It's sad. I know some of the girls. They save all year for a single dress, a dress which they probably can afford to wear only once a year. You don't know what sacrifices they make, even to come here where the company rents the place for the evening and the tickets are cheap."

I answered that I did, looking at the thin faces and anemic bodies. All the girls seemed to have bony elbows and the fellows had those scholarly looking hollows in their foreheads. We swung along, passing by the bandstand. A young Negro girl with kinky hair, a Harlem accent and eyes which rolled to heaven, was singing to the microphone "Something is wrong with his boo-boo now . . ." while the band-leader, dipping his knees and smiling like a fiend, was shaking a gourd with some buck-shot inside it. I glanced over my partner's shoulder and, coming closer to the other couples, saw indeed that the tuxedos were not perfect fits. Many of the fellows must have felt discomfort under the armpits, for their shoulders were always twitching, and perspiration was pouring from their faces upon their collars. Some of the suits were not rented, of course. In England, where cheap clothes are cheap, almost as cheap as wages, one sees tuxedos advertised in the Daily Herald, the Labour paper, for eight dollars, two fittings guaranteed.

At the end of the number my companion led me over to the punch table and introduced me to several of her fellow office workers. You will not believe it when I say that they were as polite and formal as the house of lords. Their politeness was not cold or haughty, just politeness. One or two, catching my American accent, looked as if they wanted to unbend a bit. At that moment the band began to play again. I looked at my companion with a glance which said I wanted to hunt me up a partner; she understood with a smile, and I turned away.

=== Page 33 ===
32
PARTISAN REVIEW
I picked out a girl in a pale saffron dress, a kid about eighteen years
old. She was standing with her hands clasped quietly in front of her,
in a corner. She gave me a bright friendly smile when I went up to her,
but I danced halfway round the floor before I entered into conversation.
I wanted her to get the hang of my American dancing ,and also wanted
her to get used to me as a person so that her talk would be free.
"Well, this is a big crowd," I finally opened and then made some
comment on the quality of the band.
Her first few answers were centrifugal, that is, working away from
the middle towards nothing. She began to take on charm in a few more
minutes, however. She told me she liked American movies ("Our own
pictures move so slowly!"), liked American slang and thought American
men were interesting. "I'd like to pay a visit to the United States," she
said, "especially New York and California." After she had asked me all
the customary questions about America, I guided the conversation skill-
fully back to herself.
Drawing out an English working girl, or girls, is simple, if you are
friendly and patient. Unaware, they tell you, in a few simple sentences,
the story of their lives. I do not mean that they fall upon your neck with
a full confession, but if one is patient one will hear things that are
astonishing. And all told with frankness, with candid words and quiet
honesty. My God, how honest these English girls are. And fine.
After dancing three entire numbers with the girl (I saw the girl I
had brought up was dancing with a partner, so I did not trouble myself
over her), I knew all one can expect to learn in a single session about how
to run a paying English five-and-ten-cent business. In half-humorous,
(and do not make the mistake of thinking that the English have no
humor)-in half-humorous, half-bitter phrases, answering my queries, the
girl told me things, data about herself, her background and her salary.
First of all, she was getting nineteen shillings ($4.75) a week. She
had started with seventeen-and-six ($4.40). I did not ask her how she
lived. Anyone who has been in London a few months knows the countless
gray granite streets lined with monotonous brick houses which have
primitive plumbing, no central heating and downright unsanitary lavatory
conditions. From the doorways of these homes and rooming houses, every
morning, you can see the shop girls emerge. In the fog which seems always
to be drifting from the river you can see them hurry to the trams and
buses. And transportation in dear old London is not cheap. Transporta-
tion is charged by the mile, so if a girl lives three or four miles from her
employment, she has to pay six or eight cents for a one-way fare. Food is
not cheap either. But the English, with true British tenacity, have tried to
solve the matter. Most young men bike to work, also some women. In

=== Page 34 ===
THEY DO THE SAME IN ENGLAND
33
the morning the streets stream with fast-going, hard-peddled bicycles, dart-
ing in and out of heavy traffic. As for the eating problem, that too has
been somewhat solved: the shop girls and clerks bring their lunches or, if
they go out to a tea-room to eat, eat very little. I have been in lunch-
rooms during the rush hour where the average order for a shop girl has
been a cup of tea and a scone. And I have seen how hungrily they have
nibbled, trying to make the food last. Then, with a quick wipe of the
lips with their handkerchiefs (for the English serve no napkins), they get
up quickly, pay the check and hurry out, not tipping.
Many girls, I learned from my dancing partner, come from the "de-
pressed" areas of the North, where conditions, judged even by American
southern mill-town standards, are appalling. These northern villages and
cities-industrial centers-have come under the hatchet of the Japanese
underselling spurt which has robbed England of many of her far eastern
markets. The girls' fathers, most of them, are on the dole, and the
daughters are sent to London for employment. Many of them, of course,
land upon the streets. Fully half of the girls who have stopped me late at
night along Tottenham Court Road I found spoke with a North country
dialect. Of course, along Picadilly, where things are swankier, you get a
pseudo-Mayfair or a brittle cockney accent.
"Well, where do the type of young men who are dancing here tonight
take girls, if they have no money?" I inquired.
My partner gave me a quick look, then said briefly: "To Hamp-
stead Heath." She did not know it, but her eyes were bitter. And again
I understood. Hampstead Heath at night, if the weather is not down-
right frosty, swarms with young couples who stretch themselves upon the
chilly ground. In the summer, of course, it is a lovers' paradise. It is
not under London County Council supervision and has no policemen, no
regulated hours. It is a huge wild place, with trees, bushes and hills and
dales, right in the heart of the city.
"Well, that's the way she lives," I told myself. "She comes from
some depressed northern mining or industrial town, is thrilled by the city
at first, gets a job with a five-and-ten-cent chain, lives in a dark room
without heat or running water, and learns to curb her appetite and get
along on starvation wages. And perhaps, in time, she gets into
trouble..."
At the end of the number my German girl friend came over and
tapped me on the shoulder. I introduced her to my new friend. We talked
awhile, somewhat stiffly, then separated, and my recent partner smiled
pensively as my companion and I moved off. My German girl friend, when
we were at a distance, spoke: "Now you ask me questions, I saw you
pestering her long enough."

=== Page 35 ===
34

PARTISAN REVIEW

At that moment the three cornetists in the band stood up and gave
a sad and prolonged blare of the horns. The drummer rolled his sticks, and
a man in swallow tails began to shout.

"La-dies and gentle-men," he shouted, until the microphone was sud-
denly shoved before him. Then, "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "it is
only fitting and proper that at this time, in the midst of such festivities, we
should have a word or two from the president of the institution which is
running this affair-"

There followed a clapping of hands, of grateful English hands, and
my German companion winked quickly at me and pulled me to one side,
giving me the history of the master-of-ceremonies. The master-of-cere-
monies, a big, heavy looking man jammed in a tight-fitting dress suit and
suffering, I take it, from jaundice, judging by the color of his face, had
been a "radical" small-time politician, until he had married into the family
which ran the chain giving this dance. I found out, subsequently, that
many concerns in England have, as their owners or superintendents, men
who in the past have dabbled in politics; and always, upon investigating
further, I learned that these men had been "radicals" or "progressive
liberals." Of course, they carry their "radical" ideas with them into busi-
ness. They are all for social insurance, modern housing-and low wages.
They also are for "socialism." "But we English do things slowly," they
will tell you, smiling.

Meanwhile the master-of-ceremonies had introduced a speaker who
was getting a great hand from the employees, the president, a gentleman
of about forty-five, short, well-built and with pitch-black hair. "Friends,"
he said, holding up a warm, fraternal palm, for silence, "friends," he said,
and then went into a heart-to-heart, sincere, quiet talk about the happy-
family business. He spoke on and on, and I knew the words before he
said them. "... we need you and you need us ... so that we may pull
together ... friendly cooperation..."

The German girl, winking, was grinning at me.

"Yes, it's everywhere the same," I said.

When the president finished, young girls around me clapped their
hands and murmured "Lovely, O lovely!" I looked about to see if they
had meant it. They had! The one-time radical, the jaundiced fellow who
had married into the owners' family, poked his face into the microphone
and bawled: "For heee's a joll-y goood fel-low . . . ." and all at once,
like a hoarse, trained, yet untrained chorus, the whole mass of people on
the floor raised their voices and sang.

"For he's a jolly good fel-low

For he's a jolly good fel-low . . ."

I turned away, going to one side and sitting on a chair. I was

=== Page 36 ===
THE HO THEY DO THE SAME IN ENGLAND

35

aroused, however, by a loud microphonic voice announcing the lucky draw.
After all, I had paid for two programs. Hurriedly I fished inside my
pockets and took them out.

The announcing voice went on, and when I heard the details I was
thunderstruck. Two cash prizes were being offered, the first for seven
shillings ($1.75), the second for five ($1.25)! Was I dreaming? In-
credible! I did some rapid calculus. Here were a thousand couples, and
each couple had paid threepence (six cents) for a program. Why, great
Scott! the company was working a neat racket on the thing. A thousand
programs netted them sixty dollars. Subtract ten dollars (an exorbitant
figure) for the cheap printing and still the company was making money.
My companion, watching my pencil, was grinning harder than ever.

"Now sit down again and I'll tell you something," she said, and she
began to tell me how to profitably run an English five-and-ten-cent store.
"First of all, after paying hardly any wages, you must be sure never to
draw the veil away from the private lives of your employees," she said,
and she began telling me appalling stories of clerks and shops girls who had
confided in her and to whom she had given a little money. She herself,
being an expert translator and taking care of the foreign correspondence
from foreign manufacturers, received four pounds (twenty dollars) a
week, perhaps the highest salary on the staff, but her wage was exceptional.

I sat listening while the lucky draw was going on and through the
blur of excitement the choppy Germanic words of my companion came
to me. Many boys and girls, she told me, after trying to make both ends
meet-and failing-start living together to save expenses. "So you see,
I'm working with immoral people," she smiled. However, a few years
ago, the owners had had a twinge of conscience. The "radical" member,
because business was good and expanding, called in social service people,
asking for assistance. "We want to help our employees," he told them.
"It has come to our notice that some of our girls do not live in very good
quarters. We would consider financing and operating hostels for them, at
cost; we want them to be comfortable, to have the necessary amenities..."

The social service people called in architects, technicians. A series
of conferences was held. Plans were drawn, blue-prints and figures
scanned. From the inner office a warm wave of good-will-toward-our-
employees publicity began to flow. But the wave turned out to be a
wavelet, and was stopped abruptly. The whole thing went up in smoke.
The lowest, positively the lowest figure for hostile accomodation for girls,
was fifteen shillings a week. And the law, in such a case, required some
kind of supervision-the girls would have to have matrons or overseers,
the girls would have to be in at a certain hour at night-

=== Page 37 ===
36 PARTISAN REVIEW

Here the management balked. What! Would there be infringement
of the girls' freedom-? No, positively-!
A great to-do burst forth.
But the kernel of the core was this: If the girls received only
seventeen and a half shilling weekly and paid fifteen for a company super-
vised room, how could they go on on two and a half shillings for clothes,
for tram fare, a midday meal and entertainment? And what about their
families in the depressed areas, to whom they occasionally were forced
to send money?
"But look," said the social service people, "it costs them fifteen shil-
lings for a room in unsanitary lodging houses now-"
Yes, but but the girls had their freedom, they did not have to be
in at a certain hour at night-
And slowly, slowly the truth began to unfold, the social service people
learned what has been known among the poor for a long time-that these
wretched girls, two or three times a week, in order to send money home,
go out upon the streets...
So the plan was dropped, the blue-prints folded up. It was impossible,
impossible. The freedom of the girls could not be tampered with. So now
no one talks about the hostiles any more, only the old hands, a few girls of
twenty-five or so. The plans, a brief wavelet from the office let it be
known, were not "practical."
However, the firm can ease its conscience by giving money to charity,
this year thirty thousand pounds. It's a fine gesture, the employees gasp
and gossip and it gets the company in all the papers. People read about it,
people who buy- Anyway, it is always better to give away money to
charity rather than to raise the salaries of employees. Any man can see
the sense in that. Employees are like monkeys, if you raise them once,
they'll want more. Besides, the thirty thousand was not a dead loss, it
came out of surplus profits. And the income tax returns have a special
provision for that...
We got our wraps and made our way toward the nearest exit. My
companion told me later that my face was getting red. At the door, stand-
ing to one side, waiting, was the girl in the saffron dress, her hands clasped
quietly in front of her. She glanced wonderingly at my early departure,
then, getting over her wonderment, nodded farewell and smiled. But I
guess I must still have looked sore, for when I turned around and our
eyes met I saw she had stiffened into coldness and hostility, and that her
glance, which was defensive, glittered with the pride of the English.

=== Page 38 ===
THE HUNT

Ben Field

"IF IT SAID ON THE agenda whoring and booze, it would be
a hell of a lot easier."
Lanky Schneider stopped his pacing. He glared at the
punchswollen face, the heavy shoulders, the paws flung like
guards over the knees.
Gordon smiled back at him. "Now if it was kicking the
lousy system like a football into the coffin corner, I'd be all
there. Or if it was swapping punches. But it ain't so simple.
The strings are tight. You got to do this that way, and that this
way. If the cops arrest a bunch of little comrades with you and
beat hell out of them, you got to stand on the sidelines. If you
fight, you get hell bawled out of you."
"Why shouldn't you?" Lanky's long nose reared further
back from his ragged, worried moustache. "What's the sense in
giving them the chance to smash that bullethead of yours? What
do you prove by flying off the handle? We've got to have
discipline. The party is no party for whoring and boozing. You
disappear whenever you damn please. We find you buried in a
whore or swilling till the booze drips out of your pants."
"It's hard, Lanky. I come from the other class."
"I'm talking about you. To hell with your class."
"That's what I say. But it's hard to separate me from my
class. I'm a fellow with a past. Look at it."
Lanky faughed in disgust. He stared out thru the open
window of the Workers Center. The city's tinkering came in on
the spring air.
"Look, Lanky. I got the clap when I was 16. I got
kicked out of prep school and college. I run off to the wheat-
fields one summer. I got a job in a lumber camp and got my
foot smashed to hell and pruned off. I got shipped back to
Pennsylvania, to the National Farm School. There who should
come along but a senior with a long nose and misplaced eyebrow
to start a strike against corned beef and cabbage. And when

37

=== Page 39 ===
38 PARTISAN REVIEW

that sowbelly dean got a gang to beat you up, what could a fel-
low do but muscle in on the excitement?"
Lanky drummed his fingers on the windowsill. Maybe the
strings had been too tight. It might be best to loosen up and
let the swashbuckler find himself. This being slashed off sud-
denly without a cent was still too hard to bear.
Slumped back in his chair, Gordon drawled, "Lanky, what
can you expect of a fellow whose fatass father run away with
his plant to Pennsylvania? Yeh, if both of us hadn't helped
engineer the strike he'd still be frigging his men during work
hours and his girls day and night. His guts stink the air. What
can you expect of the son of such a son of a bitch?"
"Don't be a baby and go pitying yourself. The Party uses
even a pin on the road. You'll feel better about it when you
can sit in one place and not shove around like you got oats in
your behind. Forget your old man. Why in Russia they had a
Prince come over. You're far from being a Prince." And Lanky
let himself smile.
Gordon creaked up on his feet. He'd been sponging too
long on Lanky. His year's stay in New York no success. No
relief because he was single and an out-of-towner. He must find
some work in the country.
The two friends eyed each other. Lanky turned to his
desk wearily. "Don't forget to write."
Gordon grabbed his shabby gladstone bag and walked out.
He thumbed his way out of the city. He bummed his way thru
southern Pennsylvania, across the mountains. He got himself
a job as hand at the foot of the mountain.
Gordon was the only hired man on the Hendrickson farm.
Hendrickson and his big-haunched Mennonite wife were friend-
ly people. Hendrickson considered the depression a cow that
had dried up in order finally to come in. He had switched over
to voting Democratic in a Republican county. But when Gordon
gave him a pamphlet on the Chicago Farm Convention which
pointed out that Roosevelt was the same old egg with a tricky
shell on it, Hendrickson shrugged his shoulders and read no
further.
Gordon was an expert dairyman and could handle a tractor
as easily as whipping a top. Evenings after chores he played
the harmonica or sang for them. Though there was a swell bar
at McFarlane's hotel in town, he kept away from it. He even
went to church with the boss family to see how life lumped out

=== Page 40 ===
THE HUNT
39

in this part of the country. The boss took him down to Firkin's
postoffice and general store every Saturday night.
One Saturday night the store was packed to the doors. In
the middle were rich farmer Jimpson, Plover who was director
of the bank which had its hooks in the hill farms, his nephew
big Ed Pusley, game warden, and a number of the dairymen.
Hendrickson chimed in. Gordon bought a bottle beer and listen-
ed.
Plover pinched his foxed beard. "Sure, what Jimpson says
about them one-horse farmers all over the country is true. It's
true here. We got to face the facts. There's too many people
in the country doing things they oughtn't'd had. Give the little
fellow a chance to sprout up the old way and he'll be spoiling
things for himself and everybody."
Gordon put his finger on his collaring bottle beer. "What in
hell would you have the little fellow do?" he said.
"Do?" shouted Jimpson. "These fellows ain't bona fidey
farmers. When a fellow's got three or four foot ground just
enough to stand on to chop down a tree or crack a squirrel, he
ain't no farmer. He's a lumberjack or hunter."
Wagons kept clattering across the railroad tracks back of
Firkin's store. Then the shadows and shaggy horses of the
stone farmers from the hills.
Gordon popped out, "Overcrowded milk market or not,
you'll have them all Red talking that way."
"Red!" snorted big Ed Pusley. "All red them hilljacks sees
is in their woman's rag or the old hunting cap."
Gordon belched, "Bastards," and moved to the door. A
hill girl was getting on a wagon. Her dress caught between her
legs. His throat ached suddenly. He hadn't touched a woman
since New York.
The men tramped into the store, lean, hard as bull punches.
One of them showered above the rest, bronzed like a turkey cock,
his worn breeches fanned out at the seat.
Hendrickson was the only one to say in his friendly way,
"Sit down, Hub Hone. Give us an earful."
Hub Hone growled, "Don't waste my shot."
"What you saving it for?" asked Plover thru his beard.
"We'll show you one of these days."
After Hub had stalked out, Pusley bit out, "Snotty hound.
Acts like they ought to be dynamited out of the woods like
thievin' crows."

=== Page 41 ===
40
PARTISAN REVIEW

“Well,” said Plover, “I see that the government's planning
buying up this poor farm country, turning it into hunting pre-
serves and parks. They'll send the small fellows up to Alaska
to keep cool-tempered.”
On their way back to the farm, Hendrickson talked about
the Hones. The old man laid up feeble, had been buffaloed into
signing up the hog-reduction, had to sell his famous guns. Though
old Hone couldn't afford to pay for a hunting license, he had a
picture of Coolidge in a 20-gallon hat in his bedroom and swore
he would take no help from any Democratic government even
if it was a golden scoop.
Late that night Gordon wrote Lanky. And the letter from
Lanky read here was the chance. Here was the class line which
had been furrowed in American earth with the first bull plow
of the colonists. Gordon must keep in touch with the hill fel-
lows. He must keep on writing reports which would be printed
in the paper as farmer correspondence. Here was a chance to
become a good farm organizer-in football lingo, a triple threat
man-a good fighter, writer, speaker.
Gordon muttered, "Oh, you school ma'am, you long drink
of water." He took fire. He saw himself shoulder to shoulder
with Hone. Then everything turned to ash. He became rest-
less, couldn't put any pep into his work. He lay in bed after
evening chores cursing that old bastard, his father, having his
chicken every night. Then he jumped up cursing himself for a
louse for yearning for money which could be sent to substitute
while he loafed on the bench. He lunged into the night and
found his way down to McFarlane's.

II

Dinny McFarlane kept the smaller hotel, kept hunting dogs
to stud, and sold cornwhiskey from the hills on the sly. In a
room behind the bar called the shooting gallery a couple of caly
pigeons had nested in the old days. They had become so riddled
and business so poor that they had cleared out and gone else-
where. Of all the town storekeepers McFarlane was the only
true friend of the hillsmen.
First visit to McFarlane Gordon drank carefully. Second
visit he met Hub and old Hone. The old man, bleary-eyed
and sick, with veins like guts heaped on his slipping hands. Gor-
don treated them to drinks. The old man had dragged down

=== Page 42 ===
THE HUNT 41
to sell his famous 16-gauge Damascus twist. "We's poor as piss
on a rock. Jesus, who'd a thought I'd ever sell."
The long-barreled shone like a knife just off the stone. It
had been hammered out of horseshoe nails and was over 100
years old. Old Hone had replaced the firepin with a hammer.
Gordon bought the beauty, sealing the bargain with a jug
of corn. The Hones invited sim to come up to their farm.
There were more game wardens in the woods than game, but
they could scare up something, license or no license.
Gordon laughed. "Scare up a woman? My spigot's dried
hot."
Hub said there was a big strapping girl in the family, had
a mind all her own.
When Lanky learned about the gun, he wrote, "What in
hell are you wasting your money for? Whom are you going to
shoot up, wild Indian? The gun is the end of this stage of or-
ganization, not the beginning."
Gordon felt he was on the right road. The buying of the
gun had made the Hones friendlier. He could go hunting, see
what was doing up in the hills. The gun would give him the
chance to develop into a good shot. He spent evenings and Sun-
days shooting at bullseyes.
Fall soon slid around, and he had not as yet gone up to
the Hones. He heard the old man was down in bed again. Hub
didn't show up at the McFarlane's. There was trouble up at
Halleck Point for the Saddler brothers had been arrested for
bagging deer without hunting licenses. Big Ed Pusley had been
shot at from the bushes several times.
Gordon was getting soured on the town. McFarlane's was
the only place he could stand. At the beginning he had visited
the churches. He had watched the girls with their laced breasts
and little asses he could close one hand over. He had accepted
an invitation to chicken dinner with a Sunday school superinten-
dent. It wasn't repeated after he had discussed politics. He had
rounded up some of the boys thinking he might help them with
their football team. The boys shied away from him.
And then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Gordon felt so
goddamned restless, he asked Hendrickson for the week end off.
Hendrickson told him to go ahead, but he could let him have
the truck only for a day because of the milk. Gordon drove
over to the hotel. He would get the road up to the Hone farm.
He bought three bottles of Golden Cock. He tore across the

=== Page 43 ===
42 PARTISAN REVIEW

street in the opposite direction and drank while he drove. Late
at night he crossed the river into Harrisburg and spotted in the
shadows of a side street a girl who whistled back to him. He
would have had her in the truck. She brought him to her room.
When Gordon awoke midafternoon Sunday, the girl was dress-
ed, reading the funny sheets. She was rangy, with poor teeth,
and flat pale cheeks. Came from Scranton, daughter of a miner.
Gordon reached out and pulled her to him. He couldn't re-
member whether she had gotten the kick out of it too. When
he got up late in the evening, the feeling of elation burst swiftly
like a bubble. He avoided the big eyes of the girl. All the way
back to the farm, slumped over the wheel, he felt weary, a dull
vague ache in his very guts.

Hendrickson hemmed, "Blowout? Well, you went far from
home to kill your sheep. Won't be able to let out the truck
again."

Gordon felt like hell. He couldn't even answer Lanky's
letter which didn't scold him any longer for boozing and prick-
ing between two classes, but which said that he felt he was
getting more out of the correspondence than Gordon. Maybe
it took a woman to do things with him. Anyway, life would
inevitably teach Gordon more than 10,000 letters, and could he
send to New York more information about the Hones and the
others?

Gordon got himself wild western stories and stayed up late
drinking and reading. It was only after battling around with
himself for days that he decided to stick it out a couple months
more. By midwinter, he would have enough saved to keep him
free for some time. He had been able to buy clothes and feed
his gut. He might be able to get a car. He couldn't forget his
old high-powered Buick. A car gave a fellow wings, would
slacken the strings from New York which seemed to have grown
into him, become part of his veins, nerves, blood. He could get
to California or the Dakotas where the pitchfork was growing.
And he could remember too well the little Mexican field worker
in Brawley, her hard padded hands, how she smelled of sweat
and cheap perfume crushed under you.

And then one afternoon in December, he drove to town
to get a a load of feed. He bought himself beer at Firkin's, and
stood near the door watching the high school girls sailing down
the street. From the other direction a bunch of the hill farmers

=== Page 44 ===
THE HUNT
trooped up from the hotel. Hub Hone led them. Old Hone
swung open the door shaking a big loose smoked-looking fist.
Saddler shouted hoarsely, "Firkin reports Hub to the gov-
ernment. Had a 400-pound stag, last hog in the pen, and Hub
sold it without paying no tax. So Firkin reports. We got hog
wardens now too."
The little red headed postmaster came out, a haylouse of
a man getting into everybody's hide. He waved a letter from the
office of the internal revenue. "I'm adoing my duty. It says: It
has come to the attention of this office that there are numerous
violations in regard to the hog processing tax law and this of-
fice wishes your cooperation in transmitting information as to
such violations that come to your attention."
"Spy pigeon," roared the farmers.
Old Hone hacked out, "He's only a huckleberry in a hog's
ass. It's that Rosyvelt behind him. If I had a barrel stave, I'd
get to him. Will his hide sell for more than ours that he's
lording it over on us? He's adriving us, that godly guy, even
how to cut our women."
Firkin barked out, "I'm adoing my duty." And he whipped
back behind a counter. A rotten apple whizzed across the store
and burst in his face. He grabbed a huge cleaver and swung it
at them. Gordon made a leap for him. The farmers surged
forward, backed out, and carried both of them out with them.
Firkin slipped from under them and trotted down the icy street.
Gordon burst after him. Old Hone was lying on the ice with
his legs spread out like the shaft of a wagon. Mrs. Firkin, a
cheese pumpkin of a woman, cracked open yelling for help.
Hub walked toward the postmaster with one hand out.
Firkin swung the cleaver over his head.
Gordon moved behind a tree, measured the distance to the
little man who kept backing away from Hub, and kicked. He
caught him in the wrist. The cleaver flew off across the street.
The postmaster dropped to his knees. He rode his arm blurting
and swivelling fiercely on the ice.
The farmers came up lugging old Hone. Hub said, "Better
come along with us." Gordon shook his head. He walked to
the truck. He drove to the farm.
All the rest of the day and next morning Gordon felt as
though a load had been slashed off his back. He grinned down
at his wooden foot, "Come in handy, heh, old boy?"
43

=== Page 45 ===
44 PARTISAN REVIEW

Right after dinner he went to his room. He took out his
harmonica. A knock at the door.
Hendrickson looked around the room. "Somebody just
called me by phone. Didn't know anything about it. Firkin's
wrist is splintered up. The bones like a meadowlark's."
He closed the door. "I ain't got much use for Firkin
myself. Why in hell did you take sides? Hub's all right, but
those fellows up there'll kill a man quick as spitting. Last year
Hub half killed Ed Pusley who nabbed him suckering out of
season. Threw him down, said he'd make a sucker out of him.
Hell, with the law. It's been screwing us too long."
Gordon got up and tightened his belt.
"Talked it over with the missus. You're one of the best
hired men we've had. But there's going to be trouble. They'll
come down here. I'm paying you off. No hard feelings."
"Hell with you." Gordon hurled his stuff into his bag, put
shells into his gun. He refused to let Hendrickson drive him
to the edge of town. He tramped down to town and into the
postoffice. He stuffed a letter for him into his pocket and sent
a card to Lanky. No one inside but Mrs. Firkin and the clerk.
The fat woman began heaving as if some one were pumping out
her stomach. He bowed, "Morning ma'am. Tell Firkin I'm in
town if he wants surgery done on his wrist."
He walked over to the hotel. McFarlane was sprawled
over the bar, snoot between paws like a hibernating bear. "So
they ain't pitchforked ye out yet?"
Gordon drank and laughed. "Let them try." He finished
the bottle and looked at his watch. There was a late afternoon
train. He ordered another bottle.
A big boy stamped into the bar. He was hippy with black
greasy hands like steering knuckles. Went over to the pretzel
bowl, fished himself pretzels, and backed out, staring at Gordon.
Gordon worked on the second bottle.
McFarlane walked over to the door. He walked back and
clutched him by the arm. "Say, I got a swell stag's head up-
stairs, twelve points." Gordon stumbled after him up to a back
bedroom. McFarlane slipped out and banged the door shut.
Gordon leaped after him and pounded the door with his fists.
He opened the windows. He couldn't risk the jump.
He walked around the room, then flung himself on the bed
with his sleek Damascus. He finished the second bottle. The
last train was leaving the station hooting. A door flung open,

=== Page 46 ===
THE HUNT
45
the tramping of many men, and then as if at the end of a tunnel,
Pusley bawling, "Where in hell's that Jew, cut one way."
Glasses shattered. A shot. Gordon hurled himself out of bed.
He stumbled and crashed on the floor.

It was dark as a pocket when he woke. His head felt as if
there were an axe in it. He yanked on the light. His gun and
bag were on the bed. There was a plate of ham sandwiches and
another bottle. Well, McFarlane had to keep his nose clean.
He lay down rubbing his head. A shot of pain thru his big
toe flung him up. The old trick. It was his wooden foot. And
for a second the face of his dead confused mother, hanging over
him in the hospital, flashed before him like powder. And now
that free fatass having every night light-footed girls young
enough to be his daughters. Gordon wiped his mouth and cursed.

Lanky and he had fixed him up during the strike, had him
by the crotch. Lanky bringing in farmers to the picket line.
Gordon on the line with a football helmet and camphor for tear
gas. A deputy had splintered the artificial foot with a shot from
the roof of the plant. Gordon had unstrapped it and shouldered
it on the line. His picture, carrying the foot, had appeared in
newspapers all over the country. This had helped win the strike.
This had helped his father get rid of him.

He reached for the bottle, clicked it to his foot, laughing.
He searched for the last letter from Lanky. Lanky wrote that
there would be no great problems getting the Hones and the
others started here. You could get them together on the simplest
grievance. In Minnesota farmers had gotten together on fight-
ing the dog tax and hunting licenses. What steps was Gordon
taking?

Gordon felt suddenly as if he had been hurled into the open
and an iron door bolted fast behind him. He got up and stamped
about the room. He doused his face in the basin. He couldn't
get the fever out. Even the whiskey hung like a knife in his
chest.

He leaned against the window and watched the dawn crack-
ing over the mountains. Couldn't run off without seeing how
the Hones were making out. Couldn't face Lanky empty-handed.
He would shoot a couple pheasants. That would stuff Lanky's
mouth. Tramping the hills all day with a gun would stir up his
guts. Remembering the girl on the wagon, Gordon bawled like
a rutting bull, "Heads up, tails up." He marched downstairs.

=== Page 47 ===
46 PARTISAN REVIEW

III

McFarlane drove Gordon up the hill road before the town
stirred to life. He was worried. Yesterday they had smashed
half his glasses in the bar, jawed of cleaning out the hills. Gor-
don looked at him and realized McFarlane in town could help
a lot with the work.

Six miles up a wagon track sliced the road. Gordon got
out, shouldered his gun, and cut up the wagon track. The fields
were bare and ribbed with snow, stubble, rock. When he reached
the farmhouse after a long tramp, the little sunlight fired over
the
hills was gone. It had turned bitter cold.

He knocked, finally pushed in. Found himself in a long
kitchen full of smoke, sharp smells, and children. A woman
hurried from the other room, a baby saddled on her belly. A
small turkey hen of a woman with her dress torn in back as if
from heavy treading. "Hub's tending to the sick horse with
Nettie. L'll be in soon. Maybe Pa'll talk."

One of the boys dashed barefooted out to the barn. The
old gobbler lay in the next room under a pile of horse blankets.
There was an old-fashioned cackstool in the corner with a pan,
filth floating around like boats. The children played near it.

Hone blinked leaky eyes. "Shoo, the kicker." He fumbled
with his swollen hand. "So, they got us in the bullrushes, fast."
No furniture but bed and stool. The yellow walls were
covered with pictures of Coolidge and Lincoln. Lincoln with a
big wart, and the other with a wart-face.

The old man gasped, "Nettie's been reading the papers to
me. It's something to scratch the devil out. There was the war.
A Democrat Wilson fired that. There was Teddy killed,
younger than Hub. Belly shot out and spread like a frog in a
French lot. And now this Democrat Rosyvelt..."

Gordon looked at the door desperately. He walked over
to the window and let the cold air paw his face while the old
man droned on. At last Hub tramped inside blowing.

Hub's face had grown harder. He shook hands. His
hands were bloody. One of the horses with the blind staggers
and they were bleeding a vein.

Gordon said, "I came. I came to cop couple pheasants."
"Sure, we got to git some meat ourselves. The old man's

=== Page 48 ===
THE HUNT
sickness drove us down to nothing. Have to eat the cookstove
soon."
A tall dark girl with the broad hips your whole body ached
to stroke stood at the door. The old man heaved up. She flash-
ed past to help him at the stool. They heard the old man's
thunder as they went thru the kitchen.
Hub stopped in a broken shed to piss. Gordon's words
lumped out of his mouth as he told about the gang at McFar-
lane's. Hub snorted, "If Pusley and the rest ain't careful, we'll
be down on them first." He looked at Gordon as if he were
waiting for more. Gordon said nothing. Hub buttoned up and
went ahead.
The iron sky hung low. The wind cut across like a knife-
bar. Gordon braced his shoulders and gulped the strong air.
They walked abreast. In a clearing burdocks. Hub picked at
the snow. Fresh cock pheasant droppings. "Hard winter all
right if they got to hammer burdock balls. Not half so hard as
'twas for us. Been living on squirrel."
The dark brooding Hub trudged ahead tracking the cock.
They moved up to a patch of briers. A cackle and explosion.
Gordon swung his Damascus too late. Hub's rifle cracked with
a sound as if he had smashed into an empty bushel basket. The
cock curved its tail and then coasted clear into the woods again.
Hub raised his rifle as if he were going to break it in two
on his knee. He rushed ahead. They needlethreaded over the
edge of a bank. The snow came up to their bellies, stabbing
thru their pants. They beat about. All they found in the end
were a few bloody feathers.
Hub's buck teeth flared in his dark face. "Need a shotgun
for pheasants. We sold everyone one of our good guns. They
got the hunting license on, and you ain't supposed to hunt even
a louse except it's in season and you got the tag. There was
hunting and traplines so a fellow could get a living. That was
before Ted and me was took to war. But down in the valley
all the trenches they ever seen is under a skirt. Jimpson's boy
wasn't took, Ed Pusley got away with it."
Gordon said, "The bastards." Hub looked at him. All
that Gordon said again was, "Bastards."
Hub spat bitterly. They filed down a hard cowpath. Hub
told how he had shot silver fox. Last snowshoe rabbit killed in
this part of the country, was his ears steel gray, long hair to

=== Page 49 ===
48 PARTISAN REVIEW

the gambel joint, and the belly whiter than a woman's. Hub
turned round, his eyes, softening for a second.

Gordon shifted his gun and looked away.
They clambered over a stone fence into a pasture. A line
of hickories on the north side. Hub pointed to arrowhead
tracks. He crouched. His gun flew up. A crack like two bil-
liard balls kissing. The squirrel fell down heavy as rotten-ripe
fruit. It flashed up and down, flung out its tail, its paws out
prayerfully. Hub grabbed it by the tail and batted the brains
out on a stone. He stuffed it into his pocket.

They tramped a long time about before spotting another.
A gray dog squirrel which scooted up a chokecherry tree. Gor-
don circled slowly. The squirrel kept the tree between them.
Gordon feinted and let go. The squirrel held on with a paw,
then flowed down and dropped in a heap. They jumped for it.
It flew between their legs into the stone fence.

Hub dropped down and tore at the stones. The stones were
frozen fast. The ice ripped his hands. They got hold of a
fencepost and eased the stones out. Their faces fired up in the
wind.

They made a gap in the fence. Hub crawled on his knees,
sniffing and puffing. He made a sudden dive and threw the
squirrel. The squirrel landed in the snow, raced up a wild apple
and disappeared in the knothole.

They shoved a stick inside. The squirrel chittered and
squealed. They put leaves inside. The leaves smoked stingily.
They spent their last match. They could not dislodge the squir-
rel.

Hub plodded crosslots to the nearest farmhouse for an axe.
Gordon stood guard near the knothole. Hub came back with
the axe and chopped at the tree. The chips fired back at them.
The wind softened a little. Snow sifted down slowly, and then
in a wild rush as if geese had been plugged overhead.

They spotted the squirrel coiled up with one paw shoved
up towards the heart of the tree. Hub dropped his axe and
poked his hand into the knothole. There was a click. A harsh
voice bawled out, "Hands out, you tramps, or we give you an
extra asshole each."

They jerked from the tree. A man loomed out of the snow
almost on top of them. The wind tore at the snow. It was Ed
Pusley with his gun.

=== Page 50 ===
THE HUNT
49
There were others of the town men around because he
started yelling, "The Jew boy too." Hub had dropped sudden-
ly and grabbed his axe. Pusley bawled, "Drop that axe. Drop
it. We pay you back for shooting that cock, we pay you back
for Firkin."
Hub raised the axe slowly and moved towards Pusley.
Pusley stepped back and tightened hold on his gun, growling.
Gordon stared at the underslung jaw and the beading eyes. Hub
took another step forward. Desperately Gordon tore out,
"Where's the dog?" And then before Hub could answer, he
roared, "Get him, boy, sick him."
Pusley twisted his head for a second. And then Gordon
leaped. His head caught Pusley like a cannonball. The gun
banged out of his hands. Gordon kicked around in the snow.
He got on his knees. Pusley lay in the snow like a log. Hub
stood over them with his gun.
Gordon got up. His hat had been knocked off. He put his
hand to his head. It was bloody. The gun must have gotten
him. A shot came faintly on the wind. Hub hurried to the
knothole. The squirrel was gone. He stalked over and kicked
Pusley. "Git out of here or we'll sick that hound on you." The
breath snored thru Pusley's open mouth. He staggered to his
feet and made for the woods.
The gash in the forehead bled into Gordon's eyes. He
packed snow and plastered it on his head. Hub waited and kept
lookout with his gun. The snow chalked the woods. The wind
fared again. There was no sound of men. They cut around in
the opposite direction. The trees groaning and standing out like
great quills. They came to a small farmhouse huddled against
the storm.
Curley Flynn, twisted like a scythe handle, flung open the
door for them. Hub talked and skinned the brained squirrel.
Curley stomped around cursing and beating one fist against the
other. He gave Gordon some corn whiskey. A young woman
with a piece of leather and a harness needle listened near the
cook-stove and then went into the other room.
Curley couldn't sit down. "We got to make a finish of this.
Their hunting license, their tax on every hog's bristle and spear
of grass, they just going to squeeze us between stump and stone.
They won't let us sell the few squirts of milk we make. Old
Jimpson's in with the dealer. I tell you I been down in Cameron
North Carolina where we was bad off we had to steal in the

=== Page 51 ===
50 PARTISAN REVIEW

dead of night our own tobacco from the cooperative warehouse.
This is hell compared to that."
Hub spat out bitterly. "We're in the backend of the world
here. But I ain't aletting that old man straddle me much longer.
'Hub, do thisaway, Hub thataway.' Git into tantrums. The
women'd keep me from lashing back. Democrats, Republicans,
hell of a lot of difference."
Gordon grunted, his throbbing head not altogether cleared
of that long-haired girl in the other room and the hard corn
whiskey. "They play out one tit or the other. It's the same and
gets you into the old hole."
Hub snorted sure.
Curley said eagerly, "We can't take no time starting things.
We need a young fellow full of piss and morning glory."
Gordon fumbled his watch. He was going to see a fellow
soon who could start things humming. Lanky who led the corned
beef and cabbage strike at college. Lanky at the Honeybrook
firehouse meeting exposing the local banker, the vigilantes, win-
ning the farmers over to his side. Lanky, beaten up in the mill-
town, teeth knocked and mouth bloody, having enough presence
of mind to vomit over the police blotter to use it as evidence
of police brutality. Lanky always with the workers and farmers
in his mouth like a double bit. Lanky. And as Gordon finished,
the eyes of the two men flashed. He heard himself whispering,
"You bastard, you bastard, oh you long drink of water."
Curley reached out a hand. "You sold him to us. But he
ain't here. If he's your pal and your gang, you got his morning
glory too."
"Me! Hell, hide and booze, and I'm done for."
"You ain't no different from us, boy. We likes them too.
We can set you up, and give you hell's plenty of work." Curley
slapped him on the knee. Hub's hard face quivered.
He got up laughing. Hub took his squirrel. Curley cried,
"We don't take no, fellow."
They went out and plunged into wind and snow. Neither
said a single word their way back.
The long dark kitchen was full of children crying. The tall
broad-hipped Nettie was at the stove. Mrs. Hone with the baby
saddled on her belly, said, "Hub, pa—."
Hub strode into the next room. Gordon followed. The
old man lay stiff as a crowbar, the chin out like the belly of a
small burrowing animal.

=== Page 52 ===
THE HUNT
51
"He starts agaping. It was some past noon, and then
shaking a fist, fighting. He just slid back, let everything leave
him. I rushed Nettie out to git the doctor. He git round to
it too late."
"Kick up a fire. We ain't et all day." His wife hurried to
help Nettie. A child whimpered.
Hub brought out a jug of whiskey. You could smell the
corpse from the other room. Gordon took off his coat. Together
they cleaned the old man up with water and corn. They carried
him into the shed. They covered him over with blankets.
The kitchen remained dark and cold. Mrs. Hone had put
the baby down. "We ain't got a match or drop of kerosene."
Hub jammed his hands thru his pockets. Gordon hadn't
any. The last match spent on the squirrel which had gotten
away. Hub pushed wife and daughter away from the stove. It
was too late. He swung around as if to strike his wife. The
girl walked up and faced him.
He dug up a flashlight and threw it on the table. "We'll
eat them raw. The boy's staying over."
Gordon looked at him.
"We got the other bed now the old man's moved."
Mrs. Hone nodded. She hurried over cold cabbage and
bread. Hub broke the squirrel and dropped pieces on each plate.
One of the children started crying. "Shut, damn you." Hub
stuck his finger into the corn whiskey and smeared it over the
piece. "Fall on it, now. Got to git used to blood."
Gordon sat down. He rested his head on a hand. The dull
ache was passing. In spite of his weariness, he saw everything
falling into place, easily like the snow. It was around the hunt
ing licenses the farmers here would get started. Curley, Hub,
and Lanky with the detailed letters that could choke a horse.
Gordon looked up. The girl stood in the shaft of the
flashlight for a moment like a sapling well heeled in. She sat
down next to him. Mrs. Hone took the hand off the breast she
was guiding the baby to, and pushed bread towards him. Hub
chewed noisily, "There's the jug and the grub. Better snap to,
lad. Y'll be left out in the cold."
Gordon leaned over and reached out for his food.

=== Page 53 ===
BOOKS

TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT

COLLECTED POEMS 1929-1933 & A HOPE FOR POETRY, by
C. Day Lewis. Random House. $2.50.

Many of the things that could be said about Lewis's verse are said in
his essay, A Hope for Poetry. In this critical study Lewis examines the
background and outlook of the "post-war" school of poets to which he
belongs. A number of the criticisms that he makes of Auden and Spender,
as well as of their predecessors, apply just as well to his own poems. Oc-
casionally they apply too well; some of his negative comments, directed at
other verse writers, swing back at his own writings like a boomerang.

One of the chief themes which Lewis treats is the matter of literary
heritage, or of "ancestors" as his group calls it. He gives a good deal of
space to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who has been the most important in-
fluence upon the English post-war poets. His analysis of Hopkins's tech-
nical innovations is very useful in studying Lewis's own verse, for they
have affected his writing more immediately than Auden's or Spender's.
The three long poem-sequences which make up Lewis's "collected" works
—Transitional Poem, From Feathers to Iron, The Magnetic Mountain—
have the same qualities as the texture of Hopkins's verse. Lewis experiments
with sprung-rhythm—a metre which, according to Hopkins, is not based
upon uniform feet of two or three syllables, but upon one stressed syllable
in each foot, accompanied by a number of unstressed syllables or by none
at all; and which approximates the rhythm of common speech, since it is
founded upon stress and not upon a mechanical succession of two or three
beats. He works even more constantly with the devices of alliteration and
cross-assonauce used by Hopkins. These devices are employed so effective-
ly in the first set of verses in The Magnetic Mountain that I should like
to reproduce the stanzas here—with italics to mark the internal assonance:

Now to be with you, elate, unshared,
My kestrel joy, O hoverer in wind,
Over the quarry furiously at rest
Chaired on shoulders of shouting wind.

Where's that unique one, wind and wing married,
Aloft in contact of earth and ether;
Feathery my comet, Oh too often
From heav'n harried by carrion cares.

No searcher may hope to flush that fleet one
Not to be found by gun or glass,
In old habits, last year's hunting-ground,
whose beat is wind-wide, whose perch a split second.

52

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But surely will meet him, late or soon,
Who turns a corner into new territory;
Spirit mating afresh shall discern him
On the world's noon-top purely poised.

Void are the valleys, in town no trace,
And dumb the sky-dividing hills:
Swift outrider of lumbering earth
Oh hasten hither my kestrel joy!

with a slight variation in the fourth stanza, the rhyme scheme is uniformly
--by line--ab, cd, dc, ba.
As a whole these technical stunts are handled with great dexterity.
They are quite unobtrusive: you don't know they are there, until you
stop to pick them out. At least in these verses, one may say of Lewis what
he says of Hopkins--that the technical tricks are "indistinguishable from
the pattern which they help to create."
In dealing with the literary heritage of the new English poets, Lewis
divides verse writers into two classes: "those who assimilate a number of
influences and construct an original speech from them, and those whose
voice seems to come out of the blue, reminding us of nothing we have
heard before." I think he is wrong in placing Spender in the second
category; but Lewis unquestionably belongs to the first. And even the
second type of poet does not lack what Lewis calls "poetical self-conscious-
ness," for such an author has a "close acquaintance with other poets, dead
and living," even though he "remains as a poet almost untouched by them."
The intense feeling which the young English poets have for "ances-
tors" is hard to find in recent American verse. Particularly since the war
period, the tendency in American poetry of the social type has been to
decry the first class of writing as mere imitation, to repudiate literary
influence as mere bookishness. In addition to this barrier, which has been
set up as a result of the peculiar national development of our letters, a
class wall has been built by proletarian authors between themselves and
preceding literature. Many of our poets are even more disdainful of
literary tradition than their predecessors were a decade or more ago; they
sweep aside all past writing with a single epithet--bourgeois.
Even those who do not subscribe to this naive aesthetic, those who
fall into the first category of poets mentioned by Lewis, are almost as super-
ficial in their attitude toward literary heritage. They do not negate liter-
ary influence; but they do little more than tinker with it gingerly, nibble
poetry by "however skilful a blending of the best ingredients," as Lewis
phrases it. I am afraid that none of them have been deeply earnest about
it, have sought out and reworked their poetic inheritance with one-half
the critical insight or persistence of their English cousins.
However, if the newer English poets have rooted themselves in a
poetic tradition, they have stopped at this point. The seed which they
have got out of traditional soil has been replanted in the same soil. So far
they have failed to strike out for really new territory--as the Romantic
poets did, for example. What they have not done is put very well by

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Lewis in the first paragraph of his essay: "In English poetry there have
been several occasions on which the younger son, fretting against parental
authority, weary of routine work on the home farm, suspecting too that
the soil needs a rest, has packed his bag and set out for a far country.
While his neighbors are sure that he must be going to pot in some strange
place, "his father smiles indulgently, feeling a secret pride, assured of the
vigour of his seed." Finally he returns, "not a broken prodigal" but a
worldly personage, with "many acres under cultivation."
In spite of their allegiance to Communism, Lewis and his contem-
poraries have not departed for a "far country." They seem incapable of
venturing away from their fathers' estate. Their work is encased in a
conventional pattern; they never seem to be able to get out of this tradi-
tional mold, although they try continually to grope their way beyond it.
Most of their labor seems to consist in closing the open end of an old
tradition, rather than in forming a new one. They are not the pioneers of
a new poetry.
Perhaps their spirit of enterprise has been stifled by too much "ances-
tor worship," by being tied too securely to the apron strings of "parental
authority." Perhaps it is because they have not assimilated the manners
of their ancestors thoroughly enough to work out their own personal style.
More accurately, perhaps it is due to their assimilating "reactionary" as
well as "progressive" qualities of earlier poets. However, these seem to be
very minor reasons. The matter is more fundamental than the mere
influence of certain poets upon others. It is connected with the entire
social direction and state of recent literature, as well as with the whole
movement of social forces at the present time. The newer English poets
have been unable to progress very far beyond their predecessors, not simply
because they have been affected by them, but because, like their ancestors,
they are hemmed in on all sides by social and cultural barriers which they
have been unable to break through.
This is illustrated by their attitude toward the problem of com-
munication (or, as it is more familiarly known, of audience), which is
the most crucial issue in modern poetry. Lewis is, of course, greatly con-
cerned with this problem and comments upon it repeatedly in his critical
essay. In examining the work of Hopkins, he attributes its obscurity "not
to a clouded imagination or an unsettled intellect, but to lightning dashes
from image to image, so quick that we are unable at first to perceive the
points of contact." Eliot's obscurity, on the other hand, is "deliberate,
caused by the running together of a series of images without logical con-
tinuity-in the same way a series of unconnected shots are run together
in a movie, in order to express the emotions of a character at a critical
moment. In addition to these devices, which are used in present-day
English verse, Lewis also points to the "search for methods of restoring
freshness to words" which is one of the chief reasons for the obscurity of
post-war poetry.
But the root cause, according to Lewis, is to be found in the develop-
ment of city life, which brings with it an "expansion of the social unit to
a size at which it becomes impossible for the individual to have any real
contact with his fellows and thus to benefit from the group." "In the
face of this intolerable complexity," Lewis declares, "the sensitive in-

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55
dividual feels compelled to retire upon himself, to create artificially for
himself a world of manageable proportions." The poet must, first of all,
find a "point from which he may begin to work outward again." In this
process he is "bound to be obscure, for he is talking to himself and to his
friends to that tiny, temporarily isolated unit with which communication
is possible, with whom he can take a certain number of things for granted."
This is what Lewis and his school have tried to do; they have at-
tempted to form a "compact working social group," made up of themselves,
with a set of subjective symbols (not only ideas and attitudes but steno-
graphic word-signs like kestrel, railhead, pylons) intelligible largely to
themselves.
Obviously this is no solution. It is a complete rout, a method at
widening the gap between the poet and his audience instead of bringing
them closer together. It shows that their work is being pushed in the same
direction as their ancestors by the same social factors which have driven
bourgeois poetry deeper and deeper into the blind alley of obscurity, as
well as by the internal development of poetry itself, that is, by the wearing
out of familiar modes of poetic expression. Lacking the social background
or the immersion in revolutionary activity that might help them to re-
establish contact with a wide audience, and lacking also the imaginative
intensity and magnitude that might help them to solve the internal troubles
of modern verse, they flutter helplessly against the walls in which con-
ventional poetry is still encased, unable to break out into the open. In
setting up a narrow clique (even though it is to act only as a temporary
expedient, as a means of later "working outward again"), they are re-
treating from the problem they want to solve. Some of the American
proletarian poets, who have grown up within the Communist movement
or have spent their lives in the workingclass, have been more successful-
exactly because they have been a part of the workingclass, a part of the
feelings and experiences of the masses in coping with this formidable
matter. For them the revolutionary movement is becoming what the
English poets yearn for a homogeneous social unit with a "widely ac-
cepted system of morals" and a "clearly defined circumference of imagina-
tion."
In saying this I am not trying to preach, to assure the English poets
that immersion in the waters of revolutionary activity will cleanse them
one considers the nature of their lives and experiences. It is even doubtful
whether their actual participation in revolutionary work would solve their
difficulties at least not until they had undergone a long process of re-
education, of re-making. What I have been trying to do is not to evaluate
the way they write or to condemn them for not writing in a different way;
I have only been trying to say that they are working along the same path
as their predecessors, that they seem no more likely to solve the contem-
porary problem of communication than their ancestors.
This is not an intrinsic criticism of their verse, any more than blaming
Thomas Gray for not being a Romanticist would be a legitimate comment
on his poetry. It is, however, a criticism of what they have not been able
to do but apparently think they are doing.
Within the limitations of their vision, they are very skillful poets.

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Lewis seems the surest of them. The three books of verse included in his
"collected" works show a disciplined progression. Transitional Poem,
dealing with the "pursuit of single-mindedness" is a lengthy exercise in
metaphysical writing. Its theme, an individualized abstraction, is an ex-
ample of what a proletarian poet, immersed in central social experience,
would not be likely to write about; or, if impelled to do so, he would
handle it in a more objective, social manner. It is full of little fragments,
handled with amazing dexterity, like-

What use the difference
Between a gust that twitters
Along the wainscot at dawn
And a burly wind playing the zany
In fields of barleycorn?

Obscure as some of his references are, one feels occasionally that Lewis's
verse is like this stanza from Transitional Poem-

Charabancs shout along the lane
And summer gales bay in the wood
No less superbly because I can't explain
What I have understood.

However, there is one ironical stanza in this poetic cycle which bounces
back at its own author-

Few things can more inflame
This far too combative heart
Than the intellectual Quixotes of the age
Prattling of abstract art.

From Feathers to Iron deals with the thoughts of the poet before
the birth of his first child. It is breezy but it also has the tight, clipped
quality of intellectualized verse. In it, too, there are little poetic bits
whose effect is dissipated because they are merely sprinkled over the fibre
of the poem.

The Magnetic Mountain is the most successful of the three and the
most revolutionary. It describes a railroad journey toward the magnetic
mountain-the classless society. The very fact that this concept is ex-
pressed in romantic symbols, is itself a reflection of the emptiness of ex-
perience of the creative writer who tries to voice in aesthetic terms the
idea which he has accepted only abstractly. Nevertheless, the orientation
of the poet toward these symbols and the poetic response is genuine-

Somewhere beyond the railheads
Of reason, south or north,
Lies a magnetic mountain
Riveting sky to earth.

Kestrel who yearly changes

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His tenement of space
At the last hovering
May signify that place.
* * *
Oh there's a mine of metal,
Enough to make me rich
And build right over chaos
A cantilever bridge.

ALAN CALMER

AMERICAN TRAGEDY

JUDGMENT DAY, by James T. Farrell. Vanguard Press. $2.50.

Sweeping literary generalizations are often misleading, but Farrell's
work has been embalmed in so many glib labels that a definitive charac-
terization is desirable. In scope and in method the trilogy which Judg-
ment Day concludes has much in common with the tradition of European
naturalism—with Balzac and Flaubert and Zola. In his fidelity to the
routine of men's lives, and in the accumulation of motive and action to
sketch a large social landscape, Farrell is an American naturalist. His
immediate American predecessor is Dreiser, but Dreiser hewed his way
through American life, equipped with little save a keen eye and a rusty
version of nineteenth century mechanism. Farrell's social philosophy, on
the other hand, obtrudes less and permits him to see more. And Farrell
brings more literary erudition to his writing. Farrell is a naturalist not
because his characters are sordid nor because they talk slang, but because
they move easily through careers which their social position has cut for
them. Farrell pulls no wires behind the scenes.
Judgment Day takes Studs Lonigan into the responsibilities of man-
hood. He is about to be married. He loses his money in the crash of the
Insull empire. A weak heart prevents him from continuing to work as a
house painter for his father. He must get married as soon as possible be-
cause his girl, Catherine, is pregnant. In looking for another job he catches
pneumonia and dies after a harrowing illness. But his death is fore-
shadowed throughout the book by his increasingly recurrent heart attacks.
And around this are woven several themes of doom, such as Studs' con-
tinued memories of past strength and glory, and his regrets at having made
various missteps.
It is significant that Studs dies at the time of his greatest social res-
ponsibility, when he is faced with the necessity of proving his position in
society, his way of earning a living. His death then becomes a symbol of
his failure to find a rationale and a method of living. And this is also the
failure of the lower middle class to resist its ultimate extinction as a class,
to check its course into the proletariat or into the gutter. Studs' physical

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PARTISAN REVIEW

and moral degeneration gains momentum as he hunts desperately for a
job. His collapse symbolizes the destiny of all the young men of whom
Studs is a composite. The reader gets a glimpse of possible resolution
in the communist parade which the father of Studs watches on his way
home to his son's deathbed. Studs dies simply because he cannot live.

Since the trilogy is so clearly a panorama of a social group, any
literary judgment of it must take into account the quality of experience
which Farrell describes. Farrell's writing has been called statistical, a
piling up of detail without the achievement of great psychological and
dramatic moments. Aside from the fact that there is a note of prejudice
and querulousness in such a criticism, since no one method is ipso facto
superior to another, there is sufficient justification for the methods Farrell
employs to achieve his effects. The plateau quality of Judgment Day, its
even drive to resolution, the absence of sharp conflict-all evoke the
character of its actual counterpart: the lechery, the Sunday School love, the
slumming, the mock-heroic athleticism, the morbid interest in sports, the
self conscious social chatter, the braggadacio, of a people who fluctuate
temporarily in economic position or merely psychologically between a
tenuous petty bourgeois respectability and a lumpen existence. True to
his place in American history, Studs sinks slowly into a quicksand instead
of being swung by a whirlpool of forces like the characters in Man's Fate
who are carried through a tempestuous uprising. And the way Studs
dies (heart trouble and pneumonia), taken out of its entire social meaning,
is not a major tragic theme. But this too takes on importance as a symbol
of slow petering out. Only a Thornton Wilder could set a Greek tragedy
in the environment of Farrell's characters.

There might be some question, however, about the possibility of
greater concentration in the trilogy. I cannot see how such a question
can be settled by speculation, but a general reading of the novels gives
the impression that greater concentration would have improved the trilogy.
Perhaps one long novel might have sacrificed little in scope, while gaining
much in intensity. As a result, the scenes which remained would have
greater typicality, and the dramatic curve of development would rise and
fall more sharply. To be judicious, however, one would have to say that
such an opinion should be critically substantiated by careful reconstruction
of the trilogy, and that a revised trilogy by Farrell himself would be the
final test.

Farrell's remarkable dictaphonic ear for American speech has been
remarked on. But it is sometimes forgotten, especially by pseudo-realistic
novelists, that a novel of any value cannot be compounded of slang con-
versation and what is sometimes thought of as "Americanese" for the
author's commentary. Farrell's talent lies in his recognizing that speech
is only one form of behavior, and that a modulation of idiom is necessary
to effect changes of mood, situation and character. The peak of Farrell's
linguistic accomplishment is reached when he weaves many phases of
Studs' experiences in terms of their idiomatic equivalents into a single
attitude, as when Studs rehearses the virtues of Roosevelt in terms of sex,
sport and warfare as well as politics. Current American idioms have an
independent rhythmic interest, but their main value for fiction is in lighting
up character and situation.

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Most of Farrell's characters are apprentice or accomplished drugstore
cowboys. Some of them get respectable jobs; some make the pool room
their profession; some combine both. As American politics go, they provide
a reserve for stormtroopers or they veer toward the working class. Farrell
could not have made any such resolution in his novel at this time. Instead
he created Studs Lonigan as the archetype of irresolution. And Studs is
really one of the memorable characters of literature. As years pass he
will probably take on the reality that Bloom and Babbitt, for example,
have for us.
Readers who are looking for for more class-conscious characters in more
typical revolutionary situations will look forward to Farrell's new tetralogy
built around Danny O'Neill, the sensitive studious boy who appears in
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan as an incipient communist.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS

DIALECTIC OF LOVE AND HATRED

POEMS, by Kenneth Fearing. New York; Dynamo Press. $1.00.

The substance of these poems is rhetoric. But this is not said in dis-
paragement, for it is a rhetoric created out of understanding and emotion,
and charged with conviction. Within its limits there is great variousness of
manner: Addisonian balance, ecclesiastical chanting, the persuasion of
Auden's The Orators, the collectivity of Dos Passos' The Unknown
Soldier, the specific madness of Joyce's Nighttown fantasy. The most
characteristic mode is a kind of arrangement perhaps suggested by Eliot's
lines:

So I would have had him leave
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left.

For the poet is not dealing, in a sense, with things experienced, but with
in the laboratory breaking down metropolitan routine, journalistic dope-
experimental and very revelatory patterns that he himself creates. He is
dreams, official deception and testing their components by new juxtaposi-
tions, new conditions. He has all the caution of a scientist, makes most
of his statements conditional, begins long series with a repeated so or what
or such or whether. But the direction in which his experiments are leading
him is unmistakable.
In his introduction Edward Dahlberg speaks of this process as "reason-
ed derangement of all the senses," and recalls the French Symbolists. But
the reason for this derangement is not the final surrealist flight of the in-
dividual or the simple mirroring of contemporary madness. At times
Fearing drops into the latter easiness, but not often. For he understands

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PARTISAN REVIEW

this madness has causes and agents. And his derangements are diagrams for
the reader. Such passages as:

or:

or:

You heard the gentleman, with automatic precision, speak the truth
Cheers. Triumph.
And then mechanically it followed the gentleman lied.
Deafening applause. Flashlights, cameras, microphones.

All winter she came there, begging for milk. So we had the
shacks along the river destroyed by police.

you will not forget the voice of the bought magistrate
quivering in horror through the courtroom above
prostitute and pimp.

are not even non-sequiturs, but ironic statements of a necessary hypocrisy.
This method is not limited to phrases; whole poems are based on
ideas or conceits, Obituary, for instance, and What if Mr. Jesse James
Should Some Day Die? Nearly all the poems have a firm conceptual unity
of some kind. I think that is one reason why Kenneth Fearing's work has
been so heartily acclaimed. In reading most proletarian poetry and many
proletarian novels and short stories you feel that the writers found it suf-
ficient to class-angle their material, to observe it from the correct position.
There is technique, but not form, not the achievement of creation. The
reader loses the sense of sharing in rediscovery and reaffirmation, a quality
that is essential to propaganda and that inheres in true originality of form.
This quality Fearing has to a very high degree. And although he could
be easily spotted as the author of any given poem, the volume has the wide
variety, the complete shifts of a newsreel sequence.

His originality is, however, almost completely impersonal. Memories,
autobiography, individual sensibility are not permitted to complicate the
relentless satire. One is conscious of the author only from the emotion that
informs the poems, from the questioning eyes fixed on the reader from
behind the printed page. Grammatically this becomes great dependence on
the imperative and interrogative verb forms and on the third and, even
more, the second persons. Here are the beginnings of a few poems as they
follow in unbroken sequence in the volume: "You will remember," "Take
him away," "Let us present," "This advantage to be seized," "Even
when your friend," "You heard the gentleman." Perhaps the device is
used excessively, but it has not the purpose for Fearing that has made it in
other writers a contemporary trick. They wish to avoid responsibility or to
fake suggestiveness, as in the common and meaningless use of "what" as
a demonstrative adjective in poetry. But Fearing is not avoiding respon-
sibility, he is making his reader share it, by the authenticity of his material,
the power of his indictment. "What will you do? he asks, "What will
you do? What will you do?" Only a phrase here and there gives the
answer directly, the demand for a "dream that lives and grows . . . that
stands and quickens,"

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desire of millions, become more real than warmth and breath
and strength and bread.

Kenneth Fearing speaks wittily with a formal ingenuity that seldom
becomes mechanical or prolix, and rich specific allusiveness, topical and
popular, that has made comparison with Walt Whitman inevitable. On
the other hand there are no metrics, few memorable phrases or images, and
very little lyricism. But some of the tenderer passages have a very pro-
vocative ambiguity. Here is one from Lullaby:

Is the night that wraps all the huts of the youth and folds
the empty barns of the west;
is the wind that fans the roadside fire;
are the trees that line the country estates, tall as the
lynch trees, as straight, as black;
is the moon that lights the mining towns, dim as the
light upon tenement roofs, grey upon the hands at
the bars of Moab'it, cold as the bars of the Tombs.

Most recent revolutionary poetry has shied away from beauty because
pleasure in beauty, particularly in its more traditional forms, has seemed
a kind of acceptance, or an escape from deeper significance. But Fearing by
his firm fusion of both elements has intensified both. The emotions that
give his rhetoric life spring as much from a vision of the good as from
indignation with present evil, although the two are not really separable.
It is heartening to see such passion coming into revolutionary literature
amidst the jargon of intellectualism and the child's prose of behaviourists.
A comparison with political eloquence of the French Revolution or the
equalitarian and abolitionist movements in our own early republic makes
most modern revolutionary speech seem emotionally inadequate to the forces
behind it and the goal it announces. But of late there has been a broaden-
ing of emphasis, a deeper consciousness of the powerful dialectic which these
poems of Kenneth Fearing so richly express, the dialectic both of hatred
and of love, love of life, of country, of the masses and the future they shall
create.

OBED BROOKS

PROGRESS OR RETROGRESSION?

KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN and Other Stories. By Erskine Cald-
well. The Viking Press. $2.00.

Erskine Caldwell has become more certain of himself during the past
few years. The seventeen stories in his new volume are written with ease
of manner, and, in most cases, with surety of execution. Occasionally, he
finds a theme important enough for his abilities at their best, and the result
is a remarkably moving tale like the title story of this collection or even
better-Masses of Men. Kneel to the Rising Sun, a narrative of the events
leading up to a lynching, and of the lynching itself, deserves to be included

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62 PARTISAN REVIEW

in every collection of modern American short stories. The same can be
said for _Masses of Men_, in which a destitute widow, whose three children
are starving, prostitutes her little ten-year-old girl to a stranger for twenty
five cents.

These, however, are the only two stories that approach major im-
portance in the entire collection. Of the others, four are definitely good
(_Candy-Man Beechum_, _The Walnut Hunt_, _Daughter and Blue Boy_) and
four are (despite Caldwell's distinctive treatment, in which an original twist
gives the story a character of its own) decidedly mediocre. The remaining
seven tales are written, and must be treated, on a different and lower plane.
They are evidence of Caldwell's most flippant and purposeless mood, despite
their momentary humor. They belong to the category which I characterized
as "anecdote writing" in a review of his first book, _American Earth_, four
years ago.

Strangely enough, Caldwell has improved even in this limited phase
of his work. His special talent for handling slight, almost meaningless
material deftly, bringing out the maximum effect with the appearance of
almost effortless ease, is unparalleled in modern American fiction. In this
connection, his work is greatly similar to that of David Garnett, notwith-
standing their differences of approach, of temperament, of stylistic method.
But even in these slight humorous stories, which comprise the bulk of his
published work, Caldwell makes a contact with reality beyond the scope of
his localized, limited material. Whether he does so intentionally or un-
consciously, this is the saving virtue of nine-tenths of his writing. One has
only to read his _American Earth_, and _We Are the Living_, and the novels,
_Tobacco Road_, _God's Little Acre_ and _Journeyman_, to verify this statement.

It would be comparatively easy to dissect several of Caldwell's stories
—even the more successful ones—and to show where he fails in specific cases
to reveal character, to develop his situations, to probe more deeply into his
people's motives. But it would be difficult to take a single story of his and
explain its general failure to go beyond a certain point; to determine just
why his work very rarely achieves a major mood. The answer can, how-
ever, be stated in general terms.

Caldwell as a writer operates primarily on a sensory plane. He has
seen and he knows the life of the people about whom he writes. He under-
stands them and has a great tolerance toward, and compassion for them.
This is why he is able to record their lives, their tantrums, their petty
qualities and their occasional heroism faithfully and convincingly, so that
the reader sympathizes, laughs with or at them. But here his virtues as a
writer end, and the real reason for his large failure begins. The lives of
his characters are too seldom transmitted to that higher region of the mind
where alone they can be resolved into completely meaningful personalities.
They are almost never perceived in their entirety, merely felt as scattered
and fragmentary points of contact. James T. Farrell, for example, pos-
sesses this higher sensitivity and perception, this ability to understand his
material on a rigorous intellectual level; and these things give Farrell's
work major possibilities. But Caldwell, handicapped by the lack of them,
has failed so far to progress beyond a pleasant, easy competence, and a
preoccupation with themes that seldom advance beyond trivial and frag-
mentary stages.

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Erskine Caldwell is still coasting along in that easy manner which he
had mastered when his first book, American Earth, appeared. I say "man-
ner" advisedly; it is not a style. Unless he applies himself more painstaking-
ly to his art, unless he attempts larger themes, he may never fulfill any of
his early promise, but end in a literary grave next to to another American
writer whom in many ways he resembles, Bret Harte. Harte also emerged
once with a new and racy talent, with a gift for portraying the people of
a strange locale; but he played the same tune on the same guitar over and
over again. His works are almost completely forgotten today.

Caldwell seems to be following too closely this fatal line of least resis-
tance. It is about time he discarded the meaningless guitar for a
sturdier, more intricate and more developed instrument; time that he at-
tempted to study new themes. He may fail at first. But such a failure
will be preferable to the stagnation which threatens him.
EDWIN ROLFE

THE LOWER DEPTHS
SOMEBODY IN BOOTS, by Nelson Algren. Vanguard Press. $2.50.

This is the first novel of a young writer whose literary efforts
originated and took on definite shape inside the revolutionary movement.
As such, this novel merits the particular attention of our critics, as it is
among the first fruit of a literature nurtured and reared on Marxist
thought and direction. Unfortunately, those who do the sowing don't
always show up for the harvest: to be ignored or captiously disparaged
by the gadfly-reviewers of the bourgeois newspapers and periodicals is
often the price of revolutionary integrity, but when our own criticism
reacts with scant interest to a work as powerful as this, it argues a one-
sided awareness of literary currents, a concentration on some schools and
groups of writers to the exclusion of all others. So far as I know, Some-
body in Boots received but two meager reviews in the revolutionary press
and one of the reviews (in the Daily Worker) was supercilious in tone
and, to my mind, wide off the mark in its estimate of the book.

Stories and novels dealing with the jungle-lives of the hobo world-
lives pulverized by hunger and homelessness-are by no means rare in
American fiction. Many of these books, however, have been mere ex-
ploitations of gruesome material, attempts to cash in on the horrible by
turning it into an emotional aphrodisiac for sated readers. Hence the
cruel buffooneries on the theme of the subhuman that every so often hit
the circulating libraries. Somebody in Boots differs from these firecrackers
in that it is the first Marxist portrayal of box-car men and their ways.
Here we find no reportorial piling up of explosive scenes, but a careful
shaping and recreation of experience mounting to an exact social correla-
tion. The life of the lumpen-proletariat, which this novel vivifies in valid
images of action and character, is seen realistically as a life that prepares
it "far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue," as Marx
put it, than for active resistance to oppression. Such is the role of this

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64 PARTISAN REVIEW

"rotting mass" in modern society, although here and there, under the
impact of some tremendous event, parts of this mass may be swept into
the proletarian movement. With this conception firmly in mind, Algren
has created the first complete portrait of the lumpenproletariat in Amer-
ican revolutionary literature.

Cass McKay, the central character of the book, is the living embodi-
ment of this conception. He is born on the West Texas prairie in a home
that "stood like a casual box on the border." His family had no place
in the world; his sister becomes a prostitute, his father a murderer. Cass
is never granted the opportunity to develop his human faculties, and
although from earliest childhood he has seen the blood of hoboes run
down "the gleaming yellow rail,-warm wet blood running black and
slow beneath the unpitying sun"—he finds no way of living save that
of joining the horde of wanderers. Thenceforward his life become a dark
journey of pain and evil. A boundless brutality, an unspeakable insane
violence pervades each episode in this narrative of men and women forever
mutilated, forever damned. A woman is delivered of her baby in a dark
and cold reefer; a Negro girl is raped in the woods by a band of bums,
and Cass too "smelled the dark woman, her thighs and her womb,"
feeling a strong hand "pushing him from behind"; in the El Paso County
Jail he meets Nubby O'Neil, a pervert who terrorizes the prisoners through
a benevolent arrangement with the law, and when Cass comes out he
joins Nubby in a hold-up. Later, alone in Chicago, he meets the prostitute
Norah and makes her his partner in pursuing the trade Nubby taught him.
He is caught and sent to prison. Free again, he earns a precarious living
by peddling peanuts and candy in a burlesque house; but when he finds
that he cannot effect the return of Norah he rejoins Nubby to disappear in
the army of the homeless. Only for one fleeting moment is Cass brought
face to face with class organization, but his feeble mentality cannot com-
prehend the giant audacity of struggle, and aping on the lowest level the
prejudices and hatreds of his masters in the upper tiers, he finally sinks
into that stupor from which his love for Norah had once promised to
save him.

The other focal point of the novel is the special "appreciation," so to
speak, which it accords to the law, the railroad police, the bulls of all
denominations who practice legal violence on the defenceless tramps. The
pages fairly crackle with sinuous prose when the author evokes the image
of the bulls, advancing like jungle-cats—"as though on hips forged of
rock and rubber"—to pounce on their verminous prey. These carnivorous
creatures, sodden with bestiality, alive to nothing but food, drink and
blows, are a true incarnation of the system which is dependent on them
for its safety. And it is in such plastic, almost tactile particularizations
that the underworld of the hunted merges with the upper world of the
hunters, compelling the innate horror of contemporary civilization to flood
a close-up that will not fade.

Algren's prose is indigenous in every detail—in dialogue, the tonality
of structure, and the fabric of place-names cunningly woven into the
narrative like a refrain in a bold voice. A book as authentically American
as this should be required reading for every eagle orator in American
letters.
PHILIP RAHV