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PARTISAN REVIEW
PR

Volume VI, No. 3 1939
Spring

© Trustees of Boston University

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This PARTISAN REVIEW
A QUARTERLY OF LITERATURE AND MARXISM
Volume VI, No. 3
Spring, 1939
COVER DESIGN
T. J. Roszak
THIS QUARTER
3 D. M.
POEMS
21 Wallace Stevens
WE RENTED TO THE LENINS
26
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT
29 Sidney Hook
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939
THE PUBLIC V. THE LATE W. B. YEATS
46 W. H. Auden
THE POET AS POET
52 Delmore Schwartz
EXTRACT FROM AUTUMN JOURNAL
60 Louis MacNeice
ART CHRONICLE
62 George L. K. Morris
DRYBURGH ABBEY
64 W. T. Scott
THE ONLY SON
65 James T. Farrell
THE HANDS OF JEANNE-MARIE
76 Arthur Rimbaud
JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT
79 Eliseo Vivas
BACK TO THE CITY
92 W. C. Williams
PARIS LETTER
100 Sean Nial!
A VARIETY OF FICTION
106 Philip Rahv
BOOKS
Whitman and Arnold
114 William Phillips
The Poet's Responsibilities
117 R. P. Blackmur
A Belated Dialectician
120 James Burnham
The Pirenne Thesis
123 Melvin J. Lasky
Further Testimony
126 George L. K. Morris
LETTERS
127
Editors: F. W. DUPEE, DWIGHT MACDONALD, GEORGE L. K.
MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV. Business Manager:
NANCY MACDONALD.
PARTISAN REVIEW is published at 559 East 88th Street, New York, N. Y. Please
address mail to: Box 20, Station K, New York, N. Y.
PARTISAN REVIEW is published quarterly. Subscription: $1.25 yearly; Canada, $1.35;
other foreign countries, $1.50. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accom-
panied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copyright May 1939, by PARTISAN
REVIEW. Entered as second-class matter, November 26, 1938, at the post office at
New York, N. Y. under the Act of March 3, 1879.

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Contributors:

WALLACE STEVENS is the author of Harmonium, Ideas of Order, and The
Man With the Blue Guitar. . . . SIDNEY HOOK has contributed frequently to
PARTISAN REVIEW. He is chairman of the department of philosophy at
New York University. . . . W. H. AUDEN, the English poet, is now in the
United States. His most recent work is the play, On the Frontier, written
with Christopher Isherwood. . . . DELMORE SCHWARTZ's first book, In Dreams
Begin Responsibilities, is reviewed in this issue. . . . Louis MACNEICE, who
has published several volumes of verse and criticism, is now at work on a
study of Yeats. His poem in this issue is part of a longer work which
Faber & Faber of London will publish shortly. . . . WINFIELD TOWNLEY
SCOTT is the author of Biography for Traman, a volume of verse. . . .
JAMES T. FARRELL is, of course, the author of Studs Lonigan; he is at
present working on the third volume of his new long novel. . . . LIONEL
ABEL'S translations of Rimbaud will appear shortly in a volume published
by The Exiles Press. . . . ELISEO VIVAS teaches philosophy at the University
of Wisconsin. He is an advisory editor of The Kenyon Review. . . . WILLIAM
CARLOS WILLIAMS'S contribution is a chapter from the second volume of
White Mule. . . . R. P. BLACKMUR is now writing a book on Henry Adams
. . . . JAMES BURNHAM is an editor of The New International. . . . MELVIN
J. LASKY is a young writer who lives in New York City.

IN COMING ISSUES:

1. A. Richards as Psychological Simpleton, by ALLEN TATE.
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Marxism, by SIDNEY HOOK.
The Americanism of Van Wyck Brooks, by F. W. DUPEE.
Conquered City, a story, by VICTOR SERGE.
Vernon Louis Parrington: a Study, by LIONEL TRILLING.
Thursday Morning Services: an Examination of The Nation and
The New Republic, by DWIGHT MACDONALD.

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This Quarter
WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS: ACT TWO
TWENTY-TWO years ago, The Seven Arts printed Randolph
Bourne's article, "The War and the Intellectuals." "To those of us
who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war," Bourne wrote
in 1917, "it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with
which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the
use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself.
Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practi-
tioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with
their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of
the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world's people. And
the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent
gesture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who
effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perception of the
American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by intel-
lectuals!... A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that
will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the
world!... Whence is our miraculous intuition of our moral spot-
lessness? Whence our confidence that history will not unravel huge
economic and imperialist forces upon which our rationalizations
float like bubbles?... Numbers of intelligent people who have never
been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken
out of their slumbers by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never
having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and
excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional
capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages
of Europe."
If "Belgium" be changed to "Czechoslovakia", these sentences
apply as closely to American intellectuals in the spring of 1939 as
they ever did in the spring of 1917. All sections of the intelligentsia
are swinging in behind the New Deal in its drive towards a second
world war to save democracy. The Communist Party, through its

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4 PARTISAN REVIEW

League of American Writers, American Artists Congress, and
other cultural organizations, gathers the leftish intellectuals into
the war fold. Dorothy Thompson and Walter Lippmann shepherd
the rightish intellectuals. The liberal weeklies, The Nation in par-
ticular, whose war line has become a scandal, see to it that the great
middle bulk of the intelligentsia tread the path of righteousness.
A whole crop of flag-waving, anti-fascist books springs up: Ameri-
can Earth, The Stars and Stripes Forever, The Tree of Liberty,
American Saga, etcetera. Phi Beta Kappa "declares intellectual war"
on the totalitarian nations. The brain-trusters in the capital have
turned their attention from slum clearance to military aviation.
Thomas Mann turns out flimsy propaganda tracts on the beauties
of democracy and the horrors of fascism. And Van Wyck Brooks,
of all people, proposes in a letter to Time that our reply to Hitler's
book burnings should be a series of public bonfires of things Made
In Germany.

"Now Is the
Sword Drawn
For Peace"

As Act Two of the tragi-comedy, "War and
the Intellectuals", gets under weigh, it may be
useful to look back a moment on Act One. In
the very first week of the war, H. G. Wells
wrote: "That trampling, drilling foolery in the
heart of Europe that has arrested civilization and darkened the
hopes of mankind for forty years - German imperialism and
German militarism - has struck its inevitable blow... Never was a
war so righteous as is the war against Germany. Now is the sword
drawn for peace." His blood brothers across the Atlantic thrilled
to the noble phrases. It would seem that The New Republic was
founded to get us into the war, with, of course, the very best inten-
tions. Its first issue, of November 7, 1914, carried a lead editorial:
"The End of American Isolation." Before the year was out, it had
developed the classic line, now being re-echoed by The Nation in
Act Two: "A modern nation which wants the world to live in peace
should not be content to keep the peace itself. It must be willing and
ready, whenever a clear case can be made out against a disturber of
the peace, to join with other nations in taking up arms against the
malefactor." It was not long before the editors of The New Republic
were promoting "The League to Enforce Peace", an international
vision out of which the League of Nations was to grow. This
became the holy grail of the liberal crusaders. Randolph Bourne
wittily described "The New Republic's feast of eloquent idealism,

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THIS QUARTER
with its appealing harbingers of a cosmically efficacious and well-
bred war."
When the Great Day finally came, and the nation was safely
plunged into the war, The New Republic was ecstatic: "Mr. Wilson
represents the best hope in the world. He can go ahead exultingly
with the blessings of men and women upon him." The next issue
carried the famous editorial, "Who Willed American Participa-
tion?" This is something special even in the annals of liberal fool-
ishness. Those who opposed our entry into the war, it begins, are
now somewhat bewildered. "They have seen a great democratic
nation gradually forced into war, in spite of the manifest indiffer-
ence or reluctance of the majority of its population. And they have
rightly attributed the successful pressure to the ability of a small
but influential minority to impose its will on the rest of the country."
This minority is not the bankers and industrialists, who "have
favored war without realizing the extent to which it would injure
their interests." (The Nye Committee was twenty years in the
future.) "The effective and decisive work on behalf of war has been
accomplished by an entirely different class-a class which must be
comprehensively but loosely described as 'the intellectuals.' The
American nation is entering this war under the influence of a moral
verdict rendered after the utmost deliberation by the more thought-
ful members of the community.

Moral
Controversy
On the
Western Front
5
It was a cardinal point of doctrine with the
more thoughtful members of the community
that our participation in the war was entirely
disinterested. Reproving the corrupt Hearst
"considerations of national egotism," The New
Republic ended its editorial: "For the first time in history, a wholly
independent nation has entered a great and costly war under the
influence of ideas rather than immediate interests." And The
Nation, which up to 1917 had been relatively sceptical about the
Allied cause, editorialized, once the die had been cast for war: "All
Americans must be glad that their President, in asking Congress to
resolve that a state of war exists between the United States and
Germany, called upon the nation to strengthen itself in high-minded
purpose. Selfish ends he bids us put out of our minds. These are
lofty sentiments." It is true that much is now known which was not
public knowledge in 1917, but it was even then no secret that
J. P. Morgan & Co. had floated vast loans in this country for the

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Allies, and that our industrial boom was based on the huge Allied
purchases of goods and munitions. One might have expected even
liberal intellectuals to have suspected — for all their congenital
idealism — a very materialistic nigger in the woodpile. Yet the
economic implications of our entry into the war seem to have pene-
trated the consciousness only of that small band of radicalized intel-
lectuals and artists who rallied behind The Masses, led by Max
Eastman and John Reed, to carry on a witty and gallant fight
against the war. Equally courageous, but romantic and politically
naive, was the stand of The Seven Arts, the excellent literary
magazine which was founded in 1916 by James Oppenheim, Waldo
Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, and others. It printed Randolph Bourne
and John Reed on the war question. But in the April, 1917, issue,
the editors, accepting the “League to Enforce Peace” illusion, ap-
proved our entry into the war if the Administration held to its
supposedly unselfish war aims. “We must begin, then, by disavowing
that this is an action for America only.” Even John Dewey could
write of “the gallant fight for democracy and civilization fought on
the soil of France”. But the classic liberal formulation was made by
the anonymous author of a National Security League pamphlet:
“From 1914 to 1918,” he wrote in the closing months of the war,
“the world has had its greatest moral controversy.”

Disenchant- America had not been involved in the great
ment moral controversy many months before a note
of disillusion began to sound in the writings
of the more thoughtful members of the community. “Willing war,”
Bourne had warned, “means willing all the evils that are organically
bound up with it. A good many people still seem to believe in a
peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war.” A few months of
war were enough to lead President Wilson from “peace without
victory” to “The day has come when we must conquer or submit.”
The Masses was denied the use of the mails, Max Eastman narrowly
escaped lynching by some soldiers, Eugene Debs and hundreds of
Wobblies and Socialists were given severe prison terms, and in the
early weeks of the great crusade for democracy, universal conscrip-
tion was introduced. The Seven Arts soon discovered that the
idealistic war it had hoped for was a fraud, and, when its editors
courageously insisted on expressing their mounting objections, their
financial backing was withdrawn and the magazine died. The
liberal weeklies were less quixotic in giving voice to their disenchant-

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ment. They were shocked by the refusal of the State Department
to give passports to the American delegation to the Socialist peace
conference in Stockholm in 1917, especially since the United States
was almost alone among the warring powers in this refusal. The
episode was all the more disturbing since, as The Nation pointed out,
the conference would probably not have the slightest effect on the
war. In the first flush of its enthusiasm, The New Republic easily
swallowed conscription, editorializing on April 14, 1917, that the
volunteer system should be discarded because it was "inimical to
liberty." But by the fall of the year, its editors were complaining
that The League to Enforce Peace looked farther off than it had
before war was declared.

Words, Words, Today, as in 1917, the intellectuals have one
Words
set of war aims, the Administration they sup-
port, another. The intellectuals would rescue
Western civilization from fascism and restore it to the ways of
progress and democracy. Their government, however, as a serious
capitalist enterprise, of necessity takes a less romantic view of the
affair. Its aims are the destruction of a threatening competitor in
world markets and the defense of a status quo, both international
and domestic, which is greatly to the advantage of the ruling
bourgeoisie. The intellectuals, in a word, want to crush fascism,
the State Department thinks rather of Germany.

The intellectuals are very articulate about their war aims, which
are idealistic and inspiring. When the State Department, for that
very reason, publicly echoes these aims, the intellectuals conclude
they are leading the world toward the light. A notable recent con-
vert, for example, is Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State.
A few years ago, Mr. Welles was so unenlightened as to journey in
person to Cuba to make sure that the liberal Grau San Martin was
safely replaced by his own and the National City Bank's-candi-
date, Colonel Fulgencio Batista. But Mr. Welles' social conscious-
ness, stimulated by recent events abroad, has developed so rapidly
he now beats the editors of The Nation at their own game, as when
he told us the other day that all the existing regimes in Latin Amer-
ica deserve our support because they are all, without exception,
republics. This discovery greatly simplifies the tasks of the friends
of democracy in Latin America.

For if the intellectuals provide their government with fine sen-
timents, the process also works the other way round. One might

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think that a group whose chief occupation is writing would offer
resistance to the wiles of language. It has not been so. As the savage
hopefully calls the dreaded volcano "the blessed source of all good
things", so the intellectual believes in the power of verbal formulae
to sweeten the ghastliest realities. The last war would have been a
dirty business were it not for those glowing phrases of Woodrow
Wilson: "Self Determination of Nations . . . A People's War . . .
Open Covenants Openly Arrived At . . . A World Safe for
Democracy." Now once more we have in the White House a states-
man who also knows well how to use that rhetoric of heart-warming
abstractions and moral earnestness which attracts the intellectuals.
The President speaks their language.
It is a mistake to consider such politicians simple hypocrites.
Like Wilson before him, Roosevelt seems largely to share the high
hopes and generous, naive illusions of his intellectual followers.
This makes him all the more effective because of the value intel-
lectuals attach to intentions. "By defining the issues of our struggle,"
writes Lewis Mumford in his tract for the times, Men Must Act
(Harcourt, $1.50), "by projecting our purposes clearly, we may
transform the character of our war." Two decades ago, Walter
Lippmann, then an editor of The New Republic, saw a wonderful
change come over the last war once democratic America had gone
in. "We can dare to hope for things which we never dared to hope
for in the past," he wrote in 1917, "That hope is nothing less than
the Federation of the World. No other idea is big enough to describe
the Alliance. It is no longer an offensive-defensive military agree-
ment among diplomats. That is how it started, to be sure. But it
has grown and is growing into a union of peoples determined to
end forever the intriguing, adventurous nationalism which has torn
the world for three centuries. . . The democracies are unloosed!"
And only a few weeks ago, the historian, James Shotwell, could
describe how the injection of Wilson's high purposes had meant
"the transformation of the war from a meaningless carnage to a
crusade that was 'to make the world safe for democracy'." The
crusade flopped, but now we must try, try again. To quote
Mr. Mumford on the last war: "What was wrong was not that we
sought to preserve democracy; what alone was wrong was that
we failed. . . That we did not gather the beneficent results of a
democratic victory is not a proof of the notion that we were fooled
or misguided when we sought to save democracy." What can one
say?

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THIS QUARTER
The Road to
Hell
Let us grant the good intentions of Franklin
D. Roosevelt. But the laws of motion of mon-
opoly capitalism work themselves out, with
brutal disregard for intentions, much the same
under a Roosevelt as under a Coolidge. How can an Administra-
tion act in important matters contrary to those class interests of
the dominant bourgeoisie which have shaped the American state,
the American law and constitution? Their enormous mass throws
its inertia against following new paths, impelling the republic with
blind momentum along the historical path destined for it. The good
intentions of Roosevelt simply make him the more dangerous, since
he is the unwitting prisoner, along with his intellectual following,
of capitalist necessity.
The contradiction between the concept of a war for democracy
and what is actually taking place under that slogan has already
begun to appear. The closer the second great crusade for democ-
racy draws near, the feebler grow the forces of democracy inside
the country; the more battleships, the lower the relief standards;
the bolder the President's utterances against Hitler, the more con-
ciliatory his attitude towards our own business rulers. The intel-
lectuals will open their eyes some day, but not until it is too late.
To quote a recent PARTISAN REVIEW editorial: "It would
almost appear that the peculiar function of the intellectuals is to
idealize imperialist wars when they come and to debunk them after
they are over." At present, the intellectuals profess themselves to
be quite mystified by the gaps that are already yawning wide in
the war-for-democracy thesis. The failure of the President to raise
the embargo on arms to Spain-which he himself had gotten Con-
gress to impose-puzzled them very much. "Why do you not act,
and act at once?" asked the editors of The New Republic as the
Spanish republic went into its death agony. "Why did you not act
that your policy in this matter is a tragic
long ago? We confess that your policy in this matter is a tragic
mystery to us." Raising the embargo was the first step, and the only
concrete one, in Lewis Mumford's fantastic "non-intercourse" pro-
gram. Once the embargo was raised, he proposed that supplies be
sent the Republicans at once "under the convoy of the American
Navy." But the American Navy and its Commander-in-Chief went
off to the annual war games instead. Mr. Mumford, also, was at a
loss to explain the President's behavior, vaguely referring to
"callous morals" and "a false sense of expediency." The mystifica-
tion has been increased by the prompt recognition of the Franco

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regime by the State Department—the same State Department that
is championing democracy in South America.
For an understanding of these dark matters the intellectuals
have only to look at what is going on in their own sphere. The
reactionary nature of the coming war reveals itself in the effects
on our culture of merely preparing for it. Tying themselves to the
bourgeois war machine, the intellectuals have given up their priv-
ilege—and duty—of criticising ruling class values. The tide of
chauvinistic exaltation of American democracy has reached such
proportions as to sweep off his feet even a critic like Van Wyck
Brooks, whose recent speech on "Writers and the Yankee Tradi-
tion" before the Connecticut branch of the Stalinized League of
American Writers was a really tragic performance from the man
who wrote America's Coming of Age. The liberal weeklies, which
once devoted their main energies to exposing and protesting social
injustice at home, have become more interested in demonstrating
how much inferior fascist capitalism is to democratic capitalism.
Left intellectuals are rallying to the defense of the British Empire,
on the grounds that India is better off under British than it would
be under German rule. But why shouldn't the Indians rule India?
The intellectuals take such positions, it is true, with all sorts of
mental reservations. Once the fascist menace is destroyed, then they
will take up the old fight again. In politics, however, the mask molds
the face. You become what you do and say; you don't become what
your reservations are.

The Lady
Vanishes

The great objection to the war program of the
intellectuals is not so much that it will get us
into a war—the bourgeoisie will decide that
question for themselves, when the proper
moment comes, without any help from The Nation—but that it is
diverting us from the main task: to work with the masses for social-
ism, which alone can save our civilization. A crusade against fas-
cism abroad means political and cultural submission to the ruling
class at home. And so in all the current discussions on the war
question, nothing is ever said about the revolutionary alternative
to capitalism and its product, war. Social revolution is no longer
thought about. The lady has vanished.
It is hard to realize how our thinking has changed. How distant
they seem, those early years of the depression, when the bourgeoisie
was demoralized and discredited, when the Soviet Union and social-

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11
ism were in the forefront of every intellectual's consciousness!
There has been a change in the weather. The success of fascist
foreign policy, the unsuspected depths of decay and corruption in
the Soviet Union, the failure of the New Deal's reformist program
and its replacement with business "appeasement" and armaments,
and, above all, the right-wing reaction that is still gaining ground
throughout the nation all this has struck dismay into the hearts
of the intellectuals. In the hot blast of such world events, the tender
shoots of socialism have withered. As those who suffer some great
psychic shock sometimes develop amnesia, so the intellectuals,
retreating to the solid base of bourgeois democracy, have forgotten
the very idea of socialism.

And Up Pops
The Devil
Socialism vanishes, and in its place there ap-
pears what can only be called "anti-fascist fas-
cism." We can't defeat fascism, Lewis Mum-
ford writes in the last chapter of Men Must
Act, "merely by comfortably holding out the prospect of a few
extra hours to dawdle in or a few extra comforts to ease the busy
grind as democracy's highest reward. . . . There is no creation with-
out travail and sacrifice. . . . That which the soldier gives with quiet
desperation on the field of battle must become the commonplace of
the day; every mechanic, every clerk, every farmer, every house-
wife, writer, scientist, artist, inventor, industrialist, businessman
must dedicate himself to the larger tasks of upholding our demo-
cratic civilization: this, before he permits himself a second thought
about his individual fortunes. . . . Sacrifice, hard discipline, soldier-
like devotion to duty at any cost of comfort or convenience these
are the conditions that life imposes upon us if we are to escape the
degradations and brutalities that fascism seeks to make once more
the common lot of mankind." It is all there "sacrifice," "disci-
pline," "soldierlike devotion", the appeal to all classes to give up
"extra hours", "extra comforts" and such materialistic trifles all
the commonplaces of fascist rhetoric. The essential ingredient of
all the scapegoat for the sins of capitalism Mr. Mumford finds
in fascism itself.
If this regression in liberal thought is already apparent even
before hostilities begin, what will happen once we go to war? I have
described the wartime disenchantment of an older generation. But
that was nothing compared to the awakening in store for our own
intellectuals. For if there is one point that needs no laboring, it is

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that a modern war cannot be fought without universal conscription,
without outlawing strikes and shackling the unions, without sup-
pressing all dissenting opinion and handing the national economy
over to the ruling class. The Army's "M-Day" plans are well known.
The first result of a war against foreign fascism will be the intro-
duction of domestic dictatorship. The war party generally admits
this, but thinks we can return to "normal" government after the
war, just as we did in 1918. It is true that democratic forms were
ultimately restored after the last war. But it is also true that the
war fastened on the nation the rule of big business under Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover, and that it broke forever the old populist-
agrarian revolt against monopoly capitalism. Our democratic capi-
talist system being today in a much more advanced stage of decom-
position than it was in 1918, the next war may be expected to have
even more drastic social consequences. However good the intentions
of the war party and its liberal politicians, I think it unlikely, once
war has introduced dictatorship that our rulers will be able to afford
the luxury of a return to democratic government.

"But This War
Is Different!"

A few of the more enthusiastic jitterbugs,
notably Lewis Mumford, have by now come to
swallow, for the second time, the myth that
we fought the last war primarily to save
democracy. The dog returns to his vomit. Most of them, however,
still admit we went to war in 1917 for business reasons and that the
results were disastrous. But this war, they insist, is different. The
Soviet Union didn't exist in 1917. Its defense against fascist aggres-
sion must be a concern of all men of good will. Nor did Imperial
Germany offer any such radical threat to democracy as does Nazi
Germany. The fascist drive for world power must be stopped if
social progress, and Western civilization itself, is to survive. To
accomplish these great ends, they are willing to make a truce with
our own ruling class and even to submit to wartime dictatorship
over here.

Let us grant both these distinctions, and by no means only for
the sake of argument! The question is, however, whether a second
world war would destroy fascism and protect the Soviet Union. I
do not think it would serve either end, in fact, quite the contrary.
Perhaps I should add—considering the extreme novelty of such a
position at the moment—that this is not a special "line" invented by
myself. It is merely the result of applying the commonplaces of

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THIS QUARTER
Marxist political analysis to the present war situation, common-
places so well forgotten as to assume an air of eccentricity in a
discussion like this one.

The Workers'
Fatherland-or
The Kremlin?
It must be admitted that the defense of the
Soviet Union plays little part in the calcula-
tions of large sections of the war party. Men
Must Act ignores the question entirely, nor
does the problem seem to be of much concern
to Dorothy Thompson and Walter Lippmann. As a means of lining
up the left intelligentsia, however, it has been manipulated by the
Communist Party with its usual skill. But are we to defend the
present regime in the Soviet Union? Or the October Revolution to
the extent it is still symbolized by the Soviet Union? If the former,
then we must support the American government in any war in
which it is allied with Russia. But if one's concern is primarily with
socialism, then one's course is less clear. It seems to me that the
corrupt dictatorship which has arisen under Stalin is proof of the
correctness of the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that only the
spread of the October Revolution to more advanced countries could
preserve its gains inside Russia. Whether the Soviet Union is still
entitled to be called "a workers' state" is a hard question. But cer-
tainly such elements of workers' power as still survive in the Soviet
Union can best be supported by the workers taking power in other
nations. The process of degeneration which has been going on in the
last ten years inside Russia can only be arrested by pressure from
victorious workers' revolutions in more advanced countries. The
problem of social revolution is an international one. A socialist
regime in this country would be the best possible guaranty that we
will defend the Soviet Union-but, of course, as the workers'
fatherland and not as the political base of the bureaucrats now
occupying the Kremlin. To the extent the Soviet Union is a work-
ers' state, to that extent it will not benefit from the strangling of
the workers' movement in the democratic nations. The Russian
masses cannot be defended by tying the American masses to the
gunwheels of imperialism. The only perspective of such a policy is
intensification of the Stalinist dictatorship, and the victory of
fascism over here. Under our very eyes, indeed, the Communist
Party in this country is transforming itself into one more cog in
the mechanism of American imperialism-the better to defend the
Workers' Fatherland!
13

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14
Where Is
The Enemy?

PARTISAN REVIEW

The major force that is pulling the intellectuals
into the orbit of war, however, is not their
sympathy for the Soviet Union but their fear
and hatred of fascism. The Nazis march into
Czechoslovakia, take over Memel, threaten momentarily to break
through into Poland, Rumania, Hungary. Franco's military courts
begin to work through the famous card index of two million political
criminals. Italian troops overrun Albania and lap at the borders of
Greece. The second world war may break out any day now, even
before these paragraphs come off the press.

A war to save democracy from fascism. But what is fascism?
Is it some strange fungus, originating God knows how or where,
which is spreading its slow stain over the map of Europe, something
which has developed quite outside the "democratic" system we live
under? Is it an infection which can be quarantined by a cordon
sanitaire of fire and steel drawn around Italy and Germany? To
read the liberal weeklies, one might think so. The only way to fight
such a plague would indeed be to go to war against it, to conduct an
Albigensian crusade with bell, book and candle (and machine gun!)
against what John Strachey has called the great modern heresy.

Actually, fascism is something at once more comprehensible
and more difficult to fight. It is born from within a bourgeois demo-
cratic society, as the Third Reich was born of the womb of the
Weimar Republic, by the processes of social decay caused by the
growing contradictions of monopoly capitalism. Radek once called
it "the iron hoop with which the bourgeoisie tries to patch up the
broken barrel of capitalism." When they can no longer maintain
their dominance under the old forms of parliamentary democracy,
with its civil liberties and its independent workers' organizations,
when old-style competitive capitalism, with its chaotic markets and
lack of central planning, no longer meets their economic problems-
then the bourgeoisie try to freeze fast their rule in the rigid forms
of totalitarianism. When and if fascism comes to this country, it
will be because the internal contradictions of capitalism have
reached a point where they can only be temporarily-controlled
within its iron hoop. The only force that can turn us aside
from that road is social revolution. "The main enemy is within our
own borders."

"Every war is a defeated revolution," writes Trotsky. The in-
tellectuals and politicians of the left are even now preparing to
throw away, just as their prototypes did in the Europe of 1914-18,

=== Page 16 ===
THIS QUARTER
15

the one great chance for successful revolution. The next war will be
an orgy of slaughter and destruction compared to which the last war
will seem idyllic. If the masses, and their leaders, fail to take
advantage of the difficulties of their rulers then, if they fail to rise
up and wipe out forever the whole bloodstained system, the future
is black indeed.*

For the next war, as for the last, Lenin's is the only possible
slogan for all who pretend to be on the side of the masses: "Turn the
imperialist war into civil war!" To support the ruling class pre-
cisely when it most needs support will be to throw away the
golden opportunity, to lose perhaps the very last chance that will
be offered our civilization.

And for what? There is one way in which the coming war is
indeed different from the last one. In 1917 the intellectuals justified
our entry with visions of The League to Enforce Peace, the Parlia-
ment of Man, the War to End Wars. World capitalism has reached
a state of decay today so terrible that it is no longer possible, even
for liberal intellectuals, to cherish such illusions. No grandiose
dreams of world brotherhood are floating about these days, not with
the League of Nations given twenty-four hours' notice to leave
Switzerland in case of war. This war is a purely defensive action,
from which its most ardent promoters hope for nothing more than
a respite from fascism.** Far from being a crusade for a new world
order, the coming war is at best an effort to turn the clock back and
restore that fine old world order which the last war was fought to
abolish.

And so there is in the copious writings of the war party a vast
silence on the question as to what will happen once Hitler is crushed.
They are well advised not to speculate too closely. I can see only two
possibilities. Either another Weimar Republic will arise, to give
way even more quickly to another fascist regime, since there seems
little doubt that the next peace terms will be even more Draconian
than Versailles. Or a revolution may put a workers' government in
power. Is it conceivable that the democracies will not intervene to

*Certain of the war party-notably Professor Harold Laski-argue that collec-
tive security will prevent war. But if war somehow does break out, and if it is con-
ducted in an "undemocratic" fashion, these hopeful ones say: we will lead the
masses against their government. But they will find it impossible to accompany the
bourgeoisie along every step of the road to war and then, at the threshold, politely
excuse themselves. Should they really attempt such a maneuver, they will find
themselves hopelessly compromised with the masses, whose simpler mental proc-
ess cannot distinguish between supporting a war policy and supporting the war
to which it leads.

**Mr. Mumford now justifies the last war on this ground, pointing out it gained
us "breathing space," since "Germany's assault on democracy was staved off for
another twenty years." A system that needs periodic world wars as an oxygen tent
might well be allowed to breathe its last.

=== Page 17 ===
16
PARTISAN REVIEW

put this down by force of arms? Wilson sent American regiments
into Russia to attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks. The trump card
in the hands of the Social Democratic executioners of the German
revolution was the open threat of intervention by the Allied armies.
And how can capitalist democracies act otherwise, since revolution
is as much a threat to them as to the fascist regimes? If the war
ends in revolution in the fascist nations, a new war will begin, with
the positions ironically reversed: a war of intervention by the fas-
cized democracies against the new revolutionary governments.
One can already hear the cries of "Betrayal!" that will arise from
the intellectuals.

The
Isolationists

There is, of course, a peace as well as a war
party among the intellectuals. Very much in a
minority even before Munich, the isolationists
see their following drop away with each new
fascist coup. But the tendency continues to exist, and must be taken
into brief account here. Its chief tracts for the times are Stuart
Chase's The New Western Front (Harcourt, $1.50) and the more
elaborate Save America First (Harpers, $3.75) by Jerome Frank,
of the Monopoly Committee and the Securities and Exchange Com-
mission. The literary tone of these works is significant. Chase writes
in a jaunty, Time-Marches-On! manner, Frank in the loose, com-
monplace style of the professional conversationalist he is. Compared
to the portentous accents of a Mann or even a Mumford, these
authors appear as prosaic and even rather vulgar fellows, writing in
journalistic shirtsleeves, with little grasp of the broader aspects of
the question of fascism. Mumford deals in "freedom" and "culture"
and "civilization", Chase in "common sense" and those two potent
totems, "The Facts" and "The Figures." If the jitterbugs soar too
far above earthbound economics, if they are Hegelian in their ideal-
ism, the isolationists who might be correspondingly named "earth-
worms"—recall those unimaginative, parochial English materialists
whom Marx baited when he was not busy with the Hegelians.
The isolationists, in a word, are rather too simpleminded.
Because they have little difficulty in showing that war and imper-
ialism don't "pay", they reasonably conclude we should stay home
and cultivate our own garden. All too reasonably, indeed, since
capitalism is a means of keeping a ruling class in power, and not a
rational social structure. They add up our national resources in long
columns and present us triumphantly with the imposing total, as

=== Page 18 ===
THIS QUARTER

though imperialism were all a matter of book-keeping. But they
conveniently forget that, if war and colonies don't "pay", neither
does the home market that looks so fine in their ledgers. And it is
just in the crucial matter of how to make our domestic policy work
that the isolationists break down disastrously. Jerome Frank has
nothing more concrete to offer than "a new spirit of cooperation"
implemented by some arrangement "by which several industries
meet, and confer, and work with one another and the government on
their price and production schedules." This is "the old crap" of
N.R.A. all over again, and the sort of cooperation business will
expect, and get, is the kind the kid gives to the tiger when it doesn't
struggle too vigorously. Stuart Chase devotes only one chapter of
his book to the question of what American capitalism can do if it
doesn't go to war. His proposals, also extremely vague, are for some
sort of credit and inflation panacea. Having successively cried aloud
in the wilderness the coming of technocracy, consumer cooperation,
soil conservation, and semantics, Stuart the Baptist seems to be dis-
covering a brand-new savior: Major Douglas.
If our problems would yield to the simpleminded rationalistic
analysis the isolationists apply to them, we should not be in the mess
we are in today. Their calculations, however, are upset by their fail-
ure to take into account the factor which makes any capitalist society
a dynamic tension of class forces, the key to which is neither book-
keeping nor technology but power politics. Just as much as the war
party, the isolationists think in classless terms, refusing to admit
the existence of the class struggle. And so both fail to understand
that the war drive is primarily a matter of domestic rather than
foreign policy. The Administration is trying to export the class war
to the Rhine and the Mediterranean. It is true, says the President
with his famous smile, ten million of you are unemployed and we've
had to cut relief payments, but just think what social progress we'll
make once we've rid ourselves of those monsters in black and brown
shirts three thousand miles across the Atlantic! The isolationists,
indeed, are a shade less sophisticated than the jitterbugs. They not
only fail to grasp the dynamics of the war drive, but as an alterna-
tive they offer nothing but the same sort of timid reformism that
has so clearly failed to solve the problems of American capitalism-
whose failure, in fact, is precisely the reason the New Deal is now
turning to war. The jitterbugs at least recognize that the reformist
jig is up, and that war is the only perspective left for our capitalism.

17

=== Page 19 ===
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PARTISAN REVIEW
And in this recognition, they follow the lead of the most inspired
capitalist politician of several generations.

The Great
Conspiracy

So long as modern war is regarded merely as
a matter of one nation fighting another, it will
be impossible either to understand it or to intel-
ligently oppose it. Whatever may be said of
past wars, the last world war "settled" nothing, even among the
capitalist bandits who promoted it: the same opposing sides are
about to tear each other apart once more and for essentially the
same reasons. Whichever side wins will impose a new Versailles on
the loser, and the third world war will begin to grow before the ink
is dry on the treaty. Imperialist aims are still of major importance,
but modern warfare must also be regarded as the chief instrument
whereby the obsolete bourgeoisie maintain their death-grip on the
social order. "The great error of nearly all studies of war," writes
Simone Weill in a remarkable article published in International
Review last year, "an error into which all socialists have fallen, has
been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics, when it is
especially an act of interior politics, and the most atrocious act of
all." Her development of this idea seems to me to open wide and
novel perspectives on the war question. "Marx has shown force-
fully, she writes, "that the modern method of production consists
essentially of the subordination of the workers to the instruments of
labor, which are disposed of by those who do not work. He has
shown how competition, knowing no other weapon than the exploi-
tation of the workers, is transformed into a struggle of each em-
ployer against his own workmen and, in the last analysis, of the
entire class of employers against their employees.
"In the same way, war in our days is distinguished by the sub-
ordination of the combatants to the instruments of combat, and the
armaments, the true heroes of modern warfare, as well as the men
dedicated to their service, are directed by those who do not fight.
And since this directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the
enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their
death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself
into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own
army.
"War in the last analysis appears as a struggle led by all the
state apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough
and able to bear arms.. ."

=== Page 20 ===
THIS QUARTER
The Great
Spree
19
Why should a Marxist analysis like this be so
alien to the way of thinking of our intellec
tuals? They sincerely abhor war and believe
themselves to be on the side of the people. They
are moved by a high-minded concern for the future of civilization.
And yet they are blindly playing the game of the chief enemies of
both civilization and the people. Their moral indignation is turned
against a scapegoat fascism across the ocean, to defeat which they
are making common cause with the class and the economic system
which in this country right under their very noses is preparing the
next world slaughter. The explanation is to be found in the peculiar
relationship of the intelligentsia to the class struggle. They conceive
of their own thinking as being disinterested, free from class loyal
ties, taking as its referent "society in general." In a sense, this is
true. They have not the direct economic interest in one side or the
other of the class war which the proletariat and the big bourgeoisie
have. But in a deeper sense, they deceive themselves. Like the petty
bourgeoisie which produces most of them, the intellectuals shift back
and forth between the two polar antagonists, attaching themselves
to whichever at the moment seems to be the stronger. In times of
severe capitalist crisis, when the authority of the ruling bourgeoisie
is shaken, the intellectuals swing towards the workers. But since the
bourgeoisie are usually very much in the ascendant, the intellectuals
generally think in its terms. So today, they follow along after the
bourgeoisie towards war.
Indeed, one finds them right now considerably in advance of their
leaders. When Congress refused to fortify the island of Guam and
thus advance our Pacific line of "defense" some two thousand miles
closer to Japan, the N. Y. Herald-Tribune received the bad news
calmly enough, but the Daily Worker ran indignant headlines about
fascist-minded saboteurs. War is a serious matter for the workers,
who will have to die. It is also a serious matter, a point one tends to
forget, for the bankers and industrialists, who hesitate to commit
their vast properties to the hazards of war. The intellectuals have
comparatively little social responsibility: in a war they will risk
neither their property, which is generally not great, nor their skulls,
which are more valuable behind the lines. And so they can afford
the luxury of disinterested moral judgments. It was The Nation
which thought the President's jingoistic opening message to the
present Congress "rang out like a bugle across the world to rally
the dispirited and retreating democracies to a stand." It was left to

=== Page 21 ===
20 PARTISAN REVIEW

The Commercial and Financial Chronicle to point out that in his
message, the President "failed to indicate that whatever those
countries [i.e., Germany and Italy] formerly could boast of free-
dom and tolerance were destroyed from within, and not from with-
out." The Chronicle concluded its quasi-Marxist analysis: "Nor was
any reference made to the complete improbability of an attack by
any or all of those aggressor governments upon the United States,
or to the even more remote contingency of success in any foreign
attack so long as the liberties left us by our own government are
worth fighting for and preserving."
The American intellectuals are off again on a moral spree. They
will come to their senses in the cold grey dawn of a war-torn world,
and they will experience again what Rosa Luxemburg in 1916 wrote
in the "Junius Pamphlet":
"The show is over. The curtain has fallen on trains filled with
reservists, as they pull out amid the cries of enthusiastic maidens. . .
Into the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there rings a
different chorus: the hoarse croak of the hawks and hyenas of the
battlefield. Ten thousand tents, guaranteed according to specifica-
tions, one hundred thousand kilos of bacon, cocoa powder, coffee
substitute, cash on immediate delivery, shrapnel, drills, ammunition
bags, marriage bureaus for war widows, leather belts, war orders—
serious propositions only considered. And the cannon fodder that
was loaded upon the trains in August and September is rotting on
the battlefields of Belgium and the Vosges, while profits are spring-
ing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead. . .
"Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth,
thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the
roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics,
but as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilence devas-
tating culture and humanity—so it appears in all its hideous
nakedness."

D. M.

=== Page 22 ===
Poems

Wallace Stevens

THE WOMAN THAT HAD MORE
BABIES THAN THAT

I

An acrobat on the border of the sea
Observed the waves, the rising and the swell
And the first line spreading up the beach; again,
The rising and the swell, the preparation
And the first line foaming over the sand; again,
The rising and the swell, the first line's glitter,
Like a dancer's skirt, flung round and settling down.
This was repeated day by day. The waves
Were mechanical, muscular. They never changed,
They never stopped, a repetition repeated
Continually-There is a woman has had
More babies than that. The merely revolving wheel
Returns and returns, along the dry, salt shore.
There is a mother whose children need more than that.
She is not the mother of landscapes but of those
That question the repetition on the shore,
Listening to the whole sea for a sound
Of more or less, ascetically sated
By amical tones.

The acrobat observed
The universal machine. There he perceived
The need for a thesis, a music constant to move.

II

Berceuse, transatlantic. The children are men, old men,
Who, when they think and speak of the central man,
Of the humming of the central man, the whole sound

21

=== Page 23 ===
22 PARTISAN REVIEW

Of the sea, the central humming of the sea,
Are old men breathed on by a maternal voice,
Children and old men and philosophers,
Bald heads with their mother's voice still in their ears.
The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds
And of sounds so far forgotten, like her voice,
That they return unrecognized. The self
Detects the sound of a voice that doubles its own,
In the images of desire, the forms that speak,
The ideas that come to it with a sense of speech.
The old men, the philosophers, are haunted by that
Maternal voice, the explanation at night.
They are more than parts of the universal machine.
Their need in solitude: that is the need,
The desire, for the fiery lullaby.

III

If her head
Stood on a plain of marble, high and cold;
If her eyes were chinks in which the sparrows built;
If she was deaf with falling grass in her ears—
But there is more than a marble, massive head.
They find her in the crackling summer night,
In the Duft of towns, beside a window, beside
A lamp, in a day of the week, the time before spring.
A manner of walking, yellow fruit, a house,
A street. She has a supernatural head.
On her lips familiar words become the words
Of an elevation, an elixir of the whole.

=== Page 24 ===
LIFE ON A BATTLESHIP
LIFE ON A BATTLESHIP

I
The rape of the bourgeoisie accomplished, the men
Returned on board The Masculine. That night,
The captain said,
"The war between classes is
A preliminary, a provincial phase,
Of the war between individuals. In time,
When earth has become a paradise, it will be
A paradise full of assassins. Suppose I seize
The ship, make it my own and, bit by bit,
Seize yards and docks, machinery and men,
As others have, and then, unlike the others,
Instead of building ships, in numbers, build
A single ship, a cloud on the sea, the largest
Possible machine, a divinity of steel,
Of which I am captain. Given what I intend,
The ship would become the centre of the world.
My cabin as the centre of the ship and I
As the centre of the cabin, the centre of
The divinity, the divinity's mind, the mind
Of the world would have only to ring and ft!
It would be done. If, only to please myself,
I said that men should wear stone masks and, to make
The word respected, fired ten thousand guns
In mid-Atlantic, bellowing, to command,
It would be done. And once the thing was done,
Once the assassins wore stone masks and did
As I wished, once they fell backward when my breath
Blew against them or bowed from the hips, when I turned
My head, the sorrow of the world, except
As man is natural, would be at an end."

II
So posed, the captain drafted rules of the world,
Regulae mundi, as apprentice of
Descartes:
First. The grand simplifications reduce
Themselves to one.
Of this the Captain said,
23

=== Page 25 ===
24
PARTISAN REVIEW

"It is a lesser law than the one itself,
Unless it is the one itself, or unless
The Masculine, much magnified, that cloud
On the sea, is both law and evidence in one,
As the final simplification is meant to be.
It is clear that it is not a moral law.
It appears to be what there is of life compressed
Into its own illustration, a divinity
Like any other, rex by right of the crown,
The jewels in his beard, the mystic wand,
And imperator because of death to oppose
The illustrious arms, the symbolic horns, the red
For battle, the purple for victory. But if
It is the absolute why must it be
This immemorial grandiose, why not
A cockle-shell, a trivial emblem great
With its final force, a thing invincible
In more than phrase? There's the true masculine,
The spirit's ring and seal, the naked heart."
It was a rabbi's question. Let the rabbis reply.
It implies a flaw in the battleship, a defeat
As of a make-believe.

III
Second. The part

Is the equal of the whole.

The captain said,
"The ephebi say that there is only the whole,
The race, the nation, the state. But society
Is a phase. We approach a society
Without a society, the politicians
Gone, as in Calypso's isle or in Citare,
Where I or one or the part is the equal of
The whole. The sound of a dozen orchestras
May rush to extinguish the theme, the basses thump
And the fiddles smack, the horns yahoo, the flutes
Strike fire, but the part is the equal of the whole,
Unless society is a mystical mass.
This is a thing to twang a philosopher's sleep,
A vacuum for the dozen orchestras
To fill, the grindstone of antiquest time,
Breakfast in Paris, music and madness and mud,

=== Page 26 ===
LIFE ON A BATTLESHIP
25

The perspective squirming as it tries to take
A shape, the vista twisted and burning, a thing
Kicked through the roof, caressed by the river-side.
On The Masculine one asserts and fires the guns.
But one lives to think of this growing, this pushing life,
The vine, at the roots, this vine of Key West, splurging,
Covered one morning with blue, one morning with white,
Coming from the East, forcing itself to the West,
The jungle of tropical part and tropical whole."

IV

The first and second rules are reconciled
In a third: The whole cannot exist without
The parts. Thus: Out of the number of his thoughts
The thinker knows. The gunman of the commune
Kills the commune.

Captain, high captain, how is it, now,
With our affair, our destiny, our hash?
Your guns are not rhapsodic strophes, red
And true. The good, the strength, the sceptre moves
From constable to god, from earth to air,
The circle of the sceptre growing large
And larger as it moves, moving toward
A hand that fails to seize it. High captain, the grand
Simplifications approach but do not touch
The ultimate one, though they are parts of it.
Without them it could not exist. That's our affair,
That's this grandiose battleship of yours and your
Regulae mundi . . . That much is out of the way.
If the sceptre returns to earth, still moving, still
Precious from the region of the hand, still bright
With saintly imagination and the stains
Of martyrs, to be arrogant in our need,
It will be all we have. Our fate is our own:
Our good, from this the rhapsodic strophes flow,
Through prophets and succeeding prophets, whose prophecies
Grow large and larger. Our fate is our own. The hand,
It must be the hand of one, it must be the hand
Of a man, that seizes our strength, will seize it to be
Merely the sceptre over long desire,
Merely the centre of a circle, spread
To the final full, an end without rhetoric.

=== Page 27 ===
We Rented to the Lenins

Editors' Note: The following reminiscences are by the Swiss
cobbler in whose house in Zürich the Lenins were paying guests in
1917. They were first published in Schweizer Spiegel, a Swiss
magazine. The translation is by Gertrude Barnes Fiertz. We feel
that the recent death of Krupskaya-who here appears as "Mrs.
Lenin"-lends special interest to these naive and shrewd comments
on the Lenins' domestic life.

"SO, MR. KAMMERER, now there's going to be peace!" Mr. Lenin
told me a few days before he traveled to Russia. That was in
1917 just before I moved from the Spiegelgasse to the Culmann-
strasse. He wanted to come along too but if he could travel to Russia,
he would not go to the Culmannstrasse, he had said. The Lenins too
had everything packed, and were ready while we were moving.
Only they did not know whether they would go to Russia or or to the
Culmannstrasse. Then he did get his transit permit, went suddenly
to Bern and from there in the sealed car directly to Russia.
I had always liked him. He stayed with me for a year and a
half. He lived in a room with his wife, and paid twenty-eight francs
a month. At that time it was different from now. Then one was
glad if one could get any one for a room. At that time there were
so many rooms free, for the Germans and Austrians were all in
the war.
First came Mrs. Lenin to inquire about the room. My wife
really did not wish to take her. One could notice that she was of
the Russian type. But then she brought her husband and the latter
made a really good impression. They had had a room temporarily
before, but the landlord had gone to the hospital, and when he got
well they had to move. That was why Mrs. Lenin was in such a
26

=== Page 28 ===
WE RENTED TO THE LENINS 27

hurry. She was really a good soul. One should never judge a person
by appearances. As to looks, she was somewhat ordinary. She wore
a dress that was a little bit short for that time, and she spoke some-
what hastily. Lenin himself was simple too. But he had strength
in his chest. He was stocky with a broad back and a strong neck.
My son often said to me: “Gosh, he has a neck like a bull! If that's
a sign of will power this man must possess an iron will."
Mr. Lenin frequented the Eintracht Restaurant. That was
where he often had dinner at noon. When he went out he always
wore a visor cap. One would have taken him for a mechanic. His
shoes were always the sort for going to the mountains. That is why
he never needed many shoes. Only once he bought a pair from me.
Very coarse, solid shoes, and he had extra nails put into them.

They were punctual in paying, those two, one must grant them
that! We never had any difficulties with them, they were honorable
in every respect. Every day he came down to me in the store, and
fetched his correspondence. The letter carrier always put the things
on the shoe box and said, "That's for the Lenins." They received
mail three times a day, a mass of letters and papers.

Downstairs there was a restaurant, the Jacobsbrunnen. But
Mr. Lenin never went in there. Anyway he was not an alcohol-
drinker. He drank a lot of tea, however, just like all Russians.
He often went to bed very late. We were usually asleep when
he was still walking up and down his room. Mornings he was always
up and about in good time.

The Lenins always have been quiet citizens. Only once in 1917
they celebrated the Russian Revolution. Then there were at least
twenty persons in the room. On the bedside table, on the chest, on
the washstand, on the beds, everywhere they were sitting around.

With his wife Mr. Lenin got along well. I think the two of
them never quarreled. With Mrs. Lenin it was easy to get along.
She was allowed to cook in our kitchen together with my wife. We
had agreed to let her do that. The two women always got along
well together, which is something to wonder at if one considers
that the kitchen was a narrow intestine of a room, and that the two
women had to squeeze by each other to pass. Mrs. Lenin would
have been a good Hausfrau, but she had her mind always on her
other work. She often went up to the library and at home too she
wrote an enormous amount, always by hand. That's how the house-
hold had to suffer for it. My wife made the beds. The washbowls
and pails Mrs. Lenin emptied. For the dishwashing she paid four
francs a month. That was not arranged but she paid it voluntarily.

=== Page 29 ===
28 PARTISAN REVIEW

The two of them had to live with unbelievable economy. In
the evening there was often only tea and buttered bread. I never
would have had enough from a supper like that! Only on Saturdays
she made meat patties for Sunday, and these she always called
cutlets. For the noon meal Mrs. Lenin often boiled only oatmeal.
Now and then it happened that the oatmeal was burned, and then
Mr. Lenin always told me, "Mr. Kammerer, you see we live in
grand style! We have roasts every day." He called the burned
oatmeal a roast.

When Mrs. Lenin wanted to travel to Russia my wife was
disturbed about her going into this insecure land at such an uncer-
tain time. Then Mrs. Lenin answered, "You see, Mrs. Kammerer,
that's where I have work to do. Here I have nothing to do."

Before the Lenins traveled to Russia, Mrs. Lenin promised to
write to us. Probably she did, too, but at that time one never re-
ceived mail from Russia.

Before the Lenins' departure, he packed many of his belongings
into a box, and said, "If I return, I take these things again, other-
wise you may dispose of them." I opened the box only after the
news got around that he was dead. But then I saw that the moths
had raised such havoc with the plunder that I burned everything.
An overcoat of his, which he left, I presented to a relative. The tea
kettle, the tea strainer, and the tea glasses that the Lenins left
behind, I gave to my son.

The furniture is now again in a room that I have rented on
the Culmannstrasse. Only in the wardrobe I put the mirror. My
people who now rent the room, do not know that these are the beds
in which the Lenins slept. Many people have rented the room since
that time, who would have been shocked if they had known that
Lenin had slept in that very same bed.

In his room there stood two beds, a sofa, a washstand with a
mirror attached, a wardrobe, a table and a few chairs. The room
was well but simply furnished. After Lenin's death a reporter came
once, and took pictures of the house and the store, and above all of
the room and the table in it. Afterwards it was said that this was
the table on which the plan for the Russian Revolution was drawn.
But that was not the table at all, for the table which at that time
had been in Lenin's room, stands today in my living room.

=== Page 30 ===
The Anatomy of the Popular Front

Sidney Hook

THE PRESENT time in America is a time of political revaluation.
Never before in recent American history have political labels meant
so little—Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Communist. In the past
it was possible with a fair degree of accuracy to make some predic-
tions about the social beliefs and programs of an individual either
on the basis of his organizational commitments or his willingness
to accept some current political designations. To-day—who can say
what one will find if he scratches a Democrat or a Republican? This
is true not only for the old-line political parties but for the new.
What can you guess about a man's social philosophy if you know
that he is a member or supporter of the Labor Party? And if you
hear some one argue forcefully that American capitalists have been
remiss in attending to their legitimate interests in China, what is the
probability that he is a Liberty League Republican or a member of
the Communist Party?
Political revaluation, however, has not to any large extent ex-
pressed itself as a revaluation of ideas. It has taken the form of
strategical maneuvers, new combinations and alliances with an
eye to the day to day situation, not to a long time perspective. The
old controlling political assumptions have been abandoned in most
quarters as inadequate but new ones have not been substituted for
them. A specific allegiance to an organization or a leader, a mood
that all political principles are illusory, a feeling that the only thing
that matters is the day to day situation has replaced "ideas" or
political "philosophy." It is true that a long time perspective con-
sists of a series of day to day situations—but a series organized
from the standpoint of a basic need or interest. There are few as-
pects of individual or social life in which to live only from day to
day is not demonstrable foolishness. But what is foolishness in art,

29

=== Page 31 ===
30
PARTISAN REVIEW

education, any kind of husbandry, even in business enterprise—is
currently regarded as the height of wisdom in politics. The reason
for this unpragmatic empiricism is simple. The old formulas and
faiths no longer work or are hopelessly irrelevant. Those who
make a principle out of "no principles" are making a virtue out of
their bewilderment. Instead of seeking for new leading principles
of interpretation and action, instead of consciously modifying or
revising the old principles, they have abandoned themselves to a
course of principled confusion.
Who are they? Among the groups left of center—the Social-
Democrats, Communists, Laborites, Farmer-Laborites, some So-
cialists, and the liberals and progressives of indeterminate hue who
sleep in a different political bed every election day. All, practically,
but the Bolshevik-Leninists, who have learned nothing and forgot-
ten nothing since October 1917, and who, in their simplistic think-
ing, imagine that the only alternative to the murderous despotism
of Stalin, is the "enlightened" minority one-party dictatorship of
Lenin, out of which Stalin grew, or the "socialism" of Scheide-
mann or Noske. Except for this group and for some extremist sects
which are important only as illustrative material for political psycho-
pathology, it is impossible to understand the political orientation of
Left-wing America on the basis of any programmatic declaration.
But a political orientation it does have. Indeed, it is more than an
orientation, it is a positive political direction towards Roosevelt and
the New Deal.

Almost all the roads which in the past had Socialist and fanci-
ful revolutionary signposts now converge on a man and a strategy
publicly dedicated to the defence of capitalism, often used synony-
mously with democracy. None of these roads is a straight road.
Some bend around Jersey City. Others skirt the region of share-
croppers. A few are broken up as they run through the naval and
military centers. The going becomes extremely rough when they
adjoin the districts of Kelley in Chicago and Hines in New York.
But they all meet at a common end.

Maps to facilitate this orientation are plentiful; justifications
are few. We have cause to be thankful therefore to Max Lerner for
his It Is Later Than You Think.* It is one of the few earnest at-
tempts to make sense of a policy which almost the entire Left is
following despite the tragic results of similar policies wherever they
have been tried. For this reason, if for no other, the book deserves
the attention of every student of the American political scene, of

* Viking Press, $2.50.

=== Page 32 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 31

every one who wants to understand the thought processes by which
intelligent people, yesterday socialists and to-day not less conscious
of themselves as socialists-at-heart, make their way to Popular
Frontism. The author is a skillful writer with a flair for catching
current nuances of opinion and attitude and fixing them in well-
formed sentences. He is not a spokesman for the Stalinists although
he seems to be in great fear of them. Like many others who are too
independent to swallow the rationalizations that are cooked up in the
interests of Russian foreign policy, he wishes to distinguish himself
from the Stalinists and yet to escape their slanderous vituperation.
The result is, as I shall show later, that whenever he is compelled
to acknowledge the horrors of Stalin's regime, he has a tendency
to extenuate them in order to discount their striking similarity to
the domestic terror of Hitler. He has a timely discussion of the use
and abuse of power in which he makes some very pertinent observa-
tions without really coming to grips with the position of those
socialists who wish to safeguard against the dangers of bureaucratic
corruption in a planned economy.

Lerner's book is an ideal one for our analysis because it has
received extravagant praise from (to mention only a few) Mum-
ford, Laski, Bliven, MacLeish, the book reviewer of the New
Leader, and from left-wing supporters of Roosevelt generally.
There is little doubt that many of the progressives who read and
endorsed it felt that here was something that seemed to supply a
perspective for their flounderings from issue to issue; that did jus-
tice to their consciousness of rectitude and yet eased their bewilder-
ment at the sight of curious fellow-travellers in the crusade against
fascism; that revivified their dying nostalgia for socialism into a
new hope and yet strengthened their belief in themselves as political
realists. It is, I believe, as the expression of the latest variant of
American progressivism, a progressivism bold enough to declare its
ultimate goal to be collectivism, that Max Lerner's book derives its
chief significance. For the upshot of the book is an argument to
show why anyone who accepts socialism should support an American
Popular Front.

The central argument of the book is not continuous. It runs
briefly something like this. The old liberalism is dead. The new
liberalism must accept "the premises and the consequences of demo-
cratic collectivism" in order to implement its own values. The de-
velopment of capitalist economy, however, which is the immediate
context of all political action, leads to economic crises, to fascism
and to war. How can these be obviated? The Marxist left, right and

=== Page 33 ===
32 PARTISAN REVIEW

center are cursed either by sectarianism or opportunism. The only
alternative that remains is a Popular Front of all classes opposed to
reaction for the defense of whatever democracy now exists. It is a
dangerous policy but not an impossible one. The dangers can be
met by a militant struggle for more and better democracy with a
constructive program, first, of saving capitalism from itself by a
process of gradual and piecemeal socialization; second, by defeating
the civil war which "as is altogether likely" will be forced upon it as
soon as a significant step is taken in the direction of socialization;
and finally, by finishing the job of socialization. Since capitalism
cannot be revived to a point where it insures prosperity, there must
be no retreat to the past. If the social services are cut down, it may
help production but not the public welfare. Even the defense of the
capitalist status-quo is a retreat, since the hurried tempos of change
do not make the status-quo possible. Every capitalist democracy to-
day is a crisis state which, to escape fascism, must develop into a
Popular Front government in fact if not in name. The Popular
Front, to be sure, is a very precarious affair with a logically delimit-
ed end. What follows it will depend upon us; and more specifically
upon the organization of a Labor Party that will make political
bargains and alliances with other parties but will eschew dirty
politics.

Lerner has tried to forestall criticism in advance by stating
some of the objections that can be raised to this program from a
genuine socialist point of view. There is a disarming frankness in
the concessions he is prepared to make to the opponents of his
analysis. The honesty with which he faces some of the difficulties of
his position encourages the hope that he will grant the implications
of what he admits. But my primary interest is with the position it-
self. For within the limits of the probabilities that attend all political
judgment, I think it can be demonstrated that this position is con-
tradictory and self-defeating.

It is admitted on this position that the decline of capitalism
cannot be checked by political measures of any kind. It is also admit-
ted that in any Popular Front government it is the policy of the
most conservative wing, which is pledged to support capitalism, that
must prevail. Without capitalist parties there is no Popular Front.
With them, the workingclass parties become hostages of the fear,
timidity and class interest of their allies. In principle, there is no
reform or concession which can be won by a Popular Front govern-
ment which cannot be won from a normal capitalist democracy by
militant action of organized labor and its sympathizers among other

=== Page 34 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 33

classes who support a labor program. (Vide England.) It is admit-
ted on this position that the first real step towards socialism will
probably bring what Marx described as a pro-slavery rebellion to
save capitalism. Could such a movement be effectively met with a
key party in the government which is itself intent upon saving capi-
talism? And since it is admitted that there is no going back or even
marking time in the face of economic decline, what alternatives re-
main for the Popular Front? Either to present a socialist program,
which it cannot do because of its capitalist allies, or, what is more
likely, to become the executioner of its own social reforms (as well
as of those it has inherited), and thus incur the danger that the
disillusioned masses will succumb to apathy or fall prey to fascist
demagogy. If we take what is admitted and what is implied, the
whole position amounts to an invitation to disaster. This follows
from Lerner's own analysis. Either he must withdraw his critique
of capitalist economy, admitting that it can be stabilized both na-
tionally and internationally in an era of decline, or he must acknow-
ledge that the Popular Front is a dangerous illusion which, pre-
cisely because it cannot undertake any fundamental change in the
economic order, makes it easier for the Fascists to develop a mass
base.

To this Lerner can make the psychologically impressive retort:
the Popular Front is a form of Hobson's Choice. It may be theoreti-
cally bankrupt and historically inadequate. But what else is there? It
is already later than you think! I shall accept this challenge and will
indicate an alternative that is compatible both with democracy and
socialism. I wish, first, to consider briefly some historical illustra-
tions that are relevant to different aspects of the problem.

(a) It does not require great historical insight to realize that the
Social Revolutionary regime under Kerensky was at the beginning
of its rule and almost to the verge of October, a Popular Front gov-
ernment. Of course the historical situation is only roughly analogous
to the present. But there was one element in the political logic of the
situation which has a direct bearing upon all situations where it is
necessary to meet the threat of reaction in a bold decisive way. The
menace of German militarism and the restoration of Czarism was
as great then as the menace of Fascism now. Why did the Social
Revolutionary Party, from the first day of the revolution to the last,
numerically the strongest political party, fail in every crucial test?
Interesting light is cast upon this question in the important but
neglected work of Victor Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution.
Next to Kerensky, Chernov was the leading figure of the

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34 PARTISAN REVIEW

Party which controlled the Provisional Government. Indeed, before
1917 Kerensky was hardly a name in the councils of his party.
Chernov, however, was not only the chief theoretical light of his
party but enjoyed the prestige of intimate collaboration with the
great Gershini and Gots, remarkable propagandists of the deed.
Considering its source, the experience on which it is based, as well
as the theoretical analysis out of which it arose, Chernov's judg-
ment is worthy of every respect. According to Chernov, the Social
Revolutionary Party lost by default because of its heterogeneous
social composition which prevented it from carrying out its own
principles. It had become a gigantic mass popular front party with
factions ranging from extreme right to left. It could never achieve
more than a unity of phrase when unity of action was the most
pressing of all things. The right wing which worked hand in glove
with the Cadets dominated the party. Chernov now reveals that
he himself was convinced that the Provisional Government was
doomed unless it gave land to the peasants, socialized basic indus-
tries, broke with the Cadets, and came to an understanding with
Germany. This was the program which enabled the Bolsheviks later
to acquire a majority in the Soviets. All of these questions involved
crucial issues that could be settled only by a class decision. The
prosecution of the war was demanded primarily by that class which
sought to postpone and evade the necessary domestic social reforms.
Chernov worked energetically for his program behind the scenes
and succeeded on occasions in getting it formally adopted. But it
remained on paper. Any attempt to carry it out would have alienated
the Right. The result was that Chernov's own choice was either to
break with his Party or to go along with a program he did not be-
lieve in. Chernov tried to bridge this choice by remaining quiet on
important public occasions. So strange and unwonted was Chernov's
silence that it enabled Trotsky to get off one of his brilliant quips:
"Abstaining from the vote became for him (Chernov) a form of
political life." But Chernov abstained from voting and speaking, out
of fear of breaking the unity of his popular front party. Looking
back on the whole situation he writes of himself: "It must be ac-
knowledged that Chernov sacrificed to the fetish of unachievable
party unity the energetic defense of the very program which the
party had formally adopted at his initiative." What is true of a
party which has different class wings is true of any alliance of par-
ties that represent different classes. The program of the group
farthest to the right prevails and must prevail for this is the pur-
chase price of its alliance. Everything else is rhetoric.

=== Page 36 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 35
(b) Germany illustrates the danger of a Popular Front in an-
other way. During most of the life of the Weimar Republic Ger-
many was ruled by an informal coalition of Social Democracy, the
Catholic Center and some of the smaller parties on the right and
left. This Popular Front coalition went as far as any capitalist
democracy has ever gone on the road of social reform. But it did
not and could not take measures to transform Germany into a so-
cialist economy. When the business cycle dipped sharply it was com-
pelled to trim its social services. Since it would not rule the trusts,
the trusts ruled it. One graphic illustration will suffice. In 1929
when the Arbitration board decided an important industrial dispute
in favor of the Ruhr workers, the Ruhr industrialists refused to
abide by the Arbitration award. They threatened to close down
their establishments. The Social Democrats were faced with the al-
ternative of enforcing the award which meant taking over an entire
industry or capitulating. They capitulated. No other Popular Front
Party would have gone along with them if they had done anything
else. But acts like these merely increased the influence of the Fascists
on the unemployed and poorly paid.

The direct menace of Fascism was met by a Popular Front
rally around Hindenburg, the national hero, which stretched as far
to the right as Hugenberg's Deutsch-National Partei. It was Hin-
denburg who called Hitler to power-legally.

In Russia there were two possible alternatives to the policy of
Kerensky and the Cadets. One was taken by the Bolsheviks: the
other was a proposal that had supporters in every party, viz., to
organize an all labor and peasant government on the basis of the pro-
gram which Chernov secretly defended and publicly attacked. Cher-
nov's proposal was turned down in his own party and repudiated by
almost all other working-class parties with the same type of argu-
ments that are now offered for the Popular Front. In Germany,
there was only one mode of political action which could have pre-
vented Fascism, viz., a union of all the working class parties on the
left, together with their sympathizers, on the basis of a militant
socialist program. The Social-Democrat and Communist Parties
were responsible in equal measure but for different reasons for the
failure to take this road. The first was tied to the Popular Front; the
second to the Kremlin's Foreign Office.

(c) France illustrates still another lesson in the disastrous poli-
cies of the Popular Front. It showed that major domestic and in-
ternational problems are all of a piece. The revolutionary ferment
of 1936 died down under the pacifying influence of the Popular

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36 PARTISAN REVIEW

Front which was able to win some reforms because the conserva-
tives feared the mood of the masses. But in entering the government
the left Parties did so on terms laid down by the Radical Socialists.
The rise in the cost of living soon nullified the gains made earlier.
Instead of carrying out the adjustments which had been promised,
under the pressure of the Radical Socialists, the Popular Front
sought “to restore confidence” in capitalism. Working class groups
that led strikes during this period were denounced as agent-provoca-
teurs by the working class parties supporting the government, par-
ticularly the Communists. The revolts against French Imperialism
in the French colonies were curbed with an iron hand. Most fateful
of all, the Radical Socialists refused to permit the Popular Front
government, organized to defeat Fascism, to send the aid and
supplies which the Spanish Popular Front needed to defeat Franco.
France and Russia joined the Non-Intervention (!) Committee.
Now, the chickens came home to roost. Pleading the necessities of
a national emergency, a national emergency which was the direct
consequence of Popular Front foreign policy, the remainder of the
working class gains on the domestic front was whittled away.
Allegedly to take a strong hand against Germany, the Popular Front
had to take a strong hand against its own supporters. But since the
class interests of the French bourgeoisie were not challenged at
Munich, the Radical Socialists who had insisted as a condition of
their participation in the Popular Front that they keep control of
the Army and Foreign affairs, went all the way with Chamberlain.
They were not conscious of having betrayed at Munich any of their
interests, or of French interests as they interpreted them. Nor did
they. When the C.G.T. and their erstwhile political allies called for
a general strike, the Radical Socialists insisted that the same agent-
provocateurs whom they had all joined in denouncing a few months
back were the instigators of the movement. They broke the general
strike and with it the back of the Popular Front. At the present
writing, the French workers are in retreat, weaker than they have
ever been. The menace of Fascism which was to be laid by the
Popular Front looms larger than before.

What was the alternative? Had the working class parties made
a United Front; had they stayed out of the Government and per-
mitted the Conservative Parties, including the Radical Socialists, to
take full responsibility for the failure to help the Spanish in their
fight against international Fascism which, if and when it triumphs,
will be able to attack France in the rear; had they permitted the
Conservative Parties to take the complete onus for undermining the

=== Page 38 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 37

conditions of life of the masses; had they laid the Munich Pact and
everything that led up to it and followed it, at the door of the classes
whose interests were not there betrayed--had they done all this,
it is altogether likely that France would now have had a Socialist
government supported by a majority of the people.
(d) Spain-bleeding, war-torn Spain-completes the picture.
Here, too, the Popular Front was in power. As usual the lead was
taken by the most conservative party-the Republicans. Little was
done to improve the conditions of peasant life. The Popular Front
program specifically repudiated the principle of nationalization of
the land and even such mild measures as the nationalization of the
banks. Nothing was done to liberate Morocco from the hands of the
Foreign Legionnaires and its officer corps. Nothing was done to in-
sure the loyalty of the army by democratizing its structure and
eliminating the feudal officer clique which was responsible for the
Asturian massacres and other crimes. But worst of all, there is evi-
dence that the right wing was aware of the plans for the Franco re-
volt but instead of sounding the alarm kept silent in hopes of nego-
tiating for its own safety. It was only by rallying the masses behind
the back of the Azana-Barrios government, which issued misleading
bulletins about the general tranquility and refused to arm the work-
ers, that the labor parties were able to organize opposition to the
Fascist treachery. At the beginning, the spontaneous defense of the
masses was accompanied by steps towards nationalization of the
large estates and some factories. Instead of pushing further in this
direction, and extending it, even by decree, to Fascist controlled ter-
ritory, where it would have given the peasants a stake in the struggle
against Franco, a swing was made back to the program of the Re-
publicans, who were retained in the Popular Front government. In
the mistaken belief that the war against Franco could only be won
by postponing fundamental social reforms, almost all of the early
efforts along these lines were liquidated. In the vain hope that aid
would be received from other capitalist powers, the Popular Front
abandoned even its slight socialist coloration. In exchange for some
belated supplies from Russia, paid for in ready gold, it gave the
G.P.U. a free hand to frame-up, jail and assassinate any socialists
who, while fighting Franco, were were also critical of Stalin's reign of
terror.* It became the pawn and victim of the powers in the Non-In-
tervention Committee. Deserted by those to whom it had looked for
aid, paralyzed by the sacrifice of any social program which could
*The story has now been told by the Chief of the Soviet Military Intelligence
in Western Europe, General W. G. Krivitsky-the unhappy man who carried out
Stalin's orders in Spain. Cf. The Saturday Evening Post, April 15, 1939.

=== Page 39 ===
38 PARTISAN REVIEW

have rallied the workers and peasants throughout the whole of
Spain, weakened by the loss of morale among its own followers,
who were told that they must fight not for socialism but for the
status-quo out of whose unresolved tensions the revolt had devel-
oped—the tragic end was inescapable. Towards the close the leaders
of all the parties in the Popular Front offered to capitulate if Franco
would promise to spare the lives of those among them who had not
yet fled. With unexampled brazenness, the workers were asked to
continue the fight not even for a Popular Front victory but merely
that their leaders, whose policy had been responsible for the defeat,
could save their hides.

(e) A word or two about the Popular Front at home. Lerner is
right in regarding the Roosevelt administration as a Popular Front
government. But he does not see that it has already spent its force
and is in retreat. In this retreat whoever aids it, is objectively pre-
venting the emergence of a Labor Party dedicated to independent
working class action. Because it is a Popular Front government it
could not lift the Spanish Embargo; it could not proceed against the
Southern Bourbons; it could not secure sufficient funds for relief; it
had to capitulate to the utilities; it had to appease business with a
new tax program. The policy of appeasement is about to begin in
earnest. More ominous still is Roosevelt's inflated armament pro-
gram. At best it is a means of escaping from the necessity of de-
fending and carrying forward the program outlined by Lerner. At
worst, it is a preparation for war, the last resort of every capitalist
statesman or politician who desires to stave off fundamental social
change. And when we remember that war means fascism in full
military dress, the arc of Popular Front futility spirals downward
to the bloody mire it sought to avoid.

II

The basic theoretical confusion which attends most discussions
of the Popular Front consists in an identification of two proposi-
tions: (1) The working class and its mass organizations must be
the basis of the socialist movement; and (2) the working class and
its mass organizations can by themselves win power and achieve
socialism. The falsity of the second proposition is obvious, especial-
ly when it is doubtful that the working class constitutes a majority
of the population. But the falsity of the second proposition does not
imply the falsity of the first. The socialist movement must be based
upon the working class, to mention only one of many reasons, be-

=== Page 40 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT
39
cause in virtue of its situation in contemporary society there can be
no solution of its problems, nor even the plausible appearance of a
solution, short of the abolition of the profit system. In this it differs
from other classes who may indeed, like the farmers and petty
bourgeoisie, have their burdens but who with more seeming justifi-
cation believe that a partial yet satisfactory solution of their predica-
ment is possible under capitalism. The program of socialism can no
more be taken away from the workers than capitalism can be taken
away from the capitalists.
Despite this it remains true that without allies from the farm-
ers and lower middle classes the workers can never enjoy socialism
in our time. The standing problem, then, of the political parties of
the working class becomes the problem of educating their potential
allies to the fact that their basic difficulties cannot be solved by their
own political programs, all of which run counter to the fundamental
tendencies of capitalist development. To state it positively, the prob-
lem is to make their potential allies see that the socialist solution pro-
posed by the working class parties is ultimately the only solution
possible for all producers and consumers.
This requires unremitting use of the most effective techniques
of persuasion, organization, and militant struggle for continuous
improvement in living conditions. It requires opposition to every
step towards Fascism, no matter how progressive the terminology,
and the clearest differentiation from Stalinism together with its
fronts, stooges, and innocents. It is simply not the case, as Max
Lerner imagines, that it is impossible for a program which express-
es the immediate interests of a class to receive the support of the
majority of the population. The histories of the Republican and
Democratic Parties reveal that this is the general rule of American
political life, that it is possible to rally an absolute majority behind
the political program of a definite bourgeois class.
Precisely for this reason, i.e., because it does want to win over
sympathizers and allies from all other classes, the working class
should not join a Popular Front of political parties representing
different classes, not to speak of a National Front of all parties. For
if it does, it thereby accepts and publicizes a program of stabilizing
capitalism which, on its own economic theory, is doomed to fail,
leaving its credulous followers easy picking for Fascism. The cam-
paigns and slogans of working class parties must always be formu-
lated with an eye to the needs of other groups who also suffer from
oppression and economic disabilities under the existing order. But

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40 PARTISAN REVIEW

this is a far cry from an alliance with other class parties whose pro-
grams are in principle incompatible with a socialist perspective.
It is astounding but true that that many of the advocates of a Popu-
lar Front confuse it with a United Front. In politics it seems that
anyone can set himself up as an expert without having to familiarize
himself with the history, theory, and concrete practical problems
that are at the basis of all fundamental questions of strategy and
tactics. A United Front is an agreement between different political
organizations with different political programs for joint action on a
specific issue for a limited period of time. It is not an agreement on
a common political program; for in that case what we have is a
capitulation to the political program of the most conservative party
in the coalition, a state of affairs illustrated by all Popular Fronts.
A United Front is usually an agreement between political parties of
the same class; but on some important specific issues it may repre-
sent an agreement between parties of different classes. It is even
conceivable that on an extremely urgent issue involving a common
danger, after careful precautions have been taken and full liberty of
criticism has been reserved, Labor Parties may form a United Front
with a party already in the government but without themselves join-
ing the government or giving its general program any support.
The moral of the whole discussion may now be drawn. A So-
cialist who calls for the formation of a Popular Front cannot do so
without in effect surrendering his socialism—no matter what he
says in his heart. A Socialist who relies on the program of a Popular
Front to combat Fascism is entrusting his fate to an historically dis-
credited instrument whose weakness has been established in every
situation. A Socialist who supports a Popular Front government
may find that as a result of its program of defense of capitalism, it
may open the gates to the Fascists who are even more resolute de-
fenders of capitalism. There are many who cry "Peace" when they
mean War; and not a few Fascists, before they come to power, re-
pudiate the label. It was none other than Huey Long who observed:
"It will be easy to bring Fascism in America. All you have to say is
that you are preventing Fascism."
It is false to assert that for a Socialist there is no alternative
to the Popular Front. It is only when the situation has been made
hopeless by mistaken policies, adopted at a time when there was still
a clear alternative, that this appears to be the case. And even then,
this only appears to be the case.

=== Page 42 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 41

III

Due to limitations of space I can only touch briefly on Max
Lerner's references to Russia and the question of power. On sub-
stantially the same grounds as Trotsky, but with no better reason, he
regards Russia as a workers' state. He glides over the question
whether in fact the State is controlled by the workers; nor does he
discuss the method by which one would go about determining the
fact. He does not state what class in Russia, since presumably there
are no classes, is being oppressed by the state power. In the interests
of the Popular Front, which is to include the Communist Party, any
fundamental criticism of Stalin's regime must be ruled out. It is
not the struggle for socialism but abstention from criticism of the
Russian regime which constitutes for the Stalinists the minimum
program of participation in the Popular Front. Lerner consequently
tones down his criticism of Stalin to such a degree that only Com-
munists of exacerbated sensibilities will take umbrage at them.
There is not a single question that concerns Russia which Max
Lerner does not handle like a hot potato in the mouth. And since he
links his defense of collectivism to a broad cultural humanism, I
feel justified in holding him to the values he invokes.

He admits that there is some basis for the comparison often
drawn between the regimes of Germany and Russia because of "the
cult of the leader, the suppression of the opposition, the control of
the channels of opinion," etc. but concludes that "to equate" them
is "a semi-truth far more false than true." To be sure there is even
a difference between being shot and being hanged. To equate any
two things in the abstract, even two Fascist powers like Italy and
Turkey or Germany and Japan, is far more false than true. Com-
parison is intelligently made with respect to specific features for a
certain purpose. For Lerner the fact that Russia has a socialist
economy makes it basically different from Germany which has a
capitalist economy. Economy, then, seems to be Lerner's funda-
mental criterion for coupling or uncoupling countries when discuss-
ing their social form. Yet Lerner also admits that every democratic
state even under a Popular Front regime has a capitalist economy
basically like Germany. Why, then, does he line up the capitalist
democracies and Russia, on the one side, and the Fascist states, on
the other, for a new Armageddon? Is it true to suggest that Russia
and capitalist democracies considered abstractly or concretely have
more in common than either one with Fascism? On Lerner's analy-
sis, states that are basically the same (democratic capitalism and

=== Page 43 ===
42 PARTISAN REVIEW

Fascist capitalism) are apparently more opposed to each other than
they are to states (Russia) from which they are basically different.
The explanation of this confusion is simple.

When Lerner speaks of Germany and the capitalist democra-
cies, the political and cultural differences between them become the
basic differentiating feature. When he speaks of Russia and the
capitalist democracies, these no longer are a basic differentiating
feature, otherwise Russia would have to be equated with Germany.
When he speaks of Russia and Germany, suddenly their economies
emerge as the most relevant feature of differentiation—and this
from the standpoint of a militant democrat!

But has Russia a socialist economy? Here, too, we must re-
member that "economy" is an abstraction that covers many different
features of economic life. Comparison is meaningful when the
specific features of the economic behavior in any two states are ex-
amined. If this is done in an empirical way, which demands more
than a reading of paper decrees, many striking similarities between
the economies of Germany and Russia will be discovered. The sub-
ject demands a treatise as far as details go but I do not think it
would be difficult to show on the basis of the data supplied by the
Russian government itself, that it is not socialist in the Marxist
sense; nor would it be difficult to show that Germany is not capital-
ist in the conventional sense. Both are different kinds of mixed
economies. It is just as significant to speak of the "exploitation of
labor" in Russia as in Germany. This does not equate Germany and
Russia. Nor does it permit anyone to discount the impressive simi-
larity of their totalitarian cultural patterns by vague reference to
"economy" in the abstract.

Another characteristic of Lerner's discussion of Russia is that
where he admits the record of horror and brutality, he immediately
goes on to explain that given the historical situation, the record is
Understandable. Understandable? Yes, and the same is true for
Germany which Lerner leaves without benefit of historical under-
standing. But does this mean that given their past, nothing else
could have occurred in Russia or Germany? That the leaderships
are not responsible for their respective crimes against millions of
defenceless creatures because no possible alternative of action was
open to them? Absurd! Russia, pleads Lerner, never had strong
democratic traditions, went through a revolution, has spies in its
midst, is encircled by hostile foreign powers, and that therefore
"the emergency tension that generated the absolutism of power
serves to justify its continuance — at least in the minds of the

=== Page 44 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 43
leaders and, no doubt (sic!), of the vast majority of the people."
With just as much truth do apologists of Germany explain Hitler's
actions. How can Max Lerner have "no doubt" about what people
approve in a country which he himself describes as ruled by a
minority dictatorship, resting, as all dictatorships must, on bayon-
ets, a vast secret police, and concentration camps?
The saddest feature, to me, of Lerner's description of Russia
is his attitude towards the Moscow trials. He tries desperately to
skirt it. But he introduces it by indirection after uttering a mild
criticism of Russia because it does not permit an opposition. Russia,
he holds, should permit an opposition so that those who hold differ-
ent opinions would not be driven to "sabotage, treason and the
threat of revolt." This is comparable to someone who discussing
the Sacco-Vanzetti case were to say, "the social conditions of fish
peddlers should be improved so that the poor wretches would not be
driven to acts of desperation; society would thus gain by their pro-
ductive work." Does Mr. Lerner believe that his admission of the
guilt of the Moscow defendants will bring him absolution from the
Stalinists for his mild criticism about the suppression of opposition?
He is mistaken. But why should he deplore the suppression of oppo-
sition when, on his own theory, this was an unavoidable historical
consequence of Russian conditions? Lerner cannot have it both
ways at once. If the circumstances that attended the Russian Revo-
lution made the violent suppression of all opposition parties neces-
sary, as he contends on one page, then by what right of logic or
history does he reprove the Stalinists for this on another page?
Lerner might reply that it is just as compatible with his posi-
tion to believe that the Moscow defendants were victims of a frame-
up as to believe that they were guilty as charged. In either case the
horrors of a minority one-party dictatorship are revealed. Precisely.
Then why does he commit himself to the belief in their guilt? On
what principle of the "vertical" or "horizontal" humanism which
he defends in his book, is he justified in disregarding the Report of
the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials?*
Lerner's duty to familiarize himself with this report is peculiarly
pressing. He was one of the intimidated or misinformed who in a
signed and published statement accused the American committee
formed to defend Trotsky's rights to asylum and an open hearing,
of helping "armed intervention (no less!) into the Soviet Union."
The Dewey Commission Report is a consequence of the efforts of

*Not Guilty! Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made
Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, Harpers, 1938. $2.75.

=== Page 45 ===
44 PARTISAN REVIEW

this Committee to establish the truth. Why does Lerner avoid it?
Is it because he has not the courage to disavow a tragic error or is
it in the interest of the "unity" of the Popular Front whose most
vociferous supporter is the Communist Party? I do not believe it
is the first; and if the second is the reason for Lerner's attitude, in
the mind of a sincere humanist this should constitute an argument
against the Popular Front.

But why are the Moscow trials and purges so important for
socialists except as an issue, as Lerner in one place suggests, "on
which to split a labor movement"? The answer may be clearer if
we consider Lerner's discussion of the uses and abuses of power.
He writes as if those socialists who have warned against the cor-
ruption of power in a planned society believe that power is intrin-
sically bad, and that, therefore, no effort should be made either to
take it, or to use it, or (when the enemy has it) even to combat it.
An easy position to refute if we can only find some one who holds
it. No one takes Lord Acton's maxim literally. Nor did Acton him-
self. Those socialists who have been concerned with the problem
have their eye on the specific dangers of corruption made possible
by concentration of power in a planned economy and the means to
be adopted to counteract them. Some of these dangers are of the
same generic kind as those found in a capitalist society but are
intensified in a society where property, including means of publica-
tion, has been socialized. Some, however, are unique. In a demo-
cratic capitalistic society in virtue of private property of the instru-
ments of production, it is possible to some extent to secure the
means of making some protest against oppression; the very defects
of an unplanned economy make it possible to find some kind of
work even when opposing capitalism; there is an area of private
life and of voluntary association for public life relatively free of
governmental supervision; there is at least a fighting chance for
the survival of non-conformists. A planned economy, however,
makes it easy to consolidate in the hands of a few party politicians
tremendous agencies of repression extending into every phase of
life. Once ticketed and docketed, any citizen who runs foul of the
political bosses can be deprived of his job, his living quarters, his
food, his right to move about, even to breathe free air. Under such
circumstances, the right to die may become a luxury, dependent
upon a bureaucratic whim, since it spells release from torture.

There is nothing fantastic about the fear of abuse of power
in a planned economy-from the point of view of the worker, the
consumer, the artist and the scholar. Nor does it justify the panicky

=== Page 46 ===
THE ANATOMY OF THE POPULAR FRONT 45

conclusion that bureaucratic degeneration is inevitable.* But the
obvious and quite specific ways in which these abuses may occur
justify the strongest emphasis on democratic checks and procedures
as a sine qua non of any kind of socialism worth fighting for. The
chief sources of possible oppression in a planned economy fall under
four heads which here can only be enumerated: the necessity of
centralizing administrative authority; the drive for efficiency (when
is inefficiency sabotage?); the emergence of power drives when
control over things gives control over men; the differences in stan-
dards of living which, since needs are variable, relative and histor-
ical, are by no means eliminated in a planned economy.

The very least we can demand of a planned economy, if it is
not to develop into another monstrous variety of Russian totalitar-
ianism, is that it be more democratic, more jealous of the civil rights
of its humblest member, than the most enlightened capitalist
democracy is of its wealthiest. If a planned economy needs frame-
ups, torture, false confessions wrung even from children, purge by
murder, and purges of purgers, as oil for its wheels, it will be the
bloodiest Juggernaut that has ever run amok in human history.
To the extent that anyone fails to condemn these practices in Russia
where the evidence for their existence is overwhelming, there is no
assurance that he will be opposed to them elsewhere. That is why
the issue of the Moscow trials must be put in the forefront of every
discussion of socialism today.

*Cf. my critique of Mosca (Pareto, Michel, et al) in The Nation, May 12, 1939.

=== Page 47 ===
William Butler Yeats: Two Essays

I

The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats
W. H. Auden

THE PUBLIC PROSECUTOR:

Gentlemen of the jury. Let us be quite clear in our minds as
to the nature of this case. We are here to judge, not a man, but
his work. Upon the character of the deceased, therefore, his affecta-
tions of dress and manner, his inordinate personal vanity, traits
which caused a fellow countryman and former friend to refer to
him as the greatest literary fop in history, I do not intend to dwell.
I must only remind you that there is usually a close connection
between the personal character of a poet and his work, and that
the deceased was no exception.

Again I must draw your attention to the exact nature of the
charge. That the deceased had talent is not for a moment in dispute;
so much is freely admitted by the prosecution. What the defence are
asking you to believe, however, is that he was a great poet, the
greatest of this century writing in English. That is their case, and
it is that which the prosecution feels bound most emphatically
to deny.

A great poet. To deserve such an epithet, a poet is commonly
required to convince us of these things: firstly a gift of a very high
order for memorable language, secondly a profound understanding
of the age in which he lived, and thirdly a working knowledge of
and sympathetic attitude towards the most progressive thought of
his time.

Did the deceased possess these? I am afraid, gentlemen, that
the answer is, no.

On the first point I shall be brief. My learned friend, the
counsel for the defence, will, I have no doubt, do his best to convince
you that I am wrong. And he has a case, gentlemen. O yes, a very
fine case. I shall only ask you to apply to the work of the deceased
a very simple test. How many of his lines can you remember?

46

=== Page 48 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939 47
Further, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a poet who has
a gift for language will recognize that gift in others. I have here a
copy of an Anthology edited by the deceased entitled "The Oxford
Book of Modern Verse." I challenge anyone in this court to deny
that it is the most deplorable volume ever issued under the imprint
of that highly respected firm which has done so much for the cause
of poetry in this country, The Clarendon Press.
But in any case you and I are educated modern men. Our
fathers imagined that poetry existed in some private garden of its
own, totally unrelated to the workaday world, and to be judged by
pure aesthetic standards alone. We know that now to be an illusion.
Let me pass, then, to my second point. Did the deceased under-
stand his age?
What did he admire? What did he condemn? Well, he extolled
the virtues of the peasant. Excellent. But should that peasant learn
to read and write, should he save enough money to buy a shop,
to attempt by honest trading to raise himself above the level of the
beasts, and O, what a sorry change is there. Now he is the enemy,
the hateful huxter whose blood, according to the unseemly boast of
the deceased, never flowed through his loins. Had the poet chosen
to live in a mud cabin in Galway among swine and superstition, we
might think him mistaken, but we should admire his integrity. But
did he do this? O dear no. For there was another world which
seemed to him not only equally admirable, but a deal more agreeable
to live in, the world of noble houses, of large drawing rooms in-
habited by the rich and the decorative, most of them of the female
sex. We do not have to think very hard or very long, before we
shall see a connection between these facts. The deceased had the
feudal mentality. He was prepared to admire the poor just as long
as they remained poor and deferential, accepting without protest
the burden of maintaining a little Athenian band of literary land-
owners, who without their toil could not have existed for five
minutes.
For the great struggle of our time to create a juster social
order, he felt nothing but the hatred which is born of fear. It is
true that he played a certain part in the movement for Irish Inde-
pendence, but I hardly think my learned friend will draw your
attention to that. Of all the modes of self-evasion open to the well-
to-do, Nationalism is the easiest and most dishonest. It allows to
the unjust all the luxury of righteous indignation against injustice.
Still, it has often inspired men and women to acts of heroism and
self-sacrifice. For the sake of a free Ireland the poet Pearse and

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48 PARTISAN REVIEW

the countess Markovitz gave their all. But if the deceased did give
himself to this movement, he did so with singular moderation. After
the rebellion of Easter Sunday 1916, he wrote a poem on the subject
which has been called a masterpiece. It is. To succeed at such a
time in writing a poem which could offend neither the Irish Repub-
licans nor the British army was indeed a masterly achievement.

And so we come to our third and last point. The most super-
ficial glance at the last fifty years is enough to tell us that the social
struggle towards greater equality has been accompanied by a grow-
ing intellectual acceptance of the scientific method and the steady
conquest of irrational superstition. What was the attitude of the
deceased towards this? Gentlemen, words fail me. What are we
to say of a man whose earliest writings attempted to revive a belief
in fairies and whose favorite themes were legends of barbaric heroes
with unpronounceable names, work which has been aptly and wittily
described as Chaff about Bran!

But you may say, he was young; youth is always romantic; its
silliness is part of its charm. Perhaps it is. Let us forgive the youth,
then, and consider the mature man, from whom we have a right
to expect wisdom and common sense. Gentlemen, it is hard to be
charitable when we find that the deceased, far from outgrowing his
folly, has plunged even deeper. In 1900 he believed in fairies; that
was bad enough; but in 1930 we are confronted with the pitiful,
the deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-
jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India. Whether he seriously
believed such stuff to be true, or merely thought it petty, or imagined
it would impress the public, is immaterial. The plain fact remains
that he made it the centre of his work. Gentlemen, I need say no
more. In the last poem he wrote, the deceased rejected social justice
and reason, and prayed for war. Am I mistaken in imagining that
somewhat similar sentiments are expressed by a certain foreign
political movement which every lover of literature and liberty
acknowledges to be the enemy of mankind?

THE COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE:

Gentlemen of the Jury. I am sure you have listened with as
much enjoyment as I to the eloquence of the prosecution. I say
enjoyment because the spectacle of anything well-done, whether it
be a feat of engineering, a poem, or even an outburst of impassioned
oratory, must always give pleasure.

We have been treated to an analysis of the character of the
deceased which for all I know, may be as true as it is destructive.

=== Page 50 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939 49

Whether it proves anything about the value of his poetry is another
matter. If I may be allowed to quote my learned friend, "We are
here to judge, not a man but his work." We have been told that the
deceased was conceited, that he was a snob, that he was a physical
coward, that his taste in contemporary poetry was uncertain, that
he could not understand physics and chemistry. If this is not an
invitation to judge the man I do not know what is. Does it not bear
an extraordinary resemblance to the belief of an earlier age that a
great artist must be chaste? Take away the frills, and the argument
of the prosecution is reduced to this: "A great poet must give the
right answers to the problems which perplex his generation. The
deceased gave the wrong answers. Therefore the deceased was not a
great poet." Poetry in such a view is the filling up of a social quiz;
to pass with honours the poet must score not less than 75%. With
all due respect to my learned friend, this is nonsense. We are
tempted so to judge contemporary poets because we really do have
problems which we really do want solved, so that we are inclined
to expect everyone, politicians, scientists, poets, clergymen, to give
us the answer, and to blame them indiscriminately when they do
not. But who reads the poetry of the past in this way? In an age
of rising nationalism, Dante looked back with envy to the Roman
Empire. Was this socially progressive? Will only a Catholic admit
that Dryden's "The Hind and the Panther" is a good poem? Do we
condemn Blake because he rejected Newton's theory of light, or
rank Wordsworth lower than Baker, because the latter had a
deeper appreciation of the steam engine?

Can such a view explain why

Mock Emmet, Mock Parnell
All the renown that fell

is good; and bad, such a line as

Somehow I think that you are rather like a tree

In pointing out that this is absurd, I am not trying to suggest
that art exists independently of society. The relation between the
two is just as intimate and important as the prosecution asserts.

Every individual is from time to time excited emotionally and
intellectually by his social and material environment. In certain
individuals this excitement produces verbal structures which we call
poems; if such a verbal structure creates an excitement in the
reader, we call it a good poem. Poetic talent, in fact, is the power to
make personal excitement socially available. Poets, i.e. persons
with poetic talent, stop writing good poetry when they stop

=== Page 51 ===
50 PARTISAN REVIEW

reacting to the world they live in. The nature of that reaction,
whether it be positive or negative, morally admirable or morally dis-
graceful, matters very little, what is essential is that the reaction
should genuinely exist. The later Wordsworth is not inferior to the
earlier because the poet had altered his political opinions, but because
he had ceased to feel and think so strongly, a change which happens,
alas, to most of us as we grow older. Now, when we turn to the
deceased, we are confronted by the amazing spectacle of a man of
great poetic talent, whose capacity for excitement not only remained
with him to the end, but actually increased. In two hundred years
when our children have made a different and, I hope, better social
order, and when our science has developed out of all recognition,
who but a historian will care a button whether the deceased was
right about the Irish Question or wrong about the transmigration
of souls? But because the excitement out of which his poems arose
was genuine, they will still, unless I am very much mistaken, be
capable of exciting others, different though their circumstances and
beliefs may be from his.

However since we are not living two hundred years hence, let
us play the school teacher a moment, and examine the poetry of the
deceased with reference to the history of our time.

The most obvious social fact of the last forty years is the fail-
ure of liberal capitalist democracy, based on the premises that every
individual is born free and equal, each an absolute entity indepen-
dent of all others. And that a formal political equality, the right to
vote, the right to a fair trial, the right of free speech, is enough to
guarantee his freedom of action in his relations with his fellow men.
The results are only too familiar to us all. By denying the social
nature of personality, and by ignoring the social power of money,
it has created the most impersonal, the most mechanical and the
most unequal civilization the world has ever seen, a civilization in
which the only emotion common to all classes is a feeling of
individual isolation from everyone else, a civilization torn apart by
the opposing emotions born of economic injustice, the just envy of
the poor and the selfish terror of the rich.

If these latter emotions meant little to the deceased, it was
partly because Ireland compared with the rest of Western Europe
was economically backward, and the class struggle was less con-
scious there. My learned friend has sneered at Irish Nationalism,
but he knows as well as I that Nationalism is a necessary stage
towards socialism. He has sneered at the deceased for not taking
arms, as if shooting were the only honorable and useful form of

=== Page 52 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939
51
social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?
But to return to the poems. From first to last they express a
sustained protest against the social atomisation caused by indus-
trialism, and both in their ideas and their language a constant
struggle to overcome it. The fairies and heroes of the early work
were an attempt to find through folk tradition a binding force for
society; and the doctrine of Anima Mundi found in the later poems
is the same thing, in a more developed form, which has left purely
local peculiarities behind, in favor of something that the deceased
hoped was universal; in other words, he was working for a world
religion. A purely religious solution may be unworkable, but the
search for it is, at least, the result of a true perception of a social
evil. Again, the virtues that the deceased praised in the peasantry
and aristocracy, and the vices he blamed in the commercial classes
were real virtues and vices. To create a united and just society where
the former are fostered and the latter cured is the task of the
politician, not the poet.
For art is a product of history, not a cause. Unlike some other
products, technical inventions for example, it does not re-enter his-
tory as an effective agent, so that the question whether art should
or should not be propaganda is unreal. The case for the prosecution
rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen,
whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been
written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the
history of man would be materially unchanged.
But there is one field in which the poet is a man of action, the
field of language, and it is precisely in this that the greatness of the
deceased is most obviously shown. However false or undemocratic
his ideas, his diction shows a continuous evolution towards what
one might call the true democratic style. The social virtues of a real
democracy are brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel lin-
guistic virtues are strength and clarity, virtues which appear even
more clearly through successive volumes by the deceased.
The diction of The Winding Stair, is the diction of a just
man, and it is for this reason that just men will always recognize
the author as a master.

=== Page 53 ===
II

The Poet as Poet

Delmore Schwartz

“A
MIRACLE of development!” Thus one critic describes the
contrast between the early and the later poetry of Yeats. The aston-
ishment, the phenomenal applause contained in this phrase and in
much that was said of the poet's last two volumes of verse are com-
pelled by the complexity of a literary career which lasted for fifty
years, and which exhibits, looking backward, the process of a bad
poet of the 'Nineties becoming a great poet in middle age. Hence-
forth no poet can be regarded as utterly hopeless: the possibility of
a Yeatsian miracle will always present itself.

During the first half of his career, the poems which Yeats
wrote were full of a verbal glitter, an effect of being very "poetic,"
a soft mellifluous speech to please the reader who delights in the
most obvious aural quality—the Shelleyan-Swinburnian quality—
of language. Yeats was the son of a painter friendly with the Pre-
Raphaelite group, to whom he was introduced and with whom he
himself became very friendly, and certain poems may be affected
by that visual example. During this period, too, Yeats visited Mme.
Blavatsky (though she had recently been discredited by the Society
for Psychical Research), so that Indian deities join the Irish ones
in some poems. The young poet's interest in such matters and his
experimental attitude toward them is but one more example of the
desperate shifts to which the poetic sensibility was reduced by the
world-picture presented by nineteenth-century science: "I am very
religious," Yeats explains in his Autobiographies, "and deprived
by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded
religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion", an activity
which continued throughout his life. From beginning to end, Yeats
was evidently prepared to try anything, Socialism or hashish, once
or twice. The idiom in which he wrote, however, was the period
style, based upon a misunderstanding of Baudelaire and Mallarmé
by an emphasis of their superficial qualities. A just example of this

52

=== Page 54 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939 53

writing is this stanza from a poem in Yeats' fourth book of poems,
"The Wind Among the Reeds":

Dim Powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be
Like the pale cup of the sea,
When the winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim
Above its cloudy rim;
But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow
Whither her footsteps go.

During the latter half of his life, a genuine revolution in style
occurs, although the subjects of the poems remain the same, as did
the poet's interests. Instead of a general effect, a specific one is
always intended; instead of dim images musically sounded, the
precise word and the precise observation are used to get a specific
emotion upon the page. The poet's initial gift for versifying has
become the power to get into verbal behavior, into meter and diction,
the slightest shift in emotion, the least movement of attitude and
tone. Here he is writing of the same woman as in the poem just
quoted, although she is now old:

Her present image floats into the mind-
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledean kind
Had pretty plumage once-enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

The mastery of the poet is displayed in the ease with which he shifts
from a description of the beautiful woman as old to the personal
emotion with which it is involved and the irony consequent upon
it which completes itself in the phrase "pretty plumage", while the
further shift in emotion is contained perfectly in the brief mark of
punctuation and the colloquial phrase which follows, "—enough
of that". It is this ability to represent emotion with the greatest
vividness, directness, and dramatic justification which constitutes
Yeats' peculiar gift, rather than the understanding and insight or
the brilliance of observation or the freshness of attitudes and values
which are the more usual marks of the great poet.

It is natural to try to explain the transformation of the poet
in terms of his life or the life of his times, the fact, for example,
that he participated in the Irish Nationalist movement for a time
and attempted to participate in the life of the people. But Yeats,

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54 PARTISAN REVIEW

in the Autobiographies, says nothing of decisive events which
would compel a great change of heart and of style, nor does he
attribute the change to any interest apart from his will as a poet to
go from an over-decorative style to a bare one. Such an explana-
tion begs the question, which is the reason for wishing the modifi-
cation and the source of the means to accomplish it. One concludes,
then, that the explanation is to be found in a culmination of factors,
just as the change is displayed gradually through ten years in his
poems.

During the years in which the change began to show itself,
Yeats was faced with failures of various sorts. His early fame had
begun to wane, his long courtship of one woman had ended in empti-
ness. The Abbey Theatre, on which his hopes for a poetic theatre
rested, had received little but abuse and misunderstanding, the whole
Irish literary renaissance had faded, and many of his most gifted
friends, Wilde, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Synge, had died in
misery and degradation. This would be enough to make most men
forget about the land of dreams and the Irish fairyland of the
early poems.

Something much more complicated than a mere forgetting
happened or would seem to have happened to Yeats. He seized
upon the opposition between the land of dreams and the actuality
about him, and engaged in a continual see-saw between the two.
The structure, so to speak, of thought and of feeling became what
Yeats came to call antithetical. Antithesis as a dynamic process of
the conflict and interchange of opposites, became the movement and
the framework which he saw everywhere, just as a man who has
donned rose-colored glasses sees the color of rose on all things. The
antithesis took many forms-day and night, life and death, the sun
and the moon, the natural and the supernatural-but the funda-
mental opposition was between what Yeats called subjectivity and
objectivity; or less ambiguously, between introversion and extro-
version, for Yeats was really concerned with psychological attitudes.
A whole philosophy of history and of human nature in these terms
is the result: everything that happens to man and to society is
viewed as a stage in the passage from objectivity to subjectivity or
from subjectivity to objectivity.

Yeats began with subjectivity, that is to say, with ART, spelled
with capitals, and opposed to Life, which was sordid, sodden, and
soiled, or, as Lionel Johnson said of the poems of Arthur Symons,
constituted by "a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red
omnibus, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering women."

=== Page 56 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939 55

Yeats literally inhaled the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake as a young
man; from his father, who quoted only poetry significant of intense
emotion, believing only such poetry was genuine, or from Oscar
Wilde, who told him that his narrative verse was like Homer, or
from Walter Pater ("we looked consciously to Pater for our phil-
osophy"), Yeats and many of his friends learned that nothing was as
important as "Beauty." Not only ought one to occupy one's daily
life with aesthetic experiences above all, but there were only one
justification for other experiences, the possibility that they might be
a means to the creation of a great work of art. To be a poet for
Yeats actually included a deliberate appearance, the pale dreamer
of mussed hair, flowing tie, and ethereal look which caricature has
now established in the popular mind as the figure of the poet and
which is established as Yeats' image by the portraits next to the
title-page of many of his books. Lionel Johnson, whom he admired
as the most learned of his friends, had told Yeats that "Life is
ritual," and Yeats never stopped seeking ritual, formality, and cere-
mony, as traits of Art. One more attitude of the young Yeats is
important because he adheres to it throughout his life and it enters
into many of his poems, the romantic conception of woman:
"Woman herself was still in our eyes romantic and mysterious, still
the priestess of her shrine, our emotions remembering the Lilith and
the Sybilla Palmifera of Rossetti."

The priestess of Yeats' shrine was Maud Gonne, who was
devoting her whole life to Irish Nationalism, an activity on her part
which Yeats never stopped regretting, even in the poems of his
latest volume. Partly in the hope of winning her, Yeats entered the
movement himself and what occurred then, by his own confession,
seems the fundamental motion of his life: "I went hither and
thither speaking at meetings in England and Scotland, and occasion-
ally at tumultuous Dublin conventions, and endured the worst
months of my life," "I took pride in an evening spent with some
small organizer into whose spittoon I secretly poured my third glass
of whiskey," "I dreaded some wild Fenian movement, and with
literature perhaps more in my mind than politics, dreamed of that
Unity of Culture which might begin with some few men controlling
some form of administration."

With literature perhaps more in my mind than politics! This
is precisely the equivocal attitude which Yeats maintained every-
where. The poet of the 'Nineties was dragged again and again from
his tower into the most alien and the least desired circumstances.
In the midst of them he did not for one moment surrender his notion

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56 PARTISAN REVIEW

of himself as Poet, nor his belief that Art was the most important
value of life. In this sense he was intransigent; and yet, on the
other hand, he was the most flexible member of his generation. And
this double character, the capacity to be both intransigent and yet to
be drawn into many circumstances of existence which have little to
do with Art, shows itself in his best poems.

Consider "Easter 1916," which is supposedly a political poem.
What is said, in crude brevity, is that the poet has known the leaders
of the Easter Rebellion who were executed and had thought of them
as casual and unimportant acquaintances; the fact that they have
become a part of a national tragedy suggests not a political nor a
patriotic conclusion to Yeats, but he speaks from the standpoint of a
man long obsessed with being a poet when he writes, as the refrain
of the poem:

A terrible beauty is born

Again, he writes a short poem during the World War about an
Irish airman, in which the airman is supposedly revealing his reasons
for participating in the war on the side of Great Britain:

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I hate I do not love. . . .
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss,
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds. . . .

The lonely impulse of delight, the rejection of law, duty, public men,
and cheering crowds, betrays the voice as that of the poet of the
'Nineties who has lived into the next generation. Yeats has trans-
formed his hypothetical airman into a romantic poet, or we may
say, if we consider this poem in relation to his work as a whole, that
even when confronted with the World War, the poet succeeds in
sustaining the romantic attitude with which he began; but not,
however, without being perfectly aware of the difficult circumstances
in which he is sustaining it.

And once more, in the volume of verse which was published in
1929, Yeats writes of two beautiful women who, like Maud Gonne,
had devoted their lives to politics, and he remains utterly unchanged
in the sentiment which motivates his poem:

=== Page 58 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939 57

Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle. . .
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years.
I know not what the younger dreams-
Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics. . .
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time. . . .

To think that the innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but
time is probably not a Shakespearean nor a Biblical wisdom, if
taken in itself as a literal statement. But the emotion which this
poem is concerned to represent transfigures the statement, for the
poem concludes with a dramatic statement of the poet's longing to
destroy time altogether, a desire which is related, as in other poems,
to the poet's awareness that it is history, the movement of his age,
which has greatly altered the bases and the assumptions with which
he began to practise his art.

Many other later poems concern this hatred of time and the
change which attends all natural things, and this hatred takes
several significant forms. There is the emotion, in such a poem as
"Sailing to Byzantium," to be outside of time and a part of "the
artifice of eternity"; the poet longs to be free of birds, beasts, and
the young in one another's arms, and to become what? a work of
art! Eternity or heaven is conceived by the poet as being like
Byzantium, a civilization in which artificiality and ritual dominate,
where all that is natural is suppressed, where the unchanging is the
good, where art is the structure of existence:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

The next best thing to being free of the fury of human veins
in a Byzantine civilization is to exist in a society where a landed
aristocracy rules. In every poem on the subject of the landed aris-
tocracy as the good society, the figure of the artist appears in the

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58 PARTISAN REVIEW

doorway, works of art abound, the rich man, or the rich woman.
Lady Gregory, has been the patron of artists, and by means of the
country house and its tradition, ceremony, and continuity, a victory
over change and history is made possible, though only for a while.
"I meditate," he says in writing his two poems about Lady Gregory
and her country house, "upon an aged woman and her house."
What are the leading virtues of this lady and her house? "Great
works constructed there in nature's spite," "Beloved books that
famous hands have bound, Old marble heads, old pictures every-
where." In the midst of these poems, the poet always remembers
how precarious is the existence of such a society:
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.

And this awareness is usually accompanied by the feeling that the
fate of poetry is inseparable from the fate of that society, so that,
when he returns to Coole Park after Lady Gregory has died, where
"whatever most can bless The mind of man or elevate a rhyme"
was composed with the help of her hospitality, he finds everything
altered:

But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

The fact that he was to say three years later in prose that the past
sixty years have been a very great period of poetry contradicts that
sentiment only if we forget the context in which it is felt, the end
of the society in which Yeats came to be a poet.

Then there is one short poem called "The Dolls," another
symbol for Yeats of the artificial and unnatural object which is art
and not life. In this poem, when the doll-maker's wife has a child,
the dolls scream that the house has been disgraced by the filthy
thing which the child is, and the doll-maker's wife apologizes humbly
to the guilty doll-maker who has been shamed by the dolls: she tells
him the child was an accident. The hatred of the natural and the
biological in this poem is obviously related to a like obsession in the
poetry of T. S. Eliot-it is the same "birth, copulation, death"
which the poet abhors and there is also the connection with the
opposition of Art and Life in Thomas Mann, which is the signifi-
cant inheritance of all the writers who came to maturity during the
first decade of the present century. In another famous poem,
"Among School Children," the poet turns from the children to the

=== Page 60 ===
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: 1865-1939 59
image of the beautiful woman he has loved all his life (the identity
of the beautiful woman and the work of art had been established in
the earliest poems) in the distortion of old age; and in his anger at
Old age and the changes of life, he sees all philosophy as a denial of
Nature and time, he compares a mother's love of the living child
with the nun's love of a bronze image, preferring the nun's love to
the mother's, and he concludes by calling before his mind with
longing a realm where process – and history – do not exist.
The substance of the later poetry is, then, the emotion of the
Poet as Poet (in the romantic sense) when faced with modern
times, when forced to exist and to practice his art in the circum-
stances of the last forty years. If every generalization is bound to
omit or to distort, and if this must be especially so of a general-
ization about the work of a poet, yet, in terms of this emphasis, the
nature of the shift from the early to the later style becomes entirely
plain. Yeats shifted from the effort to write the "poetic" poetry of
the 'Nineties to the concern, as poet, with what it was to be a poet
amid the alien circumstances of his age. That is why he is so often,
in his later poetry, writing about the artists, scholars, and beautiful
women he has known, and their unfortunate lives. And that
is perhaps why the unknown instructors or spirits who dictated a
supernatural system to him through the mediumship of his wife,
and prompted Yeats to offer to use the rest of his life explicating
what had been dictated, rejected his offer, saying: "No, we have
come to give you metaphors for poetry." Those spirits, it is certain,
recognized their man. The poet intent upon Art so exhausted his
intention and learned so much about that intention from others who
were of like mind that his poetry became a revelation of the fate of
Art and the emotion of the Artist in modern history. The will to
seek one's opposite, the doctrine that one must seek one's anti-self,
is at once the method by means of which Yeats found his genuine
and peculiar theme, and one more example of the concern with
acting a part which flows from the obsession with Art. The result
has been a group of poems which will be known as long as the
English language exists.

=== Page 61 ===
Extract from "Autumn
Journal"

Louis MacNeice

Spider, spider, twisting tight
But the watch is wary beneath the pillow-
I am afraid in the web of night
When the window is fingered by the shadows of
branches
When the lions roar beneath the hill
And the meter clicks and the cistern bubbles
And the gods are absent and the men are still-
Noli me tangere, my soul is forfeit.
Some now are happy in the hive of home,
Thigh over thigh and a light in the night nursery,
And some are hungry under the starry dome
And some sit turning handles.
Glory to God in the Lowest, peace beneath the earth,
Dumb and deaf at the nadir;
I wonder now whether anything is worth
The eyelid opening and the mind recalling.
And I think of Persephone gone down to dark,
No more a virgin, gone the garish meadow,
But why must she come back, why must the snowdrop
mark
That life goes on for ever?
There are nights when I am lonely and long for love
But to-night is quintessential dark forbidding
Anyone beside or below me; only above
Pile high the tumulus, good-bye to starlight.
Good-bye the Platonic sieve of the Carnal Man
But good-bye also Plato's philosophising;
I have a better plan

60

=== Page 62 ===
EXTRACT FROM "AUTUMN JOURNAL"
61

To hit the target straight without circumlocution.
If you can equate Being in its purest form
With denial of all appearance,
Then let me disappear—the scent grows warm
For pure Not-Being, Nirvana.
Only the spider spinning out his reams
Of colourless thread says Only there are always
Interlopers, dreams,
Who let no dead dog lie nor death be final;
Suggesting, while he spins, that to-morrow will outweigh
To-night, that Becoming is a match for Being,
That to-morrow is also a day.
That I must leave my bed and face the music
As all the others do who with a grin
Shake off sleep like a dog and hurry to desk or engine
And the fear of life goes out as they clock in
And history is reasserted.
Spider, spider, your irony is true;
Who am I—or I—to demand oblivion?
I must go out to-morrow as the others do
And build the falling castle;
Which has never fallen, thanks
Not to any formula, red tape or institution,
Not to any creeds or banks,
But to the human animal's endless courage.
Spider, spider, spin
Your register and let me sleep a little,
Not now in order to end but to begin
The task begun so often.

=== Page 63 ===
Art Chronicle

AMERICAN ARTISTS' CONGRESS:
Third Annual Exhibition, New York.

T
HE Artists' Congress offers perhaps the broadest opportunity for
appraising various influences that are now shaping the more popular
courses of American art. And there are indications of greater
promise in this 1939 Exhibition than one is accustomed to discover
from large-scale displays at the present time. The native selections
at the Metropolitan and Whitney Museums have long created a
suspicion that American bourgeois art was fated to become perma-
nently stuck in a lifeless morass of expanding vulgarity, and most
local exhibitions have merely added to this unpalatable picture.
At the Artists' Congress, however, there is an absence of impres-
sionist trickery, and a refreshing directness which might conceivably
vitalize a genuine tradition. There is often a surprising technical
freedom as well, and a pleasure in the manipulation of direct
impasto. No quality is more readily communicated than that of
drudgery, and it is perhaps significant that in this show the leading
exponents of drudgery are usually those artists whom we encounter
most often in the public galleries.

The favorable impression would have been more successfully
sustained if the galleries had been less generously provided with
chairs. One must pause at length before a picture to know it, and
unfortunately there was little here that could stand a very intimate
acquaintance. Many works disclosed the striking transcription of a
momentary image, but that real distinction which our century seems
so rarely capable of realizing, was singularly absent. There was
little to suggest the stirring of an esthetic impulse; the political
earnestness had obviously thrown its weight in the opposite
direction.

Works of every genre were in evidence, but the Congress
exhibitions derive their special character from a preponderance of
paintings that might be loosely classified as "social satires." Here,
at any rate, they tended to eclipse all other types of work; at the

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=== Page 64 ===
ART CHRONICLE 63

same time they serve to demonstrate the unavoidable effect of violent
subject-matter upon artists who have never become grounded on an
authentic tradition of their own. The very language of painting by
which literary ideas can be made plastically credible, has been laid
aside; therefore, the more intense the illustrative emotion, the more
it has appeared to stick through the structural fabric, until often
the connection between title and expressive means would become
quite arbitrary. A painting here entitled Refugees could have passed
many years ago for a peculiarly romantic Madonna and Child. And
one particular work, Flight from Fascism, went so far as to take
its pose and composition quite blatantly from Delacroix's Flight
of Medea.

AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS:
Third Annual Exhibition, New York.

An Exhibition of almost equal proportions, although in com-
plete opposition to that of the Congress, was held in March by the
American Abstract Artists, and the resultant impressions are natu-
rally interesting to compare. The slogan of the Congress is For
Peace, For Democracy, For Cultural Progress, and obvious com-
ments upon these phrases echo resoundingly from every wall. The
Abstract Artists share these convictions, but they also believe that
the esthetic impulse cannot become a tool for concrete political or
philosophical dissemination, at this stage of our cultural meta-
morphosis at least. In their galleries the emphasis contracts upon
rudimentary encounters with pattern and design; there is a con-
sistent searching after such shapes and linear combinations as
can hold those conceptions of individuality which they feel to be
evolving anew. The present decade may have publicized at last the
cracks in the old social order. The Congress illustrates the crevices.
The abstract artists, on the other hand, attempt to re-order their
plastic instincts; they attack the established conceptions of art itself.

The emergence of a sudden and intense restriction has often
in the past accompanied the painful processes of cultural reorienta-
tion. It can hardly have been by accident that another age of chaos,
which saw the disintegration of the Roman Empire, should have
left the Ravenna mosaics as its purest heritage. Possibly it requires
an impasse comparable to that in which the world finds itself today
to give courage for that complete restriction which has made pos-
sible the work of many abstract artists. The pitfalls are many which

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64 PARTISAN REVIEW

await the processes of consciously attempted simplification. 'Partic-
ularly in an age of science and mechanism the artist can be lured
into reproducing no more than the static technique of the manu-
factured object. Such painters as Shaw, Gallatin, and Greene have
concentrated upon every direction that their flattened forms can
follow, every linear juncture, every weight of tone and color, with-
out relinquishing the essentially personal stylistic overmeaning.
Their works are reticent, for their expressive ends have purposely
been carried no farther than their simplified fabric will allow. Yet
through such limited means they have destroyed the old conception
of the "picture"; each has substituted a thing,-an object that is at
rest completely, and thus some day can a way be cleared for a new
reality.
GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

DRYBURGH ABBEY

The stone walls, roofless and broken, lie open in the light.
In the corridors and chancels the grass grows, and the sun stands
At the place of the high altar, rock is hairy with ivy
And the moss moves with shadow and shine over, over,
Soft on the column drums. Church hewn by hands,
In a hundred and a hundred and a hundred and a hundred years
Lies split, stilled, ended, laced to the earth, beautiful.
Beautiful and quiet because it is broken, roofless, sundered.

We are not mocked; this is true, means what it means-
The larks fly through these upright Gothic ribs,
This skeleton the sun reclaims, the grass makes good.
WINFIELD TOWNLEY SCOTT

=== Page 66 ===
Charles G. Shaw: Abstraction 1939
Riverside Museum, New York

=== Page 67 ===
A. E. Gallatin; Composition 1939
Riverside Museum, New York

=== Page 68 ===
[NO TEXT DETECTED]

=== Page 69 ===
The Only Son

James T. Farrell

IT WAS Patrick McMurtrie's twenty-first birthday. Father,
mother, and son sat down to supper. Mrs. McMurtrie was a lean
woman with tannish, rough skin. Her face seemed always drawn,
her expression changelessly tight and sad, and her bony hands work-
worn. The father was a gruff looking little man with a weather-
beaten and wind-roughened face, the result of his years of work in
the building trades. He was now working as a foreman on a build-
ing that was going up. The boy was medium sized, with a sensitive
face, blue eyes, curly brown hair, and slightly hollowed cheeks.
All day, the mother had been waiting for this moment. She had
spent three times as long as usual in puttering about the kitchen and
cooking the same kind of a supper that she prepared every evening.
She blessed herself, bowed her head, and said grace, both father
and son waiting in boredom while she performed this ritual. She
always did the serving, and she served her son first, giving him a
large cut of the thick steak she had fried, and then, filling his plate
with potatoes and other vegetables. The father looked on silent and
dour, watching her pass the plate to her son.
"Now you can serve the poor relation," he said as she started
to serve him.
His remark passed unheeded, but Patrick frowned. They
began eating.
"Well now that you're a man, with your schooling finished,
and your fine college degree signed, sealed, and paid for, you can
start paying back your old man the money he's spent making you
so smart and highly educated. Maybe you'll start repaying your
father and mother for what they've done for you and for the fine
education they've given you," the father said, speaking slowly and
with undue casualness as he ate.
Patrick did not reply. This was the old man's regular line.
"Joseph, why in the name of God would you be talking to your

65

=== Page 70 ===
66 PARTISAN REVIEW

son like that, and this his birthday. You know that now the boy
is working, he'll be giving us back everything we've given him, and
with interest," Mrs. McMurtrie said.
"Of course he will," the father said with a note of irony in
his voice. "I was just thinking out loud," he added.
They ate on in silence. It seemed as though the mother would
cry, but no tears came. Patrick was uncomfortable. He wanted
to be over with the meal, and to be out of the house and with Sarah.
The strained atmosphere at the dinner table was not unusual to him.
It was a replica of what happened nearly every night. The old man
hated him. There was no love between his father and mother. For
years now he had known his father as a dour and bitter man, hating
everything about his home, always making sarcastic remarks, con-
stantly starting family squabbles. And for years now also, he had
known his mother as a sad and spiritless woman, fanatically reli-
gious, always seeming to suffer from the sharp gibes of her husband
sometimes fighting back, sometimes bearing herself with a painfully
martyred expression on her face as if she were just going into a
lion's den to die for her faith. He looked on her. That same expres-
sion. His mother embarrassed him. She loved him with such
possessiveness.

Patrick's father always looked for something in the son's con-
duct which could be used against the mother. Patrick often looked
upon himself as a kind of family no man's land. He remembered
how ever since he was a boy this had gone on, with fighting and
the old man's drinking. But in those days he had been innocent
and afraid of his father. Even so, he had quietly detested him.
Now, he did not detest his father. He was, at times, even sorry for
the old man. Often, he was contemptuous of him. And his mother,
she embarrassed him. She was so damned religious, and demanded
that he be the same. Every Sunday, he had to go to Mass with her.
For years now, he had been fulfilling his religious duties, even to
the reception of Holy Communion, only to please his mother. His
hypocrisy often disgusted him. But he could not bring himself to
tell his mother that he was an atheist. She was such a sad woman.
She had so little in life to which she could cling. And then, it would
give the old man a trump card to play against her. The father
always said that he he had no education, and that the son's education
had served to make him into a heathen and a snob, who soon
wouldn't act as if he even knew his old parents.
Suddenly, while they were eating, Mrs. McMurtrie began to
cry. Her husband sarcastically asked why she was crying. She

=== Page 71 ===
THE ONLY SON
answered that it was because she was so happy.
"Joseph, remember when Patrick was a little gossoon, and
you would be so often taking him to the park, and there he would
be chasing the squirrels. Patrick, my son, you always loved to chase
the squirrels, and you couldn't say squirrel. You would always call
them, 'quirrels.' You'd come home with your father and tell me of
the great time you had, chasing the 'quirrels'," she said.
"Yes mother," Patrick said, striving not to show that he was
bored.
"Ah woman, will you forget that talk. That's all happened
years ago, and what's the good in remembering it all of the time.
Tell me, do I ever hear anything out of you but when he was a little
gossoon?"
"And son," she went on, ignoring her husband. "You were
the good little fellow. On Sundays often, I would dress you up in
your Sunday clothes, and take you to mass with me, and sometimes,
I'd be taking you to see your Aunt Ellen, Lord have mercy on her
soul. Yes, 'tis proud of you I'd be then. And now you're a fine
young man, and it's prouder I am of you. And Lord have mercy
on me, but how you would cry for ice cream when you were at
your Aunt Ellen's. I wish she could be here with us now to see
the fine young man you have become. But the Lord took her."
"Yes, and whenever you cried for ice cream, you'd get it too,"
the father said.
"Why Joseph!" she exclaimed, shocked.
"You always spoiled him by giving him everything he asked
for. Is it any wonder he reads the books I see around here?" the
father said.
"There's nothing wrong with the books I read," Patrick said.
"No, there's nothing wrong with Darwin, and men coming
from monkeys and all that high and mighty nonsense. No, nothing
wrong with heathen books," the father said.
"You don't know anything about the books I bring home and
read," Patrick said.
"See, Mary! Did you hear what he said to me! Many's the
time, woman, that I warned you you were spoiling him. Here's
the fruit of your willfulness. Here we save all our life to educate
him, and how does he repay us? He calls his father ignorant. So
the father said, and suddenly he turned from
the mother and faced Patrick. "Well my lad, it's not ignorant I'd
be if I spent the money educating myself that I spent on you and
your miseducation. Coming home now that you're a college gradu-

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68 PARTISAN REVIEW

ate and acting like a snob!" He turned back and with a melo-
dramatic gesture of the right arm, he said, "Woman, I warned
you!"
"Oh quit putting on a show and acting as if I were still a two
year old," Patrick said.
"Son, you must not be saying such things to your father. If
he provokes you or not, he's your father," the mother said.
"Hell, I didn't ask him to be," Patrick said, disgusted.
"Patrick son!" the mother exclaimed in that injured martyr-
like tone of voice that she so frequently used.
"Mary McMurtrie, before he dies, he'll disown his old father,"
Joseph McMurtrie said solemnly, shaking his finger as he spoke.
"Well from the way you go on, you'd think you're a section
boss here at home, and I'm one of the hunkies working for you,"
Patrick said.
Patrick hadn't meant to answer his father's provocation. The
answer had come against his will and his determination as it so
often did.
"See Mary McMurtrie! It's your doin'! See, he's twenty-
one now and been to college, and right away, he knows it all. Pretty
soon, he'll be too good to deign to live in the same flat with us.
He'll be leaving us ignorant old greenhorns. He'll be leaving us to
go and marry that whore he runs around with," the father said,
speaking with a bitterness that seemed to rise out of the depths of
his being.
"Listen! Cut that out! You hear me!" Patrick said, blanching
with anger.
"Well then show a little respect for your father," McMurtrie
said, changing his tone of voice when he perceived the reaction he
had produced in his son.
"People should do something in this world to earn respect,"
Patrick shot back at his father.
Patrick warned himself to exert more self-control. He under-
stood more than his father did. He shouldn't let his old man get
him so sore. With understanding, things should take on a different
light. He knew that his father was jealous of him, bitter, unhappy,
and that the old man had never loved his mother. Understanding
these things, sensing causes underlying his father's conduct, he
should take his father's words in stride. But damn it, it was too
thick. The old hypocritical fathead calling Sarah a whore!
The father had been eyeing his son closely, and observed a

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THE ONLY SON
69
change as if Patrick were softening while these reflections hastily
passed through his mind.
"I'm boss in this house, and I want a little respect shown me!
She's a whore anyway. What other kind of a girl could she be,
sleeping with you?" the father said.
The old man couldn't stand anybody else having any enjoy-
ment or happiness in life, Patrick told himself, now determined to
maintain his self control.
"Saint Joseph pray for me," the mother exclaimed woefully
as a response to what her husband had just said.
"Watch what you're saying," Patrick said to his father.
"As long as this is my house, don't ever bring that woman of
yours into it," the father said.
"Mother of God, protect my son from evil companions," the
mother said.
"How do you know she'd want to come here?" Patrick said.
"Why should she? Why in the name of God should she be
wanting to come into a decent household?" the father said.
"What the hell decency is there in this house?" Patrick asked,
disgust rising above his efforts at self-control.
Shaking, the father rose and pointed an accusing finger at
Patrick.
"Out of my house, you young cur!" the father said.
"My son is not going to be put out of this house. Not while
I breathe the breath of life," the mother said.
Mrs. McMurtrie clasped her hands and silently prayed while
tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Goddamn you!" Patrick said, flinging out each syllable.
"I hope that God will never give you or that whore of yours
a decent day as long as you live!" McMurtrie said.
Patrick walked out of the room.
II
Patrick sat in his bedroom with his door closed so that
he could not hear his father and mother fighting. It was a
small room, with books scattered around it, and holy pictures
on the walls. Right over the bed, there was a framed picture of
the bleeding Sacred Heart. No, he didn't want to hear them talking
and scrapping. It was often a puzzle to him that his old man never
got bored with the sound of his own voice uttering the same com-
plaints against his mother that he had been uttering for years and
years in their squabbling. He never seemed able to probe down to

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PARTISAN REVIEW

what seemed to him the real reason for his father's hatred and
jealousy. What had happened in the old man's life to cause this?
He knew that the old man had never been happy with his mother.
And he could understand that. Who would want her for a
wife? Who would want to sleep with her? As far back as
he could remember, she had always been the same. The same reli-
gious fanaticism. The same air of sadness and tiredness. She could
give any man the creeps. She had always made both him and his
father feel that their home was populated with death. Always
images of the same suffering Christ on the cross plastered all around
the house! He looked around the room at the holy picture. Christ
was suffering over his dresser. All of the pictures were cheap and
banal. Assuming that there was a God, these pictures were a dis-
service to Him and to His supposedly True Faith. They made Him
out as no more of a character than his own father and mother, or
than some ignorant Irish priest. He couldn't get at the bottom of
his old man. Perhaps, the old man hadn't wanted to marry her?
Perhaps the old man hadn't wanted a kid? He didn't know. The
old man was jealous of him now because he was young, had gotten
a little education, and might have a different kind of a life.

How many times hadn't his old man come rolling home drunk?
But always, his father had turned on respectability like a fountain
to use in arguments with him. Yes, his father was a damned old
hypocrite. Both his father and his mother were failures in life.
They were mismated and they had botched their lives. Neither of
them had ever seemed to be happy, except when his mother was
smothering him with affection or praying, or when his old man
was drunk with his cronies in a saloon or speakeasy. They were
trying in their own way to drag him down to their own level. And
he wouldn't be dragged down. He wouldn't! They were failures at
living. They were going to make the same thing out of him if he
let them. His mother wanted him to settle down into a successful
nonentity. Well he wouldn't. He didn't have much of a job, but
he would do something, make something out of his life. He didn't
know what, but he would. Because he was out of college, he wasn't
going to give up studying and trying to think. He was his mother's
excuse for living. Somehow, he hated to hurt her. He didn't care
about hurting his father. But she seemed so tragic a figure. Did
she ever smile? Did she ever enjoy herself? Just looking at her sug-
gested to him something of the cause of his father's bitterness.

He did things that he hated himself for doing, just because
of his mother. Once a month, or once every two months, just to

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THE ONLY SON
71

satisfy her, he said that he had gone to confession, and then, when
she went to mass with him, he received Holy Communion. Sacri-
lege! It caused no fear, no terror in his soul. His non-existent soul,
he added with a smile. He asked himself were there many others
in America doing the same thing as he was doing? Were there
others with mothers and fathers such as his, and were they com-
promising themselves and their dignity in their own eyes by pretend-
ing to be Catholics, receiving the Sacraments of the Church sacri-
legiously in order to preserve a little domestic peace and to nurture
the illusions of older people!
Just now, his old man had gotten him damned sore when he
had slandered Sarah. He loved Sarah, and he would live with her
all his life. He wanted to marry her now, but she always counselled
him to wait because neither of them had much money, and because
of his home situation. What the hell business did the old man have
saying what he'd said about her? Sarah was unlike any one he had
ever known. And the old bastard calling her a whore! It was only
self-control that had saved his father from getting something that
he hadn't in the least bargained for. And what was going to happen
when he did marry? He could see his father and mother alone in
this house, eating themselves away with unhappiness and mutual
hatred while they lived on waiting only to die. There they would be,
each getting older, the old man becoming more and more bitter, the
old lady growing more and more sad. She would throw anything
she could in the way of his marrying Sarah. She would fight with
all means to keep her son to herself. And it was clearly a case of
who should be the one that was to be sacrificed? He or his mother?
He and Sarah, rather, or else his mother? Why was it this way?
Why did life have to be this way? Why did parents have to cling
to their children like drowning persons clinging and clutching a
lifeline for dear life itself. All damned fool banal questions he
was asking himself, and yet they were real, and they cut through
the very fibres of his life at this very moment. It was all more than
he could make out. He stood up and told himself that he was twenty
one, and that technically, he had reached manhood's estate. He had
to be a man. He had to walk over his mother's unhappiness and
misery, or else, he couldn't be a man.
To thine own self be true...
He quoted the line with seriousness and determination. He wouldn't
be just a dutiful son and a nonentity in an office all his life. He
vowed that he wouldn't.
He dropped back on his bed, and reflected that what was the

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PARTISAN REVIEW

worst feature of this whole situation was that there was no solution
to it. No matter how he thought it out, no matter how much he
understood of the motives of his father and mother, and of his
own motives for that matter, where did his understanding lead him
to? It could not reduce one bit the pain and the agony and sorrow
of it. He could not give up Sarah without suffering intensely. If
he did that, he would have no heart to go on, to go on and fight to
make something decent out of his life, to go on and rise above the
ranks of mediocrity. With her, he might work, go to night school,
study law, and make a career for himself. That was a plan he had
been thinking about. And if he did not give up Sarah, what about
his mother? It was painful to think of his mother and father in
this house alone, waiting to die after he had left them. And Hell,
what was it now to live here? And where was it getting any of the
three of them? What was it getting them? Look at the scene at
supper time tonight. And there they were going at one another
now in the dining room.

He sat on the bed, glum. He heard his father slam the front
door. The old man would come home drunk to raise hell tonight,
he told himself.

III

Patrick was ready to leave when his mother entered the room.
She clutched him fiercely.
"You're all that I have. My son! My son! My baby boy that
I nursed. My baby!"

Held in an embrace by his mother, Patrick felt almost
physically ill.

She kissed his forehead.

"I have to go, Mother. I got to meet a fellow and I'm late and
keeping him waiting on a street corner," he said.

Jealousy flashed in her eyes.

"Is it a lad you're meeting?"

"Why, of course Mother," he said, thinking to himself that
she probably was sure that he was going to see Sarah.

"Patrick, you wouldn't lie to your mother?"

"You know I wouldn't, Mother. Why should I?"

And while he said this, he thought to himself that she forced
him to lie to her; she had forced him to lie to her for years and
years now. And she didn't know it, didn't know that it was im-
possible to tell her the truth about almost everything that he really
felt or believed.

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THE ONLY SON
73
Wiping away a tear, she stood before him like a personification
of desolation. That goddamn look of hers! Always that way!
Always having to look at her standing there so silent, so injured,
and so sorrowful. He could understand a great deal about his
father, just by seeing her now, standing there before him.
Suddenly, she drew a pair of rosary beads from her pocket.
They were expensive, with a solid gold crucifix. She held them
before him with great pride.
He waited for her to say something.
"For my son on this twenty-first birthday, from his mother,"
she said, and her smile was a miserable effort.
"Gee, thanks Mother! But you shouldn't have done that for
me. They're expensive," he said.
"I had them blessed," she said.
She was so damned unfair and foolish, he reflected. And the
pity of her was that she didn't even know. And giving him rosary
beads! His mother was a fool.
"Son, never lose your religion. God is good. Never lose your
faith in him," she said in a strained voice.
Again she wiped a tear away. Patrick was moved to pity his
mother. But he was unable to express his emotion to her. And he
dared not. If he did, then, that only served to make the tie between
her and himself the more intolerable. And so often, the ties which
held flesh and blood together were so artificial. This realization
made him hate all society, because it was society that kept firm these
artificial ties. And just look at the hopelessness it had made in
his home.
He put his straw hat on, and waited, anxious to get out, acutely
uncomfortable here with his mother.
"Son, tell me the truth! Are you going to see that girl?"
"Why mother, I told you I was going to see a fellow, and go
to a movie with him."
"Son, she might be a nice girl, but she's not for you. I'm your
mother and I know it," she said.
Patrick did not answer her.
"Patrick, isn't there a nice Catholic girl you grew up with that
you could take out now and again?" she said.
"Mother, I'm late. And I'm going to be busy because I'm
going to night school and study law in the fall. I won't be able
to bother about girls," he said, feeling that he should blurt right
out and tell her, force the issue into a showdown; but he was unable
to force himself to do just that.

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74 PARTISAN REVIEW

"Patrick, you do bother about that girl. I know you do. I
can tell it. I'm your mother, and no one knows you better than
your mother. I have been seeing how different you are since you've
known that girl. I tell you this for your own good."
He asked himself why didn't he just tell her to mind her
damned business?
"Son, you won't be having your mother with you always.
You should stay in with me some nights. And that's little I'm
asking of you," she said.
"Mother, I got to go," he said.
Whether she did it purposefully or not, he wasn't sure, but she
always succeeded in making him feel so damned guilty. And guilty
of what? Just of trying to be himself and live his own life.
"I'll be home early," he said, unable to bear that look of hers.
She kissed him passionately, and he left. At the door, he turned
and said goodbye to her with what sympathy he could force into his
voice.
"Goodbye," she said, again with all that sadness in her voice,
saying it as if she were bidding him farewell for the final time in
this world.
From the window, she watched him disappear down the street.
She sat alone, rocking in the darkened parlor, tears filling her eyes.

IV

Walking to the street car, Patrick thought gloomily that things
would go on without any change just as long as they three lived
together. If his mother died, what then? It would be better if she
died first. If his father went first, he'd be left with her around his
neck, depending on him, using every sentimentality offered to her
by society to keep herself like a chain holding him at her level.
Unless he wanted to continue going through such suppers and
scenes as that of tonight's, he had only one path to choose—to leave.
And he couldn't do that while his mother lived. He knew that he
would only die. Death would be best for her. He
thought of Sarah. Suddenly, he was fearful to the point of dread.
He and Sarah would get married, and one day they would be old,
and one of them would die and leave the other behind. But that
was years away. And they wouldn't grow old together like his
mother and father had. They would build a free and beautiful life
together. They would!
On the street car, he accidentally put his hand into his coat

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THE ONLY SON

pocket, and felt the rosary beads that his mother had given him.
He drew his hand out as if he had touched something disgusting.
The beads brought him back to thoughts of his mother just when
he had happily dismissed her from his mind. He thought of the
meaning of her religion to her. It was all that she had. Her faith
in him gave her nothing but misery, and earned from him nothing
but annoyance and contempt and a kind of sympathy that would be
insulting to any dignified human being. He hated her religion. Yet
it did her good, saved her from utter misery and loneliness. He
didn't care, he hated it! People had to learn to be brave and free,
to face what life flung at them, and not weakly to ask the consola-
tion of religion. But there there she was. She came from a different
world than he, and a different country, and she was a lone, forlorn
woman in the present world. Yes, death would be gentle to her, a
smooth, rippling, sleepy approach into darkness. And it would
produce an irony that she would never experience. There was no
waking after death, and she would die, and she would not wake
up in any Heaven. She would die, and there would be no more of
her, and all her dreary life would have been in vain. He wanted to
revolt against it all. Life was a lousy business. You had to stand
up to the whole lousy business, he told himself with feeling and
passion. Goddamn it, he would!
But he was going to Sarah. And when he and Sarah were
married and they had children, they would raise them intelligently,
intelligently and free from all that he had been raised in. He vowed
that he would. He had no God to Whom he could vow. He vowed
it to himself. Sarah! She was so lovely. And once with her, now,
he would tell her all that happened, tell her all that he had been
thinking.
The car stopped and he got off. He was going to Sarah now,
and all of his home life would drop from his mind for a little while,
and he would find joy and love with her. He walked briskly, a
young man on his way to see his girl.
75

=== Page 80 ===
The Hands of Jeanne-Marie

Arthur Rimbaud

These are the hands of Jeanne-Marie,
These are the hands of Jeanne, not Juanna.
These are dark hands, mysterious,
And powerful, and tan as summer.

How were the hands of Jeanne-Marie
Burnt to marvellous brunette?
What cosmetic seas were fathomed?
What dark pools were drained for pigments?

Did they swim through barbarous skies
With soft stroke of charming knees?
Have they rolled and rolled cigars,
Handled drastic diamonds?

On the warm breasts of Madonnas
Have they blistered golden flowers?
The blood of belladonnas surely
Sleeps and pulses in their palms.

Huntresses of diptera?
Experimenters in auroras
For the indigo of nectars?
Have they served as flasks for poisons?

O what eternal dream has seized them
With strange pandiculations?
What never accomplished dream of Asias,
Of invasions, Khans, Zions?

76

=== Page 81 ===
THE HANDS OF JEANNE-MARIE
Have they perhaps been laundering
The shorts of uncontrollable boys?
No. These hands have not sold idols,
Incense, figs, oranges.

These are not congenial fingers
Like some workman's, swollen, raw,
Good for shaking hands—however
Maculately gloved in tar.

These are the hands of Jeanne-Marie,
Designed to dislocate and black,
To split spines and darken skulls,
Like machines, accurate,

Carboning like furnaces,
Blasting shudderings away,
Their flesh chants the mysteries
Rhythmed by the Marseillaise!

These hands will take your delicate
White elbows, ladies, in their hands!
They are stranglers, they exult
Like Othellos at your throats!

Glittering, imperious,
In their exquisite phalanges
Spots of sunlight set like rubies
Frighten madmen, delight children.

Hands tanned, nicotined,
By violent breasts, smoking lips,
By the passionate, lighthearted
Men of Paris in revolt!

Once they were marvellously pale—
When the sun of love looked down
Across precarious barricades
And lit the bronze of riflemen.
77

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78 PARTISAN REVIEW

Ah, sometimes, sacred hands,
At your wrists, where our lips
Utter with despair and pride
A chain of clearly linked cries,

Sometimes, sacred hands, we dream
That neither death nor history
Can bleed a single freckle from
Your perfect fingers, drained of blood.

(Translated by Lionel Abel)

=== Page 83 ===
John Dewey's Achievement

Eliseo Vivas

THERE ARE many indications that we are witnessing a more thor-
ough break in the philosophical tradition of the West than that
which took place in the days of Galileo and Descartes. Or perhaps
what is taking place is only the completion of that break, the snap-
ping of the last strings which tie us to an incubus of dead errors. In
any case no one in our day has done as much as John Dewey to
accelerate the process and to point the direction which future
thought must take. The pre-eminence he has achieved and the re-
action which still greets his writing derives from this fact. Dewey's
quarrel with the history of philosophy is radical. We are not able to
make sense of what he writes until we realize that his strictures on
our tradition are based on his complete rejection of it. He does not
deny the solutions which have been proposed but the problems them-
selves, because he repudiates the assumptions from which they
spring. Most of the current criticisms of Dewey's philosophy can be
traced to failure to realize how radically subversive is his thought.
Readers whose quarrel with our philosophical tradition is super-
ficial read him in the light of their own luke-warm aims and pitifully
miss his thrust. In recoil they attribute to Dewey a confusion which
really exists in their own minds, and which is inevitable in any one
who attempts to read him in terms of traditional viewpoints which
Dewey has abandoned.

Dewey's dissatisfaction with the tradition of Western phil-
osophy is to be traced, at least in part, to Hegel, from whom he
gathered, as Mead pointed out, a deep aversion to dualism. But it
has a more important source in his grasp of the implications of
Darwin for philosophy. It has been generally conceded that Darwin
dealt the coup de grace to the other-worldliness of our Western
tradition by opening the question of the origin of man to scientific
study. But few thinkers besides Dewey have realized how deep-
going are the implications of the theory of evolution for epistemol-

79

=== Page 84 ===
80 PARTISAN REVIEW

ogy and for logic. Dewey saw that if we take the species to be in
continuous process of evolution there is no valid reason for not
applying to the understanding of man's highest interests the same
techniques and procedures, the same method, used with so much
success at the inanimate and biological level. And he also saw that
when mind is conceived as an instrument of survival, an interpreta-
tion of knowledge grounded on the notion of mind as mirror of
reality becomes obsolete. The elaborate development of these sugges-
tions constitutes Dewey's chief contribution to philosophy. He has
demonstrated that the basic dualisms of our thought, which are so
deeply institutionalized in our material and moral life, have their
origin in the primitive science of the Greeks. Ancient science was an
honest and roughly satisfactory expression of the intellectual needs
of the slave-holding aristocracy which created it; but it is hopelessly
unsuitable for our needs. And while everybody but the Thomists
has abandoned it, the philosophy which grew out of it is still intact
and implicitly in daily use in the schools and in the streets.

Dewey's objection to dualism is no mere prejudice. He is deeply
convinced that dualism invariably develops into duplicity, for theo-
retical splits sustain divorces in practice. If modern culture has
failed to bring forth its promise, if the brass knuckles of the bar-
barians threaten us at every turn, from the theoretical standpoint the
reason for both failure and threat is to be found in the separation
between our practical and our spiritual needs. The divorce allows
our practice to be guided by the principles and techniques of the
pirate and the slave runner, while our ideals, like chlorotic virgins,
are immured in the sterilized nunneries of our Art and our Higher
Thought.

Dewey does not mean that our theory is the sole efficient cause
of our material troubles. On the contrary he has sought to show
how the theory of a culture is rooted in its material soil. But my
image is inadequate, for he recognizes that theory should guide
action, and if we are going to make our world into a fit habitation
for human life lived in dignity and in freedom, the theory that now
guides us must be scrapped. "The basic problem of our time," he
tells us in his last book, "is that of effecting integration where
division now exists." He has told us that the problem is not a purely
theoretical one. But he knows that it can not be resolved satisfac-
torily if we shirk the purely intellectual task of re-examining
critically and without sentimental piety the basic elements of our
conception of the world.

=== Page 85 ===
JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT
81
2
The classical conception of knowledge assumes that intellectual
activity is the result of a pure disinterested curiosity with which
men are naturally endowed; but what is the source of that curiosity
it does not attempt to tell us. "Men by nature desire to know," says
Aristotle, and there is no sense in asking why: that is the way we
are. On this theory the defining function of mind is pure contem-
plative activity. Whatever their differences, on this point all philos-
ophers, whether idealistic or materialistic, agree. But when the
function of mind is thus conceived, the objects of knowledge are
taken to be fixed and complete affairs: they are eternal structures or
objects existing independently of the inquiry which reveals them;
and the objective of knowledge is taken to be the grasping of these
"eternal essences of things."
Sharply contrasted with this view is the evolutionary concep-
tion of mind. For the latter, mind "has its origin in biological
adaptive behavior and the ultimate function of its cognitive aspects
is a prospective control of the conditions of the environment." We
do not start thinking prodded by the spontaneous stimulus of a pure
curiosity, which seeks to grasp a static reality behind the deceptive
flux. We think in order to resolve difficulties or "problematic situa-
tions" that obstruct our on-going activity. In order to do so we
devise hypotheses with the aid of hints gathered from somewhat
similar situations successfully resolved in the past. A hypothesis is
a hunch, addressed to resolving the difficulty out of which it grew,
and is therefore tested against the situation by carrying out the
activities it suggests. If these resolve the difficulty, the hypothesis
works, and is said to be true. We value the result of our thinking
in so far as it stimulates, guides, and serves to check further
inquiry. This is true of both scientists and ordinary men. They
make hypotheses, do not discover pre-existing traits. The picture
in which either common sense or science paints of nature has meaning
only in terms of the procedures by means of which it is constructed;
and far from being fixed, it is in a state of constant transformation.
The scientist does not accept his results because they fit neatly into
an already constructed picture or because they approximate more
closely the true nature of reality. When he makes the assertion that
that is what he is after, it can clearly be shown that he is interpreting
his modern practice in the light of the Greek theory of knowledge.
The reason why he accepts his results is that they enable him to
anticipate with accuracy events in which he is interested. The objec-
tive of his inquiry is control, and its objects are the formulas by

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82 PARTISAN REVIEW

means of which he achieves it. But the formulas are not a picture of
objective reality. They are not only relative to the practical function
they fulfill but are also relative to the operations and the instruments
by means of which the scientist arrives at them. In the practice of
modern science "knowledge is an affair of making sure, not of
grasping antecedently given sureties."

Although the primary function of knowledge is practical,
once enjoyed it is often sought for its own sake, and only then does
it develop beyond a purely utilitarian activity of limited scope and
application. But no matter how elaborate and far reaching our
knowledge may get to be, the criterion of its truth remains the
ability of the hypothesis to resolve the difficulties which gave rise
to the inquiry. It is of course true that as knowers we seek con-
sistency and are thus led to systematize our theories. Elegance and
logical simplicity are important factors in scientific formulations.
But the internal consistency of scientific theories and their elegance
and simplicity are sacrificed to their relevance. The criteria of truth
are successful prediction and control.

When the traditional philosopher is confronted with this anal-
ysis of knowledge he falls back on logic as a field on which it can
not be applied. Scientific method, he tells us, may partly be accounted
for in terms of the instrumentalist theory. But not altogether. For
obviously instrumentalism leaves out of account the formal canons
—the so called "laws" of thought, and the principles of inference—
by means of which we regulate the operations of our understanding
in empirical as well as in purely deductive thinking. And it must be
granted that the failure to account satisfactorily for the formal
disciplines has been one of the most serious weaknesses of tradi-
tional empiricism; and conversely the claim to account for them has
been one of the strongest arguments in favor of rationalism.

Rationalists argue that the canons of thought cannot have
their origin in experience, for if they did they would have to share
the contingent character which stains all that comes from experience.
And yet the conclusions of mathematics and the inferences of formal
logic are necessary, not contingent. Or less cryptically stated: If the
principles of thought are contingent, they can not be regulative
principles at all; and it follows that thinking can not claim any
validity whatsoever. But there are necessarily valid inferences in
logic and mathematics, and there are basic principles, like the laws
of identity and contradiction, on which we can not cast doubts.
These cannot have their source in experience if they are to be
capable of regulating our knowledge. Empiricism is therefore an

=== Page 87 ===
JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT
83
incomplete philosophy; it is necessary to postulate a realm of fixed
and immutable reality beyond experience. And this is the ground
for asserting a complete break between logic and scientific method.
The former deals with the immutable principles of thought, and its
sphere is the realm of the necessary; while the latter deals with the
facts of experience, and can never give us anything better than con-
tingent truths. This in turn is the reason why we may trust "specu-
lative philosophy" or "metaphysics," a discipline which claims to be
governed by the pure "laws" of thought, and hence is completely
independent of the techniques of verification employed in the empir-
ical sciences.
Dewey's elaborate answer to this argument is to be found in
his recently published Logic.* Although to a great extent it is but
a restatement and development of conceptions found in previous
books and articles, the publication of the Logic is an extremely sig-
nificant event in the history of contemporary philosophy, since it
represents the most uncompromising effort to show that within a
naturalistic and empirical conception of the world and of knowledge
a place can be found for the subject matter of formal logic. Dewey
argues that the formal principles of thought need not be derived
from a source beyond experience, for logic has never been and need
not be more than the theory of our knowing activity. It was so for
the Greeks. Whatever the means they thought they employed to elicit
the principles of their logic, they really got them empirically,
through an analysis of their discourse and of their techniques of
knoweldge. Rather than being immutable and eternal, logic is a
progressive, self-improving discipline, as are the human techniques
of knowledge from which it is derived. Though empirical in origin,
the principles of logic are nevertheless authoritative, since they
enable us to distinguish successful knowledge from false; but we
can put our trust in them for the identical reason that we trust an
automobile or a pill: we may trust logic more than medicine, but we
trust it for the same reason, because its principles have been labori-
ously discovered to be instruments by means of which we can satis-
factorily achieve successful knowledge. They are the abstract rules
of a winning game. There is no need therefore to assume that they
express ultimate and invariant properties of the universe.
It follows that the time honored distinction between "formal
logic" and "scientific method" is a distinction without a difference.
Indeed formal logic was the scientific method of Aristotle's day, de-
rived by Aristotle from the scientific practice of his day. It is incom-
*Logic, The Theory of Inquiry. Henry Holt and Company. $4.00

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84 PARTISAN REVIEW

plete and inadequate, because the scientific needs of his day did not
go beyond classification and demonstration of already discovered
truth—a truth initially arrived at by haphazard empirical methods.
The Greeks did not need their theory to control the world—they
controlled their slaves, who in turn took care of their mechanical
and menial tasks. But since their day many additions have been made
to logic particularly in the sphere of inductive inference. And yet in
spite of all these additions we stubbornly retain the illusion that
Aristotle formulated once for all the principles of thinking. Dewey,
however, is not primarily concerned in his Logic with improving
on Aristotle's formulations or adding to them. That has been done
again and again and will be done again in the future, and in so far
as he does it in this book it is done only incidentally. Dewey's
treatise is primarily a philosophy of logic.

This is, I take it, the essence of the "instrumentalist" theory
of knowledge and truth. It would not have outraged traditional
philosophers as deeply as it has, had its import been properly
grasped. Of course the fault is not altogether theirs; for in those
books like Experience and Nature in which Dewey has pushed back
the frontiers of thought, he has not been the easiest and most
lucid of writers. But there was certainly no excuse to take him
to mean that we have a right to accept as true whatever we
damn please, since truth is after all merely a means to our
personal satisfaction. Whatever William James may have meant
by his pragmatic theory of truth, Dewey has never meant any-
thing of the kind. He has frequently pointed out that while
knowledge is instrumental, the subjective motive for its pursuit need
not be utilitarian but may be, and indeed often is, an end in itself
for the inquirer. Knowledge is instrumental in the sense that it is
addressed to the resolution of the problem which gave rise to the
inquiry; therefore the value of the solution—its truth—can not be
determined independently of it. In Dewey's own words, instrumen-
talism is "a theory not about personal disposition and satisfaction
in knowing, but about the proper objects of science."

This analysis of knowledge bears directly on the so-called
epistemological problem, which is admittedly the basic problem of
modern philosophy, but which philosophy is no nearer resolving
satisfactorily in our day than it was in Descartes'. The problem
emerges when the conception of knowledge which modern philos-
ophy inherited from the Greeks is used to interpret the results of
modern science. Since science is believed to discover the "real,"
the physicist has a right to assert that the world is really atoms or

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JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT
85
charges of energy. Consequently a break is made between common
sense and knowledge; and what is worse, the world is stripped of
the qualities and values which we find in it, and for the sake of
which we live. But introspective psychology, which is also a science,
reveals the world to be made up of ideas, sensations, impressions, or
in current lingo, sensa. We have therefore two diametrically op-
posed and incompatible versions of "reality." The so-called problem
of epistemology is the problem of reconciling physics and psychol-
ogy. Tender-minded souls try to reduce physics to psychology; for
if reality is spiritual they can look forward to the day when, bodi-
less, they shall undulate in a heavenly medium wafted by angelic airs.
On the other hand, tough-minded men accept the physicist's picture,
and attempt to show that mind can be reduced to physical energy.
If a world of whirling electrons offers no eternal rewards neither
does it pollute with spectral shadows throughout eternity. If life
has no cosmic meaning, death cannot be a great evil, since it is a
respite from the choking bitterness of human anguish and the blind-
ing indignity of living.

The two solutions are silly since they rest on the erroneous
assumption that it is the aim of thought to grasp the real essence
of things. This is a philosophical interpretation of the function of
knowledge roughly true of Greek science, but inapplicable to mod-
ern science. We cannot say the world is idea or matter because we
do not seek to know what the world is but how it behaves. It is
simply twaddle to make the assertion that the world is one thing
or another. The epistemological problem is a factitious problem
and can only be resolved by surrendering the premise from which
it arises the belief that the aim of knowledge is to grasp the essence
of reality.

3
If in the light of the above analysis we examine the pictures
of the world which Western culture has entertained from the begin-
nings of recorded speculation, several things become clear which
otherwise remain shrouded in utter darkness. One of these has
already been suggested in passing; and that is how superficial are
the disagreements between traditional philosophers as compared
with the quarrel between them and Dewey. For all their theories,
based on the same conception of knowledge, are at one in the belief
that knowledge reveals a type of "reality" which eludes common
sense. Another point that comes to light is how organically de-
pendent on the dualism of appearance and reality are the conceptions
of human destiny which have shaped the course of Western culture.

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86 PARTISAN REVIEW

Transcendental religions, compounded of fancy and fable ground
in the mortar of frustration, nevertheless borrow from science legiti-
mate sanction for their belief in a static reality which it is the best
part of wisdom to cleave to, while "humanistic" or "naturalistic"
conceptions of human destiny face the paradox of counselling men.
in the name of science, to make themselves at home in a world of
value and of color which the traditional interpretation of science
declares to be fictitious.

When we have done away with the dualism of appearance and
reality which infects Western thinking, we are in a position to
provide ourselves with a satisfactory description of the world free
from the errors to which the traditional theory of knowledge com-
mits us. This has been attempted by Dewey in Experience and
Nature, in which he seeks to discover "the generic traits" of exis-
tence by means of the empirical method. But note that the word
"empirical" is not used by Dewey in the same sense in which it has
been used by British philosophers. Dewey uses it as it is used by
contemporary scientists.

Empirical observation of the world gives us a philosophy which
Dewey calls "empirical naturalism". It discovers the world to be
made up of processes or events, having histories, and involving
natural beginnings and ends. Observation reveals also that these
events exhibit both traits of contingency and stability, hazard and
regularity. But philosophy has always undertaken the task of ex-
plaining away as illusory the untoward traits and of demonstrating
the exclusive or superior reality of the dependable ones. Thus it
has always been a superior type of magic, whose chief function has
been to help us adapt ourselves imaginatively to the universe instead
of helping us to change it; in so doing, it has pushed "the genuine
moral problem of mitigating the troublesome factors" into the back-
ground and has disparaged and neglected it as "merely practical."

Since the function of knowledge is not to discover an underly-
ing reality, neither "matter" nor "mind" (or "spirit") can be
thought to be a substance or hidden cause of events. "Matter is a
word which points to a character of events when they occur at a
certain level of interaction," it is the "character of regular and
stable order" in the change of natural events. And "mind" denotes
the fact that with the aid of language-which develops from the
interaction of animals endowed with specific physiological equip-
ment-things and events are referred to by us, the order and the
connection of their appearance can be discriminated, and their con-
sequences can be anticipated and communicated to our fellows. For

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JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT
87

a naturalistic empiricism the insoluble problem which haunts both
materialism and idealism does not exist. "Matter" is what the
scientist tells us it is in terms of behavior, for science is not con-
cerned with investigating the nature of substance. And "mind" is
a word that points to a different type of natural events, not to a
different kind of substance. There is no reason why we should not
seek to understand mental events as we do any other natural event,
by discovering what are the conditions of their appearance and
continuance, and what are the modes of their behavior. Natural
events at a certain level of organization are designated as "inor-
ganic." At another level they become "organic." And at still an-
other level of organization, concomitantly with the development of
language, "mind" appears. The distinction between the physical,
the psycho-physical and the mental "is thus one of levels of increas-
ing complexity." But the important thing for philosophy is not to
offer a finished theory of life and mind; these are tasks for biology
and psychology. Its task is to establish the methodological point:
to show that the so-called problems of "life" and "mind" are not
"metaphysical" problems; that there is no need to assume different
kinds of stuffs or different kinds of energies to explain the emer-
gence of life and mind; that these are problems therefore that can
be solved by the same methods of investigation that are used suc-
cessfully in investigating other natural phenomena. Neither the
problems of "life" nor of "mind" have yet been solved completely;
nor is this peculiar to them as scientific problems. But we do know
enough about them to dispel the mystery which makes of these
phenomena dark Gothic dungeons haunted by the phosphorescent
spooks of medieval obscurantism.

4

Throughout the preceding sections use was implicitly made of
a principle which is ubiquitous and radical in Dewey's thought.
Knowledge, it was intimated, arises from "the interaction" between
organism and environment. The Darwinian origin of the principle
of interaction will not escape the reader; but he should also note
how much more fluid and deeper Dewey made it, and how he
extended its use to explain all aspects of experience. Nor must we
take it "mechanically"; the principle must be understood in so
complete and literal a sense that we must not suppose that the
organism and the environment "are 'given' as independent things,
and interaction is a third independent thing which finally inter-
venes." Dewey is able to rear on this deepened and extended concep-

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88 PARTISAN REVIEW

tion of interaction his moral and aesthetic theory as well as his
theory of knowledge and truth. It follows that the subjective aspect
of experience has an objective correlative, and the objective, in so
far as it affects man, has also its subjective terminal. This disposes
of arguments in favor of the unqualified subjectivity of experience.
And it also disposes of the traditional conception of the self or soul,
which views them as an essentially self-complete or monadic affair.
And this is in turn of the utmost importance for ethical and social
theory.

Dewey's conception of the self is developed in full in Human
Nature and Conduct. Man's nature is shown to be a function of his
biological equipment, defined chiefly by habit and desire, in inter-
action with a physical and social environment. Since habits and
desires are functions of two variables, they are plastic within limits.
Intelligence has the task of discovering the direction of desirable
change and the means of bringing it about. The picture that results
is quite unlike the conception of human nature inherited from Plato
by way of Paul and Augustine. The latter is an autocratic concep-
tion—a reflection in psychology of the totalitarian political ideals
of an embittered hater of democracy. Emphasizing the complexities
of impulse and desire which make up human personality, Dewey's
theory points to the fact that its adequate development consists of
an optimum of harmonious fulfillment, rather than the thwarting of
a "lower animal nature" by a "higher faculty" which is inimical to
its needs and cravings.

In the light of such a conception of personality the moral
problem becomes the problem of altering the individual and the
environment to realize concrete desiderata. What is desirable, as
distinguished from the merely desired, is defined by intelligence in
terms of the long range needs of the social animal, the plasticity of
his nature, the availability of resources at hand, and the resistance
offered by the environment. And since individual and environment
are, except for pathological cases, in intimate interrelation, the
needs of the one are never utterly out of relation with the resources
of the other.

In terms of Dewey's redefinition of the moral problem some of
the fundamental theoretical problems of classical morality remain.
We still have to define "the good" and "the right"; and we still must
give meaning to such terms as "freedom" and "responsibility." We
still have to define the objective and relatively stable criteria of
conduct for any given place and time, for otherwise life is at the
mercy of arrogant power in the hands of whimsical wills. But

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JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT 89

Dewey lifts the problems of ethics out of their classical context and
defines them in empirical terms. The parochial prejudices which it
is so frequently the end of ethical theory to justify are stripped from
it, and the emotive tone of unctuous and unexamined piety which so
frequently suffuses moral discussion finds no capillaries through
which to flow. Ethics becomes scientific and verifiable, and bluntly
pertinent to human aspirations.

Although the human animal is plastic within more or less deter-
minate limits, the problem of moral control includes the need for
changes in the environment as well as in himself. That a transforma-
tion of the social environment is possible and necessary an evolu-
tionist like Dewey can not doubt. It is only a question of the
direction of that change and the pertinent means thereto. The end,
Dewey thinks, should be socialism. This entails, of course, "thor-
ough-going changes in the set up of institutions and corresponding
activities to bring those changes about." But when we look for
concrete directions as to how to achieve that end we do not find
them in his political writings. But since in this paper no space can be
spared to show the limitations and difficulties of Dewey's thought,
it should be enough here to remark that Dewey's discussion of liber-
alism and socialism, and his faith in the power of education to bring
the desired changes about, are the impassioned expression of a man
of supremely good intentions. Let us accept his political writing as
an expression of his faith, and concede that it is not as a political
thinker that Dewey will be remembered. The daring and originality
of his thought manifest themselves in the field of technical phil-
osophy. Because Dewey is a philosopher his contributions are at one
remove from immediate practical actuality. There are good reasons
to expect that ultimately his thought will affect the practice of men
profoundly. But its effect will be indirect and slow.

5

Although Dewey's contribution to the philosophy of education
represents his most influential sphere of activity, if measured quan-
titatively, it will not be mentioned here for reasons of space. His
philosophy of religion must also be ignored, although it marks a
significant step in the development of a purely ethical and essen-
tially naturalistic conception of religion. But reference must be made
to his aesthetic theory, for it constitutes a very important contribu-
tion. Indeed I believe that in the history of American aesthetics
Dewey ranks as the outstanding figure; and this is said in full recog-

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90
PARTISAN REVIEW

nition of the importance of the contributions of men like Santayana
and Prall.
Dewey defines the aesthetic experience as a complete and full
experience in its rounded and integrated totality. The aesthetic is
not different from any other kind of experience; we find in it only
those traits which belong to every normal experience. The difference
lies in the degree of clarification and intensification achieved by the
components of the former and not of the latter. Complete experi-
ences have their own unique emotional tone and carry with them
"an individualizing quality"; throughout them "there runs a sense
of growing meaning conserved and accumulating towards an end
that is felt as accomplishment of a process." Because the aesthetic
experience is a complete experience, all that does not contribute to
mutual organization is eliminated from it, and only those aspects of
things or events that are consonant with one another are selected.
That is to say that it has unity, that it is an experience. And to the
degree to which it is an experience it involves heightening of vitality.
At its height, it also involves complete interpenetration of the self
and the world of objects and events. The aesthetic object therefore
is not the physical thing on the pedestal or on the wall in an empty
gallery. The object hanging on the wall is the stimulus necessary to
produce the vivid and unified aesthetic object which emerges in the
aesthetic experience; it is the product of an interaction between the
consumer, who brings to bear on the experience the totality of his
available resources, and those energies and forces which the artist
ordered and expressed through the physical material.

Like the rest of Dewey's theory, his theory of art is profoundly
naturalistic. What is expressed by the artist and perceived by the
consumer are values and meanings, but these are inextricably bound
to the matter which expresses them; indeed it would be more exact
to say that the values and meanings expressed are the material itself
when it is organized in a certain manner in the aesthetic experience.
"Ethereal things" are things of sense. "There is no limit to the
capacity of immediate sensuous experience to absorb into itself
meanings and values that in and of themselves that is, in the
abstract would be designated 'ideal' or 'spiritual'."

By means of these fundamental conceptions Dewey is able to
clarify the notions of form and content, and show how they are
logical distinctions possessing only a mutually relative status, so
that they can change places with one another depending on the
shifting interests of the spectator. He is thus able to show how
freshness of material entails necessarily newness of form and vice

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JOHN DEWEY'S ACHIEVEMENT
91
versa, and hence how originality of expression, contributed both by
artist and consumer, is necessary for a truly complete and vivid
experience. But what is perhaps most important of all for a complete
theory of art, he is able to demonstrate the place art can have in a
well rounded life, and the impact it can have on ordinary activity
by bringing into clear expression the meanings and ideals found
vaguely diffused in the drives and aspirations of our humdrum
pursuits.

6

The achievement of John Dewey is very great. One who
surveys his thought with a modicum of knowledge of the history of
philosophy must place him among the men who constitute its high
moments. He has scope of vision and depth, acuity of analytic
insight and bold originality. A quick glimpse at the table of contents
of Mr. Ratner's Selections,* just published, is all that is necessary
to show how wide is the range of his interests. Dewey has called
forth strong criticism, and some of it is not altogether unfair, for
his work is not finished like that of an architect of French gardens,
but is rough, like that of a pioneer who builds lightly and hastily and
pushes on when the mass of the homesteaders catch up with him.
His system awaits the detailed labor of the interpreters and the
finishers; but in this he is not unique in the history of philosophy.
Whatever place he may come to have in history, he cannot be denied
the distinction of having presented his generation with a philosophy
profoundly naturalistic in temper, addressed to resolving the most
urgent and most fundamental problems of his age; one based on a
method which is faithful to the procedures of modern science; and
one which avoids the pitfalls of obsolete mechanistic materialism
while cutting the ground from under that form of mysticism known
as dialectical materialism; and yet one which can serve as a theo-
retical foundation for practical action addressed to building a sane
and humane world.

*"Intelligence in the Modern World. John Dewey's Philosophy. Edited and with
an introduction by Joseph Ratner. The Modern Library. $1.25. This book is heartily
recommended to anyone desirous of getting acquainted with Dewey's thought.
Mr. Ratner's long essay is an admirable piece of interpretation and an invaluable
introduction to that end.

=== Page 96 ===
Back to the City

William Carlos Williams

THE SMELL of a train and the smell of a boat are two different
things.
It was still early evening when the Boston Express pulled into
Troy and hot! Whew! said Gurlie. Why it's worse than summer.
It is summer, said the baggage agent.
She wondered if she hadn't made a mistake after all, coming
down at this time. What's the matter with you people down here,
she said to him. Why do you have it so hot?
The man looked at her as he was putting the various pieces of
luggage on the wagon to run them down to the boat alongside the
tracks. Is this all? he said.
Lottie clung to her mother. Flossie was half asleep again with
the heat. Here, said Gurlie putting her down beside the baggage
for the moment. You watch her.
Hey! said the man. You can't put her down there. You take
her off. If you want to get on board you go on down that way.
Right down there. That's the passenger entrance.
How do I know you'll put my things on the boat? said Gurlie.
You got your receipt, ain't you? He looked hard at her.
There was a steady line of men with hand trucks going down
the gangplank, passing close to where Gurlie stood-sweat, tobacco,
rope, oil there was a smell even of fresh hay, bale after bale of it
being wheeled in hurriedly. They were under a long station shed,
worn planks full of nails working up out of the wood and broken
splinters.
What time does the boat leave? asked Gurlie of a passing
employe in a peaked hat.
Six o'clock, ma'am. In about an hour. There it is posted above
the passengers' entrance. Dinner will be served in the dining saloon
after we leave. Boat leaves at 6 P.M. it said in chalk on a small
blackboard suspended by a string from one of the roof supports.

92

=== Page 97 ===
BACK TO THE CITY
93
“I think this is the same boat we came up on, said Gurlie to the
colored stewardess. “Yes’m. I remember you. You had your sister
with you that time, a big woman. Shall I help you with the bags,
ma’am? The children looked at her. Lottie smiled. You better get
yourself a stateroom, ma’am, if you haven’t done so already. She
spoke beautifully with a soft, velvety voice that inspired instant
confidence.
At last the two were undressed and in their bunks, smelling
so oddly, half fresh, half stale—and so close to the wall! with a
high edge so you couldn’t fall out. They could hear shouts outside,
“Let ’er go!” then the fall of a heavy something into the water. The
engines started to throb just before dark and they were really off
back to the city.
“The city, the city, the city, the city,” said the engines
gradually gaining speed. Gurlie soon began to find out that return-
ing down a river was nothing like going away up it, already a kind
of fever to her. Never again, not with children. She would never
go to that trouble again. Not she. Put them on the boat and let
somebody else meet them.
Away to the west over the suburbs of Albany there was a
flaming sunset, mountains of golden cloud riding over turquoise
bays with level rifts of lesser clouds between, reds and pinks and
greys. Gurlie watched from her stateroom window while the chil-
dren chirped and looked from the upper berth where Lottie wanted
to be placed along with her sister—for company. “Go to sleep. I’ll
sit outside the window, right there, where you can see me.”
At least it was a little cooler now though a following wind
between the low banks as they dropped below the city prevented any
strong breeze from the boat’s motion. A man shouted some sort of
greeting from shore. You could hear his voice distinctly—though
Gurlie couldn’t quite make out what he said—if it was anything
intelligible. “What a small stream it is up here.”
“Birds, weeds, flotsam—That couldn’t be a man—No, just a
dog—it must be—floating.”
“I’ll watch the children, ma’am. You go on up on the deck
awhile. I’ll take care of them.”
“Now don’t you expect me to give you a big tip,” said Gurlie.
“Because I won’t. I’ll give you a quarter if you help me but I’m not
going to give you a tip like these rich people around here.”
“Yes Ma’am. I’ll take care of the children. You go on and get
yourself a rest.”
Inside the saloon you could feel the woodwork shake with a

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94 PARTISAN REVIEW

low thundering sound, a rhythmic shudder. Several older children
were drawing water from the cooler. They were spilling it. Gurlie
saw herself in the large mirror where the stairs turned to go up
from either side. Her face was flushed. Stepping over the high sill
of the door she went onto the upper deck.
Downstream now. The air was hot and still. Out here the boat
seemed to glide as if immobile, the banks receding silently. That was
the country—rushing off. The city, the city, the city—it went’on—
on in her mind. The old thoughts rushing to greet her, already
changing from what she had known all summer long.
She watched the darkening river bank with long patches of
pickerel weed out through shallow water in the mud. There was a
boy fishing from a boat. She watched as the swell of the river
steamer caught him aslant rocking his small craft violently for a
moment, then passing. Some men were swimming in front of a
stranded scow tilted inshore. There was a piece of ladder nailed to
its side in one place so that a person could climb from the water
to dive from it. One of them was waiting now for the swell to reach
him before he plunged off. A straggling flock of crows was passing
lazily overhead across the river.
The country is quiet and peaceful. The city will be hot and
uncomfortable. The city, the city, the city—it made her restless,
uneasy. I wonder if Joe got my letter. He'd better be there.
Gurlie half dozed, finally slept and awoke later chilly and
alone. She did not realize how long she had been there. She felt
cramped. The banks were higher here, the steamer was turning in
to the shore. It was dark too—drifting without a sound of the
engines. It must have been the bell that woke her, or the change
in the ship’s motion.
Brugh! she decided to go down and get to bed. Country still.
At night the country is like a wilderness.
She must have slept longer than she realized. The saloon was
deserted except for one or two as usual with no cash for a state-
room sitting dozing. She unlocked the door, the children were
asleep together. She undressed. Tomorrow—the engines had not
started. There was not a sound of any sort but a man snoring
somewhere. The boat was drifting again. Then—she heard a giggle,
almost at her ear. She had not put the light out—having drawn the
curtains in front of the children's bunk deciding to read a little
while.
There were whispers next door and a smothered laugh. Gurlie
looked at the wood of the partition which was painted white. In the

=== Page 99 ===
BACK TO THE CITY
95
intense gliding silence she could hear distinctly, Bless you, darling!
and a soft, continuous rustling noise that caused her to stiffen,
intently alert—a tittering laugh and then after a moment heavy
breathing. It was the last she heard. For the bell rang three times
rapidly and the heavy shudder of the boat as the wheels were re-
versed approaching the landing drowned everything else out.
At the wharf she could hear the dull, regular thud of merchan-
dise being dumped on deck—just a few pieces, then the subdued
shouts, the poundings of the cable and the engines starting again
—somewhere, outside, in another world. It was deathly hot in the
cabin while they were inshore. She'd be glad when they were out
in the river again. Must be near eleven o'clock. She was too indiffer-
ent to look.
She had glanced at the boat's "library" on her way down to
her cabin thinking to find something there she might read, knowing
she couldn't sleep, but it was closed—behind the sliding glass door
along the wall of the saloon and locked tight. Lying at the dock the
noises next door had ceased. Gurlie picked up an illustrated book
of children's verses belonging to the children. She held it in her
hands staring at it—tried to read it but relapsed—after a moment,
with the light lit—into staring and listening.
She thought she'd like a boy—but not yet—not till Joe had
more money. Europe first. Go back and show them—she'd see
to that.
They were out in the stream again under the steady drive of
the engine and the vibration of the paddle wheels—staring and
listening—vague sounds had begun again next door—unable to
make out more than occasional unrelated syllables—and Lottie
breathing heavily above her—once she seemed to whimper, as a
pup will do in his sleep, and say a few mumbled words. Gurlie knew
there was talking next door but the steady, continuous jarring of
the hull was just enough to make words unintelligible. She felt
feverish—unable to close her eyes. The noises next door were stilled
—at last.
She awakened again later—the boat making steady down-
stream in the dark, nearer and nearer—the light still burning
brightly, the book of children's stories still by her left hand. The
noises had begun again in the next cabin—a dull blow against the
woodwork of the partition and the noise of mattress springs—as if
a heavy person were turning over. The city, the city. The nervous
drive of it made her angry in her thoughts.
Gurlie put out her light, put her head down in her pillow. She'd

=== Page 100 ===
96 PARTISAN REVIEL

like to get her eyes on that woman in the morning. She'd make it
her business to do so, the dirty thing. What kind of people-on a
boat! practically in public.

This time she did not awake until she could see, in an early
morning light, the grey pillars of the palisades. The children were
calling her. Almost in. The children were whispering-or Lottie
was and trying to look out between the narrow slats of the shut-
tered windows. There were a few people walking by on the narrow
deck and occasional snatches of conversation. She heard water run-
ning into the basin next door and the splash of someone washing.
She didn't like it.

Mommię, I want to get up. Little Flossie took up the refrain,
Mommie, Mommie, Mommie, Mommie, Mommie. Gurlie was afraid
they would fall out so she took the baby in with her and let Lottie
kneel on the plush couch and peek out as best she could. Dress
yourself, said Gurlie to her, if you want to go out.

I want to go! Gurlie rang for the stewardess and made her
take care of the children, then she put on her own clothes-and
opened the window. Thank goodness. What a beautiful day.

Give them each a glass of milk. Anything for you, Madam?
No, said Gurlie. Just let me off this boat. That's all I want. You
don't know how to make people comfortable in this country.
Dreadful.

I'm very sorry, madam.

What a night! She hadn't slept a wink-so to speak-thanks
to those people in the next cabin. She sat down on one of the chairs
in the saloon on purpose to see them come out which they did after
a time, together. Just a child! Gurlie was shocked. A little thin
faced boney legged thing-probably the mother of the race-but
very cocky, holding her head high and with a shy, thickset, strong
looking man-freshly shaved, following her. Entirely dispropor-
tionate.

Pugh! said Gurlie puffing out her lips in disdain and forgot
about them at once. Now they were coming into the dock at 23rd St.
She rushed back into the cabin to see if she had forgotten anything.
Opening the drawer of the wash-stand, on the chance that she might
have left something in there, she saw a black book and picked it up.
It was the Bible. Why didn't I have that last night? She turned
instinctively to her favorite Revelations.
Too late now.

Telegram. Gurlie opened the yellow envelope nervously. Joe
couldn't be there. He was in Washington. Just like him. He knew

=== Page 101 ===
BACK TO THE CITY
97
we were coming home today. Now just what can that mean?
It was frightening to be in New York again on the noisy dock
among the luggage-especially with the two children. Gurlie was
irritated and bewildered without Joe by the slowness and indiffer-
ence of the baggage handlers so that it was more than a simple
delight to see dear Auntie coming smiling among the crowd to them.
Lottie ran to her at once.
You poor things, said she. You look hot and tired. How brown
you have become, Lottie sweetheart. And how's little Spider? Let
me see her. Um, she's still the same-Well, have you got your bag-
gage out? Did you rest on the boat?
Rest! I didn't sleep a wink. I didn't even want to touch any-
thing. I wouldn't wash in those basins, said Gurlie. I don't know
who was there before me.
Auntie took the stubs and soon had everything or almost every-
thing efficiently managed so that they could take their small hand
luggage, hail a cab and go bumping over the stones back to the
apartment. But the trunk?
Was it hot on the boat?
Yes, it was hot and dirty and impossible. I wish I could tell
you-but I'm ashamed. You don't know anything about such
things. We weren't brought up that way. I think those boats are
no better than floating whore houses. Terrible people. I couldn't
sleep a wink.
What! said the big woman in amazement.
You should have seen the fresh face on her. On whom? said
Olga. The woman. What woman? The woman I am telling you
about, she slept next to me all night long.
Next to you?
In the next cabin. And that man. I don't believe it was her
husband. I'll bet the company hires them for that-to get pas-
sengers. You can't tell me different. Do we have to stand in this
line? The law should put a stop to it. All night, all night. I don't
know how they didn't get tired.
Maybe they were on their honeymoon.
Nonsense! you don't know anything. You're just an old maid.
Decent people don't act that way. Just a harlot. I'm going to tell
Joe to write a letter to the company protesting or to the Police,
subjecting decent women and children to filth of that kind. You
can't tell what they were doing in there. And there was a Bible in
the room-
Oh, I don't think it's so bad as that.

=== Page 102 ===
98                               PARTISAN REVIEW

You don't! Well I am more experienced than you and I know
better. How can you safely take children on a boat like that. Society
should protest—or put the boats out of business. What have you
been doing all summer? And what is Joe up to?
     He didn't tell me anything except that you would be here on
the boat today.
     At the high desk on the dock Gurlie couldn't find the check for
the trunk. I gave it to you.
     No madam.
     Just now. I handed it to you with my own hands.
     You gave me the slip for the small baggage but not for the
trunk.
     They were both the same. I mean they were together.
     I beg your pardon ma'am, they were not.
     What are you trying to tell me. I tell you they were. Don't you
talk back to me like that. What are you trying to do? I tell you I
gave them both to you. Gurlie was furious.
     The man said nothing.
     I'll bring a complaint against you. If my husband were here
you wouldn't talk to me like that. There were several people wait-
ing by this time. I'm sorry madam, you will have to move on.
Gurlie didn't move. Not till I get my things. There it is right there.
with my name on it. I'm going to take it with me. Give me a piece
of paper, I'll write my name and address on it—
     I'm sorry madam, I'll have to call an officer. You are holding
us all up here.
     Call him. I'll have you arrested. I gave you the two slips, both
together. Are you trying to steal them for the company. Such dirty
boats. I won't leave here till I get my trunk. No, I won't! She turned
to the others near her.
     I don't blame you, said a shabby looking man.
     I'm sorry madam but you gave me only one stub.
     I gave you two. Oh come on, Gurlie, said Olga under her
breath, we can straighten that out later. I'll go to the office.
     I will not.
     Next, said the man. There it is, said Gurlie taking up several
papers on the desk. The man came out from behind it in alarm and
attempted to take them away from her. No, said Gurlie. Yes, said
the man. No, said Gurlie, this is mine. The man looked at it. He
went over to the trunk and compared the numbers.
     No ma'am.
     You're a lot of thieves, said Gurlie.

=== Page 103 ===
BACK TO THE CITY
99
You'll have to take that up with the office. Next, said the man.
Look in your handbag, said Olga. Come on. But I want to take it
in the cab with us now. No, I won't go. Come on. They want to
keep it here then charge us extra. I'm sure I gave him the ticket.
Or else it's lost, I don't know.
A very pleasant older man at the office said he would take care
of it-and he did.
Gurlie produced her key and in a very short time the trunk in
the cab they were on their way up town.
How are they all in Vermont?
I feel dizzy. It's so hot here. I wish I hadn't come home to be
left alone that way with those stupid men.
Wasn't I there to help you? said her sister.
I don't want to talk about it.
The poor kids were completely ignored - but they had the
windows to look out of. As the cab stopped at a crossing a boy of
twelve or so stared in at Lottie, not a foot away, and made a face.
She drew back but the baby unabashed stared at him in return
wide-eyed.
The cab jerked and started. You should have heard them,
Gurlie broke out, referring to the pair in the next cabin. Then
changed to, What is he doing in Washington?
I don't know. I suppose it has something to do with his
business.
It's about time I got home. What does he think. I'm his wife.
He never tells me anything.

=== Page 104 ===
Paris Letter

The last Paris Letter's gloomy prognosis of the season has
proved only too correct. Indeed, it is so bad that Parisians pretty
much accept Virgil Thomson's melancholy crack that "this is just
a winter dropped out of everybody's life; and the sooner we forget
it, the better."
Artistic Paris, like the rest of France, is oppressed as by the
lowering atmospheric depression before a crashing thunderstorm.
The literary left roughly reflects, though with characteristic pro-
fessional deformations, the discouragement and disarray of the
French workers and peasants. For if there is, relatively, social
peace, it is the peace of despair. Not even yet has the French work-
ing class recovered from the smashing defeat of the November 30
general strike. Even that weak and half-hearted effort brought out
such disproportionately colossal repressive forces and produced such
savage reprisals that the too often betrayed French workers, having
as it were crawled into their holes to lick their wounds, cannot
yet regain either their courage or their faith. Never have the
Second and Third Internationals fallen to such depths of discredit:
the time would seem famously ripe for reassembling the still basi-
cally militant workers around the original revolutionary Marxist
program, the desertion of which for Popular Frontism has led
to defeat in France, in Spain to catastrophe. Yet the result is, for
the time being, the opposite. The blows have been too hard. For
the moment, their effect has been to turn the French proletariat,
not to revolution, but to inactivity and despair and the almost
cynical jemenfoutisme of the feeling that "if you don't lift your
head nobody will club it."
Grim though this sounds, the situation is far from hopeless.
It is retreat, not capitulation: could the French worker see clearly
and convincingly how to reform ranks for the fight, there is plenty
of fight in him. On the (Fourth Internationalist) P.O.I. and the
(Centrist) P.S.O.P. rests the historical responsibility of showing
him—a responsibility on which it were no exaggeration to say that
the fate, not only of France, but of all European civilization, at
present depends. The French working class, which probably has
the highest level of political comprehension of any national prole-
tariat, seems merely to have retired temporarily from militant activ-
ity. Defeat has not, by and large, driven the French proletariat
either to a suicidal renewal of belief in social reformism, or to
crank cure-alls, or to a hysterical self-abandonment to the demagogy
of fascism; quite the contrary. Would that the same could be said
of the intellectuals who reflect it!
Such politically the season has been, and its deformed reflection
has shown itself in the arts. It seems now time, as it draws toward
100

=== Page 105 ===
PARIS LETTER
101
its close, to examine some of its literary productions. For the pur-
pose your correspondent, rather than following his perhaps limited
or biased personal proclivities, attempted, by a frank pestering of
his acquaintance, followed by a statistical winnowing of the an-
swers, to discover what, apart from poetry, was being most read and
discussed. The results of such a method are naturally odd: an
uneven lot of six books, two of fiction, four of what one might
horrendously but fairly term "politico-philosophico-literary" works.
A purely personal report on which he herewith respectfully submits.
With Le Mur,¹ second book by Jean-Paul Sartre, the new
white-haired boy of French fiction, it is easy to be pleased, hard to
be excited. Its five stories, of varying but considerable length, are
workmanlike, realist, and interesting. The impact of political events
shows in the subject of the title story (a largely psychological
reportage of the thoughts of a miliciano condemned to execution
by Franco fascists) and of L'Enfance d'un Chef, (a long careful
biographico-fictional account of how fascist leaders get that way).
The remaining three stories are individual psychological studies.
All the stories are to be praised for the fact that Sartre (who is
neither lazy nor amorphous as an artist) eschews the facility of
the mere slice-of-life technique, and presents them as fully formed,
conclusively constructed dramas. Were it not for the American
reading public's incomprehensible prejudice against volumes of col-
lected stories, these should prove a natural for publication in trans-
lation by an enterprising American publisher.
Yet, withal their excellent qualities, they somehow disappoint.
Certainly to take an American comparison-they are far superior
to those of, say Hemingway. But they have the faults of their
qualities a cautiousness, a sense of prose tradition, a tendency
to choose the surefire effect that render them, despite their youth-
ful richness, a little literary, a little thin. Sartre, a very young
writer, may well go on to greater self-confidence in and self-aban-
donment to his own art; yet he may equally well, especially under
the indirect temptation of present success, degenerate into a mere
homme-de-lettres.
Les Enfants du Limon is a horse of a quite different kettle of
feathers. A long fantastic satirical novel, splashed with poetry and
a weird exhaustively cited scholarship on the subject of nineteenth-
century French literary madmen, it is, if in any French literary
tradition, in that of the encyclopædic Rabelais. Illuminating com-
parison with known works in English it practically defies. For its
tone varies from the profound and brilliant satire of a Ronald
Firbank down to the simple artful gayety and wittiness of an Evelyn
Waugh. Perhaps, stylistic differences duly discounted, its net effect
most resembles that of the less pedagogical sections of Wyndham
1 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: Le Mur. Pp. 226, Gallimard (nrf), fr. 20.
2 RAYMOND QUENEAU: Les Enfants du Limon. Pp. 316, Gallimard (nrf), fr. 22.

=== Page 106 ===
102

PARTISAN REVIEW

Lewis' Apes of God, in that the preposterous and blown-up figures
who stalk its pages seem sometimes more vividly real than reality.
It is "about" practically everything under the sun, but most
particularly concerns the financial, intellectual, and human collapse
of a millionaire family, the descendants and relatives of radio-king
Jules-Jules Limon. Its characters range from an Antoniolatrous
anti-fascist fruit-merchant to a professorial uncle who in his schol-
arly study of literary madmen comes within a millimetre of losing
his own mind, through a gamut including a conceivably genuine
devil complete with sulphurous breath, a communist-minded elder
daughter who starts a fascist party under a total and ultimately
fatal misapprehension, and a chic style-setting brother who ends as
a junk-dealer. It is more full of gusto and mischief than a treeful
of monkeys, and its style is a perpetual acrobatic. If it is definable,
apart from the cauterizing effect of its destructive satire, as the
literature of escapism, it frankly pretends to nothing else. It proves
nothing, teaches nothing, but is it diverting!

With the non-fictional group, we enter a more solemn, and,
alas, a more earnest and depressing, field. With one exception, these
four books, under the more or less explicit pretext that Marxism
isn't the whole story (which genuine Marxism has certainly never
pretended to be), attempt, not a synthesis between basic Marxist
theory and whatever their technical specialty happens to be, but an
escape from Marxism, either, on the one hand, by a flat denial of
its validity, or, on the other, by sundry "revisions" and "moderniza-
tions" of its basic concepts-both often seen before in times of
retreat. This escapism, indeed, is itself a phenomenon which only
Marxism itself can consistently explain. Need it be insisted on that
what the time most urgently demands is synthesis of still inade-
quately related knowledge? Among the exact sciences alone the
need is striking enough; add to that the still unincorporated discoveries
in anthropology, in psychology of all schools, in semantics and
general epistemology, in Marxist development itself to name only
a chance few. Yet, in only one of these books is there any serious
attempt to establish these relations, to make this fusion.

Most summarily disposed of is La Psychanalyse du Feu,
though Bachelard, who apparently fancies himself as a rebel, often
distinguishes himself carefully in this book from "classic psycho-
analysis", the real distinction is that he has introduced psychoanaly-
sis into belles-lettres. This fancy little volume strikes one as the
Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler of psychiatry, and, if translated,
should most correctly be published with prodigious margins on
hand-chewed paper by some Nonesuch Press for the delectation of
psychoanalytic bibliophiles. Limiting philosophy to the rôle of rec-
onciling poetry and science, this pretentious literary gent has never

GASTON BACHELARD: La Psychanalyse du Feu. Pp. 219, Gallimard (nrf), fr. 22

=== Page 107 ===
PARIS LETTER
theless written a book of philosophy (using the word in the sense
in which most of the practitioners of the exact sciences do, i.e. as
in which most of the practitioners of the exact sciences do, i.e. as
a term of abuse) in a coquet little style which bursts constantly into
poesy of the ickiest description. Sandwiched in among such defini-
tions as "Fire is a privileged phenomenon which can explain every-
thing.... It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is sweetness
and torture. It is cooking and apocalypse" we find such earnest
dicta as "One can study only what one has first dreamed." This
escapist volume is significant, quite apart from Bachelard's personal
farciness, as an example of the way that, under political stress,
psychoanalysis tends to become a pseudo-antithesis to both Marxism
and the exact sciences.
A better but still sadder book, because by a man of great artis-
tic power, is Giono's Poids du Ciel. This volume, printed by highly
advanced industrial processes, illustrated with Lumière Opta and
Super S. E. astrophotographic plates made through a complex 81-
centimetre telescope, is largely an attack on industrial processes
and a passionate advertisement for individual peasant farming,
Arcadian sheep-herding, handicraft weaving, and the necessity of
leaving Jean Giono alone so that he may "live! live!" in "grandeur
and nobility." Repeatedly infuriated by the fact that the rails of
tramcars are "fixed" (1), and that people driving automobiles have
a tendency to look where they are going, Giono, in his hysterical
desire to preserve individuality, cannot believe that we are all trying
to save individuality, but that some of us doubt the best means
thereto to consist in gazing at tall mountains and distant constella-
tions in a rapt daze, or attempting to return to an agricultural econ-
omy plus philosophic anarchism and pastoral psychology which has
certainly never existed outside the Eclogues of the most refined
classical poets. Smitten with the realization that man is infinites-
imally small in comparison with the universe, Giono's conclusion
seems to be that man should therefore abandon all clarity of thought,
all further effort to improve his lot in nature, and drift on to
nothingness in an ecstatic fog. Or rather, not to nothingness, for,
as Giono will soon find, the world will not leave him alone: suicidal
imperialist wars, fascism, and the ultimate destruction of European
civilization would, one fears, find Giono still bleating for everyone
to please be nice and not to "belong to" things. This comic view is,
oddly enough, the kindly one. Sterner folk might with justification
point out that Giono's hatred of industrialism, which already in the
present book shows a hemi-metamorphosis into a hatred of the
industrial worker, suggests that, if he is too humanly decent and
bright in the head to be a pushover for the fascist demagogy about
peasant holdings, return to the soil, and the spirit of the race, he
might yet prove a bewildered but murderous Makhno³. One can
4 JEAN GIONO: Les Poids du Ciel. Illustrated with 32 astrophotographs by M.
de Kerolyr. Pp. 243. Gallimard (nrf), Fr. 75.
103

=== Page 108 ===
104
PARTISAN REVIEW
have humanly nothing but sympathy for Giono's hatred of French
rationalism and industrial capitalism; but his resultant attack on
them from the positions of poesy and agrarianism proves but a sad
step backward. This deluxe volume for the masses (peasant or
otherwise), which, despite its boyscout muddledness, retains in parts
Giono's indisputable poetic ability (there is an early descriptive
outburst on the robots of a fascist army which is of an amazing
brilliance), shows him essentially a pathetic-and characteristic-
modern instance.
Mabille impresses one at first by posing himself a respectable
task: the systematization of knowledge. Stating that his purpose
is not to collect knowledge, as did the encyclopedists, but to suggest
the schemata by which knowledge may be assembled, he chooses
as key: morphology. An égrégore (the term is revived from the
Hermetics) he defines as "the human group endowed with a person-
ality different from that of the individuals who compose it". This
he sets up as a more fruitful concept than the Marxian concept of
the determining nature of the means of production, redefining
égrégores as collectivities which are "a coherent system which
hierarchizes all human values". Noting that parent collectivities
die long before their psychological effect has worn off their children,
to collective action he opposes the determinism of contemporary
events. At this point the book goes off into social astrology and a
special Spenglerian Cloudcuckooland of its own, focused much on
the key-year 1550. Etc.
It is depressing reading. Mabille is not only a brilliant but
often a serious mind. He has had a Marxist training. He frankly
anticipates an obvious accusation by flatly stating that in this time
of political defeat, it is necessary to retire into contemplation, nor
does he deny the psychological effect of political defeat upon him-
self. Yet, having seen clearly thus far, he goes off into social astrol-
ogy; and ends up like a Spengler, as dangerous, if not more so,
because his little volume is not only symptomatic but impressive.
In all this drearyish account the principal ray of hope gleams
from the Foyers d'Incendie of Nicolas Calas. This brilliant young
Greek, of whom this is the first published volume, has posed, and
gone a good way toward solving, some of the most interesting
politico-artistic problems of the epoch. A conscious Surréaliste, he
has first of all done a job that has long been needed: he has decently
interred Surréalisme in a scholarly textbook which will permit it
to be taught historically in colleges, and permit art to go on to
something else. But, as a sort of Wyndham Lewis of the Left, in
5 In the September "War" Crisis, Giono is credibly reported to have mobilized
the surrounding peasantry to resist mobilization to arms by arms; a character-
istically fantastic and an anti-pathetic in its instinct, dangerous in its ramifications.
6 PIERRE MABILLE: Égrégores, ou La Vie des Civilisations. Pp. 186. Jean Flory.
fr. 18. (See also his earlier book, La Construction de l'Homme and the study
Thérèse de Lisieux.)

=== Page 109 ===
PARIS LETTER

105

this curiously uneven and heterogeneous work, evidently accreted
gradually (indeed, one has the sneaking suspicion that it is the
amplification of a doctoral thesis), he does much much more--more
than a casual letter like this can even touch on. But, for examples,
among a thousand other things, he examines in thought-stimulating
detail the whole connection between art and revolution; he raps
alternately the knuckles of both Marxism and psychoanalysis when
the more religious of their practitioners try to extend them beyond
the limits of their own fields; he backs up economic analysis by a
revealing study of the psychology of fascism as an abandonment
to a credo-quia-impossibile faith; he poses the necessity of a revo-
lutionary synthesis of knowledge; he finds time to explode such
disparate figures as Proust and Tzara and Max Eastman, and to
spare a few sound smacks for the religion and politics of White-
head, and the weaknesses of the well-meaning Herbert Read. With
an amazing linguistic scholarship, he can pause in passing to do such
useful jobs as that of demonstrating why the vocabulary of Joyce's
Finnegan's Wake is a dead end; he can derive interesting conclu-
sions from subjecting the work of Picasso vs. Dali to the odd test
of converting a picture of each into a sort of jig-saw puzzle; he
surprisingly elevates surprise and habit to the poles of revolutionary
psychological dialectic; he casually starts a sharp polemic by drop-
ping the obviously true observation that the Freudian goal of social
adaptability is reactionary in contrast to the Surréaliste goal of
revolution; and sometimes, letting himself go, coolly proposes a
mechanized Louvre, or suggests for workers' children the substi-
tution, in lieu of bourgeois lead soldiers, of lead figures of workers,
barricades, and overturned omnibuses, and an opposing force of
bosses, priests, and cops-even going on to suggest, with a bright
grin, the substitution of chocolate guillotines for chocolate Easter-
eggs.

It is only fair to note that Calas's simple unspoiled passion for
sadism makes him seriously misstate the causes of Hitler's acces-
sion to state power; he believes naïvely that psychoanalysis has
brought about the sexual emancipation of man; and, though we may
accept chocolate guillotines, we beg to be excused from sharing
the author's anticipated pleasure in hearing Shakespeare's sonnets
sung by Tino Rossi. But, unless there is a mute inglorious Milton
somewhere about, this book is indubitably the most stimulating that
France has produced this year.

With which somewhat hasty and superficial report of the state
of the republic of letters in the city of light, your correspondent
begs leave to catch up on his two-weeks-neglected newspapers, to
see whether he can postpone until at least the autumn, his hiring of
a country cottage and a bomb-proof bicycle.

SEAN NIALL'
NICOLAS CALAS: Foyers d'Incendie. Pp. 268, Editions Denoël.

=== Page 110 ===
A Variety of Fiction

Philip Rahv

THESE SEVEN WORKS of fiction* divide themselves between Europe
and America. Reading them in succession, the first thought that
comes to mind is that nowadays the difference between the literature
of the old world and the new amounts to the difference between
manifest and latent horror. The writer in America is making what
he can of his liberty to record the grimmer aspects of life; yet placed
against his European counterpart, it at once becomes evident that
he still inhabits a temperate human zone.

For Europe — Odon von Horvath tells us in his short fable of
totalitarian society—is rapidly moving into the zone of the Fish,
where the soul of man turns as rigid as the face of a fish. Horvath
found a simple and inevitable image for what has happened in the
Third Reich. His novel, The Age of the Fish, is hardly anything
more than a brief, compact sermon built around this image and
illustrated by a few dramatic episodes in the life of a schoolmaster
and his numb little pupils. The schoolmaster intrudes upon the
sphere "ruled by the radio" when one day he reproaches a boy for
writing in his composition that "all niggers are dirty, cunning, and
contemptible." Having touched one of the tentacles of the Moloch-
state, the hapless man will never again sleep in peace. But the
schoolboys hate not only the "niggers" but one another; and as one
of them commits a murder for the sake of the mite of warmth the
sensation provides, the teacher, now deeply compromised, takes a
hand in discovering the culprit, only to be deprived of his position
for his pains. And in the end that beehive of culture called Europe is
caught in a final beam of irony as we sigh with relief watching the
schoolmaster—nicknamed "the Nigger"—depart for Africa to
teach in a missionary school. Expelled from civilization for believ-

* The Age of the Fish, by Odon von Horvath. Translated from the German
by R. Wills Thomas. The Dial Press. $2.00. Goodbye Jo Berlins, by Christopher
Isherwood. Random House. $2.50. East of Eden, by I. J. Singer. Translated from
the Yiddish by Maurice Samuel. Knopf. $2.50. Rope of Gold, by Josephine Herbst.
Harcourt, Brace. $2.50. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Viking Press.
$2.75. Night Rider, by Robert Penn Warren. Houghton Mifflin. $2.50. Pale Horse,
Pale Rider, by Katherine Anne Porter. Harcourt, Brace. $2.00.

106

=== Page 111 ===
A VARIETY OF FICTION
107

ing that all men are human, it is to the jungle that this refractory
individual exports his obsolescent reveries.
But at bottom he is no warrior against fascism, this scurrying
little man with a conscience, this searcher for tokens of divinity.
Every time his ideas get twisted, a supernatural power reaches out
to enlighten him. The author, one feels, is on much too familiar
terms with God, whose intervention resolves the conflicts outlined
in the narrative. The problem it raises is primarily one of under-
standing the process of dehumanization, and this shifting of the
burden to God, though it may have helped Horvath to finish his
story, in no way helps the reader to complete the experience he has
been offered. Nor is it a question of objecting to the author's faith
on ideological grounds. It really is a matter of observing how
through the license of mysticism he evades the responsibilities of
his medium. To drop, as he does, a concrete human situation-
which at its start is presented with high integrity and a beautiful
economy of means-into the lap of the infinite is to convert relig-
ion into a literary man's ruse.

Odon von Horvath was a gifted young playwright and novelist
who was accidentally killed in Paris last year. His prose, quite apart
from any of its specific themes, strikes an ominous note, a note that
during the last few decades we have come to recognize and to expect
from the troubled writers of Central Europe. It can be described
as a kind of portentous buzz of the psyche. In different keys we
have heard this grave sound in the work of the Expressionists, in
the poems of Rilke, in the fictions of Kafka, in the pseudo-Dostoy-
evskyean novels of Wassermann; and people of the type of Franz
Werfel repeat it on a conventional level. It is a tone of foreboding,
peculiar to the air of cities like Prague, Vienna, and Berlin, on the
one hand related to religion and on the other to pathology. Of
course, the literature of most countries has for many years now
been stirred by sinister rumors. But the Central European note has
a certain timbre of its own-the modulation of a state of anxiety
at once reflective and intuitive.

This note is not absent from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye
to Berlin, a collection of diaries and narratives dated from 1930 to
1933, whose theme is the neurotic condition of German life on the
verge of Hitler's triumph. Mr. Isherwood, however, was no more
than a visitor. His account, though it communicates the strain of
the period through casually presented details of melancholy and
derangement, has an undertone of humor which in a way measures
its degree of detachment. One of the author's gifts is a droll
mimetic talent, and his imitation of the speech of his Berlin charac-
ters, as that of Natalia in "The Landauers," comes off so well that
the simple fun often dissipates the atmosphere of apprehension.

=== Page 112 ===
108                                                               PARTISAN REVIEW

But Mr. Isherwood did not set out to write a history, and even
as fiction his book makes no pretense to objective form. His prose
manners are those of an impressionist. He has saved for us the
flavor of the Berlin decadence during the last days of an epoch:
the wealthy Jews holding in their exhaustion and giving themselves
to business as usual with the suavity of bankrupts; the tough and
perverted boy, Otto Nowak, who reminds one vaguely of André
Gide's sweet and sour youngsters; Frl. Schroeder's boarding-house
which is so skillfully sketched that it turns into a kind of social
aquarium; the Communist café crowded with students "dressed
mostly with aggressive political untidiness" whose mental untidiness
is equally apparent at a glance; and behind every Prussian façade
the flicker of hysteria and in every mouth the whisper of the fall
of the city.

The Yiddish novelist, I. J. Singer, takes us into Poland and
Russia. His gloomy novel, East of Eden, grows out of the disap-
pointment with the results of the Russian revolution, and it may
be regarded as the first literary chronicle to concern itself seriously
with a subject that is bound to expand into a special genre. There
is plenty of game here for ravenous realists. The actualities of the
Russian situation are so fearful that even the inebriated fellow-
travelers of Stalinism are fated to sober up before long. And on
the morning after we can expect from them a virulent pessimism,
such as Mr. Singer reveals, or else a backsliding into the cheapest
bourgeois illusions.

The first part of the book tells the story of Jewish woe in the
ghetto, a story told so often that it has become a standard theme,
a norm, in fact, of Yiddish writing. But this version differs from
others in that Mr. Singer is too tough-minded ever to yield to the
poetry associated with the ghetto, the idyll of self-sufficiency evoked
by those literary Romantics who see in the religious past the golden
age of European Jewry. In this first part both the characterization
and the painting of the environment are excellent. Mattes, the
destitute, pious peddler whose one hope is to raise his son, Nachman,
to a higher social station, is defeated at every turn; and when his
oldest daughter is seduced by a soldier, he flees his disgrace by
moving his family to Warsaw. The war comes and Mattes is drafted
into the Russian army, to be killed in the first skirmish with the
Austrian troops. At this point the plot, freed from the inert world
of the ghetto, begins to wind itself around Nachman's experience in
the revolutionary movement. Converted by the Communist leader
Daniel, Nachman, now a worker, turns into a rank and file militant
wholly devoted to the struggle and to his party. The stress here is
on the contrast between leader and disciple. Daniel is from the very
first exposed as a strutting careerist in love with his own barricade

=== Page 113 ===
A VARIETY OF FICTION 109
gestures and steaming rhetoric; Nachman, the faithful child of the
masses, is his inevitable dupe. Physically broken by serving a long
sentence in a Polish prison, he can no longer restrain his longing to
enjoy the benefits of socialism in the land of Eden lying to the east
of capitalist Poland. He makes his way into Russia and finds work
in a large mechanized bakery in Moscow.—And now the scabrous
facts begin looming through the doctrinal mists. Gradually, pain-
fully, despite his almost suicidal will to believe, Nachman realizes
that for people of his class nothing has really changed. Together
with other half-starved, unwashed workers he lives in a crowded
barrack the walls of which are adorned with lying slogans. In the
factory he sees that "just as the workers hate the higher-ups, so the
higher-ups hate the workers," and that this mutual hatred
reproduces the class war which ostensibly has been abolished
forever. Things go badly with him. Arrested for speaking up in
defense of an unruly comrade, he is forced to sign the usual con-
fession of wrecking and espionage. Any one who is puzzled as to
why the old Bolsheviks "confessed" at the so-called treason trials
should read this book for its close analysis of the psychology of
capitulation. In Poland, where the police had nearly beaten him to
death, Nachman had resisted the demand that he sign a confession
naming himself as a spy, but once he is put away in the cell of a
"socialist" prison ("our" prison) he is no longer the same man.
For how can the revolutionary character survive the death of the
revolution?

As a work of fiction East of Eden is far from being as success-
ful as its predecessor, The Brothers Ashkenazi. Nachman and
Daniel, both, are statistical types rather than characters. The second
half of the story is no more than fictional reporting. Throughout,
however, Mr. Singer retains his ability to represent elemental people
and elemental emotions; and despite its limited perspective the book
is valuable for its sober and thoughtful realism. In this connection
a point might be made about the treatment this novel received at the
hands of certain liberal reviewers. The prevailing hypocrisy of
literary opinion is such that these reviewers—the very same indi-
viduals who for years now have been boosting political novels whose
sole virtue is their Stalinist content—set out to condemn Mr. Singer
for abandoning, in order to engage in politics, the "proper sphere"
of the novelist. And, of course, these belated guardians of the shrine
did not fail to assure their readers that it is not Mr. Singer's
exposure of exploitation in Russia that annoyed them, but solely his
rude tampering with the art of the novel.

Such reviewers, however, need but rarely resort to an esthetic
false-face, for the political novel is still mostly the preserve of the
pious. Thus in Rope of Gold Miss Josephine Herbst reverses the

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110 PARTISAN REVIEW

heresies of East of Eden. Shutting her eyes to the Daniels, she cele-
brates once again the hopes and struggles, the excited optimism of
the American duplicates of Mr. Singer's Nachman. But be that as
it may. So long as the Nachmans are what they are, novelists like
Miss Herbst should not be blamed too harshly for taking advantage
of their innocence—that is, if we keep in mind that novelists too
are what they are.
Rope of Gold is the third volume of a series that has been
advertised as a chronicle of the American middle class in decline.
But the ambitious chronicler, I am afraid, is rapidly sinking under
her load of sociology. For the fact is she is no Zola, no assembler
and disciplinarian of large masses of social material. Her sense of
drama is weak, and being merely shrewd about people rather than
good at character-creation, she is unable to project dominant and
representative types—such as Babbitt or Clyde Griffith or Studs
Lonigan—to embody dramatically the ideas her narrative is meant
to develop. Moreover, her nervous and nostalgic style is fundamen-
tally at odds with her objective subject-matter. And perhaps it is
this contradiction which has led reviewers to describe her prose as
"dull"—a criticism almost fantastically unperceptive, I think,
though it is easy to see how it originated. She is among the few
novelists, it seems to me, who have mastered the American idiom
and developed its rhythms. Her language never sounds like the
ingenious imitation of street-talk which has such a tiresome effect
in so much of even the best American fiction. But the trouble is
that her free, flowing, often introspective style allows for no em-
phasis, is ill-adapted to sustained external writing—to the conflicts,
sharp turns, and climaxes her theme requires. Stretched out to take
in oversize objects, it sometimes affects an impatient reader as baggy
and shapeless.

Another impression is that Miss Herbst does not so much want
to understand human beings and human situations as she wants
simply to "know" them. Perhaps this trait can be explained by that
frantic search for experience so characteristic of the writers of
her generation, whose first and main reaction was against the
genteel, prohibitive American past. Now travel, in the native tradi-
tion, has always recommended itself as an effective method of
soliciting experience (or "Life"). Possessed by a migrant sensibil-
ity, writers assumed an air of roving reporters whose job is to
"cover" as many peoples and places as possible. And political inter-
ests only encouraged and justified this floating tendency;—so that
in novels like Rope of Gold we find the author, in her anxiety not
to miss any of the eruptions of the class struggle, rushing to and
fro on the planet—from Detroit to Cuba, from Cuba to South
Dakota and Madrid, and back to New York and Pennsylvania.

=== Page 115 ===
A VARIETY OF FICTION
111

Yet, for the most part, these tours of history in the making result
rather in "written up" illustrations of the class struggle than in
truly felt representation and in judgments transcending the plane
of popular sentiments.
Miss Herbst's new volume tells, among other things, of farm
revolts, auto strikes, unemployment, and life on the intellectual
periphery of the "movement." But it lacks an organic centre of
consciousness unifying and evaluating the piled-up impressions.
Among the numerous characters, Victoria and her husband are
possibly the most conscious and intimately felt, though Victoria,
whose complicated relationship to Jonathan is poorly motivated,
at times is much too soulful, too submerged in good feeling to be
quite real. The best parts of the novel are the long ruminative,
nostalgic passages, in which personal affection and the memory of
the dead and gone bring back the old American times, making the
past seem close and worth doting on.
Since one expected more from Miss Herbst, a reaction of dis-
appointment was in order. On the other hand from Mr. John Stein-
beck-whose inspired pulp-story, Of Mice and Men, swept the
nation like a plague-one expected nothing. It is therefore gratify-
ing to report that in The Grapes of Wrath he appears in a more
sympathetic light than in his previous work, not excluding In
Dubious Battle. This writer, it can now be seen, is really fired with
a passionate faith in the common man. He is the hierophant of the
innocent and the injured; and his new book, though it by no means
deserves the ecstatic salutations it has received in the press, is an
authentic and formidable example of the novel of social protest.
The book is at the same time a detailed exposure of dreadful
economic conditions and a long declaration of love to the masses.
It is an epic of misery-a prodigious, relentless, and often excru-
ciating account of agrarian suffering. Once introduced to the Joads,
a large family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma, we don't lose sight
of them through 619 pages of the most minute and literal descrip-
tion of their misfortunes. Living in the dustbowl area, the Joads
are evicted by the banks that convert their land to large-scale cotton
farming, and together with thousands of other ruined farmers they
start on the long auto-trek to California. But all that awaits them
is the fate of migratory workers, notoriously the most depressed
stratum of the farm population. Mr. Steinbeck spares us not a
single scene, not a single sensation, that could help to implicate
us emotionally. And he is so much in earnest that a number of
times he interrupts his story in order to grapple directly with his
thesis. Thus several chapters are devoted to outright political
preaching from the standpoint of a kind of homespun revolutionary
populism.

But the novel is far too didactic and long-winded. In addition

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112 PARTISAN REVIEW

to the defects that are peculiar to his own manner, Mr. Steinbeck
has assembled in this one book all the familiar faults of the "prole-
tarian" literary mode. There are the usual idealized portraits and
the customary conversions, psychologically false and schematic as
ever, to militant principles. Moreover, the technical cleverness dis-
played in Of Mice and Men is lacking in this novel, which should be
credited with valid political observation and sincere feeling, but
which fails on the test of craftsmanship. Its unconscionable length
is out of all proportion to its substance; the "ornery" dialect spoken
by its farmers impresses one as being less a form of human speech
than a facile convention of the local-color schools; and as to prob-
lems of characterization, Mr. Steinbeck does not so much create
character as he apes it. For aping, too, can be turned into a means
of "re-creating" life. It would appear from this and similar novels
that on a sufficiently elementary level, and so long as a uniform
scheme of behavior-however simple-is imposed upon characters,
all a fiction writer requires to make his people seem real is the
patience to follow them everywhere, the perseverance to copy down
everything they say and everything they do.

At long last we come to Mr. Robert Penn Warren's Night
Rider, patently the most distinguished work on my list. Known as
a poet and literary critic, Mr. Warren has achieved the seemingly
impossible: his first novel shows none of the strains and shifts that
ordinarily mar such prose narratives as poets and critics have been
able to produce. Night Rider, manifesting an almost classic nor-
mality of form and rare qualities of a dramatic and pictorial order,
is told with so much ease and power that its author can be said to
have attained in one bound a leading position among American
novelists.

Mr. Warren has designed his narrative on more than one
plane. Its exterior reality is that of the strife in Kentucky, some
thirty-five years ago, between the tobacco farmers and the tobacco
trust, while within or behind it there exists the interior reality of
the moral process and of the hazards and mutations of personality.
And the inner and outer themes are unified by a constant exchange
of meaning, by a never-interrupted dialogue between the visible act
and its psychic shadow.

The problem of identity is deeply implanted in the novel. Percy
Munn, whose life is overpowered by the passions and cruelty of the
tobacco war, feels that if he only knew who he is he would surely
know how to resolve his bewilderment. In a numb, awkward
fashion he attempts to arrest the loss of inner continuity. He tries to
fathom the ambiguous connections between things done and things
remembered, between the present self and the vanishing and perhaps

=== Page 117 ===
A VARIETY OF FICTION
113
contrary selves of the past. But since "the future was dead and
rotten in his breast, the past, too, which once had seemed to him
to have its patterns, began to fall apart, act by act, incident by inci-
dent, thought by thought, each item into brutish separateness. . . ."
His sense of identity cannot withstand the shock of his experience
and, finally, he wills his own destruction. And in some obscure way
one perceives that the disintegration of Munn, though the reasons
for it in the story are immediate and specific, may have its larger
implications. Possibly its meaning relates to that compulsive ele-
ment in the history of the South whose objective equivalent in its
literature is the obsessive theme of violence and death.
But aside from its value as a psychological fable, Night Rider
is exceptional for its vivid, sensuous writing, and for its realistic
picture of sectional life. It has, however, its opaque side. Given
the desperate economic struggle in which Munn acts as a leader,
we are never certain whether his fate is being determined by forces
in the main social and impersonal, or whether the objective events
serve merely to provoke his own intrinsic temper. The author, of
course, draws both curves of determination, but the way in which
they interact is not quite clear. Still, despite this uncertainty, Munn
is wholly convincing, and Bill Christian, Lucille, Senator Tolliver,
Doctor MacDonald, and Willie Proudfit are equally real. Willie
Proudfit's tale of the frontier days forms an heroic chapter recalling
the lost innocence of the continent as well as the terror of its subju-
gation. There are at least half a dozen superb scenes of action, such
as the search of the Negro cabins by deputies and the burning of
the warehouses in Bardsville by the night riders; and from the less
resounding parts I would single out for comment that wonderful
passage, rendered through the memory of Munn, which tells about
a Miss Ianthe Sprague of Philadelphia. Resembling a species of
marine life, this ageing and nondescript spinster is unforgettable.
Miss Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a col-
lection of three long stories, calls forth the reflection that the re-
wards gained by the ardors and refinements of composition are still
unique. Of the three stories, "Noon Wine" is the most perfectly
constructed and at the same time a story that one would have least
expected to find in this volume. Dealing with mad doings in the
countryside-such as Erskine Caldwell is fond of it is developed
with so much lucidity as to give enduring literary form to a per-
vasive native theme. The other two narratives proceed more closely
along the lines of Miss Porter's typical manner. But at this late
date, after the critics have discussed these stories at length and
with abounding sympathy, little is left to say except to regret that,
publishing as seldom as she does, Miss Porter allows us to read her
only at such rare intervals.

=== Page 118 ===
Books

WHITMAN AND ARNOLD

WHITMAN. By Newton Arvin. Macmillan. $2.75.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. By Lionel Trilling. W. W. Norton. $2.50.

It was only natural that Walt Whitman should have seen
Matthew Arnold as the guardian of British gentility, and that
Arnold in turn should have said that Whitman's poetry achieved
originality only at the expense of genuine culture. They were far
apart in temperament and training; and, in addition, each one
reflected the condition of his national culture to a greater degree,
perhaps, than any other contemporary figure. Whitman, the great
commoner, expressed the excitements of an expanding society and
its prospects of a freer and more abundant life; Arnold attempted
to release the humanist tradition from the dogmas of existing insti-
tutions and, at the same time, to save it from the attacks of nine-
teenth century materialism.

In the structure of their thinking they had little in common.
Yet they were facing the same social and intellectual predicament.
For while both were influenced by the libertarian ideals of the
Enlightenment and looked to their realization in an ultimate commu-
nity of material and cultural interests, they could not fail to observe
that the growing injustices and vulgarities of a competitive economy
presented a serious challenge to their faith. Even their solutions-
heroic in Whitman's case, and militantly urbane in Arnold's-were
in large measure elaborate restatements of their common predica-
ment, for the theories they advanced were often entangled with the
prejudices they were ostensibly combating. If Whitman was opti-
mistic, it was because he transformed his belief in the innate virtues
of man into a general teleology of progress. Arnold, on the other
hand, was somewhat less confident the tensions were greater in
England than in America but he, too, did not question the possi-
bility of a natural evolution, with the aid of reforms, toward higher
levels of culture and equality.

Unfortunately, the legends which have enveloped both men
have obscured their common tasks as well as their distinct contribu-
tions: Arnold has become the darling of the academies, Whitman
the god-father of every populist crank. It is a good thing, there-
fore, that scholarly biographies of both men should have appeared

114

=== Page 119 ===
BOOKS
115

this year. For, whatever the merits of each study, they provide at
least the documentary clues to the understanding of Arnold and
Whitman. The authors, Lionel Trilling and Newton Arvin are
exponents of the historical and materialist mode of criticism which
has grown up during the last decade in this country. Hence they
have investigated the social worlds of Arnold and Whitman to
explain the meaning as well as the origin of their ideas. But here
the similarity ends: for where Trilling applies himself to the full
scope and intricacy of Arnold's thought, Arvin seems more intent
on bringing Whitman up to date by smoothing out his nineteenth
century wrinkles.

In this respect, Arvin illustrates the tendency to revaluate
writers according to some political doctrine of the moment. Some
years ago sectarian critics were concerned chiefly with the revolu-
tionary sympathies of the writer; today writers of the past are
being matriculated in the recently established school of democratic
progressivism. But despite the shift in perspective, the emphasis
continues to be on the relation of the writer's political opinions to
current political needs. Thus Arvin states that his "main concern"
is to decide whether Whitman was a socialist poet, and he goes about
this task not through an analysis of the consciousness that emerged
in his poetry, but by assembling Whitman's views, as stated in con-
versation as well as in writing, on the working class, science, phil-
osophy, the Civil War, and socialism itself. The result was of
course predictable-a mass of violent and contradictory attitudes.
And though Arvin attempts to solve the contradictions by inter-
preting those views of Whitman which are patently non-socialist as
momentary lapses in the general trend of his thought, and by read-
ing the modern theory of socialism back into Whitman's vision of
a greater democracy, the numerous qualifications Arvin is forced
to make come close to vitiating his general conclusions. In fact his
researches serve only to convince us that it is not as a student of
political affairs that Whitman will be remembered.

The meaning of Whitman is obviously to be found in his
poetry and not in his opinions, for it is in his poetry that Whitman's
plebeian instincts and personal optimism merged with the social
currents that shaped the thought of his time. And a perception of
the resulting poetic qualities hardly needs the ideological justifica-
tions that Arvin has set up. Intellectually, Whitman stood at the
junction of agrarian America and the growing industrialism; hence
he combined the old equalitarian longings and the legend of self-
reliance with the scientific materialism and the solidarity of the
multitude that came from the city. But what distinguished Whit-
man, and gave his poetry, I believe, its unusual energy, was the
projection of his very being into the variety of impulses that made
up American life. His celebration of democracy, for example,

=== Page 120 ===
116 PARTISAN REVIEW

created large images of physical association, and his pantheism was
tempered by a sense of participation in the actual labors of mankind.
Even if his poetry, like his general beliefs, did not resolve the con-
flicting tendencies about him, still it achieved a remarkable fusion of
the expansive ego of the individual with the urgent tasks of society.

Arnold, on the other hand, worked within the established tradi-
tion of British thought, and if he too was unable to reach a satis-
factory resolution, it was largely because he could not make a suffi-
cient break with the past. Resting as it did on the contradiction
between those two great opposing forces of the nineteenth century,
science and theology, it was inevitable that much of his work should
be made up of incompatible elements. Unlike Arvin's, however,
Trilling's "biography of Arnold's mind" does not attempt to recast
Arnold in our own image: on the contrary, Trilling's book is an
extremely intelligent and exhaustive analysis of the organic con-
sistency and logical inconsistency of Arnold's thought. If one were
to quarrel at all with Trilling's method, it would be to point out
that it is somewhat diffuse and overburdened with details and quota-
tions. But it would be captious to stress these faults when we con-
sider that Trilling's extraordinary fidelity to the subject makes his
book one of the best works of historical criticism produced in this
country.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Arnold's career is that,
though primarily a man of letters, he crossed swords with the most
pressing cultural and social problems. His thought-span, as Trilling
tells us, covered the functions of criticism, the uses of theology, the
place of science, methods of education, the theory of the state, and
the political role of the working class. But however wide may have
been the spread of his interests, they all revolve around a concern
for the survival of British civilization. France had already been
shaken up in 1789, and all of Europe in 1848. Class differentiation
was growing and Arnold feared the anarchy that might result from
further upheavals. Yet the picture on the side of conservatism was
scarcely more attractive, for the aristocracy was dying, the middle
class was becoming more philistine and less stable, and the symbols
of religious and governmental authority were being questioned by
the findings of science. Arnold's solution, as Trilling points out,
was in the nature of a compromise: hence he was constantly tossed
between conservative theories of order and revolutionary theories
of freedom. Originally embarking, like most nineteenth century
critics of society, on a criticism of religion, he soon began to retrace
his steps, and he ended with a secular version of religion and a
clerical version of society. He professed sympathy for the social
aims of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, yet he
found their moral values unacceptable. He was committed to the
principle of individual conscience and conviction, yet he constructed

=== Page 121 ===
REVIEW BOOKS
117
a morality of checks and balances. And Arnold's conception of the
strong state as a firm base for Culture, that is, as a central discipline
to check the growing anarchy of thought, is a striking example of
Arnold's life-long effort to reconcile the principle of reason with
the principle of authority.
As Trilling shows, Arnold's literary criticism was bound up
with his theories of social reform. He believed, for example, that
a heroic society was necessary for a truly noble and tragic literature,
and he expected that poetry would take on the function of unifying
and refining man's values which had been performed in the past by
religion and philosophy. Even his theory of "the grand style"
flowed from the serious and dignifying aims he attributed to liter
ature. As a result, much of his own poetry was academic and his
criticism had a hygienic tone which is somewhat alien to modern
taste. Yet his sensitiveness to the modulations of contemporary
thought saved his poetry from the facile optimism of so much
Victorian writing. And Arnold's social interests may be said to
have led to that awareness of the responsibilities of literature to the
general needs of humanity which has had so great an influence on
subsequent criticism.
Both biographies seek to define the relevance of Arnold and
Whitman to our time. And both suggest that Arnold's "ideal of
order, of peace and of unity" and Whitman's democratic enthusiasm
might well be rediscovered at a time of social frustration and intel-
lectual panic. Yet the methods of historical analysis employed by
Trilling and Arvin have very little in common. Arvin, apparently
conceiving the present as but the prolongation of the past, ascribes
to Whitman the values of "contemporaneity". Trilling, on the
other hand, finds in our consciousness the necessary detachment for
a more objective view of the past than it was able to have of itself.
Hence Trilling's admiration of Arnold comes not from any suspen-
sion of criticism but rather from a recognition that Arnold's "fail-
ures in judgment" did not diminish the largeness of his aims.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS

THE POET'S RESPONSIBILITIES

IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES. By Delmore
Schwartz. New Directions. $2.50.

Mr. Schwartz' first book has had an unusually good press; it
has been praised for a variety of qualities and has been generally
accepted as a fresh expression of poetic energy. The words made
welcome music and the promise of music; not so much particular
words or particular music, I think, but generally-what is a great
deal-words and music just the same. One has the double advan-

=== Page 122 ===
118 PARTISAN REVIEW

tage, in coming late as a reviewer, of general concurrence, and of
being able without injustice to isolate one or two points for empha-
sis. One can write a little as if the reader already knew what the
poems are about; better, one can think as if oneself knew—and if
there is injustice there it should be the less felt, being at a second
remove.

What the poems are about, so far as this review goes, is in
this distich from "Faust in Old Age":
Spontaneous, I have too much to say,
And what I say will no one not old see;
in this line from "The Beautiful American Word, Sure":
In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace;
And, as an example of such an accident in the poetic sense, in this
passage from "Dr. Bergen's Belief":
But every side is wrong, but every man
Is guilty, every child is used, and now
Effort is useful as spitting in the sea,
Good and evil are merely expressions of pain
In the perpetual return of the blind night
And the bit by bit disorder of the rain.
Other lines and passages could be added to articulate the skeleton;
Freud and Marx; Ego and Ennui; Mozart and Socrates; Yeats,
Cummings, Eliot and Stevens; and added on the very basis of the
distich above. Mr. Schwartz has spontaneity, the gift of speech,
together with that slant, that deep inclination, towards maturity,
which has not yet saved him from that glibness which is lack of
subject-matter. We see him resort to the artifice of getting under
way, no matter where, and accepting whatever wind or spirit pro-
poses. "Coriolanus and His Mother" is an example; almost avow-
edly in the prose interludes, where the speaker works himself up
into saying something, which by the very process of the working
up seems significant or ominous; but also in the verse sections,
where the names of Marx, Freud, Aristotle, Beethoven, and so on,
people the thoughts and images. It should be observed that a good
deal gets done by these artifices; the artifice may become actual like
Yeats' artifice of eternity, or it may not; but meanwhile what gets
done, though not satisfying, is exacting and exciting. If there is
an error in the poet's conduct of affairs it is that he has applied
psychological form, which we know is appropriate to drama, to
philosophical subject-matter, where the appropriateness is question-
able. (One risks that such transposition is appropriate to moral
philosophy, which I risk as a poet not as a philosopher, but applied
to any other branch will probably produce amorphous substance and
inadequate objectivity regardless of the verbal or metrical merit of
the medium in which the transposition is made; one can hardly be
aware of, and therefore cannot manage, all the forms one is using

=== Page 123 ===
BOOKS

at one time: a major reason why poetry is so much in passages,
and the rest haunted.)
Yet the spontaneity which, extended, corrupts the forms of
"Coriolanus" leaving it sound only in sections, is the probable
source or at any rate the intimation of order for almost all that is
most successful in the book. Spontaneity, the gift of speech, is also
the factory of awareness, of recognition, insight, discrimination.
If one lets oneself go within the limits of a manageable form (as-
suming one has enough to let go) there will emerge the dark acci-
dents of the mind's sufficient grace. Mr. Schwartz is able to do this
to one degree or another rather more often than not. The title
story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," lets go of a pure fan-
tasy: one sees as in a movie how it was when one's father and
mother got engaged and went to Coney Island and quarrelled in a
Fortune-teller's booth; then one is put out of the theatre for crying
out commonsense warning. The fantasy becomes a fable and in its
new atmosphere gains meaning in the form of intimation much
faster than the logical mind can keep up with. The materials of
presumptive perception have worked upon each other under the
pressure of the form, let us say, meaning that one immediately
thinks that one could manage effects as good as pressing one's own
motion into fable; and in the synergy is a poetic order. It seems
to me that "Dr. Bergen's Belief" is similarly a fable-play, a pre-
sented fable, and not a play at all; not an enactment of conflict,
but an almost helter-skelter descriptive recitation of a predicament
of belief: What can man ask to have? made orderly, in the poetic
sense, because felt as fable. The dramatic form is so frailly present
as not to interfere with but only prop politely the contemplative
backward movement into the fable. Mr. Schwartz has not mastered
his peculiar form; it is not everywhere equal to the demands of his
sensibility, nor does it always seem able to possess itself of a subject-
matter; but he has felt the incentive and worked on it cleanly, as a
poet, not as a beggar. The form, as illustrated in the story, the
play, and in separable parts of "Coriolanus," would seem to be
fertile, seminal for us, in our day; that is, capable of coping with
our subject-matter when we find it. That is a good deal to illustrate.

Elsewhere, in the shorter poems in the book, which because
they are shorter we are likely to think of as less ambitious but
which are doubtless as honest to their intent as the longer works,
we find naturally (it is the same man writing) the same tendency
towards the mature perception of the bit by bit disorder of the rain.
Some of course are merely exercise bits, more imitative than inti-
mate, and therefore quite clear and easily exhaustible. But in others,
some whole and some in part, there is at its own level an inexhaus-
tible quality in the perception which the associations of image and
statement reveal. That is not to say anything of Mr. Schwartz's

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120 PARTISAN REVIEW

rank as a poet; it is only to say that he works his materials upon
each other, and the results work upon the reader; which is poet's
work. I think especially of "At This Moment of Time," "The
Ballet of the Fifth Year," and "Far Rockaway." Others, as I know,
have a different choice; which is further witness.

R. P. BLACKMUR

A BELATED DIALECTICIAN

THE MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCES. By
J. B. S. Haldane. Random House. $2.50.

This is a naive, and rather pathetic book. Professor Haldane
has come to the true faith late in life; like so many similar convertis,
he is as eager and awkward as a middle-aged bridegroom. "I am by
no means qualified to speak on Marxism [a word he confuses with
Stalinism]," he notes disarmingly in his first paragraph. "I have
only been a Marxist for about a year." This lack-enough, one
would think, to daunt many a bold man, and especially, perhaps, a
scientist-does not in the least restrain Professor Haldane from
writing his book, nor his publishers from insisting in their blurb,
that "it is required reading for an understanding of the forces in
thought and action that are re-shaping the modern world."

Professor Haldane explains why he gave the lectures upon
which his book is based: "My own reason for delivering these lec-
tures is a different one. I think that Marxism is true." He is going
to try to prove that he is correct in his opinion. He is a scientist,
and "in these lectures, we shall mainly be concerned with the rela-
tionship of Marxism to science." What, then, is the Marxism which
he is to prove true and to study in relationship to the sciences?
Professor Haldane is not altogether clear about what he means
by Marxism, but he explains that his primary concern is with
"dialectical materialism."

Dialectical materialism consists chiefly of three principles.
"One of them is the principle of the unity of opposites." "The
second principle is the passage of quantity into quality, and con-
versely." "A third principle, which is perhaps the most important,
is what is called the negation of the negation."

Having cleared up Marxism in his first chapter, Haldane
devotes the rest of his space to popularized accounts of recent devel-
opments in mathematics, quantum theory, chemistry, biology,
psychology and sociology. Presumably these scientific develop-
ments are supposed to prove his thesis that Marxism, meaning the
three principles of dialectical materialism, is true.

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Let us examine the principles a little more closely, and try to
see how, if at all, they might be proved "true." First, let us observe
that the principles are not stated but only named. The first, for
example, is that "of the unity of opposites." But what about the
unity of opposites? What does the principle say, or claim, concerning
the unity of opposites? Professor Haldane does not enlighten us.
Further: what are "opposites"? We use the word loosely in
common sense, relying on the context to give a rough approximation
to our meaning. Logic and science must be more precise. The word
"opposites," among its other meanings, may refer to: (1) "contra-
dictories"—i.e., two sentences in such a logical relation that one of
them must be true and both cannot be true; (2) "contraries"—i.e.,
two sentences in such a logical relation that one of them must be
false and both may be false; (3) points, angles, lines, and other
geometrical terms having certain geometrical relations with each
other; (4) two human beings (or other animals) or groups of
humans who are in physical conflict with each other; (5) or simply
two particulars which are "different" from each other—a relation
so general and purely formal that it may, in one way or another, be
interpreted as applying to any two discrete terms, things or events.

The second and third principles may be analyzed linguistically
in an analogous manner.

The vagueness of the alleged principles of dialectical material-
ism is not accidental. The fault here is not Haldane's, but is common
to all who have written about them, from Engels on. It is impossible
to specify what the principles mean; and it is therefore absurd to
argue whether they are true or false: they are neither true nor false.
Those who believe in these principles claim that they give us
information, that, as they put it, they are "objective" laws of the
physical universe; in other words, that they are empirically sig-
nificant (and also true). If they give us information, if they are
empirically significant, they must be capable of interpretation in
terms of precise experimental and observational procedures, and,
reasoning from them by the accepted rules of inference, we must be
able to make specific predictions about future observations. These
are criteria for the significance of any empirical law.

Professor Haldane, as scientist, knows this. In Chapter 3 he
discusses the "doctrine of universal determinism", and rejects the
doctrine, not as false, but as meaningless. His criterion is the same
that I propose for him. "But the question of whether all future
events are absolutely determined today seems to me meaningless
unless it can be tested. And unless it can be tested by reference to
the knowledge of an omniscient being [which Haldane of course
rules out] I can see no method of checking it as ordinary scientific
theories are checked. And, therefore ... we had better scrap 'the
idea of determinism, at least as understood by Laplace."

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PARTISAN REVIEW
In his entire book, Haldane does not use a single word to
explain how the three principles of dialectical materialism might be
tested; he makes no single prediction on the logical basis of the
principles, nor does he give any example from the past of such a
prediction's having been made by himself or by anyone else; he
neither establishes nor even attempts to establish any logical relation
between the principles and any of the scientific theories he talks
about. He does none of these things, nor does he can anyone else.
He gives the show away when he writes: "Now I do not want to
suggest that Engels predicted quantum mechanics. Engels had before
his eyes the awful example of Hegel when he ventured into the
philosophy of nature, and in consequence he steered very wide of
too detailed predictions in the scientific field." Here, indeed, must
Engels' ghost feel faint with damned praise. For that steering wide
of detailed predictions is exactly what betrays that the principles are
without scientific significance.
Let me then apply Haldane to himself, and paraphrase: "But
the question of the principles of dialectical materialism today seems
to me meaningless unless it can be tested. . . I can see no method of
checking it as ordinary scientific theories are checked. And, there
fore... we had better scrap the idea of dialectical materialism, at
least as understood by Engels."
The methodological analysis which concludes that the prin
ciples are empirically meaningless does not, however, in the least
deny their historical importance. The principles can best be under
stood as metaphors. Through them Marx and Engels seem to have
expressed: their dissatisfaction with the usual "substantive"
approach of the traditional philosophers; their disagreement with
the mechanical materialism of the 18th century; and above all their
rejection of gradualist methods in politics, their insistence on the
irreconcilability of the major class conflict in modern society, and
their contention that the social revolution could be brought about
only through political revolution.
It is historically true, also, that most attacks on dialectical
materialism, from Marx's own time up to our day of Hooks and
Eastmans, have been, in their political meaning, ideological masks
for attacks on revolutionary politics. The defense of dialectical
materialism from these attacks has thus often (though by no means
invariably the Soviet philosophers and the sectarians are today
the most vocal and lengthy defenders) served indirectly a progres
sive political function.
But these metaphysical principles of dialectical materialism
survive now only as out-lived, vestigial remnants. Like the vermi
form appendix in man, they are at best useless; and they are liable
to dangerous infections. They can become dangerous because:
(1) They are without testable meaning content, and are so vague

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BOOKS 123
that they may be manipulated to justify, seemingly, any course of
action whatever—as they are manipulated by the Russians to justify
Stalinism or by Matticks and Oehlers to justify their sectarian
absurdities. (2) When they intrude upon the scientific analyses of
Marxists, they can obscure and confuse the accurate predictions of
the future upon which successful political action rests. (3) They
give political opponents a smokescreen behind which to hide, even
sometimes from themselves, their political struggle against revolu-
tionary politics and the revolutionary movement.

Let us, then, perform the necessary operation, and remove this
appendix from the corpus of Marxism. And let us take our clear
point of departure from Marxism understood first and most pro-
foundly as the science and art of the social revolution.
JAMES BURNHAM

THE PIRENNE THESIS

A HISTORY OF EUROPE. From the Invasions to the XVI
Century. By Henri Pirenne. W. W. Norton. $5.00.

Although he is only beginning to be widely known in this
country, the late Henri Pirenne has long held an extraordinary
reputation abroad in his field: medieval history. Almost single-
handed, he displaced four centuries of historical stereotypes. From
the time of the Italian Humanists, the medieval period had been
the battle-ground for the warring ideologies of the day. The
Humanists found in the Middle Ages only a criminal gothic inat-
tention to the niceties of Ciceronian eloquence, and the Enlighten-
ment saw only the depths of irrationalism and priestcraft. The
nineteenth century, with its confident individualism, hailed the emer-
gence of self-conscious freedom in the Renaissance. Nor were the
modern schools any freer from bias. Nationalism, as Pirenne him-
self saw, was transforming history into national chauvinism; cler-
icalism was reducing the facts to denominational requirements; and
there was a growing body of proto-fascist thought which found in
the feudal corporation refuge from capitalism and Marxism. Noth-
ing could be stranger than Henri Pirenne's call at this point for
“scientific universal history."

Indeed, Pirenne was something of a small miracle in historiog-
raphy. Most of his colleagues were engaged with paleography and
technical feats of scholarship. Most of his teachers—even when,
somehow, they had come to grips with central economic issues—
were caught in the arid legalism of the constitutional approach. But
this son of a merchant came to write the exciting history of the
bourgeoisie, to trace the emergence of an historic class. And he

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124 PARTISAN REVIEW

brought with him something of that "capitalist spirit" for which
he had so much respect—an adventurous sense of freedom, a rough
intelligence, and an impulse to find new techniques for new tasks.
At any rate, Pirenne broke cleanly with every bourgeois tradition
in European historiography to rethink the problems of the medieval
period in terms of a changing, developing economy and shifting
class alignments.

It was the rise of bourgeois civilization with which Pirenne
was largely concerned. In point of fact, his earliest and most valu-
able original research was on the growth of towns. For Pirenne
that urban transformation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
was the central and crucial phenomenon of modern Europe; it was
the significant Renaissance. Around that pivotal development he
built his interpretation of medieval life and society in a series of
dramatic theses which have ranked the great Belgian among the
most outstanding historical minds of our time. In Medieval Cities
and in his remarkable Economic and Social History of Medieval
Europe they are given their most precise formulation.

In this strange and brilliant general History of Europe they
are restated, in certain respects more loosely and erratically, in
others far more wonderfully, than before. For it was during the
World War that Pirenne was first given an opportunity to write
this general work which he had planned for so long. He had been
taken prisoner by the Germans, and alone in a war-camp cell he
thought back over his years of study. Interned a few months later
in a little German town, he proceeded, without a single note, to
write this tremendous volume—because, as he said, "the essential
thing is to kill time and not allow oneself to be killed by it." Pub-
lished four years after his death, and some twenty years after the
writing, with no revisions, it works out once again his classic outline
of the main stages in the history of medieval Europe.

The Pirenne thesis was striking and attractively simple. It
denied, in the first place, the old historical stereotype of the cata-
clysmic collapse of the Roman Empire with the barbarian invasions.
The essential characteristics of the ancient world, it was Pirenne's
claim, survived intact—international trade and town life remained
to give a commercial foundation to Mediterranean civilization. The
world-order lived on, but then came Islam. Before the onslaughts
of the Moslem invaders, the West fell back. The double-edged
Crescent had cut it off both from the East and the Sea. Civilization
in the ninth century broke sharply with the civilization of antiquity,
for it saw the hardening of the great artery of commerce in the
closing of the Mediterranean. The rupture with the old economy
produced feudalism: land became the sole source of subsistence and
the sole condition of wealth. In Pirenne's phrase, "Mahomet gave
rise to Charlemagne." The transition from this economy of con-
sumption to a capitalist economy of markets and exchange involved

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125

the rise of towns. And here Pirenne revised all the standing views
of the problem with his mercatorial theory: the town was the new
creation of the merchant, it was a fortress for the bourgeoisie,
developing within the womb of the old society. That develop-
ment meant, of course, the penetration of the medieval world with
the new commercial forms of money and credit, and subsequently
the bourgeois-democratic revolutions for political power.

There was, however, one implication in such a simple and
direct statement of the birth of capitalism that Pirenne warned
against, brilliantly calling attention to one of the most significant
aspects of the new society. The development of the bourgeoisie, he
insisted, was not a linear one. And he pointed to the consistent and
irresistible obsolescence of the upper cadres of the bourgeoisie.
Inevitably the bourgeois becomes an oligarch, conscientiously with-
drawing from productive activities, and leaving the fulfillment of
the progressive tasks of capitalist advance to a new group of entre-
preneurs, who metamorphose in the same way. Here, clearly, are
the economic roots of the modern leisure-class. In a sense Pirenne
is the 'necessary historical introduction to Thorstein Veblen.

Pirenne made, it seems, an important distinction between
economic motives and meanings. The motive was a matter of fact,
which investigation would or would not reveal; yet economic motive
or no, the meaning of historical phenomena he formulated with
reference to the economic organization of society. I stress this point
because Pirenne is perhaps the single instance of a bourgeois his-
torian who embraced a materialist interpretation, and yet managed
to shake free from vulgar economic determinism, without a final
resort to some sort of idealism. (Beard and Turner among Ameri-
can historians are striking victims of this cycle.) This approach in
Pirenne, however, can not truly be seen as methodological sophisti-
cation; he was pressed to such a position by certain peculiar biases.
As the historian of the early bourgeoisie, he combined basic insights
into the nature of the class with a half-romantic attachment to its
"historic mission." Pirenne knew capitalism meant social progress.
But he saw all too clearly the inexorable development of the intelli-
gent enterprising bourgeois into a ruthlessly exploitative and para-
sitic patrician. And although he constantly looked forward with
confidence to the renewal of progressive productive activities with
the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, he was forced to a genuine
sympathy with the masses in their class struggles: his sympathies
were with revolution, for revolution meant reform. Clearly, though,
he never looked a revolution squarely in the face. It is significant
that Thomas Münzer, whom Engels and Kautsky had hailed as the
brilliant revolutionary tactician of the Peasant Wars, represents for
Pirenne "mystical terror." In a real sense, Pirenne has formulated
an ideology for the progressive section of the bourgeoisie, and had
taken it over for himself.
MELVIN J. LASKY

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126 PARTISAN REVIEW

FURTHER TESTIMONY
PICASSO. By Gertrude Stein. Scribner's. $3.00.

Braque's contribution to the Testimony against Gertrude Stein
(Transition 1935) was the briefest in the series, for it merely
enlarged upon a single observation, that "Miss Stein understood
nothing of what went on around her." The present volume demon-
strates that she certainly understood very little about the painting
that went on around her. For the vast and complex subject of
Picasso's life and work, which should have been handled with con-
siderable honesty, taste, and insight, has come to us embellished with
countless tidy inaccuracies and neatly-phrased morsels of misin-
formation.

The book begins very cleverly, and the opening sentence sets
the key: "Painting in the nineteenth century was only done in
France and by Frenchmen, apart from that, painting did not exist,
in the twentieth century it was done in France but by Spaniards."
The first of these concise pronouncements seems hardly fair to
Van Gogh, while the second tends to overlook Matisse, Braque,
Léger, and a number of lesser Gallic luminaries. There are more
ambitious critical hypotheses scattered throughout the volume which
will probably lead many innocent readers astray. At one point
Miss Stein works up to a thoroughly eloquent analysis of Picasso's
cubism, with arguments to explain how it differs from French
cubism. She concludes: "Nature and man are opposed in Spain,
they agree in France and this is the difference between French
cubism and Spanish cubism and it is a fundamental difference."
A drawback to Miss Stein's diagnosis is the recollection that fine
cubist pictures are usually notable for their similarity; it has become
legendary that at the early cubist exhibitions Picasso and Braque
were sometimes amused at their inability to tell their own works
apart.

It is ironical, in the light of such limitations, that it should be
chiefly when Miss Stein writes of these contemporary painters that
she is brought into touch with her widest reading public. And this
is not entirely to be deplored, for Miss Stein's vast literary equip-
ment is nowhere more impressive than in such monographs of the
Parisian artists. Whether or not she understands the significance of
their works, she manages to retain an uncanny gift for transcribing
into her own medium the rudiments of a visual conception. By subtle
suggestion she is able to convey what a picture looks like, and an
artist's works, actions, and comments become woven together
through that flow of spoken tones which she has brought back to
literature with a new intensity. The present volume, to be sure,
does not reach the verbal solemnity and eloquence of her Life and

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BOOKS
127

Death of Juan Gris. Perhaps because the subject-matter in
Picasso's career is more sensational, the approach would seem to
become naturally more journalistic. Yet the familiar Stein mastery
of echo and cadence is still employed with undiminished sensibility,
and the scarcely perceptible repetitions beat through the paragraphs
like the steadying measures of a figured bass. So it is that there are
many writers who can recount an anecdote more accurately than
Miss Stein, but no one could integrate a conversation more engag-
ingly than this:

"As I was saying, in the daily living it is an other thing.
A friend built a modern house and he suggested that Picasso
too should have one built. But, said Picasso, of course not,
I want an old house. Imagine, he said, if Michael Angelo would
have been pleased if some one had given him a fine piece of
Renaissance furniture, not at all. He would have been pleased
if he had been given a beautiful Greek intaglio, of course."

It is unfortunate for Americans that the book so unfailingly
jars when it reaches specifically esthetic grounds. For Miss Stein's
inability to distinguish between good pictures and bad has wrought
havoc with the sixty-odd illustrations that support her text. This
selection will certainly not enhance Picasso's reputation, which is
distressing, when one considers the equally inferior examples by
which many are fated to know him through the New York com-
mercial galleries.

GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

LETTERS

Paris, France.

To the Editors:

Thanks for the Partisan Reviews, they really did interest me.
I must say you have made it fairly readable which is always the most
difficult thing to do, I rarely can read a magazine but I did that, which may
be bad praise as I certainly have not a magazine taste, well anyway we will
hope for the best, and that it is a compliment, and some time I will send
you some poems if you like, and thanks again.

Always,

Gertrude Stein

Cambridge, Mass.

To the Editors:
In Harold Rosenberg's essay on Thomas Mann, there is no justification
that I can see for making Mynheer Peeperkorn and Cipolla central to
Mann's view, past or present, of the world. Nor is Hans Castorp in any
literal sense a "hero." The question of Peeperkorn is most important, I
believe: like Naphta and Settembrini, he embodies a certain structure of

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128 PARTISAN REVIEW

attitudes; his position in the novel is less considerable than are those of the
other two, and the limitations, indeed the absurdities, of his attitudes are
made unmistakable (see the scene by the waterfall). Peeperkorn fascinates
Hans Castorp, not Thomas Mann: Rosenberg's fallacy is—to use the trite
example—that of identifying Polonius with Shakespeare. There is more
involved here than a choice of interpretations, I am afraid, because for me
there is unpleasant innuendo in the handling of the quotations in this crucial
section of the essay, and in the subtitle, "Duty and the Great Leader,"
which precedes it.

Yours very truly,
Howard Baker

Washington, D. C.

To the Editors:
I am grateful to Mr. Baker for his interest in my interpretation, and
to P. R. for the opportunity of clarifying further one or two points.

My essay attempted, among other things, to show the place occupied
by Mann's characters within his allegorical scheme. If Peeperkorn, Castorp,
Naphta, etc. merely represented "certain structures of attitudes," Mann's
work could not have accomplished its triumphant artistic formulation of
present-day cultural universals. Baker has made the error of reading The
Magic Mountain as if it were a simple dramatic narrative, (which would
have a value of another kind), rather than a world-embracing allegory.

Now within this philosophic structure, Peeperkorn is enthroned in the
highest and most mysterious position as "uniter" and "life-giver." And
though Mann is aware of the contradictions in the ideal of the Leader, and
is also lively and artistically subtle in poking good-natured fun at its
friendly personifications, the power of the élite, in its dual creative and
destructive aspects, is, as I said, "the peak of his vision." This is of course
further borne out by the elaboration of the same theme in the Joseph.

Since Baker is dissatisfied with my quotations, may I give him another,
this time from the waterfall scene? Here Mann, not Castorp, is describing
the irresistible influence of Peeperkorn over the group: "What could the
others do? In such matters he was accustomed to command, and the weight
of his personality would always have been decisive, even if he had not
been, as he was, master and mover of the expedition. Size itself is tyran-
nical, autocratic; thus it has always been, thus it will remain. Mynheer
desired to eat in sight, in thunderous hearing of the waterfall, it was his
mighty will. Who did not wish to go hungry must acquiesce."

Very truly yours,
Harold Rosenberg

P.S. It is Mann himself, who, no doubt ironically, refers to Castorp as
"my hero" in the interview quoted by me (P.R., pg.29).