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PARTISAN REVIEW
PR

Volume IX, No. 1 1942
January-February

© Trustees of Boston University

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PARTISAN REVIEW
VOLUME IX, No. 1
JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1942

A STATEMENT
2 The Editors
STENDHAL: IN QUEST OF HENRI BEYLE
3 William Troy
ON THE EVE
23 Victor Serge
MONTRACHET-LE-JARDIN
34 Wallace Stevens
ON THE "BROOKS-MACLEISH THESIS" 38 Allen Tate
39 William Carlos Williams
40 John Crowe Ransom
41 Henry Miller
42 Louise Bogan
43 James T. Farrell
46 Lionel Trilling
MIGHTY GOOD TO ME
48 Lewis Fisher
THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT
52 Marianne Moore
POEMS
Separation
22 D. S. Savage
The Country Was
58 Randall Jarrell
The Immigrants
60 Lionel Abel
What of the Chain Remains
60 Lionel Abel
Etching
61 J. Patrick Byrne
Winter 1939
62 Paul Goodman
FROM ENGLAND
War and the Writer
63 Stephen Spender
B.T.N.L.
67 Rayner Heppenstall
Letter from the Country
70 D. S. Savage
Controversy
73 Nicholas Moore, George Orwell
BOOKS
The Burnhamian Revolution
76 Dwight Macdonald
Shorter Notices:
84
Miller's "The Colossus of Maroussi"; Agee and Evans' "Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men"; Woolf's "Between the Acts"; Rodgers' "Awake!
and Other Poems"; De Weerd's "Great Soldiers of the Two World
Wars"; Smith's "So It Doesn't Whistle."
A COMMUNICATION
90 Louis Clair
LETTERS
93
CONTRIBUTORS
47
Editors: CLEMENT GREENBERG, DWIGHT MACDONALD, GEORGE L. K.
MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV. Business Manager: NANCY
MACDONALD.

Partisan Review is published at 45 Astor Place, New York, N. Y.
Partisan Review is published six times a year. Subscription: $1.50 yearly; Canada, $1.65; other foreign
countries, $1.80. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envel-
opes. Copyright January, 1942, by PARTISAN REVIEW. Reentered as second-class matter, January 20, 1942,
at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879.

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PARTISAN REVIEW

A Statement by the Editors

The country is now actually at war. PARTISAN REVIEW, while pri-
marily a cultural magazine, has always been concerned with politics. A
question, therefore, as to our future editorial policy naturally arises.

For some time, as recent issues of the magazine have made clear, the
editors have disagreed on major political questions. The complexity of the
world situation, indeed, is reflected in the fact that no two editors hold the
same position on all major issues. The actual outbreak of hostilities has not
altered this line-up. It is clear, therefore, that PARTISAN REVIEW can
have no editorial line on the war. Its editors will continue to express
themselves on the issue as individuals.

We believe that a magazine like PARTISAN REVIEW cannot under-
take to present the kind of programmatic guidance one expects of a
political party. Our main task now is to preserve cultural values against
all types of pressure and coercion. Obviously we cannot even speak of the
survival of democratic civilization apart from the survival of our entire
cultural tradition. This includes the fullest freedom of expression on
political matters. All of us can at least agree on this: that in times like
these it is a necessity, not a luxury, for PARTISAN REVIEW to continue
to give space to radical—in the literal sense of "going to the roots"—
analysis of social issues and the war. No intelligent decisions can be made
without a full consideration of alternatives.

CLEMENT GREENBERG
DWIGHT MACDONALD
GEORGE L. K. MORRIS
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
PHILIP RAHV

2

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Stendhal: In Quest of Henri Beyle
William Troy

Whoever is gifted with alert and daring senses, curious to the
point of cynicism, logical almost from disgust, a solver of
enigmas, friend of the sphinx like every well-born European—
he will be compelled to go after him.—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

ON A FINE MORNING in October, 1832, on the Janiculum at
Rome, there might have been observed a pudgy middle-aged
Frenchman expensively attired in tight-fitting white trousers of an
English material. (The latter are important because later to be
concealed in their cuff was the sentence, written in English and
jumbled "so that it should not be understood," Imgo ingt obefif ty.)
Who was this personage and of what was he thinking among so
many interesting reminders of the human past? The first of these
questions is by no means easy to answer. According to one esti-
mate the number of his pseudonyms was one hundred and sixty,
and his disguises, which included those of a Cistercian monk and a
woman of quality, were more than thirty. It is a mere accident of
literary history that of the many names attached to his published
writings one in particular should be associated with his reputation.
Less accidental perhaps, but of some significance, is the fact that
he should be remembered only as a writer; for he was in his time
a lieutenant of Dragoons, a grocer, a commissar in Napoleon's
army, a suspected police spy, a consul, and through all the self-
styled Lovelace of his age. In the arts his interest included music
and painting as well as literature—with a passion for opera bouffe
perhaps lending a certain unity; and his works represent not only
all the known genres but also some that cannot be too easily placed.
Indeed, the difficulty of "placing" the figure on the hilltop is no
greater for us than it seems to have been for Henri Beyle himself—
to use the convention of labelling an individual by his baptismal
name. The moment is memorable because for some unexplained
reason—the blended influence of autumn sunlight and Roman ruins
3

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PARTISAN REVIEW
4
and the prospect of his fiftieth birthday?—it determined him to
write his autobiography. "I shall soon be fifty," he writes in The
Journal of Henri Brulard, "it is high time that I got to know
myself. What I have been, what I am, I should really find it hard
to say." This autobiography would be composed "without lying
... but with pleasure, like a letter to a friend," for its purpose was
to be no less than to discover "what manner of man I have been."
As to his hero Lucien Leuwen, the occasion had finally come for
the secret and heart-rending interrogation, "Who am I?"
Like Beyle himself, nearly all the good critics in his own
language have focussed his problem quite squarely, and rightly so,
on the metaphysical problem of identity. To the excellent studies
of Fernandez, Valéry, and Seillière there is perhaps not a great
deal to be added along this line. But today we are so much im-
pressed by the manner in which metaphysical are bound up with
psychological considerations and both with the general cultural
situation that the time is appropriate for the sort of comprehensive
stocktaking that Beyle himself seems to have had in mind. For
example, a little further on in Henri Brulard, the memory projects
the following very interesting little spontanée:
It was two months ago... while I was musing upon writing
these memoirs... that I wrote in the dust, like Zadig, these
initials:
a
d
i l
ine pg
de
r
V. A. A. M. M. A. A. A. M. C. G. A.
1
2
3
4 5 6
The initials turn out to be those of the various women that he has
loved in the course of his life. What the whole incident reveals is
some sort of mysterious identification in Beyle's mind between the
impulse to discover the truth about himself and the delight in set-
ting down this cryptogram of his amours. It illustrates the manner
in which everything in his life and work-his writings, his theor-
etical speculations, his political attitudes-takes on a complex and
imponderable character. More particularly, it provides us with the
clue that somehow involved in his case is some disturbance or at
least malaise of the emotions. And for such a condition it is pretty
inevitable for us nowadays to look for an explanation in the genetic
history of the individual.
Behind the boldest and most annihilating protestations of the
Moi in Stendhal (to distinguish now between the man and the

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STENDHAL
5
writer) there is indeed always the recollection of those long, aban-
doned hours-with his Rousseau, his memoirs of Napoleon, and
his caged thrush-in the dank little room on the Place Grenette in
Grenoble. Not less at work are the remembered buffetings of the
temperament that was so formed in its collision with a society that
was to undergo three revolutions in forty years. For a proper
understanding of the man in the white trousers we are compelled,
therefore, to put his public utterances in their right place, which is
a relative one, and consider them both in relation to the personality
from which they emerge and the society to which they were one
kind of reaction. Perhaps through such an effort the celebrated
enigma of Stendhal will prove less mysterious if not less remark-
able.

The childhood of Stendhal is a Freudian classic even for the
grand siècle of the Oedipus-complex. "My mother, Madame Hen-
riette Gagnon, was a charming woman, and I was in love with her,"
he announces in Henri Brulard. And, lest there be any doubt in
the matter, he continues, "I wanted to cover my mother with kisses,
and for her to have no clothes on. She loved me passionately and
often kissed me; I returned her kisses with such ardor that she was
often obliged to go away. I abhorred my father when he came and
interrupted our kisses." But this is perhaps more than enough-
except to note that hatred of the father prevents him from referring
to his mother except by her maiden name. It is demonstrated by
any number of gloating recollections of infantile sadism. When
his tame thrush disappears, for example, he insinuates that his
father has killed it out of spite, and the latter, hurt at the suspicion,
alludes to it one day in roundabout terms. "I was sublime; I
blushed up to the roots of my hair, but I did not open my lips. He
pressed me for an answer, the same silence met him; but my eyes,
which were very expressive at that age, must have spoken for me."
Thus was he avenged against the "tyrant," and for more than a
month was proud of his vengeance-a laudable trait, we are told,
in a child. Here we see, among other things, the beginning of that
talent for mystification-a talent that he shared with his contem-
poraries Poe and Baudelaire-which he was later to put to such a
variety of uses. And in another quarrel with his father, a bour-

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6 PARTISAN REVIEW

geois with vague Royalist leanings, we have what is perhaps the
key to his whole attitude toward any kind of authority. Instead of
sympathizing with his father, who is on a list of suspects during
the Revolution, he ponders, "My father glories in execrating 'the
new order of things' (a term then fashionable among the aristo-
crats); what right have they to get angry?" This indignation not
so much at injustice as at lack of logic, indicated by the peculiar
emphasis on the word right, was to lead Stendhal to the rejection
of much besides paternal authority. It had already led to a com-
plete and final rejection of religion. At his mother's early death
his main feeling is one of astonishment—perhaps that such a thing
could happen to him. "I began to speak evil of God," he says
simply. It was not "right" that the warm circle of his mother's
affection should be intruded upon by the stupid fact of death.
But it is wholly unnecessary to prod further into what is the
open scandal of Henri Brulard and the Souvenirs of Egotism. It
will be enough to point to the more objective consequences. Turning
to his first attempt at narrative, the tenuous but rather charming
and too little read Armance, we find that the hero is a sensitive and
gifted young aristocrat—the precursor of Villiers' Axel, Huys-
mans' Des Esseintes, and the early Proustian characters—suffering
from a malady whose precise source is clear neither to himself
nor the reader. Octave's "sole pleasure consists in living isolated
and with nobody in the world having the right to address him a
word." Exception is made for his mother—the only person in the
world that he can love. Despite his avowed detestation of society
he is persuaded to put in an appearance at certain of the great
houses of the Faubourg, and in time becomes gradually involved
in a curious sort of intimacy with a young woman of his own class.
To call this a love-affair is inaccurate; it is one of the vaguest rela-
tionships in all fiction. The girl is hardly more than a substitute
for the mother as an audience for the hero's endless self-revela-
tions and articulated horror vitae. Finally he admits to her that he
cannot love either her or anyone else—because of a terrible secret
that sets him apart from all living men. This secret turns out to be
that he is a man altogether "without conscience." What is of course
puzzling is the complete lack of any overt wickedness in his be-
havior and the reader is left wondering as to the particular nature
of his crime. Yet other characters hint at sinister elements in his

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STENDHAL 7
personality. His mother remarks, “This singular taste [for soli-
tude] is the effect of your disturbing passion for the sciences; your
studies make me tremble; you will end like Goethe’s Faust.” What
is soon evident, however, is that Stendhal is having supreme diffi-
culty writing a novel about a young man motivated by “the obliga-
tion not to love.” There is nothing to do but have him hurl himself
into the sea and send the girl to a convent.

Armance is a slight work, with neither the scope nor insights
of the later novels, but its very simplicity throws into relief what
was to be their remarkably uniform pattern. All of them are about
superior young men who hover about the great bonfire of love
without ever wishing to approach near enough to get burned. All
of them are built on an essential pattern of frustration. In every
case the hero, like Fabrizio in the Charterhouse of Parma, although
“in love with love,” is blocked by some overwhelming obstacle
either in himself or in external circumstances. To establish this
obstacle Stendhal at times is reduced to far-fetched and improbable
dodges. In Lucien Leuwen, for example, the hero, after trying
through several hundred pages to make up his mind, is saved by
the false information that the very virtuous heroine is having a
child by another man. This relieves Lucien of the necessity of
declaring his love but it prevents Stendhal from finishing the book.
The relationship between Fabrizio and his aunt Madame de Sanse-
verina in the Charterhouse is kept pure through an implied antip-
athy for incest. That there may have been other reasons, however,
is suggested in certain passages. “I was in love with love,” Fab-
rizio tells the Duchess. “I have done everything in the world to
acquire knowledge of it; but it appears that nature has refused me
a heart to love, and to be melancholy.” And perhaps nowhere is
the dread of taking on the responsibilities of physical love better
symbolized than in the closing scenes of the same work, in which
Fabrizio carries on a liaison with the jailkeeper's daughter behind
the bars of his cell by means of a sign-language. During this
period he is at last completely happy; and when Sanseverina and
the others plot for his escape he announces that he prefers to remain
in jail. Here the iron bars of a cell provide an “obstacle” as irre-
futable as it is concrete.

But it is of course in The Red and the Black that we find the
most elaborate as well as most comprehensive treatment of the

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PARTISAN REVIEW
love-theme in Stendhal. And here the first of the two obstacles in
the way of the hero is one that loomed quite large at times for
Beyle himself-poverty. To consider Julien's relations with the
two women in the novel without taking account of his origins is
to miss much that explains their peculiar character and develop-
ment. Julien, alone of these agitated young men, is of lowly birth
-the son of a carpenter who knocks him about brutally and sells
him to the local representative of the rising haute bourgeoisie, M.
de Renal. Apparently he has also been knocked about by his many
older brothers, and has never known the protection of maternal
love. At the moment that we meet him he is steeped in Napoleon's
memoirs and Rousseau's Confessions. And the physical descrip-
tion is revealing enough to be quoted in full:

His cheeks were flushed, his eyes downcast. He was a slim
youth of eighteen or nineteen, weak in appearance, with irregular
but delicate features and an aquiline nose. His large dark eyes,
which, in moments of calm, suggested a reflective, fiery spirit,
were animated at this instant with an expression of the most
ferocious hatred. Hair of a dark chestnut, growing very low,
gave him a narrow brow, and in moments of anger a wicked air.
Among the innumerable varieties of the human countenance,
there is perhaps none that is more strikingly characteristic. A
slim and shapely figure betokened suppleness rather than
strength. In his childhood, his extremely pensive air and marked
pallor had given his father the idea that he would not live, or
would live only to be a burden upon his family. An object of
contempt to the rest of the household, he hated his brothers and
fathers; in the games on Sunday, on the public square, he was
invariably beaten.

Of what this countenance is actually characteristic Stendal does
not mention; but it is easy to detect in it the compounded linea-
ments of the Man of Feeling-the "delicate features," the "marked
pallor," and the "pensive air"-and the Satanic hero-the fiery
dark eyes, the wicked dark hair, and even the aquiline nose. By
1830 the process of assimilation between them had been com-
pleted; and in Julien we can see unmistakably how the hyper-
trophied sensibility of the former merges into the neo-Machia-
vellian diabolism of the latter.

In the de Renal household Julien is motivated neither by a
thirst for experience nor by by simple material ambition but by what
may be called a sense of duty. The briskly conceived campaign

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STENDHAL
9
by which he seduces Madame de Renal is an affair not so much
of the heart as of the will. It is his "duty" to make love to this
virtuous and naive woman in order to prove to himself that he is
the equal of the class to which she belongs. "It would be cowardly
on my part not to carry out an action which may be of use to me,
and diminish the scorn which this fine lady probably feels for a
poor workman, only just taken from the sawbench." And again,
"The ruthless warfare which his sense of duty was waging with his
natural timidity was too exhausting for him to be in a condition to
observe anything outside himself." This condition is not relieved
until the first great climactic scene, in which Madame de Renal
permits him to hold her hand. "His heart was flooded with joy,
not because he loved Madame de Renal, but because a fearful
torment was now at an end." The next morning he is filled with
joy that "He had done his duty, and a heroic duty."
Duty toward what or toward whom? Fortunately, Stendhal
provides an explanation: "Instead of paying attention to the trans-
ports that he excited, and to the remorse that increased their vivac-
ity, the idea of duty was continually before his eyes. He feared a
terrible remorse, and undying ridicule, should he depart from the
ideal plan that he had set himself to follow. In a word, what made
Julien a superior being was precisely what prevented him from
enjoying the happiness that sprang up at his feet." Discussion of
this "ideal plan" belongs to a later section of this paper. But it
must now be pointed out that realization of his duty is for Julien
never more than a momentary source of self-satisfaction. The
primary struggle is not with Madame de Renal or with society but
in himself, between the unacknowledged promptings of the heart
and the dictates of the intellectual will. His confusion is betrayed
in the paradoxical antithesis: "I ought to be stirred by her beauty;
I owe it to myself to be her lover." The whole pathos of his situa-
tion is summed up in Stendhal's comment on the incident of the
hand-holding: "The idea of a duty to be performed, and of making
himself ridiculous, or rather being left with a sense of inferiority
if he did not succeed in performing it, at once took all the pleasure
from his heart."

What constitutes the source of Julien's ordeal may be more ap-
parent if one recalls what has been said of Henri Beyle's child-
hood. It is not without significance that to Julien Madame de

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10 PARTISAN REVIEW

Renal is many years older than himself—and a mother. The
encounters between them are unlike those of adult lovers: Madame
de Renal is too shocked by the impact on her innocent nature of
her first experience of real love to maintain any strong sense of
reality; and Julien is too dominated by his will to recognize the
extent and quality of his attraction toward her. It is very nearly
as “pure” a relationship as that between Fabrizio and the San-
severina; descriptions of the physical side are suspiciously vague
and uncircumstantial. For the most part Julien behaves like a
spoiled child engaged in an intrigue with his mother. Only at
rare moments of collapse, such as the one in which he is rebuked
for breaking into Madame de Renal’s bedroom at night, is the real
basis of his trouble, the natural Julien revealed:
“Wretch!” she cried. There was some confusion. Julien for-
got his futile plans and returned to his own natural character.
Not to please so charming a woman seemed to him the greatest
disaster possible. His only answer to her reproaches was to fling
himself at her feet, clasping her round the knees. As she spoke
to him with extreme harshness, he burst into tears.
Different in kind and development, however, is the relation-
ship with Mathilde de la Mole. Like the heroine of the frag-
mentary Lamiel, this character is a feminine counterpart for the
desperate and amoral heroes. To Julien the obstacle that she
presents is of course that of social rank; she is at the very top of
that ladder that he must ascend to guarantee his victory. From her
standpoint she is fascinated by the idea that there is something
“daring and audacious” in loving one so far beneath her. If Julien
had been merely another suitor of her own class, the affair would
lack that element which characterizes great passion: “the immen-
sity of the difficulties to be overcome and the dark uncertainty of
the issue.” At times she is the transparent little sadist: “She had
infinite cleverness, and this cleverness triumphed in the art of tor-
turing the self-esteem of others and inflicting cruel wounds upon
them.” The meeting of these two can only be sterile and mutually
destructive; it has the character of moral or spiritual incest—a
merging of identities in the flux. As incapable of love as her hus-
band, she seeks to escape the ennui of her class and her position
by a kind of perpetual titillation of the soul. At the top of one of
the chapters Stendhal quotes from some forgotten book of memoirs:
“The need of anxiety, such was the character of the beautiful

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STENDHAL

11

Marguerite de Valois. ... The need of playing at a game formed
the whole secret of the character of this amiable princess." And in
nothing more than in this "need for anxiety" and "need of play-
ing a game" does Mathilde resemble her lover and husband. What
helps us explain these traits in him should serve also to explain
them in her.
It is not too much to say that The Red and the Black is the
first full-length treatment of the "split-personality" in nineteenth-
century literature. Of course this had been the secret basis of all
the troubles of the heroes of the Gothic novel and of Byron; it was
also being allegorically rendered in Hoffman's Elixire des Teufels
and Doppelgänger as well as in Poe's William Wilson. In Julien's
case, however, the situation is presented almost as a problem or a
demonstration (Beyle had had an early passion for mathematics):
What would happen if someone really attempted to separate the
intellectual will from the impulses of the simple heart? Stendhal,
a kind of naturalist of the heart, puts his hero through the paces
like a scientist his guinea pig through a maze. Actually, the anal-
ogy is as unsound as it is trite; for the paces happen to be the still
incompletely unravelled interplay of human thought and feeling
and the maze is the whole organic complex of human relationships.
Nor is the observer nearly so detached as he pretends. But Stend-
hal brings to the problem the kind of patient and exhaustive analy-
sis of its elements that we like to think of as modern; through his
influence on Nietzsche and possibly also on von Hartmann he may
be considered as one of those responsible for the modern move-
ment of psychoanalysis. In Julien what was to be the predicament
of nearly all the major heroes of later nineteenth-century litera-
ture-those of Dostoievski, Melville, Proust and Kafka-is fore-
cast with the bareness of a penny horoscope.
We say everything perhaps when we state the cause of this
predicament as a dislocation for the individual of his normal or
traditional objects of love. But this is to be quite general, to be
confronted immediately with the unlimited range of possible
operations open to the human organism. Before attempting to
describe further what seems to be happening in the typical Stend-
halian hero, therefore, it will be necessary to do what in the case of
a writer of more complete or self-sustaining works would be less
legitimate to turn back again for a moment to the life. For

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PARTISAN REVIEW

Stendhal must be classed with an important type of modern writer
in whom the life and the work are so mutually indispensable that
the latter does not yield up its real interest or significance when
taken alone. Together they constitute what may be called a
phenomenon—not only within literature but within their culture
as a whole. Certainly Poe, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and even Melville
are more interesting when considered in this way rather than in
relation solely to their incomplete and variously confused produc-
tions. Less obviously apocalyptical in style than any of these per-
haps, Stendhal's writing has the same quality of being the casual
outpouring of someone who is essentially more the prophet than
the artist.

In a preface to the perplexing and inconclusive Armance,
André Gide, who has an excellent nose in such matters, advances
the theory that the only possible meaning to be extracted from the
book is that the hero is impotent. Gide proceeds to suggest that it
is a study in the superiority of spiritual love over physical—im-
potence having a merely symbolical value. Even if this is true for
this particular work we cannot help being tempted to apply the
clue to the other Stendhal novels. In going over the roll-call we
have seen that at least two of his heroes, Octave and Lucien, appear
to have gone to their graves in a virginal state. Fabrizio admits
equivocally to not having been born to know “the taste of love,”
and we have noted the rather suspect quality of Julien's passion
for the two women in his life. (In fact, he finally says of Mathilde,
“She is my wife, but she is not my mistress.”) Moreover, the
notion that Octave's “lack of conscience” was a euphemism for
another kind of lack cannot but direct us to certain avowals of the
author of Armance himself. In that same scene in his autobiog-
raphy in which he writes the initials in the dust, he adds, “The
fact is that I have possessed only six of the women whom I have
loved.” And later, “With all of these, and with several others, I
have always been a child.” Recalling his early years in Milan, he
complains, “Nobody took pity on me or aided me with some char-
itable advice. I therefore spent the two or three years in which my
temperament was most active womanless.” (The italics are his
own.) Moreover, from an obscene remark in a letter to Mérimée
there is evidence to be drawn that his much recollected life in Mar-
seilles with the little actress Melanie Louasan was of the more

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STENDHAL 13

innocent sort. This is also one interpretation to be placed on a
passage in a letter written by her after his abandonment of her—
in any case, one of the most pathetic documents in literary
biography:

I assure you again of my loyal devotion and genuine ten-
derness; I have already given you sufficient proofs of both, and
you have replied only with vague letters, saying that you love
me, that you still love me, and that I will realize it two weeks
from now when I see you again. All of that means only that
when we meet you will make love to me a great deal, and swear
you adore me, and that you live again now that you are with me,
and all that sort of thing. That may seem like a great deal to
you, but I am afraid it has very little real meaning to me, espe-
cially when I consider your conduct as a whole, and your charac-
ter as a whole; it cannot prove to me that you love me as I wish
you to and as I must be loved if I am ever to be happy and at
peace. And that is why I beg you to be frank with me. . . .

Of course it cannot be proved definitely that Henri Beyle
suffered from a real or psychopathic impotence. Nor is it to be
supposed that even if such proof were available it would ade-
quately explain everything in his life and work. But if the value
of any hypothesis is to be tested by the number of things that it
allows us to put together we have here an extremely fertile
hypothesis. Not only does it suggest the reason for the obsessive
repetition of the frustration-pattern in the novels and the peculiar
opacity of his treatment of love but also his attitudes toward many
other unrelated subjects. For the dislocation of the love-object,
which here may now possibly be more closely defined as an en-
forced separation of sentiment from its appropriate object, is not
a single aspect of an individual; it affects every aspect of his being.

Very generally, it determines what may be called the domi-
nant personality-tone—in Stendhal's case, the sense of self-humil-
iation. Like Lucien Leuwen, who compels a beautiful and virtuous
woman to fall in love with him simply because she has once seen
him fall off a horse, his sole impulse is to prove himself to himself
by some objective and incontrovertible gesture. But since this can-
not be accomplished in any direct and sincere fashion he resorts
to two extreme stratagems—deception and violence. It is clearly
the first that explains the fondness for intrigue, masquerade and
pseudonymity already indicated. And most of the characters have
the same secretive cunning about them: Octave has his "terrible

=== Page 15 ===
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PARTISAN REVIEW

secret" from the world; Julien confides only in the mountains and
the skies the extent of his Napoleonic campaign against society.
But deception actually turns out to be self-deception, and, as we
have seen, all of them come to a bad end. The Machiavellian will
does not easily displace the wounded sensibility of which it is the
inverted expression. But since it is through his celebration of the
other mode of self-assertion, the mode of violence, that Stendhal
has probably had his most concrete influence we must look at the
manner in which this is represented in his work.
Violence in the crude sense finds its symbol in the familiar
figure of the outlaw or criminal. Ferrante Palla, the nationalist
revolutionary poet in the Charterhouse, is rendered with such brio
as to emerge the only truly heroic character in that novel. At the
end Julien succeeds in becoming what he has subconsciously de-
sired to be all along—an enemy of society in deed as well as in
thought. In the notes for Lamiel we are told that the hero was to
be an arch-criminal named Valbayre, who would declare, "I am
waging war on society, which is waging war on me." Symbolically
enough, the heroine was to avenge his death by burning down the
Palace of Justice, in the ashes of which her own bones were to be
found. Even mild-tempered Fabrizio seems to be delighted when
referred to as the "great culprit." Undoubtedly, there is a survival
here of the Noble Brigand tradition of Schiller and Byron—a pop-
ular literary tradition. And Stendhal was among the first to intro-
duce that nostalgic glorification of the exploits and misdeeds of
the Italian city-princes of the Renaissance which was to be carried
so far by Burckhardt. But what is important is the manner in
which these outside influences are modified to suit the necessities
of a particular sort of temperament at a particular moment of time.
The criminal-type is no longer the confused and sometimes
philanthropically motivated rebel of the romantic period; he is
more cerebral; he has taken on a Latin sharpness and lucidity of
mind. There has also intervened the grand example of Napoleon—
the criminal among the nations. He now knows that what he is
against is not a class but the whole of society—even the idea of
society. Of all the men at a ball, Mathilde de la Mole is interested
only in a picturesque Spanish conspirator who is under sentence
of death. "I can see nothing but a sentence of death that dis-
tinguishes a man," she remarks, "it is the only thing that cannot

=== Page 16 ===
STEN HAL 15
be bought.” In such an epigram Stendhal says as much about the
particular society of his time as Balzac in the whole of César
Birotteau or Lost Illusions. But this disgust is ultimately trans-
lated into an intellectual contempt for the world in general. Of
Octave it is remarked, “No suspicion of personal interest came to
Julien is equally “detached” toward all the social classes to which
the bourgeois, the clerical, and the
aristocratic. There is nothing but the stripped ego against the
world—the whole personality canalised in the intellectual will. At
least this is the self-conscious ideal that these characters set before
themselves; and action, instead of being the expression of some
material or idealistic motive, becomes more and more an end in
itself. Action, that is to say, is something spontaneous and essen-
tially irrational—to use a word that Gide has made well-known,
gratuitous. It has no meaning except as an objectification of the
“pure will” of the doer.
But if the ideal of a Napoleon operating on society through
other means than the sword dominates their minds, there lingers
in the sensibility the still unquieted echoes of J. J. Rousseau. And,
at the end, as a Freudian critic would put it, the assertions of the
Super-ego are successfully drowned out by the protests of the Id.
When Julien makes his attack on the life of his former mistress,
it is not out of the assumed necessity of justifying himself by such
an act—like Raskolnikov's murder of the two women in Crime and
Punishment. It is far from being a "gratuitous" act. It is rather
the act of an exasperated child—a means of relieving the too great
tension created by the contradictory nature of his feelings toward
her. Afterwards, just before his execution, he confesses, "And
why be a hypocrite still, when I am cursing hypocrisy? It is not
death, nor the cell, nor the damp air, it is the absence of Madame
de Renal that is crushing me."
The consequences of this ordeal are strikingly reflected in
the formal bankruptcy of the Stendhalian novel. Because his
heroes are incapable of action in the classic sense Stendhal is
forced to rely almost exclusively upon analysis. Of course one
admits that the analytical is the modern habit of mind; Hamlet, as
Monseignor Kolbe has pointed out, is fundamentally a play about
analysis. But in Stendhal the analysis is a vast and endless im-

=== Page 17 ===
16 PARTISAN REVIEW

provisation, without center and without limits—a medley of con-
flicting themes and motifs that can never be resolved because they
are never really grasped. Distinctions, comparisons, and qualifi-
cations of the most tenuous sort must be made for every movement
of the mind or sensibility. It would not be hard to discover in this
mania for analysis a symptom of what we today call paranoia. In
Lucien Leuwen at least it is carried to the point of absurdity if not
of madness; and it is no wonder that the book is uncompleted.
Indeed, of all Stendhal's novels only Armance may be considered
complete, and that simply terminates with the unexplained suicide
of the hero.

Yet even the briefest resumé of any one of them reveals that
there is action—a kind of action. But this is neither the rapid and
vigorous melodrama of Balzac nor the mechanical Punch-and-Judy
show of Flaubert and the naturalists. Rather, the web of analysis
is punctured at intervals by unprepared and frequently meaning-
less outbursts of ferocity—like the end of The Red and the Black.
Because the conflict cannot be resolved it is elaborated and re-
peated; and there are lacking all those qualities of movement and
design that we expect of the novel form. If we compare the work
just mentioned with another on which it had a direct influence,
Crime and Punishment, we see the difference between a work that
renders only the agon and pathos of the hero, to use the terms of
classical tragedy, and one that includes within it something like an
epiphany. The value or feasibility of the latter in Dostoievski may
be questioned; but, from the aesthetic point of view, it gives final-
ity and completeness. Stendhal cannot be numbered among those
few great novelists who were also artists; his works have been
interesting for other things than their style and form. And to dis-
cuss these things is to turn from such action as we find in his novels
to some of their theoretical aspects—to what is sometimes called
his "philosophy."

For Stendhal had no philosophy of a systematic kind, nor
were his major ideas and opinions even very original for his time.
His metaphysic of the Will was a common heritage from German
idealism; it is in Balzac and it will be a little later in Schopen-
hauer. (We know also that Stendhal read and was rather impressed

=== Page 18 ===
STENDHAL
17

by Fichte.) This famous Will was destined to take two directions
in the later course of the century—according to to whether emphasis
was placed on the individual or the race. From Fichte, Gobineau,
and Nietzsche was to come the cult of racism that has been trans-
lated into action in our own time. The cult of egoism, reaching its
peak in the 'eighties, found its spokesman in Germany in the now
forgotten Max Stirner and in France and elsewhere in Stendhal.
Of a common philosophical origin, however, both are subject to
the identical philosophical objections.
Beylism is indeed as good as any other label to cover the
moral and intellectual anarchy of the undefined individualism of
the modern world. For actually the romantic will, as we have seen
it at work, is nothing but instinct parading as Machiavellian rea-
son. The cult of the Moi becomes a cult of self-destruction the
moment that the individual realizes the interdependence between
the sense of his own being and society. The notion of an altogether
free and irresponsible individuality becomes a metaphysical conun-
drum if one inquires how a human individual could exist without
a social environment to which he may offer the resistance by which
he can be measured and defined. And it may be shown that when
the individual makes his instinct the sole measure not only of him-
self but also of the universe, like Stendhal and many other writers
of his century, he runs the risk of becoming indistinguishable
from the universe—which may provide certain satisfactions but
certainly destroys the possibility of individuality. In fact, he
achieves a state that is indistinguishable from the state of death.
The same objection is to be made to the implied ethics of the
passage on Julien's "ideal plan" quoted earlier. According to this
plan the individual would seem to project a sort of ideal version
of himself—once again the Super-ego at work—by which he must
be governed in all his judgments and actions. But we have seen
that what creation of this ideal self involves is a drastic separa-
tion of will and feeling that results in a total disruption of the
personality. What it amounts to is a particularly hazardous mode
of self-hallucination. “I am isolated here in this cell," Julien tells
himself, "but I have not lived in isolation on this earth; I had
always the compelling idea of duty. The duty that I had laid down
for myself, rightly or wrongly, was like the trunk of a strong tree
against which I leaned during the storm; I tottered, I was shaken.

=== Page 19 ===
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PARTISAN REVIEW
After all, I was only a man. . . ." At the last Julien does seem to
have learned that the individual man has never been able success-
fully to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
In the political realm Stendhal reveals the same confusion;
to reduce to logic his innumerable utterances on the political
events and ideas of his time is impossible. In childhood his sym-
pathies were republican, and he was seized with an acute sensation
of joy upon the execution of Louis XVI. But it is clear that this is
but one more expression of the revolt against his father-like his
anti-clericalism. Denunciation of the class that the Revolution
actually pushed into power abounds everywhere in his writings-
the treatment of the de Renals and the diatribes against "middle-
class meanness." And of the people he has this to say, "I abhor the
mob (that is, any contact with them) while at the same time, under
the name of 'the people,' I have a passionate desire for their hap-
piness." Nothing better states the contradiction between the snob
who boasts of his liaisons with duchesses and the child who exults
in the death of kings. In the novels, as we have seen, cynicism and
abuse are distributed almost equally among all classes of society
and all shades of political opinion. Stendhal is much interested in
politics; The Charterhouse and Lucien Leuwen are novels with
political backgrounds; but he was interested in politics as in life as
in "a game of chess." The truth is that he could not remain faith-
ful to any political party or even program for the reason that he
was incapable of any kind of allegiance. The refusal to accept any
responsibility in his relations with society is of a piece with his
attitude toward his father and toward women. His politics, like
his ethics, end up in a completely naive anarchy.
Certainly French society of the 'thirties and 'forties-with the
old guard scheming to hold power even at the expense of selling
France to the Prussians and the liberals barricaded behind their
meretricious press-was not such as to elicit much faith in man as
a social animal. And the Church, somewhat dazed by events, but
also struggling for power, offered few securities of a moral or
spiritual variety. But there were other possible modes of adjust-
ment; Balzac, Baudelaire, and even Flaubert, each in his way and
to a greater or less extent, achieved some sort of private solution in
spite of the public chaos. What is noteworthy in Stendhal is the
manner in which the private history and the public history are

=== Page 20 ===
STENDHAL
19

identified, in which the moody and recalcitrant child of the Place
Grenette grows up into the avowed enemy of the whole social
order. This is to say that he is to be explained neither by a glib
invocation of the Oedipus-complex nor by a description of the now
quite familiar socio-economic contradictions of bourgeois society.
It is rather that the whole soil of Western European culture in his
time was such as to bring to monstrous flowering those talents for
confusion and self-destruction which his early experience enabled
him to contribute to it. It was such as to give special scope in his
case, largely intellectual, although in the next century active as
well to the potentiality for pure evil that exists in the race in
every time and place. And the reciprocal nature of the whole
process should prove as much as anything to what extent even in
the negative sense the individual is involuntarily tied up with his
society and committed to its destiny. But to pursue the point
further is really to return to the question raised at the beginning
of this paper.

Who, in the last analysis, is the person that emerges from
behind the slily constructed barrage of subterfuge and deceit that
was the career of Henri Beyle? Or, at least we may ask, what kind
of person? In attempting an an answer we have depended much less
on his own explicit statements about himself than on the monot-
onously consistent pattern underlying his life and work. This pat-
tern we have seen as the hackneyed modern one of frustration-
the brisk progress to death and destruction of some unusually
gifted and equally handicapped individual. Even when it has not
been too apparent on the surface of the works we have insinuated
that the basis of this handicap was some secret sense of sexual
inferiority. Also noted has been the process by which what was
originally a rejection of the father-symbol is translated into a
rejection of all existent religious and social symbols. And the
whole operation has been seen as one made possible only by the
particular situation of early nineteenth-century culture. But for a
fuller identification of the type we must now consider him from
the perspective of a much broader and also more traditional frame-
work of human thought and values.

From the beginning one cannot but be struck by the sacri-
ficial and even hieratic air that surrounds most of Stendhal's char-
acters. "At times I find something superhuman about him,"

=== Page 21 ===
20 PARTISAN REVIEW

Octave's own mother remarks. And his uncle exclaims, "I conclude
that if you aren't the Messiah awaited by the Hebrews, you are
Lucifer in person, returning to this world expressly to addle my
brains." It is harder perhaps to detect it in Fabrizio, although he
is if anything the victim—of his family, of the Milanese police,
of Parma, and, most of all, of his own indefinite sensibility. He is,
in any case, alloted an early death. Lucien Leeuwen too is martyr-
ized largely through his own incapacity to feel strongly enough to
make a choice in any situation. But in The Red and the Black the
note is sounded in the first description of Julien's treatment at the
hands of his brothers: "The jealousy of these rough laborers had
been so quickened by the sight of their brother's handsome black
coat, and air of extreme gentility, as well as by the sincere con-
tempt which he felt for them, that they had proceeded to thrash
him, leaving him there unconscious and bleeding freely. Madame
de Renalsaw Julien lying on the ground and thought him
dead." There can be no doubt that what we witness here is the
"superior being" at the mercy of the gross and uncomprehending
social group—Joseph and the brethren. And what is the whole
narrative up to the last explosion into febrile and pointless action,
as has already been suggested, but the pathos of ritual and tragedy
—the representation of the suffering that the hero brings upon
himself through the excessive assertion of his will? As a modern,
it is true, Julien's suffering comes before rather than after the
action; it is the malady of the split will itself that constitutes the
real suffering; and overt action is no more than a temporary and
unsuccessful anodyne. Pathos on the physical plane is mutilation
or dismemberment; and lest we think that Stendhal has limited
himself only to moral and psychological dismemberment we need
only recall the last scene of all, in which Mathilde places Julien's
head upon a marble table and kisses it. "A great number of priests
escorted the coffin and, unknown to all, alone in her draped car-
riage, she carried upon her knees the head of the man whom she
had so dearly loved." Like Oedipus and Hippolytus, he will have
a grotto erected in his honor and presumably become a local cult
among the people.

How much of all this is deliberate in Stendhal and how much
the unconscious symbolization of his own old and deep-seated sense

=== Page 22 ===
STENDHAL
21

of martyrdom is not the kind of question to be easily answered. It
is significant, however, that for his finest and most enduring novel
he should find his "objective correlative" (to use T. S. Eliot's
phrase) in an account in the Grenoble Gazette of the guillotining
of a handsome young man for a crime passionel. Entirely by
chance life threw up for him what elsewhere his imagination failed
to accomplish a design that gave an illusion of unity to all the
elements in his long internecine warfare with society. By his choice
of symbols is Henri Beyle finally found out; and in identifying
himself with the criminal who pays to society the debt which it
does not deserve he becomes identifiable in our eyes as the familiar
and immemorial scapegoat-hero. The romantic outlaw of the
Gothic tradition is apotheosized into the sacred criminal. To such
an extent does the aureole gather round Julien's head that the old
Abbé is obliged to protest, "This Julien is a strange creature, his
action is inexplicable. . . . Perhaps it will be possible to make a
martyr out of him." And let there be no mistake about it: Julien
himself, in his last agony of self-communion, accepts his fate with
the pride and also the fullest consciousness of his role: "The
accuser whom society sets at my heels has been made rich by a
scandalous injustice. ... I have committed a murderous assault,
and I am rightly condemned, but, short of murder only, the Vale-
nod who condemned me is a hundred times more injurious to
society."

In the classic manner the Stendhalian hero rehearses in the
cycle of his own rise and fall the pattern of his culture as a whole.
He takes on himself the guilt that is the result, in individuals and
societies alike, of the disequilibrium between the principle of con-
servation, expressed in the limitations set by tradition and the
moral code, and the principle of expansion, expressed in the inter-
ests and motives of the will. As a prefiguration of what was to be
the destiny of his culture, his career has perhaps more meaning
and a more terrifying reality for us today than when it was re-
corded. Prophecy has become a fait accompli. Not only does it
throw into boldest relief the most obsessive problem of our time,
the problem of justice, but it also demonstrates to what extent that

=== Page 23 ===
22
PARTISAN REVIEW

problem is ultimately dependent for its solution on the problem of
love. And this is the problem of what is to become of the individual
in a culture which, by reason of its structure and fundamental
naïveté in regard to the human individual and his needs, is incap-
able of providing him with adequate objects of transcendence. The
lonely and somewhat grotesque figure of Henri Beyle gazing down
upon the ruins of the Holy City is a symbol of a society without
love,—a society which has so far forgotten the meaning and im-
portance of love as to be doomed to pay the consequences.

Separation

All day I have been completely alone, and now the night
Descends, swathing in shadow and swaddling all,
And all but a smother and blur is bandaged from sight,
Blots and blotches of shadow clotting on ceiling and wall.

I lift the glass chimney and light the oil-lamp's wick,
The quick lick of the flame flickers, and shadows distend,
The elongations of fingers sprawl on the wall, and the tick
Of the tin clock in the silence and the tick of my pulse contend.

In this prolongation of solitude, I am estranged
Even from myself, in you; in your absence I dwindle apart
In a ghostly attenuation of feeling, till all my deranged
Consciousness aches in the void for the physical thud of your heart.

D. S. Savage

=== Page 24 ===
On The Eve

Victor Serge

FROM THE PORTE DE LILAS the suburb of Pantin appeared to be
covered with an immense blanket of suspicious-looking bluish fog
rising towards Bellevue and Montmartre. The gasoline tanks at
Rouen were said to be on fire. The neighborhood of the Gare du
Nord was deserted and wan in the twilight, the shop-shutters down,
people on the doorsteps listening to the throb of distant guns. Taxis
roofed with mattresses rushed in all directions. The Boulevard
Sébastopol was in complete darkness and deserted, but underneath
it was the Réamur-Sébastopol subway station, with its human
magma waiting in animal fear for bombs that did not come. There
was a mob atmosphere around the Gare de Lyon: no more trains,
no more room in them, no more room in the station. A providential
taxi with a one-eyed driver took us over jammed roads under
artillery fire through the forest of Fontainebleau. Helmeted men
cried from the edge of the black road "For God's sake, lights out!
There's an alarm!" But no one gave a damn.

We fled with a feeling of relief that verged at moments on
light-heartedness. Everything one possessed had been reduced to
a few bundles. The day before yesterday I had worried about not
finding a note among my papers-Now my books, personal belong-
ings, documents, all my work, everything, had been abandoned,
yet without any real emotion. (It's true that as far as I was con-
cerned this sort of thing was almost habitual.) We would go on
feeling this relief, this light-heartedness, even when mixed with
bitterness. A piece of old Europe was crumbling, something was
happening that had to happen. We had been stifling in a blind-
alley. For years, it seems to me, France-perhaps the entire West
-had been possessed by the feeling that "It can't go on this way."
None of it could go on, none of it. The frontiers, Danzig, all the
varieties of fascism, the parliaments, the whole heap of iniquities
and absurdities, all the rotten literature and journalism, the blinded
working class. Not that we were defeatists. Not at all. Like the
French people as a whole, the revolutionists would have fought

23

=== Page 25 ===
24
PARTISAN REVIEW

the Nazis with all their might if it had been possible. But only a
living society can be defended, and the decay of this one was
already too far advanced. Nobody believed in anything any more,
because nothing, objectively, was possible: no revolution could be
made by a working class stuffed with fresh Camembert, good wine,
and rhetoric, nor could a counter-revolution be made by a bour-
geoisie incapable of audacity or thought, and sick with fear since
the sit-down strikes. Nor could we go on under a regime of emer-
gency decrees, whether Daladier's or Paul Reynaud's. (I used to
marvel at Daladier's funeral-parlor face in the news-reels. He
always seemed to be repeating to himself, to the point of nausea,
"No, this can't go on. . . .") Now it was all over, the bad tooth
had been pulled.

Few people have as yet this new sense which modern man is
painfully acquiring, the sense of history. Nevertheless, the people
who fled with us along all the roads of France and in the last
trains had to acknowledge in their stupor that "it had to happen."
I suddenly recaptured the strongest and most heartening emotion
of my childhood, the one, I feel, that will stay with me all my life:
confidence. I grew up among exiled Russian revolutionists who
kept photographs on their mantlepieces of men who had been
hanged. All their talk was of prisons, of Siberia, of the next revo-
lution. They had confidence, they knew that the revolution was
coming, inexorably. Without big phrases, they taught me faith in
man, and to await with certainty the necessary cataclysms. Trav-
elling with us was a Spanish friend (between the two of us we
could put together a pretty collection of overturned states) and
getting up at dawn in open fields under a light luminous rain, we
decided that this time the road had been half-cleared for the Euro-
pean revolution.

Meanwhile the collapse went on before our eyes, sweeping us
along with it. It was our own collapse too. Yes, our own. Along
with an empire and an army, the workers' organizations were col-
lapsing, and what was more serious, even solidarity had gone. The
farce of it all, the monstrous farce, swallowed the tragedy of a
hundred thousand dead, Amiens half destroyed, some bridges des-
perately defended at the price of blood, columns of refugees
sprinkled with bombs, children lost in the insane confusion of rail-
road stations, and more, much more. But the tragedy was left

=== Page 26 ===
ON THE EVE
25
north of the Loire. Crossing the bridge at Nevers on foot, we
noticed that it was "fortified" on its far side by two small square
sandbags, very white, very new and very neat. Seated on them
were some territorials smoking their pipes. This, precisely, was
where the farce began. (Hadn't the officers in this country ever
seen a fortified bridge?) It was like a ridiculous stage-set in a
provincial theatre.
Down all the roads caravans of cars streamed towards the
south. Entire general staffs with their secretaries and stenog
raphers were escaping; with them, squadrons of planes, columns
of new tanks, ambulances, etc., etc. Busses from Paris appeared
suddenly on a curve of the road. The drivers from the Gare de
l'Est-Parc Montsouris run explained that they were taking their
families to the Pyrenees because their employers had told them,
"Save the machines, but pay for the gas yourselves, understand?"
"You can imagine how much they care about our families," the
drivers added.
The store-keepers raised the price of coffee to us. One old
proprietress, from behind her counter in a town shaken from one
end to the other by waves of refugees, refused to sell me a piece of
string because I wouldn't buy the whole ball. Some one cried at
her, "Yes, save your junk for the Boches, old lady Grigou!" Every
thing was crashing, but little tradesmen intended to survive. To
gether with the fleeing army and all the fugitives from the north,
those from Paris, Alsace, Belgium, Holland and many other places,
we invaded charming little towns, devout and comfortable, each
sleeping around its church and the mansion of the rent collector.
People there lived in the warm obscurity of old houses, skimping
on electricity, never buying a book, patiently as ever filling their
little stocking, rounding out their little nest-eggs. "Please God,"
moaned the old women, "can you tell us what's happening? Do
you understand anything about it?" And soldiers would answer in
chorus, "We've been sold out, betrayed!" By our officers who
skipped off in a hurry with their tarts and by the general staff and
by the Cagoulards, who wanted to get even with the Popular Front.
"It's as plain as day." It was as plain as day. In a single month
the masses had received, without the slightest propaganda, a revo
lutionary education such a Lenin would have dreamed of. There
was nothing to do but let the seed germinate. A soldier told me of

=== Page 27 ===
26
PARTISAN REVIEW
some grotesque incidents of the debacle; non-commissioned officers
had been seen making off in autos "to save the regiment's flag." I
had asked him, "Suppose for a moment that the radio had announced
that there was no longer any general staff, that all the officers had
been removed, and had cried 'Soldiers, defend France yourselves,
hold every bit of ground you can!?'" He answered, "Then it
wouldn't have happened this way, oh no!" He was right. . . .
We had to find a refuge. Several had been offered or prom-
ised to us; it had been quite the fashion in Paris to hand out invi-
tations: "If Panama gets too disagreeable, come to my place in the
Dordogne or in the Gironde. You'll like our wine." But my com-
panion was put out of the chateau of a rich anarchist, quite politely
indeed, on a day of torrential and romantic rain that beat down on
the slate towers, the river and the beautiful rocks the anarchist had
once praised to us. At an isolated farm in the woods, a friend who
had been a socialist journalist the day before yesterday, revealed
himself as Lord of the Manor and begged us to leave immediately,
even if we had to take his car-because They were coming! As we
were about to go, this one-time socialist explained that he had been
converted to collaboration with Hitler, and was now in favor of a
strong military government. (Government, that is, by bankrupts.)
One more possible asylum remained, which had been promised to
us by the pacifist writer. It was a pretty little house, nesting among
flowers, but its door was closed and well guarded. The writer had
gone to the mountains to meditate. Policemen gathered us up and
sent us on our way; they too were meditative. These experiences
were not confined to my case alone, but were rather the rule. To
the petty bourgeois of these rich provinces the refugees were some-
thing suspect, hostile. Refugees made prices go up, looted provi-
sions, stole bicycles-and just think of it, there were Spaniards
among them, regular bandits! We could have kissed a peasant
woman who offered us coffee and shelter on a day of pouring rain.
She was not rich, but she refused our forty sous. A great moral
exhaustion was revealed by this concern for money and material
comfort. It was another aspect of the defeat. In a more or less
working-class town even the militant trade unionists had not the
slightest idea of offering the hospitality of their sacred meeting
hall. The socialist municipal government refused to house any

=== Page 28 ===
ON THE EVE
27
Spaniards as refugees. To have been refugees twice was rather
excessive, one had to admit.
I realized suddenly that we political refugees, we hunted
revolutionists, were doubly, triply, beaten at the moment, for many
of us were no longer "of us," having been defeated and demoral-
ized in the depths of our souls. We had begun to fight among our-
selves for a place on the last boat.
The extremity of our defeat was this sauve qui peut. The end
of solidarity means the finish of socialism and the workers' move-
ment. I remembered José Negre, one of the first secretaries of the
C.N.T., whom I met at Barcelona in 1917. When I next saw him it
was during the war. He was lying on a pallet in a little concentra-
tion camp in the Jura, half dead with hunger but still full of
enthusiasm at the age of sixty. I got in touch with the Veterans of
the CGT, the printers' union at Paris, and the paper Proletarian
Revolution; I had some one speak to Jouhaux-who got out of it
with some useless advice. After having obtained a contribution of
300 francs, I was relieved to learn that the old man had died. The
failure of the French working class (it's hardly worth speaking of
the "left-wing" intellectuals, who went from one failure to another,
from the Moscow Trials to worm-eaten pacifism or Stalinized bel-
ligerency, etc., etc.) this failure lay in its complete passivity in
the face of the White terror in Spain and in its desertion of the
Spanish refugees. Repression, in its Freudian sense, played a
great part here. We lived too comfortably, our holidays were too
beautiful; half of the militants of the extreme left-the best of
them were functionaries. Nobody wanted to see these fugitives
from hell or hear any talk of them; it would have bothered our
consciences and spoiled our week-ends. There was a great con-
spiracy of proletarian cowardliness in regard to the concentration
camps at Argèles and Saint-Cyprien. A militant trade-unionist
whom I respected (he was a functionary) cried from the platform
of a convention, "Rather slavery than death!" It was a magnificent
slogan-magnificent for the partial lucidity of its false reasoning
and as a confession of degeneration. It was the finish of courage.
For it is not death one accepts when one enters a struggle, but the
risk of it and there are slaveries indeed so much worse than death
that they only lead the way to it and multiply suicides.
The little towns of the Midi slept in the sun as if nothing had

=== Page 29 ===
28

PARTISAN REVIEW

happened: Beaucaire, Tarascon, Avignon, white towers above the
Rhône. The science of earthquake-detection had not yet reached
this far. Tartarin of Tarascon would begin to comprehend only
when he got thinner. We arrived at Marseilles three weeks too
late; every place on the “life boats” had been taken—by the first
arrivals, naturally. And besides, in making up the lists of requests
for visas, the old socialist émigrés seemed to have decided not to
put down any of the militants of the extreme left whose mere names
would have been compromising. Every one was escaping in fam-
ilies, each with his own party or his own group—which were no
longer good for anything else except escaping. It was unlucky for
any one outside a party or a group, for any one who took the lib-
erty of thinking for himself about the great cause of socialism. I
met old comrade-opponents whom I had once known in Moscow,
Berlin, Vienna or Paris. They shook your hand, but kept to them-
selves the name of the American who was looking after their visas.
That was only for themselves and their own people.
Marseilles, a city swarming and unconcerned, was nominally
a Red town, but it was an artificial shade of red—a business of
little deals that were not always quite on the level. The man in the
street understood things rather well: “Nothing can be done as long
as there’s the occupation. Afterwards there’ll be fun, but not for
the salauds.” None of the old workers’ organizations in Marseilles
took even the slightest interest in the foreign political refugees. If
it had not been for the American relief committee, many of the lat-
ter, and many of the intellectuals too, would have had no other
reasonable way out than to jump into the harbor from the top of
the cable-ferry. . . . We sometimes told ourselves that if 5% of
these exhausted, defeated people managed to regain their will to
fight on the other side of the Atlantic it would be wonderful. Those
who bore the most scars were standing up best: young workers or
semi-intellectuals who had been through concentration camps,
prisons, splits in little parties, and the ordeal of Spain. They were
difficult to rescue because the big conformist political parties felt
no sympathy whatever for them, because the governments of the
Western hemisphere were afraid of them as subversive characters,
because most of them were obscure, without names as “intellec-
tuals” or scholars, and because the threat of the concentration camp
dogged their heels continually. (I know of several courageous

=== Page 30 ===
ON THE EVE
29
persons who fought hard to save some of them; I should like to
put on record here our deep gratitude.)
There were some Italian friends whose morale was fine: a tall
straightforward old man of reformist opinions, a young and adven-
turous Trotskyite, and an old and temperamental Garibaldian. It
seemed that in their corner of the world they could clearly hear the
framework of the whole edifice cracking. They explained that the
moment had arrived when even those who were profiting by the
fascist regime had become aware that their only hope of salvation
lay in a readiness to sell out.

There followed round-ups, petty arrests, denunciations, short
imprisonments aboard a boat during holidays, messages from con-
centration camps, helpful letters from America. We lived on
tenterhooks. The news came of Trotsky's assassination in Mexico;
the darkest hour in the history of the working class was a fitting
time for the Old Man to have departed he who in its days of hope
had risen so high. There was news of the suicide or murder of
Walter Krivitsky in Washington, and of the disappearance of Hil-
ferding and Breitscheid from among ourselves. There were suicides
all around.... Despite all this I worked on a novel, though not for
any love of "literature." André Breton read aloud to us, admir-
ably, poems which he wrote in a green-house under a November
sun. We named the dilapidated chateau in which we were living:
"Espervisa." Others, who had become professional life-savers and
were swamped by their task, worked desperately. But the ship-
wreck was too great. Only a few of those in danger got away.
Suddenly we found ourselves aboard a freighter moored at
Pier 7. It was fixed up strangely like a floating concentration
camp. I took my leave without joy; if it had been possible I would
have a thousand times rather stayed. How one clung to this Europe,
with its Russians dying before firing squads, its Germans trampled
underfoot, its crushed France. We were leaving only to return,
only in order to carry on our work. In the open Atlantic, after
passing the shores of the Sahara, we gathered together on the upper
deck between the smokestack and the lifeboats. The stars pitched
and rolled over our heads. We were forty comrades among three
hundred. The other refugees were intent only on escaping, for the
most part unpolitical, and a great many of them were reactionary.
What could I, when it was my turn, have to say that was essential

=== Page 31 ===
30
PARTISAN REVIEW
to these forty people gathered in the darkness between the sky and
the sea? At least this:-
We have not been so badly beaten, we are only defeated in the
immediate present. We have brought to the struggles of society a
maximum of consciousness and a will that was much superior to
our own strength. We have spoken in the name of the working
classes, whose aspirations and needs we have tried to make clear.
But they most often did not recognize them, could not understand
us, could not wake up to themselves, because in the depths of their
souls they were captives of the social machine. We all have behind
us a great number of faults and errors; the progress of thought
cannot be other than stumbling and vacillating. The first of these
is intolerance towards our own comrades, a fault springing from
that feeling of the possession of the truth which is at the bottom
of all strong convictions, and which is right and necessary-for we
do possess great truths-but which also tends to create inquisitors
and sectarians. Our salvation lies in a tolerant intransigeance
which recognizes in each other the right to error, that most human
of rights, and each other's right to think otherwise, the only right
that makes any sense of the word liberty. (I have thought and I
have written this since 1920, when at Petrograd I saw the Russian
Marxists then the purest, the most intelligent and the most virile
cohort of revolutionists history has as yet produced striving
mightily to extirpate the "errors" around them, and thus already
creating inquisitors.) But this aside, we have been astonishingly
right. We have seen clearly and put down what we saw in our
insignificant little papers, while the statesmen were floundering
about in a morass of disastrous imbecilities. We have foreseen and
glimpsed the human solutions to the problems engendered by his-
tory in movement. And we have known how to win, which must
never, never be forgotten. The Russians and Spaniards among us
have known what it is to take the world in your hands, make rail-
roads and factories go, defend bombarded cities, draw up plans of
production, and treat deposed masters according to their deserts.
We have seen the generals, the ministers, the financiers and the
archbishops smile ingratiatingly and tremble before us. No pre-
destination condemns us to be the victims of concentration camps
-and as for the prison-torturers, we know quite well how people
are put against a wall. Our experience will come in handy tomor-

=== Page 32 ===
ON THE EVE
31
row. Events are on the march! Beaten, yes, but our hearts are
light, our hearts victorious. We are on the eve of tomorrow.
... Before our eyes the Western Hemisphere spread out its
strange landscapes, the sunlight rippling over everything. . . . At
Martinique we found one more concentration camp, a hot one,
guarded by great black children and run by crooked police. We
found out about the political economy of the Antilles. A few
families, millionaires in sugar and rum, owned Martinique and
kept it in a moderate slavery-which will last as long as it is
allowed to last-perhaps for a rather long time, because the primi-
tive peoples are a problem.-All of a sudden we found ourselves
strangely free (liberty was unbelievable!) at Trujillo City in the
Dominican Republic. It was a neat little capital, modestly lit, full
of flags and agile young girls dressed in rose and neon blue, who
had every conceivable variety of Eurafrican and Polynesian physi-
ognomy. There were also comradely Spanish refugees, about
whom we could only wonder how, and on what, they lived. ...
I arrived at Havana during the battle for Leningrad. The
beauty of Havana, its sensual joy, fed by electricity-what a relief
after the blackened cities of Europe. Here I found unexpected
friends. But I was haunted by the thought of Leningrad, by visual
images of a place where I had lived more than ten years, splendid
and grim years, but years that became darker and darker as we
descended the slope, as they began to kill my friends. . . . I had
arrived at Petrograd at the end of another voyage, across another
age, in 1919, having been released from prison, and having left
Barcelona in a state of insurrection to join a vaster insurrection.
I travelled sixteen months, fourteen of them in prison, while the
revolution rose towards its crest; Zinoviev welcomed me to a
besieged, frozen and starving city that was in the process of win-
ning a miraculous battle for the future. In 1933 I had to leave that
city on the way from one prison to another; I was being secretly
transferred to the G.P.U.'s inner prison at Moscow-because unre-
mittingly and without fear, we had denounced the Thermidorians
who were leading our revolution into the abyss. This abyss was
not at all a metaphor; we are in it right now. And there will be
no other salvation for Russia than in a revolutionary resurrection.
This resurrection is almost certain, but how much will it cost?
... The airplane teaches us a new vision of the world, a lyrical

=== Page 33 ===
32 PARTISAN REVIEW

grey vastness from which should rise a new poetry and a new
painting. But our civilization reduces it all to a mechanism for
killing. Only the well-to-do use it for travelling, their senses long
dead to all excitement. They slept in the comfortable armchairs
of the Douglas while we flew over the stormy landscape of Yucatan
and spanned the high central plateau covered with heavy clouds
transfused with light. . . . The first face I saw at the airport in
Mexico City was that of a Spanish friend, an eye-glassed face,
intense, energetic, lean. For eighteen months during the Spanish
war we had struggled at Paris and elsewhere to save this man, one
of the most clear-headed of all revolutionists, from a death which
the Stalinists were stubbornly preparing for him in Mr. Negrin's
prisons. Now he with other comrades had just fought for fourteen
months to ensure my voyage and escape. Without them I would
not have had a chance. It was my good fortune to have had the
rational miracle of solidarity happen twice for me. The first time
was five years ago, when I left the USSR for exile, stripped of
everything—saved, on the eve of the mass executions, saved by the
action of some French comrades. So it is that we stand together
from one end of the world to the other, few in numbers, but sure
of each other, and confident: on the eve, confident of tomorrow.
... In the streets of Mexico City the feeling of no longer being
outside the law was extraordinary. No longer was I a hunted man
on reprieve from an internment camp, nor that alien suspect whose
papers the Haitian police had examined with a kind of horror. Do
you come from Europe? From France? Political refugees? No
nationality? But Russians all the same?! And a French writer
too?! With a Mexican travel-permit! Writer, painter? Is that why
one of you takes notes and the other makes sketches? The police-
men would go into a fit, and regain their composure only just in
time to smile politely at some Phalangist gentleman who was pass-
ing through with a passport in good order, prettily bound in blue
paper and duly stamped by Franco's consuls.
I have gone through too much not to be able to live in the
immediate moment only. But the hospitable lights of Mexico City
still superimpose themselves on a background of far-off, ruined,
uneasy cities, plunged in the black-out; and I see hunted men
going through them, the most hunted men in all the world. I know
that not all can or ought to leave, that the duty of those who can

=== Page 34 ===
ON THE EVE

stay is to stay. (They too are doing their simple duty well, and
they too are on the alert for tomorrow, one must not doubt that.)
And I know that some of them will have to die the law of averages
requires that. But I also know that some of them cannot and ought
not remain, otherwise they will perish inevitably and uselessly.
And yet, although these are the most resolute and conspicuous
enemies of nazi-fascism, your great American democracy closes its
doors to them. High officials, wearing V's in their button-holes,
have drawn up new regulations for visas that are virtually deliver-
ing some thousands of courageous workers into the hands of the
Gestapo. I don't know just how this could happen, but it has. I
can well understand that those officials have no sympathy for men
who are after all subversives. But can't they realize that Europe is
going to have urgent need of these men tomorrow? That if the
cadres of old European socialism are not rescued, tomorrow's
inevitable revolutions are going to be inspired and led by ex-Nazis,
ex-Fascists, ex-Stalinists, by adventurers without ideas, without
humanity, scruples or devotion? All that's necessary to see this is
a simple political calculation. In the concentration camps of the
Sahara and in the sad streets of Marseilles are men who must be
saved if we are at all anxious to save certain values-for human
values cannot exist without men to incarnate them....

(Translated by Jean Connolly)

33

=== Page 35 ===
Montrachet-Le-Jardin

Wallace Stevens

What more is there to love than I have loved?
And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright,
The chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives

And great moon, cricket-impresario,
And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past,
Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest.

Chome! clicks the clock, if there be nothing more.
But if, but if there be something more to love,
Something in now a senseless syllable,

A shadow in the mind, a flourisher
Of sounds resembling sounds, efflorisant,
Approaching the feelings or come down from them,

These other shadows, not in the mind, players
Of aphonies, tuned in from zero and
Beyond, futura's fuddle-fiddling lumps,

But if there be something more to love, amen,
Amen to the feelings about familiar things,
The blessed regal dropped in daggers' dew,

Amen to thought, our singular skeleton,
Salt-flicker, amen to our accustomed cell,
The moonlight in the cell, words on the wall.

To-night, night's undeciphered murmuring
Comes close to the prisoner's ear, becomes a throat
The hand can touch, neither green bronze nor marble,

34

=== Page 36 ===
MONTRACHET-LE-JARDIN

The hero's throat in which the words are spoken,
From which the chant comes close upon the ear,
Out of the hero's being, the deliverer

Delivering the prisoner by his words,
So that the skeleton in the moonlight sings,
Sings of an heroic world beyond the cell,

No, not believing, but to make the cell
A hero's world in which he is the hero.
Man must become the hero of his world.

The salty skeleton must dance because
He must, in the aroma of summer nights,
Licentious violet and lascive rose,

Midsummer love and softest silences,
Weather of night creatures, whistling all day, too,
And echoing rhetorics more than our own.

He hears the earliest poems of the world
In which man is the hero. He hears the words,
Before the speaker's youngest breath is taken:

Fear never the brute clouds nor winter-stop
And let the water-belly of ocean roar,
Nor feel the x malisons of other men,

Since in the hero-land to which we go,
A little nearer by each multitude,
To which we come as into bezeled plain,

The poison in the blood will have been purged,
An inner miracle and sun-sacrament,
One of the major miracles, that fall

=== Page 37 ===
36

PARTISAN REVIEW

As apples fall, without astronomy,
One of the sacraments between two breaths,
Magical only for the change they make.

The skeleton said, It is a question of
The naked man, the naked man as last
And tallest hero and plus gaudiest vir.

Consider how the speechless, invisible gods
Ruled us before, from over Asia, by
Our merest apprehension of their will.

There must be mercy in Asia and divine
Shadows of scholars bent upon their books,
Divine orations from lean sacristans

Of the good, speaking of good in the voice of men.
All men can speak of it in the voice of gods.
But to speak simply of good is like to love,

To equate the root-man and the super-man,
The root-man swarming, tortured by his mass,
The super-man friseured, possessing and possessed.

A little while of Terra Paradise
I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,
Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,

But in that dream a heavy difference
Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,
In vain, life's season or death's element.

Bastard chateaux and smoky demoiselles,
No more. I can build towers of my own,
There to behold, there to proclaim, the grace

=== Page 38 ===
MONTRACHET-LE-JARDIN

And free requiting of responsive fact,
To project the naked man in a state of fact,
As acutest virtue and ascetic trove.

Item: The cocks crow and the birds cry and
The sun expands, like a repetition on
One string, an absolute, not varying

Toward an inaccessible, pure sound.
Item: The wind is never rounding o
And, imageless, it is itself the most,

Mouthings its constant smatter throughout space.
Item: The green fish pensive in green reeds
Is an absolute. Item: The cataracts

As facts fall like rejuvenating rain,
Fall down through nakedness to nakedness,
To the auroral creature musing in the mind.

Item: Breathe, breathe upon the centre of
The breath life's latest, thousand senses.
But let this one sense be the single main.

And yet what good were yesterday's devotions?
I affirm and then at midnight the great cat
Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone.

=== Page 39 ===
On The "Brooks-MacLeish Thesis"

Editor's Note: We asked some twenty writers to comment on Van
Wyck Brooks' theory of modern literature, as discussed in Macdonald's
"Kulturbolschewismus Is Here" in the last issue. We print below the
replies received.

ALLEN TATE
With most of Mr. Macdonald's criticism of Van Wyck Brooks I fully
agree; but at two points I believe that it is seriously at fault. Mr. Mac-
donald seems to feel that the great writers of our time were consciously
exposing the evils of capitalism; yet I believe that the most we can say, if
we are not going to succumb to special pleading, is that they have written
out of a vision of life in our time, or out of a vision of the evils of life
which are common to all times; and it is this tragic view which Mr.
Brooks cannot understand, because he holds the moralistic and didactic
view which can be extended, as he has extended it, into the nationalist and
patriotic view. And this view can believe in the dignity of man only by
sticking its head in the sand. It is a very old view, and there is nothing
novel or abstruse, except in the tangled misconceptions of Mr. Brooks'
remarks on his contemporaries, in Mr. Brooks' revival of it. We may let
him have Whittier if he wants him.

Yet the trouble is that Mr. Brooks and the "school" for which he
stands are probably going to make us like Whittier too. Nobody who fol-
lows the drift of opinion in this country can fail to see the parallel
between the Brooks-MacLeish school and Dr. Goebbels' Hitler-inspired
attack on "modern" art. It is wholly irrelevant whether a nationalist-
patriotic censorship of the imagination is set up in the interest of democ-
racy or of totalitarianism; the results may turn out to be the same. The
best defense of democracy, or of any other political order, in terms of
the creative imagination, is no defense at all; and the worst defense of
democracy, or of any other political order, in terms of the imagination, is
the effort to prove that the arts prefer any one political system. Censor-
ship and repression of the arts are possible under any system; they are
not impossible under a democracy, particularly at that moment when
democracy begins to change, as ours is now beginning to change into some
kind of functional state.

As an old reader of Mr. Brooks' works, I cannot share Mr. Mac-
donald's surprise that Mr. Brooks has come round to his present views. He
has always seen literature as chiefly a symptom, and if you see it that way
you are going to prefer Whittier to Henry James because though tame and
pious and limited Whittier is safe. I have also an uneasy suspicion of Mr.
Macdonald's defense of the moderns: are they not a symptom too? After
the triumph of Mr. Macdonald's socialism, will they not become unneces-

38

=== Page 40 ===
"BROOKS-MACLEISH THESIS" 39
sary, perhaps even decadent, and make way for the socialist Whittier?
Meanwhile we had better keep an eye on Mr. Brooks. His large audience
and his great powers of persuasion, most of all his facile assumption of
the role of the defender of democracy, will bear close watching; it may
already be too late to do anything about the influence of a man who joins
these powers with a bourgeois preference for the inferior in literature: a
preference which permits him to make even Tolstoy and Goethe sound
second-rate, as if they were well within the reach of the whole American
public. Perhaps it is this gross flattery implicit in Mr. Brooks' views
which is the saddest sight of all.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Dear Mack:
You were never more picturesque or correct in your indignation
than when you voiced your astonishment, in "Kulturbolschewismus," at
what Brooks had said in his now notorious pronunciamento. To me there
was something too ludicrous in it to make me feel like taking it seriously.
But you may be right, such things should be noticed, as when a locomotive
goes off the track. I suppose someone has to clear the way again. I prefer
to drive by.
The thing that impresses me most though about the affair is that any-
one should be moved by it one way or the other. Isn't such an attitude as
Brooks displayed just the very ordinary one of all bad writers and editors?
What else have I been facing all my life? You can't expect me to give it
a tumble now. The only interest, and that a mild one, is that the name of
Brooks should be involved in it.
Men like Brooks ought to be digging around the young coming up,
to see what they are made of. They ought to realize that, as creators, they
themselves are wearing it pretty thin and that, logically enough, the new
litter will probably have the yeast in it somewhere. Go out and discover
that. Discover it and learn. But no, these potential dotards can't believe
their eyes. They can't read anything unless it is in some old lingo they
learned when they themselves were brats.
What the heck does Brooks think the boys are talking about these
days in the poorly heated rooms? Does he think it is anything different
from what he was thinking, at his best, when he was young? It's different,
all right, because the age is different but in its essence it is just as "right"
as his highest conceptions. The only difficulty is he has lost the power to
recognize it.
Let him go to school again to the young. He's stymied. And how
many others of his ilk along with him. Only, I say, there's nothing par-
ticularly unusual or interesting about it. Just an ignorant sap, the world
running away in new and brilliant colors under his nose and he is bewil-
dered. It's too bad.

=== Page 41 ===
40 PARTISAN REVIEW

JOHN CROWE RANSOM
There would be an irony if the writers whom Mr. Brooks has abused
should find in PARTISAN REVIEW's invitation the occasion to form a chorus
and abuse Mr. Brooks. They would be supporting his charge that theirs
is a coterie mentality.

There is a good deal of substance to Mr. Brooks's generalization as
Mr. Macdonald reports it. He finds that the modern writers do not have
the rating of "primary" or "great" writers; and that is generally correct
as I see it. Our literature with its brilliance is less creative and positive
than other literatures have been.

Documenting that a little, I do not know how many of Mr. Brooks's
academic strictures I shall be repeating, and it does not matter. Suppose
we look at fiction. It is the literary mode in which production has been
most prodigious, almost displacing the other modes, and that itself is
significant; for fiction is the mode closest to non-literary prose, the one
in which a writer can carry on most successfully without much creative
imagination. So we get mass production of fiction that is in good form
but without any power. We also get fiction that is tractarian and topical,
writing out satire and case histories; and though this may achieve real
power, it is power that is not literary but secular and practical. (The fic
tion that is openly Marxist or Social Revolutionist, for example; and, if
the fiction is not that, the Marxist "criticism" which is prepared to show
that it must be working then for the dread Bourgeoisie.) Then, as if not
to serve in any man's army, there is the fiction so "pure" that it is richly
detailed to the point of being without direction, and fantastic or obscure.

The poetry of our age is also brilliantly unsuccessful. The lyrical
note is a tinkle without resonance, and we take no note of it, or else it
employs its orchestration so wildly that it produces mystification. It is
born in mystification. The artist has lost the approach to his art.

I should argue bitterly in defense of the greatness of a few moderns,
such as James, Yeats, and Proust; though confessing that there is not one
of them but bears witness to his age by the desperateness of his way of
escaping the common frustration.

When Mr. Brooks blames the tendency of the literature upon the
vanity of its writers, or their misanthropy, that seems to me as incredible
as it is cynical. More likely it is due to a scruple of conscience, holding
the writers sternly at home in their actual contemporary world and not
permitting them to lapse back into the inadequate forms and immature
affirmations of the last century. What Mr. Brooks should indict is not the
writers but the age which bore them. That would be more heroic. They
will not really evade their difficulties by denying them, and Mr. Brooks's
idea of doing so is dogmatic, and in fact it is Christian Science.

What is the matter with the age? Something profound and still
obscure. I cannot think the difficulties are social, or economic, or material,
for these difficulties are perennial. It is true that we have plenty of
trouble adjusting to an Age of Machines, but it hardly paralyses us. I find

=== Page 42 ===
"BROOKS-MACLEISH THESIS"

41

myself more and more imagining that the epochal thing that has happened
to us is a sudden crisis of language and expression. For the first time in
human history we have pure science, which is pure prose, and that means
that we have pushed language to the point where it is the perfect instru
ment for science. The esthetic or imaginative elements of language that
used to clutter it-the figures of speech for example-have been spotted
and thrown out. The consequence is that literature, with its imaginative
order of knowing, is homeless. It has to make up its own occasions, and it
becomes factitious and technical in a degree that was never known before.
Something like this, I think, determines the difficulties of all sorts of
creative writers, so that it now devolves upon criticism to study it in every
sort of case. But poetry is the core, or the epitome, of all the creative
forms, and in poetry the issue is found most simply. There are now many
men of good will attempting in the name of criticism to analyse the logical
or linguistic element in poetry, a study which is nothing at all if it is not
intensive; believing that perhaps the obscure fate of literature itself may
depend on the issue which they are trying to isolate. I do not know what
is the precise fault which Mr. Brooks finds with my own studies, but I
suppose it is because they take criticism partly in this light. I have been
notified by writers who do not have this particular interest that it is tire
some. But it may be that literary studies must very soon develop by
policies like those that have served science so well: by a series of close
and small efforts rather than by some single great push. Science did not
begin to flourish in the general before it learned how to succeed in the
minute; but if indeed there is no such thing as science in general there is
also no such thing as literature in general. Writers now are painfully
self-conscious and bewildered. Perhaps they will have to stay with their
self-consciousness, and discover if they can just what literature is calcu
lated to do, before they will be freed again.

HENRY MILLER
Thanks for asking me to contribute to the controversy. I have just
read the article. I think Macdonald disposes of the issue himself. What
good is there in drawing it out? My impression was that Van Wyck
Brooks was dead-years ago. I see now he's deader than dead. It's too
damned silly to bother about. These people kill themselves off. As for
MacLeish, I never read a line of his-that's significant too. If I'm going
to fire a salvo, I'd like something better to aim at-that's how I feel, to be
honest. And Thomas Mann!-it's all pitiful. I don't know any intelligent
person who gives these matters a second thought.

LOUISE BOGAN
The first time I realized Van Wyck Brooks' deficiencies as a critic was
when I consulted his book on Henry James, in the course of writing an
article on The Princess Casamassima. I came upon his explanation of the
character of Hyacinth Robinson and knew that it was wrong. It might

=== Page 43 ===
42 PARTISAN REVIEW

have been wrong for two reasons: 1.) That Brooks did not understand in
any way what it was that James was driving at 2.) That Brooks under-
stood, but was warping the facts to fit his theory of James.
Since Brooks' metamorphosis into an official critic functioning on
the behalf of an official literature, I have come to believe that both explana-
tions fit his case. These explanations overlap and interact. Brooks does
not deeply, wholly, intuitively understand what the artist is, or is trying to
do; and Brooks, because of this deficiency can readily switch on and off
the reasons of the artist to suit his arguments. Brooks is at bottom a
moralist, looking for literature to back him up. He is a man seeking a
religion desperately, who will catch at any straw to give him a sense of
security. He is, as well, a person who has no idea what the aesthetic
emotion is, or can be. For this last reason alone he can be forgiven a few
of his worst blunders. He is not always telling lies. He simply, utterly
and completely, does not understand.
This basic lack of understanding makes him the perfect propagandist,
his conscience does not check him in his career because it sees nothing to
check. This lack also accounts for the spotty character of his work: his
reliance on pastiche; his fondness (which he shares with Mrs. Humphrey
Ward) for Amiel; his abortive enthusiasms for both psycho-analysis and
socialism. The early books, re-read in the light of modern insights, are
uncommonly uneven and, often, childish. Brooks has always wanted
"constructors" and "a focal center." He has always set up "the will"
against "mysticism."

"I know of no considerable artist whose work does not viv-
idly represent some trait of the race it sprang from."
"An American artist can have no sane originality deeper
than that of technique (its. mine) which does not spring from
American life."
This is Brooks speaking, in 1908. He is saying the same things now. He
has found his center; and, finding it must, as the Philistine militant,
denigrate all which does not fit into his ultimately moral pattern. "Few
writers, I think, at present are living up to these expectations. What then,
is literature doing for us in these perplexing times?"-It might be Samuel
Smiles.
Perhaps it is dangerous and futile to compare the literary develop-
ment of one century with another. The 19th century opened with dark
psychic turmoil and romantic extravagance everywhere present in Euro-
pean literature. In France the roman noir held the field; and Hugo had
triumphed over Vigny. Béranger was the most popular French poet; and
there were bad nationalist political French painters to equal him. Out of
this welter came quite different things. Baudelaire and Flaubert were both
born in 1821; Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal were both pub-
lished in 1857; and this was the year of Béranger's death. The Bourgeois
revolution, in spite of 1848, had triumphed, but so had the beginning of
modern consciousness, as expressed in the art of literature. Art, and its

=== Page 44 ===
“BROOKS-MACLEISH THESIS” 43

great power of enlightenment, truth-telling and release goes on, as some-
one has said, behind history’s back. It cannot be manufactured to order.
We do not need worry about its future in America. In ways and forms
unforseen and unimaginable by Brooks and others, it will occur. Eliot,
Stein and James are stages on the way.

JAMES T. FARRELL
Dwight Macdonald’s article on Van Wyck Brooks was very good. I
should like to add two points to it, and to offer some additional comment.
First, the “primary” writers of the past listed by Brooks were attacked
in their own days for the very same reasons that Brooks cites in his casti-
gations of modern writers. Dostoevsky was accused of nihilism. Whitman
was treated almost as if he were an immoral scoundrel. Victor Hugo was
driven into exile. The Philistines looked on Ibsen as if he were the devil.
And Socrates was driven to his death for the “crime” of having demoral-
ized the youth of Athens. Brooks is pirating the reputations of great
writers of the past while he speaks the language of their bitterest enemies.
Second: While it is proper to defend the writers whom Brooks attacks
so shamelessly, it must be pointed out that they do not all belong to the
same tendency, and it does not mean that valid criticisms of many of them
are not appropriate. The recent critical writings of T. S. Eliot, for in-
stance, emphasize religious values. While it is impossible for Eliot to be
as critically immature as Brooks, he is in many ways closer to him intel-
lectually, than he is to Macdonald.
It was pertinent to mention the Moscow trials. We are not done with
them politically, or in terms of their influence on cultural matters. As
Trotsky pointed out, there is nothing new in their basic character: the
amalgam is familiar in political and literary frameups. And we can now
see a pattern that is unfolding. First, destroy the intellectual and artistic
backgrounds of contemporary writers and thinkers: discredit them by
attacking Marx and Joyce; then, ruin their artistic and intellectual reputa-
tions; finally, call in the cops and put them in the clink as subversive
ideological Fifth Columnists.
Macdonald says that P.R. is fighting a rear-guard action. I think
that since it was re-established on the new basis in 1937, it has done far
less than it might have done. It has already lost many opportunities. Now,
when the situation is rapidly worsening, it has to make up for these lost
opportunities. Something better than the Zabel article, for instance, should
have been printed on MacLeish. Zabel’s politeness appeared almost like
hedging. To him, MacLeish is inconsistent. But he did not seem to know
what deductions to draw from the specific character of MacLeish’s
inconsistency.
Many lines of cultural life are now coalescing. Just as the govern-
ment is becoming the main customer for the products of heavy industry,
it is also becoming, more and more, a major employer of intellectuals,
artists, and writers. (Parenthetically and apropos of the managerial revo-

=== Page 45 ===
44                                             PARTISAN REVIEW

lution, it is clear that to date the only trust that the government had really
been able to control is "the brain trust.") Because of the economic plight
of writers, government institutions, political movements, and commerce
provide many of them with the sole means of making a living. Thus, the
New Deal, Hollywood, the Stalinist movement play such important roles
in the cultural life of America. The result of this tendency has been
restrictions on artistic production and on thought. Now, with the world
crisis becoming more increasingly severe, an ideology to justify this
process is in a state of formation. Even the sordid purchase and misuse
of talent will be justified, not as an unpleasant necessity, but as something
good, progressive, a means of furthering culture. Brooks, in On Contem-
porary Literature, declares that our "cynical" writers, imbued with a
drive-toward-death, do not want to become public figures. And this notion
also intrigues Lewis Mumford (who, along with Brooks, has succeeded in
raising obscuranticiasm to a higher level). In Faith for Living, Mumford,
too, says that writers should become public figures. The idea seems to be
that we should all imitate Archibald MacLeish and Robert Sherwood.
         Behind such manifestations, there is a simple historic fact: the bour-
geoisie cannot stand its own culture and its own past. In the 18th century,
the writers found a common interest with the merchants. The latter wanted
to be free of feudal restrictions in order to sell on a free market: the
writer wanted to sell his works on a free market instead of being forced to
depend on the patronage system. The significance of Samuel Johnson's
famous letter to Lord Chesterfield is that it is a public document which
date-lines and drives home the coup de grace of the patronage system. But
now, a new patronage system is developing. In the heroic days of democ-
racy, the bourgeoisie was pro-scientific and anti-clerical. Its sponsorship
of science, and its struggle with the church helped to create the material
and the cultural basis which permitted the great development of modern
realistic literature. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, it became
clear to more and more writers that bourgeois culture, which once prom-
ised so much to the artist, was beginning to crush him. This is the basis
for the profound despair of men like Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud. In
their way, they questioned the whole moral sensibility of their times—that
is, of bourgeois culture. It is this profound despair which is the founda-
tion for the personal aesthetics of Joyce's character, Stephen Daedalus.
And Finnegans Wake is, in a sense, the final word of Joyce on the brutality
of bourgeois culture. He turns his whole intellectual past into a grandiose
and scholarly joke. To repeat, since roughly the middle of the nineteenth
century, we have been witnessing a process whereby bourgeois culture is
destroying its own artistic sons, and the artist has sought, in various ways,
to find the means of preserving the integrity of his own being as an artist,
and to combat this crushing weight. This is part of the significance of
l'art pour l'art.
         Brooks has made himself part of the process of destroying the artist.
He has advanced it one more stage. Ex-post-facto, he justifies every Philis-

=== Page 46 ===
"BROOKS-MACLEISH THESIS" 45

tine who attacked Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Joyce. In fact, few Philistines of
the past ever descended to a lower level than that of Van Wyck Brooks.
For he has compared serious writers with Hitler and Mussolini-even with
rattlesnakes. And then, in order to show that he is really tolerant, he
assures us that some of his best friends are writers.
Brooks' recent fulminations parallel the current reaction against
Marxism. Brooks' diatribe against dead geniuses is really a means of
attacking living writers: Max Eastman's personal war against Karl Marx
seems to be a means of achieving the same end. Such attacks cannot dis-
turb the bones of dead men: they can only injure the living. And herein,
we observe one of the traits which the Philistine shows in all ages.
Now, from all sides, the Philistines are coming together, and they
wail for a Weltanschaung. They are disturbed because they do not see
sufficient faith in their fellow men. Max Eastman declares that his con-
temporaries lack faith in democracy: Brooks states that modern writers
have lost faith in "the idea of greatness." They are looking for some
soul-saving hope which will no longer require them to meet problems
patiently, with discipline, and with courage. They want a faith which will
save them the onerous difficulties of thinking. I observe, for instance,
that when Eastman criticizes dialectical materialism, he seems to be more
disturbed because it seems to him to be a fighting faith, than he is because
it is an inadequate statement of scientific method, and an unwarranted
description of nature. What these men are really trying to do is to create
a metaphysics of the war. But they do not pursue this task systematically,
and with a real intent to tackle the problems which it poses for them.
Instead, they snipe at those who disagree with them. Eastman discusses
the beard of Karl Marx. Brooks indulges in his petty psychological
assumptions about writers whose books he would like to burn. These men
render trivial the discussions and the controversies which rage over the
most serious problems which the human race faces in this era.
The statement that Brooks lacks historical understanding is very
appropriate. His recent studies of the past merely make a doily out of
American history; he wants American literature after all that has hap-
pened in this century-to extend this simple design. He wishes that a new
Saint Augustine would rise from out of our society. It is characteristic of
men lacking any historic sense that when they come face to face with
serious social problems in a troubled age, they always turn their eyes to
some renowned thinker of the past, and they wish that he would be resur-
rected in order that he might solve for them, the problems which they
cannot solve for themselves. And alas, there is no Saint Augustine: there
is only Van Wyck Brooks. The similarity between Saint Augustine and
Van Wyck Brooks is to be found in the zeal which they have both shown
in hunting out heretics. But there, the similarity both begins and ends.
P.R. should continue to criticize such men as Brooks and Archibald
MacLeish. They are attacking the entire basis on which modern literature,
thought, and science is founded. And in doing this, they are most assur-

=== Page 47 ===
46 PARTISAN REVIEW

edly setting the basis for staging a kind of Moscow Trials of American
culture. It is to be observed that they do not ask—do the writers we dis-
agree with try honestly to tell the truth, do they try to give us true pictures
of life? It seems that this question is as important to them, as was the
question of truth to Mr. Vishinsky. As Macdonald states, we are seeing a
repetition of the thirties: rather, it is a continuation of tendencies that
were set in motion in that decade. Although the vocabulary is now some-
what revised, the attacks on serious writers are of the same calibre as
those which made dreary so much of the literary polemics of the thirties.
In those days, many writers penned mea culpa articles for New Masses
declaring that they repented the sin of having “bourgeois origins”: now,
different writers are busily engaged in a new series of confessions, as
follows: I confess that I once tried to think, that I once tried to write
decent articles, decent books, decent novels. Forgive me, I will not write
any more such articles, books, novels.
To all these penitents, I wish to offer some advice. I have culled it
from a book entitled The Flowering of New England. It reads: “Literary
men indulge in humbug only at a price.”

LIONEL TRILLING
As I read Brooks's address to the Conference on Science, Philosophy
and Religion, I thought: "And Shakespeare—whatever will he do with
that man of negation, questioning, disgust, verbalism? So disillusioned
a man and often so very difficult a writer—will Shakespeare turn out to be
Primary?” And as I thought of Shakespeare it occurred to me that
Brooks had quite made up his mind that literature was divided between
Iago and Othello, the base Iago representing negative intellect, the noble
Othello representing the Affirmation of Values. And the more I read the
more precise the analogy grew. I remembered that Othello, though he is
much concerned with sight, is so preoccupied with his Affirmation of
Values that he cannot see what is before his eyes, just as Mr. Brooks can-
not see what is in a given book: it seemed to me that Othello listening to
Cassio talk about Bianca and thinking Desdemona was the subject was very
like Brooks reading Henry James or Proust or Joyce. And as I watched
Brooks's savagery grow, the Othello connection grew clearer still: in order
to affirm his Values, Brooks must kill off the Desdemona of moral sensi-
bility. Honor triumphs, and stupidity and cruelty with it; the nobility of
Othello masks a destructiveness rather greater than Iago's.
Literature, I suppose, has not recovered from the decay of religion,
For it is certainly clear that what Mr. Brooks wants is religion and not
literature at all. This is a perfectly respectable desire, but Mr. Brooks
ought to name it properly. He ought not make Primary Writers into
Church Fathers carrying the Torch of Life in a Pageant of Progress.
Macdonald's article on Brooks is very just so far as its literary judg-
ment goes. I do not share his feelings about the political importance of
Brooks's recent attitudes; it seems to me that people will not willingly

=== Page 48 ===
SEPARATION 47
enter the moral stuffiness that Brooks desires. And I do not share Mac-
donald's assumption that socialism promises a moral and literary regenera-
tion.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Among those invited to comment was T. S. Eliot, to
whom we sent airmail a copy of Brooks' paper and of Macdonald's article.
The following cablegram has just come:
LETTER JUST RECEIVED QUITE AGREE STOP HOPE SEND COM-
MENTS BEFORE FEBRUARY BEST XMAS WISHES... THOMAS ELIOT

CONTRIBUTORS
WILLIAM TROY, who has written frequently for us, is head of the Eng-
lish Department of Bennington College. ... VICTOR SERGE's most recent
novel is S'Il Est Minuit Dan le Siecle (1940, Paris).... WALLACE STEVENS
is the author of Harmonium, The Man with the Blue Guitar, and other
books of verse.... LEWIS FISHER lives in Aurora, N. Y. He writes: "You
may be interested to know I have spent over a decade writing a very long,
very serious novel, A Chicago Pastoral, without trying any shorter forms
until it was finished." ... MARIANNE MOORE's latest book is What Are
Years.... D. S. SAVAGE has contributed to Horizon and other magazines.
... RANDALL JARRELL, well-known for his poetry and criticism, teaches at
the University of Texas.... LIONEL ABEL, who has contributed verse and
criticism to PARTISAN REVIEW, lives in Rockaway Park, N. Y. . . . J. PAT-
RICK BYRNE lives in Ireland.... PAUL GOODMAN, whose novel, The Grand
Piano, or The Almanac of Alienation, Colt Press has just published, is a
frequent contributor to PARTISAN REVIEW.... STEPHEN SPENDER, the Eng-
lish poet, is an editor of Horizon.... RAYNER HEPPENSTALL is an English
novelist, author of The Blaze of Noon.... NICHOLAS MOORE is an English
poet.... H. J. KAPLAN is a young writer who lives in Chicago.... HAROLD
ROSENBERG has published verse and criticism in Poetry, PARTISAN REVIEW,
and other magazines.... F. W. DUPEE, a member of the English Depart-
ment of Columbia University, was formerly an editor of PARTISAN REVIEW.
... KARL KORSCH's most recent book is his study, Karl Marx. He lives in
Boston.... ALFRED A. KNOPF is publishing this spring WELDON KEES'
novel, Fall Quarter.
Some of our readers may have been puzzled by the fact that the
author of "Genesis of 'Swann' " in the last issue was Alfred Vigneron on
the cover, and Robert Vigneron elsewhere. The correct name is Robert,
and M. Vigneron is a member of the Department of Romance Languages
of the University of Chicago. How "Alfred" crept in we don't know-
possibly some one was thinking of Alfred De Vigny. We wish to express
our apologies to Professor Vigneron for the mistake, and to thank him for
his good nature about it.

=== Page 49 ===
Mighty Good To Me
Lewis Fisher

E WERE SPENDING a few days in Warm Springs, Virginia,
and it seemed afterwards that the purpose of the trip had been to
hear her say it-'her' being an old Negress, and 'it' being to her
just a casual remark or question with which she finished out our
conversation. Or at least finished it so far as my memory goes.
But maybe I was a little stunned, as by a revelation.
They treat the Negroes very nicely in that neighborhood.
More than mere courtesy: they even take a great deal of pains to
train them for an occupation. Their darkies have been educated
into almost perfect servants, very kind, very thoughtful, anticipat-
ing every movement you might need to make, always pleased about
your tips-which anyway occur only on the last day. And per-
fectly harmless, we were assured. Our hostess herself walked
through their village without the least misgiving, as you might in
a kindergarten. I'm certain she found their silence, or soft brev-
ities, a relief from the conversation of her paying guests, who
were roughly from New York. The time I met her there she was
so relaxed and sad I hardly recognized her.
We had taken all the drives, had bathed in the springs, had
gone the shorter rambles, and I, who climb better than my wife,
had walked the ridge. I had looked down on the handsome wheel-
ers, or east and west at ridge after ridge disappearing
inaudibly into one blue trill. Their spring had begun in earnest,
and going shirt-off on those high paths I had a good start on my
summer's burn. We weren't far enough south for the citrus or the
sea shells; a sunburn was the one southern export we'd take home
with us.
So on this blue moist early-season Sunday the new thing left
for us was evidently to attend the Negro church. We hesitated
even to speak of the desire since we knew no objection would be
made and we wanted not to abuse our position. If religion was a
48

=== Page 50 ===
MIGHTY GOOD TO ME
49
solace, these people had at least the right not to be gaped at while
being solaced. Yet in such situations one hesitates and goes ahead.
We spoke of it to our hostess, who insisted we need have no
scruples. They were children, really, and would be ever so pleased
if we'd pay them this attention. They'd be proud to have us. The
church, for some reason, lay beyond the settlement, in the open
fields.
Well, the church is not what I remember. The singing was
undistinguished and the preaching only moderately dull. There
was a not quite childlike, though somewhat unpleasant, effort to
cash in on the upper class attendance. We were, at some length,
made to feel that any sound of coin would be distinctly out of
character when the basket reached our party. It became just a
decent routine case of everybody's trying rather dismally to live
up to what was expected of him. There was never the remotest
approach to that Negro preacher who rolled forth the splendor of:
"Moses was a nomad, but not in the Leibnitzian sense." No, the
church part seemed no solace to any of those present.
But we had become a group. And since all the others chose
to ride over I had gone along earlier, alone, for the sake of stroll-
ing through the lazier preparatory part of morning, the blank time
after breakfast and before the start of serious cooking. No one
was doing anything. I had on my light gray suit, but everyone
not in his own yard was dressed up too.
She was sitting dreamily on her stoop, a little past the vil-
lage. Although neither fat nor wearing the bandana, she was so
typical a mammy that in a larger place I would have suspected the
chamber of commerce. She had everything the smile, the white
white hair, the ashy calico, the ability to sag with porch and pillar
right down to the corn cob pipe. The cabin was sheer plagiarism
from Tobacco Road.
When she removed the pipe to smile more, her smile included
me as naturally as if I'd been a hen. I leaned against her gate-
which corrects what I said about Tobacco Road. If there was a
gate in that set, a tall man would hardly dare lean against it. She
seemed to have the cabin to herself, as I the lane. Things were
planted in the yard but hadn't yet identified themselves. The jon-
quils had only then opened. I couldn't tell which birds belonged
there and which were stopping over.

=== Page 51 ===
50 PARTISAN REVIEW

We exchanged the usual compliments and spoke favorably
of the sun before we drifted off into philosophy. This arrived by
way of Harlem. I hadn't thought of her as feeder to that popula-
tion but she had children in it. She was not satisfied by what par-
ticulars they furnished. She used my help in making New York
real, and I said the more indulgent things about it. Having lived
also in Chicago I knew some pleasanter details toward freedom
after hours.
She smoked and nodded and enjoyed the sun and asked and
reconstructed Harlem. I too had got quite beyond a mere collec-
tor's interest.
"The Lord," was her conclusion, "has been mighty good
to me."
We were by now in full philosophy and so I asked her to
define her terms; to tell me, as I put it, what she meant.
"Mighty good to me," she said, using the argument by
repetition.
She paused to blow out incense.
"My children," she explained, "were always even, always
came in pairs."
As soon as I got any meaning from this, I thought of twins.
Such a constancy seemed strange, but I still hadn't understood pure
essential orderliness in her conception of it. However she treated
me with patience and went on.
"No, only one pair of twins. He works in Richmond and the
girl was married, in Louisville I remember. But always if I had,
say, a girl, then the next one was a boy. Mighty good to me. Or
when I lost a baby, then that time the next would be the same kind
to keep it even."
The scheme penetrated. It was impressive; we lost ourselves
some moments in its contemplation.
"Finally I had ten, all living, five one way, five the other."
She smoked again in the descended peace around us.
"You might think I had enough by then," and clearly she
meant enough of bounty. "But He been mighty good to me. Now
they old enough to die it keeps the same. First a woman die and
then a man. I got six now, still divided pretty."
I didn't inquire about grandchildren. From her silence they
fell outside the pattern. One mustn't ask too much of life. And

=== Page 52 ===
MIGHTY GOOD TO ME
51
why should she feel any restlessness because a church bell was
ringing urgently. She didn't need to go. She sat where she was,
with harmony about her as a turtle always has his roof and is
excused from seeking it.
Suddenly I noticed that a complete difference had crept into
her way of speaking to me from what my week had begun to make
sound customary. Her first remark had been "Yas sir" when I'd
informed her that the day was fine, since when the Sirs had utterly
dropped out. The reason I noticed suddenly is that, leaning on
her hospitable gate, I had for a while forgotten that we were both
not simply people. Perhaps I should mention that actually I have
never yet been knighted so that in the first days there this bombard-
ment of Sirs had fallen on my ears a bit strangely.
She too may have noticed something not quite usual about
the way we talked. Anyway we were now partly emerged from
the adoration of her mystery and it was time we turned to what-
ever should be next. She removed her pipe again to speak, and said
then, unemphatically, what I was surprised to hear, what seemed
so revealing that I don't recall exactly how we parted or know
what other explanation of our tone occurred to her.
"And you, Mister," her question was: "Are you a Negro?"

=== Page 53 ===
The Dial: A Retrospect†
Marianne Moore

AS GROWTH-RINGS in the cross section of a tree present a contrast-
ingly differentiated record of experience, successive editorial modifications
of a magazine adjoin rather than merge; but the later Dial shared or
thought it shared, certain objectives of its predecessors.* It is that Dial
which I know best, and when I think of it, recollections spring up, of
manuscripts; of letters; of people.
I think of the compacted pleasantness of those days at 152 West 13th
Street, and the three-story brick building with carpeted stairs, fireplace and
white mantel-piece rooms, business office in the first story front parlor, and
of plain gold-leaf block letters, "The Dial," on the windows to the right of
the brown stone steps leading to the front door. There was the recurrent
flower-crier in summer, with his slowly moving wagon of pansies, petu-
nias, agaratum; of a man with straw"ber"ies for sale; or a certain fish-
man with his pushcart-scales, and staccato refrain so unvaryingly impera-
tive, summer or winter, that Kenneth Burke's bit of parenthetic humor
comes back to me-"I think if he stopped to sell a fish, my heart would
skip a beat."
I recall a visiting editor's incredulity on receiving the statement, "To
me it's a revel," after asking if I did not find reading manuscript tiresome;
-manuscripts meaning the requested, the volunteered, and the recom-
mended; that third and sometimes uneasy entrant inducing a wish not
infrequently, that the roles of sponsor and author might be interchanged
as when in a letter of introduction, a (Persian, I think) typographic neigh-
bor wrote us, "In the country where I came from, the people say: 'Ham
Liyarat, ham Tüjarat' -Both pilgrimage and business, and so it is. Miss Z
would like to have you see some of her poems."
Before being associated with The Dial editorially, I had been a sub-
scriber, and still feel the impact of such writing as the W. B. Yeats remi-
niscences,-"Four Years," "More Memories," and "An Autobiographic

† Miss Moore has requested us to print the following footnote: Since this article has been delayed
until it follows the editorial, In Repositions on the War in the July-August issue, may I say that I am
intensely pro-Churchill, pro-De Gaulle, and pre-U.S. net co-operative with that statement; that I am intensely pro-
defense effort. MARIANNE MOORE.
*The Dial, founded in 1840 with Margaret Fuller as editor, Emerson as next editor, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Hawthorne and others, as contributors, was discontinued after four years. In 1880 it was re-estab-
lished by Francis F. Browne of Chicago, but in 1917 there was a change in editorial policy; the publica-
tion offices were moved to New York and as a (fortuitously with socially analytical and humanitarian
emphasis, it was sparingly edited, first by George Bernard Donlin, then by Robert Morss Lovett with
Thorstein Veblen, Helen Marot, Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Harold Stearns and others as con-
tributing editors. In 1920 it was refashioned and brought out as a non-political monthly of "art and
letters" by Scofield Thayer, Editor, and J. S. Watson, President; with Lincoln MacVeagh as Treasurer,-
since his connection with The Dial Publishing Company Inc. being the full title, as it had been of the
forthrightly Dial. The Dial Press, it might be noted, was not anonymous with it, but a separate organ-
ization. Then with Stuart Mitchell as Managing Editor, followed by-though not always with the same
title Gilbert Seldes, Alyse Gregory, Kenneth Burke, and Marianne Moore, it was discontinued with the
July issue, 1929.

52

=== Page 54 ===
THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT
Fragment"; Paul Valéry's "An Evening with M Teste"; Mary Butts'
"Speed the Plow"; D. H. Lawrence's sketches, "Rex," and "Adolph." I
recall the aplomb of "Thus to Revisit," by Ford Madox Ford and the
instructively mannerless manner of W. C. Blum's pages on Rimbaud; the
photograph of Rimbaud as a child, reproduced next the translation of
A Season in Hell; and Julien Benda's statement in Belphegor, "the prob-
lem of art is to discipline emotion without losing it." There was the con-
tinually surprising work of E. E. Cummings; William Carlos Williams'
dangerous brio; the exciting unconformity of the "Bantams in Pine
Woods" group of poems by Wallace Stevens. Thomas Mann's "German
Letter" was, in effect, a commentary on his fiction, Ezra Pound's "Paris
Letter" and T. S. Eliot's "London Letter" italicized their poetry. I recall
the strong look of H. D.'s "Helios" on the page, and my grateful scep-
ticism in receiving her suggestion that I offer work also.

Among the pictures, as intensives on the text, were three verdure-
tapestry-like woodcuts by Galanis; Rousseau's lion among lotuses; "The
Philosophers" by Stuart Davis; Adolph Dehn's "Viennese Coffee House";
and Kuniyoshi's curious "Heifer"-the forehead with a star on it of sep-
arate whorled strokes like propeller-fins; Earnest Fiene; Charles Sheeler,
Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keefe, and Max Weber, and Carl
Sprinchorn and the Zorachs and Bertram Hartman; Wyndham Lewis,
Brancusi, Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, Picasso and de Chirico, Cocteau line
drawings, and Seurat's "Circus."

Such titles as "Sense and Insensibility," "Engineering with Words,"
"The American Shyness"; and the advertising-especially some lines
"Against the Faux Bon" and "technique" in lieu of "genius,"-seemed to
say, "We like to do this and can do it better than anyone else could"; and
I was self-warned to remain remote from so much rightness; finding also
in Alyse Gregory's delicately terse and lethal honesty, something apart
from the stodgy world of causal routine.

There was for us of the staff, whatever the impression outside, a con-
stant atmosphere of excited triumph; and from Editor or Publisher, a
natural firework of little parenthetic wit too good to print.

In analysing D. H. Lawrence's social logic, one usually disagrees with
him, but I remember the start of pleasure with which I came on his evoca-
tion of violets, in the introduction to his Pansies: "Pensées, like pansies,
have their roots in the earth, and in the perfume there stirs still the faint
grim scent of under-earth. Certainly in pansy-scent and in violet-scent it
is so; the blue of the morning mingled with the corrosive smoulder of the
ground." As typical of the unaccommodating poetic intensity of W. B.
Yeats, was the article on "The Death of Synge": "Synge was the rushing
up of buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a
furious impartiality, indifferent turbulent sorrow. Like Burns' his work
was to say all that people did not want to have said."

And there were our at times elusive foreign correspondents: as com-
menting from Germany, Thomas Mann; Italy, Raffaello Piccoli; Madrid,
53

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54 PARTISAN REVIEW

Ortega y Gasset; Vienna, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Dublin, John Eglin-
ton; London, Raymond Mortimer; Paris, Paul Morand; Russia, Maxim
Gorki;—active. And Bela Belazs (Hungary), and Otakar Fisher (Prague),
inactive. Those were days when as Robert Herring has said, things were
opening out, not closing in.
I recall the condensed but explicit anatomy of duties with which the
office was provided; and despite occasional athletically protesting editorial
reciprocities, the inviolateness—to us—of our "contributing editor-critics,"
Gilbert Seldes (The Theatre); Henry McBride (Modern Art); Paul Rosen-
feld and then Kenneth Burke (Music). Even recklessly against the false
good, they surely did represent The Dial in "encouraging a tolerance for
fresh experiments and opening the way for a fresh understanding of them."
Rivaling manuscript in its significance, were the letters; those from
certain contributors, indivisible as art from their more impersonal writ-
ings. The effect of vacuum silence and naturalness in a note or two from
D. H. Lawrence, belongs for me with Mabel Dodge Luhan's statement,
"the inessentials" seemed deadly to him, who knew how to savor a piece of
crusty bread on the side of a hill."

11 Feb 1929

c/o Signor G. Orioli
6 Lungarno Corsini
Florence Italy

Dear Marianne Moore
I should have liked to see you in New York—but how was I to know you
would like to see me!—many people don't.... We are staying here in Bandol near
Marseille a little longer, then going back to Italy—so will you write me there, if you
get the poems. And many greetings—
Regarding my statement about the Pensées: there are lines in the book, that are
the outcome of certain hurts and I am not saying that in every case the lines themselves
leave no shadow of hurt....

18 April 1929

Dear Marianne Moore
I like the little group you chose—some of my favorites—... I think I shall
withdraw that introduction from the book form—so you just keep any part of it you
wish, & use it with your group of poems, as you wish....
I knew some of the poems would offend you. But then some part of life must
offend you too, and even beauty has its thorns and its nettle-stings and its poppy-
poison. Nothing is without offense, & nothing should be: if it is part of life, & not
merely abstraction.

We must stay in this island a while, but my address is best c/ G. Orioli.
All good wishes
D. H. LAWRENCE

And from Paul Valéry in reply to a letter about his Introduction to
the Method of Leonardo da Vinci: Note and Digression, Part I: ... "I am
very pleased to hear you have found some spiritual refreshment in a work
which so many readers feel a little too much hard and bitter tasted for
common sense. But lucidity and will of lucidity lead their passionate
lover in crystal abysses deeper than old Erebus. . . ."
Besides humor in our correspondence, there was satire, as in A.E.'s
reply to a suggestion that it was a long time since he had sent us work

=== Page 56 ===
THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT 55

"Hawks should not prey upon hawks." And an ostensibly formal humor-
esque of our own, concocted by Kenneth Burke, recurs to me,—the answer
to an advertising manager who complained that if books which had re-
ceived long reviews and unanimous approbation elsewhere, were to be
damned at The Dial by brief notices and faint praise; might they not be
damned somewhat more promptly? To this complaint from an acquain-
tance of Mr. Burke's who had not foreseen that someone he knew might be
answering it, Mr. Burke said, ". . . Why not give The Dial credit. As you
have said, under our silence the book went through five editions. Now
that we have spoken there may never be a sixth. Further, we are happy to
learn that whereas we had feared that our 'Briefer Mention' was a week or
two late, the continued success of the book has kept our comment green.
We are, you might say, reviewing a reprint—a courtesy not all gazettes
will afford you. . . . And are you, after all, so sure that a book benefits
by having the reviews all let off at once like something gone wrong in the
arsenal, followed by an eternity of charred silence."

And we were not without academic loyalty in the guise of reproof,
one complainant who has been writing some very good verse, taking us to
task about a review which he considered "unfair to the author" in being
"nothing but a warped summary" and "dangerous" as "a bad piece of
work . . . sponsored by a magazine of The Dial's reputation." Almost
simultaneous with this letter, we received from the ill-treated author, one
that said in conclusion, "And may I tell you how much I was pleased
with A.A.A.'s review of ______? Quite apart from the fact that it was
kind, it seemed to me an almost miraculous 'summing-up.' I have always
wondered if A.A.A. was a nom de plume. Will you extend my thanks to
him or her?"

Occasional inadvertences, moreover, at the expense of the acting
editor were not wanting; sundry inquiries requesting the attention of the
Active Editor; a letter from one of our Spanish contributors beginning,
"My respectable Miss:" and resulting from statements about the Dial
Award as acknowledging a contribution to "letters," offers to provide
whatever sort of letters we required.

It was an office truism that declined manuscript accompanied by a
printed card had been read as carefully as manuscript returned with a
letter. But occasionally there was the compliment of anger from those
whose grievances were imaginary and whose grudges were real; who were
so incurious in their reading as to accuse us of anti-Semitism, or hid salt
between pages to test the intensiveness of our reading. But not all "con-
tributors who were not allowed to contribute" bit the hand that had not
fed them. One to whom Alyse Gregory had given advice, replied that
before submitting work to The Dial he had not known there was such a
thing as editorial reciprocity, that he had rejection-slips enough "to paper
the Washington Monument inside and out"; that at last, however, as the
result of The Dial's encouragement, he was appearing regularly in the
XYZ—(a fiction magazine of robust circulation). And I recall the gener-

=== Page 57 ===
56 PARTISAN REVIEW

ous disappointment of a writer whose work had elicited suggestions, when
we returned to him a check that he had thought might be “used for a
reckless meal.”
Misunderstandings were with us in most instances, like scepticism
that “doubts in order to believe”; and anything in the way of ill-wishing
fulminations was constantly neutralized by over-justice from other quar-
ters; by such stringence against encroachment, as Raymond Mortimer’s
when he wondered if certain requested work might not be done more to
our liking by someone else; and by his patience when Dial work of his
was reprinted without his permission; by Gilbert Seldes' magnanimity
toward a minor phase of collaboration, and L. A. G. Strong's willingness
to believe that editorial crotchets are not all of the devil; by Yvor Winters'
probity of resistance and tincture of editorial virus; by such quixotry as
Professor Saintsbury's when hesitating to incorporate ia an article on Poe,
material that Andrew Lang had not published,-saying once an article had
been declined, he did not care to offer it “to the most different of editors”;
by Professor Charles Sears Baldwin’s acquiescent addendum in omitting a
touch of underlining humor, "You are not only good friends but good
critics."
To some contributors-as to some non-contributors-The Dial, and I
in particular, may have seemed quarrelsome, and it is regrettable that
manners should be subordinated to matter. Mishaps and anomalies, how-
ever, but served to emphasize for me the untoxic positiveness of most
writers. And today, previous victims of mine have to dread from me, as
preempting the privilege of the last word, nothing more than solicitude
that all of us may write better.
I think of Mr. McBride-his punctuality and his punctuation, each
comma placed with unaccidental permanence, and the comfortable equa-
bility of his pitiless ultimatums. One does not lose that sense of “creeping
up on the French,” of music, of poetry, of fiction, of society sparkle, that
came with his visits to the office. He did not “specialize in frights,” nor in
defamation, nor nurse grudges; and too reverent to speak in religious
accents often, could not trust himself to more than refer to personal
losses, sentiment with him was so real.
Gaston Lachaise's stubbornness and naturalness were a work of art
above even the most important sculpture. Admitting to an undiminishing
sense of burden that made frivolities or time-killings a sort of poison to
him, he was as deliberate as if a potion had put him under a spell. I
remember his saying with almost primitive-tribal moroseness, “But I
believe in a large amount of work”; as on another occasion, “Cats. I could
learn a million of things from cats.” And there was, when there was, E. E.
Cummings, the really successful avoider of compromise, of scarecrow
insincerity, of ordinary rubber-stamp hundred percent deadness.
I think of Charles Sheeler coping with the difficulties of photograph-
ing for reproduction, Lachaise's polished brass head of Scofield Thayer,
mounted on glass,-glitteringly complicated from any angle-and have

=== Page 58 ===
THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT 57

never seen anything effected with less ado or greater care; these scien-
tifically businesslike proceedings relating themselves perforce with the
simplified aspect of the Bucks County Barn and often reproduced winding
stair-turn.

Decorum, generosity, and some genial pictorial improvements to the
proof-sheets, were matched in Gordon Craig by an aesthetic unsubservience
justifying the surname crag as synonym for Craig. I recall Ezra Pound's
precision as translator of Boris de Schloezer,-reinforced by an almost
horrendous explicitness on returned proofs. But nothing supplants in
recollection, the undoing linguistics and scholarly resourcefulness of
Ellen Thayer as Assistant Editor; the inevitable occasional untender accu-
sation of stupidity or neglect of author's revisions being found invariably
to be reversible.

Padraic Colum's clemency and efflatus are not confined to the printed
page, and upon his visits to the office, routine atmosphere was transformed
into one of discovery. And John Cowper Powys, inalienable verbalist and
student of strangeness, inventor of the term "fairy cardinal" for Padraic
Colum, seemed himself, a supernatural being; so good a Samaritan, any
other phase of endowment, was almost an overplus. Indeed as has been
said by Mrs. Watson of his conversation, "He is so intense, you don't know
whether he's talking or listening." And his brother Llewelyn's dislike of
"a naturalist with an umbrella," of shams and pickthank science, come
back to one in connection with his gift for metaphor. At all events, one
who has known the shallows of a tree-bordered stream is not likely to
forget his phrase, "the cider-coloured reaches of The Stour." And though
suicidally kind to victims of injustice, he was as aloof from the world of
non-books as some subterranean depth inhabited by fish without eyes.

Above all, for an aesthetically inflexible morality against "the nearly
good enough"; for non-exploiting helpfulness to art and the artist, for
living their own doctrine that "the love of letters knows no frontiers,"
Scofield Thayer and Dr. Watson stand foremost. One of my first recollec-
tions of their literary partnership was their support of James Joyce when
The Little Review was censored for publishing Ulysses. "Our insistence
that The Dial's award is not a prize is frequently taken to be a character-
istic pedantry on our part," they said, but "a prize is something competed
for, an award is given." And on another occasion, "it is given to afford
the recipient an opportunity to do what he wishes and out of that to enrich
and develop his work." Nor was a gift ever more completely transferred,
without victimizing envolvement.

As it was Abraham Lincoln's ideal to lift "artificial weights from all
shoulders ... and afford all an unfettered start," so here. And in lifting
weights, money has its part. Contributions were paid for on acceptance;
for prose, two cents a word; for verse, twenty dollars a page or part of a
page; reviews for the Briefer Mention department, two dollars each. There
were not special prices for special contributors, a phase of chivalry
toward beginners that certain of them suspiciously disbelieved in. Any

=== Page 59 ===
58 PARTISAN REVIEW

writing or translating by the editors was to be done without payment, Dr.
Watson's participation under the name of W. C. Blum being contrived with
"a quietness amounting to scandal." And payment was computed in amounts
that are multiples of five. For example, as stated in our manual of pro-
cedure: "if a manuscript counts up to $15.98 or $16.01 or $18.01, the
writer should be paid $20.00; and if same is more than $90.00 it should be
computed in multiples of ten."

Writing is an undertaking for the modest. Those of us employed at
The Dial, felt that the devisers of the organization we represented could do
better than we, what we were trying to do, and we always will feel, The
Dial's strength of purpose toward straightness, crispness, and usefulness.
"If," as has been said, "it had rough seas to navigate because it chose to
sail uncharted zones, the structure was the better tested"; and we think back
with gladness to the days when we were part of it.

Poems

Randall Jarrell

(This is supposed to be a parody of Miss Marianne Moore's poetry.
I hope that it is accurate, admiring, and a little critical.)

THE COUNTRY WAS

all hills and all interesting in one field
by a barn, by a haystack, were two 'real
brand new lambs',

three ewes too 'uncertain of their
election' to judge at all or require
much more than

lambs believed in by another
lamb, perhaps, but not by other

things. The 'impossible once-or-twice-seen'
freak flower 'marred by dew', smashed by tears, seems
healthy by

this starveling fantastic sawdust
changeling rag-Sambo scare-crow cur, with its
embryo's

generalized pink pig's head un-
suited for earth, as anyone

=== Page 60 ===
POEMS
but an ewe knows. Yet obviously no one
could 'harm seriously or curse at' so in-
nocent a
virgin-much less 'seethe, butcher, and
so forth and so forth', as poor Couperin
wrote strongly:
meaning tenors. One thinks all three
his mother and uncertainly

prances to each in his jointless graceless
ungainly knock-kneed stagger, as if fac-
ing nothing
but joy: the maturing half-wit
perfecting in these scrupulous scales its
cadenza,
the overwhelming responses
of the horned ram. The other raises

his head an inch and lets it drop with a
conclusiveness familiar to the ewes graz-
ing by the
barn and to the understanding
farmer as birth, but not yet as hackneyed
to the lamb,
who would perhaps not recognize
birth either. 'Just as advertised'

by the champion of Oxford and other
lost causes such as the classics, as the
man who 'saw
life steadily and saw it whole',
Sophocles got 'about twenty' firsts, still
thought: Better
to be dead than alive but best
of all not to have been born. Test

this response with the dead lamb and it rings
like a bell: iron. The live lamb's sprawling
bright gait is
59

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60

PARTISAN REVIEW

learned, exact, and in a way
magnificent, but after all play, a
prepara-
tion rather than the essential
life of sheep-dumb, but theirs and real.

Lionel Abel

THE IMMIGRANTS

Chagga, Arunta, Bata, Barabong.
Prompt and equipped with human vanity,
All sociologists, we go among
These nervous immigrants to humanity.
They missed the boat. Why did they miss it? Laws
Demented. Quotas. And they killed their great.
Amazed by blue they stayed. Because, because
Run over by a lion. Or just late.

Oh how could they make durable delay
Without book, kodak, Sunday supplement?
-Long before bowbend, singing string, or lasso-
What could they do but while epochs away,
Poor past folk breaking time in two? They spent
Their human substance. Talking to Picasso.

WHAT OF THE CHAIN REMAINS

O find him! find him! find that Jack of Jacks,
That necessary monster! Where is he
Who can absolve us of monstrosity?

He who can tuck a tail between his teeth
Struck with the mystery of words, he who can talk
Of a thick coil and comfort in the dark;

That mystic animal, that cross between
A brother who can climb on branching words,
A wordless brother tailed among the trees.

=== Page 62 ===
POEMS
61
J. Patrick Byrne
ETCHING
Before our Gaelic order passed
A poet had the power to cast
Blight on foe in flesh or purse
By limning him in blistering verse:
Amergin, Keating, Merriman,
The Dean, and Yeats-all barbed a rann
Has the power come down to me?
This, then, mine enemy:

Meetly was the slut begot
In nuptial orgy when sire sot
Mounted that brobdingnagian trull.
Though Maids of Honour stank to Gul-
liver astride a monstrous teat,
Their perfumed bosoms passed for sweet
With lovers of appropriate size:
So sot approved that trull's gross thighs.
His drunkard's lust knew hurried levee;
Drunken sleep fell quick and heavy;
Fulfilled, and sated, bride and groom
Snored. Deep in enormous womb
Seed of sot's and trull's loud rut,
Foully fungoid, swelled to slut.
Thus began their country's shame
When Wigglesworth to Jordan came.

Now thirty-odd: bobbed, greasy hair
A frame for sodden eyes that stare;
Slobbering lips show yellow fangs;
Her dugs are sacks, and belly hangs;
As other cats' her breath smells sweet;
Water seldom sullies feet;
Conceived in alcoholic heat;
Graceful as any streel's her walk;
Virago's endless squall her talk.
Sure, little need for bitter verse;
To wish her length of days were worse,
She herself her own worst curse-
Woman foul as senile lust
That would, but cannot; fumbles dust....

=== Page 63 ===
62 PARTISAN REVIEW

Paul Goodman

WINTER 1939

In 1934, 5,
then were we alive!
after the experiments,
to few (and to no) audience
making art extreme because
of imminent utopian applause!
Then too the sit-down strikes
made flower Michigan for weeks
when the lads played basketball
in the interim of toil
—in the April and the June
of the decade now so coldly gone.
The prudent days were those
we took each thing for what it was!
then action was direct,
much therefore done by a little act,
till fixed institutions were
trembling on the brink of order.
When acts of witty power made
the energetic shoulders broad
disgraced themselves in '29
at last ashamed,—oh, then, then
a human smile was sometime seen
as well as th' universal smeer.
It was a time of fearful ease;
it was a time of waged peace.
In 1934, 5,
then we were alive!
in the April and the June
of the decade coldly gone!
But first new money gave new heart
to nummies we had almost hurt;
and soon we saw that 'revolutionary'
ignoramus meant and liar;
and now at last they have their war.

=== Page 64 ===
From England
War And The Writer

Stephen Spender

EDITORS' NOTE: This letter was written for publication in the Decem-
ber issue of Common Sense. Since it arrived too late for inclusion in that
issue, and since it seems of special interest to Partisan Review readers, the
editors of Common Sense have very kindly passed it on to us.

London
Oct. 25, 1941.
Since my last letter, I have joined the A.F.S.-the Auxiliary Fire Ser-
vice, soon to be renamed the National Fire Service. At present I am under-
going a fairly strenuous training, manning pumps, climbing ladders, jump-
ing off roofs into the 'taut sheet,' etc.
I begin on this personal note, because you will then understand that
I have been spending my time chiefly in the company of unskilled work-
men, ex-clerks, and the like. But before I go on to discuss these, I should
say why I chose to join the Fire Service, because my motives throw some
light on the position of creative writers here.
Creative writers in wartime England have no status at all. They are
neither reserved, nor given any kind of work as writers in the way that
some journalists and painters who are appointed 'official war artists' or
asked to do camouflage, are. They are driven either to join one of the
armed forces or to use such pull as they may have to get into a reserved
job, such as some Ministry or the B.B.C. In either case, the prospects of
their being able to go on with their own work are extremely slight. If they
are in the army, they become stupefied by the routine, the physical exer-
cise, and the lack of any kind of solitude or privacy. If they are in a
Ministry, they are likely to be transformed into hacks, civil servants,
or/and careerists. Of the two alternatives, the more active life seems
preferable, because it is at least a new experience.
The question of writers is rather complicated, and since it seems too
late for the authorities in England to consider it now, perhaps it is not too
late for America to do so with their writers. Some writers in the P.E.N.
Clubs have recently issued a manifesto on the subject. They don't think
that writers should be reserved from the war altogether, but that they
should be given some opportunity to write. The conditions of modern
totalitarian war are such that they might easily snuff out literature alto-
gether (as they have already done in some countries) unless a little
thought is given to the subject. One has only to think back to see that the
conscription of say Shelley, Byron and Keats into the armies fighting

63

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64                                                      PARTISAN REVIEW

against Napoleon would have made a considerable difference (perhaps not
altogether a bad one) to English literature and thought. It is stupid not
to realise that it might also have stopped the romantic movement altogether.
A hundred years ago, the intelligentsia, together with most of the
people with whom they lived and for whom they worked, did not have to
fight. Nowadays, everyone has to take a part in the war effort, so it would
be artificial and unnatural to divorce the writer from his readers, who are
mostly conscripted, by keeping him in cotton wool. At the same time, it
does not seem satisfactory to stop him writing altogether.
Walt Whitman foresaw this problem when in Democratic Vistas he
outlined his idea of the Divine Literatus. As I see it, he thought of the
writer as the forerunner of the moral and intellectual consciousness of a
coherent and intelligent democracy. The writer should travel, witness the
experiences of the democracy and be able to assimilate and organize them
according to his imaginative gift. This task is something quite different
from journalism which consists of reporting things that are not allowed
to be reported and presenting points of view and agitation which suit the
opportunistic needs of the country at some given moment. One would
have thought that democracy at war could make effective use of writers
who supported the democratic cause, and who could state its case in long
terms which did not come up against the censorship and which contained
deeper and more resilient truths than the agitation of the moment.
If America ever wants to appeal to the imaginative sympathy of Eng-
land, I hope that the American government will give the opportunity to
about twelve American 'literati' really to witness and to share every aspect
of American life at a moment of great strain, and then give them the time
to write what they would like about America. Make them join the army,
the Civil Defense Forces, work in the factories, by all means: but guaran-
tee them an opportunity to write.
Meanwhile I live the life of a navy, and this gives me an oppor-
tunity, at any rate, to tell you what ordinary people in England are think-
ing just now.
The attitude of the miscellaneous collection of bricklayers, builders,
navvies, clerks, commercial travellers, to whom I belong, is curious. They
accept the war as inevitable, and they wish it to be won; at the same time
they do not think of it as their war. This is not because the war is the
"bosses' war" (that feeling has rather disappeared since Russia came in),
but simply because it is too large and vast and horrible for them. Only
today the man standing next to me at drill said: "Ain't the business in
Russia 'orrible? Anyway, p'rhaps it will teach ten or twelve people in
the world to feel sorry for the slaughter they've caused." What is odd
about this, is that I am sure his ten or twelve people would not be exclu-
sively Germans, though perhaps three Germans would head the list. No,
they would be the dictators, followed by one or two of our own politicians
followed perhaps by Laval, and then by a few big industrialists and arms

=== Page 66 ===
FROM ENGLAND 65

manufacturers. The point is that the 'little man' cannot imagine himself
being really involved in anything so vastly horrible as the war. It is not
that he considers himself better than it, but both smaller and saner.

The war has no glamour and very little hatred. If the Germans mean
anything to my fellow Firemen, they mean a disease of which several of
them have witnessed the horrible results in the form of mangled corpses
during air raids. Our problem is to prevent and counteract the spreading
of this disease-that is how they look at it. They take their work extremely
seriously. A very large part of their conversation consists of the shop of
people who are determined to know their job. They realize that sooner or
later they will have to fight real fires, and they are determined to be as
well qualified as possible. During this period of training, there is no
slacking, no absenteeism, and no drinking. All this is rather a surprise
to me.

The best quality of the people I work with is their unfailing kindness.
The defects, eccentricities and shoddiness of life are too near to them for
them to laugh at anyone for making a fool of himself. They need help too
often themselves not to give it to others. When new recruits arrive, the
older recruits go out of their way to help and make things easy for them.
Excuses are made for even the most stupid and ridiculous bunglers on the
ladders. It is not considered disgraceful to be afraid. At the back of all
this, we are drawn together by a common wish to get on with the small
things of our lives, looking after our families, cultivating our gardens,
enjoying some degree of independence. The loss of the small business, the
taxicab, the newspaper pitch, the shop in the back street, is a common
grief which draws everyone together in a slight and tacit mourning.

The A.F.S. is in some ways a model democratic organization. The disci
pline is based on everyone recognizing that a certain degree of efficiency
is necessary, that certain inefficiencies cause unnecessary risk of life. The
old London Firemen who train us are indefatigable, patient, humorous,
and never malicious. They are nothing like what I have imagined drill
sergeants to be. They are often extremely funny, usually on purpose, and
they show a manly contempt for 'fancy stuff' such as hydraulics. One or
two of them are such good lecturers that I spend as much time trying to
learn public speaking from them, as what they are saying. One day this
week our instructor lectured twice for two hours on collective pumping,
without seeming tired and without being boring for a moment (although
the subject is one in which I am not specially interested).

There is no saluting in the A.F.S., and so far no one has been kept in
or in any way punished. The bad sides of it are things such as feeding
and sleeping arrangements which are very scrappy. Also, although when
Firemen are actually allotted to their stations, they spend long hours
doing absolutely nothing (as do all the Civil Defence workers) nothing
seems to have been done about Civil Defence Education. A tremendous

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PARTISAN REVIEW

opportunity is being missed of helping people to make a better society
and find better places for themselves in it.

The depressing part of the company of the unskilled English working
man is his terrific disillusion. The good qualities of the people I am with
lies in what they are and in their situation, not in what they think and
believe. They are kind, because being very close to misfortune themselves,
it is easy for them to sympathise with it in others. But, given the oppor-
tunity, on principle each one is entirely out for himself, and says so
repeatedly all day long.

But this disillusion goes further than the working classes in England
today. In spite of the talk about Reconstruction, there is no tangible grasp
of what will be possible at the end of the war. Few people can think that
we are fighting for a better society, and those few who do are strangely
out of touch, people inflated by their own importance, people who make a
living out of having exalted ideas (you can still make a small income this
way). It is not their fault, it is the fault of a society that either grinds
you in the machine or else pushes you right outside it, so that the intellec-
tuals, the people who, after all, have many right ideas, are very isolated.

Perhaps it is difficult to pick out the bits from this morass of destruc-
tion. But I have tried to show that if the bits here are grim and dusty, they
are not yet deformed by cruelty and vindictiveness. One of the most cheer-
ing things to my mind, is that on the other side, the bits have got untidy.
Only someone who has lived (as I have) in Germany for some years can
realise what it must mean to the Germans to have turned the whole conti-
nent of Europe into an enormous Ireland at the time of the worst troubles
there. However many machines the Germans have, they must, to retain
confidence in themselves, govern in a neat and orderly manner. If they
have opponents, they must be neatly stored away in concentration camps.
That disorders should go on in spite of repression and shooting squads
that is well, isn't it very like the Weimar Republic at the time when the
Nazis were reducing Germany to disorder, and at the same time produc-
ing martyrs?

So we live through this grimmest phase of the war, feeling that Rus-
sia is fighting our battles, that we can do very little to help, and dreading
the result if we cannot help still further. The New Order has proved that
it cannot govern, the boil of the German armies has burst, but no one
knows how long the disorder can continue, or how much poisonous matter
the boil still contains. But, despite the importance of machines, we may
be coming to a stage when the men in the machines count. It may be that
Hitler is making a mistake in thinking that that matters, that mechanical
superiority is all that matters, that human losses are irrelevant and that
machines can be replaced. In that case, our own morale, and what we have to offer in the
way of Reconstruction and new ideas will become enormously important

=== Page 68 ===
B. T. N. I.*

Rayner Heppenstall

SOME GUARDS are not so bad as others. On some guards you take about five minutes to mount, and then you get your tea. On others, you come out blancoed up to the eyes and stand around for an hour while sergeants, sergeant-majors, orderly officers and field officers criticise your chin, your buttons, the length of your hair, the powder on your brasses, the tar on your greatcoat hem and the dust in the welt of your boots until you begin to feel that you suffer from an halitosis and a B. O. so vigorous that only your best friend could ever keep quiet about them. On some guards you can take off your boots to sleep. On others, you keep on your greatcoat, tin-hat, gasbag, gas-cape, ammunition pouches and straps shoulder web- bing all night and all the following day. On some guards you are turned out for a brigadier every half hour. On others, you mooch around for a bit in six balaclavas and three pairs of gloves, and the women of the vil- lage bring you out pots of tea and plates of soda bread, and as soon as the orderly officer has done his rounds you can wander into the cookhouse and make yourself tea and settle down for the night without ever bothering to go round and waken your relief.

In the artillery, you don't have bayonets. That is a mercy, but on the other hand it makes the I. R. A. less afraid of you. Not that I have any- thing against the I. R. A. I have been right in the heart of the Bad Lands, and I always found them to be nice chaps, generous with their drinks and free with their hearths and their daughters. They are quite frank. They say, "We like you, but we hate your uniform," and then they get on with the serious business of being friendly and keep it up long after you've made it clear that you're giving away no military information, even if you had any. But they do get the least bit troublesome once in a while. Twice they rushed our guard, not where I myself was stationed, but at Bally- cwmirhondda where the horse-fairs are held every month. Three of the 16th in the village on Boxing Night. And I have been told of several houses in which are kept rifles and ammunition that the Quartermaster has been explaining away for a long time.

Unfortunately, these excitements are rare, and I recommend any man of sensitive nature to get a stripe or become an officer's batman or a sani- tary orderly at the first opportunity. The best you can ordinarily hope for on a guard is that somebody will get a spare round up the spout and let

*The Irish Command. The letters stand for British Troops in North Ireland.

67

=== Page 69 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
68
it off not too near your head. At Blackwater Dun there was a canal end
with three coal barges and two swans on it, and bullets frequently came
hissing over the canal at night. One came up through the floor of
McGinty's warehouse about two feet away from my bed when I had only
been in the army two days, and the first time little Silverman was on guard
(he is a barber in Hackney E 5, and he sings operatic arias all day long)
he let one off in the guardroom while he was loading and filled Reg Rob-
erts's eyes with plaster and made my right ear deaf for half an hour. My
head was very near the breech, and I went on feeling at my nose and ears
for a long time to see if anything was missing before we saw where the
bullet was, in the wall no more than four inches from where Reg Roberts's
head had been.
Guards are also useful as a means of calming down young officers.
Connie Kendall made himself so unpopular at one time that he could not
be seen around after dusk without somebody letting off a spare round at
him. Eventually, he was sent away for three months until the bad feeling
had died down.
There are also cookhouse duties. Some people think they are worse
than guards. Some say they would do three cookhouses for one guard
any day, and some say the opposite. The two have one thing in common.
They destroy one's sense of time, and this is a source of anxiety. One is
always taken aback, coming off guard or out of the cookhouse, to find
that only a day has passed and that one has missed only one set of battery
orders. Coming out of the cookhouse, one suffers from a combination of
indigestion and nausea. One's fingers are spongy, and there is a sore on
the first finger of one's right hand.
A drill order is sometimes worse than either guards or cookhouses.
One gets up earlier than usual. Sometimes one sleeps out in a draughty
barn or even in the open under only one blanket. The skin is rubbed off
one's bottom unless one rides in a wireless truck. And unless one is lucky
or gifted with foresight, one lives on a single bully-beef sandwich from
six in the morning until ten at night. All the same, drill orders are with-
out monotony. On the last regimental exercise, for instance, a Don R¹
broke his ribs, two quads² were left in a field and forgotten with their
drivers and passengers, and an old woman kept fainting. We were firing
into Lough Neagh. Lough Neagh is one of the sources of the Atlantis
legend. It is an enormous stretch of water so gradual in depth that you
can wade into it for a mile and a half from any point on the periphery.
It contains eels which used to be exported to Manchester and a fish called
'pollan' which is not found elsewhere. The Bad Lands, where political
desperadoes hide out when there are troubles, lie round its southern shore.
¹Signaller's code for 'dispatch rider.'
²Semi-armoured vehicles which draw the guns and accommodate their crews.

=== Page 70 ===
FROM ENGLAND
69
We were firing into Lough Neagh, and one of our gun positions lay
but two or three hundred yards behind a row of cottages, where some of
the signallers had gone scrounging tea. A widow who was making tea
fainted with anticipation two minutes before each shell was fired, and the
signallers had to keep catching her. It was a pity that she missed the
flight of the shell every time, for the flight of a shell and its invisible or
smudgily visible suction upon the air can be very soothing to the nerves.
This was not very far from the border. The border haunts everybody's
mind when he is at all browned off. It is so easy to get across in civvies.
You just ride across on a bus, and nobody looks at your papers. The
trouble is that when they find you they don't intern you but merely send
you back.
On another drill order, half the regiment wandered over the border
by mistake and stayed over it for several hours without anybody taking
any notice.

"Dummy"

That Saturday afternoon I was at the railway station getting tickets
to White Harbour for Bill Budge and myself. A well-made, red-haired
young man in a new overcoat was standing outside the booking-office, and
I asked him what time it was. He did not answer, so I touched his arm.
He turned rather abruptly, and when I asked him again what time it was
he touched his mouth and his ears with the tips of his fingers.
It was also a Saturday afternoon when I saw his sister for the first
time. Bill Budge and I had bought our tickets to White Harbour, and
there was half an hour to wait for the train, so we went into the boot-shop
across the road where they make you tea and toast if you want it. While
we were there drinking tea and eating toast a good-looking girl of thirty
came in and conducted some business with the cobbler. Her manner was
not conspicuous, but when she had gone the cobbler's wife, who makes
the tea and toast and who is very charming and must have been quite
beautiful in her younger days, said that the girl was deaf and dumb, that
she had a brother in the same condition as herself and that she was a very
clever girl and a dress-maker.
This was not long after our arrival in Ballyduff, and presently the
camp as a whole was aware of at least the girl's existence. She was spoken
of as "Dummy," and it was said that she . . .-ed like a rattlesnake.
* * *
Marshall lives in the next hut. It is the HQ drivers', Don R's and
tiffies' hut. They are a tough lot. Don R Evans, with his purple, pitted
nose and false teeth, belonged to a gang of petty thieves in Nottingham.
Averbach was a fair-ground showman. Marshall is a tall, thin fellow
built on the lines of the traditional film cowboy. He contests with another
driver and one of my sanitary orderlies the reputation of having the
largest male organ in the battery. He takes a poor view of me. When I

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70                                             PARTISAN REVIEW
appear, he nudges whoever is with him and says, "Look who's here." He
cannot be a really strong individual because it is obvious that he says
things like this to make himself feel big, but he does put over quite a suc-
cessful act as a strong man, and he is one of our small-arms experts as
well as a lance-bombardier artificer. However, he interests me for one
reason only. He is the only man who admits or claims to have been with
"Dummy" himself in a sexual sense.
He told the story to Bombardier Allen. He stood outside "Dummy's"
house in the high street and beckoned her out. She came bringing with
her a pencil and paper, on which she wrote, "I am not well." Marshall
did not cotton on to this at first, and they went out for a walk. When
Marshall set about fixing the girl he found out what was wrong, but she
gave him what he described as "a . . . against the wall."
As I say, Marshall is the only man who personally admits or claims
to have been with "Dummy." But there is no lack of stories about the
curious, brutish noises of appreciation she makes when confronted with
spectacles of virility or directly assailed by it. Her face could I suppose
be a whore's face, but it is very appealing. She is pale, and she is heavily
and rather badly made-up, but she wears pretty colours, and she takes so
much interest in whatever is going on around her. I saw her last Saturday,
the 12th of July. We were drinking outside Alick's, which was full to
capacity of Protestant Irish celebrating the Battle of the Boyne. "Dummy"
stood at the bottom of the street in a blue dress, laughing with pleasure at
our drunken or half drunken antics and evidently waiting for something
outrageous to happen. She did not go to the dance afterwards. As the
rest of the village whirled round singing "The Sash My Father Wore" and
"The Green, Grassy Slopes of the Boyne" and screaming as Highland
dancers do, I missed her.

Letter From The Country

D. S. Savage

Dear Friends:
Perhaps you would be interested to have a very brief account of our
existence since the war. There is not really much to tell: quite simply,
when the war broke out we decided the country was more healthy than the
town, and as (a) my wife and child had been sent out near Cambridge at
the beginning of the war under the Government's evacuation scheme, and
(b) our thoughts for some time past had been turning towards a life in
the country, I relinquished my office job in London and joined my family.
After a month or so of living rather miserably billeted upon someone else
in a desolate suburb of jerry-built "residences" clustered round a Victorian
jam-factory, we found this cottage at a very cheap rent in a nearby, and
although ruinous, quite charming village

=== Page 72 ===
FROM ENGLAND
71
It was my intention to find a job in or near Cambridge, but it did not
take me long to realise that in war time a pacifist is regarded as a kind of
moral leper, and that practically the only work open to me was a kind of
enlightened gang-labour organised by the county War Agricultural Com-
mittee, composed of similar outcasts engaged upon hedging and ditching,
reclaiming fen land, and so on. There are large numbers of pacifists near
here engaged on this kind of work, and as they are mainly artists, archi-
tects, musicians, writers, accountants or lecturers, doctors, etc., you can
imagine that they are pretty inefficient labourers. Of course, the reason
they are doing this work is that they have been ordered to do it by the
Conscientious Objectors' Tribunals, as an alternative to military service.

I was fortunate enough to go before my tribunal quite early on in the
war, before the war atmosphere had assumed its present fog-like quality,
and also to have my tribunal in Cambridge, where there was an academic
element sitting on the tribunal. Three other applicants, or whatever you
call them, were there with me, each had his written statement read out, and
was then questioned, harangued, or what not, by the tribunal. I happened
to be the second, and after taking the oath on a white prayer book some
singularly inane questions were put to me, which I answered quite sweep-
ingly and categorically. One of the things which most amused me was the
fact that as an "unemployed clerk" I was treated with, at first, very scant
respect, but later I happened to mention that I was a writer and a poet,
and from peremptoriness the tone of the tribunal altered to one of purring
confidentialness. I think perhaps the main reason for my unconditional
exemption was the fact, which evidently impressed the tribunal, that I had
stated I was associated editorially with an American quarterly magazine.
At any rate, all the applicants who were with me were likewise exempted.
One of these was a very simple, uneducated farm-boy, who "just knew"
that war was wrong: his simplicity and earnestness, plus his inarticulate-
ness, was very impressive. Another was an earnest, anxious-to-please
schoolmaster, of the kind who spends his holidays mixing with the unem-
ployed in holiday camps, and who had got a plump clergyman to put in a
word as to his excellent character. The other was a bible-punching
"Brother," who had written a statement a mile long, which read like some-
thing out of Revelations. He appeared carrying a huge bible, and was
very contemptuous of the whole tribunal. Altogether he put up the fun-
niest performance I have ever heard outside of a place of entertainment.
He was a mechanic or fitter of some sort. I thought the whole thing pretty
ludicrous. There were about five members of the tribunal, and each re-
ceived I know, several guineas for a few hours' sitting. At any rate the
result was that I walked out with a ticket of freedom from interference
from the army, which I was quite glad to have.

All that was nearly two years ago now, and since then I have led a
somewhat peculiar existence on the money I have been receiving from the
Labour Exchange. My position is a peculiar one because, (a) I will not

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PARTISAN REVIEW
do war work of any description, and, with the tribunal's finding, it seems
I cannot get work of a sedentary kind (if I write for a job, mentioning that
I am totally exempt from military service as a C.O. I never get a reply):
(c) owing to a physical disability-which, had I not been a pacifist, would
have precluded me from military service anyway-I cannot do manual
labour of the chain-gang kind. So, until further totalitarian pressure is
brought to bear upon me somehow or other, I am at liberty, on the border
line of starvation, to pursue my own interests.
However, we keep clear of the borderline in one way and another.
We have a garden, in which I grow everything from cabbages to tomatoes;
we have a goat who should be giving us us milk later on, and now a few
chickens who should, ditto, eggs.
One result of living in the country is the different texture of experi
ence, the greater concreteness and solidity, seemingly, of the outer world,
with a certain stabilisation of experience which comes from a growing
familiarity with one particular environment. I do not think we shall go
back to the town at all, afterwards. If we can in some way make a living
in the country we shall do so. Our thoughts have been turning, like those
of many other pacifists, to the idea of community, in the rather special
sense in which it is coming to be used by pacifists. So that, with two or
three other families, we are nursing this idea of living a group, communal
life, as self-supporting as possible, on the land.
More and more I am coming to feel that there is a kind of process at
work throughout society, coherent and logical, and that what is important
is for us not to obstruct this process. So far as politics is concerned, I am
becoming more of an individualist, but in a new and responsible sense. I
think that with political movements and ideologies, in nine cases out of
ten we are obstructing this process, imposing our will and mentality upon
a fictitious actuality. The outer structure of society has become so cum
bersome and unwieldy that it is hopeless for people of good will to try
and interfere, they can can only get their fingers or heads crushed. And we do
see this, in England now-the detachment, palpable and undeniable, of the
vast, massive superstructure of society, all that that is a dead weight, a mass,
non-human, from the effective world of men and women. The war is
essentially an impersonal process, a movement of things, systems, masses.
But with this increasing chasm between the human being and the non
human framework of society one thing is made clear-that purpose is
absent from what is collective and impersonal, and present only in what
is personal, individual. Historically, it seems to me, what is happening is
a severance between the world of things and the world of persons, who
have let it get out of control. Given a kind of demonic purpose of its own,
detached from the effective world of persons, the world of things can only
tear away and roll fearfully into the abyss, leaving what remains of
humanity together in a new, personal, relationship. It seems to me that

=== Page 74 ===
FROM ENGLAND
73
it is this personal relationship which is important, that the quick centre
of living change is within the individual person, and is a matter of being,
of growth. At any rate, it is obvious that in war time at least all political
activity goes by the board. Those revolutionaries who have not joined in
the general smash-up are left with nothing on their hands but themselves
and their neighbours. If there is a new kind of life in this country after
the war which is not totalitarian, it will, I think, be a life brought round
to a new concreteness through a realisation of personal responsibility. The
era of politics, when we could shelve our own personal problems, and
feel righteous by trying to solve the problems of society, I feel, is over.
As I have not seen PARTISAN REVIEW for nearly two years, I do not
know how you are responding to the situation, and I am eagerly waiting
for my wife to bring back the copy she has recovered from Winchmore
Hill. I suppose, in England, we are a bit nearer the focus of change than
you in America. From what very little I know of America I gather the
impression that the country is just being demoralised, as we were in the
years before the war. But I am sure you are providing a centre of morality
for the educated intelligence of America.
Yours,
D. S. SAVAGE
Kindest wishes,

Nicholas Moore vs. George Orwell

Cambridge, England
August 25, 1941.

Sirs,
Apropos of your questionnaire and Horizon's questionnaire and the
answer thereto. Firstly I'd like to say that I think the politics of your
paper are far superior to Horizon's, and that that undoubtedly accounts in
part, as you suggest, for the fact that your articles come out better than
Horizon's and your stories and poems less well. The obviously amateurish
politics of Horizon can scarcely appeal to any of the intellectuals who
apart from the fact that no doubt its politics
read it for its literature; for,
as such are not those of its readers, the political articles
poorly in intelligence to those in the P.R.
compare very

This letter arises from your July-August issue, which I obtained
through Horizon, and from the fact that I'm interested in (a) literature
(especially poetry) and (b) politics (especially your kind: the partisan
nature of your review gives it a value that Horizon cannot have). Con-
sidering the partisan nature of your politics I was very surprised to see
that you had a London Letter from George Orwell, an omnivorous and
omniscient writer whom I greatly suspect. No doubt he writes well. He
is extremely plausible, but are not his politics as much at variance with
yours as are Horizon's? The impression that he gives in his London Let-

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74 PARTISAN REVIEW

ter is (though much better expressed) much the impression given by a
sequence of Horizon editorials. He moves among Tribune circles, and the
literary left, and you must know how irresponsible that literary left is:
that had a pseudo-proletarian admiration for Moscow and social-realism,
when it suited it, and, equally under pressure of war lined itself up with
Churchill. What I am getting at is, frankly I don't think Orwell is in a
position to know what serious writing is being done in this country at the
moment: because the literary circle of which he is aware is the circle
which grinds out highbrow pseudo-proletarian "kitsch." Once, it was
communist. Now it is bourgeois pro-Churchill leftist. Nor does Orwell
know very much about poetry, or, if he does, show any signs of it. In
actual fact there is something of a post-poetic revival going on: admit-
tedly subjective (if you like romantic), but not particularly escapist. Its
organ, if any, is Poetry (London): its forerunners Dylan Thomas and
George Barker. (That is not to say, of course, that it is derivative in
technique or style, from them: but merely that its enthusiasm is.)

I would deny utterly Orwell's statement that "a belief in the unity of
European civilization, and in international working-class solidarity"
doesn't exist any longer. In the particularly Leftist group whose parties
Orwell frequents, Fascism has killed it. That particular group happens
to have a monopoly of the progressive literary press. New writing comes
out in sixpenny penguins and sells like hot cakes. (Hot kitsch fresh from
the fake-proletarian oven.) Horizon is the only extant (subsidized) pur-
veyor of good writing. Politically it again reflects the defeatism of social
democracy and ex-communists. It probably shares Orwell's belief that
"to be effectively anti-war in England now one has to be pro-Hitler." Are
P.R. readers really expected to accept that?

I hope the P.R. continues to provide what America needs and what
we here don't get. In my part of the world officers are still saluted in the
street (pace George Orwell) and the big cafes have plenty of good food.
For food for thought I think I shall have to rely on P.R., Horizon being a
wet-blanket politically. I think you will be surprised in the "serious writ-
ing" that will arise from this England in this war.

Yours sincerely,
NICHOLAS MOORE

London, England
September 23, 1941.

Sirs:

When I said that the belief in international working class solidarity
doesn't exist any longer, I was not thinking of what may or may not be
said at the "parties" which Mr. Moore supposes I frequent. I was think-
ing of the history of Europe during the past ten years and the utter failure
of the European working class to stand together in the face of Fascist

=== Page 76 ===
FROM ENGLAND
75
aggression. The Spanish civil war went on for two and a half years, and
during that time there was not one country in which the workers staged
even a single strike in aid of their Spanish comrades. So far as I can get
at the figures the British working class subscribed to various "aid Spain"
funds about one per cent of what they spent during the same period in
betting on football and horse-races. Anyone who actually talked to work-
ing men at the time knows that it was virtually impossible to get them to
see that what happened in Spain concerned them in any way. Ditto with
Austria, Manchuria, etc. During the past three months Germany has been
at war with Russia and at the time of writing the Germans have overrun
the greater part of the Russian industrial areas. If even the shadow of
international working class solidarity existed, Stalin would only have to
call on the German workers in the name of the Socialist Fatherland for
the German war-effort to be sabotaged. Not only does nothing of the kind
happen, but the Russians do not even issue any such appeal. They know
it is useless. Until Hitler is defeated in the field he can count on the
loyalty of his own working class and can even drag Hungarians, Roma-
nians and what-not after him. At present the world is atomised and no
form of internationalism has any power or even much appeal. This may
be painful to literary circles in Cambridge, but it is the fact.
"To be effectively anti-war in England now one has to be pro-Hitler."
Of course this is so. Ask Stalin whether he wants us to be anti-war in
England. Or on the other hand ask Hitler, whose radio praises so warmly
the efforts of the PPU and (till recently) the People's Convention. It is
a matter of ordinary common sense. If you hinder the war effort of your
own side you automatically assist that of the enemy. See Lenin's remarks
on the subject.
The rest of Mr. Moore's letter is froth. The attempted buildup of
myself as a fashionable "bourgeois leftish" intellectual frequenting
"Tribune circles" (whatever those may be) and generally saying whatever
it pays to say at the moment is based on imagination. Mr. Moore has never
seen me, knows nothing about me, who my friends are, what "circles" I
frequent, what my income is, or how and where I came by my political
opinions. I have no doubt that he did not count on your giving me a
chance to reply. His motives for writing the letter are, I should say, toler-
ably obvious.
Yours,
GEORGE ORWELL

=== Page 77 ===
Books

THE BURNHAMIAN REVOLUTION

Dwight Macdonald

JAMES BURNHAM'S BOOK* has sold around 10,000 copies, which is
extremely good for a work of that kind; it has been reviewed seriously
and sympathetically almost everywhere except in the Trotskyist press,
which damned it with a sectarian obtuseness calculated to convince the
outsider that it is a major work; a summary of its thesis has been printed
in this very magazine. Yet I must confess that the considerable objections
I had to the summary are tenfold magnified now that I have read the
whole book. While we were in the Trotskyist movement together, I greatly
admired Burnham for his courage, honesty and political intelligence. It
is hard to say it, but these qualities seem largely absent from his book.
Even as an attempt to open up the field for discussion, the book
seems of small value-and this despite my agreement with Burnham on
the emergence of a new non-capitalist and non-socialist form of society.
Burnham's methodology is so unscientific and the terms in which he argues
his thesis are so vague, unhistorical and often self-contradictory, that it
would take another book to correct errors of fact and to qualify, unravel
and properly define his terms. And I can more easily swallow the Trot
skyist theory that Hitler is a tool of big business, or Stalin a Bonapartist
usurper in a "degenerated" workers' state, than accept Burnham's mana
gers as the new ruling class.

The most striking feature about the book is the contrast between what
its author says he is doing and what he actually does. He talks much of
the scientific method, but, as will be seen shortly, makes no use of it. He
rejects at length the concepts of 'orthodox' Marxism, yet his thesis is
argued in the crudest sort of mechanical-Marxist terms, merely substitut
ing the managers for the 16th century bourgeoisie as the new revolutionary
force. He makes great professions of refraining from qualitative judg
ments, yet his book is the boldest attempt yet made to justify fascism in
terms of materialistic progress. He disclaims the slightest programmatic
aim, yet the chief virtue of his book-and the one which I think has made
it a best-seller-is its persuasively (and, as will also be seen, quite decep
tively) logical structure and its admirably clear expository style; it is the
style and the structure not of a serious analyst grappling with the com
plexities of history but of a propagandist putting his message into the
simplest, most effective form. As a propaganda tract, The Managerial

*The Managerial Revolution (John Day, 285 pp., $2.50)

76

=== Page 78 ===
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77

Revolution is successful. As a serious study of, in the words of its modest
subtitle, "What Is Happening in the World," it boils down to a number
of broad statements organised into a plausible enough structure, but un-
supported by data and floating in an ether of formal logic far above any
historical context.
These are sweeping charges. I shall try to justify them.
In his letter in a recent issue, Victor Serge commented on Burnham's
"sudden and amazing abandonment" of Marxism. The most extraordinary
instance of this occurs on pages 44-5 of the book. Here Burnham states,
without any qualifications, that (1) the fact that the revolution broke out
first in the backward country of Russia was "contrary to the opinion of
all socialist theoreticians prior to 1917," and (2) that once the revolution
had taken place in Russia, "the leaders of the revolution itself" expected
it to develop steadily towards socialism. That is really shameful! Leon
Trotsky, Burnham's own leader and teacher for five years, in his long
study, "Prospects of a Labor Dictatorship," written in 1906, argued in
great detail against precisely these two conceptions.* The most charitable
explanation is that Burnham is suffering from that "cultural amnesia"
which Philip Rahv described in this magazine two years ago, a mental
disease which has been spreading like wildfire among our intelligentsia
since then, and in which the victim, as the result of some great shock,
simply cannot recall the most elementary truths from his past experience.

THE
Before examining Burnham's major thesis, I want to go into
METHOD his method a bit, since it is in his method that I think the root
of the book's failure lies. Burnham's procedure in this book
seems to me to violate at least four requirements of a scientific approach
in its field: precision and consistency in defining terms; the critical use of
data; relation of concepts to a historical rather than a formal-logical con-
text; caution in making sweeping claims and predictions.

There is a passage on p. 260 which shows up in concentrated form
most of these methodological weaknesses. "In the 1936 elections," he
writes, "probably three-quarters or more of the bona fide capitalists were
against Roosevelt. In 1940 the figure must have been above 90%.... The
simplest explanation which can cover the facts is here, as always, the best.
This explanation is merely that the capitalists oppose the New Deal be-

*This is available in English in Our Revolution published by Holt in 1918. Rele-
vant passages are: (1) "The industry of the United States is far more advanced than
the industry of Russia, while the political role of the Russian workingmen, their influ-
ence on the political life of their country, the possibilities of their influence on world
politics in the near future, are incomparably greater than those of the American pro-
letariat.... You can reassure yourself by saying that social conditions in Russia are
not yet ripe for a Socialist order, and you can overlook the fact that, once master of
the situation, the workingclass would be compelled . . . to organize national economy
under the management of the state." (2) "Without direct political aid from the Euro-
pean proletariat the workingclass of Russia will not be able to retain its power and to
turn its temporary supremacy into a permanent Socialist dictatorship." Trotsky wrote
this in 1906. I wonder how Burnham's book will read in 1952.

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78
PARTISAN REVIEW
cause they realize . . . that the New Deal is in direction and tendency anti-
capitalist." (The New Deal is, according to Burnham, a "primitive" mana-
gerial system.) First, where do the figures "probably three-quarters" and
"above 90%" come from? And what is a "bona fide" capitalist exactly?
(Maybe it's a capitalist who votes against Roosevelt.) Next, granting for
argument's sake the figures as correct and meaningful, is not Burnham's
explanation much too simple (as are most of his explanations)? It is not
even good formal logic: that capitalists oppose Roosevelt does not of itself
—and Burnham rests his case wholly on the mere fact of opposition—
show that the issue is capitalism. It is logically possible that the choice
before the bourgeoisie in 1936 and 1940 was between two varieties of
capitalism and that they voted for the more palatable variety. Historically,
this happens frequently in politics. For many generations the bourgeoisie
have united to fight against trade unions, which doesn't make unions any
the less a part of the institutional structure of capitalism; similarly, the
business community in the last three New York City elections has been
solidly behind LaGuardia, without Tammany thereby becoming an 'anti-
capitalist tendency.' Coming back to Burnham's point: is there any de-
cisive difference between the 'anticapitalist tendencies' of the New Deal
and those of much earlier analogous reformist tendencies in Europe, such
as Bismarck's 'Prussian socialism' of the nineties and the Liberal-Labor
upsurge in England led by Lloyd George just before the last war? If New
Dealism is "primitive" managerialism, is not the Weimar Republic, which
superimposed additional state controls on the already existing legacy of
Bismarck, a much more mature type of managerial society? Thus we get
the absurd result that the Nazis merely replaced one managerialism with
another. Burnham naturally presents the Weimar-Nazi struggle as being
between capitalism and managerialism, since the other presentation (which
flows logically from his definition of the New Deal) would show that his
concept of 'managerialism' has no historical meaning.
Burnham's semantic difficulties with the word "Marxist" are also
worth a little attention. He insists on applying the term indiscriminately
to all three existing Internationals, on the grounds that, since each claims
to be the only "true" Marxist movement, all their claims must be disre-
garded and the term used for all of them. Again this violates formal
logic, since the fact there is disagreement among the groups does not of
itself prove that all three claims are equally valid (or invalid). Again it
is false historically, since the single term "Marxist" cannot sensibly
be stretched to describe the behavior and beliefs of reformist socialists,
Stalinist nationalists, and Trotskyite world revolutionaries. The advantage
of Burnham's procedure, of course, is that all the defects of all the move-
ments can be laid at the door of "Marxism," as when he calls the French
Popular Front "the last distorted partial upsurge of the Marxist parties."
(Shades of Trotsky—and Daladier!) This satisfying procedure, however,
threatens to get him into trouble later on when he comes to describe the
Soviet Union as the "most mature" of existing managerial systems. For

=== Page 80 ===
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the natural question arises how Russia can be at once “managerial” and
“Marxist,” if Marxism is the historically outworn doctrine Burnham says
it is. Burnham extricates himself with a completely bewildering distinction
between socialist Marxism and non-socialist Marxism. He can then call
Stalin a non-socialist Marxist (why not a managerial Marxist?). He takes
care to make this distinction, whatever it means, only after he has run
through his entire case against “Marxism” (including Stalin’s non-socialist
variety). Such are the refinements of the scientific method.
A few more examples of Burnham’s methodology may be examined:
p. 35: The Nazi victory in the Saar plebescite is cited as a
triumph of Nazi over bourgeois ideology. The same point is
made later on. In neither place is it mentioned that the Saar-
landers were Germans and that simple nationalism thus played
an important role in the Nazi victory.
p. 189: The fact that the United States could not raise a
mass army last year by voluntary enlistment and that conscrip-
tion had to be used is cited to demonstrate the lack of popular
appeal of bourgeois ideology today. (1) Bourgeois ideology cer-
tainly had plenty of appeal in the French revolutionary period,
yet the armies that defended the Republic as well as Napoleon’s
armies were mostly raised by mass conscription (first introduced
by the 1789 revolutionists, in fact). (2) The 1917 American
army was also conscripted, although popular belief in demo-
cratic capitalism was much stronger then than it is today. (3) If
conscription is a symptom of a dying ideology, how does Burn-
ham explain its use by the managerial Hitler and Stalin?
p. 239: Burnham thinks it significant that managers are
“seldom” found among the refugees from Germany. Does he
possess figures for (a) the number of managers among the refu-
gees, and (b) the numerical proportion of the managers to other
groups inside Germany? If so, he doesn’t give them.
p. 248: Burnham makes much of the ability to predict accu-
rately as a touchstone of the validity of theories. As Victor Serge
noted in the last issue, the Nazi attack on Russia exposes the
oversimplification of his views on the Nazi-Soviet pact, and also
makes hash of his prophecy that first the two managerial states
would gang up on capitalist England, and then, with England
smashed, would fight it out between them. Here he states: “By
the end of 1940 it was clear that the focus of the war was shift-
ing, that the result of the European struggle was in fundamentals
decided, and that a new, third, phase was beginning. . . .” This
phase was to be a world-struggle between Germany, Japan and
the United States, with England practically knocked out. Instead
we now have England stronger than ever and Germany at death
grips with managerial Russia.
p. 268: Burnham cites as evidence of the managerial nature
of the New Deal the fact that Baruch, the Wall Street speculator,
ran the war economy of 1917, while Knudsen, the manager, runs
(or ran) this one. Again Burnham has already been refuted:
Knudsen has lost most of his powers precisely because he fol-

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80 PARTISAN REVIEW

lowed business-as-usual policies so faithfully as to reduce the
production program to chaos, while Baruch is in the ascendant,
working closely with the managerial Leon Henderson, who bases
his price control policies on the experiences of Baruch's War
Industries Board of 1917 and who differs from Baruch only in
advocating a less drastic intervention of Government into the
price field. Thus the capitalist Baruch advocates 'managerial'
policies, while the 'manager' Knudsen remains true to capitalism.

THE "I mean by managers," Burnham writes on p. 80, "those who
THESIS already for the most part in contemporary society are actually
managing, on the technical side, the actual process of produc-
tion." He lists some typical managerial occupations: "'production man-
agers', operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers,
supervisory technicians; or, in government . . . administrators, commis-
sioners, bureau heads. . . ." He distinguishes them, in business, from the
stockholders, the bankers, and those executives who are chiefly concerned
with sales and profits; in government, likewise, managers are not to be
confused with politicians. The operating heads of General Motors and
T.V.A., for example, are managers, while Chairman Sloan of G.M. and
President Roosevelt are not.

It is these managers, who "actually" and "in practice" run modern
industry, that are the ruling class of the future. "This drive," pronounces
Burnham, the scientific critic of Marxian inevitability, "will be success-
ful." Parliaments are yielding to administrative bureaux as the loci of
sovereignty, private capitalism to a managerially directed collectivised
economy. The managers control modern industry as the bourgeoisie con-
trolled their property in early capitalism, and the historical results will
be analogous.

This is a very neat theory, especially satisfying if one's thinking is
of the crude economic-determinist variety which Burnham and myself, in
the Trotskyist movement, used to call "mechanical Marxism." But it is not
difficult to show that it is not the managers, but the politicians, who are
and will remain-barring socialist revolution-the new ruling class. The
distinction between those who determine policies (what is to be done) and
those who carry them out (how it is to be done) would seem elementary.
Burnham himself makes it when he excludes from the managerial category
chemists, physicists, non-executive engineers and similar highly trained
professionals because, while they exercise a technical skill necessary to the
productive process, "they have no functions of guiding, administering,
managing, organizing the process of production," that is, they exercise
their skill only within the limits of a general policy handed down to them
by the managers. Carry the distinction one step higher, and what are the

*Aspiring propagandists should note, by the way, how frequently such expression
as "actually," "really," "in practice" and "in fact" crop up in this work-a note of
pragmatic reassurance which is especially attractive to the American bent of mind.

=== Page 82 ===
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managers but skilled technicians carrying out policies determined by the
political leaders? Just as it has never been any problem for the managers
to get plenty of competent (and tractable) professional technicians to run
their plants, so neither the bourgeoisie nor the dictators have any trouble
getting competent and tractable managers to run their economy.
Logically fallacious, Burnham's thesis is also historically baseless.
Although he frequently claims that the revolution he describes has already
taken place to a large degree, he mentions only one specimen of a man-
ager in the whole book (poor old Bill Knudsen!) and not a single man-
agerial party, program, or even group. He has absolutely no data on the
actual position of managers in Germany and Russia. For the embarrassing
fact is that in those full-fledged "managerial" systems, the managers are
considerably less powerful than in an advanced capitalist country like the
United States. In this country, the well-known inability of the stockholders
to control the modern big corporation gives a certain autonomous power
to the management. But Stalin and Hitler are no absentee owners; they
are on the necks—often literally—of the harassed managers every minute
and they have perfected a minute and all-embracing political control of
the whole economy.*
Burnham's main arguments (and their rebuttals) may be summarized
as follows:
(1) "As a group, the managers probably already receive much
more income than the remaining capitalists [in Italy and
Germany] and of course much more relative to their num-
bers than any other section of the population including the
'political bureaucrats'." Since he has not defined the term,
"political bureaucrats," which might mean the millions of
lesser state and party officials or might mean only the few
thousand tops, this statement is meaningless. Even if he
defined his terms, no statistics exist to prove or disprove the
statement. And even if the point could be proved, it would
not even demonstrate that the managers are a class, let alone
a ruling class.
(2) "In both Germany and Russia the managers decide in prac-
tice who shall be denied access to a factory. . . ." Thus the
shop foremen over here are the ruling class since it is they
(and not the owners, nor even the executives) who decide
"in practice" who gets into the plant. (The real question
is: who decides it "in theory"?)
(3) With the objectivity of the true scientist, Burnham admits
that "the GPU or the Gestapo may oust a manager from his

* A current study, for example, gives as a major cause of the overexpansion, rela-
tive to the market, of the German industrial plant in the twenties: "the supremacy of
technicians over economists, with the result that technical rationalization was carried
out according to the wishes of the former without regard to economic considerations."
(Regulation of Economic Activities in Foreign Countries, Monograph No. 40 of the
Temporary National Economic Committee, p. 55.) That is, the bourgeoisie of the
Weimar period were unable to control their managers within the limits of capitalist
economics. Can one imagine Hitler allowing such independence to His managers?

=== Page 83 ===
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82

position and send him to execution or a concentration
camp. "But," he adds, "relatively speaking, such cases,
though conspicuous, do not happen so very frequently."
(Relative to what? How often is frequently? Apparently
more often than this happened in the Soviet purges of
1936-8.) "And even more important," concludes Burnham
solemnly, "though the individual manager may be removed,
it is not a soldier or a policeman but another manager who
takes his place." The individual American worker may be
fired, but he is replaced not by a soldier, not by a police-
man, not by an astronomer, not by a saxophonist, but by
... another workman! He is furthermore "essential to the
productive process." Conclusion: the U.S.A. is a workers'
state.
(4) Just as the absolute monarchs of the 17th and 18th cen-
turies (to whom Burnham compares the modern dictators)
were dependent on the rising bourgeoisie for money to run
the state, so the dictators are dependent on the managers for
the goods to run their social system and to wage war, since
("in practice," of course) these goods "can be assured only
through their collaborating with, and in the end subordi-
nating themselves to, those who are actually directing the
processes of production, to the managers. The sources of
wealth and power are the basic instruments of production;
these are to be directed by the managers; and the managers
are, then, to be the ruling class." I have already dealt with
the theoretical misconception here, which stems from the
failure to distinguish between determining what is to be
produced, and determining how it is to be produced. The
historical parallel (which recurs throughout the book) is
also baseless for the same reason: the bourgeois market sys-
tem determined what was to be produced; the managerial
system determines merely how, and the all-important what
is strictly the province of the political bureaucracies. Else-
where Burnham correctly states that the managers and the
politicians have "coalesced." But the absolute monarchs and
the early bourgeoisie were far from coalesced; the monarch
played off the two powerful social classes of the time, the
bourgeoisie and the feudal nobility, against each other in
Bonapartist fashion. The "coalition" Burnham notes be-
tween dictators and managers is simply the subordination of
the latter to the former; the politicos, for example, do not
play off the managers against the bourgeoisie, because the
managers have no basis of class power and are not, in fact,
a class at all.

THE
MEANING
The most significant passage in the book is perhaps the fol-
lowing (pp. 155-7):
How will it be in the new society? Will it be the managers
or the political bureaucrats who are the ruling class? In the first

=== Page 84 ===
BOOKS
83
place, we may observe that it really doesn't make much difference
which of the two groups is to be correctly regarded as the new
ruling class.... In either case, the general structural and insti-
tutional organization will be the same.... To say that the ruling
class is the managers is almost the same thing as to say that it is
the state bureaucracy. The two have, by and large, coalesced.

In a few casual words, Burnham blows up the foundation of his elab-
orately constructed thesis. But-and this is the important point-he him-
self is not aware of this because he is not aware of any significant differ-
ence between the political and the managerial bureaucracies. This he
makes clear when he writes (pp. 156-8):

Modern politicians-that is, politicians of the types found
in the present Russian and German regimes . . . are in reality
not unlike modern managers. They direct masses of people in
ways analogous to those used by managers in directing produc-
tion; they have similar habits of thought, similar methods....
[There are] moral prejudices against regarding war and propa-
ganda and diplomacy and policing as 'economically productive'
processes; though, in a complex society, above all in a society so
integrated as under a managerial structure, no clear line can be
drawn between them and the remainder of the economy. Armies
and police forces and courts and fireside chats and prisons can
be looked on as among the means whereby society produces
goods....

It is not difficult to show that this conception conflicts fatally with his
previous contention that the managers, not the politicos, are the ruling
class because it is the former who "in practice" direct the productive
forces. For if a war is to be considered an economic process, it clearly
dominates any conceivable managerial field, and if Hitler and Stalin are
also managers, they are so by virtue of their control of the State power,
which determines for what end the economic machinery is to be set in
motion. But I am interested in these passages less for the additional flaws
they expose in Burnham's thesis-there's really no end to such openings!
-but rather for what they tell us about the meaning of the thesis.

The dangerous thing about The Managerial Revolution is that its
author assumes his most important premise, the identity of managers and
politicos (the two passages just quoted are almost all he has on this
crucial point). Having assumed this, Burnham presents his thesis almost
exclusively in managerial terms (a strategy which in itself suggests the
falsity of his primary identification of managers with politicos). Thus
while he defines very closely just what he means by a manager-the one
serious slip into scientific method, in fact, in an otherwise admirable job
of special pleading-he nowhere defines even approximately what he
means by a political bureaucrat. And why does he call it the managerial
revolution if the new ruling class also includes the politicians? As Burn-
ham states himself, "the name given to the theory... is not unimportant."

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84 PARTISAN REVIEW

For "managerial" to the American reader (and, I suspect, to Burnham
himself) has good connotations ("production," "efficiency") while "bu-
reaucratic" or "political" have bad connotations ("war," "class conflict,"
"dictatorship"). Our detached scientist has thus loaded the semantic dice
before the game begins. Furthermore, though he nowhere describes the
social outlook of the dictators, he has at least two very soothing descrip-
tions of how their alleged co-rulers, the managers, look at things: "The
managers tend to think of solving social and political problems as they
coordinate and organize the actual process of production." And again:
"Society can be run, they think, in more or less the same way that now
they, when they are allowed, can run, efficiently and productively, a mass-
production factory." A cursory acquaintance with the literature of tech-
nocracy and the public utterances of managers like Tugwell, Kettering
and Henry Ford confirms the accuracy of this description. But this is not
the way Hitler or Roosevelt approach such matters. It is rather the ap-
proach whose theoretical organ is Common Sense and whose practitioners
include the early New Deal "planners" (Berle, Tugwell, Frank, Coyle)
and, at the other end of the political spectrum, Herbert Hoover, "the
Engineer in the White House," and the quasi-fascistic ideas of Henry
Ford. But, as Hoover found out in a most spectacular way, political prob-
lems do not yield to such an approach because their factors (not the least
important being the class struggle) are quite different from those involved
in running a mass-production factory.

The nature of Burnham's approach, and the main reason for its popu-
lar vogue, should now be clear. He has combined the Marxist concept of
a revolutionary new class based on an economically progressive reorgan-
ization of the productive forces and invested with the mystic aura of his-
torical inevitability, with the technocratic-"planning" illusion of solving
society's problems the way engineers solve the problems involved in build-
ing a bridge. He has used both concepts, especially the Marxist, at their
crudest (and most propagandistically effective) level. The result is some
thing we have already seen coming into existence abroad in the conquered
nations, in the pro-fascist propaganda of such former Marxist leaders as
Deat and Henri De Man, but which has not hitherto appeared over here.
As expounded in his book, Burnham's thesis seems to me to create at least
three highly dangerous illusions: (1) by presenting the "new order" in
specifically managerial-productive terms and playing down the role of the
dictators, it makes it appear desirable from the standpoint of materialistic
progress; (2) it greatly exaggerates the strength, the internal consistency,
and the conscious planning of these totalitarian systems; (3) by present-
ing fascism as historically inevitable with a finality which would have
shocked Marx, and by underestimating the subjective, I venture even to
say the moral, factors working on the other side, Burnham's theory para-
lyzes the will to fight for a more desirable alternative.

=== Page 86 ===
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THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI. By Henry Miller. The Colt Press, San
Francisco. $3.50; limited signed $6.00.
The Colt Press has done a beautiful job on this book: fine binding,
elegant (i.e. unobtrusive) type; and a jacket that dawns on one after a
while, blue, white and violent, like Henry Miller's Greece. Colt has done
well, moreover, to print Miller, who is important as a prose-writer and
(though he makes a great to-do about hating America) as a thoroughly
American case.
"Thus Homer lives on. Though I've never read a line of Homer I
believe the Greek of today is essentially unchanged. If anything he is more
Greek than he ever was." And thus Miller lives on (etc.). He goes to
Greece on the eve of the war, determined to find it miraculous, for he
believes on page 84-in living miraculously. He wanders idyllically
from Delphi to Knossus, bestowing on each a spiritual orgasm. "At
Mycenae I walked over the incandescent dead; at Epidaurus I felt a still
ness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of
the world beat and I understood the meaning of pain and sorrow." Above
all he meets the Colossus, Katsimbalis, who comes through to us in loving
luminous prose, a magnificent figure. (The most obvious point about
Miller's prose, by the way, is that "the meaning of pain and sorrow"
remains bloated and diffuse, like Nashe or Greene throwing a sop to the
censor. But if it's the body of a peasant woman, a storm at sea, or a man
named Katsimbalis, the writing tightens up, at once passionate and firm,
charged with a desperate effort to get at something not REAL or COSMIC
but simply real, intensely realized like Nashe again.) Now all this is
very festive. Greece is the "carrefour of changing humanity," and Miller
has his genial finger on "the schism between the human and the divine."
(Alas! with his finger on real schisms Miller has a certain obscene power,
but this metaphysical one stretches over pages and pages, arid and empty
as a desert.) In Athens he visits an Armenian soothsayer who confirms an
old suspicion: that he, Miller, is destined to live forever. And he caps his
rendition of this scene with the remark that he felt "chastened," filled with
a "great sense of responsibility." Is this the change of heart so hopefully
announced by Edmund Wilson some months ago? Don't believe it. Miller
seduces no Greeks, steals no silver, expresses the "desire to serve humanity
in the highest possible way." And since it costs him nothing he gives more
than we ever asked for: "I know now what the world is and knowing I
accept it, both the good and evil." But he's no less Miller than he ever was.
It is not simply that he still finds "contradictoriness, confusion, chaos
-all sterling human qualities" (p. 6), that he is still infuriated by Logic,
Progress, the Machine, nor even that he has not ceased to look forward
with impatience to "the inevitable destruction of our present civilisation."
To slip from one term to the other of the reject-accept dichotomy requires
no essential change in Miller, because the dichotomy is verbal, unreal, used
only to splash his canvas with the crude tones of love or hatred. His

=== Page 87 ===
86                                        PARTISAN REVIEW

       "thought" is all posture and froth, without significance or coherence
except insofar as it furnishes a kind of parallel (who can say cause or
effect?) to his final failure as an artist. For, among his prized confusions,
that between art and "self-expression" is fundamental and abiding. And
it is the perpetual anarchic spilling of seed on the ground (not the actual
content of his ideas) which sends him off to limbo.
                                                    H. J. KAPLAN

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. By James Agee and Walker Evans
Houghton, Mifflin. $3.00

        This remarkable book began as a journalistic assignment "of" share-
croppers, but the editors did not reckon with their men, and the result is a
serious effort to present three Alabama families and their little houses in
their inner humanity and divinity on the rolling world. Agee's subjective
sobriety is deeper than could be imagined, and perhaps the best portions
of the work are those very ones in which he describes his misgivings at
being a spy and a stranger, his refusal to submit to the categories of sociol-
ogy or the devices of drama, and (to my mind a place of intense beauty)
the description of his guilty joy as he fine-combs the house when the
family is away.
         Of the farmers, very little reality is conveyed, but there is a striking
presentation of Agee himself. In rejecting the ordinary frames of explana-
tion, he falls back on his immediate awareness and a passionate desire,
and occasional sentiment, of being "with" or even "in" his subjects. At
the same time, he seems to know himself not at all — but just the feeling of
his anxiety and longing — so that he is always reading into their situation
his own qualities, frailties, and often prejudices. Sometimes this is done
with insufferable arrogance, as when he feels, on the briefest acquaintance,
that a girl is going off to a marriage of misery.
         He speaks always as if there were a norm of virtue and happiness; he
is too modest to think this out: he continually feels and judges on the
basis of it: and he occasionally explains that being as such is a disease.
         Obviously, whether conscious or not, to present one's-self thru objec-
tive descriptions is a good method; but when Agee raises his art to the
level of theory, which requires understanding, he is far off. His passages
on the poetics of what he is doing are confusion, and he seems not to
realize that many other writers, faced with the white page and their past
and immediate experience, also ask what they are about, and that there are
several ways to go from there. When his scrupulousness is raised to theory,
he is for all the world like the girl who tries for the prize for Conspicuous
Modesty. Above all, till he acquires the gift of objective personal intuition,
he should shun like the plague the matter of educational psychology.
         What is surprising to me is that a writer so conscious and ashamed
of his "own kind" (journalist, Harvard, urban, etc.) is so unable to shake
all that off, to treat it ironically, or with scientific heat.

=== Page 88 ===
BOOKS
87
On a point of technique: altho the division of the work into sections on
Shelter, Clothing, Education, Work, etc. is reasonable, I do not see why
it would be less true or more "artistic" to present the subject prior to this
analysis, concretely functioning with them all. And especially, in place of
the lists of items that Agee gives us, must we not return again and again
to Lessing's remark on Homer: he shows us the dress of Agamemnon when
Agamemnon is putting it on. As a critic of architecture I am simply flab-
bergasted by the sentence "Since a house is so entirely static a subject, the
presenting of it may be slow going."
Many of the items, for instance the oil-lamp or the overalls, are pre-
sented with extraordinary beauty and power and a kind of isolated truth.
The observation of the style, surface, and matter of things, not people, is
sensitive often to the point of genius. The sense of their proportions,
tradition, and social tone is more feeble.
In this brief notice I must culpably omit any mention of the effects
of Agee's singular prose, and the least mention of Evans' marvelous
photographs.
PAUL GOODMAN

BETWEEN THE ACTS. By Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, Brace. $2.50
"She was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights
into the past and future..."
Like Mrs. Swithin in Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf stretched Time
both ways and up and down. She surrounded her characters with an
expanse of duration which they could never hope to fill with their acts.
So much Time did Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, have on her hands that
scores of pages were needed to tell of it, while the lady herself was merely
crossing a room.
Outside the courses of personal Time, Mrs. Woolf found others, and
one of these was History. In the midst of Time-the-fog, the Time of
"Nature" that spreads its dank aging around the living-room and lawn
furniture, marches Time-the-pageant, that simplification created when
individuals merge their moments together to make a group Time: a "life
of the times," a Period.
Between the Acts is a story about thinking of Britain as a continuing
unit, a story of an effort to bring the history of England to life through
recollection and play-acting, and through putting on the stage those who
represent its past and lay claim to its present. Like its title, the book
touches many surfaces of meaning; but again and again, on one level
after another, it repeats the question: Is anything left?
During a perfect summer's day in June 1939, a village pageant is
produced at a "middle-sized house," solid and respectably old. The mem-
bers of the family and their servants and acquaintances wait for the show,
each hanging at different altitudes from his enlarged moments, as from
colored balloons. Mrs. Woolf's scene-painting is most exquisite and firm
in this last work, fruit of one of the finest styles in modern English prose.
Time, or rather times, was her technical medium, as well as her subject:

=== Page 89 ===
88 PARTISAN REVIEW

she handled it like a palette of washes: grey for Mrs. Swithin's readings
in the Outline of History; green and azure for "the view" (which is "so
sad" because "it'll be there when we're not"); pink splashes for Mrs.
Manresa, "nothing like so grown up as you are."
The audience does not understand the pageant very well. It is even
impossible at times to catch the words sung by the villagers as they pass
in and out among the trees. "Scenes from English history" is about all
anyone can make of it: "Merry England"—at the thought Mrs. Manresa
"clapped energetically." Though one lady inquires, "Why leave out the
Army if it's history?"
The pageant itself, put on in a way that often reminded me of Ger-
trude Stein's Four Saints, parodies the great periods in English literature.
Miss LaTrobe, author and director, hovers off stage, straining to see the
flame of vision lighted by these august memories. Of course, the play is
a failure. There are a few who wonder about its "message;" others to
whom the affair is simply an annual event—these talk about the weather.
Miss LaTrobe cannot hold them together, for it is as "scraps and frag-
ments" that they see themselves when the actors turn mirrors on them at
the close of the play. But "there is death, death, death, when illusion
fails." So the phonograph in the bushes creaks its leitmotif: Dispersed
are we, Dispersed are we, while the aeroplanes pass overhead.
In our day, the historical pageant has taken on a new, ominous sig-
nificance, as the rulers of the present seek to give power and content to
their acts by dressing them in the costumes of the past. Between the Acts
is a genuine poem, witty, skeptical and laden with sorrow, on a theme
chosen with genius.

HAROLD ROSENBERG

AWAKE! AND OTHER POEMS. By W. R. Rodgers. London: Secker &
Warburg. 5 S/.

W. R. Rodgers is a young Irish poet whose work has appeared in
English magazines and, recently, in PARTISAN REVIEW. His English pub-
lishers tell us that the entire first edition of the present book was "de-
stroyed by enemy action." And this seems an appropriate misfortune, for
Rodgers' verse is wholly Crisis-begotten and wholly catastrophic in feel-
ing. Indeed both technically and in spirit he carries on the kind of poetry
written by Auden, Spender and Lewis about 1934: the violent alliterative
effects, startling juxtapositions, insistent concreteness, warnings, exhorta-
tions, pictures of disaster in the present, dreams of future peace and
delight. In imitating the older poets, however, Rodgers necessarily carica-
tures them; and much of his work so far is spoiled by extravagance, auto-
matic brilliance, and lack of personality. Yet his very considerable talent
is always appearing in some well executed and freshly inspired detail:

There in the hard light
Dark birds, pink-footed, dab and pick
Among the addery roots and arrowy stones...

F. W. DUPEE

=== Page 90 ===
BOOKS 89
GREAT SOLDIERS OF THE TWO WORLD WARS. By H. A. de Weerd.
W. W. Norton. $3.00.

Though not free from the usual shortcomings of its type, this popular
book is more than a mere biographical account of the military heroes who
rose to fame during the last thirty years. The twelve "portraits" are so
arranged as to cover nearly all important events of the two wars and all
major contributions to military thought.

There is a remarkable freedom in the selection of the representative
figures. It was a splendid idea to begin the list of the "great soldiers of
the two world wars" with the name of Schlieffen. The disciple of Clause-
witz and creator of the famous Schlieffen-plan which, if it had been cour-
ageously adhered to, might have saved the German armies from defeat at
the Marne in 1914, and which had not outlived its utility when it was
followed, with an important modification, by Hitler's armies in 1940, was
indeed "in a very real sense" a soldier of the two wars although he died
one year before the first world war began. While some names (Foch,
Haig, Ludendorff) have been omitted for external reasons, the list other-
wise includes all who participated in the shaping of the present style of
warfare-Hindenburg and Hoffmann, Kitchener and Lawrence, Pétain
and Gamelin, Pershing, Seeckt and Wavell, Churchill and Hitler.

Although the emphasis is on hero-worship rather than on "debunk-
ing," the misery of the lives of the great soldiers is revealed along with
their splendor. There are few among them who would not have preferred,
at one or another occasion, the defeat of their own country to the triumph
of a rival. Nor is it sufficient to dismiss those petty quarrels as merely
personal. They often expressed conflicting political and social tendencies,
just as the famous "pessimism" of Marshal Pétain and his constant quar-
rels with the (democratic!) "politicians" during the first world war fore-
shadowed his pro-fascist activities of 1939-1941. Even more strikingly
appears the intimate connection of war and politics in the strangely
analogous careers of the two "statesmen-soldiers," Churchill and Hitler.
Both acquired their present effectiveness in war through an extension into
the realm of force of their life-long political struggles. There was no need
for the author, who is fully aware of this real source of Hitler's present
soldierly achievements, to fall for the fantastic tales told by Rauschning
in 1941 about the "blueprints of the coming war" that were allegedly
outlined by Hitler to a group of young Nazis as early as 1932. In so far
as it is not merely the application of a highly developed material equip-
ment the whole "unorthodox" Hitlerian technique of breaking down an
enemy is based on the transfer of the methods of civil war to a war against
outside enemies.
KARL KORSCH

SO IT DOESN'T WHISTLE. By Robert Paul Smith. Harcourt, Brace. $2.50.
Mr. Robert Paul Smith, the most recent (as we go to press) of the
sentimentally visceral and isn't-Bix-wonderful school of novelists, looks
remarkably like another Boy in the Back Room. So It Doesn't Whistle is

=== Page 91 ===
90

PARTISAN REVIEW

a short, but overlong, book of nostalgic intent, with its lack of focus
trained on four young men in New York-a writer-producer in radio,
another writer, a dance-band musician, and a painter-their girls and
other acquaintances. I suppose that Mr. Smith is an experimental writer
of sorts: he has not only dispensed with dramatic progression, but charac-
terization and motivation as well. Once again we are among old, not to
say moth-eaten, friends: the hero who talks tough but can break down and
cry like a child, the beautiful girls who jump into bed with the gayest
alacrity and willingness, the happy musicians with their marijuana, the
Broadway hearts-of-gold. And certainly never before has the word "fine"
been used, in a 1925 Hemingway sense, with such zest and frequency.
The early hard-boiled novel depended for much of its effectiveness
on shrewd pacing, staccato narrative drive, careful plotting; its heroes
were heartless-gunmen, bootleggers, enemies of society. Cain's postman
and the novels of W. R. Burnett formed an orbit around which their suc-
cessors carefully swung. The latter-day type, of which Mr. Smith's book
is a reprehensible and conspicuous example, is plotless, indirect, and
written in a sluggish, padded prose that derives limply from Dorothy
Baker and Otis Ferguson. Its heroes are witless and passive, softer-
boiled; they behave in what appears to be a return to a quasi-This Side of
Paradise manner. They approve of Lionel Hampton and denigrate T. S.
Eliot, and their vulgarity almost eclipses Mr. Smith's: "So we tried talk-
ing in complete sentences, we stuck our necks out and liked Van Gogh
even if it was stylish to like him, we had read the little magazines once
upon a time, we knew that James Joyce was a giant on this earth."
But let us be fair to our author. Let us look at the other side. The
Boston Herald, in its review, mentions Kafka and says that Mr. Smith has
"got something." (As specified, this is quite undeniable.) Miss Kay Boyle
remarks that the book is "touchingly pure . . . the very highest praise."
Otis Ferguson adds that it is "the best of its kind since that particular
mood appeared in the early Hemingway." Yet to this reviewer it seems
merely shoddily pubescent, and its author a writer fully competent of out-
doing even the chronicler of the Beautiful People in brashness, vulgarity,
and collegiate bounce. He whistles too loud.

WELDON KEES

A Communication

Sirs:

Philip Rahv's article, "10 Propositions and 8 Errors," expresses the
disillusionment of many American intellectuals with the prospects of
socialism and the strength of the workingclass abroad. Everywhere one
runs into these self-styled "realists," who put on a very sceptical air and
insist that, since there are no newspaper headlines about workingclass
activity abroad, none exists. These "realists" seem to me as blind to future
possibilities as their colleagues of twenty years ago were. Real insight
into the making of history can only be grasped through a historical, i.e., a

=== Page 92 ===
A COMMUNICATION
91
dialectical approach, one which supplements the immediate empirical
analysis with some understanding of historical processes. As one who was
in France through the fall of this year, I should like to indicate my reasons
for believing that the European workingclass is already stirring and that
Hitler's "New Order" is much less stable than the common-sense "realists"
think it is.

The first reactions of the French workers to the 1940 defeat are well
known: disgust with their old leaders and parties, a certain friendliness
towards the German army because of its unexpectedly "correct" behavior,
and a sneaking admiration for the organizing talent and general efficiency
of the Germans. This soon yielded, however, as is also well known, to a
growing resentment against the ever-increasing plundering which the
Nazis had to impose on conquered France. Early in 1941, the Stalinists,
who in the first months of defeat had refrained from attacking the Ger-
mans, began to change their policy either because they realized they
would lose all influence if they didn't, or because Stalin already foresaw
the coming clash with the Nazis, or perhaps both. Their activities grew
tremendously, thousands were arrested, but thousands more filled up
their place.

Another factor which overcame the apathy of the early months was
the fact that the factories began to work again. Workers who had been
sitting around without any contact with their fellow workers became
"socialized" again, so to speak, and began to think in terms of collective
action and class solidarity. The younger workers were especially active.
Most of them were Stalinists-unhappily, the C.P. is, as yet, the only mass
organization now existing among the French workers-but they seemed
much less traditional-minded than the older generation of Stalinists, much
less docile towards the top bureaucracy. I have frequently heard such
young Stalinist workers discuss politics with oppositional leftwingers, even
with Trotskyists!

Some life began to appear also in the trade unions-though I don't
think the unions will play an important part in the fight to come, illegal
activity being channelled largely through factory or party groups. Those
unions whose leadership was for outright collaboration with the Nazis lost
most of their membership, while those which kept some independence
retained their members. Thus the metalworkers fell to 8,000, while the
railwaymen, pursuing an anti-collaborationist policy, still have some
50,000 members.

But the most significant single event up to the time I left was the
general strike in the coal mines of the North, which took place at the end
of May, about the same time as the big miners' strike in Belgium. This
was not Communist-inspired, the Stalinists never having had much strength
in this region. It was a spontaneous movement of the workers against the
Nazis, and that, too, in a district which is under much stricter military
control than most of France. Despite the enormous German pressure, it
lasted some three weeks.

=== Page 93 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
92
The Petain regime has tried to win over the workers, but with no
success. The trade union leaders who "rallied" to Petain are even less
popular with the workers than are the other Petainards. Recently, partly
because of their ineffectiveness, partly because of the ever more reaction
ary trend of the Petain regime, these turncoats have been threatened with
elimination from the State payroll. "We have abandoned internationalism
and socialism," they lament in their press, "and still you don't trust us."
Despite clever propaganda, the Nazis have been equally unsuccessful
with the workers. "A united states of Europe?" the workers say, "All very
nice--but meantime they take our food and keep our prisoners!" The
English propaganda is much better received, simply because England is
fighting the hated Nazis. But there is a widespread scepticism as to Eng-
land's war aims: "They're fighting Germany-O.K. But they're pretty
imperialist themselves, they too want to dominate the world"-this is the
usual reaction.
Finally, there is the crucial matter of the attitude of the German
soldiers themselves. There is little hope for a successful revolutionary
movement against German occupation without at least the neutrality of
of the German soldiery. In the first year of occupation, the
French workers felt and expressed simply a hatred of all German soldiers
alike, and the Germans in return felt utterly isolated. But a significant
change seems to be taking place. German soldiers have come into contact
as foremen or as fellow workers, with French workers in certain war
plants. Technical knowledge is compared, the French begin to feel that
after all the German is a worker too, and that "it's not his fault." I recall
one instance, when a German noncommissioned officer, in charge of a
Paris garage for staff cars, became impatient with the efforts of the
French mechanics to fix a car and, peeling off his military jacket, climbed
under the car and soon found the trouble. Relations henceforth in that
shop were on a completely different basis. I know personally of several
instances when a German soldier who had been working in some Paris
plant, was ordered to the Eastern front-and was tearfully bid goodbye
by his French fellow workers. "He's a poor devil, a worker like us. It's
not his fault."
War weariness is by now general among the occupying troops. "I'm
not a soldier, I'm a tailor," said one of them impatiently to a friend of
mine. But of course neither the British nor the DeGaulle propaganda can
take any advantage of this feeling, since it speaks entirely in terms of
inflicting an even more terrible fate on Germany this time than last. "We
don't want a new Versailles"-this sentiment is what keeps most of the
Nazi soldiery loyal to the Fuhrer, not any dreams of world empire. In
short, the kind of propaganda which can reach both the French people
and file of their German military oppressors, must speak the
language of workingclass internationalism rather than of British imperial-
ism or DeGaullist nationalism.
LOUIS CLAIR
NEW YORK CITY

=== Page 94 ===
long beards—on the other hand if you’re
a plumber, you’re reserved at 25. . . .
BEN NICHOLSON
ST. IVES, CORNWALL ENGLAND
*Ben Nicholson’s “Notes on Abstract Art” ap-
peared in the October number of Horizon.
LETTER FROM THE ARMY
SIR:
This is a twofold letter which makes it
at once an economical one and one which
I have to write in spite of my military
lassitude.

First, since I am a new subscriber, I
want to add my own to the welter of
opinions you have received on the REVIEW.
1. You are to be congratulated on the
magazine’s ‘tone.’ It does, as you say,
have a “definite editorial character.” And
that is good; you have no reason to relax
your standards. In fact, a little more
maturity rather than less should be your
aim.

2. But there is one danger in this re-
fusing to talk down to your readers.
Often you talk above your own heads. A
good example of this is the article on
D. W. Griffith in the May-June issue.

3. There is a nasty streak in some of
your articles, a puerility which cannot be
quite defined. The article on Jules Ro-
mains is an example of this tone which I
can only call snide. Also the literary gos-
sip columns retailed by Victor Serge.
These would be bad in any language.

4. Many of your contributors seem
afflicted with a kind of cosmopolitan
provinciality. The stories of McCarthy
and Goodman in the last two issues are
cases in point. They are drawn from an
infinitely small class experience and they
use for their mechanics certain pleasant
conceptions (such as the castration com-
plex) current among this class. They are,
in fact, trade stories, proper for trade
journals—which may or may not describe
the PARTISAN REVIEW. The Goodman
story is extremely interesting since it
combines a self-corrosive irony with the
kind of wishful thinking which sees sex
as a solution of a political problem.

5. This same kind of irony and ingen-
uousness characterises your political ar-
ticles. Your discussions of “The Mana-
gerial Revolution” were excellent (ex-
93
Letters
A LETTER FROM BEN NICHOLSON
Dear George Morris:
It was very nice getting your article
and reading how you make your paint-
ings. It is, isn’t it, a bit of a mystery
how other painters make their paintings
—I expect you thought my naturalistic
approach a bit mysterious? I wondered
how much our two articles* might over-
lap—but not much, it seemed. Gabo and
Barbara Hepworth both liked yours very
much. I enjoyed the orange story, which
was new to me—but if only dear old
Kandinsky had been able to make his
circles as quiet as an orange. (Wallis is
a good case of a painter utilizing a
strange-shaped board as the key to the
movement in his painting.) Yes indeed
paintings using representational forms
can be expressive! The objectors to ab-
stract art so often say that representa-
tion adds “that much more” which indeed
it does (and loses something as well)
and makes it a different kind of art. Just
because painting can be more naturalistic
than music why should they deny the
profound possibilities of ‘abstract’ ex-
pression in painting, which are no less
profound, presumably, than in music?
The influences of pornography in art
seem to me unsatisfactory, as ideas of
this kind give no solution and do not
endure. (I much prefer Arp’s collages
and reliefs to his more recent sculptures.)
The Hartung you reproduced looks well
and for me makes the Gonzalez look a
bit superficial and “decorative.” Of your
3 examples it is No. 3 I like best and it
looks very nice—I would like to see the
original with its colour, which I cannot
guess. . . . I had to go up to London early
in Oct. on account of some business
which kept me there a month—an abso-
lutely blissful month after two years and
London was a pleasure indeed. . . .
By now every one is flat-out and things
are pretty difficult—however we do still
manage to get some “work” done—how
long we shall be able to I don’t know.
Mothers with 14 children seem to get
called up and old boys with immensely

=== Page 95 ===
94

PARTISAN REVIEW

cept, of course, for Mr. Mattick's unread-
able article which should have been left
in the original German) but the "Ten
Propositions" were exasperating. I agree
with all your despairs but your hopes
seem chimerical. The falseness is the
same as in the "Facts of Life": you know
that we have been sterilized but your
wishes tell you that we are still potent.
6. Whatever your readers may say,
your poetry remains one of the high points
of PARTISAN REVIEW. The Eliot is as fine
as any since "The Hollow Men." The
Auden ("At the Tomb of Henry James")
was good if uneven. Certainly it is above
most of his recent products. At its worst
your poetry is precious--as in David
Schubert's "Simple Scale." But even in
its preciosity you may find something ornate
and fine like the Moore poem in your
July-August issue.
7. Your reportage from France and the
article by George Orwell are excellent.
These and the articles on Art represent
the best of your prose.
Then I want to say something about
the Army, prompted principally by Pvt.
Shapiro's letter in the September-October
issue.
The Army is quite liveable. The food
is edible. A normal person can sleep in
the beds, and the work is non-existent.
The claims of the Government about good
treatment are not "substantially true."
They are pure fantasy. But they are not
objectionable since they are one of the
things which make Army life so amusing.
The men in the Army are not intelligent
in the genre of the PARTISAN REVIEW but
they are all amiable companions. They
have to be since we live so closely one
upon the other.
The prime characteristic of the Army
is its pure uselessness. Since it has been
an institution without duties in a peace-
time nation for the last twenty years it
has developed some rather natural traits.
Like religion in an apostate age it has
substituted ritual for duty, ceremonial
works for patriotic faith. Now when we
are supposed to be preparing for a highly
technical war it is still concentrating on
the trivialities of inspections, military
courtesy, retreat parades and so on. The
chief virtue of the good soldier is that he

is inconspicuously idle or engaged in con-
spicuous waste.
This "made work" is the chief deter-
rent to military morale. Otherwise the
Army knows how to handle its men. Like
the rulers of Aldous Huxley's "Brave
New World" they have their soma (equals
3.2 beer, movies, a library full of Western
stories, and regular chow) which keeps
men in the mass contented by not recog-
nizing them as individuals.
Yours,
FORT LEWIS, WASH. PRIVATE Z

IN BRIEF
I enjoy the magazine immensely, and
find it the one remaining source of pro-
gressive artistic and political thought.
The revolting spectacle of the "liberals"
and their weeklies makes PARTISAN RE-
VIEW a necessary antidote to the almost
universal falseness of American periodi-
cals. —ROBERT M. PALMER, LAURENCE,
KANSAS.

And may I add parenthetically that I
think PR is doing a first-rate job, even
if I don't always agree with its social pro-
gram.--CONRAD AIKEN, BREWSTER, MASS.
Your magazine is refreshing, reassur-
ing and stimulating in these days of total
assent to total war. Auden's Henry James
poem and Rodgers in last issue were
first rate and some of the most interesting
poetry you have published. Good luck.
You'll need it before long if we continue,
politically, in our present direction.--
E. P., FAIRFAX, CALIF.

PARTISAN REVIEW continues to be the
most stimulating magazine on the mar-
ket; not (for me) because of its politi-
cal philosophy, but because it is the one
contemporary publication which is con-
sistently cultivated and serious-minded.
Thanks especially for Mr. Rahv's extra-
ordinarily fine essays. May subscriptions
keep mounting.--D. P., NEW YORK CITY.

May I say how much I appreciated the
PARTISAN REVIEW during the last year
and especially since being in the Army?
--XYZ, CAMP CROFT, S. C.

Although often enough disagreeing with
P.R., I think it is one of the very few
stimulating reviews I have come across
since I am in this country.--G. E., NEW
YORK CITY.

=== Page 96 ===
LETTERS

P.R. gets better and better. W. R.
Rodger's poems gave me an uplift I've
not had for many a weary day (reading
New Republic poetry, etc.) and Philip
Rahv on Hawthorne is first rate. Kultur-
bolschewismus made me shoot with glee
and think there might be a little ray of
hope somewhere if such fine stuff can
still be written and published. More
poetry, and articles of the Rahv and Mac-
donald kind. Your book reviews are
mostly first rate, too.-G. C. AULT, WOOD-
STOCK, N. Y.

BROOKS AND POUND
Sirs:
Is Brooks really a literary pro-Nazi, or
isn't he simply a common American
phenomenon - the self-educated man
whose urge to moralize outstrips his taste
and his judgment? Take another speci-
men of the same type, Ezra Pound, and
consider how Brooks and Pound run par-
allel to, or complement, one another.
Neither of them is much good at discur-
sive reasoning, as Brooks proudly admits
in Allerton but as Pound has never recog-
nized in himself. The lists of classics
chosen by each neatly complement one
another, with hardly more than one case
of overlapping. Both writers have worked
hard at perfecting a pastiche style: more
than a third of the Gente's is translation
or paraphrase, the fabric of Brooks' New
England books is largely paraphrase or
quotation without quotation marks. Van
Wyck Brooks, one might say, is merely
the Ezra Pound of the upper middle class
-the chief difference being that Pound,
in his time, has composed great verse, but
would anyone maintain that Brooks has
written great prose?

CHARLES WALLIS
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
No.-EDs.

ON MOUNIER-A LETTER AND REPLY
Dear M. Serge:
During the four years in which I took
part in editing Esprit, Emmanuel Mou-
nier often spoke of you with the warmest
regard. Allow me, then, a short comment
on the note you devote to him in PARTI-
SAN REVIEW No. 5.
Since the armistice, Mounier has sought
not to "adapt" himself, but rather to fill
up a void. He wanted, with such means
as were possible, to give some direction
in a situation where only empty rhe-

95

toric was permitted. As he was accused
of "radicalism" when he sought for the
human spirit through socialism, so now he
is accused of being a "collaborationist"
when, as always, he simply works with the
materials to hand. Many of his friends
thought from the first that any attempt
to influence Vichy would not succeed. It
seems they were right, for Mounier has
just seen the suppression of Esprit, an
event in which there is clear proof that
he had not "collaborated" very effectively.
I think that his stature as an honest man
emerges greater than ever from this fail-
ure. And I think you must agree with me
here, and that you will want to correct
the impression you gave to the readers of
PARTISAN.

C. G. PAULDING
American correspondent of Esprit
NEW YORK CITY

Dear M. Paulding:
I have always considered Emmanuel
Mounier, leading spirit of the personalist
movement and of Esprit, to be one of the
freest, most courageous and clear-headed
of French intellectuals. Nonetheless,
Esprit last winter put out several issues
which contrasted strikingly with those put
out before the fall of France-a really
distressing attempt at "adaptation." Per-
sonalism is a doctrine based on respect
for the human individual, and yet this
personalist magazine made not the slight-
est slightest reference to anti-semitism,
that outrage against all human values.
I'm told that since then Esprit has been
suppressed, which is to its credit. I know
it takes courage to try to survive under
certain conditions, and that it is neces-
sary to survive; but if a movement is to
emerge from such an experience strength-
ened (and cured of certain bad illusions)
we must state these things clearly. I do
so with as much esteem and regard for
Emmanuel Mounier as concern for simple
accuracy.

MEXICO, D. F.
VICTOR SERGE

POETRY ON THE AIR
Sirs:
The near-New York readers of PARTI-
SAN REVIEW may be interested in hearing
about a series of modern poetry programs
that I'm going to conduct over Station
WQXR, every Thursday from 2:30 P.M.
to 2:45. The title is "Out of the Ivory
Tower," and there will be an interview

=== Page 97 ===
96 PARTISAN REVIEW

and then readings by a different poet
each week. The initial broadcast will be
January 8th, with Mark Van Doren as
guest. On the 15th, Horace Gregory; the
22nd Muriel Rukeyser, and the 29th,
Stephen Vincent Benet. Later on I hope
to introduce younger, less established
poets.
NEW YORK CITY EVE MERRIAM

EGYPT HEARD FROM
Sirs:
I'm sorry for PARTISAN REVIEW that it
had to publish such a sad, dull and bor-
ing cretinism as M. James Burnham's
theory on what he pompously calls "the
managerial revolution." I say that articles
like his have no other possible aim than
that of justifying in a pseudo-dialectical
way the acceptance of "fascist order" re-
garded as a natural phenomenon if not as
a profitable step towards a new social
horizon. Besides, a work which has been
finely carried on for years by M. de Man
now supported by Professor Spinasse,
Marcel Déat and other minor traitors.
It seems strange to me that M. Burn-
ham nowhere mentions private property

or analyzes its respective situation in
Germany and USSR. Private property
doesn't interest him. Managers only do.
As a matter of fact, his theory lacks de-
tails on the nature, the social origins, the
frontiers of the managerial class. It makes
me think of a new type of holy spirit, the
bourgeoisie being the father and the
working class the son. It probably floats
somewhere between sky and earth, free
from every material tie.
The destiny of PARTISAN REVIEW is a
funny one indeed. Starting from Marx-
ist sectarianism, it develops into non-Mar-
ist eclecticism and concludes with anti-
Marxist revisionism.
GEORGE HENKIN
Aug. 21, 1941
CAIRO, EGYPT

P.S. At least it becomes possible now
to laugh at M. Burnham's historical pos-
tulates (... "the basic explanation of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact"). Impudence is some-
times punished.

P.R. continues its mysterious course.
See my review of Burnham's book in this
issue. DWIGHT MACDONALD