=== Page 1 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
PR

Volume IV, No. 3 1938
February

© Trustees of Boston University

=== Page 2 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

A LITERARY MONTHLY

Volume IV, No. 3

FEBRUARY, 1938

THE LAST PHASE OF HENRY JAMES
DIXIE DOODLE
A CHILDHOOD MEMORY
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY
TWO YEARS OF PROGRESS
ART CHRONICLE
VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE
CONGRESSMEN - FLOWERS - CLENCH
CROSS-COUNTRY
3
8
9
11
22
31
34
39
41
44

Edmund Wilson
James Agee
Ignazio Silone
Philip Rahv
George L. K. Morris
Mary McCarthy
Balcomb Greene
Dwight Macdonald
Rose M. Stein

BOOKS
New Verse

49
52
56

Delmore Schwartz
R. P. Blackmur
F. O. Matthiessen

RIPOSTES

60

Editors: F. W. DUPEE, DWIGHT MACDONALD, MARY McCARTHY,
GEORGE L. K. MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV.
Business Manager: NANCY MACDONALD

PARTISAN REVIEW is published monthly at 22 East 17 Street, New York, N. Y.
Subscriptions $2.50 yearly; foreign rate $3.00; Canada, $2.75. Manuscripts will
not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copy-
right January, 1938 by PARTISAN REVIEW. Entered as second-class matter, No-
vember 12, 1937, at the post office at New York, N. Y. under the Act of March
3, 1879.

=== Page 3 ===
CONTRIBUTORS

EDMUND WILSON is the author of Axel's Castle, I Thought of Daisy,
Travels in Two Democracies, and other volumes. . . . JAMES AGER'S
Permit Me Voyage was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
He has contributed to The New Masses, Fortune, and other magazines.
. . . IGNAZIO SILONE, who lives in Switzerland, is writing a sequel to his
novel, Bread and Wine. . . . WALLACE STEVENS recently published a new
book of poetry, The Man With the Blue Guitar. . . . PARKER TYLER
edited an anthology of modernistic poetry, Modern Things, and is the
author of two pamphlets of verse. . . . BYRON A. VAZAKAS was born in
New York City, lives now in Reading, Pa. His poems have appeared in
Smoke and The American Poetry Journal. . . . WINFIELD TOWNLEY
SCOTT is the author of Biography for Traman, a volume of verse pub-
lished last year. He writes us that his poem, Those Autobiographical
Blues, is about Haverhill, Massachusetts. . . . JOHN WHEELWRIGHT is the
author of Rock and Shell, a book of poems, and editor of Vanguard
Verse. He lives in Boston. . . . KENNETH PATCHEN, whose volume of
verse, Before the Brave, was published by Random House, lives in
California. His poem in this issue is from a sequence called The Execu-
tions in Moscow. . . . HARRY ROSKOLENKO has contributed to Poetry: A
Magazine of Verse, The New American Caravan, and Scribners. He
lives in New York City. . . . LIONEL ABEL, whose work has appeared in
The Nation, New Letters in America, is now working on a translation
of Rimbaud. . . . DELMORE SCHWARTZ has contributed poetry and fiction
to earlier issues of PARTISAN REVIEW. . . . BALCOMBE GREENE lives in
New York City; he is a member of the American Abstract Artists group.
. . . ROSE M. STEIN has published in The Nation and other periodicals. Her
book, M-Day, came out last year. She is now writing a book on the
recent strikes in the steel industry. . . . R. P. BLACKMUR has written verse
and criticism for many periodicals. He is the author of The Double
Agent, a book of criticism. . . . F. O. MATTHIESSEN is a member of the
faculty of Harvard University. His most recent book was The Achieve-
ment of T. S. Eliot.

=== Page 4 ===
THE LAST PHASE OF HENRY JAMES*

Edmund Wilson

N 1904, for the first time in twenty years, Henry James revisited
America. The chief results of his trip were The American Scene and
a novel, The Ivory Tower, left unfinished at his death. In his late
novels written before his return it has always been the American
view-scoring heavily off a fascinating Italian prince, an equally fas-
cinating French lady and a formidable group of middle-class English
people. Yes: there was a beauty and there was also a power in the
goodness of these naive and open people, which had not existed for
Flaubert and his group. It is something different and new which
does not fit into the formulas of Europe. What if Lambert Strether
had missed in Woollett, Mass., many things that he would have en-
joyed in Paris: he had brought to Paris something it did not have.
And the burden of the book on William Wetmore Story and His
Friends, which was also written during this time rather different
from that of his early book on Hawthorne-is that American artists
might much better stay at home.

In his other unfinished novel, the fantasia called The Sense of the
Past, he makes a young contemporary American go back into eight-
eenth-century England. Here the Jamesian ambiguity serves an ad-
mirable artistic purpose. Is it the English of the past who are the
ghosts or is it the American himself who is a dream?-will the mo-
ment come when they will vanish or will he himself cease to exist?
And, as before, there is a question of James's own asking at the bottom
of the ambiguity which is real-America or Europe? It was, how-
ever, in the novel, the American who was to remain real. (It is curious
to compare The Sense of the Past with A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court, with which it really has a good deal in common.)

For, in spite of the popular assumption founded on his expatria-
tion, it is the American who finally dominates in Henry James.

And his warmest tributes to American genius come out of these
later years. Though he could not, in Notes of a Son and Brother,

*From a longer study of Henry James.

3

=== Page 5 ===
4 PARTISAN REVIEW

resist the impulse to remove references to Lincoln as “old Abe” from
William James’s early letters of the war-time, it contains pages on
Lincoln’s death of a touching appreciation and pride. “It was vain
to say,” he writes of Andrew Johnson, of whom he says that the
American people felt him unworthy to represent them, “that we had
deliberately invoked the ‘common’ in authority and must drink the
brine we had drawn. No countenance, no salience of aspect nor com-
posed symbol, could superficially have referred itself less than Lincoln’s
mold-smashing mask to any mere matter-of-course type of propriety;
but his admirable unrelated head had itself revealed a type—as if by
the very fact that what made in it for roughness of kind looked out
only less than what made in it for splendid final stamp; in other
words for commanding Style.” And of the day when the news reached
Boston: “I was fairly to go in shame of its being my birthday. These
would have been the hours of the streets if none others had been—
when the huge general gasp filled them like a great earth-shudder
and people’s eyes met people’s eyes without the vulgarity of speech.
Even this was, all so strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy
has but to be of a pure enough strain and a high enough connection
to sow with its dark hand the seed of greater life. The collective sense
of what had occurred was of a sadness too noble not somehow to
inspire, and it was truly in the air that, whatever we had as a nation
produced or failed to produce, we could at least gather round this
perfection of classic woe.”

In The American Scene, he writes of Concord: “We may smile
a little as we ‘drag in’ Weimar, but I confess myself, for my part,
much more satisfied than not by our happy equivalent, ‘in American
money,’ for Goethe and Schiller. The money is a potful in the second
case as in the first, and if Goethe, in the one, represents the gold and
Schiller the silver, I find (and quite putting aside any bimetallic pre-
judice) the same good relation in the other between Emerson and
Thoreau. I open Emerson for the same benefit for which I open
Goethe, the sense of moving in large intellectual space and that of
the gush, here and there, out of the rock, of the crystalline cupful, in
wisdom and poetry, in Wahrheit and Dichtung; and whatever I open
Thoreau for (I needn’t take space here for the good reasons) I open
him oftener than I open Schiller.” Edith Wharton says that he used
to read Walt Whitman aloud “in a mood of subdued ecstasy” and
with tremendous effect on his hearers.

Henry James’s career had been affected by the shift in the na-
tional point of view which occurred after the Civil War. It is being
shown by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his cultural history of New Eng-
land how the Bostonian of the first part of the century was inspired—

=== Page 6 ===
THE LAST PHASE OF HENRY JAMES

as, in our time, the Russians have been—to present the world with a
new humanity, set free from the caste-barriers and poverties of Europe,
which should return to the mother-country only to plunder her for
elements of culture which might contribute to the movement at home;
and how, with the triumph of the industrial system, the persons who
were occupied with art and thought became gradually ashamed of
the United States and tended to take refuge in Europe. Henry James
belonged to this second phase, but he had a good deal of the idealism
of the first one. It appears in the name of the hero of The American:
Newman, and in his phrase about Lincoln's "mold-smashing mask";
and, after a period of partial abeyance, when he had been writing
largely about Europeans, it cropped up again, as I have shown, and
took the field.

But Henry James is a reporter, not a prophet. With less political
philosophy even than Flaubert, he can only chronicle the world as it
passes, and in his picture the elements are mixed. In the Americans
of Henry James's later novels—the Milly Theales, the Lambert Streth-
ers, the Maggie Ververs, as well as the Newmans and the Isabel
Archers—he shows us all that was magnanimous, reviving and human
in the Americans at the beginning of the new century along with all
that was frustrated, sterile, excessively refined, depressing—all that
they had in common with the Frédéric Moreaus and with the daugh-
ters of poor English parsons. There they are with their ideals and their
blights. Milly Theale, for example—quite real at the core of the
cloudy integument with which James has swathed her about—is one
of the best portraits of a rich New Yorker in fiction. It is the great
period of the heyday of Sargent; but compare these figures of Henry
James's with Sargent's and see with what profounder insight as well
as with what superior delicacy James has caught the rich Americans
of this race.

And between the first and the second blooming something tragic
has happened to these Americans. What has become of Christopher
Newman? He is Lambert Strether now: he has been worn down by
the factories of Woollett. And these Americans of the later novels,
who still bring Europe the American sincerity—what has happened
to them to make them so wan? Well, for one thing, they have become
very rich, and being rich is a terrible burden: in the process of getting
rich, they have starved themselves spiritually at home; and now that
they are trying to get something for their money, they find that they
have put themselves at the mercy of all the schemers and adventurers
of Europe. It seems to me foolish to reproach Henry James for having
neglected the industrial background. Like sex, we never get very
close to it, but its effects are a part of his picture. James's tone is more

=== Page 7 ===
6 PARTISAN REVIEW

often old-maidish than his sense of reality is feeble; and the whole
development of American society during his absence is implied in
these later books.

Now when he returns-late in the day though it is for him-he
reacts strongly and describes vividly what he finds.

The returning New Yorker of The Jolly Corner encounters the
apparition of himself as he would have been if he had stayed in
America: "Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his
own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his
power to dismay." At first the apparition covers its face with its hands;
then it advances upon the returned native "as for aggression, and he
knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the
force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the
sensed passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality
before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to dark-
ness," and he fainted.

But at contact with the harsh new America, the old Balzac in
James revives. I do not know why more has not been made by James's
critics-especially by the critics of the left, who are so certain that
there is nothing in him-of his unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower.
The work of his all but final period has been "poetic" rather than
"realistic"; but now he passes into still a further phase, in which the
poetic treatment is applied to what is for James a new kind of realism.
The fiction of his latest period is preoccupied in a curious way with
the ugly, the poor and the old, even with-what is unprecedented for
James-the grotesque. It is perhaps the reflection of his own old age,
his own lack of worldly success, the strange creature that he himself
has become. This new vein begins, I think, with The Papers, with its
fantastically amusing picture of the sordid lives of journalists in Lon-
don. Fordham Castle, in which he said he had attempted to do some
justice to the parents of the Daisy Millers, whose children had left
them behind, is an excursion into the America of Sinclair Lewis.
The Bench of Desolation-one of the most beautifully written and
wonderfully developed pieces in the whole range of Henry James's
work, and, I believe, the last piece of fiction he published-is a sort
of poem of loneliness and poverty among the nondescript small shop-
keepers and former governesses of an English seaside resort.

And now the revelation of Newport, as it presented itself in the
nineteen hundreds-so different from the Newport which he had de-
scribed years ago in An International Episode-stimulates him to
something quite new: a kind of nightmare of the American new rich.
Here his gusto for the varied forms of life, his interest in social phe-
nomena for their own sake, seems suddenly to wake up from its

=== Page 8 ===
THE LAST PHASE OF HENRY JAMES
7
reveries. The actual appearances of things become suddenly vivid
again. In the novels which preceded The Ivory Tower, the carefully
selected and charming old-world settings had been steadily fading
out; but now, to our amazement, there starts into relief the America
of the millionaires, at its crudest, corruptest and phoniest: the im-
mense summer mansions full of equipment which no one ever seems
to have selected or used, the old men of the Rockefeller-Frick genera-
tion, landed, with no tastes and no interests, amidst an unlimited
magnificence which dwarfs them, the silly or clumsy young people of
the second generation with their off-color relationships, their enor-
mous meaningless parties, their touching longings and resolute striv-
ings for an elegance and cultivation they cannot manage. The ap-
parition in The Jolly Corner came upon the Europeanized American
"quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the
magic lantern of childhood"; and in the same way, for the reader of
James, with the opening of The Ivory Tower, there emerges the
picture of old Abner Gaw sitting and rocking his foot and looking out
on the sparkling Atlantic while he waits for his partner to die.
The Ivory Tower is immensely comic, deeply human and bril-
liantly observed-and it is poetic in the highest sense, like all these
later novels: in the sense that its characters and images, individualized
though they are, shine out with the incandescence which shows them
as symbols of phases through which the human soul has passed.
The moral of the book-which seems quite plain from the
scenario left by James-is also of particular interest. The ivory tower
itself, a fine piece of Chinese carving, figures the spiritual isolation,
the cultivation of sensations and the literary activity which are to be
made possible for the young American, returned from Europe, who
has inherited his uncle's fortune; but it contains, also, the fatal letter
in which the vindictive Mr. Gaw has revealed all the swindles and
perfidies by which the fortune has been created. So that the young
man (he has always had a little money) is to come finally to be glad
enough to give up the ivory tower with the fortune.
James dropped The Ivory Tower when the War broke out in
1914, because it seemed to him too remote from the present. The
War seems to have presented itself to him as simply a struggle be-
tween, on the one hand, French and English civilization and, on the
other, German barbarism. He had believed in, and had been writing
rather vaguely about, the possible salutary effect on human affairs
of a sort of international élite such as he tended to depict in his novels;
and now he spoke of the past as "the age of the mistake," the time
when people had thought that things would be all right. He now be-
came violently nationalistic, or at least violently pro-Ally, and took

=== Page 9 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
8

out citizen's papers in England, because America had not yet gone
into the War. It never seems to have occurred to him that in The
Ivory Tower he had been much closer to contemporary realities than
in becoming an English citizen, that the partnership of Betterman and
Gaw was a European phenomenon, too-any more than it ever oc-
curred to him that the class antagonisms of The Princess Casamassima
-his response to the depression of the eighties-must inevitably
appear again. But as Hyacinth Robinson died of the class struggle,
so Henry James died of the War.

DIXIE DOODLE

In the region of the Tee Vee Aye,
Of the cedars and the sick red clay,
We've discovered a solution
Neither hearstian nor rooshian
In the embers of a burnt-out day.

When the world swings back to sense
(But the world is so damned dense)
An indisputably aryan
Jeffersonian Agrarian
Will be settn awn the Ole Rail Fence,

Swaying lightly with a hot cawn bun,
Quoting Horace and the late Jawn Donne,
He will keep the annual figgers
Safe away from the eyes of niggers,
And back his Culture up with whip and gun:

And in every single solitary region
We'll each frame our millenium
In a native-hewn proscenium
Unbedunged by any nonindigenous pigeon.

JAMES AGEE

=== Page 10 ===
A CHILDHOOD MEMORY

Ignazio Silone

I
RETAIN with surprising clarity many memories of the time when
I was barely three or four years old. But my earliest memory of all
is an isolated one, and even if it leaves my friends incredulous, I
have not the slightest doubt of its authenticity. It takes me back to
the distant day when I was weaned. I deduce from local custom in
force at the time that I must have been between eighteen months
and two years old. I must first explain that in the part of the world
from which I come a rather underhand though very ancient and
certainly very effective stratagem is resorted to cause a baby volun-
tarily to accept other food after the long period in which its sole
nourishment has been its mother's milk. When a mother believes the
time for weaning has come, without warning the child in any way,
she makes big black smudges on her breasts with charcoal or some
other colouring matter; and when the child wants to be fed she offers
it the breast as usual, as though the occasion were perfectly normal.
The child is astonished and horrified at the sight of the smudges, and
the way in which it reacts varies "according to its temperament."
Some children burst out crying and wait for the smudges to disap-
pear; some think it over, shut their eyes and suck, in terror; some
try to suck, but the sight of the horrible smudges repels them. The
final result, however, is always the same; the child abandons the
breast and accepts other nourishment. I distinctly remember that this
cruel trick succeeded at once with me. I well remember that a friend
of my mother's was sitting with her that day. My mother was sad
and silent, as later she always was when she had to do things of
which she inwardly disapproved, but that were required by her by
tradition. Her friend, however, looked at me and laughed. I remem-
ber the mixture of terror and disgust with which I discovered the
mysterious marks on the maternal breasts. It was the first tragic
moment of my life. I had to part for ever from those two dear,
soft, round, intimate, dependable sweet things from which I had
hitherto extracted my nourishment in a marvellous and easy manner.
Three years later the same thing happened to my brother, this

9

=== Page 11 ===
10 PARTISAN REVIEW

time with me as spectator. My brother wept and screamed. My mother
remained silent and impassive this time too. Then she asked me if I
remembered the effect it had had on me three years before, and she
was very surprised to learn that I remembered it all distinctly and that
I still could not understand how she, who was always so kind and
affectionate to me, could have brought herself to deceive me like that.
“But I had to start feeding you on other things!” she tried to
explain.
“Did you really have to?” I objected.
“Did you really have to?”
(Translated from the Italian by Eric Mosbacher)

=== Page 12 ===
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY

TWO POEMS

Loneliness in Jersey City

The deer and the dachshund are one.
Well, the gods grow out of the weather.
The people grow out of the weather;
The gods grow out of the people.
Encore, encore, encore les dieux . . .

The distance between the dark steeple
And cobble ten thousand and three
Is more than a seven-foot inchworm
Could measure by moonlight in June.

Kiss, cats: for the deer and the dachshund
Are one. My window is twenty-nine three
And plenty of window for me.
The steeples are empty and so are the people.

There's nothing whatever to see,
Except polacks that pass in their motors
And play concertinas all night.
They think that things are all right,
Since the deer and the dachshund are one.

11

=== Page 13 ===
12

PARTISAN REVIEW

Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is

Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, "Phooey! Phoo!"
She whispered, "Pfui!"

The demi-monde
On the mezzanine
Said, "Phooey!" too,
And a "Hey-dee i-do!"

The bee may have all sweet
For his honey-hive-o,
From the eglantine-o,
So, so sang the concubine-o.

And the chandeliers are neat . . .
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the parrots cried,
In a place so debonair.

The Johannisberger, Hans.
I love the metal grapes,
The rusty, battered shapes
Of the pears and of the cheese

And the window's lemon light,
The very will of the nerves,
The crack across the pane,
The dirt along the sill.

WALLACE STEVENS

=== Page 14 ===
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY

Testament from the Inheritors of the Waste Land

While we drop our consonants
The actor remembers and rehearses his lines
He remembers to remember the emphasis
We remember the emphasis
We forget to remember the rehearsal

The actor must remember the hour
Of the rehearsal, he must be
In an Eliot-hurry. We
Must not be in an Eliot-hurry.
We must remember our dignity.

Our dignity is not the actor's dignity
The saving of us from embarrassment
The triumph of the learned syllable
Echoing like a bell;
This is not the breath of our satisfaction
The uptake of our pleasure

We are dwellers in leisure.
Our word is Mallarmé's Swan
Undivided in feather and
Unrehearsed in movement
We do not remove our feathers
After the performance. We keep them.

We do not go to the Night Club
After the performance
In order to relax after our triumph
Or to listen to the rehearsals
Of our triumph. We do
Not go to the bar of drinking
Except to drink, nor go to the bar
Of thinking, except to think.

13

=== Page 15 ===
14

PARTISAN REVIEW

The actor arrives at his pay-check
And the Elusive Thing called Fame
And he rehearses the fame every morning
That we rehearse the blame
We rehearse the blame yet we seize the lights
We rehearse the phosphene-spots, and
On the inside of the fallen lids
Of our expert-dreamer's eyes,
None is that hero that dies
In the violet spot.

There is something we do
That is called Nothing that the actor
Does not do. Something that within the Plot
Of time we do not plot. We are the unplotters
Unstringers. We grasp the scissors
From the palsied hand and we unscissor
And we deflower the dropped forgotten flower
That the stagehand fingers for a moment, then puts back.

There is nothing we have to say that
We do not lean over saying as
From a balcony, there is no balcony of words
We do not drop voice from as
From the murmurous one of Juliet
Sounding and unhinged from sound
Ah, honeysweet Romeo might be intercepted
By absence of that elocutionary sound

The night is a bouquet of a strange delay
And the day an instant of impetuous wait:
Cool and deliberate as a fan.
If we are monsters yet we have not masks
But naked stalk the naked idea love
If we do not love the way Time the actor loves
Under a sun of summer sumptuousness
We grow irrevocably, simply, tan.

We remember our inadequacy in our parts
Rather than our adequacy—
But we forget our inadequacy

=== Page 16 ===
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY

As we forget our adequacy
In straining over the footlights of
Our brows. We abhor the nights
As an actor loves his "post-mortems."
We abhor the sleepless nights
As an actor sleeps in the "post-mortems."

PARKER TYLER

Un Martyr

Quentin Massys

Hear now the elegant chimes
over the low crawling water
the negroes are sleeping
in the perched boat on the wave

The flowers unite
with furious odors
through the afternoon's
united song

How to gloss the word
of that feathery sky
and the feathery arrows
cluttering the monotonous void

Soon in a drop of blood
night may come
and animate the metal birds
to sing through longer evenings

BYRON A. VAZAKAS

=== Page 17 ===
16
PARTISAN REVIEW

Those Autobiographical Blues

I think every day of the city where I was a boy—
I remember all of it, too: not only the river road
Flanked with autumnal color nor gold-leafed water
Nor the slow hills around, nor the smoke of thin spring—

That was after the war; money was easy, and everyone
Kept up his lawn in summer evenings and went
For a ride in the new car and was mostly young—even
The Armenian and Italian shoecutters got fur coats

And the Jews were buying up Main Street while the Yankees
Moved over a block or two, I remember; and the first to have
Radios—the Irish—bought big ones on installments.
The noise of things broken on the air began then

And in the daylight-saving we kids sat under neighbors' windows
To listen to the crackling notes of speech or jazz; and 'static', we said,
Sucking grass or wrestling, or watching the fireflies
Bewildered over the new cellar holes in the near fields.

I remember the bare bottoms of the kids I knew—
How they used to plunge and disappear and bounce up
Shining in the brown river in the afternoons, even until
The leaves were coming down brown and gold—O Christ, yes!

And that was not longer than ten—fifteen years ago
Before everything began to close up: the factories shut,
Houses unpainted along the frost-split streets and no
Macadam nor paint thought of, with clothes themselves junk;

Mr. Forrester shot himself at the Bank; Benny Goldstein
Lost his apartment houses; the store took back the Armenians'
Rugs and furniture; the Italians moved on with the shops; the
Irish got on relief, and the Yankees voted for Hoover.

=== Page 18 ===
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY
17
Full many an arse that smiled with mine-O, yes:
'Static-static-static': but all the while everywhere
Coming down the river and over the trees and up the steps and under
The evening grass, the no-sound of everything breaking in air.
WINFIELD TOWNLEY SCOTT
The Word Is Deed
for Kenneth Burke
Before ever any Deed came
the sound of the last Deed coming
came with the coming Word
(which answers everything with dancing)
So John begins like Genesis:
Im Anfang war das Wort;
But Engels read there: war die Tat.

In the Beginning was the Word:
'Plant, tend, harvest our own food.'
This distinguished Men froin Brutes.
(Men who dance know what was done.)
Good and Evil took roots
in this cause of Destinies
whence every Revolution stirred.

Ways of work determinate
moulds for men's intelligence.
Discoveries follow thence
obscured by fallibilities'
compensating philosophies
doubted soon as heard.
(Who dance not know not what is done.)

=== Page 19 ===
18 PARTISAN REVIEW

But when, against Fate, errors ward:
"Frustrate while ye mirror kind
disaster, blind
Chance, at once your enemy and guard"
the muscles of the mind reply:
"Think, act in answer to desire;
from the will springs Promethean fire."

Deeds make us. May therefore when our Last
Judgment find our works be just;
all of our tools, from rulers to flutes
praise us; and our deeds' praise find
the Second Coming of the Word.
(Dance, all whose nature is to dance;
dance all, for all would pipe.)

JOHN WHEELWRIGHT

Poem

The poor thing crying at night,
Putting blunt head to our door
How the sky over these houses pushes itself
Against God's great agile hand

Hush, be still

In the village are lights and the voice
of a woman who knows your name

Hush, and sleep

"Who'd bread for dying?"
"Cheap candles for the dead?"

=== Page 20 ===
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY

And the heart puts a fence around heaven
As snow a privacy over the least sparrow fallen . . .

"Who'd bind the wound?"
"Cloth to cover terror!"

On this last hill strides that stranger and the voice
which is not to be stilled

The door opens and it stands there, horribly,
As the hungry of heaven have always stood.

KENNETH PATCHEN

Aesthetics in Our Time

How emptily—
the white towers fall, the printed parchments
rot within their stalls; the wood
eaten to death by worms: the words
you use to-day are yesterday's cliché,
the dancer in the mirror's prance;
the poem, the phrase, the image
shattered by shock of falling glass and rock!

To invent and circumvent, to hollow—not hallow
in the briefer intensity of leaner language,—
not fattened in the mind's ornate theatre,
of imagination's clownish arabesque
for journalistic quest;
not dulled by season, plant and sky—
to wallow, as if the world primped and primed
its rhetoric—for subtler tricks:
the dancer has left the scene,
the audience remains with the broken mirrors,
the lights smashed by a blind spectator. . . .

HARRY ROSKOLENKO
19

=== Page 21 ===
20 PARTISAN REVIEW

Ode

A colored boy without
A textbook in the South
But with head bare as if
Always at school

Not at regular school
With truant officers
But another one
Open Sundays, too

Always ready for
An examining
In all the etiquettes
Of every melon breath

Here is another boy
In Poland, Germany,
It does not matter which
There is no sun indoors

Even his lips are pale
He keeps an old book warm
By rocking, intoning,
With his hat on

Until the difficult prose
Goes on among oranges,
Colors, characters
So warm they color him

O what friendly boys!
Sensual, studious,
Which was born for Talmud,
Which for Florida?

LIONEL ABEL

=== Page 22 ===
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY
21
Poem

Someone is harshly coughing on the next floor,
Sudden excitement catching the flesh of his throat:
Who is the sick one?
Who will knock at the door,
Ask what is wrong and sweetly pay attention,
The shy withdrawal of the sensitive face
Embarrassing both, but double shame is tender
—We will mind our ignorant business, keep our place.

But it is God, who has caught cold again,
Wandering helplessly in the world once more,
Now he is phthisic, and he is, poor Keats,
(Pardon, O Father, unknowable Dear, this word,
Only the cartoon is lucid, only the curse is heard)
Longing for Eden, afraid of the coming war.

The past, a giant shadow like the twilight,
The moving street on which the autos slide,
The buildings' heights, like broken teeth,
Repeat necessity on every side,
The age requires death and is not denied,
—He's come as a young man, to hang once more!

Another mystery must be crucified,
Another exile bare his complex care,
Another spent head spill its wine, before
(When smoke in silence curves
from every fallen side)
Pity and Peace return, padding the broken floor
With heavy feet.
Their linen hands will hide
In the stupid opiate the exhausted war.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

=== Page 23 ===
TWO YEARS OF PROGRESS—FROM WALDO
FRANK TO DONALD OGDEN STEWART

Philip Rahv

IT is not for the sake of raking up old speeches that we have set
out to examine the record of the writers' congresses that met in
New York in the spring of 1935 and of 1937. The congresses were
run, of course, on the strict schedule imposed by their organizers, and
to anyone not taken in by the art of political showmanship they may
seem devoid of interest. But their importance lies in what they reveal
about the history of the literary Left. Today revolutionary thinking
in literature has virtually come to an end—at least so far as concerns
those who once wrote and talked most about it. To consider the back-
ground of the two congresses, the amazing contrast between the first
and the second, and the political mystifications employed by the
party that staged them, will help us to understand how this has come
about.

The Communist Party has captured an entire sector of literary
opinion. This sector—of considerably less importance culturally than
politically—it now exploits for its own peculiar ends. The phenomenon
is new to this country, and as a factor in the literary situation it may
not be ignored. In organizing gatherings of writers this party cleverly
transforms its barrack ideology into the angelic diction of culture-
yearning and humanist largesse. Its representatives are skilled in
palming off administrative notions as principles of criticism and in
suppressing intellectual freedom in the name of the defence of cul-
ture. There is, also, the emergence of the stooge as a leading character.
In the mechanism of political seduction his function is that of a
necessary lubricant.
Two Congresses: Two Policies

The Call to the first Congress was straightforward enough.
"The capitalist system," read its opening paragraph, "crumbles so
rapidly before our eyes that, whereas ten years ago scarcely more

* AMERICAN WRITERS' CONGRESS. Edited by Henry Hart. New York:
1935. International Publishers. $1.00.
THE WRITER IN A CHANGING WORLD. Edited by Henry Hart. New
York: 1937. Equinox Press. $2.00.

22

=== Page 24 ===
TWO YEARS OF PROGRESS
than a handful of writers were sufficiently far-sighted and courageous
to take a stand for proletarian revolution, today hundreds . . . re-
cognize the necessity of personally helping to accelerate the destruc-
tion of capitalism and the establishment of a workers' government."
The suggested program for the permanent organization to be evolved
at the Congress committed itself to "the fight against imperialist war
and fascism, defence of the Soviet Union against capitalist aggres-
sion, the development and strengthening of the revolutionary labor
movement, solidarity with colonial people in the struggle for free-
dom," and other equally militant ideas.

Now, it must be remembered that this first Congress was as
much a congress "against war and fascism" as the second one. Yet
no attempt was made to dissociate the fight against fascism from the
fight against capitalism, and imperialist fascist wars from imperialist
democratic wars. The class struggle was still being fought between
two material entities called capital and labor, not two ideologies
known as fascism and democracy. The focal discussions concerned
themselves with the various forms of revolutionary writing and the
writer's relation to Communism. In his speech Earl Browder declared
that "the overwhelming number of writers who are producing living
literature" were choosing sides on the basis of "the class struggle be-
tween capitalists and workers-the two basic forces in modern
society. . . ." The other speakers were just as outspoken. "What are
we here for? What do we believe in?" asked Edwin Seaver; and
his reply was candid: "The fight against war and fascism? True
enough. But this is largely a negative statement. Are we not here
because we believe in forming a new and Communist ideology within
the shell of the old and decaying capitalist society. . . ."

As to literature, the most flaming message came from Louis
Aragon in Paris, who wrote to the Congress that "the literature of
tomorrow has for its foundation the new humanity which rises from
the proletarian revolution. . . . Above this living literature floats the
red flag of the new materialism, of the Soviet literature of the whole
world."

This was still in the blood-and-thunder style of blatant "leftism."
Aragon's ultra-revolutionary rhetoric was only a grandiose French
version of Granville Hicks, but the delirium of both had its identical
source in the literal translation of sectarian and utopian party policies
into the language of literary proclamations. These people have never
learned to distinguish between the living world and the mechanized
dreams of their party-apparatus.

The most amusing episode of the first Congress was provided by
Kenneth Burke, who blandly suggested that Communist propagandists
23

=== Page 25 ===
24 PARTISAN REVIEW

use the word "people" rather than the word "workers" as their "basic
symbol of exhortation." At once several defenders of the Party Line
leaped up to expose the perils involved in such a shift of verbal al-
legiance. Burke was overwhelmed with arguments. Is not the symbol
of the people associated "with demagoguery of the most vicious sort?"
Did not Hitler use it to deceive the masses? According to the German
playwright, Friedrich Wolf, this symbol was "an essential part of
the reformist approach" and resulted in the fascists taking power.
Joseph Freeman, in those days as revolutionary as the next func-
tionary, rose to instruct Burke in the elementary precepts of Marxism.
He very sensibly said that the symbol of the people belonged to the
epoch of the bourgeois revolution. "The word 'people'," he con-
tinued, "then became a reactionary slogan-not because of the
philosophy of myths, but because it concealed the reality, the actual
living antagonism between the social classes. . . ." (Freeman, in-
cidentally, was the only speaker in this debate who showed any under-
standing of what Burke was talking about. All the others attacked
him as if he were attempting to revise the Marxist theory of the rôle
of the working class in modern society, rather than suggesting a
change in the technique of propaganda. An adequate reply would
have analysed the relation of the verbal forms of propaganda to its
intrinsic meanings. Instead Burke was declared a heretic and bela-
bored with the big stick of the Party Line.)

But a few months later-in August, 1935, at the time of the 7th
Congress of the Comintern, to be precise-Burke was completely
vindicated. In fact, the Comintern vastly improved on Burke's "sym-
bolic" suggestions. Now it was no longer a question of changing a
key word of Communist propaganda but of throwing overboard the
whole theory of scientific socialism. And the second Writers' Con-
gress was accordingly saturated with the once dreaded symbolism of
the people. Within the short space of two years the "revolutionaries"
of 1935 had substituted the stars and stripes of New Deal Marxism
for "the red flag of the new materialism."

In the Call to the 1937 Congress the capitalist system, that
system which was so "rapidly crumbling before our eyes" in 1935,
was no longer referred to. Neither was revolutionary writing men-
tioned. If the first Call summoned writers to the struggle against
imperialist war and fascism, the second contented itself with a
timorous meliorism designed not to offend well-paid scenario writers
and ancient contributors to The Saturday Evening Post. In the past
nothing short of the sovietization of "the literature of the whole
world" would do; today the gates of the dialectic have been thrown
wide open to any successful money writer.

=== Page 26 ===
TWO YEARS OF PROGRESS

25

By the time of the second Congress the miracle had already
been performed whereby culture had been released from its class
moorings and transformed into a pure endowment of democracy.
When the tiny opposition at the Congress asked some embarrassing
questions concerning this matter, the answer was that it is improper
to propagate the Marxist point of view at a united front gathering.
But in reality there was no trace of a united front. The overwhelming
majority of delegates were either Communists or sympathizers of
Communism. The name of the united front was lent to a meeting
conducted under the exclusive control of one political party.

Listening to the speeches one got the impression that the interna-
tional class struggle, bag and baggage, had been exported to one
country: Spain. And even there it was held strictly to account and
told to behave itself—it was a duel between fascism and democracy
and no more. Here in the United States all we had to do was to
encourage trade unionism and defend what we already possess, name-
ly, our bountiful bourgeois democracy. On these foundations we shall
build a "great" American culture. Naturally, no one on the Left
denies the need of defending the democratic rights of the masses. But
to lead writers to abandon their revolutionary direction for the sake
of defending the bourgeois democratic order—which Lenin called "a
paradise for the rich and a snare and a trap and deception for the
exploited, for the poor"—is nothing less than betrayal. The Stalinists
have converted anti-fascism into the latest rationale for defending
the status quo; and it was precisely the sharp dichotomy they have
set up between capitalism and fascism that formed the political basis
of the second Writers' Congress. In literature this can only mean
the artificial revival of values that have been historically transcended
and a thousand times deflated.

The ritual phrases of the People's Front were used at the
second Congress purely as a means of emotional incitement. The
Stalinist literary politicians follow the classic models of their chiefs,
which is always to assume exactly what you have to prove. No
analysis was offered of the People's Front either as a theoretical
formulation or as an actual experience in several European countries.
There were many dramatic descriptions of the heroism of the Spanish
people, but no serious discussion of the fundamental politics of the
Spanish situation as exemplified in the mutual relations of the social
classes or the perspectives of the war. The danger of fascism is
tremendous; it must be fought. Yes, but how? Their reply is always
on tap: the People's Front, "the union of all progressive forces."
Now the point is that the word "progressive" is like the word "beauti-
ful." But the criteria of physical beauty are relatively simple; to

=== Page 27 ===
26                                        PARTISAN REVIEW

estimate correctly the progressive or reactionary character of a social
movement, however, is infinitely more difficult. When divorced from
an evaluation of the real class interests involved, the concept of pro-
gress becomes a purely meretricious phrase. The Stalinists are now
wholesale importers of Progress, that opium of the 19th century!
Who is so base as to oppose Progress? Beasts, not men.
        In 1935 Freeman shuddered at the word "people." Now he
makes smooth speeches about "restoring control of the government to
representatives of the people's organizations through a broad People's
Front. It seeks to restore and raise the living standards of the people,"
etc., etc. His formulation of the hoary clichés of reformism is sleek
and up-to-date. But how can the government, which never belonged
to the people, be "restored" to them? Freeman, who has been
educated in Marxism, knows very well that lasting social reforms are
only the by-products of revolutionary struggle and cannot be attained
by subjecting the working people to the middle class. In its very
nature this class, grumbling at those above it but inevitably their dupe,
is incapable of resolute and protracted resistance to big capital. In
his speeches at the second Congress Freeman waved the bloody shirt
of fascist terror to reduce the opposition to silence. His arguments,
however, boil down to this: Either you become a bourgeois democrat
or else the capitalists will really get sore and bring in fascism. This is
the sum total of the wisdom of the People's Front.
        The second Congress met "in the shadow of the coming world
war." But it was not a congress against war. On the contrary, it was
calculated to aid in mobilizing American intellectuals for the support
of the imperialist government of the United States in a possible war
against the fascist powers. At the first Congress Harry F. Ward,
president of the League Against War and Fascism, said that "it is
understood that we are dealing not with war in general, but with the
war which the United States government, in common with the other
great powers, is now so strenuously preparing. . . . It is manifest that
the declaration of war will bring the attempt to fasten down the full
tyranny of repressive fascism in those capitalist countries where a
vestige of democratic procedure still survives." In 1937 all this was
forgotten. Not one word was spoken in criticism of the huge military
budgets piled up by our own government. The writers of America
were enjoined to support one imperialist coalition against another.
Literature was being coördinated with the propaganda for a new
crusade to make the world safe for democracy.

                       Presidents Come and Presidents Go

        The first Congress set up a permanent organization called the
League of American Writers, and elected Waldo Frank its president.

=== Page 28 ===
TWO YEARS OF PROGRESS 27

Frank was elected unanimously, amidst overwhelming applause, and
his impassioned speech closing the sessions made a deeper impression
on the delegates than anything else they had heard at the Congress.
Expressing his faith in the new League, he concluded with the cry:
"Everything remains to be said. Everything remains to be done. Let
us get to work!" Two years later, however, he was unceremoniously
replaced by Donald Ogden Stewart, a dark horse from Hollywood.
Stewart was likewise elected unanimously, and the applause for him
was equally overwhelming. What, in the meantime, had happened to
Waldo Frank? Not only did he make no report to the Congress of the
organization he ostensibly headed for two years, but he did not even
participate in its proceedings. Frank had simply disappeared, and
the only reference made to him was in the speech of Earl Browder,
secretary of the Communist Party. Browder ridiculed Frank as a
meddler in political matters. Thus the hero of yesterday, chosen to
lead a political league of writers, was now denounced for daring to
think he had anything to contribute to a political discussion. Behind
it all, of course, was the fact that Frank had written an unorthodox
letter to the New Republic about the Moscow trials. He had dared
to speak out of turn and was excommunicated. The Stalinists, who
manage and control the League of American Writers behind a facade
of big-shot presidents and vice-presidents who seldom attend the meet-
ings where the business of the League is really decided, have chosen
well in elevating Mr. Stewart. As a stooge he will doubtless prove
more pliable than Waldo Frank.

The program of the League of American Writers is supposedly
restricted to the struggle against war and fascism. Officially it asks for
no endorsement of the Stalin leadership in Russia. It claims to be a
democratic, independent organization of writers free of party control.
Yet in practice it will not tolerate the active participation of anyone
who is not ready to defend every policy of Stalin. And in his speech
to the second Congress, a congress convened to defend democracy,
Browder, in the polite language and with all the paraphernalia ap-
propriate to a cultural occasion, called for the denial of free speech
and the democratic rights of public controversy to all literary and
political opinion to the left of the Communist Party.

A Manufactured Renaissance

Have we dwelt too long on the political side of the second Con-
gress? What about literature? Yes, but how can one take seriously an
approach to writing wholly determined by the immediate political
dividends it can be made to yield? Literature to these people is, after
all, merely a pretext for the manipulation of ideas in favor of the

=== Page 29 ===
28 PARTISAN REVIEW

current party policy. Writers were being exhorted to become political-
minded; but in this setting political-mindedness means no more than
unthinking adherence to Stalinism. There was an obscure paper by
Kenneth Burke and indignant reports on the suppression of artistic
freedom in the fascist countries; but literature in the Soviet Union
was reported on purely quantitatively, as a feat of publishing and
distributing "millions of books." The truth is that no genuine interest
in writing could ever express itself at these gatherings organized under
totalitarian auspices. The glib denunciations of every doubt, the
smugness, the crawling before celebrities, the jargon of political up-
lift-what atmosphere could be more alien to creation, to indivi-
duality, to intellectual experience?
Nevertheless, some big pretensions were aired. The Call to the
Congress opened with the statement: "Today in America there are
signs of a literary revival that may resemble or surpass that of the
period of 1912-1916." Freeman saw "every indication that American
literature is about to enter a new period... the best writers are now
armed with the knowledge and insight they formerly lacked." Mal-
colm Cowley declared that "American literature seems richer and
more vigorous than at any other time since Anderson, Sandburg,
Brooks, and Eliot...." This unexpected renaissance seems to have
been manufactured for the express purpose of justifying the Stalinist
management of left-wing writing; an imaginary crop of master-
pieces was invoked to give the Congress its literary raison d'être.
Actually, of course, literature in America has seldom been so stagnant
as it is at present. The excitement of the early 30's has given way to
confusion and anemia. Fiction, these last few years, has been on a
lower level than that of the 20's. The young poets, including the
radicals, seem to be engaged in an endless metaphysical stammer; the
naturalistic reportage of the obvious has swallowed up the young
novelists; and most of the older writers, after the first few good books,
are petrified within their reputations. After expressing himself so
optimistically at the Congress, Cowley discovered a few months later
(New Republic, Nov. 24, 1937) that there is, "this year, a curious
analogy between the dullness of the new books and the dull mood
that afflicts the literary world. Writers, like everybody else, are carry-
ing on mechanically while waiting for something to turn up, some
new hope to avert catastrophe." So much for the renaissance.
Cowley's talk of catastrophe will come as strange news to Gran-
ville Hicks, who regards pessimism as the devil's brew. During the
discussions at the Congress a popular type was evolved, an ideal man
of whom Hicks is the very image. This exemplar of virtue can best
be described as the writer who, facing the future, does not look, in the

=== Page 30 ===
TWO YEARS OF PROGRESS 29

memorable words of A. B. Magil, "with microscopes, for pimples on
the shining face of the Soviet Union." Hicks' paper dealt with the
problem of frustration in American literature—a problem real enough
to have become one of the larger concerns of the American critical
tradition. But to Hicks this became a matter of party homiletics and
Calvinist thrift. Besides counseling writers how to organize their
time efficiently, he forewarned them against swerving from the strait
path of party doctrine. To Hicks literature is an organizational ques-
tion, and the terms to which he reduced his subject illustrate the in-
tellectual level of that body of criticism of which he is the leading
spokesman.

Compared to Hicks, Newton Arvin is a tenderfoot Stalinist; but
primarily he is a diligent and able student of the antiquities of New
England. His speech on "The Democratic Tradition in American
Letters" had a noble ring to it, dedicated as it was to the evocation of
the libertarian ideals of the past. Unfortunately Arvin suffers from the
tendency to slice our classic literary figures in half: the good
("progressive") half he presses into the service of present-day politics,
and the bad ("reactionary") half he commits to the outer darkness.
Such methods make the critic's job easy, but they do not contribute
to the understanding of literature as an organic process. Neither the
history of esthetics nor the history of thought will be served by this
political surgery on the American literary tradition. A conception of
Emerson or Thoreau, for example, which is not a whole but an ex-
traction is of little value to criticism.

Stalinism and American Literature

To people unfamiliar with the literary politics of the Communist
Party the juxtaposition of these two terms may seem ridiculously
melodramatic. In the final analysis, they will ask, what has Stalinism
got to do with the actual production of novels, plays, and poems?

Among those who ask such questions are many who are politically
indifferent and not a few who are trying to escape unpleasant truths.
In discussing literature in relation to Stalinism we are not dealing
with those writers to whom literature is merely a means of livelihood
or those to whom it is a purely esthetic matter. We have in mind,
rather, that advanced body of American writing which responded to
the social crisis of our decade. And in this sphere the Stalinists, despite
their insane sectarianism, played an advanced rôle in the early 30's.
They popularized some of the fundamental ideas of Marxism among
American intellectuals, no matter how much they themselves mis-
applied these ideas in practice. Their literary policy was a reflection
of a narrow and factional Party Line, but since the Party still based

=== Page 31 ===
30 PARTISAN REVIEW

itself on revolutionary principles, it was possible for them to release
certain revolutionary forces on the literary scene. "Proletarian
literature," whose demise they deny for reasons of political prestige,
was never a pure product. It was partly an outgrowth of the social
condition of contemporary culture and partly an administrative
notion of the Communist Party and of the power cliques among
Soviet writers. The program of this literature they carried beyond
any possible application, reducing it to an absurdity; nevertheless
their agitation for it was valuable for its larger resonance. It changed
the direction of literary thought and subjected the theme of class con-
flict to the workings of the creative imagination.
But the point about the Stalinists now is that they not only
stand between the writer and Marxism but between him and the
most elementary kind of integrity. The moral degeneration which
afflicts the Communist Party cannot but reflect itself in its literary
politics. Reformism offers no basis for revolutionary literature, which
either strikes at the foundations of the capitalist order or else dis-
solves into a variety of social service. To expect a bureaucratic,
authoritarian regime to nourish a truly critical, revolutionary con-
sciousness in art is to expect miracles. Already the Stalinists have in-
troduced into their literary organs the methods of calumny and
frame-up. It is impossible for the intellectual to make the moral and
political compromises that Stalinism demands of him without be-
traying himself.

The tradition of individual judgment, of skepticism, of scientific
verification is inherent in the very terms and conditions of knowledge.
The collectivity of the Marxist movement aims to raise this tradition
to the level of materialist consistency and conscious political direction.
A collectivity of blind faith and accomodation, on the other hand, is
altogether the opposite of that envisaged by the founders of socialist
thought. "Comrade," one would say with Gide, "believe in nothing;
accept nothing without proof. The blood of martyrs has never proved
anything. There is no religion too foolish not to have had martyrs or
not to have awakened burning conviction. Men die in the name of
faith and in the name of faith they kill. The taste for knowledge is
born in doubt. Cease to believe: Learn. People try to impose a belief
only when they have no proofs. Do not let them impose on you. Do
not let them take you in."

=== Page 32 ===
ART CHRONICLE:
The Dramas of Uday Shan-Kar

HERE is a qualitative gap between the dancing of Shan-Kar and
contemporary exponents of occidental ballet-forms that cannot be
limited solely to what the Hindu is able to project as one of the great
aristocratic personalities of our time. There are elements in the nature of
India and its art that, after 2000 years, permit him to produce a com-
pletely grounded unity in an age commonly characterized by misfits and
expressionistic jumbles.

Every Hindu art-form has reiterated a delight in bodily exuberance;
the Greek is cold and introverted by comparison. Buddhism tried to
restore quiet, and for a moment the cathedral-caverns of Ellora and
Ajanta loomed with an almost Egyptian austerity, but it was not long
before the rocks were noisy again with voluptuous human shapes that
spilled out of portals, walls, and capitals. A thousand years later the
Moguls fixed the subjugated Hindu spirit into a stiff Persian arabesque,
but even their fierce severity could not hold it permanently still.

A first glimpse of India suggests confusion; a closer association dis-
closes an order and discipline not at first apparent; there is a blocking-out
of big masses, and lines that coordinate into a rhythmic unity. This is
the aesthetic foundation that the Hindus spread wherever they con-
quered, into Burma, the Indies, even the far-off kingdom of the Khmers.
And it relives today in those countries that had been taught so well,
through the dance-forms of Java and Cambodia, and its most expressive
heritage, the wonderful music-dramas of Bali.

Shan-Kar, aside from his prowess as a dancer, has brought to his
art a completely sophisticated intelligence (he started his career as a
student of painting in Paris) and an inexhaustible zeal for research and
analysis. He retires from the stage this year and will found a school for
the study of Hindu culture at Benares. His vast store of knowledge—
the long history of Indian art—crops out through his dances and he
presents the whole history of his nation's culture. There is the savage
jungle folk-art (Bhill Dance), varying forms of the Buddhist and Hindu
as they developed through the centuries, and last, in the cruel Sword-
dance, the very gesture, pose, and spacing of the Mogul miniatures. The
mere turn of a finger, the bending of a wrist, will lead the line back
from infinity to the center of the radiating masses. The conscious
harmonizing of every anatomical segment right out to the tips of the
fingers, the facial expression, the glances, the weird neck motion that
apes the striking cobra, combine with a controlled coordination that is
tellingly abstract. And finally, in the Shiva-Parvati Nritya Dwandva,
we are confronted through rhythmic suggestion with the awful illusion
of six-armed Siva dancing.

31

=== Page 33 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
32

Miro and the Spanish Civil War

LAST YEAR, for the first time, it appeared that there may be some
relation between liberalism in politics and what might be termed
"radicalism" in the plastic arts. Early in 1937 the liberal-radical gov-
ernments of Spain and France gave official recognition-and support in
more tangible ways as well-to such aesthetic revolutionaries as Picasso,
Miró, and Léger. The advent of the Blum ministry caused an extra-
ordinary change in the temper of French art commissions, those tradi-
tional enemies of all that is living in art. And the Spanish government,
in the midst of its fight for life, has given important commissions to
such artists-hitherto unknown in their native land-as Gonzales,
Picasso, and Miró.

Picasso and Gonzales have lived for many years in the vicinity of
Paris, but Miró has always remained in contact with his countrymen.
He has done most of his best work in Catalonia. The selection of Miró,
therefore, to execute commissions for the Spanish government is the most
appropriate choice of all, and is likely to prove the most fruitful. The
war in Spain, especially since it involves also a bitter class struggle, has
had disturbing repercussions on Miró's development-at once stimulating
and confusing. The shocks* have been accentuated because Miró lacks
the sophistication of the other famous Spaniards. The recent work of
Picasso, for example, suggests that perhaps his sensibility has been
calloused by the many reversals, the swift and acrobatic changes of
style which have marked his career in painting. His sincerity in pub-
licizing the cause of Loyalist Spain cannot be questioned, but neither
can it be said that he has been able to give mordant or convincing ex-
pression to his feelings. In his recent paintings on Civil War themes,
the aesthetic impact seems to be bogged in a morass of mannerisms.

Miró, on the other hand, has been able to put on canvas in a much
more satisfying way his reactions to the war. This might have been
foreseen, for he is less the intellectual constructor, more the commen-
tator upon his inward vision. Above all, his interpretations are un-
mannered. There is none of the aggressive showmanship with which
Picasso is accustomed to startle and insult his audiences, before sub-
duing them with an unapproachable grandeur of style.

Miró's development has been the logical result of the influences
which have crowded upon him. He commenced with that dry sharpness
of vision which must haunt the air of Northern Spain, which produced
Zurbaran, Juan Gris, and the anonymous Catalonian frescoes. Later, as
he came in contact with Arp and the Dadaists, who opened up the field

* Since this writing, we have learned that Miro's brother-in-law has been shot
by a fascist firing-squad.

=== Page 34 ===
[NO TEXT DETECTED]

=== Page 35 ===
JOAN MIRÓ
Painting
Summer 1936
Pierre Matisse
Gallery

(Painted in Spain during the Revolution)

=== Page 36 ===
JOAN MIRÓ, The Old Shoe 1937

=== Page 37 ===
ART CHRONICLE 33
of tactile sensations, he alone of their disciples never grew mannered.
Here already was the familiar Miró, the world half heavy with gloom,
half buoyant with fantasy, alive through tiny linear rhythms that tickle
the canvas and create a dance. With the beginning of the present decade
the technique was ready to loosen and the forms floated free from the
background; the picture opened with an ordered smoothness unknown
to Western painting since the days of Simone Martini and the Loren-
zetti. He reached his summit with the large mural canvases of 1933;
the outcome of the war will determine for the future whether this
spacious series is destined to remain the most important achievement
of Miró.

No one knows toward what end this development might have led,
since the Civil War has obliterated the old creative approaches. For
several months Miró endeavored to follow the path he had been open-
ing, but the break in his progression is at once apparent. The suave
lyricism dries up before the new staccato rhythms, the color withers into
black and grey, the brush can no longer titillate and caress the canvas.
The works of these months are confused episodes in a welter of unab-
sorbed sense-impressions; he must leave Spain for a long contemplation
in tranquility and gather up the meaning of the social upheavals that
begin to make themselves felt.

It is now eight months since Miró recommenced his work in Paris;
he began again with the interminable drawings, broken only by the large
mural for the Spanish Government Pavilion at the Exposition; an area
so vast must have been a trial to one whose poise and style were still on
the verge of rising from such recent ruins. He fills other commissions
for his government, and the resulting attempt at remaining impersonal
becomes a strain upon him. He must return to his natural beginnings
if he is to stand securely, and so rearranges into still-lives the household
objects that dominated his first dry period. He is back in the visual world
and interprets it once more in the old tight style native to Catalonia, but
this time more tortured and mature. For four months he works over a
painting of his shoes, but he has not yet found the plastic expression to
hold the change of viewpoint. His next painting is to be a self-portrait.

“Doubtless individuality is a sign of decadence,” he said recently.
“In the great epochs individual and community go along together; but
today what do we have?” Perhaps if the nation with which he has so
closely identified himself can win its fight for survival, his talent will
move forward with its old decisiveness, and “individual and com-
munity may go along together,” enriching his work with a fulness beyond
even the murals of 1933.

GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

=== Page 38 ===
VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE
Mary McCarthy

T
HE American theater, unable to produce a renaissance of its
own, has imported an old one. With the withering away of the
American playwright the Elizabethan playwright has been called in
to understudy. During the nineteen twenties, the most energetic years
of the American theater, a few old stagers with repertory companies
of confirmed Shakespearean hams were, as if by common consent,
appointed official caretakers of the Bard, and an occasional revival
of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet on the part of a recognized star was
no more than a duty call paid to the grave of an honored but distant
relative. Today the best and liveliest young talent has been turned
full blast on Shakespeare and his colleagues. The last two seasons have
seen nine high-powered Elizabethan revivals, with three more pro-
mised before the season's end. Since both American and British acting
seem to be temporarily in crescendo, and the Elizabethan plays are
admittedly good, the result has been two quite stimulating theatrical
seasons.
The current phenomenon of a theater without playwrights sug-
gests that classic plays have an additional function beyond those
generally assigned to them. Classics, in general, are supposed (a) to
please readers and (b) to instruct writers. The present Elizabethan
facade of Broadway makes one think that classics, by their very
nature, are also meant to fill a cultural interregnum, to tide over an
art medium which, without them, would collapse. In a literal sense,
this can only be true of the interpretative arts, music, stage production
and criticism, and, obviously, such use of the classics is most ob-
servable in these fields. I am totally ignorant of music, so of that I
cannot speak, but it is painfully clear that in American literary critic-
ism the tendency is to re-examine the great works of the past, since
practically no creative literary work is being done in the present.
However, in a more obscure and less explicable manner, the classics
can, it seems to me, act as a life-line to the primary arts themselves.
This is because the relationship between the primary and the inter-
pretative arts is not one-sided but reciprocal, and the classics, by
keeping the interpretative arts alive and perhaps even fermenting
them a little, can vicariously succor the primary arts. Thus the interest
in problems of acting and production which this regime of revivals has
imposed upon theater people can hardly fail, if properly handled, to
introduce new techniques, which will evoke new playwrights who
34

=== Page 39 ===
VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE
will be anxious to use them. So simplified, this sounds a bit too much
like the-house-that-Jack-built to have any but a fairly-tale truth, and,
of course, an art so carefully inbred would become too attenuated to
be worth preserving. This recipe for the fertilization of the arts is but
one of several with which it must be applied jointly; it cannot be
taken as a panacea.
At any rate, on Broadway today the process is only in its foetal
stage. No serious new techniques are yet being evolved from Shakes-
pearean productions; rather, tricks are being played on them. A spirit
of carnival excitement possesses these revivals, and an annual Shakes-
pearean World Series seems to have been written into the rules of
the game. Last year it was John Gielgud versus Leslie Howard with
Hamlet as the ball park; this year it will be Orson Welles versus
Maurice Evans with Henry IV, Part I. (Mr. Evans on tour is doing
an occasional matinee with himself as Falstaff, and expects to bring
the play into town in the fall. Mr. Welles anticipates a spring pro-
duction with himself in the same role.) In these ostentatious rivalries
one can see the exploitation of Elizabethan plays in its most blatant
and harmless form. In the actual productions of Gielgud's Hamlet
and Welles's Caesar, the exploiter, that is, the stunt artist, wears a
more successful disguise.
The two productions were poles apart in theory and in perform-
ance, but they met on common ground in their attitude toward the
material. In both cases there was a preoccupation with the forms of
the play at the expense, of course, of its meanings. Mr. Gielgud was
obsessed with the acting traditions of Hamlet, and a book recently
published by the Oxford University Press, John Gielgud's Hamlet
by Rosamond Gilder, makes this very clear. Mr. Gielgud himself has
a chapter on "Costumes, Scenery, and Stage Business," in which
he appears to have set up a virtual barricade of stage props between
himself and the lines of the play. He seems always more interested in
his differences or agreements with, say, Sir Henry Irving, as to whe-
ther or not a sword should be worn at a certain point, than in any
less conspicuously physical feature of the production. His connoisseur-
ship of the fine points of past productions of Hamlet seduced him also
into a rather desperate hunt for new readings, new inflections in
familiar speeches. These were sometimes illuminating, more often
tortured and distracting. I do not mean to imply that Mr. Gielgud
had no conception of Hamlet. He did, but it was muffled by his
precious, strained, almost dandified manipulation of the baggage of
the production. His own performance was so decorated, so crammed
with minutiae of gesture, pause, and movement that its general out-
line was imperceptible to an audience.
The rococo style is of all styles probably the most inappropriate

=== Page 40 ===
36

PARTISAN REVIEW

to a production of Shakespeare, and Mr. Gielgud's Hamlet, with all
its refinements, was a kind of climax of the rococo. Indeed, I think
it impossible to do a good production of Shakespeare in terms of the
tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether actor
and producer swallow that tradition whole, or whether they deviate
from it in much or in little, as long as their thinking is bounded by
that tradition the result will be a more or less competent theatrical
barbarism. It is strange that Mr. Gielgud's interest in the stage his-
tory of Shakespeare should not have carried him back to Shakespeare's
own day. If any style of presentation is relevant to Shakespeare's
plays it is surely the style of Shakespeare's period, the style to whose
terms he adapted those plays. Yet Mr. Gielgud, speaking of the first
scene of Hamlet, where the Ghost appears on the sentinel's platform,
is full of pity and condescension for the Elizabethans. "One wonders,"
he says, "how this scene can have been played effectively when it was
originally written. A noisy, fidgeting, mostly standing audience, no
darkness, afternoon sunshine streaming on to a tidy little platform."
The point is that the plays were written with these conditions, con-
sciously or unconsciously, in mind. There being no stage parapher-
nalia to create the "illusion," the lines themselves had to do the work
of scenery, careful costuming and props. It is therefore a tautology
to add externally to Shakespeare what exists already in the very fiber
of his plays, and the heaviness one feels in most traditional presenta-
tions of Shakespeare is the heaviness of repetition, of underscoring.
Moreover, it seems as if Shakespeare were intended to be played fast;
in fact, I can think of no other way in which blank verse can be read
effectively. The caressive attention Mr. Gielgud gave his lines, the
pregnant pauses, the judiciously interlarded stage business, all inter-
fered with the sweep of the verse, and the dramatic sweep of the
play. This kind of acting (which is and has been, by the way, the
prevailing style for Shakespeare) tends to atomize the plays, to reduce
them to collections of small and (again) quite heavy nuggets.

If Mr. Gielgud's production was a sort of ornamental appliqué
imposed on the original, Mr. Welles's Caesar was a piece of plastic
surgery. Mr. Welles, to judge from his interpretations of Macbeth,
Dr. Faustus, and Caesar, has the idea an Elizabethan play is a liability
which only by the most strenuous showmanship, by cutting, doctor-
ing, and modernizing, can be converted into an asset. Mr. Welles's
method is to find a modern formula into which a classic can some-
how be squeezed. In the case of Macbeth, the formula was The Em-
peror Jones; for Dr. Faustus it was a Punch and Judy show; for
Caesar it was the proletarian play. Now of these three it seems to me
only Dr. Faustus was truly successful, for here the formula actually

=== Page 41 ===
VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE 37

corresponded in a way to the spirit and construction of the original,
and one saw a play that was modern and that was, at the same time,
Dr. Faustus. The other two have been what people call "interesting";
they have not been good.

The Harlem Macbeth is now far enough in the past so that even
those who enjoyed it can see that it was at best a pleasant bit of
legerdemain. Caesar, however, is still thought of as an important pro-
duction. This is not the first play of Shakespeare's to have been done
in modern dress, and superficially, therefore, Mr. Welles's stunt of
taking the Romans out of their togas does not sound as novel as on
the stage it seems. What is novel about the production is Mr. Welles's
motive for putting it in modern dress. In the past, when Hamlet, for
example, was done by Basil Sydney in a dinner jacket, the motive was,
apparently, to say something about Hamlet, to show how modern a
character he is. The purpose of the Mercury Theater Caesar, on the
contrary, was to say something about the modern world, to use
Shakespeare's characters to drive home the horrors and inanities of
present-day fascism. Caesar, in fact, was Mr. Welles's personal ac-
knowledgment of the bankruptcy of contemporary playwriting, for in
Caesar Mr. Welles as director tried to construct a modern play of his
own. Any other interpretation of Mr. Welles's production seems to
me nonsensical. I cannot believe that Mr. Welles is, for example, so
ignorant of Roman history that he can offer this as his conception of
what actually happened, that he can equate Caesar with black re-
progressivism, when the exact opposite was
the case. On the other hand, I cannot think Mr. Welles so naive as to
imagine that Shakespeare in 1599 had premonitions of fascism. The
alternative (already mentioned) is that Mr. Welles felt that Julius
Caesar was an adequate rack on which to hang an anti-fascist play.

Only a very superficial understanding of Shakespeare's play could
have permitted Mr. Welles to entertain this notion for long. Julius
Caesar is about the tragic consequences that come to idealism when it
attempts to enter the sphere of action. It is perhaps also a comment
on the futility and dangerousness of action in general. In a non-
political sense it is a "liberal" play, for it has three heroes, Caesar,
Antony, and Brutus, of whom Brutus is the most large-souled and
sympathetic. Shakespeare's "liberal" formula, which insists on playing
fair with all its characters, is obviously in fearful discord with Mr.
Welles's anti-fascist formula, which must have heroes and villains at
all costs. The production of Caesar, consequently, turns into a battle-
ground between Mr. Welles's play and Shakespeare's play. Mr. Wel-
les has cut the play to pieces; he has very nearly eliminated the whole
sordid tragic business of the degeneration and impotence of the re-

=== Page 42 ===
38
PARTISAN REVIEW

publican forces; he has turned the rather shady Cassius into a shrewd
and jovial comedian whose heart is in the right place; he has made
Caesar, whose political stature gave the play dignity and significance,
into a mechanical, expressionless robot; he has transformed the showy,
romantic, buccaneering Antony into a repulsive and sinister dema-
gogue. If he could do all this and still come out with a play that was
consistent and uniformly forceful, the experiment might be forgivable.
There were some things, however, which could not be cut or distorted,
and these by their very incongruous presence, destroy the totality of
the play's effect. The most prominent of these unassimilated chunks
of Shakespeare is Antony's final speech ("This was the noblest Roman
of them all"—too famous, doubtless, to be cut), which in the mouth
of the unreliable monster of the Welles production seemed an un-
convincing and even tasteless tribute to the memory of Brutus.
The Mercury Theater Caesar, it goes without saying, had virtues
that are lacking in the ordinary Shakespearean revival. The simplicity
of the mounting, the calm, conversational tone of the players, an ex-
cellent if wrongheaded performance by George Coulouris as Antony,
were all new and commendable. There were, on the other hand, cer-
tain vulgarities of playing that arose from the oversimplification of a
complex work. Orson Welles's Brutus was cloying and monotonous:
his performance seemed to be based on the single theory that if you
drop your voice two registers below the voices of the other actors you
will give an impression of innocent saintliness.
Yet whatever the technical virtues or faults of the Mercury
Theater company, its energies, like the energies of Mr. Gielgud, seem
to me to be misapplied. If the classics are to play any important rôle
in the American theater, their contents ought at least to be examined.
To encrust them either with traditional ornament or with modern
formulae for playwriting is to shut them off from the world and the
theater. Acting as an art cannot exist by itself; it must feed on the
material of plays. Both Mr. Welles and Mr. Gielgud, who in a peculiar
way are trying "to lead their own lives," to make themselves inde-
pendent of plays, are the potential victims of a sterile cleverness,
which can readily lead them to a very dead end.
Mr. Gielgud and Mr. Welles, unfortunately, represent the
dominant trends in the production of revivals. Only Maurice Evans,
who stands outside both the old school and the new, has given a
Shakespearean performance in which the actor was in harmonious
relation with the play. Yet Mr. Evans has so carefully eschewed ec-
centricities and mannerisms of style that he will not easily attract
imitators. Mr. Welles's forthcoming Falstaff will probably create a
greater stir; my money is on Mr. Evans.

=== Page 43 ===
CONGRESSMEN - FLOWERS - CLENCH

Balcomb Greene

MUCH which has happened to me is of small significance and
much which I think about has no meaning because I am that sort of
a man in 1937. I am close to forty, it was said yesterday by a congress-
man and by a professor and by some small fry of a poet that death
begins at forty. For an American.

Life begins at forty or at sixty for he who has feathered his nest
and who can defend his nest against young men, who can lean on
precedent and his subordinates and his coupons. Friendships.

The Essay on Friendship I do not remember clearly.

I am young in the sense that I lean forward.

Death has begun for me.

“I saw you with a woman yesterday, you old rascal. She had
flowers in her hair. It was spring. You were laughing together. I had
no idea! And you were not married.”

Other men were reading as avidly as I our national literature
of sophistication. The latest book of Cabell was upon their shelves
before it was on mine. What were their names? Erskine? Van Doren?
At evening you read them and told your wife how right Havelock
Ellis was. Remember it? Remember?

“Always meticulous is the idea. Get it? Leave no stone unturned
in assembling your detail. Check all your generalizations. And nuances,
my good fellow, are but a haziness to deceive you.”

I have noted in particular the way your hands all go up toge-
ther. Palm outward and the arm slightly inclined. You are Fascists
and you are Hatred and you are Devotion and from this you do not
vary. Or I have seen you with fists clenched and for a while I have
been with you until some spry fellow among you has said: SEE! HIS
HAND IS TOO CLENCHED! HIS HAND IS NOT CLENCHED!
He's a TROTSKYITE!

And the devil of a brilliant and a muddled man in Mexico came
back to me.

39

=== Page 44 ===
40 PARTISAN REVIEW

I never liked his beard. I liked it-too.
You almost had me arguing that the man is brilliant.
You mustn't talk when you clench your fist.
Or don't clench things when you talk.

"Your justification finally is not moral nor can it be poetic.
Partly it's biological.
"Then there are the classes, the Class Struggle.
"Dialectical Materialism."

It's okay about that dialectical materialism, only don't clench
things when you talk.

"And nuances!"
What about nuances?
"I don't like them and they aren't dialectical."
I know what got YOU sore.
"Rubbish!"
It was that woman.
"Liar!"

She had flowers in her hair and it was spring, we were not mar-
ried and we were laughing together.
I am young in the sense that I lean forward.
Partly it's biological, death has begun for me.

Only don't clench things
When you talk
Talk

=== Page 45 ===
CROSS COUNTRY

D. C. - 1938

THIS is the imperial accent, the Roman rhetoric. Columns in rows,
pediments loaded with ponderous allegories in stone, massive blocks of
masonry-dykes against the foaming tides of the popular life. The star-
lings fling themselves against the stolid façades, life spurts among the
pediments, the graven seals and the pompous republican insignia are
perching places for starlings, a rush of birds bursting like a grenade
against the masonry, cascading over the tile roofs into the sky, distant
rustle of bird voices and the silent stone.

These birds are considered a civic pest. The police have tried shoot-
ing them, they have tried to poison them. They have posted men to shout
at them, to wave things at them, to scare them away. But the starlings
persist. They specially haunt the interminable façades built by Hoover
and Mellon.

D. C. is the city of spittoons. Big brassbellied monsters squat on the
carpeted floors of the Capitol. In the newer buildings, they are small,
neatly enamelled in dark green and white, discreet.

The Room is nightmare tall. The light is utterly dead, too dead even
to be harsh, a corpse pallor shed from bowls high overhead, a light as
cold and sterile as the atmosphere of an extinct planet. One sits softly
on red plush pew benches. A spoken word, if any one dared, would
reverberate as in a tomb, or a bank vault. One feels one's flesh puffing
out in corpse-dropsy. In this Room, smelling faintly of marble, window-
less, pillared, breathing is a slight indiscretion. The nine old men slip
from behind the velvet draperies and settle into their appointed seats.
Justice Cardozo is said to have said: "We ought to ride in on elephants."

The Senators sit at grammar-school desks, with lids that lift up.
(But this is a schoolboy's paradise, where no one "pays attention" and
where special messengers are provided to facilitate note-passing.) A few
wear cutaways. But a Senator is unmistakeable even in a business suit.
An opulent air of authority, an expansiveness of gesture, a wellfed
satiated look. Above all, the Senatorial handclasp.

An elderly man appears at the back of the centre aisle, in his hand
a large envelope with red seals, a burlesque monster of an envelope like

41

=== Page 46 ===
42
PARTISAN REVIEW

the one carried by the Fish Footman of Alice in Wonderland. The
orator of the moment allows himself to be interrupted. "A message from
the President to the Senate," the emissary intones. Another functionary
takes the envelope and bears it to the presiding officer on his dais. The
orator resumes.

Going from the Senate to the House of Representatives is like step-
ping from the Ritz into a flophouse. For the Senate's deep red carpet, a
bluegrey linoleum. For the individual mahogany desks, curving rows of
theatre seats. For somnolent, dignified calm, a monkey-house chatter.
One sniffs for disinfectants.

Democratic government seems to require that those who make the
laws and those who interpret them shall spend a large part of their time
listening, or rather not listening, to other people talk. The Senators don't
listen to each other. They confer on leather settees, they send page boys
on errands, they inspect their fingernails, they read newspapers—while
the Voice goes on and on. The Supreme Court Justices don't listen to
the lawyers. They sit aloft, glazed with ennui, their relief expressing
itself only in the droop of a hand shading a brow.

No one listens because what is being said is rarely of importance.
Or what is said is insignificant because no one ever listens. The data are
all on paper somewhere—or will be presently put on paper. As for the
opinions, these are already well known and neither Senators nor Justices
change their minds easily. The talking seems to be entirely for the sake
of form, a veneer over the crudity of the actual processes of government.
Everybody has his say. Free speech. A fair hearing. In a democracy every
word must be allowed utterance, must be transcribed by the appointed
officials and printed by the Government Printing Office. The U. S. Gov-
ernment is the largest manufacturer of words in the world. The harsh
blue lights burn all night in the interminable pressrooms.

D. C. is also the city of The Record. This is the universal eaves-
dropper. Congressmen make speeches to each other but for The Record.
Senate committees question important citizens to build up The Record.
Documents, stenographic notes, affidavits, statistical tables, poems, news-
paper clippings, business letters are shovelled into the hopper, to come
out, crushed and dried and standardized, in the impersonal Govern-
mental type face on the regulation Governmental paper. The life of our
times happens all over the country, but only such manifestations as by
chance or favor penetrate the consciousness of D. C., only these are pre-
served in The Record. All day and all night the presses thunder, gallop-
ing to keep up with The Record. Already it would take ten thousand
scholars, twenty thousand, a lifetime to read through the accumulation.
And the avalanche of data pours on, a turbid flood that buries as much
as it uncovers, in which the strongest swimmer drowns.

The lawmakers don't swim. Resting elbows on the school desks,
they let the tide stream onward and think of their constituents.

=== Page 47 ===
CROSS COUNTRY 43

Ninety-six desks, and on each a pile of newly printed matter, con-
tinually refreshed by the page boys. Senators with literary tastes must
find it hard to resist a dillettantish toying, to read a paragraph here, a
title page there, and then to pick up another neatly printed pamphlet
fresh from the press. The distraction offered by this constantly renewed
supply of reading matter, brought to one's desk as inevitably as the
seasons change—and with as little personal reaction on one's part—such
an ease of distraction must be debilitating. These pamphlets are State
papers, and it is no doubt a Senatorial duty to read them. But how diffi-
cult to accomplish any sustained thinking, to get anything really done
with all these pleasant interruptions!

The Senators relax, the justices are ostentatiously moribund, but
they know their every movement is being watched, tensely, expectantly,
by boys in knickerbockers. In response to signals which are imperceptible
to the onlooker—a lifted finger, a flicker of the eyebrow—the boys dart
about like swallows. One doesn't like to think what it must do to the ego
of these judges and lawmakers—all this frantic running about at their
slightest nod.

It is an alien language: women with ample classical breasts ordering
their heavy stone limbs according to Beaux Arts rules; horns of plenty,
rams' heads, fasces, acanthus leaves, olive and myrtle, the symbols and
flora of another culture; groups of stone people striking attitudes over
the revolving doors of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce.
The men in snap-brim hats, the women swaying on high heels who enter
these classic portals pay no attention to the myrtle and the fasces. They
are not part of their lives. They are part of no life except the conserva-
tive, defensive, closed life of the buildings they ornament. These build-
ings are fortresses and the enemy is the life of the people.

DWIGHT MACDONALD

=== Page 48 ===
SKETCHES IN LITTLE STEEL

I

CLEVELAND AVENUE S. W. in Massillon, Ohio runs directly into the
gates of Republic Steel's Central Alloy plant. The last house on the left
hand side of the street faces the gates diagonally, and commands a
complete view of them. The house is a two-story, drab, unpainted,
wooden structure, indistinguishable in the main from scores of the
neighborhood's dwellings occupied by steel workers and their families.
After the strike in "little steel" began, this last-houses-on-the-street be-
came the center of activity. It was converted into a strike headquarters
and strike commissary. Here strikers came for assignment to or release
from picket duty, for their coffee and sandwiches, and to hear latest
developments in the strike situation. The establishment consisted of an
office, a general sit-around room, a kitchen, and pantry. The workers'
wives had charge of the place, and managed to keep it clean and orderly.
Then, suddenly, this headquarters was turned into a mass of ruins the
equal of which Il Duce's bombers would find it difficult to duplicate.
The outer front wall was spattered with buck shot and deep gashes
made by tear-gas projectiles. All the windows were broken, and faded
green window shades, with curiously shaped cuts in them, as though
slashed by a maniac, flapped in and out of the window frames like
loosely hanging sleeves of a scarecrow. The interior was aptly described
by the deputy, who escorted newspaper representatives through the
rooms, as a "mess." Without the slightest trace of emotion he kept re-
peating: "It's a mess all right, it sure is a mess." Broken chairs, an over-
turned leather covered sofa, a table with two legs splintered in the
middle, boxes, desk drawers, packages of every size and description were
piled into a fantastically conglomerous heap on one side of the room.
The other side presented an even more grotesque sight. Loaves of bread,
literally hundreds of them, wrapped in their colorful cellophane wrappers,
were scattered over the floor in greater or lesser piles, abandoned to a
kind of merciless uselessness. A small oblong table peered out from under
one of the bread piles and conspicuously displayed a package of ham.
It was impossible to enter the kitchen for the flies which swarmed
in it. One noticed from a cursory glance a refrigerator door torn loose
from one of its hinges, huge pans and kettles in crazy half overturned
position, with their contents spilled over the stove and floor. The room
which served as an office was littered with broken furniture and piles of
torn papers and circulars. Copies of Steel Labor, with their red head-
lines mixed curiously with the bright green circulars and formed a kind
of mad color discord. Several pictures of conventional landscapes and
enlarged photographs hung at odd angles, their glass, and in some
instances their frames, broken. Only one picture escaped this fate. Its

44

=== Page 49 ===
CROSS COUNTRY
45
wholeness in this scene of chaos and destruction appeared downright
uncanny. Even more uncanny was the broad, careless smile which
emanated from it. It was the picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Not more than twenty feet from the house a sizable crimson-red
spot on the pavement attracted passersby. The spot had been scrubbed
and scraped, but there it was still, a stark bit of testimony to the night
of terror. It was a spot made by the blood of Fulgencio Calzada, a
striking steel worker, a union man, a young Spaniard who met his
Franco in Massillon, Ohio. He was shot in back of the head, shot dead
as he was running to safety from an unprovoked attack.
Massillon was slow to respond to the back-to-work movement. Even
after Governor Davey's "tin soldiers" came upon the scene, and offered
safe conduct to work, the men still failed to respond. A more workable
strategy had to be found. The first step consisted in getting several car
loads of professional back-to-work-goers, escort them through the picket
line with the aid of the militia, burn a lot of coal and tar paper so that
plenty of smoke might be seen on the outside, and go through the
motions of pretending that steel was being made, in the expectation
that the strikers would lose courage. A few did, but only a few. The
Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Slavs, and Italians were not fooled. They
knew the mills could not very well make steel without them. Many of
these men do not read English, some are altogether illiterate, con-
sequently they could not read the extravagant newspaper accounts of the
number of people who returned to work. They looked about them, saw
all their cronies out, then looked at the smoke and chuckled.
The situation was becoming critical. Foremen and straw bosses were
sent to workers' homes asking them to return to work. The union
countered this move by sending union committees likewise to make at-
home calls. There were more union men than bosses to do the at-homes
and the back-to-work movement did not move. Open-hearth workers,
and other highly skilled men, were especially urged to stay out, and
without them no steel could be made. On Saturday, July 10, Republic's
Central Alloy Plant in Massillon, employing some 4,500 men, closed
down voluntarily and everyone of the 600 men who had been in the
mill was given the names of two workers whom he had to see during
the week-end and urge to come to work. It was a difficult assignment.
It is hard enough on a steel worker to play the scab role for himself,
but to urge others to do scabbing, is next to impossible. The assign-
ments were either entirely ignored or were unconvincingly presented.
They produced no results. Some of those who had been in the plant
hesitated to go back lest they be reprimanded for not bringing others
with them. When the plant reopened Sunday night, very few workers
showed any inclination to go in.
A court injunction had been procured the week before which limited
pickets to from six to twelve at any any one gate. In compliance with this
injunction the strikers remained away from the gate, but about 200 of
them gathered around the headquarters, and from that post were able

=== Page 50 ===
46 PARTISAN REVIEW

to see the gates and to observe with considerable satisfaction that the
back-to-work movement was practically standing still. At about 11:00
P. M. a troop of 35 men, most of whom were later identified as foremen,
passed across the street in military formation, and moved on toward
the gates. They massed themselves so as to face the strikers, and before
anyone knew what was happening bullets began to fly. It was later
learned that the immediately provoking incident had to do with a
motorist's refusal to turn off his automobile lights. The motorist con-
tended that he had started his motor, was ready to pull out, and there-
fore could not turn off the lights. The deputies, however, would stand
for no argument. "Let's bust 'em up," the leader shouted, and the firing
began.

The gathering in front of the strike headquarters was so startled
that for a few seconds everyone stood still, then they began to run like
deer, hopping, jumping, ducking. The bullets followed them. One was
dead when picked up. Another died the next day. A dozen more were
sent to the hospital. A few nursed their wounds at home, preferring
the risk of improper medical care to that of having their names exposed
to the authorities. Two factors account for the reason why there were
not many more casualties: (a) the deputies had to stop briefly to
replenish their ammunition and many of the people got away during
that interval; (b) most of the deputies were particularly poor marksmen.

The shooting and rapid dispersal of the strikers was only the begin-
ning of a night of terror which lasted until early dawn. Reinforced by
city police from Massillon and Canton, as well as by two car loads of
militiamen, the original squad of deputized foremen went on a sadistic
manhunt. Their leader, who also led in the shooting and bragged about
it, was a man named Harry Curley, a former army officer, reported in
the press as assistant to the Massillon Chief of Police, although there
was no public record of his appointment to that post. After invading
the strike headquarters, and leaving it in the condition already described,
they proceeded to the homes and rooming houses in the vicinity. They
forced their way into these places without warrant, without permission,
without warning. One rooming house on McKinley Avenue, a few
blocks away from the riot scene, had every door in its 28 rooms broken.
The invaders allowed no time or opportunity for the unlocking of doors,
but broke right into the rooms and houses, dragging all male occupants
off to jail.

Those who were in their night clothes were not given an opportunity
to dress. Two men were arrested in their pajamas, several were dragged
off in their bare feet. They were beaten, thrown down flights of stairs,
herded as many as 20 in a single cell, fed on bread and water, questioned
as to their affiliations and citizenship, whether or not they would go
back to the picket line; photographed, fingerprinted, made to sign
waivers so as to immunize the community against suits for false arrest;
then after from 24 to 72 hours were released without charge. Out of a
total of 200 arrests, only 11 charges were filed. These included nine

=== Page 51 ===
CROSS COUNTRY
47
charges of suspicious person, one reckless driving, and one carrying con-
cealed weapons. The weapon in question was a pocket knife.
One of the arrested men, a Greek, was particularly worried over
his arrest because he feared his friends in the old country might hear
about it and think he committed a crime. "I work this country 25 years,"
he explained. "Only once I visited old country. I no like him there,
only now maybe America aint so good either. I never done nothing bad,
and them bosses in the mill know it too. I don't drink, (a bit hesitating-
ly) I no fool around women, all I do is smoke, that's all. Now they
arrest me and ask me all kind foolish question. What's that button you
got? Oh, that, that I say, that's my union button, I belong CIO and I no
fraid say it. You go back picket line?' they say. Sure I go back picket
line. They say, 'you got three day, you go back picket line and next
time maybe you get three year.' I say, I no care I get ten year, I go
back picket line."

II

ALL THROUGH the afternoon loud speakers were shrieking final
speeches and announcements at the crowd gathered in the Wye. It is
Aliquippa's busiest intersection, so named because it is shaped like the
letter Y. Hopewell Avenue, a narrow colorless street, starts from a split
in Franklin Avenue, just where the highway turns in from Pittsburgh,
and extends like the narrow stem of the Y. The two upper stems extend
one in the direction of the main mill gate, the other in the direction of
the business part of the town. People gather at the Wye for all sorts of
reasons. They come here to do their shopping, to get their drinks, to
meet their friends, to pick up gossip, and on this afternoon of May 12,
1937, they gathered to listen to final word from the union crowd, which
came over a microphone attached to the window of a photographic
studio on the second floor of a ramshackle building directly facing the
Wye.
The studio belonged to a shriveled up little Italian of about 50,
nervous, excited, and immensely pleased with his rôle of host. He
maneuvered his camera from one window to another photographing the
crowd, all the while talking to no one in particular, and saying mostly,
"Look at the crowd, my, my, I gonna take 'nother picture, I don't care
couple dollar, I want everybody see big crowd in Aliquippa no fraid
J & L."
There was the usual line-up of speakers. Sub-regional director Joe
Timko, organizers Mallinger, Porter, Bozareli, Smiley, were all there.
They made their usual speeches, and then, just in order to add a new
voice, they called on this author to "say a few words." I picked up the
cue from the other speakers, and touched on several generalities in the
peppery tone set by the others. When I finished and resumed my seat

=== Page 52 ===
48 PARTISAN REVIEW

at the window, I saw a woman motioning to me through the glass door
leading into the hallway. When I asked her what she wanted she mo-
tioned for me to be quiet, led me into "the other room," which served
as a kitchen, dining room, and bedroom, closed the door so that no
disturbance would reach the studio, then shook my hand with feeling
and said, "that was great, that was great. You come all the way from
Pittsburgh to speak to these people. That's great, that's great." She did
not seem to know what else to say, but just then the need for saying
anything disappeared for the host, who turned out to be this woman's
husband, came tearing up the stairs and into the room with a bottle of
coco-cola. "Here," he said, breathlessly, overcome by his rapid ascent,
"your throat must be dry after that fine speech." I had spoken only
about ten minutes, my throat was not in the least dry, and I was totally
unprepared for such solicitude from my audience. However, I took the
drink and began to sip away. "Maybe you want sandich?" he said sud-
denly, rushing toward the door. "I go get you one downstairs." "No,
no," I pleaded. I was not in the least hungry. He seemed disappointed
that I would not let him do something for me. He finally began to tell
the reason why he was eager to see J & L licked.

He had not worked in any mill for a number of years, and had no
particular desire to. But a brother of his had been fired for union activity
and his brother's son, just turning twenty, had never been able to get a
job. The family had been on relief for a long time. "And," added the
host, "thasa why I wanna get even with J & L." He suddenly got a
bright idea. "I gonna take 'nother picture. This sure big crowd."

With him out of the room, the wife became more talkative. "How
do you like this dress?" she asked, pointing with pride to a lavender
two-piece affair with shiny black buttons, which she was wearing. "I
made it myself. Last night I stayed up real late to finish it, because I
wanted to have it for the strike." Later that day, close to midnight,
when some 10,000 people crowded into the Wye, defying a heavy down-
pour of rain, and when my own clothes were drenched, I ran up to the
studio to dry off a bit. The husband was not there. He was "somewhere
on the picket line," and the wife sat at the window, her hands clasped,
her lips pursed, her colorless eyes absorbed in watching the crowd. "It's
wonderful, ain't it?" she gasped. "They all came out. My husband says
there's nobody inside. And they're going to stay out too. You know,"
she said, finally turning her eyes away from the window in order
to address me, "I sure am glad I've got my washing and sewing all done,
because I wanna watch this. I wouldn't get away from here for anything
I don't care if I don't sleep or eat. I want to watch this." During the
following day, as I passed through the Wye, I looked up several times
and ran up twice to rest a bit. Through it all she sat there in her lavender
dress, her hands clasped, lips pursed, staring tirelessly, endlessly, watching
Aliquippa "get even with J & L."

ROSE M. STEIN

=== Page 53 ===
BOOKS

NEW VERSE

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR, AND OTHER POEMS. By Wallace
Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.00.

The poems of Wallace Stevens present an elegant surface. It has
been mentioned often, and misunderstood even more frequently, but its
affiliations are fairly clear. The same dandyism of speech and the same
florid irony is to be found in such writers as James Branch Cabell and
Carl Van Vechten, in certain poems of J. C. Ransom and Conrad Aiken,
even in the prose style of Santayana, in the poems of the forgotten
Donald Evans, and going further back in time, in the moonstruck poems
of Dowson, Laforgue, and Verlaine, the Verlaine of "Fêtes Galantes,"
and the Laforgue who sighs that existence is so quotidian. This is a
formidable family, but the resemblances are unmistakable. They are
also superficial; Stevens has made a significant virtue out of the dubious
verbal habits involved in the tendency from which he seems, in some
way, to have derived his style. He is unquestionably a much better
writer than most of the above authors.

Perhaps it is worthwhile attempting to account for the kinship by
relating Stevens to the milieu which must have surrounded him when he
began to write. As a hypothesis, one may suppose that his style crystal-
lized in the days when The Smart Set was the leading literary magazine,
when one knew French with pride, discussed sophistication, feared to be
provincial, and aspired to membership among the élite. The backwash or
lag of that day is still apparent in the Greenwich Village tearoom, and one
can scarcely doubt that among the admirers of Miss Millay, there are
some who still exist in that period of time. To be a poet at that time
was to be peculiar; merely to be interested in the arts was to take upon
oneself the burden of being superior, and an exile at home. It may be
that as a result of some such feeling, Stevens called his wonderful dis-
course on love Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, thus resorting to French,
and thus mocking, as so often in his titles, the poem itself, as if the poet
were extremely self-conscious about the fact of being a poet. It ought to
be added that the title of the poem in question does, nevertheless, have
a distinct meaning in the poem.

In the present volume, Stevens provides another example, the best
one perhaps, of how much there is in his poetry beneath the baroque
decoration. The surface would seem to be a mask, which releases the
poet's voice, a guise without which he could not speak. But the sentiments
beneath the mask are of a different order. If we rest with our impression

49

=== Page 54 ===
50
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the surface, we get nothing but a sense of play and jocular attitudin-
izing:
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
If we dig into just such usages and then come back to the poem as a
whole, we understand the justice of such verbalism, its necessity, and we
are confronted with a mind of the utmost seriousness, aware and in-
volved in the most important things in our lives.
The imagination and actuality, the blue guitar which is poetry and
things as they are, constitute the antithesis to which Stevens devotes
a varied discourse in the present book. In the title poem or suite of
poems, there are thirty-three short lyrics in which the various relation-
ships between art and the actual world are named, examined, turned
upside down, and transformed into the terms of Stevens' personal vision.
In the opening lyric, we are given the suggestion of some lack in the
nature of poetry. The poet is addressed by his audience:
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are"
The poet replies that the imagination must of necessity alter and distort
actuality, and the audience then extends its demand:
"But play you must
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."
The difficulty is that poetry is somehow insufficient. The incidence of
that insufficiency, its present point, is made evident further on in the
poem:
The earth is not earth, but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell,

But stone, but like a stone, no, not
The mother but an oppressor
It is because of an enforced awareness that his time is one of immense
conflict and derangement that the poet has been compelled to consider
the nature of poetry in its travail among things as they are. The basic
preoccupation, the apprehension which has produced two volumes in two
years, was revealed most explicitly in the previous book, Ideas of Order:
There is order in neither sea nor sun,
There are these sudden mobs of men,

These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how....

=== Page 55 ===
BOOKS
51
This is the way, then, in which Stevens answers these sudden mobs of
men, these sudden clouds of faces and arms: he justifies poetry, he
defines its place, its rôle, its priceless value. Nothing could be more
characteristic of this poet, of his virtues and also of his limitations, and
one cannot think of an answer of greater propriety.

The second sequence of poems, "Owl's Clover," consists of five
meditations in blank verse, all of them concerned with extending the
theme of the fate of art amid terrifying change and destruction, and
envisaging the kind of place toward which history is moving:
Shall you,
Then, fear a drastic community evolved
From the whirling, slowly and by trial; or fear
Men gathering for a final flight of men,
An abysmal migration into possible blue?

The fear is in the foreground and is complicated by the themes which
were Stevens' direct subject in Harmonium, the brutality and chaos of
Nature, which is here figured forth in a new symbol, Africa; and also
the absence of belief, the departure of God, the angels, and heaven. The
attitudes toward what is to come are complex and ambiguous, as they
ought to be. The poet can only regard the possibilities which he fears
and state his hope:

Basilewsky in the bandstand played
"Concerto for Airplane and Pianoforte,"
The newest Soviet reclame. Profound
Abortion, fit for the enchanting of basilisks...
What man of folk-lore shall rebuild the world,
What lesser man shall measure sun and moon,
What super-animal dictate our fates?
As the man the state, not as the state the man.

But finally and unequivocally, in the last poem of the volume, the poet
salutes the men that are falling, for whom God and the angels have be-
come identical with the cause for which they are falling:
Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!

This death was his belief, though death is a stone
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

This is clearly a poetry which flows from a mind in love not only with
the beautiful, but also with the just.

There are, however, distinct limitations also. From beginning to end,
in Harmonium as well as in the present volume, these poems are absorbed
in "responses" to various facts. They are absorbed to such an extent
that the facts can scarcely get into the poems at all. We may compare
Stevens to William Carlos Williams, whom he admires and who may be
said to represent the other extreme, a poet whose whole effort is to get
facts into his poem with the greatest exactitude and to keep everything

=== Page 56 ===
52 PARTISAN REVIEW

else out. One beautiful line in particular in “Owl's Clover” (“The sound
of z in the grass all day”) emphasizes by contrast how little direct ob-
servation there is in Stevens. There is no specific scene, nor time, nor
action, but only the mind moving among its meanings and replying to
situations which are referred to, but not contained in, the poem itself.
“Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds,” another poet writes, “The woman
keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish
gutter.” By thus placing the fact within the poem, the response to the
fact gains immeasurable strength and relevance. In Stevens, however, the
poet "strides" "among the cigar stores, Ryan's lunch, hatters, insurance
and medicines" without convincing the reader that he is walking on an
actual street. There is always an abstractness present; everything is
turned into an object of the imagination. Certain weaknesses result: the
word-play does not always escape the adventitious frivolity for which
it is always mistaken by the careless reader; the poem is sometimes ex-
tended not by a progress of perception, or of meaning, but one word and
one phrase multiplies others; and, to sum up these defects, the poet is
“too poetic.” It may also be that the burden of this style is responsible
for the faults which have always been present in Stevens' blank verse,
a lack of variety in going from line to line, a difficulty with overflow, and
lately, in “Owl's Clover,” a tendency to anapestic substitution which
unsettles the sonorous Miltonic period.

Virtue and defect, however, seem to be inseparable. The mag-
nificence of the rhetoric necessitates an exclusion of narrative elements,
necessitates the whole weight of the verbalism, and, on the other hand,
makes possible the extreme range and freedom of the symbols. The blue
guitar, the statue, the duck, the greenest continent, and above all the
bread and the stone presented here for the first time are figures and
metaphors of a richness and meaningfulness which justify the method.
The poems taken as a whole constitute a special kind of museum, of
a very familiar strangeness, located, because of the extent of the poet's
awareness, in the middle of everything which concerns us.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

READING THE SPIRIT. By Richard Eberhart. New York. Oxford
University Press. $2.50.

Mr. Eberhart is not an easy poet; he is too energetic, which he
luckily cannot help, and he fails at critical points to complete his poems
on the page either as examples of perception or as examples of craft,
which is a failure that, luckily, he can help. It is his predicament, and
ours, that his talent has seldom in the particular poem either found a
satisfactory medium or discovered its governing limits. We feel him

=== Page 57 ===
54 PARTISAN REVIEW

with the struggle to actualise his individual experience of good and evil,
the true and inadequate, the beautiful and flat. This is the business of a
poet, not of a philosopher; and it is a very ambitious sort of poet to be.
This ambition is the seed of the positive side of Mr. Eberhart's
talent; it is the drive, or habit, or trope of his imagination, that keeps
him at the poet's business of making something which can be appreciated
primarily apart from its accidental inspiration that is to say, some-
thing as near the actual or the objective as words can come. The whole
matter may be managed for our present purpose by recalling T. S.
Eliot's comment on Matthew Arnold's remark that "no one can deny
that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world." Mr.
Eliot thought a beautiful world an advantage to mankind in general.
"But," he went on, "the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a
beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both
beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory."
Now that is a good deal to be able to see; it involves an inviolate sen-
sibility, requires a visitation of the Muse, and demands a pretty con-
tinuous mastery of craft. Yet it is just some such profession that Mr.
Eberhart's poetry wants to make; just as it is some formula of escape
from this profession that your poetry of negative talent hints at, and
your pure poetastry even promises to provide.
That Mr. Eberhart comes short is not surprising; and the reason,
facilely thought of, is obvious: he so far lacks a theme adequate to his
He sees it, or perhaps it would be more accurate to put it
that he has never so felt a theme as to require his consistent utmost in
craft. At any rate, the facts are that his poems show unevenness in
execution, strain of sensibility amounting sometimes to falsified emotion,
inconsistency in the modes of language in single poems, relapse into the
banal when the banal is not wanted, and verbal or typographical ex-
periment out of control. Most of these faults are at their worst when the
poems present the problem of imitation in acute form; or put the other
way round the faults tend to minimise themselves when his sensibility is
not deracinated by using other men's modes conspicuously. It is the dif-
ference between gross imitation and genuine imitation. Michael Roberts,
in his introduction to this volume, finds the influence of Blake in "In a
Hard Intellectual Light," and we may perhaps distinguish a sort of
Yeats-Hopkins influence in "Cynic Song"; these are imitation digested
and genuine, and it is flattery to point them out. Gross imitation is some-
thing else again.
One of the most interesting, and certainly one of the most ambitious
poems in the book is "Four Lakes' Days," in which the poet walks four
different landscapes in four different weathers. The sense of landscape
is fresh and stirring and intense; in its best passages, which are often
inseparable from the worst, it revitalises and redirects the sensibility.
Here is the best.
In air-shiver against white wall
A flower, blue, incandescent

=== Page 58 ===
BOOKS
Does dance on the eye-ball;
It makes beauty effervescent.
At Fell Foot (charm) farm. Rob
This, clover-over-the-dales;
Smells of cows; good hob-
Nail, spike my ear! and kissing pails.

Till the twilight folds and all's
As blue as the bluewashed walls.

55

The image in the first four lines is creative observation: it adds to the
ability of the eye to see; and the last two lines carry besides possible
observation their own ominous secret symbolism. As for the other lines
(charm) is inexcusable, and together they form a complex trick which
defeats its own solution by being unreadable.

On the next page, a little apart, I find these two contrasted passages.

Not the woundedness of the soul;
Of desire, the joy. And, soaked all day,
Sky, earth make each other whole,
You between, cold mote in the gray.

So he, I go, we
Slow to the pelt-rain-drum's rally-
Of-loneliness in rained-on weather.

Of which the first forces an apposition which may or may not be, how-
ever strained, an excellent image, but is at least readable verse, with
metrical joints and a common speed; and of which the second is not
verse at all, but at most a kind of shrieking notation, from which we
gather that at this point some emotion, not present, was needed.

I think all the faults listed above, including the banal (charm), are
exemplified in these passages from what I repeat is the most interesting
poem in the book. The whole poem is I think an imitation of Hopkins,
the good passages genuine imitation because Mr. Eberhart had a subject,
and the bad passages gross imitation because Mr. Eberhart lacked his
subject. Hopkins' extraordinary and almost physical grasp of landscape
in words, came, one supposes, from the struggle of an intensely detailed
love to express, not itself, but what was loved; and this in turn came
out of Hopkins' convicted faith that God might best be glorified in the
knowledge of his created things. I do not know what Mr. Eberhart's
motive may be; but I am sure that he does not naturally suffer from the
disability of language of which Hopkins complained and which he tried
to improve. Mr. Eberhart goes the whole hog, disability and all, of
Hopkins on purpose, using an expressive means to substitute for
subject matter what was in Hopkins an expressive obstruction. In Hop-
kins even at his worst things forced themselves together and struck in
the impact an inner light. When Mr. Eberhart imitates Hopkins to get
out of his own necessity, his elements hinder each other and fall apart at

=== Page 59 ===
56

PARTISAN REVIEW

the centre; only necessity could have driven them together. Gross imita-
tion is its own punishment.
I do not charge Mr. Eberhart with insincerity; it would be nearer
home to charge him with insufficient insincerity for the best of poetry
is Jesuits' trade, once the end is in view. It may rather be put that Mr.
Eberhart wants to put more into his verse than he has got ready in
imaginative form, and that he also employs imaginative devices beyond
the scope of the material he actually does have. If he himself wrote the
passages complained of above, and others in other poems drawn from
Hopkins and Eliot, not only would the source of complaint disappear
but the poems would be far more objective. That he could do this is
demonstrated by what he has done; that he wants to do it is either
obvious, or I am wrong entirely about what I feel as his sense of his
profession: which for the practitioner must be above all the obligation
of craft.

R. P. BLACKMUR

POEMS. By Louis MacNeice. Random House. $2.50.

Louis MacNeice is an exact contemporary of Auden's, but at thirty
has been far less prolific. He offers now a collection which retains only
four poems from his first volume, Blind Fireworks, 1929, and adds to
his volume of 1935 about fifteen poems more. He showed his Irish sense
of humor in choosing the title for his early poems "because they are
artificial and yet random; because they go quickly through their antics
against an important background, and fall and go out quickly." The
short musical exercises that he has decided to keep from these pieces
possess what Eliot, in talking about Blake, recognized as the more likely
kind of promise; instead of crude efforts to encompass something gran-
diose they are "quite mature and successful attempts to do something
small." The distance he travelled between the less distinct remainder of
that volume and the Poems of 1935 is considerable. In the two years
preceding his second book he developed a distinguishing style, a rhythm
unmistakably his own. He seems to have profited most from Hopkins
in learning how to give to the conventional line a more resilient conver-
sational tone. But his feeling that Hopkins was wrong to bind his sprung
rhythm to the arbitrary frame of an equal number of accented syllables
for every line has enabled MacNeice to gain a greater fluency, and a
very deft approximation to an actual speaking voice.

Although he was at Oxford at the same time as the group of young
English poets who have hitherto been more widely discussed, MacNeice's
course has been fairly independent of theirs. His is not "fighting" poetry.
His impulse has not been contentious and hortatory like Auden's; he has
not joined Spender in romantic proclamations of faith. He has recently

=== Page 60 ===
BOOKS
57
remarked: "Poets are not legislators (what is an 'unacknowledged legis-
lator' anyway?), but they put facts and feelings in italics, which make
people think about them and such thinking may in the end have an out-
come in action." Such an attitude may seem too passive for much con-
temporary taste; and it has not brought into poetry the wide subject
matter of economics and science which Auden's unflagging curiosity has
explored, nor the more mechanically manipulated culverts and pistons
and other modern properties of Day Lewis. In "Turf-Stacks," written in
1932, MacNeice formulated his lack of political position:
For we are obsolete who like the lesser things
Who play in corners with looking-glasses and beads;
It is better we should go quickly, go into Asia
Or any other tunnel where the world recedes,
Or turn blind wantons like the gulls who scream
And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.
But he has not embraced either of the alternatives offered in that stanza,
though ironically bitter contemplation of his own country has brought
him closer to the last one. He has never made of poetry an easy vehicle
for evasion, for although he has a warm feeling for landscape, he knows
that he always carries a city-bred mind with him. He has, however, set
himself fairly deliberately to writing descriptive poetry, as when he states
in "Train to Dublin":
I give you the incidental things which pass
Outwards through space exactly as each was.
He knows that this demands an exacting discipline. Unlike most other
poets who have been influenced by Eliot he has learned and declared
that "You must walk before you can dance; you can't be a master of
suggestion unless you are a master of description." He has consequently
evolved the neat craft of making the inner coherence of a poem depend
on the subtle and precise interrelationships of a series of things observed.
But success in this kind requires tight-rope technique, for if any image
asserts itself too vividly, the balance is quickly upset, and the whole effect
falls into obtrusive fragments.

Nor is it conceivable that a poet could describe anything exactly as
it was without betraying some point of view towards his material. Mac-
Neice's frequent fascination with catching the effects of sunlight and
smoke suggests that he has the eyes of a painter, but his interest is never
confined merely to recording surface textures. In some passages he may
reveal that
... there is beauty narcotic and deciduous
in the very midst of the sinister chaos of a modern city. But though his
subject matter is seldom political, he is increasingly aware of the social
implications of what he sees. He quoted last fall: "Other philosophies
have described the world; our business is to change it.' Add that if we
are not interested in changing it, there is really very little to describe."
And the close of "Eclogue from Iceland," 1936, to which he travelled
with Auden, finds him in a much more positive mood than that of the

=== Page 61 ===
58
PARTISAN REVIEW
young Irish intellectual who, in "Valediction," had two years previously
turned away from his own country in the manner traditional to "The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." For in the "Eclogue" the ghost
of Grettir tells the two summer visitors that they had better go back to
where they had come from, and that in spite of the enormous odds against
their being able to make anything prevail:
Minute your gesture but it must be made-
Your hazard, your act of defiance and hymn of hate,
Hatred of hatred, assertion of human values,
Which is now your only duty . . .
Yes, my friends, it is your only duty.
And, it may be added, it is your only chance.
Notwithstanding the dramatic tension here, MacNeice's talent so far
seems fundamentally lyrical. In saying that I bear in mind that he has
already published a translation of the Agamemnon and a two-act play of
his own, Out of the Picture. But whereas the translation displays a firm
controlled simplicity that recreates much of the original passion, his own
play is the one occasion where MacNeice seems to have collapsed into
being affected by the least valuable elements in Auden, and has pro-
duced a loosely blurred mixture where it is hard to say whether the
intention is satire or farce, since nothing comes through clear. Moreover,
in his poems, MacNeice's continual subject is Time, conceived wholly in
the lyric mode of dwelling on the moment's evanescence, as when he
advises a Communist that before he proclaims the millenium, he had
better regard the barometer-
This poise is perfect but maintained
For one day only.
Both his mind and imagery are so possessed with this theme that he
finally tries to shake off his preoccupation by affirming that he does not
want always to be stressing either flux or permanence, but to keep his eye
"only on the nearer future." From the stuff of that "nearer future" he
makes his most balanced and proportioned poems.
In an ode for his son, which owes something to Yeats' "A Prayer
for my Daughter," he would ward off from him the desire for any abso-
lute "which is too greedy and too obvious." MacNeice cannot accept the
"easy bravery" of being "drugged with a slogan," and can hand on to
his son neither decalogue nor formula but only symbols, and those only
so far as he can feel them emerge from close and concrete samples of
experience. Most of all he would pray:
let him not falsify the world
By taking it to pieces;
The marriage of Cause and Effect, Form and Content,
Let him not part asunder.
The desire for such fusion has found fulfillment in the architectural
structure of many of his longer poems, and it is the chief evidence for
MacNeice's skill as an artist that his clearest successes are in their com-

=== Page 62 ===
BOOKS 59
plex harmonies rather than in his simpler short pieces. In "Homage to
Clichées," for instance, he has devised and developed a series of repeated
images to celebrate his delight in the familiar: the expected response
of his companion is elicited as though by stroking a cat, or is angled
from the stream of their conversation as the fish swim into the net and
the drinks swim over the bar. Here his observations intermesh so intri-
cately that even though you can take surprised delight in a single ex-
ample:
... an old man momentously sharpens a pencil as though
He were not merely licking his fur like a cat,
it becomes the best tribute to the unity which the poet has created that
no adequate illustration is possible short of the entire poem. For here his
attitude is less bald than in the somewhat stagey declaration in his "Epi-
logue" that he drinks Auden's health before "the gun-butt raps upon
the door." For, in "Homage to Clichées," the perishable stuff of the
everyday life which he relishes is embodied with such warm resilience
that the undertone of the menacing future which he expects reverb-
erates far more movingly than it would by means of any bare direct
statement.

Where his dependence on oblique and symbolic images can fail him
is when they are not reinforced by sufficiently mature experience. This
is the trouble with the pictures of contemporary man and woman near
the end of the "Eclogue from Iceland." The details by which they are
presented do not bite deeply enough into actuality, they are too private
and trivial. The fact that this can be the case in one of MacNeice's
latest poems will be disturbing to those readers who believe that the
artist must progress and offer with each new year a better-appointed
model. But, despite the clarification and firming of his social attitude,
it cannot be said that MacNeice's graph has gone continually upward.
He seems to have remained on about the same level from the time that
he hit his individual stride five years ago, and he may not yet have writ-
ten a solider poem than the sardonic conversation between a city-dweller
and a country-dweller, "An Eclogue for Christmas," in 1933. It must also
be added that in spite of his realization, on the Iceland trip, that further
travel could be productive only of more souvenirs and "copy," 1937
found him, not following Grettir's advice, but in the Hebrides, evolving
another detached and sensitive descriptive poem about those islands.
It is undoubtedly true that MacNeice's conversational style is less
socially useful to the needs of our day than the public speech that may
be developed from Auden's exciting rhetoric. Nor does MacNeice possess
the exuberance and inventiveness which Herbert Read believes Auden
to have brought back into English poetry for the first time since Brown-
ing's death. On the other hand, MacNeice's richest resource is sug-
gested in a curious remark which he made about Day Lewis, that he is
an inferior poet to Auden "perhaps because his vision is purer and more
consistent." He recognizes that Lewis, though doctrinally correct, can
fall into both priggishness and diffuseness by his humorless preaching

=== Page 63 ===
60
PARTISAN REVIEW

for the cause. MacNeice's own awareness that life “is incorrigibly plural,”
his deeper immersion in its complexities, his more unchecked reliance on
the evidence of his senses, at times result in a vague softness. He does not
have anything like the extraordinary range of technical dexterity with
which Auden seemingly can take up or burlesque almost any kind of
tradition from Skelton to Tennyson and Kipling. But MacNeice's control
is far more matured, he rarely indulges in thin tours de force or slipshod
virtuosity. And if the measurement is not by “promise,” by brilliant pas-
sages standing out from obscurity, but by whole poems, which can be
tested line for line and re-read with accruing satisfaction, MacNeice's
performance so far is ahead of that of his contemporaries.
F. O. MATTHIESSEN

RISPOSTES

Is Naturalism Exhausted?
Writing about the contemporary
short story in the winter number of
The Southern Review, Mr. Howard
Baker has made explicit, in terms of
an assault on naturalism, some of the
dissatisfaction with the current state
of American fiction which has of late
been stirring the critical air. It was to
be expected that this dissatisfaction
should take the shape of a revolt against
the sway of the naturalist method.
Manifestly the revival of some form
of symbolism (or its extension into
some new form) is burgeoning in the
younger generation. In this connection
one hears the name of Franz Kafka
pronounced with awe in various circles
as a possible source of fresh inspiration.
And, in truth, more than any other
European writer who has recently come
to the attention of Americans, Kafka
suggests the rich potentialities of the
fable and of symbolic conceptions. Mr.
Baker likewise professes to see the
genius of Kafka contending with the
benighted naturalists; and among the
signs and portents of new departures in
prose he lists the short stories of Eleanor
Clark and Delmore Schwartz. To Mr.
Baker's sparse list one might add other
items of recent date that tend to con-
firm this change of literary purpose. In
their essay, “Literature in a Political
Decade” (New Letters in America),
William Phillips and Philip Rahv ex-
coriated the perennial devices that
American fiction adopts as substitutes
for consciousness and imagination. In
the PARTISAN REVIEW for December,
1937, William Troy, reviewing a re-
issue of Germinal under the significant
title “The Symbolism of Zola,” at-
tempted the difficult feat of rescuing
the father of naturalism from the en-
gulfing sands of his own system. And
not long ago the New Masses opened its
pages to a controversy occasioned by
Granville Hicks' alarm over the inroads
that pessimism is making among the
younger writers—which showed that in
that camp too the virus of anti-natural-

=== Page 64 ===
RIPOSTES 61
ism has infected some of the more
critical spirits.
In this period, when the blight of
political meddling in behalf of narrow
party interests makes so much thinking
about literature insincere and super-
ficial, it is good to see vital literary dif-
ferences again coming into the open.
But do the sins of naturalism really
offer a sufficient explanation of the
failures of present-day writing? Natural-
ism needs to be put on the defensive,
but it seems to us that the attack on
it, essentially healthy insofar as it pro-
mises a renewal of the creative im-
pulse, has not transcended the formalist
approach to the problem. It is not
primarily a matter of placing any one
method of representing experience on
the expurgatory index. Compared to
most American practitioners of natural-
ism, Zola was surely a titan of
literary art; and a work as power-
ful as *Studs Lonigan* points once
more to the dangers inherent in a
fetishiastic attitude to any given creative
method, whether through this attitude
we negate or affirm it. Variety, curiosity,
and amplitude of means all these are
lacking in the American novel as now
written. Its imagination lurks in am-
bush instead of walking in the broad
light of day, and its moral and intel-
lectual sensibilities have neither grown
singly nor have they intertwined into a
net to catch those monstrous modern
presences that swim in the American
deeps. Patently what is at fault here
weighs heavier in the scale of deter-
minism than a possibly mistaken or in-
adequate method of resolving material
and fashioning it for creative uses.
Provisionally, we tend to agree with
Mr. Baker that "the back of natural-
ism is being broken in many different
ways" and that "a critical, intellectually
organized" point of view on the part of
the novelist or short story writer re-
quires a less primitive mode of repre-
sentation. Also, we were particularly in-
terested in his statement that natural-
ism "seems to have become the par-
ticular heritage of the Marxists." Be-
fore any such vague opinions, however,
can assume the dimensions of a critical
position it becomes necessary to analyze
in some detail the social and cultural
conditions that make for a rise and
decline of naturalism. There are ample
data for such an analysis; but so far
more questions have been raised than
answered. The term itself strikes us as
too loose to describe with any degree
of exactness the diverse works cited as
examples of naturalist formlessness and
indifference to values. In fact, the
whole subject, with its many ramifica-
tions, ought to be done full justice in
a longer and more elaborate discussion.
We promise the readers of PARTISAN
REVIEW such a piece in an early issue.

Politics and Partisan Review

We might have guessed that the
Socialist Appeal, organ of the Trot-
skyists, would criticize our editorial
policy, challenge our concept of in-
dependence, and charge us with
ignoring the claims of practical politics.
We could not have foreseen, however,
that our gentle contemporary, Poetry,
A Magazine of Verse, would come for-
ward to quiz us on the same score.
Both publications seem well-disposed
towards PARTISAN REVIEW in general;
yet both of them, reviewing the edi-
torial statement in our December issue,
ask substantially the same question: Is
It Revolutionary?
Poetry pays its respects to our literary
content, then editorializes as follows:
Formerly associated with the Com-
munist Party, this magazine now
pledges itself to fighting "the party-
line in literature." Though some of the
contributors are adherents of Trotsky,
there is no evidence that the review
is an organ of Trotskyism as its
opponents charge; nor is there anything
to indicate a sectarian bias in the plain-
ly mugwump attitude of the opening
editorial. The question arises, however,
whether a magazine professedly revolu-
tionary in character can avoid having
some definite political program, either
explicit or implied. Taken at its face
value, the policy of the PARTISAN
REVIEW seems to boil down to this:
that literature, for the present, should
lead not to action but to more liter-
ature. That may or may not be an ex-

=== Page 65 ===
62 PARTISAN REVIEW

cellent policy. But is it revolutionary?
We answer Poetry as follows: our
program is the program of Marxism,
which in general terms means being
for the revolutionary overthrow of cap-
italist society, for a workers govern-
ment, and for international socialism.
In contemporary terms it implies the
struggle against capitalism in all its
modern guises and disguises, including
bourgeois democracy, fascism, and re-
formism (social democracy, Stalinism).
As for the rôle of literature in the
revolutionary process, we are frankly
skeptical of the old imperatives. Novels
and poems, we think, are rarely weapons
in the class struggle in a sense direct
enough to justify the phrase. Marx-
ism is a guide to action, certainly; and
Marxism can be a guide to literature,
but whether literature itself is, can be,
or should be, typically a guide to action
is one of the problems that PARTISAN
REVIEW is dedicated to explore. For
the rest, a literature which "led to
action" without at the same time lead-
ing "to more literature," would not,
we are convinced, be literature at all.

The Socialist Appeal regards our
break with Stalinism as the most sig-
nificant fact about PARTISAN REVIEW.
We are a sign of the times, of "a revolt
against Stalinism among the intel-
lectuals." They concentrate on the poli-
tical implications of Ripostes and the
editorial, and they ignore completely
the 70-odd pages of literary material
between the two departments. Approv-
ing our rejection of the Stalinist
practice of equating literature with
factional politics, they nevertheless
charge us with having "swung over to
the opposite extreme." In their opinion,
we "propose to remain independent, i.e.
neutral and indifferent, not towards
politics in general, but only towards
the revolutionary politics of the labor
movement." A few more paragraphs
and we are "culpable of ignoring, and
thus denying in practice, the close
bond" between literature and politics.
And finally we are charged with hold-
ing a "conception of its (literature's)
absolute independence." So the Appeal,
by equating independence with indif-
ference, lands us in pure estheticism.
All because we have failed editorially

to decide which "among the tendencies
struggling for supremacy within the
ranks of the American working class
most clearly and consistently fights for
the ideas, interests, and aims of Social-
ism and most faithfully carries on the
best traditions of Marxism? Which must
be considered the vanguard of the
revolutionary movement?"

Let a poet who is also a member of
the Trotskyist organization correct
their over-zealous simplifications and
answer their ultimatist demands. The
following is a letter addressed to the
Appeal by John Wheelwright, who sent
us a copy. So far the Appeal has failed
to publish it.

To the Editors of the
Socialist Appeal:

On December 4 you devoted nearly
a page to the PARTISAN REVIEW. "We
salute," you began, but your salute
turned into a thumbnose. If your in-
tention be to win the Partisans over,
your lack of tact is in sad contrast to
the Partisan's handling of Stalinist
centrism in its review of Horace
Gregory's anthology, New Letters.

Your review shows no knowledge of
more than the first 4 and the last 3
pages of the magazine, and you must
merely have skimmed through them,
for your say that the Editor blames the
New Yorker for being petty-bourgeois,
while as a matter of fact, it is the New
Masses and the Daily Worker which
he thus accurately characterizes. But
where he is mistaken, you do not cor-
rect him.

"Marxism in culture," he says, "is
first of all an instrument of analysis and
evaluation; and If in the last instance
it prevails over other disciplines, it does
so through the medium of democratic
controversy." This falls short of a
revolutionary view of letters. Marxism
is, first, a guide to act. It prevails over
other cultural disciplines because its aid
is indispensable to the creative imagina-
tion. Reciprocally, the creative imagina-
tion guides political action. Such simple
corollaries could have got your reviewer
through the body of the magazine.

Abel on Silone and Wilson on

=== Page 66 ===
RIPOSTE S
63
Flaubert discuss problems of authority
which press brutally upon us. No one
in the labor world would profit more
from considering them than your re-
viewer. His thorough negligence im-
plicates our Party not only in a breach
of literary manners, but as well in a
violation of professional morals.
Matters even more serious are at
stake. This review is unsigned. It there-
fore carries the formal weight of an
Appeal editorial. But it does not speak
for Left Socialism.
The PARTISAN REVIEW has been
founded to fight the tendency to con-
fuse literature and party politics. The
mere rumor of so independent an at-
titude brought forth (to the delight of
nations) such Daily Worker fits of anti-
Trotskyism which to describe would in-
volve the use of a lexicon of mental
pathology. Your editorial pointed out
the political weakness of the Partisan's
an-Trotskyist retort. But your intricate
distortion of its intention is that the
Review proposes to "remain neutral and
indifferent only towards the labor
movement and independent of revolu-
tionary Marxist politics with toplofty
indifference and alienation turning their
backs upon political questions," just
what the Daily Worker with its limited
vocabulary was trying to say: "slander-
ers of the working class, turncoats,
agents provocateurs, strike-breakers."
This identity with the Daily Worker's
view towards conacientious persons
whom they cannot control is far from
accidental. Your view is that "Accord-
ing to the correct Marxist position,
there need be no discord between re-
volutionary politics" (our National Of-
fice) "and revolutionary literature"
(the PARTISAN REVIEW's office). "All
depends upon establishing a correct
working relationship between them and
their organizational expressions." With
Stalinism's history behind us, no one
can be surprised when this so correct
threat gives way to meaching plea: "It
will be easy enough to find fruitful con-
ditions for collaboration. A revolution-
ary organ should be open to the best
productions of living literature, regard-
less of the special political views of
their authors"!!!
Once a Trotskyist watchdog is ken-
neled in the Partisan's office desk, the
doors of literature open upon vista after
vista of opportunism. In all conscience,
this is something worse than literary
Stalinism has yet got at. Contrariwise,
the PARTISAN REVIEW pays regard to
the politics of its authors in order to
open up the best of contemporary
literature, and, even without the col-
laboration of our political organizers,
to bring proletarian politics to a Marx-
ist position.
Graciously, you concede "complete
autonomy for the workers in the arts
and sciences within their own fields."
What are these cut and dried cate-
gories? Who charts these realms as
Pope Paul divided the terrestrial globe
between Spain and Portugal? Who is
being toplofty now? You say, "Politics
dominates everything in our world, in-
cluding literature." This is an error
which Bonaparte phrased better: Politics
is the modern destiny. William Blake
said: Art does not follow empire. Em-
pire follows art. Scientific Socialism
finds Blake and Bonaparte equally at
fault in special pleading. Mode of pro-
duction underlies all culture; literature
and politics respond autonomously;
each retarded, each advanced by the
other.
But you, with high authoritarianism,
declare it necessary for a literary cir-
cumference to have a political center
from which all the rest logically
radiates. O, formal pundit! The
PARTISAN REVIEW will get a super-
logical center empirically by methods
of objective test, finding chords and
diameters of the circles, spheres and
spirals of a reality beyond yours. It
must do so without a political center
if yours prove unfit.
The brain behind the hand that
wrote your editorial is the brain behind
the tongue which would with proletarian
vs. intellectual demagogy transform
Trotskyism into a Stalinesque interna-
tional slum.
JOHN WHEELWRIGHT

=== Page 67 ===
64 PARTISAN REV
Mass Criticism
In its issue of January 12, the New
Republic prints a round-robin letter
signed by fifteen people from East St.
Louis, Ill., which makes a personal and
scurrilous attack on the literary reputa-
tion of James T. Farrell. Such an at-
tack, when made by an individual,
might, of course, be a spontaneous ex-
pression of his literary taste. But a letter
of this kind, signed by a large group
of people, takes on the aspect of an
organized campaign of vilification. Re-
gardless of the merit of Mr. Farrell's
work-and we do not agree with the
East St. Louis camarilla-we deplore
the publication of such a letter. Unless
the New Republic is sponsoring a new
form of mass literary criticism, it seems
to us unfair to select one writer for
this type of "special attention."

Letters in Brief
Babette Deutsch writes (New York
City): "It has been a pleasure to read
the first two issues, both for the interest
of the contents and the admirable
character of the policy." . . . From
Ezra Pound (Rapallo, Italy) a query:
"Marxism, ameliorated or sunk?" Our
reply: "Ezra, come home: all is for-
given." . . . R. P. Blackmur (Boston)
and Leonard Brown (Syracuse) protest
the review of Kenneth Burke's Attitudes
Towards History in our December
issue. Mr. Blackmur finds it "irrelevant
to what the book actually contains."
Mr. Brown calls it a "marvellous study
in feints." David Haskell (Brooklyn)
feels, on the contrary, that Mr. Hook
took Mr. Burke "too seriously." . . .
Nathan Asch reminds us that in his let-
ter to us, printed in our January issue,
he wrote: "Except for the Farrell piece,
I think the first issue is swell." . . .
Richard Eberhart (Southboro, Mass.)
liked James Agee's "Lyrics" in the
December issue. ". . . he is the only
U. S. poet his age who knows much
about music-something a good many
of the rest of them could study to ad-
vantage." . . . Z. Zacharia (Mt. Ver-
non, N. Y.) asks: "Are you sure you
are not pro-Hitler?" and cancels his
subscription. . . . Another cancellation
from Betty Hudson (Winnepeg). "Take
your magazine back to the underworld
where it belongs," she writes. . . . From
William Pillin (Santa Fe): "I want to
say that the first two issues of PARTISAN
REVIEW are the best two issues of a
revolutionary magazine I have ever
seen." And David C. DeJong (Pro-
vidence) finds the magazine "far above
expectations, which were fond enough."
. . . From George Marion O'Donnell
(Belzoni, Miss.): "I approve whole-
heartedly of the fight you are making
against those who would make liter-
ature the ancilla ecclesiae to some of
the contemporary political religions."
. . . Saul Shapiro (Montreal) approves
of everything but the proof-reading and
the art section. Of the latter he writes:
"I would recommend something less
aesthetic and more to the general taste.
A few good lively cartoons, shall we
say, that pack a real social punch." . . .
Dorothy Dudley (New York City) likes
"the tone of the magazine which is
creative and aesthetic." . . . From
James Laughlin, IV (editor, New Direc-
tions, Norfolk, Conn.): "I want to
tell you that I think the two issues of
PARTISAN REVIEW have made it the
best magazine now being published. I
hope you can keep it like that." . . .
From Sydney J. Harris (editor The
Beacon, Chicago) a warning: "I should
guard against being too esoteric, if I
may venture the suggestion. Most
periodicals of your type end up with
readers consisting solely of the editors'
relatives. I hope that PARTISAN REVIEW
won't meet this fate."