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PARTISAN REVIEW
PR

Volume II, No. 6 1935
January-February

© Trustees of Boston University

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PARTISAN REVIEW
A Bi-Monthly of Revolutionary Literature
Published by the John Reed Club of New York

VOLUME II, No. 6 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1935

A PLACE TO LIE DOWN 3 Nelson Algren
THE PORT OF NEW YORK 10 Alfred Hayes
LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS 14 Andre Malraux
BENEFITS OF AMERICAN LIFE 20 James T. Farrell
TWO POEMS 29 Kenneth Fearing
FORM AND CONTENT 31 Wallace Phelps
FOR ERNST THAELMANN 40 Richard Goodman
THE SCAB 42 Arkady Leokum
IF A MAN BITES A DOG 47 Edwin Seaver
CITY OF MONUMENTS 53 Muriel Rukeyser
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 54 Ben Field
THE FRONT 74 Harold Rosenberg
I MEET SCOTLAND YARD 75 Nathan Adler
A SIGNIFICANT REVOLUTIONARY
NOVEL (review) 82 Edwin B. Burgum
NARCISSUS (review) 84 Philip Rahv
EXILES FROM REALITY (review) 86 Samuel Putnam
THE DEPRESSION GENERATION
(review) 89 Alan Calmer
OLD HORIZONS (review) 91 William Pillin
MAGAZINE REVIEW (review) 92 Gertrude Diamant
THE COMING WRITERS CONGRESS 94

Editorial Board:
LEON DENNEN, KENNETH
FEARING, HENRY HART,
ALFRED HAYES, WALLACE
PHELPS, PHILIP RAHV,
EDWIN ROLFE, EDWIN
SEAVER.

Address all communications to
PARTISAN REVIEW, 430 Sixth
Avenue, New York City. Subscrip-
tions $1.25 for six issues, $2.50 for
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be accompanied by stamped, self-
addressed envelopes.

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CONTRIBUTORS

NELSON ALGREN will be remembered for his Storm in Texas in Partisan
Review, No. 4. Vanguard will publish his first novel, Somebody in Boots,
early this spring. . . . ALFRED HAYES is now preparing a volume of poetry
for publication. . . . ANDRE MALRAUX, author of Man's Fate, was a mem-
ber of the French delegation to the Soviet Writers Congress last September.
On his return he was one of the speakers at a mass meeting of 2000 people
to which the delegation reported on the Congress. . . . JAMES T. FARRELL
is now revising the manuscript of the third novel in the Studs Lonigan
series. . . . KENNETH FEARING is an editor of Partisan Review. . . .
WALLACE PHELPS has published literary criticism in the New Masses,
Dynamo, The Symposium, and most of the previous issues of Partisan
Review. . . . RICHARD GOODMAN contributed to the recent New Republic
anthology of modern British poets. He is writing for Left Review, organ
of the Writers International in England. . . . ARKADY LEOKUM is a new-
comer to revolutionary literature. He is a student and lives in New York
City. . . . EDWIN SEAVER is the editor of Soviet Russia Today. We are
looking forward to his novel, Between the Hammer and the Anvil, which
is scheduled for early publication. . . . MURIEL RUKEYSER has appeared
in the New Masses, The Magazine, Dynamo and other periodicals. . . .
BEN FIELD has recently returned from a visit to the Soviet Union. He
is a regular contributor to revolutionary publications. . . . HAROLD ROSEN-
BERG's criticism and poetry has appeared in The Symposium, Poetry: A
Magazine of Verse, and other journals. His poem in this issue is his first
in a proletarian magazine. . . . NATHAN ADLER has appeared in a previous
issue of Partisan Review and has published stories and movie criticism in
the New Masses. . . . EDWIN BERRY BURGUM is a frequent contributor
to Partisan Review. . . . PHILIP RAHV has published in Left, New Masses,
International Literature, The Little Magazine, and other periodicals. . . .
SAMUEL PUTNAM was the editor of New Review, an expatriate magazine.
. . . ALAN CALMER is one of the editors of the anthology of American
revolutionary literature which International Publishers are preparing for
early publication. . . . WILLIAM PILLIN has appeared in Left Front, New
Masses, Dynamo, The Windsor Quarterly, and other periodicals. He
lives in Chicago. . . . GERTRUDE DIAMANT is a frequent contributor to
Partisan Review.

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A PLACE TO LIE DOWN

Nelson Algren

Mopin' down the ties, feelin' mighty low
Got to keep movin', got no place to go
Just one more hungry poor sonofabitch
Wond'rin why he goes hungry in a country so rich

TWO HUNGRY BUMS in Texas, mopin' down the S. P. ties.
On either side of the tracks stretched the Texas prairie, half-
unseen now under a fog. Within the fog a cowbell tinkled, near
at hand and coming nearer. The black 'bo drew a battered
pack of cigarettes out of his hip pocket.
"Say," he asked his white companion, "You know why
they made Ol' Gol's in the first place?"
The white didn't know.
"To keep niggers an' Jews from smokin' camels is why."
They both laughed, without strength, and moped on.
The Negro paused, stood on one leg like a heron, and
slipped off his right shoe. His toes were encrusted with a fish-
like scale; he rubbed them with gaunt knuckles until brownish
chips brittled off onto the ties.
"It itches," he complained, "It itches like the crabs."
The white offered advice: "Y'all ought to wear a white
sock on that. On anythin' like that."
When they reached El Paso streets were deserted; but
morning was breaking over Juarez, and an empty C.C.C. truck
rolled past as though to herald an empty dawn.
Neither boy knew where this city's breadline, if any, was
to be found; so they walked on aimlessly. Once they paused in
a doorway while the Negro removed his shoe once more, and
again scraped his knuckles with his toes. Above them an un-
shaded night bulb still burned feebly, casting a sickly greenish
glow across a staircase leading up to nowhere. A woman passed
the doorway, head down and hurrying through the rain along
the unlovely southern street.
"I'm tired as a old hound, aint you?" the Negro asked as
he scraped.

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PARTISAN REVIEW
“Yeah,” the other answered, “Bummin’ takes all the tallow
out o’ mah pole. Ah ain’t been eatin’ so reg’lar o’ late, neither.
What’s yore name, nigger?”
“Call me Mack. What’s yours?”
“Call me Tex.”
“If I jest had a sock like you said, Tex, do y’ think it’d
keep it from rubbin’ some?”
Tex surmised that this must be a northern Negro, to judge
by his speech.
The fog lifted a little, and the El Paso sun came through.
They came to a park with a picket-fence going around and
around; there were teeter-totters for small children and swings
for smaller children; and at one end was a net whereon two
large men swung and belammed one small red ball. A stretch
of grass looked dry for sleep here. The ‘boes found a gate,
and entered.
The small grass bent itself between Tex McKay’s fingers.
Long shadows trembled in the light. . . .
“Ah better shake this shine,” Tex counseled himself.
Surreptitiously, the Negro began bathing his foot by wrig-
gling his naked toes beneath a dripping bush. He did this for
several minutes, covertly, then declared his foot well.
“But a sock. . . . If oney I had a white sock now.” His
eyes closed even as he muttered, and in a moment he was sleep-
ing soundly, one arm in a ragged sleeve outflung and the other
shielding his eyes, as though fearing in sleep to be struck.
“Ah ought to got me a coat fo’ the night that’s comin’,”
Tex thought, watching sunshadow between half-closed lids. Sun-
shadow made him think of wet lengths of yellow ribbon stretched
flat aslant the grass to dry. Some lengths were narrow and
some were quite wide, some intertwined and became one, then
wriggled away into many, all yellow-wet and delicate across
green shadowgrass.
The Negro wriggled his toes, in sleep. Tex’s own feet
had gone sockless for months, he too was very tired; but even
as he felt himself dozing off he became aware of someone com-
ing toward him. Then a silver badge above small boots, (a row
of brass buttons and a neck on thighs swung up a winding cin-
dered path twirling a club-on-a-cord like a swagger-stick. Tex
saw him coming, shoved Mack, and ran. From behind the
picket fence, safe outside, Tex watched. Boots budged Mack
until he rolled over, moaning like a sick man. He was sweating

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A PLACE TO LIE DOWN 5
in sleep, his mouth drooled saliva, then he woke with a start,
his eyes budging out; there was, for one moment, no flicker of
understanding in his eyes.
"White-folks' park, nigger. Git a-goin' 'for ah fan yore
fanny."
He twirled his club-on-a-cord significantly, boy-fashion,
threatening.
Tex waited on the street. He'd like to josh the nigger a
little now. But when the Negro joined him they walked on
silently, and Tex said nothing at all.
On a street lined with radios competitively blasting the air
into splinters, they sat down on a Keep-Our-City Clean box.
Both were hungry enough to chew their tongues; but they were
both too weary to think consistently even about food. Tex
rested his feet on the curbstone and watched the gutterflow swirl
past.
Much was being borne on that gutter-tide: a frayed cigar
butt came past first; then a red beercork; and then, its pages
flung wide in a disgraceful death, a copy of Hollywood Gossip
came floating by. It lay flat on its back, a whore-like thing.
Tex sniped the cigar and the magazine, crushed tobacco onto
a dry page, and rolled a rude cigarette. Smoking, he loked at
the magazine's pictures. One page bore a picture of Douglas
Fairbanks, Jr., in a stove-pipe hat, hugging two girls in one
piece bathing suits. Out of Fairbanks' ears Tex fashioned four
long cigarettes, but the figures of the girls in the bathing suits
Tex McKay preserved, studying them as he smoked.
The cigarettes were strong, hence good; he offered Mack
one, but the boy shook his head as though he were too tired
even to smoke. To make a few more, Tex ripped one of the
bathing girls up the middle. He had an odd feeling when he did
that, and looked through the book for more bathing girls' pic-
tures; but there was no other dry page, and he began to feel
tired again.
As he sat Tex recalled that, the last time food had passed
his lips, he had been in some place where there was snow on the
streets. But he could not remember the name of that place,
though his mind sought sleepily and long. Somehow, much
seemed to depend upon the remembering: Chicago, Little Rock,
Memphis too. His brain stopped on Railroad street in Baton
Rouge, and could go no farther. So he dropped the magazine
in the gutterflow, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and

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6 PARTISAN REVIEW
poked the Negro. Mack followed Tex mechanically. When
Tex turned, he turned; when Tex paused, he paused; when Tex
hurried forward, he hurried forward beside him. Only once
as they went did he speak. 'Bummin' takes 'most ever'thin' outen
a feller, don't it?" he asked as they turned a corner.
Tex McKay nodded, "Sho' do. Knocks all the tallow outen'
yore pole." And to himself: "Ah better shake this shine, we
might get picked up."
When they reached a second Keep-Our-City-Clean box
Mack wanted to remove his shoe again; but his fingers slipped
around his ankle like a little child's fingers. So McKay took
it off for him, kneeling as the other sat; he pulled a wad of
paper out of the box and wadded it into the shoe's torn places.
Beside him a barefooted Mexican boy holding a small girl by
the hand stood and watched with a cynic's air. A woman with
furred shoulders went by on high heels, her head in the air and
her nose sniffing elegenatly at the sun; as though about to snort
green phlegm skyward. As Tex struggled to get the shoe back
on Mack's foot, someone behind him spat in the gutter across
his shoulder; he saw the gob, like a speckled bug, being borne
away on the stream. People were gathering behind him; it was
time to be getting on.
They had not gone half a block when Mack stopped and
complained, half-accusingly, like some petulant little pickaninny:
"It hurts. You just made it worse you did. Now it hurts
worst." But they could not stop here, there was no place here
to stop; and Mack continued to complain with a rising irascibility.
"If oney I had a sock. A white sock mind you. Hev you
got that kind?"
That was the last thing he said to show he knew that Tex
was still with him; after that he seemed slowly to lose awareness,
he became like a man mildly drunk or doped. Tex had not
known what havoc the simple fact of over-tiredness could wreak.
Only a few hours before he had picked up with a husky young
buck; now there plodded beside him a half-helpless black boy
who depended on him to put on his shoes. Tex began to feel
a mild responsibility.
Mack stopped dead still and planted himself directly in
front of a bespectacled white youth with books in both hands.
He looked to be frightened at Mack's glance. When Tex looked
at Mack it was not hard to tell why: Mack's eyes now were

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A PLACE TO LIE DOWN 7
fever-bright, and burning hollowly. Tex took his arm, but he
would not budge one inch.
"You. Gimme that sock."
He took the boy by the lapel, and the boy dropped a book.
"Saaaaay I'll call a cop on you I will." The boy's voice
quavered shrilly as a frightened school-girl's; his eyes besought
pleadingly those of the crowd.
This time two silver badges; two rows of brass buttons-
two pairs of pointed black boots shining in the sun.
"Here, niggers at it again? All right, Smitty, take 'em
both along."
Tex McKay cocked his head, unable, for one moment, to
believe what he had heard. Slowly then, he understood: A
white man who walked with a 'nigger' was a 'nigger' too. He
recognized the park bull as the other took his arm, and he said,
"Ah'm no nigger."
Tex was too weary to feel keen fear; and going to jail was
all a part of this life anyhow. No one escaped it for very long,
and he'd been lucky for a long time now. What he didn't like,
what got him by the short hairs, was that crack about a nigger.
He saw the big park bull start reaching for Mack when
Mack was still five feet away and Specs stood in between.
Specs ducked wildly when the cop's paw came over his shoulder;
the paw seized Mack's shirt and pulled him free of the sidewalk
with a yank which ripped the sleazy cloth down to the navel.
Mack came straight forward, so that his head would have
rammed the cop's Sam Browne belt had not the cop stiffarmed
him with his open palm.
Tex glanced at the cop who was holding his wrist.
"Ah aint no nigger, mister," he said; but the bull didn't
seem to hear.
It was shameful to see the Negro so, his shirt in tatters so
that his navel showed thru.
A man in the crowd barked brief hard laughter; a girl fled
titillating "Ooooooo-What I saw!"
"Ah aint no nigger, mister," Tex repeated; but the bull
didn't look like he'd heard.
Mack's voice was a low moan. "You got no right!" he
said, and his arms flailed stiffly against the brass buttons. The
edge of his sleeve caught in the cop's star; the cop jerked away,
and the star was left hanging lop-sidedly.
"You got no right!" Mack's fingers clawed weakly upward

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8 PARTISAN REVIEW
again; the club-on-a-cord whizzed in a gleaming circle a foot
above his head, Mack reached toward it, and the club came
down. It cracked down slantwise across the temple with
the hissing sound of a large stone thrown through a thin paper
wall—a brief sound, sharp and ripping and cold. Mack stood
still for one long moment. He had stopped screaming rather
suddenly. A dark star appeared on his temple, and his head
began sagging slowly; like a wounded fighting-cock's head.
Hands caught him under the arm-pits as he fell. While hands
held him tentatively, offering him out to the cop like an unclean
dish rag.
“My! Wasn’t that brave!” a woman called from the crowd.
The big bull turned, for that voice had been mocking; but
it was not repeated, so he turned toward his patrol.
“Oh, officer!”
A boy’s voice this time.
The cop’s eyes were shifting uneasily, for the eyes of the
crowd were unfriendly. The cop remembered how, once when
he was ten, he had been beaten by a smaller boy while other boys
stood in a circle and watched: he remembered, seeing encircling
eyes. So without fixing his gaze on any one face, he asked,
“Well, who wants to see me?”
No reply, till he turned.
“No one, officer my dear. Who would? You stink most
awful vile.” The woman’s voice.
“Who said ‘at to me?” he bluffed loudly, “Who said ‘at—
huh?” His big face looked ready to burst with its bluff. Then
he saw laughter starting, and got inside the patrol just in time.
The other officer followed with Tex, in front of a chorus of
catcalls that sounded like the mad thousand applauding. But
Tex McKay heard only one thing clearly. Just as the door
slammed someone shouted in, “Niggerlickers—that’s what cops
is. That’s all they do in this town. Big tough niggerlickers,
an’ that’s all they do do.”
Mack’s eyes opened, he revived slowly. On either side of
him sat a bull. Tex wondered whether Mack understood all
that had happened. His own hands were free, but Mack’s
were handcuffed. Tex, watching him revive, was torn between
regret for having walked with him, and pity for seeing him in
pain. The Negro looked sickly grey.
From where he sat guarding the door, the bigger bull
glanced over to Tex and spoke warningly. He was still out of

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A PLACE TO LIE DOWN
9
breath, and a bit bewildered at something, it seemed.
"This'll go mighty hard with you two. Mighty hard, I
can say that now. Almost a riot call it was, an' a riot call
al'ays goes harder"—he gasped for breath—"Oh lots o' trouble
you boys made"—gasping—"trouble in the park first—"
His rump-like face was streaked with sweat. As though
to reassure himself of the penalty they were certain to have
incurred, he questioned the other officer.
"A riot-call al'ays makes it twice as bad, don't it, Arthur—
huh?
Arthur nodded. He was thin, and freckled, and looked un-
happy.
"See what Arthur says!—ya almost instergated a riot,
that's jest what I'm sayin'. Ya'll get ninety days fer this"—
gasping—or elts I'm not yer witness."
In spite of exhaustion, Tex McKay went sick with fear.
"He jest wanted a sock on account his foot is so sore," he
protested, "Honest, mister, that foot looks ready to drop off'n
his laig."
The silver badge looked at Tex McKay with a huge
and expressionless, a moon-like wonder. The big thick brain
behind the eyes began to move slowly, painfully, like a heavy
door opening onto a room long-closed. Then his face looked
somehow cunning-cruel, as understanding at last came into it.
And he guffawed. Thwacking his thigh resoundingly, he yawped
his face so near to Tex's that Tex smelled the foulness of
his breath like a breath from a privy.
"He jest wanted a sock! He jest wanted a sock! Hey,
Arthur, did y' get that, Arthur? He jest wanted a sock—an'
ain't that jest what I given him?"—He went off into whole gales
of laughter, his body shaking to its very fingertips. "Say—Art
—D'ya get it?—He jest wanted a sock—an' that's what I given
him." Arthur smiled a bit wanly, a bit indulgently, and said
nothing at all.
"Ho! Ho! He wanted a sock—a clean sock! Ho! Ho!"
Outside, the late afternoon sun was waking trembling
checkered patterns on low stone buildings rushing past.
They were going to jail; they were going to eat; they are
going to have a place to lie down.
Tex said, "Ah ain't no nigger."
Mack looked up. "You'se ridin'—ain't yo'?"

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THE PORT OF NEW YORK

This was the Promised Land, and still it is
To the persuasive suburban land agent
In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz
Bubbles in time to Hollywood's new love-nest pageant.
—HART CRANE

Magnificent to tourists and to tradesmen come,
Loaded with luggage, from voyage oversea,
Between shrill swoopings and the cabled air
White buildings lift a cue for praise.
Far out, upon the ocean's level rink
Where gulls are skaters, freighters and steamers,
Cunard liners, queens of the voyage,
Down on the world's curve curl one smudge of smoke
Farewell—and sink.
And now the port
Swells up to meet you. In the huge sunset,
Crowded with chimneys, terraces, grain elevators,
Ignite a million windows to the widened gaze,
A world afire—the city burning
In a towering architectural blaze.
O stranger welcome,
Feted with fire, but longing for the land,
Turn by the rail and see, where tall she stands,
Iron and green, and crowned with liberty,
Erect upon the bay, the rigid greeting of her hand!

Descend now gangplanks to the dock. Taxi
And hotel suite awaits you, who command
Bellhops and brilliance. Actress of screen,
Chief of staff, Minister or Financier,
You come upon us in a bitter year
Of bank failures and breadlines in the public squares.
Down South Street in one-arm joints
Sawdusted, crawling with flies—or in the Doghouse
Reading the shipping news—bronzed sailors,
Tattooed with blue anchors, naked women
In a Shanghai hophouse or maybe Samarkand,

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THE PORT OF NEW YORK 11
Wait for a berth-who know all knots, riggings,
The wheel's kick and the gloryhole-ordering coffee and.
But still up Whitehall drape shipowners' flags
And hunger has not changed Trinity's known site.
Locked in their vaults, the gilt-edged shares repose all night,
And pigeons alone assault the Treasury's bronze doors.
Through bankrupts, panics, crashes, the Exchange,
Though shaken on its pillars, knows no change.

Safe in your room, unpack and watch the evening fall.
The lamps come suddenly to life, as though
Touched by a secret hand to tungsten glow.
After your supper, served in the hotel grill,
The night awaits you; sightseer's bus will take you round the
town.
The barker will explain each famous sight.
The Mission of the Holy Name, the Bowery and Chinatown,
Hung with gold lanterns, tong wars-and further down
Through twisted streets to little Italy
And garlic smells-perhaps in Cherry Street you'll see
The celebration of the feat of Maria Negre, the black Mary,
Worshipped with white candles and pushcarts on the curb.
Peer through the smoky window, remember all the names you've
heard;
Back home you'll quiver the persimmoned souls
Of village aunts with murder dives, gin mills and opium holes.
Up through Delancey smile at the derby hats and rabbi beards.
But through the motor's purr is still unheard
The sweatshop's hiss of steam...the Hofmann's pressing roar...
When drunken laborers come lurching through the swinging
barroom door
Down on Third Avenue, under the El's shadow, think
What terrors the barker has not spieled has driven them to drink.
Then rumbling through Fourteenth you hit the Square.
And now Broadway again...this is the terminal, the end,
Lights! lights!-Times Square.

Through midnight throngs, under the dancing signs,
Among the tinhorn sports, the small time gamblers,
The hoofers out of work, the stenos taking in a show,
The restaurants with flapjaks and the Roseland Ramblers
Playing the latest dance hit-with thousands go.

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12 PARTISAN REVIEW

Past stage entrances and billiard parlors
Where bookies pass out business cigarettes, the thousand faces
Shift, vanish in a neon fog, glimpsed once and gone
Rise up anew upon the tide, new eyes the flood replaces.
And glimpsed among the lights' hallucination
Pleasure laughs out of a trombone's mouth
Lifted in the Circle north or in the thunderous Square.
Hands grope to clasp her, but she eludes them there,
Though always they return to seek her vanishing face that soars
High above the Paramount clock or laughs from haberdashery
stores.

Slow metropolitan bells empty the late theatres,
The richest to their homes upon the Drive.
But midnight sends the clerks and stenos home
By the last trains and nodding in their seats
In interborough slumbers, to dark and obscure streets
Where locals lurch and stop at silent stations.
Along deserted pavements where the thin moon leaks
Into quiet garbage cans, the feet awaken echoes.
Slip into the lock the hushed key quietly . . .
Slow snores gargle from hot rooms . . . here the bedroom
And the same bed . . . neatly fold the clothes on chair . . .
Pick out the office dress you'll wear . . .
Wind the stopped clock . . . the head sinks down in weariness,
Remembering the alarm, the muffled chorus of a song,
A face seen . . . then dark and sleep swallows the pursuit of
happiness.

Tourist, turn in—or will you go
When watchmen on their rounds
Flash searchlights into shuttered department stores?
The lean cat bounding from the fence slinks
To the pool of rainwater, eyes warily about, and drinks.
The crosstown streets run both ways to the rivers
And trolleys empty trundle to silent barns.
The ferry hoots and sails the Jersey side.
The pilot trains the splayed beam on the tide.
You go now, leaning on the rail, to ride
The quietest of waters, downstream,
Past slaughter house and ironworks, the cattle yards,
Past viaduct and park and amusement place,

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THE PORT OF NEW YORK
Until the river bending to the bay, lifts
To the sight the electric hand and the illuminated face.

Now from the brooding ragged men who nurse
Their sores in the grass on the small public lawns
Or seek the river's wharfed and warehoused side,
Yesterday's papers about their feet—what dreams
Awaken seeing across the slow and darkened tide
The apparition where her tall face gleams?
Once was she haven, harbor and desire,
Europe's better. Who knew the double eagle and the crested
claw,
North England's hunger, or the pogrom's fire,
Ireland's landlords, or the great floods, sought her shore.
Cunningly she lured them, cunningly—
Who came in the ship's depths and in the land's depths died—
Some mine exploding explained their liberty,
These warehouses shelter all that's left of pride.

But brightly to the stranger lifts her hand,
And ragged though it is, her myth survives.
White buildings still amaze the visitors who land,
And lies conceal what hungers wreck our lives.
Who sought her as the sickened seek the sun,
No longer on her towering falsehood blind our sight.
Now in the iron shadow of the piers—swept
By the North Atlantic—though tall she stand—
Brightly as ever—with myth and hand—her myth is done.

ALFRED HAYES
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LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS

Andre Malraux

IT IS INDISPENSABLE, first of all, to render clear a couple of ideas which
will provide an undertone to all that I am about to say, just as they have
done for all that has been said here up to now.

The first has to do with the relations between Marxism and Soviet
literature. The conception of a literature as the application of a doctrine
never represents a correspondence with reality. The Gospels produced
Christianity, which in its turn produced Christian literature. The Greek
doctrines shaped the Hellenic city, which gave birth to Greek literature.
Marxism has built the Soviet society, which finds expression in the literature
of the USSR. Between a literature and a doctrine, there is always a
civilization of living men.

The second problem has to do with the freedom of the artist.
To assume that the bourgeois writer's freedom is represented by the
possibility which is always his of giving expression to the bourgeois class,
is socially accurate enough, but much less accurate artistically. It is my
opinion that the bourgeois class has never expressed itself directly. It
makes no attempt to justify itself as a bourgeoisie, but always as an aris-
tocracy, whether in the matter of culture, of nationalism, or of religion.
Whereas Christian civilization essays a justification for what it is, the
bourgeoisie, ever since its great period in the Eighteenth century, always
seeks one by a round-about way.

It is neither Claudel nor Proust who stand for the bourgeoisie; it is
Henry Bordeaux.

The artist as an artist knows so little freedom in the choice of sub-
ject-matter that it is impossible for us to picture, at the present time, the
best among the bourgeois writers making up his mind to dedicate a book to
President Doumergue and, at the same time, being able to produce a worth-
while work. That is because it is only from the positive elements of a
civilization that a work of art derives its strength; and this is the point to
which I would draw your attention. The freedom that means something
for the artist is not the liberty to do just anything; it is the liberty to do
what he wants to do; and the Soviet artist is well aware that it is not
from a lack of harmony with the civilization about him, but on the con-

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LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS
trary, from a profound accord with that civilization, that he as an artist
draws the strength of his genius.

We have formed the habit of living and thinking within a civilization
to which the intellect by its very nature is opposed. I have no desire here
to go into any complicated ideologies; I should, rather, like to make clear
a very simple fact, and that is this: whatever may be their strength or
their weakness, the contemporary institutions of Western Europe are in-
separable from a certain hypocrisy. Many of my listeners have lived
through the War; and their sense of irritation at that time was due, not
to a theory, but to the consciousness of a cleavage between the bloody and
tragic reality that surrounded them-even though they may have found
in it certain elements of grandeur and the manner in which that reality
was expressed, in newspapers and in books. In this respect, the world has
not changed greatly since the War.

But let us not compare the best of Soviet art to the worst that the
bourgeoisie has to show. Rather, let us look at the highest manifestations
of bourgeois art and try to see just where it is the essential difference lies.
For more than sixty years, the great works of Western art have followed
a consistent line of development. It is no longer a question, as Balzac
put it, of depicting a world, but of giving a pictorial representation of the
evolution of a personal problem. The Possessed is not a depiction, not
even an unfriendly one, of a Russian revolutionary scene; it is the develop-
ment of Dostoievski's ethical thinking through a succession of living char-
acters. Like Nietzsche in his Zarathustra, Dostoievski is a thinker who
expresses himself parabolically.

We find the same problem in painting. If Cezanne diminishes more
and more the importance of the subject, it is not due to a flair for "good
painting" in the Dutch sense, nor to a love for the still-life itself; it is
because he is thus free to express himself; and this disappearance of the
subject, which leads to abstract painting, does not indicate, as has been
asserted, an ever-increasing respect for the graphic element, but, the truth
is an ever-growing respect for the painter himself. The modern abstract
painter sets about creating his own myth, just as Dostoievski did; and
just as Goethe observed that every writer writes his complete works, so it
may be said that, practically speaking, Picasso has never ceased painting
his complete works.

***

The artist's essential task being, thus, the creation of his own myth,
it remains to explain how it is this myth is propagated and the work of
art comes to take on viability. I shall select two examples, Baudelaire
and Fromentin. In each of these two cases, what we have is an artist
endowed with a very special sensitivity, in which a certain number of
15

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16 PARTISAN REVIEW

readers find their own sensitivity expressed upon a higher plane, and thereby
justified. My thought obviously calls for a degree of shading; but I think
that, speaking in the large, it may be stated that the reader pays the artist
in admiration for what the latter gives him in the way of justification. I
do not believe in any mysterious Platonic beauty, to which a few privileged
artists down the ages are able to attain, but rather, in a relation which is
set up between the sensitivities of individuals and the need which is theirs
of finding justification through expression.
This problem is at the core of all Occidental thinking on the subject
of art, and it may be said that the art of a bourgeois civilization practically
revolves about the point.
...
What we must understand is, that the artist and modern society are
by their very nature opposed to each other. In a country such as France,
apart from all divisions into classes or collectivities of one sort or another
a further line of demarcation is erected between those who yield their
allegiance to the civilization about them and those who refuse such an
allegiance. And school-teachers, professors, women, laborers, and bour-
geois, in varying numbers, are likely now to find themselves caught up into
that new collectivity known as the Intelligentsia, and so discover that they
have a number of points of agreement on questions of art. (Let me not
be misunderstood here; I look upon this collectivity, constituted as it is,
as a merely temporary one, one that would assuredly be disrupted by any
deep-going crisis; I am simply, here, taking the literary fact of the moment).
In our civilization, there is a fundamental lack of harmony between
the intellect on the one hand and social institutions on the other. The
element of hypocrisy, which I mentioned a while back, plays a preponderant
part where intellectual matters are concerned. If we wish to picture for
ourselves the attitude of the Russian worker toward his civilization, the
best thing that we could do would be to compare it with the state of
mind of the masses in Western Europe at the moment of mobilization,
while they still accepted the War. We can go on to imagine what an
art of the War era might have been, if the War had kept its human mean-
ing for the entire country, such a meaning as it held for the Nation during
the mobilizations of the First Republic. Soviet art is an art of this kind.
It has been said, and I will repeat it, that Soviet civilization is a totalitarian
one; by which I understand, a civilization in which men have a part, to
accord their conscious allegiance, and in which labor is not
part of life. The same thing has been said of Fascism.
I do not believe that is true. For Fascism, to the degree in which it grants
to capital a preponderant rôle, must meet again, in the ethical domain,
with all the contradictions inherent in the bourgeoisie. If they tell us

=== Page 18 ===
LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS
17
that the German Fascist literature is too young for us to be able to pass
judgment upon it as yet (although certain of the best Soviet works date
from the period of wartime Communism), we have but to reflect on the
long years under Fascism in Italy, whose literature causes us to doubt
very much the existence of a totalitarian civilization in the peninsula.
But there is, after all, a totalitarian art among us; there is one artist
who, if he were present in this auditorium, might say, as any Soviet artist
at Moscow: "You all know me, and you all admire me, each in his fashion."
For that artist is Charley Chaplin. Men of the Occident, as they stand
before a work of art, no longer feel a sense of unity save in the domain of
the comic, and the only real communion that we know is in laughing at
ourselves.
Within the Soviet civilization, the fact of first and capital importance
is the diminution of the artist as an object of interest in his own eyes.
The world to him is more interesting than himself, for the reason that a
world is there to discover. Let us make careful note of the fact that the
bourgeois world, already sufficiently advanced in age, is a world that is
relatively known, and that the discoveries of a Zola by comparison with
the world of a Balzac, are very slight; since for a Western artist, to
look at the world of society means to recopy it or to transform it through
his own vision. It may be stated that the bourgeois world's inventory
is over. On the other hand, stock-taking in the Soviet world is yet
to be done.
To beging with, take the matter of facts. The passion for secretive-
ness having disappeared, the writer finds himself confronted in all fields
with a limitless documentation, faced with a world in process of perpetual
discovery, as a psychologist would be with us, whose researches had sud-
denly opened to him a vast and unexplored realm of facts; for by his
position with reference to the universe, the Soviet artist bears a good deal
more resemblance to a Freud in the early stages than he does to a French
writer of today.
One result of this is the quest of types, which is a very important
one in Russian literature; seeing that it is through types that the reader
becomes conscious of the new world. As I see it, the appearance of a new
class or collective group in the life of a country at once connotes the pos-
sibility or the necessity of a great artist's expressing himself through types;
for nearly everything that I have just said of the Soviet artist might have
been said of Balzac, who socially had the same situation to confront.
A second point: the inventory of mankind.
Much has been said and written of Soviet man, and numerous attempts
have been made to delimit his psychology. Theories here, it seems to me,

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18 PARTISAN REVIEW

are of little avail; there are other ways that would be more fruitful in
results. For some time past, hundreds of cases have been brought to light
and passed upon in connection with the tchistkas (Party house-cleanings),
affording us a glimpse of Soviet man in action, one who is by no means
a codified being as yet. In place of seeking to formulate a theory of the
new man, it would be infinitely more to the purpose to bring together
and survey this vast and often deeply affecting body of documentation,
by way of seeing what conclusions are to be drawn from it.
Stress has frequently been laid upon the lack of confidence in man
which Russian society in process of construction, and often gravely men-
aced, has been obliged to show. But let us not confuse our terms here.
This lack of confidence has to do only with the individual; man, on the
contrary, has perhaps never known so great a confidence as that reposed
in him by the Soviets. It is by showing confidence in boys that they have
built up the Pioneers; taking woman such as she was under Tsarism, that
is to say, one whose condition was the lowest and most grievous of any,
they have made of her the Soviet Woman, one who today stands for the
highest development of feminine will and consciousness. With thieves
and assassins, they built the White Sea canal. From abandoned children,
nearly all of them likewise thieves, they have built up the communes of
reëducation. At a certain festival, I saw coming into Red Square a delega-
tion of these former waifs, and I heard the throng acclaim these wisps of
humanity which it had been instrumental in saving, with an enthusiasm
that was shown toward no other group.
And finally, we come to the hero. Thanks to the suppression of
that importance which was formerly conferred upon money, the USSR
is able to uncover the positive hero, the only true one always, the one
who risks his life for other men. The absence of money as an intervening
factor restores to the heroic deed all its primitive significance, such a sig-
nificance as it might possess in war, if the cannon-merchant did not exist,
and if no one drew any profit from war—a Promethean significance.
* * *
The basic feature of Soviet art is, accordingly, as I see it, the redis-
covery of objectivity. But what is to become, some one may ask, of the
personality of the artist? I do not believe that it is diminished, but I do
feel that its means are different. In place of proceeding by affirmation,
it functions through selection. The present method in Russian art is
socialist realism, a method which I regard as a valuable and as
potent one. But a point I would insist upon is, if the will to
realism is an effective one for the USSR, it is for the reason that it is
brought to bear upon a romantic reality. Civil war, wartime Communism,
the Five Year Plan, socialist construction, frontier-guards, autonomous

=== Page 20 ===
LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS
19
republics,—all this serves to create a tragic or a picturesque reality, which
confers upon realism all that is necessary to enable it to outstrip itself.
* * *
I feel, in conclusion, that the basic consequence of the Soviet society
is the possibility of creating a new humanism; I feel that humanism well
may be man's fundamental attitude toward a civilization which he accepts,
just as individualism is his fundamental attitude toward a civilization
which he refuses; that the important thing from now on is not that which
distinguishes one man from another, but the depth of his humanity and
his readiness to fight, not for that which separates him from his fellows,
but for that which will enable him to come to them on a terrain that
lies beyond their individualities.
It is high time to show that the union of mankind is something other
than a first-communion souvenir. I feel that, just as Nietzsche took what
was then known as the brute attitude and elevated it into a Zarathustra,
so we should set up once again, in a realm beyond all ridiculous senti-
mentality, those values that bring men together and restore a meaning to
the idea of manly brotherhood.
From the French by Samuel Putnam

=== Page 21 ===
BENEFITS OF AMERICAN LIFE

James T. Farrell

TAKISS FILLIOS was a strong shepherd boy from the moun-
tains of Greece. His hard-working mother saved up enough
money to pay his steerage fare to America where the streets
were paved with gold, where there were buildings as big as
mountains, where all the women dressed like princesses, and all
the men had their pockets lined with money, where every boy
had a bicycle, and every man and woman owned an automobile
and all the houses were like palaces. At the age of thirteen,
Takiss, large for his age, arrived in a paradise known as
Chicago.

He was met at the train, a scared and bewildered boy, by
a relative who took him to a home on South Halsted street.
Takiss was immediately employed by that relative in a candy
store. Quickly, he discovered what it meant to live in paradise.
It meant working from six in the morning until six in the evening,
and until later on weekends. It meant sweeping out the store,
washing dishes and windows, polishing, arranging, mopping,
running errands. It meant attending night school to learn
English when he could scarcely keep his eyes open, and where
he was frequently laughed at for his blundering efforts. It
meant walking along, living in the midst of dirty streets where
coal dust, soot, smoke, and the poisonous fumes of automobiles
choked his nostrils, and made him cough. It meant loneliness,
with the pain of memories of his homeland of Grecian moun-
tains, memories of his mother, and of the long slow days with
the sheep.

For a long period, Takiss was a very lonely boy, remem-
bering that homeland of his, and the games he had played with
the other boys, remembering the smile and kiss of his old mother,
remembering always. And he was afraid of America, and of
that tremendous paradise known as Chicago. He worked dog-
gedly day after day, earning five dollars a week, and from that,
saving a small pittance which he deposited in an immigrants'

20

=== Page 22 ===
BENEFITS OF AMERICAN LIFE
bank. But he looked ahead to the day when he would become
like Americans, talk like them, wear their clothes, ride in auto-
mobiles just as they did, go out with pretty American girls.
In time, Takiss learned things. He learned American
words, but never how to speak them like an American. He
learned that he was a dirty Greek greenhorn, and that many
Americans would have been just as pleased if he and many of
his countrymen had never come to their country. And he learned
that American girls laugh sardonically at a young Greek green-
horn. Also, he learned of places where for two dollars he
could go and find American girls who did not laugh at Greek
greenhorns, at least for a period of five or ten minutes. And he
learned how to buy cheap American clothes on time, to wear
a purple silk shirt, purple socks, and an orange tie. And in time,
he learned also that in the store, he could put some of the money
he took in into his pocket instead of the cash register.
Eventually the relative employing him discharged him in
anger, branding him as a crook, a robber, and a traitor. In
the heated quarrel, Takiss asked him why, if he wanted honesty,
he paid him only six dollars a week wages, when he made so
much money himself, selling such bad products.
Takiss was employed by other of his countrymen, in fruit
stores, soda parlors, at hot dog stands, and in restaurants. He
acquired additional American knowledge, and more American
words. And sometimes when he was dressed up, wearing his
purple silk shirts, with socks to match, and an orange tie, he
walked in the parks or along Halsted street, seeing American
girls, wishing that he had one of his own, a blond girl with a
beautiful pink-white complexion. And sometimes, he longed for
his Grecian mountains, he dreamed of going back there, taking
with him, American money, and perhaps one of these pretty
young American girls with a pink-white complexion.
Time slid from under Takiss, and he was a young man
in his twenties, with his first citizenship papers. He had worked
like a dog, and he was still working at the same jobs, doing the
same tasks and chores he had always done since he had come to
America. He earned fifteen dollars a week, and worked twelve
hours a day in a candy store. He cleaned, and he mopped; he
scrubbed, he polished; he washed; he waited on trade. And
often when he was alone in the store, he pocketed money from
the cash register. Every week, he deposited money in the bank,
and almost nightly, he looked at his bank book, proud of his
21

=== Page 23 ===
22
PARTISAN REVIEW

savings. But he was never able to get much money saved, be-
cause he was always quitting his job or being discharged, and
forced to live on his savings until he secured a new one.
And he learned another thing-how to dance like Amer-
icans danced. A Greek-American young friend of his took him
to a dancing school, called a taxi-dance, on West Madison street.
He paid a dollar, and was given ten tickets, each one good for
a dance which lasts from one minute to a minute and a half.
Any girl in the place would dance with him, because she received
five cents for each dance. His tickets were quickly exhausted,
and he bought more. It did not matter if he could dance or not,
and the girls were glad to teach him. He went to this taxi-
dance regularly, spending three, four, and five dollars every
visit, and once in a while a girl would ask him if he wanted to
take her home, and for a few more dollars, he could get other
things too. After he commenced attending regularly to this
taxi dance hall, he was able to save less money.
Takiss then spent some of his savings for a suit with bell
bottom trousers. He cultivated a moustache and long side burns,
greased his hair and parted it in the middle with meticulous atten-
tion. He began to look like a sheik, and listened to pick up all the
words which the American sheiks used. He went to public
dance halls where there was only an admission fee and longer
dances. At these places, there were always swarms of girls,
pretty American girls, some of them tall and beautiful blondes
with milky skins, and red lips like cherries. He would ask them
to dance. Often they would dance with him, once. He would
talk, and they would notice his accent and when he asked them
for a second dance, they would thank him with great regret, and
exclaim that all their other dances were taken. So he would
quickly be driven to dancing with the homely and ugly girls who
were called wall flowers. And then, he would go back to the
taxi dances where all the girls would dance with him for ten
cents a dance.
One day, Takiss was twenty-five. His native Greek moun-
tains seemed to have receded in time, and he saw them only in
painful mists of memory, recalling their details with lessening
concreteness. He had been in America for twelve years, and he
was working ten hours a day in a hot dog stand for ten dollars
a week, and able to graft from three to five dollars a week extra.
He wanted to make money, and when he was a rich man with
a hot dog stand or restaurant of his own, return to Greece with

=== Page 24 ===
BENEFITS OF AMERICAN LIFE
an American wife, and act lake a millionaire. And he had thirty
five dollars in the bank as a start toward these riches.
And hard times came to America. Takiss was out of work
in the winter, and again his savings melted. He was employed
for ten dollars a week in a candy store, working twelve hours,
and in four months, that job was gone. He worked for seven
dollars a week washing dishes in a large restaurant, and then,
his pay was cut to five dollars, and he went home every night,
tired, with chafed hands, and an aching back. He had less
money, also, to go to taxi dances. And he lost that job.
He walked the streets looking for other work, and always
he learned the same story-hard times.... He ate very frugally,
lived in a chilly room that was gnawed by rats, and wished that
he was back home again in his native Greek mountains. Every
day, he went out looking for a job, and sometimes, he found
work for a few days or a few weeks, and was able to skim along
while he tried again to find work.
One day he saw an advertisement with large letters at the
top-DANCE MARATHON. He investigated, and learned
that it was a contest in which everybody tried to dance longer
than the others, and the winner received a five hundred dollar
prize. And maybe if he won it, he would get a job in the movies
and become the idol of American girls, or go on the vaudeville
stage, or be given a contract to dance in a cabaret. And while
he was in the contest, he would be cared for, fed, and there would
be no room rent to pay. He was strong, and husky, and he
could dance. He was used to standing on his feet all day in res-
taurants, candy stores, and at hot dog stands. And this was his
chance to become rich. He would no longer have to tramp all
over town to be told that there were no jobs because it was hard
times. This was much better than saving up to own a candy
store, and grow fat like the American Greeks for whom he had
worked. And after he won this contest, and became famous, he
would go back to Greece with a trunk full of clothes and money,
and maybe a rich American wife whose skin was like milk.
Takiss entered the dance marathon, and when the rules
were explained to him, he only understood that he was to stay
out on the floor and dance, and if he was able to do that longer
than anyone else, he would get five hundred dollars. A num-
ber was pinned on his back, and he was assigned a partner named
Marie Glenn, a beautiful blonde American girl of the type he
had always dreamed of as a possible wife. At first, when she

=== Page 25 ===
24
PARTISAN REVIEW
met him, she shuddered, and her face broke into an expression
of disgust. But then, she saw he was strong and husky with
broad shoulders, and smiled, offering him a limp hand, and
sweetly telling him that she knew they were going to be the
winners.

The dance marathon was conducted in a public dance hall
on the south side of Chicago. A ring was placed in the center
with an orchestra dais at one end. Around it there were box
seats, and behind them, rising rows of bleacher benches. The
opening was described, in advertisements, as gala. An announcer
talked through a microphone, and the promoters and judges in
tuxedos also addressed a full house. The contestants were
introduced, and some of them, but not Takiss, spoke to the crowd
and the large radio audience all over America. It was all a
new and promising if confusing world to Takiss, and he walked
around the floor, feeling as lost and as out of place as he had
on those first days in America. But it was leading at last to
paradise.

The contest swung into action. They danced for three
minutes out of every ten, and walked around and around the
floor for the remaining time; and they were given fifteen minutes
rest out of every hour. There was glamor in being watched
by so many people, in eating sandwiches and drinking coffee
before them, in receiving attention from doctors and nurses, and
meeting all the others who, like himself, saw at the end of this
contest, five hundred dollars and fame. As the contestants got
to talking to each other, Takiss heard them using one word
over and over again—celebrity. A celebrity was somebody who
was important, like Jack Dempsey, and the movie stars. They
all wanted to be a celebrity. And Takiss too, he determined
that he was going to be a celebrity.

Takiss had not imagined that anyone could dance for more
than a week like this, and that maybe after a sleepless and tiring
week, he would be the winner. In less than twenty four hours,
he learned that it was a grind harder than he had calculated,
and while he doggedly gritted his teeth, he determined that he
would not let himself drop out. Still, he wished that he had not
entered it. He wished he were back working in fruit stores
and ice cream parlors the way he had before hard times had
come. He wished that he were a shepherd back in the Grecian
mountains where his old mother had lived until her death.

When his partner was tired, she put her arms around his

=== Page 26 ===
BENEFITS OF AMERICAN LIFE
25
neck or hips, laid her head against him, and fell asleep while
he dragged her tiresomely around the floor, and when he fell
asleep, she did the same with him. Again and again, their
bodies were jolted, shoved, pushed against each other, and he
began wanting her so that her very nearness became excruciating.
And he noticed that she, particularly in the early dog hours
of the mornings when there was scarcely any spectators in the
hall, began brushing herself against him at every opportunity,
looking feverishly into his eyes, and telling him smutty jokes.
And the other dancers became the same way, and the fellows
used to tell him how much they wanted one of these girls, any
girl.
Day after day, the marathon grind went on. His eyes
grew heavy. His back ached. His feet became sore, and raw
so that each step was pain, and he felt often as if he were walk-
ing on fire. The hall was almost continually stale with cigarette
smoke, fouled with body odors. He felt almost continually
dirty, sweaty and itchy. Dust got into his nostrils, and his eyes.
He developed a cough. His muscles knotted. He became
like a person who was always only half awake, and everything
took on the semblance of being a semi-dream. Marie, also,
changed. She began to swell around the buttocks. Deep circles
grew under her eyes. She became haggard, and blowsy and
looked like a worn out prostitute. She used more and more
cosmetics, and her face became like a ghastly caricature of the
pretty girl who had entered the contest.
In the beginning, particularly because of his accent and
Greek heritage, Takiss became the butt of many jokes. Over
and over again, he would be asked why he wasn't running a
restaurant, and he would be given orders for a piece zapple pie
kid. He was nicknamed Restaurant, Fruit Store, Socrates,
and Zapple Pie Kid. In time this wore down, and failed to
anger or disturb him. The grind settled into habitual misery
and torture. He, like all the other contestants, would long for
fresh air, and during rest periods, when they were not so tired
that they would be dragged like walking somnambulists to the
rest cots, would enter the vile and filthy dressing room or the
equally unsavory lavatory, and jam their heads out the window
to breathe fresh air, and to look longfully down at the street
where people walked free to do what they wished, not tired,
able to breathe fresh air, even the fresh air of a city street that
was saturated with carbon monoxide fumes and sootiness.

=== Page 27 ===
26 PARTISAN REVIEW
Day after day dragged on. Sometimes Takiss, Marie, or
the other contestants would exist in stupors for six hours, twelve
hours, a day, or even longer. As the time passed, the contestants
would switch from affected and over-stimulated good spirits, to
raw fighting nervousness, and then into that glazed-eyed stupor.
Particularly in those dog hours of the early morning, they would
be raw, if awake, and fight and curse. Sex too became a grow-
ing obsession, and in time, was almost madness. Living so near
to one another, their bodies touching so frequently, they told
smuttier and smuttier pokes. Perversities and desires or pro-
positions for perversities sprang up amongst them. It became
a relentless process of torture physical and mental. Constipa-
tion, diarrahea, sudden inabilities to control their kidneys so that
now and then, a contestant would be walking around the floor,
and dragged in sleep, with wet lines down their trousers, or the
beach pyjamas which the girls usually wore. Broken blood
vessels, and swollen veins in the legs. Headaches, eye troubles,
sore throats, fevers, colds. Periods of sweatiness, followed by
shivers and chills. And always that returning stupor, caused by
sleeplessness and fatigue, and by the dreams and fantasies
which they entertained as relief from that endless procession
around and around the floor. And at the end of it all, money,
the chance to become a celebrity, sex, and clean white bed sheets
and a soft freshly lined bed.
Ways of making money from day to day quickly sprang up
and were used to the utmost, so that all of the contestants had
bank accounts. Every one developed some trick or act, a song,
a dance, a stunt of some kind, and after putting it on, they would
be showered with money from the crowd. One of the contest-
ants, a raw country youth of Lithuanian origins with a nasal
twang to his voice, chewed razor blades as his stunt. Takiss
learned a dance. Stores, theatres, and politicians also paid them
fees to wear signs or sweaters and jerseys with advertising
printed on the front or backs. Money was sent to them, mash
notes, often written in as ignorant and as bad English as that
which Takiss used and wrote in. The various spectators picked
favorites, cheered for them, and shouted encouragement.
And still the days stretched out, past the first month, with
contestant after contestant dropping out, and the field narrowing
down. One day, there would be a birthday party. Another
day, there was a floor wedding between two of the contestants
who had met on the floor, and the wedding provided endless

=== Page 28 ===
BENEFITS OF AMERICAN LIFE
27
hours of raw jokes and humor about when they would have
their first wedding night, until sex-crazed, both of the newlyweds
went temporarily out of their heads, and the girls screamed until
she was dragged off the floor. Disqualified they were out of
the marathon, and new wishful humor sprang up. Another day,
a girl had an abscessed tooth extracted on the floor, and im-
mediately afterwards, she rejoined the endless walking proces-
sion that tramped around and around the floor in this ever
dullening stupor. Another day, an Italian boy, who with his
wife had entered the contest because they were both unemployed
and had been evicted required crutches, and ran a high fever.
With his eyes intent from the fever, with dogged suffering im-
printed on his haggard face, he hobbled around and around.
And at the end of the twelve hour period, he was forced out
of the contest by the judges because of his worsening condition.
Again and again, Takiss wanted to quit, and satisfy himself
with the incidental money he had taken in, and as repeatedly,
he would doggedly go on. Like the others, he would fall into
that lumbrous sleep, and external means would be required to
awaken him so that he might continue. The male nurses would
slap him in the face with wet towels, put his shoes on the wrong
feet, strap him into an electric vibrator machine, poke their
fingers into his throat, tickle his calloused soles. During one
period his cough developed into a chest cold. For another period,
he was not out of his stupor for three days. And Marie, his
partner, suffered the same tortures. They went on. Days and
nights, with the field narrowing to thirteen,
ten, eight, five, and finally two couples. Then, Marie collapsed,
and was carried off the floor and shipped to a hospital, and
Takiss was disqualified. They each collected the two hundred
and fifty dollars second place money.
After recuperation, Takiss entered other dance marathons,
and became a professional. He secured a copy of Yes We Have
No Bananas with a Greek translation of the words, and this,
with his dance stunt, became very popular. He was able with
a growing audience of fans, to earn from
ten to fifteen dollars a day in extra money. Even when he was
forced to retire from marathons or was disqualified, he departed
with added money. Again the desire to return to his homeland,
like a rich American, grew upon him, and now his bank account
increased. He was something of a celebrity in this new world
of his. He was entertained by prominent Greeks, and his pic-

=== Page 29 ===
28 PARTISAN REVIEW

ture was even placed over a feature article in the Greek press.
He had a run of a week at a small theatre on South Halsted
street where there were many Greeks.

In all Takiss participated in sixteen dance marathons. In
eight of them, he collected prize money, and was the winner
of a thousand dollar super-marathon, in which, only finalists
from other marathons were permitted to enter, and in which,
there were no rest periods. He had money now, five thousand
dollars. He could and did return to Greece. But the strain
of the marathons had ruined his lungs and he had tuberculosis.
Tubercular resorts had been developed in his native Grecian
mountains, and when he returned, it was necessary for him to
become a patient in one of them, and the money he had earned
was paid out while he lived there with his lungs rotting away
on him.

=== Page 30 ===
TWO POEMS

AMERICAN RHAPSODY

Before warmth and sight and sound are gone,
and sometimes the evening lights spring up, as always, but
not for you and not for me,
before the sky is lost, before the clouds are lost, before
their slow, still shadows are lost from the hills,

Shall we meet at 8 o'clock and kiss and exclaim and arrange
another meeting as though there were love,
pretend, even alone, we believe the things we say,
laugh along the boulevard as though there could be laughter,
make our plans and nourish hope, pretending, what is the
truth, that we ourselves are fooled?

You can be a princess and I'll be the beggar; no, you can be the
beggar and I'll be king:
you be the mother and go out and beg for food; I'll be a
merchant, the man you approach, a devoted husband,
famous as a host; the merchant can be a jobless clerk
who sleeps on subway platforms then lies dead in
Potter's field; the clerk can be a priest, human, kindly,
for prostitution and the lady can be a banker who has
his troubles, too;
let the merchant be grieved, let the priest be stirred, let the
banker be moved, let the red squad copper be a patron
of the arts;
you be a rat; I'll be the trap; or we both can be maggots
in the long black box;
murder can be comic and hunger can be kind.

29

=== Page 31 ===
30 PARTISAN REVIEW

LULLABY

Wide as this night, old as this night is old and young as it is
young, still as this, strange as this,
filled as this night is filled with the light of a moon as grey,
dark as these trees, heavy as this scented air from the fields,
warm as this hand,
as warm, as strong,

Is the night that wraps all the huts of the south and folds the
empty barns of the west;
is the wind that fans the roadside fire;
are the trees that line the country estates, tall as the lynch
trees, as straight, as black;
is the moon that lights the mining towns, dim as the light
upon tenement roofs, grey upon the hands at the bars
of Moab't, cold as the bars of the Tombs.
—KENNETH FEARING

=== Page 32 ===
FORM AND CONTENT

Wallace Phelps

ONE OF THE MANY PROBLEMS which centuries of criticism have failed
to solve is the relation of form to content. The principal reason, I suspect,
is that the question has not been accurately stated. A blurred question
evokes irrelevant answers. A long line of idealist estheticians took the
problem as a pinpoint for speculation, somehow never conceiving it as a
real basis for specific criticism. More recently the British school of
critics has evaded the fundamental issues in probing the place of a writer's
beliefs in our estimate of his achievement. The closest approach to a
solution has appeared in incidental statements by Marxian critics whose
concern for usable elements in our literary heritage has brought them to
the heart of the question.

For a long time the relation of form to content was considered to be
a special case of the general relation of matter to spirit, substance to
essence, the temporal to the eternal, etc. These are immediately recognized
as variations on a prominent motif of idealist philosophy. From this
approach form was always emphasized as the essential, enduring, spiritual
element of art. Plato and Plotinus in seeking a definition of beauty,
squeezed out the substance and meaning of specific art works, and found
beauty in the essence, the divine idea. (Aristotle, as a naturalist, examined
the material of art, but was left with an inconclusive emphasis on the
universal and on the formal aspects of poetry and drama). Kant and his
followers argued that beauty in art arises from its design which is given
to pure intuition. Hegel inverted the formula by conceiving of matter as
the form in which the Universal Idea is shaped, and he envisaged a prim-
itive dialectical relation between the two, but his hypostasizing of substance
puts the weight on form which is energized by spirit. And Croce, after
acknowledging the existence of content says "the esthetic fact, therefore,
is form, and nothing but form." I have referred to but a few outstanding
figures, but the history of esthetics is for the most part an elaboration of
this theme. This is not very surprising when we consider that the funda-
mental premise of idealist philosophy is a detachment from the material
conditions of life, and a severance of the necessary social derivations of
ideas and forms.

31

=== Page 33 ===
32 PARTISAN REVIEW

Of recent philosophers John Dewey does greatest justice to the sub-
stantial side of art. Dewey points out that content derives from experience,
that form is the shape which this experience is given, and that the two
are interdependent elements of a unity. Dewey is just short of a definitive
social and creative analysis, because the question remains for him largely
on the plane of categorical relations.

The form-content question is almost entirely absent from literary
criticism up to the twentieth century. With very few exceptions, literary
critics did not concern themselves with conceptual problems. Esthetics
and criticism were two separate streams of activity. Moreover, the periodic
transitions to new subjects and new forms represented, for the most part,
an unconscious process. Bourgeois drama, for example, introduced mer-
chant types and a merchant morality, without an exhausting overhauling
and consistent revaluation of renaissance drama. With the preoccupation
of writers toward the close of the nineteenth century and throughout the
twentieth, however, with technical innovations, and the corresponding in-
difference to subject, the form-content problem assumed considerable sig-
nificance.

Today, the conscious transition to explicitly revolutionary literature
which many writers are making swings the axis of criticism to the relation
of form to content. A systematic approach to the usable elements in our
literary heritage is impossible without an effective analysis of the connec-
tion between traditional beliefs and the way they have been shaped into
important works of art. The fulcrum for this analysis lies in the unified
outlook and sensibility which the Marxian philosophy provides. Unless the
method of analysing a problem in criticism stems from a valid program
of literature, the discussion tends to dissolve in irrelevant speculation. It
is interesting to note that I. A. Richards, in considering one aspect of this
problem, argues that a "suspension of disbelief" is a necessary condition
for appreciating a work of art, and T. S. Eliot says that the magnitude
rather than the acceptability of a writer's belief is relevant to a judgment
of his stature. This indecisive, evasive approach to content is apparently
an outgrowth of the fact that the milieu of these critics really contains
no groundwork of affirmative belief.

The usual way in which the form and content question is posed is to
ask whether content and form are separable or inseparable. But the terms
are not defined, nor is the meaning of separation explained. So far as
"separation" is concerned, whatever meaning we give to form and content,
distinguishing between the two is any specific poem is not the same as
taking over the form, let us say, of a poem and discarding the content
in writing a new poem.

Form is commonly thought of as the shape or structure of a literary

=== Page 34 ===
FORM AND CONTENT
33
work or as the linguistic method employed. It is taken as the mould into
which a writer's ideas are poured. When people speak of the sonnet, the
novel, reportage as literary forms, they are really referring to the tra
ditional patterns of writing. The use of these patterns for varied esthetic
and political purposes indicates that no literary traditions or social class
has any particular rights to these patterns and that in using any of them,
revolutionary writers do not take anything specifically esthetic from their
literary heritage. A more frequent meaning is form as technique or method.
But method or technique alone are merely the verbal surface of the impact
which a poem or novel has upon the reader, because linguistic methods
are intimately associated with the writer's purposes and perceptions. Joyce's
methods, for example, are a function of his sensory and intellectual ex
perience.
Content, on the other hand, is usually pictured as something solid,
organized and completely philosophical. It is considered as the what a
writer is saying, and form as the how a writer says it. But in examining
typical literary works, we usually cannot point to any such logical content.
No critic has yet systematized Shakespeare's beliefs into a coherent set of
ideas. Only in predominantly philosophical writers are the ideas recog
nized as such; but even in the work of Thomas Mann (who is commonly
considered a philosophical writer) it is impossible to isolate a content, since
his view of the world is so completely merged with the narrative structure.
In The Magic Mountain, the attitudes and values emerge from the novel
as a whole. And we would be hard put to reconstruct the purely content
side of such a novel as Cantwell's The Land of Plenty. The content of a
work is its complete meaning, and this includes: its politics, conceptions
of people, subject, emotions and incidental insights.
A more significant definition of form and content would reveal them
as two aspects of a unified vision. The basic equipment of a writer is
his scheme of values and his grasp of the quality of human activities and
relations. These, of course, are conditioned by the prevailing modes of
thought and perception. Content would include: the subject in the most
literal sense, like the leisure class life in Henry James' novels; specific
systems of thought, like Lucretius' philosophy, or Dante's medieval
theology; general moral, philosophical or social views which are woven
into the texture of action, like the Greek sense of fate, or Shakespeare's
sense of tragedy, or Dostoevsky's nihilistic, amoral view of the individual;
an intangible outlook, like Faulkner's or Eliot's vision of decay and tension.
In examining any specific literary work, however, it is immediately evident
that we can point to the content only when we tear it from its context, and
and if we bear in mind that it is but a relatively distinct part. Consider
the most famous passage in English poetry, Hamlet's soliloquy. As sheer

=== Page 35 ===
34
PARTISAN REVIEW
content it asks whether it is nobler to yield to adverse fortunes or to resist
them. As such, it is, of course, banal and silly. But the question takes
its meaning from Hamlet's person and state of mind, in short, from Shake-
speare's complete perception of the play of human motives and of the
character of Hamlet. And this is given not only in the working out of the
plot, in the innuendos of action, but also in the very idiom of the soliloquy
which imparts Shakespeare's grasp of behavior in his time. In saying this,
the idea of form is included in that of content.
Similarly, in Proust's study of the upper layers of French society, his
view of memory as a store-room of associations, and of time as a stream of
events and memories, his delicate but detailed probing of the psychology of
his characters, his subtle, winding prose; the structure of nuances in char-
acter relation: all make up a single texture. And Joyce's linguistic meth-
ods are as much an expression of his perceptions as of his theories of style.
The content of Ulysses would simply be something else were it not con-
tained in the form of a telescoped association of prose. What we call
style is really the writer's instrument for evoking the quality of experience,
for the idiom is the unit of style. Hemingway's lean idiom is well adapted
to the opaque, casual relations of his characters.
And when Eliot says:
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As mind is dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
the very flavor of the idiom is calculated to convey the note of resignation
which makes up the belief of the poem.
Since any suggestive idea of form would have to include the elements
which give shape and quality to content, form should be defined as a mode
of perception. In fact, some such unconscious view of form has been
current in modern poetry. Imagist and surrealist poetry concentrated to
such an extent on the perceptive character of literature, as to narrow the
range of explicit meaning to the point of extinction. Technical innova-
tion became the method of verbalizing a sensory approach to experience.
Poetry, the most susceptible literary genre to formal preoccupation, was
worn to a frazzle. The history of modern poetry serves as evidence that,
while form should be regarded as a mode of perception, it cannot be for-
gotten that it is a way of perceiving a specific literary content. The values,
philosophy and subject of an art-work are modulated by the insight of the
writer into events and characters which give the structural embodiment of
the content. The point of contact to the reader is the final fusion,

=== Page 36 ===
POETRY

35

It is not only the stature of Kark Marx as a revolutionist or as a
man which is of primary importance to the revolutionary poet. Nor is it
the revolutionary stature of Lenin, Liebknecht or Dimitroff, of Joe Hill,
Tom Mooney or Sen Katayama—all of whom have appeared as heroic
figures in our poetry. It is the peculiar and personal aspect of their lives,
experiences, personalities, which finds a responding chord in ours: a contact
which, when touched off, produces poetry.

Who are our revolutionary poets and what do they seek and represent?
I tried to answer this question recently and found the answer difficult,
so great is the confusion among our poets. Particularly is an answer
difficult if we seek to examine the poetic material which may influence
a poetry revival in America.

All of us can think of several poems which have been notable, which
have laid the basis for such a revival. At random: A Strange Funeral in
Braddock, by Michael Gold; When the Cock Crows, by Arturo Gio-
vannitti; one or two others. But a revival depends not on scattered poems,
but on poets who are continually productive.

Who are these poets? Again we must eliminate many names; at least
until the time when their work establishes their right to be included
among the active, producing revolutionary poets.

Alfred Kreymborg, author of the mass recitation America, America,
a much overrated piece of verse, has not written anything revolutionary
since it was published a year ago, unless he wishes us to consider his feeble
satire in doggerel as revolutionary verse. I think Kreymborg as a poet
was best in his early lyrical pieces, in which, incidentally, the lyricism
was in the thought, the conception, rather than in the writing.

Maxwell Bodenheim's recent revolutionary attempts have all failed.
His best verse appeared in Minna and Myself and other very early volumes.

Herman Spector, who wrote several excellent poems about seven
years ago, rarely writes or publishes poetry today. The same seems to be
true of Joseph Kalar, author of Papermill and Now That Snow Is Falling.
Kalar never a very prolific writer, has given up poetry to devote himself
solely to fiction. Norman Macleod, most prolific of all the poets allied
with the working class, has never become sufficiently integrated with this
class to write a really revolutionary poem. His main concern, at least
in his published work, seems to be with themes which, if they are not
individual, are treated in a highly individualized manner. Langston
Hughes has not produced a single revolutionary poem which compares
favorably with his early work in The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to
the Jew. He too has forsaken poetry, to the enrichment of American
fiction.

=== Page 37 ===
36 PARTISAN REVIEW

able to say this. There is no prophetic principle which enables us to foresee
the form which a content must take. Content from this angle is a slightly
different thing; for we have abstracted from specifically modulated sub-
stances (in a poem or novel) a general idea of content which is related
to our intellectual approach to the world. I mean that in Auden, for
example, there is a special kind of satire which gets its meaning and vigor
from his form, whereas satire, in general, as a subject, can have a number
of forms.

If the preceding analysis is correct, the inevitable conclusion is that
specific content and form determine each other, and that content in its
translated, intellectual aspect conditions or sets a range for form. Certainly
Eliot's values of frustration, restlessness and tension would be weird in
the heroic structures of Shakespeare's plays. But within appropriate
limits an indefinite number of forms seem possible, and it is only after
their appearance that we can see the necessary connections with content.

When confronted with the task of extracting usable elements from
our literary heritage, as revolutionary writers are, the problem is a little
more complicated. Since the days are gone when writers use the subjects
of their predecessors, except in the baldest sense (like war or declassed
intellectuals) and from writers in the same tradition (like factory or
strike scenes in revolutionary literature), the carryover of content per se
presents no critical problem. Certainly the main concern of revolutionary
writers is to utilize the new wealth of revolutionary themes. But many
hairs have been split over the question of utilizing traditional forms. If,
however, form is to be regarded as a function of perception, and, with
content, a twin aspect of sensibility, it is evident that form alone cannot
be assimilated: the sensibility of traditional writers is the assimilable
quality. The task of the revolutionary writer is the forging of a relatively
new sensibility, compounded of his Marxian outlook, proletarian experience
and whatever available literary sensibilities exist. But over short periods
of time some constants in sensibility appear to persist. Contemporary
literature, despite its conservative values and ideas, articulates a vast
range of profound perceptions. Look at T. S. Eliot, who has become the
symbol of traditional literature: his reactionary beliefs give his poetry
as a whole a nostalgic waywardness marginal to the decisive issues of
modern life; but his sensibility has produced a trenchant idiom for the
dislocation of bourgeois perspectives amidst a tightening commercial way
of life. Some revolutionary poets have been chided for their susceptibility
to Eliot's influence. It is interesting to note, however, that none of them
has transplanted his complete sensibility; the influence has been limited
largely to Eliot's reaction against the eloquent verbosities of earlier romantic
poetry, and to his sense of pervasive bourgeois melancholy. The latter has

=== Page 38 ===
FORM AND CONTENT
37
often been turned into satire and rejection of the bourgeois way of life.
Similarly, an examination of other important contemporary writers would
reveal that their importance is dependent on their sensitiveness to current
sensibilities, and that these sensibilities are encompassed by the outlook of
revolutionary writers. Modification, of course, takes place-but never
destruction. If languages forms and their living equivalents are to be
regarded as social phenomena, it follows that the art of a new class in-
troduces decisive slants into a continuum of sensibility and art works
erected upon phases of current sensibility.

Misunderstanding of this process and of the underlying relation of
form to content have produced many false notions about the way revolu-
tionary artists are creating forms for their new themes. In discussing
"style" as an expression of the values of a class, Sidney Hook writes:

"We may mean either that the technical elements of a work
have grown out of a new social experience or that technical
elements already in existence have been fused in a new way
or filled with a new content. ... But even in literature it is
clear that some formal elements, e.g., the sonnet form, re-
portage, the autobiographical novel, may be used indifferently
to express disparate political and social interests. In painting,
realistic technique may serve revolutionary or non-revolu-
tionary purposes. In music, the same tunes are often the bat-
tle songs of Fascists in Germany and of Communists in
Russia."

In this apparently single idea, Hook makes a variety of errors. First,
there is no such distinction between the fusion of old "technique" and the
development of new ones from a new social experience. All important
art effects a fusion of tradition and experiment. And proletarian art is
no exception. Then Hook is using the term form to denote those external
shapes discussed earlier in this essay. When he argues that "realistic
technique" or "reportage" may serve opposed political purposes, Hook is
saying little more than that both a Fascist and a Communist wear trousers.
It is only by seeing form and content as united by the fundamental sensi-
bility of the artist that the distinction between the form of revolutionary
and non-revolutionary art can be recognized. If fascists have used the
songs of communists in Germany, it is not through any formal creation,
but because the triumphant rhythms, of an Eisler song, for example, can
be demagogically adapted to the misguided enthusiasm of fascist masses.
In the belief that he is following Engels, who wrote that both he and
Marx often neglected the formal side of culture, in the polemical necessity
of opposing their contemporaries who denied the economic factor, Hook
further argues that the pattern of cultural development often depends
upon "certain, relatively irreducible, technical factors, and that for some
purposes, an explanation in terms of these technical factors may be valid."

=== Page 39 ===
38

PARTISAN REVIEW

Again, by failing to see "technical factors" as a part of form and their
connection with sensibility, Hook is led to bring in the bogey of irre-
ducibility. Marxism, of course, is certainly not a method of reduction,
though Hook seems here to imply that some Marxists use it as such; but
the sensibility of the writer can be seen to be conditioned and generated
by the sensibilities of his time.

Robert Cantwell, a much more sensitive critic of literature, and a
writer who is close to the aims and problems of revolutionary literature,
has however, overestimated the usable elements for revolutionary literature,
I believe, in the work of Henry James. In a recent article in The New
Republic, Cantwell says:

(Henry James') "deepest meaning is reserved for those who
hold more revolutionary philosophies. They can understand
his attitude toward his own class, and perhaps add the in-
dignation that he never expressed; his 'hierarchizing' of char-
acters according to their individual awareness is close to
their own concepts of class and political consciousness. The
question of technique is another matter, but it can be said of
him, as it cannot be said of Proust and Joyce, that the tech-
nique he developed is equally good for both sides."

I fail to see how James' "hierarchizing" of characters is close to rev-
olutionary concepts. But aside from that, though it is undoubtedly true
that a note of indignation toward the class James described is one element
of a revolutionary treatment of the leisured bourgeoisie, it is hard to see
how this distinguishes the contribution of James from Proust or any other
writer who treated the upper middle-class. Certainly the sensibility of
James is removed by many gaps of perception from that of revolutionary
writers to-day. That there are some links, as there is to every important
work of the past, no one can deny, but the links to James are not especially
significant. And the suggestion that the technique of James "is equally
good for both sides" again uses "technique" in its most superficial sense.
If verbal methods are meant, we should demur on the ground that James'
style is ill adapted to the kind of events that Dos Passos, let us say, or
Cantwell, himself, are writing about. If the insight of James into people
is meant, this precept would hold as well for Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoey-
sky and so on. Had Cantwell approached the sensibility of James as the
clue to a writers' relation to a new literary tradition, I doubt whether he
would have reached these conclusions.

Ultimately, the relation of form to content and sensibility is a matter
for special analysis of individual literary works. Only in this way can
the precise balance in each instance be seen. But the question cannot even
be approached, as I have tried to show, unless there is some agreement
on basic definitions, and on the general theoretic relationships of the ele-

8

=== Page 40 ===
FORM AND CONTENT
ments of a literary work. The examples I have discussed have been drawn
from literature, but with some modification for the peculiarities of each
medium, I think the analysis could be extended to music and fine art.
There are many other urgent questions, basic to the Marxian esthetic,
such as: a revaluation from the viewpoint of usability of our literary
heritage; a method for establishing standards in revolutionary literature
and for revising our standards in approaching traditional literature; and
a thorough examination of the meaning of literary works. As I have
attempted to indicate, the extraction of assimilable elements in our literary
heritage is closely bound to the problem of form and content. And I am
convinced, too, that a grasp of the relations among form, content and
sensibility provides the approach to the question of literary values and stan-
dards, particularly for revolutionary literature, and to the question of
meaning. For most of the problems facing literary critics to-day hinge on
the way a work of art is compounded of the writer's philosophy, values,
style and emotional temper, how these are related to the social milieu,
and how in turn, they are judged by ideological standards. The theory
that the writer's sensibility is the prism from which form and content, in
their most inclusive sense, emerge; that it is the faculty of esthetic selection
and the register of intellectual and aesthetic winds in society-presents
the method, I believe, of tackling our other critical problems.
39

=== Page 41 ===
FOR ERNST THAELMANN

I.
Comrades,
imagine now
a falcon a fury
high
a plane springing sunward
from the flexed wrist of earth
strict at the signal
Thaelmann shall not die
roaring soaring
dividing Time
not into hour and hour
not into days
but into the elate tempo of our
power
up up
through dew-light
through earth-haze
soaring roaring
Thaelmann shall not die
Speed speed ay!
plucks at wires
frantic frantic to wring
gigantic slogan out
the million-fingered wind!
Oh comrades sing and sing
hollow the hoarse lungs out
and strike this gong of sky
shout
Thaelmann shall not die
Here's
here's cloud now
here's like cottonwaste
cloud
hasten and bend
the flight-arc upward so
sharp
climb proud
so so
this million unborn rain
potential snow
hurling shall hammer down
on village and on town
our cry
Rise
Proletariat Toilers of all lands
Thaelmann shall not die
Therefore
with us who soar
who score
the sky
who helmeted ride the air
veined hands exact
—oh joystick eager there!—
declare,
with fuselage and wing
engine and singing screw
bridge space with protest
cry
you and you and you
here there and everywhere
II.
Down
in the guts of earth
down and down
beneath
clamour and glamour
beneath
their willed precarious mirth
masker of fear
beneath
valley and town
let them hear
who would murder and shelve him
away
beat
40

=== Page 42 ===
FOR ERNST THAELMANN 41

through endless invincible hours
like fate
the hammer and hammer of
hammer and hammer of
millions who mine
as they state
the steel-strict slogan the hate
of the proletariat
Thaelmann is ours
As they go as they go
precious with parasite friends
counting their dividends
through the hollow-eyed countryside
where hunger strangles and rends
let them know
how the chanting express where
they ride
the smoke-scrawled banner of sky
cry
how each wheel
thunders metrically out on the steel
what the starving the tortured feel
-let them crumple their hands like
flowers-
Thaelmann is ours
III.
Comrades,
a wind now a wind
huge
a tornado
rocking the socketed stars
transforming earth
We shall win Thaelmann like a
battle
rising
driving before
the choking broken refuse of a
world
the hideous ideologies of despair
throttling the screamed lie
in your throat
bourgeoisie

We shall win Thaelmann like a
battle
a wind! a wind
pointed with steel
with steel
the steel of Lenin
mounting

mounting
up from the tunnelling mine
echoing the twisted cries of the
doomed
weaving to fury
the silent accusation of the dead
and the unspeakable waiting agony
of the women
gathering power
We shall win Thaelmann like a
battle
now the conveyor-belt
lined by exhausted hands
and the drained heaviness of our eyes
now the picket-line
now the advancing gas-cloud
fired by police
now the demonstrations
now the hunger-march
now the barricades
up UP
to the exact skyscraper nuzzling the
blue
to the showered leaflets
and the exploding slogan shouted
through space
upward to the plane
that with gold wings writes the sky
finally to the insurrection and to
Soviet Power
comrades a wind now a wind
the wind of revolution
We shall win Thaelmann like a
battle
RICHARD GOODMAN

=== Page 43 ===
THE SCAB

Arkady Leokum

T
HE TWO MEN climb up the dark stairs on which the lino-
leum curves in and out and walk back along the first landing and
then they climb with short steps to the second floor.
"If this is another Italian . . ." McHugh says.
Brandt grins "They're tough, eh? Well . . ." he knocks
on a door near the stairs, "We'll see." They stand outside
the door and stare vacantly, listening. Brandt knocks again
sharply.
Finally there is the noise of a chair being moved inside
the room and there is a silence as if someone inside were listen-
ing too, or waiting. The two men look at each other. It is
better when the door is opened at once and they know what
they have to face and whom to deal with and they don't have
to stand there wondering and waiting.
Brandt is about to knock again when a voice suddenly very
close to the door says: "What do you want?"
"Oh open up, will you?" says Brandt. He says it lightly.
"You know us, open up."
The man inside opens the door and sticks his head out.
He looks them up and down quickly.
"I don't know you."
"Sure! From the union-" the two push their way inside
the room. "Why sure you know us,-we're from the union!"
The man comes away from the door slowly; but not too
close, he stands a little distance away.
"Well?"
"Well," Brandt looks around the room, "let's sit down
anyway." He feels very confident, and McHugh too glances
around, because this fellow isn't at all like the Italian was and
he is even frightened you can see and this is going to be an
easy job generally.
"Now let's sit down," Brandt says again and sits down
on the bed. The man follows him. He is thin with very bony

42

=== Page 44 ===
THE SCAB 43 hands and wrists and a long, drawn face. His chin hangs down like a pump that has sucked his cheeks dry and tightened the skin on his forehead, so that his hair almost stands up, separated.
Brandt unbuttons his coat. "You're new here, ain't you?"
The man is silent.
"What I mean is, this ain't your line,-this ain't your regu lar trade is it?"
The man looks at him and then down at the bed. He isn't clear about these fellows yet. It looks kind of fishy.
"Well, listen now, why don't you wanna talk? Look,- I'm telling you straight, we're from the union. Not putting anything over on you-we just wanna talk to you and win you over to our side, that's all."
The man's hand fumbles with the blanket, but he remains silent.
"Now when you hit this town-before you hit this town- didn't you know there was a strike?"
The fellow looks up finally. "Sure" he says. "I knew there was a strike" His voice is hoarse. "What do you want anyway?"
"All right, you knew there was a strike," Brandt shifts on the bed. "Now why are you scabbing on us?"
The man rouses himself, a little annoyed by all this soft ness. "Look here, I'm working an honest living. I got nothing to do with the unions-but I work honest. I work for my bread."
Brandt glances up at McHugh standing beside him. They've got a fool this time, a stupid fellow.
"Well," Brandt says, "don't you know what you're doing?" (They'll have to explain the whole business to him.) "Don't you know what scabbing means?" He looks intensely at the fellow. McHugh grabs a chair and sits down beside them.
The man glances from one to the other as they settle down. What's the matter with these two guys? Are they union men? Are these two soft mushy guys union men? He feels he can answer them-because why are they doing it so quietly, talking so easy to him? They're soft!
"Listen," he says to them, "I heard this business about scabbing maybe a million times already. Only I got a job now and I'm holding on to it...and I don't need any of that union stuff anyway. I don't go for it."
Brandt suddenly looks at the man again. He begins to

=== Page 45 ===
44 PARTISAN REVIEW
understand the face now and feels that something is emerging
here, this man is going to talk—and he wants to draw him out,
let him spin himself out.
"So you're an old scab, eh?"
The man grins momentarily. These must be new fellows
and he could tell them a thing or two, these wise union guys.
"Seattle," he says. "It was maybe seven years ago we
had a strike there that lasted four months. What did I do?
I worked those four months—and let me tell you I made more
than I'd made for a year! The unions—"
"Yeah, tell us about the unions."
"Well, there was guys like you coming down to the place
every day, picketing and all that stuff—only I didn't fall for it.
Seven years ago that was. So you see," he looks up at them,
(these must be very new and innocent fellows)—"you're wasting
your time here."
Brandt is fascinated by the man's eyes which are grinning
with the grin he has suppressed on his face and he feels that the
man is enjoying this and thinks that they will plead with him
and that maybe he will even enjoy their pleading.
"Well Seattle," Brandt says. "Any other place you
scabbed?"
The man glances up, aware of the hatred in the questions
now, but these fellows are kind of helpless and they know they
are helpless and so he doesn't mind talking.
"Sure," he says. He runs his fingers through his hair.
"I've been all over the country, you know—mills, factories, I
even did mining once."
Brandt opens his coat wider and shifts on the bed. He
has patience and he wants to hear this man out, let him talk
himself out.
"Well, and where were you mining?"
"Pennsylvania. Nine dollars a day. I remember that—
nine round dollars each and every day."
"So you've made some money on strikes?"
"Now don't get me wrong." The fellow is almost anxious.
He will expand on it for these two. (After all?) "I worked
regular too, ... years of it in my time, and I never had a decent
coat to show for it! What's the use? See, what's the use for
me? Unions, bosses, strikes—I say the hell with them all.
What does it mean to me? But now if they're fighting over
something and make conditions where I can work and make

=== Page 46 ===
THE SCAB 45
money—what am I gonna do? See? . . . And don't forget I'm
not stealing anything. I'm working for it."
"Well," Brandt says, almost incredulous, and he glances
at McHugh, "so you were making nine dollars a day in . . ."
"Pennsylvania."
"—Pennsylvania, and in Seattle, how much did you say
you made in Seattle?"
"What's the difference?" The fellow is annoyed by now.
"What do you want?"
Brandt appears very calm and he turns to McHugh beside
him. "What shall we tell him, McHugh? Do we want any-
thing from him?"
McHugh is glaring at the man and Brandt twists around
too so that the man notices suddenly and his face hardens and
his lips tighten.
"Hell, why should we want something from you?" Brandt
says. "Huh? You worked honest all the time,—ain't he,
McHugh?"
The man is half risen and his face is pale now.
"What do you want?" he says and stands up.
Brandt stands up too and moves closer to him. "McHugh,
the guy keeps asking us what we want. Can you beat that?
We don't want nothing—" the man is back against the wall
and Brandt stands before him with his coat open. The man
is perspiring and pale and Brandt grabs him. "Nothing, only
you're a goddam scab, that's all. You ain't fit to live, that's
all."
"Sock him," McHugh says.
"You're a lousy scab and I'm gonna beat you up, that's
all." He throws the man back against the wall and his head
falls back and strikes the wall. The man is trembling.
"Sock him," McHugh says.
Brandt shakes the man again and he almost falls to the
floor so that Brandt drags him up again and holds him straight.
The man has his hands raised but he keeps wetting his lips and
stares helplessly.
"Sock him will you!" McHugh shouts and moves forward.
"Sure I will," says Brandt, but he only shakes the man
and feels him trembling in his hands and sees his eyes staring.
"I'll kill this son of a bitch," he says, but the man is limp
in his hands. He holds him by the throat and clenches his fist
but he cannot raise his arm and hit this flesh, he cannot. The

=== Page 47 ===
46 PARTISAN REVIEW man suddenly stiffens and wriggles out. "Wait!" he shouts. "Wait will you! For God's sake don't hit me!" he clings to Brandt. "Don't hit! I won't scab. Never! I'm not gonna scab!" he clings to Brandt's coat. "Look, I'll picket with you! You'll see I swear I'll picket with you to-morrow!" his mouth is slobbering and he twists in Brandts hands. Brandt stares for a moment. "What?" He looks at the man. "What did you say? Did you hear?" he shouts. "Did you hear what he said! He'll picket with us! You son of a bitch, you'll picket with us?" he swings into the man's face, and again and then suddenly he lets himself go and beats into the face again and again till the man's head is bouncing against the wall and he falls to the floor. "Picket with us?" Brandt shouts and McHugh grabs his arm and pulls him away. But he twists back, his eyes wild, and McHugh pulls him to the door. "Did you hear what the bastard said? Picket with us!" Brandt shouts and McHugh drags and pulls him down the stairs, but he can't calm him and he drags him out.

=== Page 48 ===
IF A MAN BITES A DOG*

Edwin Seaver

MR. ALFRED ROSENBERG champed at the bit on the thresh-
old of Mr. Schmuck's office, flecks of saliva gathering at the
corners of his mouth as he waited fidgeting for the lawyer to
look up from the memorandum he was scratching on a pad.
"Say, did you hear the news?" he exploded, unable to con-
tain himself longer, tugging at the creased and soiled newspaper
bulging from the pocket of his jacket. "They caught Two-gun
Dowling."
Mr. Schmuck shifted the extinct butt of a cigar from east
to west with a convulsive twitch of his lips.
"Whatsat?" he said without looking up.
"They got Twogun Dowling. You know, the kid that shot
the cop. Jesus! You should've seen the mob."
Mr. Schmuck tore off the memorandum, slipped it under
the glass paperweight and leaned back in his swivelchair com-
fortably, clasping his hands behind his thick neck.
"You know what Horace Greeley said don't you?" he said.
Mr. Rosenberg looked bewildered. "You mean go west
young man, go west?"
"Go west hell!" said Mr. Schmuck with disgust. "Say,
where were you educated anyhow? I mean the one about the
man biting the dog."
"Aw, that wasn't Greeley," Mr. Rosenberg said. "That
was Dana, the editor of the Sun."
"He's telling me!" said Mr. Schmuck indicating his neo-
phyte with an indulgent thrust of his chin. "I suppose it was
Greeley who wrote Two Years Before The Masthead, eh
wiseguy?"
"No, that was his father. I mean it was Dana's father."
"You mean his grandmother, don't you?" Mr. Schmuck
gave a high squealing laugh oddly at variance with his heavy,

* Excerpts from the forthcoming novel, Between the Hammer and the Anvil.

47

=== Page 49 ===
48 PARTISAN REVIEW aggressive frame. It was evident that he was in high fettle this afternoon. "Hey, Nudnick!" he bellowed suddenly. "What d'you want?" A pale whining voice floated up from the other side of the glazed glass partition, followed by the presence of Mr. Nathan Nudnick himself, in the flesh, on the threshold of Mr. Schmuck's office, his pale bulging harassed little eyes darting back and forth like a shuttle. "Who was it said that about the man biting the dog?" said Mr. Schmuck. The look of habitual worriment on Mr. Nudnick's coun- tenance deepened. "A man should bite a dog?" he said incredulously. "What kind of a ...?" "Oh for Christ's sake!" Mr. Nudnick said. "Write a letter to the Times about it why don't you?" "There's a Mr. John Doe here to see you," Miss Bitter- man interrupted elbowing her way into the office. "Doe? Who the hell's John Doe?" asked Mr. Schmuck. "I don't know, sir. He says he wanted to see you about something important. "Aw, you know," Mr. Rosenberg said. "One of the Blu- menthal accounts." "Humph!" Mr. Schmuck blew a mighty wind through his nose. "Alright, tell him to wait." "Wait a minute," he called after the departing secretary. "Get me the Blumenthal file will you?... And close the door after you." "What about him?" he asked Mr. Rosenberg when the door was shut, jerking his head toward the outer office. Mr. Rosenberg grimaced and shrugged his shoulders, then pointed emphatically to the floor with both thumbs down. "Just another poor sucker," he said. "What do you mean another poor sucker?" Mr. Schmuck said. "Say Nudnick, did you get that? That's what law school does for 'em nowadays. Throwing up a case before he even gets started." Mr. Nudnick smiled apologetically, his hand groping for the doorknob behind him. "You'll excuse me gentlemen," he said unconvincingly. "I've got work to do," edging himself out from under his partner's contemptuous heavy-lidded stare.

=== Page 50 ===
IF A MAN BITES A DOG
49
"He's got work to do," Mr. Schmuck said when the door
was closed. "If he had any more he might have a whole case."
"Listen kid, get wise to yourself," he said suddenly sitting
erect and pointing his finger dramatically at Mr. Rosenberg.
"If you're going to begin letting these guys tell you a sob story
you'll be licked from the start. You'll never get anywhere that
way. I'm telling you this for your own good. Say, if I believed all
they tell me I'd've died of a broken heart long ago. Don't
worry, I was soft like you, too, when I first got out of law school.
But I had it knocked out of me pretty quick, see. Boy, you got
to learn not to trust your own mother in this game, take it from
me."
"I guess it's a skin game alright," Mr. Rosenberg said,
gloomily trying to tighten a button that had worked loose on his
jacket and was hanging now by a single thread.
"What d'you mean skin game!" Mr. Schmuck spat out his
cigar butt into the cuspidor under his desk. "Sure it's a skin
game. What ain't a skin game? It's not your funeral because
some boob owes your client money, is it?"
Miss Bitterman entered bearing a cluttered file and placing
it on the lawyer's desk turned to leave the office, like an auto-
maton, prodding under her hair with the blunt end of a pencil.
"I suppose not," said Mr. Rosenberg. "Just a case of dog
eat dog, eh?"
"You said it! Dog eat dog. And how!"
Opening the top drawer of his desk Mr. Schmuck took out
a fresh stogie, bit off the tip and stuck the cigar between his
strong yellow teeth.
"Say, how about that guy Shreves?" he said striking a
match to his cigar and emitting puffs of smoke. "Did you find
the bastard yet?"
"No, missed him again," Mr. Rosenberg said turning to-
ward the door.
"Wait a minute. What d'you mean missed him again?
I thought you said you had lots of experience."
"What am I supposed to be a detective or something?"
Mr. Rosenberg said squirming impatiently.
"That's what I'm paying you for ain't it?"
"You're paying me!" Mr. Rosenberg said, a trace of bit-
terness in his voice. "I don't know as you've ever paid me for
anything I haven't done."

=== Page 51 ===
50 PARTISAN REVIEW

Mr. Schmuck's glassy blue eyes narrowed as he mouthed
his cigar.
"Say, what's getting into you these days, Rosie?" he said
grinning. "Got a burr under your tail or something?"
"Never mind what's under my tail," Mr. Rosenberg said.
"I tell you I'm getting fed up with it all, fed up, d'you under-
stand?" he said sawing his hand eloquently across his throat.
"Aw tie a can to that crap," Mr. Schmuck said waving his
hand at the law student. "That won't get you anywheres. I
understand. Sure, I know you get tired and discouraged and all
that kind of thing. It seems like a long hard road to the top.
But you got to keep plugging along, see."
Mr. Rosenberg lifted his hands as if to remonstrate, but
no words came and he let his hands fall hopelessly to his side.
"Well," he mumbled, "I guess I'll get going."
"Alright," Mr. Schmuck said slamming shut the drawer of
his desk. "Tell that guy to come in on your way out."

Mr. John Doe seated himself gingerly on the edge of a
chair, his knees pressed close together, his hands gripping tensely
the rim of the still correct stiff felt hat in his lap.
"I'm Mr. Doe," he said clearing his throat as he leaned
toward the desk.
Mr. Schmuck continued to thumb the papers in the spread
open file.
"Yeah," he said vaguely.
"I came to see you about this . . . er ... notice you sent me,"
Mr. Doe said fumbling for the summons in the inner pocket of
his jacket and bringing it to light with trembling fingers.
"Yeah," said Mr. Schmuck.
"I wanted to ask you if you couldn't please do something
for me. I mean is it really necessary for me to appear in court
tomorrow morning?"
Mr. Schmuck glanced up truculently.
"What do you mean really necessary?" No, not if you
prefer to face contempt proceedings."
"Contempt proceedings ...! You mean ...?"
"You wouldn't like that, eh? Well, take my advice and
show up then."
"But I mean couldn't we settle this outside of court?"
Mr. Schmuck shoved aside the file and leaned back in his
chair, pulling vigorously at his almost extinguished cigar. An

=== Page 52 ===
IF A MAN BITES A DOG
51
ash fell to his firmly packed vest and filtered down into his lap.
"That's up to you," he said studying his clothes carefully
as he brushed himself with his hand.
"I don't understand."
"There's nothing to understand about it. Con you pay?"
"But my dear man," protested Mr. Doe politely as one
with a soft answer might seek to turn away wrath, "if I had
the money with which to pay I would have done so before this.
You wouldn't have had to send me a summons."
"Well, can you pay anything? Can you make me an offer?"
"But I told you, I told your young man when he came to
see me the other night, if I could make a settlement..."
"Alright, don't make a song and dance out of it," Mr.
Schmuck barked. The softness of the man before him was
getting on his nerves. "I'm not here to argue with you."
A feeling of humiliation, of futility, of weariness pervaded
Mr. Doe's being, like a drug, making heavy his limbs.
"But I didn't mean to argue," he protested hopelessly.
"Alright, then come to court tomorrow." Mr. Schmuck
closed the file with an air of finality as much as to say "the in-
terview is at an end," and picking up a pencil made a notation
on his scratchpad.

All the time he was talking the painful crease between Mr.
Doe's bewildered eyes had been deepening as if under the blows
of an unseen chisel. Now he stroked his forehead abstractedly
with the fingers of one hand as if he would smooth away the
deep parallel lines that puckered his brow. Why am I humiliat-
ing myself like this? he thought. What is this man to me that
I should have to appeal to him like this? Why should he treat
me like a dog? I wouldn't talk to a dog that way, no, not even
to a dog. His head felt hot and ached dully but his fingers were
cold as ice and as he gripped his temples between thumb and
forefinger he shivered and it seemed to him that somewhere lost
in his brain was a thought that was struggling to come to the sur-
face, a thought that needed desperately to be expressed, but it
was drowning, it was suffocating and he was powerless to rescue
it.

"Couldn't you give me a little more time at least?" he said
rising from his chair. "Maybe in another month or two..."
Mr. Schmuck toyed with his pencil and puffed at his cigar
in an attitude of momentous decision.
"Look here," he said suddenly glancing up at Mr. Doe and

=== Page 53 ===
52

PARTISAN REVIEW

pointing his pencil at him. "You seem to be a square shooter,
see. I don't want to hound you. I know you're honest alright.
It ain't that. We're all honest. If I'm on your neck this way
please remember that my clients are on mine, too. Now what
do you owe 'em? About two hundred bucks, eh? Alright, you
pay me a hundred and we'll call it quits."
Mr. Doe shook his head slowly.
"You don't understand," he said weariedly. "I haven't
got the money."
"Alright, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make it even easier
for you." Mr. Schmuck was melting under the warmth of his
own magnanimity. "I'll make it seventy-five, see, and tell my
client that's all that's coming to him."
"Is it a go?" Mr. Schmuck said actually reaching for the
phone. "I'll call him up right now and make him take it if
you'll say the word."
Mr. Doe shrugged his shoulders. "What's the use of
talking?" he said unhappily turning to go. "You don't under-
stand. Nobody can understand."
What was there to understand, when it came to that? If
you were walking along a straight road, or maybe between the
tracks of a railroad-incalculably sudden and vivid the memory
assailed Mr. Doe of himself as a boy walking the railroad ties,
his shoes slung over his shoulder, the ties heated by the fierce
sun of August burning his naked feet; he couldn't recall how
he happened to be there, it didn't matter anyway, but the memory
was fraught with a piercing nostalgic sadness that brought the
quick hot tears to his eyes-if you were walking along that way
the tracks seemed to come together in the distance and that was
called perspective. It was an illusion really, only it wasn't an
illusion, the way was getting narrower and narrower all the
time and you felt crushed, slowly remorselessly crushed and
stifled, not just because of this debt or that but everything to-
gether squeezing you tighter and tighter and tighter...
Mr. Doe breathed with difficulty as he put on his hat and
groped for the doorknob.
"Goodbye," he said his own voice strange to him.
The telephone bell was ringing.
"Hello!" called Mr. Schmuck yanking at the receiver and
staring vaguely into space. "Hello! Hello! Whatsat...?"

=== Page 54 ===
CITY OF MONUMENTS

Washington, 1934

Be proud you people of these graves
these chiseled words this precedent
From these blind ruins shines our monument.
Dead navies of the brain will sail
stone celebrate its final choice
when the air shakes, a single voice
a strong voice able to prevail:
Entrust no hope to stone although the stone
shelter the root—see too-great burdens placed
with nothing certain but the risk
set on the infirm column of
the high memorial obelisk
erect in accusation sprung against
a barren sky taut over Anacostia:
give over, Gettysburg! a word will shake your glory—
blood of the starved fell thin upon this plain,
this battle is not buried with its slain.
Gravestones and battlefield retire,
the whole green South is shadowed dark,
the slick white domes are cast in night.
But uneclipsed above this park
the veteran of the Civil War
sees havoc in the tended graves
the midnight bugles blown to free
still unemancipated slaves.
Blinded by chromium or transfiguration
we watch, as through a microscope, decay:
down the broad streets the limousines
advance in passions of display.
Air glints with diamonds, and these clavicles
emerge through orchids by whose trailing spoor
the sensitive cannot mistake
the implicit anguish of the poor.
The throats incline, the marble men rejoice
careless of torrents of despair.
Split by a tendril of revolt
stone cedes to blossom everywhere.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER

53

=== Page 55 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER

Ben Field

AFTER THE DEATH of old Murf, the farmhand's wife, there
was constant wrangling over a new housekeeper. The boss could
pay only half wages because of the hard times. There was the
big farmhouse to clean and feeding 4 men all year and a dozen
during harvest. The boss, who spent most of his time at his
cider mill, wanted his sister and his niece from Gun Hill to
keep house for a couple of months. But none of the hired men
wanted the loud, barrel-bellied woman. Mule, foreman, was
especially set against women: "Nosing around, driving their
skirt around us, setting the boss against the best hand. This
ain't the first farm I worked on." Mule wanted a man cook.
Anyway the Gun Hill woman and her daughter couldn't come
just then.
Mule's younger brother Steve was for hiring Mame Smith,
the daughter of the poor village bell ringer. Mule swore he
wouldn't touch that whore's cooking with a 10-foot pole. Old
Murf agreed. You did have to be on guard with a woman who
had lain with so many fellows that stretched out they could
make a fence clear across the country. You had to have a fine
upstanding girl made out of dew and iron.
A big Canuk woman hired out. Here was one should stick
like a devil's pitchfork. Especially after Steve had brushed
against her, felt her breasts were hard as iron tables. But every
thing she made tasted of wash. The hired men spent more time
in the backhouse than in the barn. Even the spunky little boss
was laid up, could not tend to his cider mill. Told to go, the
big woman broke down and bawled like a baby.
The truckdriver with applejack for the city combed the em
ployment agencies. A couple of able girls backed out soon as
they'd heard they'd be all alone with 4 men. After lots of bar
gaining, one strapping Irish girl came along. But every Satur
day afternoon her fellow drove up from the city. Every Sunday
she had to go to church. The men had to eat cold dinners. The
54

=== Page 56 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 55
boss spoke once, he spoke twice. He said sorry, she was fired.
She fired back, "I ain't a horse. Think you can keep me with
hay and cider like those 3 rubes?"
The boss flushed. "That ain't the point. We got to eat."
"I got to eat too."
She wouldn't leave until the boss paid her full month's
wages. She locked herself in the room ready for a long siege.
The boss had to pay her up to get rid of her.
Ramheaded Steve, his face twitching always as if the world
were a ewe, stuttered, "Now there was a clean one for you. I
says Mame Smith, she's out of work. The boss had his tushes
in her before he got married, got himself widowed. Now he's
forgotten. There's human nature for you."
Old Murf explained it differently. He had once owned
the village blacksmith shop, the gear box of all that happened
in the countryside, the smoky nest of the political hawks. And
there he had become as skillful handling the world's difficulties
as shoeing the heaviest work stallion. He said, "It's this de-
pression that's making people act so fouled against each other.
We had a whole regiment of women already, each one a regular
pisscutter. Wait, we're only in the general hall of it. It's this
depression."
"Depression, hell," said foreman Mule. "It's always been
the same. The best of them's cut out like the worst. Getting
into tantrums, making us cut and cover when we could afinished
plowing weeks ago. I'll get a man cook."
Mule had in mind the young fellow working in the village
lunchwagon. The young fellow said, "Who's crazy now? I was
born on a farm and ain't recovered yet. Why don't you get a
girl? Ain't the justice of the peace a good judge of hide no
more?"
Mule spat in disgust. "The boss ain't justice of peace no
more."
Murf took on the job of cooking. The farmhouse stunk
like a stall. He made biscuits so hard you could play horse-
shoes with them. Mule was satisfied so long as the field work
went on. But his brother swore he'd eat cowfeed first.
The boss had to go look for a new housekeeper himself.
They didn't hear from him for 2 days. He must be waiting to
knock down a girl cheapest or have one pay him for being hired,
said Murf. When the Ford did lurch into the yard, the runty
boss hopped out. He looked more than ever shaggy as a wild

=== Page 57 ===
56 PARTISAN REVIEW
hog, his head heavier than the rest of his body. After him a
broad gaunt girl with a satchel from the end of which a red
underthing stuck.
The three men were around the tractor. Mule grabbed his
monkey wrench with a snort and buried himself in his tractor.
But at sharp 12 the men tramped in for grub.
The boss was in the kitchen giving a hand, giving her the
old line about her being boss. She limped around, her yellow
hair flat down as a pieplate, cheeks hollow and pale. She smiled
anxiously, showing big strong teeth white as skinned butternuts.
She stood still while the men lowered their heads to the plates.
She hurried over to pick up surly Mule's fork. They batted
heads. The blow brought tears to her eyes. "Excuse me,
Mister."
Murf winked. "Another skirt leaving her mark on Mule."
The scar across Mule's forehead filled with blood.
The boss clapped his hands, his own roar of laughter
softened him more. "Take a load off your legs, girl."
Elsa rubbed her head. "Ain't used to sitting when you
been a waitress."
After dinner old Murf and Steve cidered themselves up
around the keg on the kitchen porch. But Mule couldn't even
drink. "Hell with her, Dane or Swede woman or the hell she
come from. We been doing our best to run the place right.
And that plug-headed boss-hell! I told him a woman'll always
throw her monkey in the engine."
Mule, that great sergeant of a man with an old-fashioned
epaulet of a moustache, was off women since that fierce battle in
the backroom of the Phrenologist place where the gypsy fortune
teller chattered hoglatin. She would empty a man for as low as
2 bits behind the sign which faced the street: a picture of a man's
head with the skull chopped open to show the brain like a green
helmet, and the notice that "The face is the mirror of the soul."
A drunken state trooper scratched the "s" into an "h" one
night. Mule hawed out it was a roaring insult. The trooper
split Mule's head with his gun. The three were arrested, the
place locked up. Esmeralda screeched curses at Mule and her-
self for not having dosed him up and sent him to keep his sick
brother Slim company in the lunatic asylum. It was after this
that Mule and Steve went to work for the halfpint justice of
the peace for next to nothing.
The boss hurried out to the porch. He said in a business-

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THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
57
like way, "Couldn't help it, Mule. Told her you fellows was
boss. She's on trial. We know how to keep away from them
now. Same hard luck story, tossed around from one job to the
other like a hot potato." He raised his voice so he could be
heard at the other end of the farm. "Work girls are still plentier
than pumpkin seed or stone." He whipped away in the car to
the cidermill.

The girl was hired to feed the men who fed the mill.
Before prohibition the cidermill could shoot streams of money
into the boss's pockets some of which leaked into the farm. Now
not only the apples but also the corn, the milk, the hogs slaugh-
tered off under the Roosevelt reduction plan were pumped into
the mill. And so all spring long the men plowed their guts sore
to save the mill. Mule on the tractor from dawn till day sank
like lead. Steve behind the walking plow, his twitching face
turning lean and hornhipped. Murf on the sulky, full of hard
cider to oil up the old machinery of his bones.

The girl rushed around with that wild hunted look of hers
like a mouse caught in a threshing machine. Only once did
Steve catch her resting. She was smoking a butt, her legs thrown
up on a chair, one of them bound as in a legging. She baked
fresh bread every day. She brought a second breakfast out to
the fields. Steve cut himself a half dozen new sharp-smelling
goosequills for toothpicks. And the old blacksmith dropped in to
a rocker near the cookstove at the end of the day, his washy
blue eyes closing wearily. He sniffed the roast. "Like old
days." He blinked thru the window. Over the hill behind the
beeches the cemetery mound with a marker like a breadboard.
Then he cracked up, "One day nearer hell, boys."

Only Mule kept sullen. When Elsa gave him special
sandwiches because he was out on the far fields, he left them
behind in the machine shed. When she served paper napkins
the boss's wife had stored away years ago, his she found later
in the backhouse. When she asked how clover seed was drilled,
he growled, "With a shotgun." She had to search for his
clothes. She was the only housekeeper who washed the men's
clothes, socks full of dirt and grit like a cock's gizzard, shirts and
pants foul from the Black Leaf Forty spray.

The boss came around to look over the apple spraying. He
said to Mule, "Boy, I see you ain't happy. Out she goes."
Mule said, "Hell with her. Those two fellows think she's

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58 PARTISAN REVIEW

quiet. Quiet be damned. She's breeding trouble. The best of
them: poker face and play one jack against the other.”
The boss went into the house. Then he got into his car and
drove to the mill.

Steve and Murf squatted at the foot of the ash tree, Murf
tickling his pet toad and feeding it flies. He said, “The boss is
a sly guy. He'll take on a man cook now because with summer
he don't care how the place goes to hang so long as he gets a
fellow who can sling hash for the whole harvest gang. The best
trying woman can't stand the gaff. Now that she's cleaned up
the place, she can go to hell. Makes believe to the world Muley
wants it.”

The kitchen door banged. Out tore the girl wild as wind.
“Where's Mule?”

The old man dropped his toad.

She stumbled thru the yard towards the machine shop.
When the two men crashed in after her, she was flagging
Mule with both hands. “Feeding you till it runs out of your
ears, washing your shity shirttails. Scared of my own shadow.
What did I ever do you? You!”
Mule's big ears burned.

“Worked in a tobacco factory. Searched our drawers
afraid we was hiding cartons up us. Linking sausages the
strawboss sawing away at us, speed up. Waiting, waiting—
look!” She flashed up her dress. Her right leg swollen thick
with blue veins. “What you got against me? Here’s my Blue
Eagle stamp.”

She started screaming, “What do you want? Setting the
boss against me. We —we should be together. Got a place to
sleep, to eat. What do you want, you?” She threw her dress
high above her big white kness. She rushed back to the kitchen,
her wild face torn thru her hair.

Mule stood spiked to the ground, his scar filled with blood.
Steve stared at his brother. He scraped the sweat off his
forehead.

“Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Christ,” said the old man slowly,
reverently.

Mule said at last thickly, “Hell with her.” He stuck his
head after the the monkey wrench into the tractor.

The two walked back. From the room above the kitchen:
“My God, oh my God.”

The old man turned pale. He stomped up and knocked at

=== Page 60 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 59
the door. The door was locked. She kept on sobbing.
They sat at the foot of the ash. The seed keys paddled in
the night breeze.
Steve tried his goosequill. He tried his corncob. He
wasn't comforted. The hard man with his moist nose and curly
hair waited for Murf to speak. But Murf was too busy with
the toad.
Steve had gone thru many women as thru a fence, but every
time he came across a new one he was stumped and terrified.
He said, "She talks like a whore."
Murf twanged like a jew's harp. "It's this depression.
Lots of women, straight as a shingle, had to take on with men.
Two trades got hurt bad. They ain't fixed codes for them yet.
Barbering and whoring. A man shaves himself and bulls his
own fist."
"Human nature, it sure changed."
"Human nature's the same. People get set against each
other like fighting cocks. Hard times digs a pit for them.
Republicans against Democrats, and you don't know whom to
put money on. Read the papers, Stevey."
The old blacksmith was the only one who read the papers.
Evenings he would read over his cider until the print would
swarm over him like carrion flies.
"Sure," said Steve. "With Mule, it's this way. It ain't
only hisself, he can't forget Slim in the asylum jail. That woman
dosed him up. It went to his head. He can't forget it."
"That's it. Yet that there little hotbox was only earning a
living for herself. You got to consider that. Some of them
big shot farmers along the river and up on Gun Hill, I heard
the boss's fat sister say so, they hired housegirls and egged them
on and salted them around for the hired men. Fine girls was
forced that way. How the hell did they keep all them foreign
hired men they got from Castle Garden? But then if a man
ain't got it, he goes crazy; if he's got it, he goes crazy. Only
the more a man you be the less happy in all ways. It's an ache
always. When you're born you fight and wrestle to get out.
Soon after, you start bawling for it. And the rest of the days
of your life, you get into all sorts of scrapes because of it. Seems
like human nature was built by guess and by God, not by square
and level."
The tractor exploded suddenly in the machine shed. The
bed jangled in the girl's room. Murf groaned and crept to his

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60 PARTISAN REVIEW

room. The younger man hunched up listening. He tiptoed up
and nosed the keyhole.

Next morning the boss said, "Mule, she says you fellows
want her."

Mule jerked his head from the plate. The other two
stopped chewing.

Elsa took up the coffee pot without the dishcloth and
ground it against her belly.

Mule's beg jaw quivered. "Hell, who?"
Her broad face twisted into a knot hacked with fear and
hate.

He stared at the calendar. He switched his eyes to the
window thru which one could see the fields heavily shouldering
timothy and clover. He said slowly, "Swapping cooks now'll
kind of stall us. Come winter'll be different."

The boss stared at him and then at the girl as if matching
them. "Well." He chewed his pork. "You're boss, man.
We'll let this blow over till damn harvest's done."

When the men tramped out, she stood in the corner breath-
ing uneasily, greasing her burnt fingers with pork fat.

Elsa served as many as 15 men at the table thru harvest.
She limped around, a sweat rag jammed into her waist. Once
Steve saw something like a bloody little cottontail on the kitchen
porch, looked as if the dogs had brought it in. Murf said it had
dropped from her, hurrying the devil out of herself. Once
bringing in more bread, she keeled over on the floor. Young
Bill Fuellan, who sorted the apples, threw a glass of cider into
her face. She shivered up. "Tastes good," she laughed. Only
once did she complain. That was to the three bunched around
the ash tree. "Still treating me like poison with a skirt on?"

Steve twitched and looked at Mule. Mule stalked off to
the machine shed. The old man scratched his head.

That night Murf helped with wiping the dishes. He said
later, "I ain't planning to get corns, horns, splinters sleeping
with her. Jesus H. knows I'm old enough to be her father. My
porker's always in the bush. Time it could root it had the ring
in its snoot. After all, she's a hard trying girl. This is the first
girl after Sarah I'm taking a shine too."

Mule growled, "Hell with you all." But said nothing
about swapping cooks.

Fall went. The boss was so busy with the mill he even
slept there. Wild geese had all flown south, woodchucks buried

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THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
61
themselves. And now because the men had only 12, 13 hours
work instead of 16, 18, time lay like earth upon them.
Even on Sundays between milkings there was no place to
go. The village movie, baseball and football had flown off with
good times. The only excitement was the bull breaking another
fence or the horses getting on the tracks and walking toward
the city. Murf's toad had stored itself away in some hole in the
garden. Steve got himself drunk, blundered around, blobber-
tongued. Mule spent all his spare time tinkering with the tractor.
He would take it apart, oil and grease it for the thousandth
time, listen to it while it ran like a peacock. He would sit in
the saddle, be bucked up and down until the hardness in that iron
jack of his body seemed to get out of him. But he couldn't eat
or sleep with it.
The only one who seemed easy was Elsa. She cooked,
baked, made the place shine like glass, sent off to the sales order
store for clothes. She read the romances the boss's wife had
gulped down in the old days before the "Caesar's operation"
had killed her and the baby, driving the boss to bury himself in
the cidermill. She banged on the old melodeon. She made it
easier for Murf to fight the winter when old hands find them-
selves hanging by a last thread over the boneyard. At night
they played cards. She taught him the Danish game: "Will you
go into the park with me?" And the old man would wink slow-
ly, "I'll make 30 marks day and night if it's the woods instead."
But the two brothers sat together in the kitchen near the
cookstove, mum, keeping an eye on each other, all the life run
out of them.
With the coming of spring the men looked lean and blinky,
the earth dripping slowly off their lids. The sun rose like a
ballcock every morning drawing water. They fretted waiting
for the rain to be pitched out of the sky.
But Elsa had straightened out. The wild look was gone.
Her eyes were clean as whistles. She left off wearing the legging,
her fattened hips shook as she bustled about in kitchen and
garden.
The boss was making a last desperate effort to save the
mill. The new political rulers, Green Lantern Party, consisting
of wild jackass Republicans and progressive Democrats wouldn't
let old timers like him root in the pork barrels. The farm must
save the mill. He ordered more lots plowed for hay. Last year

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62
PARTISAN REVIEW
because of the drouth hay sold high with all the small farmers
peeping for it.
Mule went up on the ridge with the tractor. This was
virgin soil, rocks the size of corncribs on the east end. He
plowed all day, took a couple of hours off, plowed all night. In
the morning Elsa banged the old iron wheel for breakfast. Steve
whistled. They couldn't hear the tractor. As they were eating
their oatmeal, they heard a crawling on the porch. It was Mule,
red as a slug, blood bubbling from all over him.
The tractor had turned over, smashed his face in, collar
bone felt broken, one arm torn up in the biceps. Hospital was
the place for him. But there was no money. He spent most of
his $30 a month with the little Steve saved after boozing to
make young Slim comfortable in the asylum. Murf had been
saving to get a stone on the old woman's grave. Mule wouldn't
touch Murf's. The shaggy little boss paced the room. “I know
how you feel, man. I promised you fellows bonuses, couldn't
give them because the mill took it all. It ain't a spider in me.
That mill's got me coming and going.” He screwed up his un-
shaven face, couldn't look his foreman in the eye.
Mule was in a bad fix. Even the tractor gone back on him.
He wouldn't let them move him from bed, let him greenrot away.
Here Elsa stepped in. She would nurse him. She hovered
over him with her long nails like a brier patch and the smell of
hot bread and meat mixed with the milky smell of a woman who
is in good health and sweats easily. Or she sat near the window
peeling potatoes, her neck bent so you could see the bone and the
hair yellowish, thick enough for cropping.
Steve kept his eyes cocked on her. Believing Mule fast
asleep, he breathed out once, “What a rump she's built up for
herself. Fattened out like a smokehouse.” His face twitched,
his eyes watered as if he had been given a blow in his nose.
Mule roared out, “You heller, good-for-nothing rumhound
getting ready for trouble!”
Steve fell back. “I'm my own boss, damn you.”
Mule kept getting queerer the more girl tended to him. He
lay for hours, the big bones of his hands heaped on his sunken
stomach. Evenings when the two men and the housekeeper kept
him company, he never said a word, his face yanked to the wall.
Murf said, “Here's a good riddle, people. Why's a woman
a better haypitcher than a man?”
Steve slapped his knees, guffawing.

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THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
63
“It’s this way, girlie. A woman can take a whole—”
Mule jumped up in bed, grinding out like a corn blower in
his fury.
Elsa laughed, “Come on, boy, be a sport. It's only a little
fun. And I've been married once too.”
Murf swiftly cackled the answer.
Elsa lay back, laughing till her breasts leaped and picked at
her dress.
She hummed her way downstairs to play the melodeon.
The boss came out of his office with his chewed cigar. She sang
in her deep breaking voice of sweet Susanna with the buckwheat
in her mouth and the tear in her eye, of love’s old sweet song,
of home, sweet home, for no matter where you roam there is no
place like home, sweet home.
Mule and Steve said nothing. They lay on their cots, sons
of a poor Cayuga Indian renter and a Yankee girl, two of the
old tough breed of farmhands, who started working the earth
and girls when they were 12. Young Slim, the apple of their
eye, the only one of a large brood to even get to high school.
Last time they walked with queer Slim in the asylum garden he
couldn’t add 2 and 2, caught a pigeon on the path, bit her head
off, mouth stuffed with blood and feathers. The little Mule had
ever been able to grind together wiped out by Stayhot Electric
Iron Corporation whose shares peddled to farmers, hands, vil-
lage shopkeepers dropped low as horsedock and drove half a
county into the ditch. “Home, Sweet Home”: the Toolbox,
Turkey Roost, the Phrenologist. Always the cylinders in an-
other man’s machine, the drills in another man’s earth for an-
other man’s grain.
And Elsa playing softly now, “Goodnight, Ladies.”
The boss sighed, “Makes a man forget the darned mill.
I’ll get the tuner come fix the old box.”
Murf said, “The boss’ll skin a louse and build a butcher
shop to sell the fat. Listen to him. What's he up to now?”
But Mule turned to the wall, his body sprawled as if it
were being yanked in all directions, didn't answer goodnight with
Murf peeling off his socks, groaning: “There's a gal with the
goods. Makes a man feel he can build a home round her. The
old woman’d think such language was bleeding old Christ a
second time. More a sister to a man than anything else. Harder
to handle than high water after Stayhot wiped us clean and
grabbed the shop, forcing us to another fellow’s land. When

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PARTISAN REVIEW
she was sick and I says to her how when the school trustee Ed
Greener's wife was adying and he climbed in bed with her and
the doctor swore that made her live 5 years longer, she just
started bawling like a babe, wringing her cut-up hands, crying
when would old fools like me grow up t'see the dick don't drive
away all pain, make bread and-and ..." He raked his old
poll. "Neither did Jesus on a stick help her. Yeh, she thought
if women bossed the world ... but there's this women suffrage,
and the world's still jammed tight like a burdock up the tail of
a horse, and the horse not half broke. Stayhot, the banks bus-
ting like mushrooms, this cutting everything little by little off a
man. . . . When a fellow's alone, no home really his own, he
don't act right, don't work right. That's gospel truth. He
takes to bulling his own fist when maybe his fist should be knock-
ing hell out of them that's run us down to-"
Steve roared he go bull himself to sleep.
"That's what I'm adoing," cackled the old man. He bel-
ched, fussed, tossed, and groaned all night thru. And in the
morning, he was sick as a dog still hanging over the vomit of
his past.
Mule dragged himself out of bed to help the old man.
He couldn't stand bed any longer. Bill Fuellan was tearing
around the farm on the tractor.
Bill was a tall husky lad, full of spit and song, with a nose
sharp as a cornknife and a keen black eye. He had a rattleban
car. He started taking Elsa out for ice cream, to the dancehall
over the village drugstore.
The boss cursed Bill in the presence of his men. "The
damned catting around. Mule was right. But she was acting
right, so I let it blow." But the boss didn't say anything tu
Elsa, only lowered his head as if to slash into her like an angry
boarhog.
Murf pawed at her shoulder. "I got a fatherly interest in
you, girl. The more you listens the farther I go. We don't want
trouble. Now Bill's a good lad. He wouldn't hurt a girl fly.
Only he likes to jabber, he's half your age, he's-"
"Ready to marry and take care of me," Elsa finished with
a laugh. "But is the boss sore?"
"Better find out. He's a sly feller, don't know what bug's
in him half the time."
The boss shoved away from his desk when she asked.
"You're the boss," he said looking up at her two loose breasts

=== Page 66 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 65
picking at each other like cocks in a bag. He cleared his throat.
"Don't let that wild Buffalo Bill rope you. We need you yet a
while." He threw her the front key.
Upstairs Steve went around and around like a horse with
a boom bringing up water, waiting for Bill to come back. Mule
was working on the floor over a small engine. He too jerked
up his head at the first faint sounds of the car. Bill swaggered
in with his pipe going pup, pup, pup.
First time he swore he couldn't get at anything but her
work hand. She was too uneasy about her job. Second time
he said he had more luck. That belly of hers was as firm and
curved like a banjo and—.
Mule got up slowly, the big jaw of his hitched forward in
fury. "You little spitbug you, coming here to start trouble,
meddling."
Bill roared back, standing his ground. "If that gun didn't
knock your little brains out, you'd feel the same way, you crazy
old gelding. What's this to you? Hell, she can take care of
herself. You and who else'll drive me off?"
They trooped downstairs. Behind the silo. There was
enough moon.
Bill feinted, drove a left cross. He laughed and danced
around, tattooing Mule's collarbone and sore arm, driving those
big ears back with a twisting first. Mule towered above him
swinging those long bats of his arms in wild roundhouse swings
that always cut Bill down in the end, knocking the breath out of
him, knocking him cold in the moon watering the ring. Mule
waited against the silo hoarsely breathing.
Every time he got up, Bill ground out, "I'll bull her yet
before you'll."
It wasn't long, however, before he was so punchdrunk that
he kept reeling into Mule's first. He dropped on Mule's knee, in
his great pain butting Mule's crotch. Mule caught him as on
the horn of an anvil. He hammered his head until the bones
cracked.
The seconds washed up Bill with cider. They poured cider
down his throat and over his clothing. They dragged him into
his car. Steve drove it half way across the county, Murf follow-
ing in the milk truck. They stopped in front of a doctor's place,
rang the bell, and drove off, the truck banging like a shotgun.
Couple of days later, the boss returned from the mill with
the news that Bill was in a bad auto smashup, that's why he

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66 PARTISAN REVIE

hadn't been showing up. Elsa twisted her fingers, eager to get in
touch with him. But it was like trying to ring the devil to find
Bill. The hands winked at each other. The boss was in it too,
seemed to have been behind the silo during the fight. And Mule,
his arm harnessed up in a sling, had been butted by the bull.
But even before the excitement was over, the boss wrote
to his niece. He wanted one of the family to come down
to help him in his cidermill fight. The Gun Hill girl came down.
She was stiff as a poker to Elsa, had big red lips like a burn,
could cook and clean. Now that she had lost her job in the Gun
Hill Five and Ten she might as well be his permanent house-
keeper, teased the boss.
Mule sat at the table glaring at his thumbs as though if he
could ge the boss and girl on them he would fix them both.
His brother talked to the boss that night. The boss said,
"You don't have to tell me Elsa's got no home. I'd keep both
if I could. The more the merrier. But I'm caught. Her dad
and the 3 boys are handle end in trouble in their hardware store
in Gun Hill. Those stinking chickendrop farmers there got the
storekeepers by the crop if they don't side with them. Maybe,
they'll sell out and come down here. There's nothing like the
family taking care of the place."
Steve kept cudgeling his brain how to get rid of the girl and
slap Elsa's wonderfully easy rich body his way. Finally when
the niece went out riding, he loosened the axle nut on the buggy.
The wheel slipped off, the girl grabbed the lines and wasn't
hurt. He covered the barn floor trapdoor with hay when she
went hunting eggs. She fell thru only to be slightly jarred. He
slipped some poisonous henbean, used for the cows, into the
sandwiches she was taking to the Sunday school picnic. Her
lips swelled. Elsa had to lash her hands with towels to the bed
during her convulsions.
Right after the niece was taken back to Gun Hill, Steve
felt the coast was clear. He offered the boss to pay another
cook to help Elsa during harvest.
The boss laughed in his swivel chair, clognosed. "You talk
like you was ready to marry her."
"I been thinking," stuttered Steve. "We been knocked
around till the stitches is flying loose. Maybe we could fix that
old milkhouse for us . . ."
The boss sagged as if the bone were all taken out of him.
"Don't know what to say. The little girl sick, the cider mill, it's

=== Page 68 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 67
got me in a hopper." He looked at Steve with the corner of
his eye. "She's a fine piece, that Elsa. A fellow feels these
days what's left is curling up in a hole. But Mule's no fool.
Hell of a time with Bill, hell of a time with Sarah and Murf.
... Women take the cake when it comes to stirring clean water
muddy."
Steve scratched his head. He went to the old man. The
old man said: "Sure, it ain't a bad idee, the boss acting some-
times like we'll be with him all the days of his life, sometimes
like he got no more use for us than a boarhog for tits. But
about women, they got two mouths, and you got to be careful
to see if both mouths talks together. I'm an old geezer, an
old orphan boy, and we three got to stick together...." And
again old Murf turned to politics to explain it all. "If we voted
maybe for LaFolly, Farmer Labor man, we wouldn't agot this
Hoover is my shepherd, he leadeth me past souphouses. If no
Hoover, no Roosevelt with a great hog reducing plan that's
filled the country with more hogs. This LaFolly wore no man's
collar, was going to make excursion boats out of battleships...."
Steve went to Mule. He thought he could handle his
brother, softhearted at the bottom, still wearing a faded arm-
hand like a recruiting sergeant for the mother dead 15 years.
He explained that the three of them could tell the boss go bull
himself, could rent a farm or even only a house and work the
country round. They would be able to get young Slim out and
take care of him.
Mule snorted.
"Murf says the boss acts like he'll throw us off, old mitts.
We take Elsa-."
"Elsa?"
"I got a halfhitch on her already."
"Hell, you drunk."
Steve shoved his rammy fist underneath the jack of a nose,
and backed away.
Mule hawed again. He had never been drunk in his life.
Drink, no matter how strong, seemed to have all its fire sapped
out on its way down the long gut. He stuck his head into the
tractor. "Go dibble yourself in the engine. Them oil holes is
dry."
Steve went out and wandered around in the barnyard. So
he would have to wait until after harvest. A hen fought a
mole in the grass. He caught the mole by the tail. It was a fat

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68 PARTISAN REVIEW

she. He drove a twig thru her tail and flung her to the hen.
He hadn't gotten drunk in months because of Elsa. He filled
a jug stealthily. He lay in the grass with his cider.
But after harvest, it was no easier. Let him succeed in his
stocking feet to steal up to her room and the door was locked
or she would start from her sleep. "Oh Steve, please, I can get
along." And the only time he could look at her was when the
others were around.
The old man with his toad, bottle, newspapers. Mule on
the saddle of the horserake grown into the ash tree. Elsa squat-
ting softly, her hands in the trough of her lap.
Murf saying, "The boss can blow the best man off this place
easy as snot. Why cuss a woman for carrying a jobless fellow
on her neck like a horsecollar? Yesterday I was down with the
milk I see a freight and homeless men on it like a cattlecar. Now
Ed Greener, he's school trustee, he's a hawk on history. He
says the Revolutionary War, it put us ahead of the world. Sure,
but the Revolutionary ain't stopped one half the world bulling
the other half."
Elsa wiped her hands on her haunches. "It ain't one half,
it ain't even one-fourth, it's the few who got the money."
Murf said sadly, "Yes, the women got to take it, the work-
ing man got to."
Elsa held her hands to her face as if to keep her laughter
from spilling. "They don't."
Steve lay on the ground so he could see Elsa's thighs naked
as flannel plants.
"How you going to stop it? Get together? They got
together against the devil. They had Sunday meetings. Much
good that did. Now some people talk like if you had a bellyache
or a man's disease, for the sake of arguing, have a meeting, get
together. Here's these hawbucks from Gun Hill the boss bats
about. There's sex trouble, as the papers say, sex short for
sexton as dick short for deacon to bury and raise you. Here's
a letter they made the paper print."
So Murf read of the Gun Hill farmers in the north county
where they milk stumps and hire crows to shell their corn. The
letter by the chairman of the Gun Hill branch of the United
Farmers League which had won electric lights and put Pie
Johnson, electric contractor and rich farmer, into the soup. They
were fighting for the immediate release of Al Robertson, facing
a 10 years' term in the penitentiary. Johnson had hired Robert-

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THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
69
son while the old hand was out on probation after having
"raped" a 15-year old girl. Johnson had hired him because he
could use this probation as a club over the old man's head. The
day after the farmers' victory over Johnson the hired man had
been framed up on charges of having attacked Johnson's servant
girl. The farmers charged that Al was arrested not because of
the servant girl but because he had helped them fight Johnson.
The farmers charged that Johnson used flycatcher servant girls
for shoestring wages. They pointed
to keep hired men working
out that Johnson, the local bankers, the rich storekeepers were
the real criminals because with their mortgages they were chok-
ing thousands of farmers off the land, breaking up homes, forc-
ing the women to hit the streets, shutting down schools and pay-
ing school teachers with warrants worth less than last years
cornshucks. The farmers said that if hired men like Al Robert-
son had been given land and a chance to have their own homes
they would never have blundered for their comfort to know
nothing young girls. The farmers said there would be hunger,
diseases, and such problems so long as the farmers were unor-
ganized and did not run the whole shooting match to suit them-
selves.
Murf guffawed until tears came to his eyes. "There you
are. Join the Gun Hill United Farmers League'."
Elsa grabbed the paper.
Mule pawed the earth to bury his spittle. "Never heard
of farmers fighting to help a hired man."
Murf said. "How in hell can you do it? This guy John-
son is a crablouse. But they're going to be so long as the world
is ballocksed up. He'll die like us, and'll be buried a long time,
damn him." And he jammed his fist down as if turning a switch.
Elsa muttered, "That makes us sing. He's doing the harm
alive."
The boss had come up slowly, leaned against the porch pil-
lar. "It's fellows like me's worse off. Work
hubhigh and made something, and now they're tearing it to
pieces. I'm caught in a corner between two stonewalls, capital
and labor. The fellows working in the cider mill bleeding me
white. They're after the farm too. Got a notice from the feed
company feed's gone up $3 a ton, the Blue Eagle jacked up the
men's pay. Go to the bank for a loan, and they're dry as apple-
drunk cows, had a hell of a time splattering over the whole
world. Looks to me we'll have to haul our horns in. Looks to

=== Page 71 ===
70 PARTISAN REVIEW
me like Murf'll have to cook this winter." He glared at them
as if they were all in league against him, flung his head up as if
to rip them up the belly, and stalked off.
Steve grunted, "Hell with him. There's jobs."
Elsa had turned white. "It ain't so easy. I-you've got
the same job for years." Her husband working in the foundry
lost his job. She had to go back to work in the slaughterhouse
again linking sausages, coming home with pay checks snipped off
always (now they'd take off 5 cents, now a dollar) mice and
bugs in her clothing, the strawboss finally getting at the women
who were fat. "Fat asses," he called them. In bed that's what
they want, but in the factory, no. The women caught between
two knives. How she had to starve herself, her German girl
friend using rubber pads and drugs. They were fired anyway.
Her husband disappeared. She got a waitress job working
nights. With the Blue Eagle, the boss charged waitresses for
meals, fired her. Then her spunky girl friend and she bought
overalls to keep the cold and everything else out and rode the
freights. She looked at the men hatefully. In New York they
waited around for jobs, once sleeping all night on the pavement
to be first in line, once in a subway with newspapers round their
faces like chickens with their heads chopped off. Her friend
was weak from reducing drugs, couldn't stand it any longer, took
sick, and died in the hospital...
She dug her fist into her lap. "Who's afraid of work? I
-I want to live. Was always going to the movies back home,
now ain't been in one so long. It's-," She banged the screen
door and ran upstairs.
Mule had his face muzzled with his hands. His brother
walked around as if he had a worm in his head.
Old Murf said, "We got to look out for number 1. If it
was a factory, say, where a boss is trying to frog a girl clerk or
cut her pay, everybody together can kind of slam him against
the wall." The old man lay back on the grass as if his last
thread had snapped.
Steve went looking for the boss. The boss said quickly,
"Movies? I'm using the car, going tonight to a bank meeting.
I'll take her along to the town movie, pick her up way back."
Steve gawked and walked off, the boss's laugh like a hornet
plugged into his ear.
The boss yelled up at her window. He sat in his car blow-

=== Page 72 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER
ing the horn. She limped out dragging her leg, looking away
from the men.
Mule sat up in the machine shed reading the Gun Hill news-
paper laboriously. His brother had the light on in the bedroom.
When the car lurched in, Mule walked out towards the kitchen
porch. Elsa flung goodnight over her shoulder to the boss. She
moved thru the wet grass slowly. She stopped, her powder
smell sweeping over him like a mist. She touched him with her
hand. "Mule, Mule, I-." He stiffened back. The boss hur-
ried forward coughing. She slammed the door and walked
heavily up to her room.
"Steve's on his ear about the girl," whispered the boss. He
offered his foreman a cigar, lit one himself. The light flowed
up his face in a grin. "We don't want any trouble, damn it.
Soon's the cider mill's finished off and I hear from Gun Hill, we
can settle who's to hang on for winter."
Left alone, Mule couldn't thumb out what it was that kept
bothering him again. A she all over, soft as rabbit's foot clover
one puff, the next hard as bullhorns. Hell, the boss couldn't
mean any of the men. He fingered the fat cigar shaped like a
barrel spigot and flung it away in disgust. The boss was still
in the office, as he climbed to his room.
Next morning Elsa was swollen-faced, said nothing to any-
body.
At the end of the week the boss lost the cidermill. The
bank wouldn't give him an extension. He burned bushels of
bills, rammed around the farm rooting up things with plans to
turn the farm into a money mill.
Elsa continued dragging around, dogged and pale, until
Murf decided it was the turns she had. When worry and the
turns hit a woman at the same time, it's a one-two blow that
knocks the devil out of the spunkiest one. The old man had a
strong patent medicine with a label showing a sick family kneel-
ing to an angel with outstretched wings like a gander.
Elsa flung out, "Fool, silly old damn fools. That's you
men, always running it down to the same things. God, God."
The old man crawled off to the brothers. "Even if it ain't,
it won't do no harm to make things easy for her. She jumps on
us. That's the way a fellow was brought up, that to be the
leaning stick. The boss said before he fires, he'll talk it over.
Meantime, help a little. Get her something special to eat. That
wild celery down Chesapeake Bay, that's full of ir-

=== Page 73 ===
72 PARTISAN REVIEW

the Agriculturist. Ducks eat them. Ducks fight over their
womenfolk, but they ain't got the turns, they ain't got labor
troubles." He scratched his burnt neck in confusion.
So the old man helped with the dishes. Steve brought in
the wood and brought milk chocolate from the village drug-
store.
Mule took his shotgun along to work, said the crows were
bad. He felt restless. Monkey wrench and tractor couldn't
help him. It was as though the fences built around the farm all
these years were shaking, with a strange storm smashing the
whole world loose. Geese flew chevroned against the sky.
He stood, hand over his eyes as if saluting. Even for a fine
rifle, it was a hard shot. He let the old shotgun blaze. And
with the flash and kick, he felt none of the thrill when he was a
kid gunning, the whole country humming with game. And
memory like a retriever dog piled nothing at his feet but the
bodies of men and women, torn long ago, muddy with the past.
He began getting up even before the cocks' bugling. He
stole out of the room barefooted not to wake the others.
He sat in the fencerow, his shotgun pricked up like a great
ear watching the horsepond. The stubble of stars was covered
over. A red bandanna hung in the east. Soon you could make
out the bullrushes, the gap in the stones, and then two shadows
gliding over the water.
He slipped down thru the pasture slowly. A hen's flutter
from the pond, the bandanna flowed into a red flag, the rushes
shook. Up whirled the ducks. A gun banged with his.
He tore around. It was Steve.
One of the ducks had shot into the woods. The other was
tumbling among the rushes. Steve plunged ahead with his horn-
ed knife.
Mule was up on him. Steve backed away. "Git the mate
in the woods. Git-"
Mule knocked him tail over teakettle. Steve pawed up
with his knife. Mule glanced at him sideways and drove him
back on his knees into the rushes.
A cow bawled in the barn.
The blood was streaming from Steve's face. He looked as
if cleanings were coming out of him. He jerked at his gun.
The second barrel plowed the rushes between Mule's legs.
Mule just spat on him. "You evil stinking rumhound.
He picked up the little wood duck. He rung its neck. The yellow

=== Page 74 ===
THE NEW HOUSEKEEPER 73
web stiffened. He stroked its breast, "Hellish fat, the little
bugger."
He strode towards the kitchen. His brother twitched
behind him, trailing the duck's blood.
At the barway Murf. Old Murf holding his belly, dancing
on one leg, then the other. He jerked up his hands. The
brothers stared at him. He hished. They followed him the
back way. Murf choked, coughed, waving his arm. "Went at
it like corn." They stopped at the foot of the stairs.
The boss was heaving in Elsa's room.
Murf pushed the brothers out, spluttering and wheezing.
"Been after her all the time. Slippery as pigspit, he's always
been." He wigwagged his hands. "Jesus Hell Chirst, what a
bulling he's giving her, what a bulling he give us all, the boss."
He howled with delight and bucked the air.
Mule picked up the little wood duck. His big jaw hung as
if it were broken. Murf laughed. He batted it down suddenly
on Murf's head. Murf went down like a ball of lead. Steve
jumped on him. And the two brothers furiously trampled the
howling old man.
Up jerked a window. The boss rammed out his red face.
Murf crawled into the bushes sniffing and spitting.
Mule jerked up the wood duck. But all that was left was
a leg and a bloody little piece of ass. He hurled it after Murf
into the bushes.
The swollen cows were bawling to be milked.
Mule and Steve stumbled down to the barn.

=== Page 75 ===
THE FRONT

who thrust his fist into cities
arriving by many ways
watching the pavements, the factory yards,
the cops on beat

walked out on the platform
raised his right arm, showing the fist clenched
"comrades, I bring news"

came back then skies and silhouettes,
facing the bay, of sailors
who no longer take the sea
because of strikes, pay-cuts and class-unity

"comrades, I bring news"

of the resistance of farmers
in Oneida county on a road
near a small white cottage
looking like a Xmas card,
4 shot, the road was blocked
glass to blow their tires

there was one guy we grabbed
some bastard of a business man
learning to play State Trooper
one of the boys tackled him neat as he ran

Behold my American images get it straight
a montage of old residences bridges shops freights
Xmas, the millions walking up and down
the tables where applications are received
the arguments that will yet get down to something

in the center of this a union-hall
and on the platform he
with right arm crooked, fist clenched
"comrades, I bring news"

HAROLD ROSENBERG

74

=== Page 76 ===
I MEET SCOTLAND YARD

Nathan Adler

IF THEY HADN'T ASSASSINATED Alexander of Yugoslavia and Premier
Barthou that festive day in Marseille; if the Duke of Kent hadn't decided
to marry the Princess Marina in mid-November, I might be taking tea
today in London and shaking hands with Picadilly or whatever it is every
good American does in England if he doesn't fly to Paris. Perhaps I'm
wrong; perhaps Scotland Yard had other reasons for deporting me.
It's likely, though, that the wireless story in the New York Times is true.
The bullets of that embittered Croatian ricocheted and affected a young
New Yorker setting out to discover the world anew and making a literary
pilgrimage to England.

For a long time I have wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence.
I think of him as a man who lost his class; who, in the struggle between
his mother and father, transcended the Freudian implications of the per-
sonal conflict and was forced to choose between the class goals that his
parents represented. In doing so he anticipated by at least ten years some
of the main currents of fascist consciousness. Towards the end I think
he recognized his mistake.

When I received an assignment to cover the British Film Industry
for a New York trade paper, I jumped at the chance. I felt it would
give me an opportunity to learn the English background I wanted so much
to know. I thought also of those English young men, many of whom
have not yet passed their twenty-fifth birthday, who are becoming the
musclemen and thugs for the Mosley fascists. I wanted to meet these
young men. I have known my fellow twenty-four year olds along Sixth
Avenue and in the coffee pots, in New York; jobless, hoping something
will happen, saying something must happen, they don't care what,-even
war, so long as it happens, so long as it is different, so long as it isn't the
terrifying paralysis that is now destroying them.

Like many another person setting out to a foreign country I fortified
myself with letters of introduction. To a prominent literary agent from
a New York publisher, to a respectable and not too significant novelist,
to the son of a British Lord, a leading movie critic in London, to John
Strachey, to the editors of Left Review, a Marxist literary magazine.
I also carried a letter to Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, where I planned to
stop. These letters were to brand me as a dangerous conspirator, and,

75

=== Page 77 ===
76
PARTISAN REVIEW
force my deportation from tight little Albion, so that the Duke of Kent
could be married in thirteen unhindered minutes.
All the way across we sailed under a hot sun over a sea placid as a
mill pond. It was so easy to look out to the scalloped rim at the horizon
and imagine that it was a line of low lying hills. The modern steamer
insulates the passenger, encompasses him with the security and luxury of
a modern hotel, prevents his coming face to face with the world outside.
From Ambrose Light clear across to the Cornish coast the gulls and sea
swallows followed the ship; and there was nothing new. I had known
all this, known more; learned it all in the movies since childhood. Even
an airplane could give me nothing really new.
Finally we passed Bishop's Light, sticking out like a sore thumb
above the Scilly Islands, and we were in England. That last night, steam-
ing up the South coast, most of the English passengers got drunk; they
seemed to be wanting to run away, displeased at seeing England again.
As soon as it was light enough to see I dressed and came out on deck.
I wanted to see the chalk cliffs at Dover, see the port where the English
soldiers had embarked, that Germans had sown with mines. Twenty
six miles across the Channel was France and beyond that stretched the
continent. I seemed to sense it all, the Romans, the conquering Normans,
and then twenty years ago the hundred of thousands of young English
men who had crossed the Channel to muck, terror and death. The wind
came down from the North Sea and all Europe's history seemed to swirl
about my head. The ghosts of a thousand years swept over the water.
I was alone on deck. Later some Americans came up to join me. The
English slept soundly below. They seemed not too eager about returning
home.
After ten days of sea and sky, though the sea is calm, one looks with
wondrous newborn eyes again on the life men have made for themselves.
As the ship moved cautiously up the Thames to London I stayed on deck
and watched the barges go by. The English passengers were still drinking
at the bar. The barges were small little tubs with large russet brown
sails, cosy and warm. There were other barges more like the ones we
see on American rivers. There was always a man walking across the
stern, pushing the arm of a long thin oar before him. There, on both
sides of the river, was the land I had come three thousand miles to see.
A man can become so deluded by names; one has only to say "Thames,"
and the years, the images, and the desires telescope into a sharp longing
The Thames shore under London is a lot like the Jersey
swamplands, a sordid and depressing industrial landscape.
We entered the locks that were to lift us to the basin where the
ship docked. Across a bridge, a red bus rolled by. There was a large

=== Page 78 ===
I MEET SCOTLAND YARD 77
placard over the top of it, Schweppes Soda Water. I was in England.
The names remembered and the places.
As we were towed through the locks to the pier, the customs and im-
migration men came on board. The ship had been freshly painted and
the immigration man got some of the wet paint on his gloves. He swore
and muttered under his breath. He didn't forget those paint stained gloves
all afternoon. I went to my cabin and opened my baggage. It was one
of those formal examinations and it was soon over. I had passed the
the salon to see the Immigration man. On the
way I passed one of the English women. She was in a rage. "Oh, the
bahstards! They're so damnably rude."
While I waited with the other Americans for the I
get their landing permits, I was uneasy. The card I held read "Aliens
Entry Permit" and the associations that have been pounded into our
heads here in America in relation to the word, alien, made me feel self-con-
scious as a man standing under klieg lights.
The turn of the Americans came. One by one they were subjected
to a painstaking and thorough examination. A natty young man from Scot-
land Yard, so unlike the heavy, red-necked bulls of New York, sat beside
the immigration man. He kept looking through a little red book as each
new passenger came forward for the interview. That book, a steward told
me, was Scotland Yard's blacklist, and held the names of all "fugitives
from justice." No immigration man could clear passengers, the steward
said, unless a Scotland Yard man was present and passed on them.
When my turn came I showed the immigration man my credentials
from the New York motion picture trade paper.
"Have you any other letters"? the immigration man asked.
"I've no other letters," I said. "I'm travelling on assignment from
my paper. British films have been attracting attention in the American
market and I have been asked to write a survey."
"So you've come here to spy on our films"! bellowed the young man
from Scotland Yard. Why was he trying to provoke me?
"Not quite," I said. "Twickenham and Shepherds Bush still import
their artists and technicians from Hollywood to show them how to make
films."
"Bring in your baggage," the Immigration man said. What could
they have on me, I wondered. I couldn't possibly be on the blacklist.
I dragged in my trunk. Among my books they found some typewritten
manuscripts and the letters.
"I thought this was the only letter you had," said Scotland Yard.
"These are personal papers, letters to friends of mine. They have

=== Page 79 ===
78 PARTISAN REVIEW

nothing to do with the film work which has brought me to England."
Scotty picked up a letter. It was addressed to Left Review at a
Charing Cross bookshop that sold revolutionary literature.
"Are you a member of the I.W.W.?" asked Young Lochinvar.
"No. That letter says I am a member of the John Reed Club. It is
an organization of writers and artists opposed to fascism and war. All
the other letters say I am a writer."

They went through my trunk. They made me bring in my valise
and combed through that. The immigration man gave me a slip of paper,
an official notice denying me the right to land. The reason given was
Section 13a. The Scotland Yard fellow gathered up my manuscripts and
letters and put them in his portfolio.
"You've no right to take those papers," I said.
"They are in the custody of the police."
"This is an American ship, you have no authority here."
"They are in the custody of the police," he answered.
"I demand an itemized receipt," I said. But he didn't answer. He
closed his portfolio, instructed an officer that I was not to leave the ship,
and I was left alone in the deserted salon.

I went out on deck. Fog had crept in from the Channel during the
hour I was below with the Immigration and Scotland Yard men. It was
yellow and heavy, one almost had to push it aside to walk. The sky was
low, mottled and swollen like an abscess. England had welcomed me.
I walked intently around the deck till I was tired. I could see nothing
but the heavy fog rolling past. I went below, stretched out on my bunk,
and counted the rivets in the ceiling.

Later when I tried to go out again there was a member of the crew
standing watch at my door. He was ashamed and apologetic but the
orders were that I was not to leave my cabin till further notice. I asked
to see an officer and when he came he promised to phone a friend of mine
and to bring me newspapers. When he brought the papers he said my
friend sent his greetings, that he would come as soon as he could, and that
he was going to get a lawyer on the case.
I felt a lot better. Here I was in a foreign country yet I couldn't
ever be completely alone. There would always be comrades in arms, and
the kinship would be there, though we had never met.

I settled down to wait. In the newspapers I could see that the
English were creating their modern mythology in the Duke of Kent-
Princess Marina wedding. They were giving the English people the
equivalent of the Lindbergh saga. Heroes and circuses. And the circuses
were necessary. In Wales, and in the North of England, according to
the papers, unemployment was increasing. It was doubtful whether thou

=== Page 80 ===
I MEET SCOTLAND YARD 79 sands of these people would ever be reabsorbed into industry. In Plymouth, six young men, all under twenty-five, had been arrested for breaking up a street meeting. They were Moslelyites and they had worn brass knuckles and their hands had been taped. For two days I kept reading the papers and waiting for evening so that there would be more papers to read. I wanted to write but I was afraid the Scotland Yard man might return and seize what I had written. The thick yellow fog blotted out the light from my porthole. The news- papers said it was the worst fog London had known in ten years, all traffic was at a standstill, there were many accidents. Every four hours the watch at my door was changed. Finally my friend came; he apologized that he had not come sooner. He said it was because of the fog. He had gotten in touch with the Man- chester Guardian, with a Labor Member of Parliament, with a leading and influential attorney who had been prominent in the Reichstag trial. They had gone to the Home Office in my behalf where they had been told that there was no political discrimination; I was being kept out because of lack of funds. My friend had brought his British passport and his bank- book with him. He wanted to show the Immigration officials that he could be responsible for me. "But how does it happen," he asked, "that you came without money?" "But I have money," I said. And I drew sixty-three pounds from my wallet. "Over three hundred dollars, certainly enough for three months. And I can get more." "Barbusse arrived by boat, yesterday, from the Soviet Writers Con- gress," he said.. "He wanted to stop in London for a few days but they made him go right on to Paris. Others have been locked up. It's because of the royal wedding. But we shall get you off. You will stop in London. I'll get all the newspapers down on this," he said. "If I can't land, please try to get me permission to see the Soviet Consulate. I'd like to get a visa for Russia." My friend promised, but he insisted there was no reason to keep me, and he would get me ashore; I wouldn't go on to Russia. I'd stop in England first. When he left he told me to be careful in any letters I might write. Their mail was opened frequently and their telephones were consistently interfered with. The other day, when he tried to communi- cate with the lawyers and newspapers in my behalf there had been inter- ference on his phone for over three hours. It was a common occurrence, he said. At least, I thought as my friend left, England isn't as clumsy as Germany in these matters. Telephones and mails tampered with, but the official reason is "lack of funds"; Brother Jonathan can still stand before the world, holding the Magna Charta in his right hand.

=== Page 81 ===
80 PARTISAN REVIEW

That afternoon one of the ship's officers informed me I could receive
no more visitors unless they had a pass. "Instructions," he said. Every
hour a Bobby poked his head into my cabin to see if I was there. He
didn't like the job, he was ashamed and tried to laugh it off. "You've
never been so well looked after in all your life," he said.

On the fifth day the immigration man came and brought back most
of the letters and papers. Though he denied it, there were some he didn't
return. He boasted that he knew of every visitor I had had, knew all
about them. He knew the contents of all telegrams and cables and letters
I had sent. He said I couldn't go on to Russia. I would have to return
to the States with the ship that afternoon.

"You have honored me very much," I said.
"You should be ashamed," he answered.

"No, the shame is yours. You've really made something important
out of this case, when it is actually trivial. You've behaved hysterically.
You took a man of Barbusse's reknown and expelled him from England.
It's your shame. Barbusse is an eminent artist and England won't soon
blot out this act."

"How did you know about Barbusse," he asked.
"Isn't it true?"

He mumbled something about doing his duty, about all of this being
out of his hands, the ruling of the Home Office. Then he shook my hand,
said good-bye, charmingly, and left.

In an hour passengers came aboard the ship. The ship cast loose,
the purser returned my American passport to me and I was permitted to
leave my cabin. The fog had finally lifted but I stayed below. I didn't
go on deck to see the Thames shore as we moved down the river. I kept
thinking of that English newspaper I had read while I was confined to
the cabin.

I thought of those young Mosley thugs, all under twenty-five, who were
sentenced to six months hard labor at Plymouth. I was not sorry for
them. But I could understand what had driven these young men into
the fascist armies of death. I had wanted to meet these legions in Europe
and write about them so that we in America would understand them better.
As a twenty-four year old who has been out of work for over two years,
I think I can understand the hold the Mosleys and Hitlers have over
these young men.

On the trip home the Americans did most of the drinking. Why do
people dread "home"? Finally, we were towed up the Hudson River.
The tug turned the ship towards the dock. My friends were there,
cheering. It seemed only a moment ago that the boat had reached mid-
river, now we were turning back. Everything else seemed so unreal.

=== Page 82 ===
I MEET SCOTLAND YARD 81
"What's the matter," a friend shouted. "Did you forget something?"
"I forgot my umbrella," I called back.
On the dock they showed me some newspaper clippings. The Boston
Herald wrote "They found a letter addressed to David Herbert Lawrence,
whose writings and paintings have attracted the attention of the London
police." I knew I was back in America! A wireless story to the New
York Times concluded, "Apparently he was one of many who were turned
back as "undesirable aliens" in the fortnight preceding the royal wedding."
I thought of the dream I had had, the England of the novels and
history books I had come to see. Suddenly I realized how futile had been
this pilgrimage to yesterday. Yesterday was dead; it was a myth. There
was no returning. Today's headlines about the India Bill and armaments
and the shard of a civilization in Wales and the North country, that was
real, that was England. A country knowing that death was certain,
placing young men at all ports and all terminals glancing furtively at a
little red book hidden under the table, that was the image, the end of
a thousand years.

=== Page 83 ===
BOOKS

A SIGNIFICANT REVOLUTIONARY NOVEL

THE EXECUTIONER WAITS, by Josephine Herbst. Harcourt,
Brace. $2.50.

The title of Miss Herbst's latest novel means, I take it, that the
executioner waits for the great middle class. So many Americans belong
to this class by descent and by income that the implications of this book
make it one of the most absorbing novels of the season. It is a more
faithful reproduction of our actual experiences during the years of depres-
sion than Sinclair Lewis was for the years of prosperity, since it is free
from the distortion both of satire and of conscious propaganda. It pictures
the progress of impoverishment in the way in which it is coming to most
of us, so gradually that we are loath to admit it. Our incomes are periodi-
cally reduced. The rents from our little properties are so uncertain as to
leave scant profit after increasing taxes are paid. We find it harder to
get new jobs at the same time that we contribute to the support of a larger
number of relatives, most of whom are neither aged nor infirm. The
adage to be thrifty, to labor incessantly and thus guarantee the reward
of a tranquil old age; the old adages no longer work. At this point we
visit our really prosperous relatives, only to find them repeating the advice
and keeping their incomes to themselves. We become conscious that class
distinctions are gradually and with a cruelty that is often unrecognized
supplanting the ties of blood once believed so sacred and now generally
functioning in proportion to mutual poverty. The Executioner Waits is
the most damaging criticism yet published in the form of fiction of the
theory of capitalistic individualism as applied to the petty bourgeoisie.

But the value of the book is not simply that these sociological reflec-
tions are embedded in it. It is rather that they are embedded in it after
the manner appropriate to fiction as an esthetic medium. Nowhere, to
my recollection, are these statements actually made in the book, but they
lie behind the action of the novel and give form to its accumulation. Miss
Herbst is writing of the family of Anne Wendell and of those of her
brothers and sisters, her brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and her cousins
and her aunts. It would be impossible for her within the limits of a single
volume to philosophize successfully about the activities of so many people.
Where philosophy intrudes, it is in the conversation of her characters.
For she knows better than most novelists that people do "talk philosophy,"
and better than most propagandists that when they do, it is normally a
generalization of their own experiences with the aid of whatever formal
philosophy in the air at the moment seems to explain them. She has doubt-
less been led to this insight by another shrewd observation from life: that
persons without the leisure of the wealthy actually do find other matters
vital besides sex and recreation and culture. Mr. Galsworthy rarely
82

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brought business into his Forsythe Saga, and Henry James thought it
positively beneath the attention of the novelist. When novelists of the
middle class have done so, it has been usually, as in Balzac, Dickens, and
Lewis, in the spirit of satire, which is of course the spirit in which the
aristocratic view-point would regard it once it decided to regard it at all.
Miss Herbst, on the contrary, weaves it into her book precisely as it is
woven into the family life of our petty bourgeoisie, where it is as real and
necessary an interest as finding a mate, and tremendously more real and
necessary than gossiping about the neighbors or discussing the latest women's
club lecture. And yet no two of her families have quite the same prob-
lems or quite the same outlook upon them. It is true that a direct dialectic
opposition becomes apparent to the reader through the natural grouping
of these families according to generation. But it is not a simple dichotomy.
The older group holds to the theory of capitalistic individualism. And
those of the older generation who have not followed it are the least pros-
perous and respected. But, on the other hand, those of the younger
generation who command our respect are those who are conscious of the
present inadequacy of the system, out of whose own problem of survival
is arising a social attitude and explanation. Whereas the younger char-
acters who still adhere to the theory of the older are no more successful,
no more happy, and much more shrivelled and crabbed in personality than
their contemporaries who do not. But here again the contrast is an in-
ference of the reader since Miss Herbst leaves us amid the rich plenty of
incident and individual characterization.
In previous novels, Miss Herbst has had the same interest in practical
life and has employed the same technique. But she has never before
displayed them so adequately; for she has not, let us say, in Pity Is Not
Enough, applied them to a material with which she has been sufficiently
acquainted. Pity Is Not Enough deals with the youth of Anne Wendell
and especially with the career of her brother who became involved in
Reconstruction politics in the South. Since she does not, in fact, cannot
know, intimately the particular circumstances of life at this now resnote
period, and sees the personalities of the era only through the eyes of history
and family legend, because of the very nature of her method, this earlier
novel failed to become realized. In place of detail in human personality,
she gave, as Dreiser did in An American Tragedy, detail observed from
the newspapers or other documents. But with her economy in the use
of detail, as far as any individual character out of the many on her canvas
is concerned, her objective method, when applied to history, became a
failure. If it is to her credit as an artist that she has nevertheless insisted
upon the method natural to her talent, it is to the credit of her insight
that in this later novel she has brought to it the contemporary material
in which alone it can properly function. The artifice and superficiality
which, despite her intention, are present in Pity Is Not Enough have now
given way, and in The Executioner Waits, Miss Herbst has developed into
one of our most significant novelists.
EDWIN BERRY BURGUM

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PARTISAN REVIE

NARCISSUS

THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE
by William Saroyan. New York: Random House. $2.50.

Just because Saroyan has been writing silly letters to the magazines
is no reason for discounting him as a total loss. First the common run of
reviewers lost their heads and then the boys with the higher standards
tried to laugh him out of court, and they almost succeeded. They pierced
through the ballyhoo and pointed to his very definite shortcomings, his
adolescent struttings, etc.; yet I feel that the man illustrates a literary
trend or symptom of social importance. And this, rather than the efforts
of press-agents or the rakish angle of his hat, explains the languishments
whose blatancy so offended the adverse commentators. Except in a certain
sense, both the response to him and what he says are not fads but articula-
tions of concrete history. Hence it might prove worth while to examine
his work in detail. Esthetics may be the under-sea level of ideology, but
that's where you find the pearls.

From the viewpoint of sheer writing Saroyan's performance deserves
little praise. He overstates what he says and he says it the same way at
the beginning, the middle and the end of his stories, self-consciously,
with the romanticism of an uncalled-for defiance that soon becomes ridicu-
lous. Usually he runs around and around a perception till finally it's as
big as life and he can't miss it. Instead of philosophical overtones or im-
plications, he gives us philosophy in the actual texture, line after line. He
does not tread the earth; he promenades—a soul-de-luxe in felt slippers
—and yet there are many vivid passages in the book, which prove the
writer to possess a very tangible talent. Moreover, since we don't believe
‘sheer writing' to be self-determining, it must be in the conception, in
the world-feeling that shapes it, that we will find the source which man
his expression. In most of the stories Saroyan is concerned with himself,
with his fusion with God and the Universe, with his dark ways as a young
man of a dark kind. And these are precisely the stories that most per-
ceptive critics didn't care for. He is more successful where he manages
to discard the poetry of ego and eternity in favor of a more objective
field of reference. Instances of this are Laughter, Harry, and Aspirin Is
A Member of the N.R.A., in which he tries to spread himself but the
N.R.A.—more real than he—rudely overshadows him. The less there
is of Saroyan as a subject (because then the subject ceases to exist and the
writing really becomes ‘sheer writing') the less he writes “for God” and,
ultimately, for Vanity Fair.

The dashing title of the book has given people a false sense of the
author. Actually he is trembling. Objective life terrifies him—art alone
is "everlastingly dependable." Working as a teletype operator he feels
that he is being murdered, and only in the fiction room of the public
library is he able to identify himself. He hates to think of the world's

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structure and events in it and change and strife; hence he denies its
motion, seeking to affirm it as being in the Platonic sense, as a virtual
stability "out of time": in other words out of history, which is social
time. Then certainly it becomes necessary to lift Man (not men) "from
the calm dream of his own soul." And this
calm dream is "language" (not apprehension and expression as affective
communication). For a while he is forced to give up writing because of
poverty, and at once he "becomes nothing, not even a shadow." The real
world presses in on him, and he cannot help feeling that "it is blasphemous
for any living man" to live thus and that "he has less honor than a grocer's
doorman at the St. Francis hotel, less identity
than the driver of a taxi-cab." Here is the vision of shame in the face of
the worker's labor, which proves its reality by affecting life. But it is
merely a passing insight; its impingement on the consciousness is too brief
to save him from the seductive mystery of the dream of stasis. It is easier,
more in the tradition to rejoice in one's cosmic piety and fondle the type-
writer thinking: "This is my room and I have created a small civilization
in this room, and this place is the universe to me." Life from the
Viewpoint of the Short Story! Now we can understand the sources of
the prose, which is so prolix, naive and egocentric. Piece by piece a full
portrait emerges. Without awareness he writes in one context: "Drama
is impossible because everyone is interested in himself." This means that
literature is impossible. A sensitive young man leaped into the eternal
ether and was smothered.

I have seldom read a more self-revealing exposition of the life of the
declassed intellectual, who, being an artist, finds in his very medium a
haven from activity. The result is language without perception. He
desires "evil," but all he finds is "filthiness"; he wants to give purity, but
all he gives is the sentimentality of the "vastest ego." In the title-story
he suffers starvation, he makes the rounds looking for work: but the reso-
lution comes when he faints away into infinity. Rejecting on one side
the brutishness and sycophancy of commerce, of getting ahead in the world,
and on the other the sober courage of struggle against the prevailing op-
pression-what is left but consoling oneself with the small explosions of
"universal" anarchism. He sees the existing order for what it is, for he
comes "upon strange specimens of life, men made frightening by capitalism."
Yet he cannot see how this same force makes "strange specimens" out of
his own themes. In a letter to the New Masses he finds the Communist
program the most valid, but that is, after all, a secular matter. As regards
his writing, it is predetermined and immutable.

This whole mode, of course, is nothing new in American literature.
But now the time is ripe for its stagnation; in Saroyan the whole stream
comes to the surface; its peculiar essence has become marketable. In the
historical sense the school of esthetes-modernists-from whom Saroyan
stems and whose "holy" names he invokes in his little testaments-is
philosophically of the same complexion. His masters had the advantage
over him in functioning earlier, when the mode had a stronger base because
of the absence, in the cultural sphere at least, of its dialectic opponent
and conqueror. In the nineteen-twenties Horace Gregory quavered:

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86 PARTISAN REVIEW

"And if you hear me crying: My god, my god,
down streets and alleys
I am merely trembling (afraid, my god,
to be nothing to fade away,
In grass, in stone.)"

(McAlpin Garfinkel, Poet)

But even then Gregory was half-aware, he turned it off and on, and has
now moved away. Saroyan has made this the leitmotif of his first
book, and the pseudo-intellectuals read him in wonder, for here at last
is the mystery of Pound and Jolas and Cummings and Williams wriggling
on the ground, in full view. Will he stay?

PHILIP RAHV

EXILES FROM REALITY

THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH, by Franz Werfel. The
Viking Press, $3.00.

TABARAS, A GUEST ON EARTH, by Joseph Roth. The Viking
Press, $2.50.

There is a sense in which the German writer and the German intel-
lectuals as a group are to be held responsible for the triumph of Hitlerism;
theirs is an ineluctable portion of the larger social blame. Prof. Ernst
Robert Curtius, representative of an older Humanist tradition, in his
Deutscher Geist in Gefahr, published on the eve of Hitler's accession, has
spoken of a "cultural breakdown" and a "culture hatred"; but the human-
ist's own muddled thinking is evinced by his dread of "Soziologismus,"
his stress on the Jew's "sub-Marxist" tendencies and "national unassimil-
ability," etc. The end of Stefan George and his "singing youth" move-
ment, dating as far back as 1910, was the manifestations centering about
"die Tat." The end of the "neue Sachlichkeit" in literature is Herr Paul
Fechter, the editor of Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart, the representative
anthology of modern German poetry, published some years ago, who a
few months back made the startling discovery that Goethe was Hitler's
John the Baptist!

Nor are the slates of the "exiles" by any means clean. When we read
Klaus Mann's Kind dieser Zeit, we get a picture of the intellectual weak-
ness in which the generation that came to adolescence during the War
was permitted to grow up,--a posturing decadence a la Cocteau and les
Enfants Terribles. For Germany was the home of Expressionism, the
Teutonic correspondent of Cubism, a highly subjective individualism in
art that attained its slithering depths in the murky mysticisms of a Kan-
dinsky. As for the outstanding non-Marxist exiles of today, Johannes
Becher, in his address to the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, has
subjected them--such writers as Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger

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—to a kindly but unsparing criticism. Willy Haas, exiled editor of
Die Literarische Welt, may speak of Prussian Germany's having a "tradi-
tion of exile" for her intellectuals; but in the present instance, the German
intellectual, if he is honest, must surely find cause for an examination of
conscience. Ever since Nietzsche, his thinking has tended to become more
muddy, false and hollowly romantic. The result is the embodiment of
all this, in the "ideology" of Hitlerism.
Of the two novels here considered, the one is by a German exile who
resides in Paris and publishes in Amsterdam, the other by a writer who,
born in Prague of Jewish parentage, received his education in Germany
and fought for her during the War, but who after the Armistice took up
his residence in Vienna, and whose works are now in disrepute in Mr.
Hitler's dominions. Both books, it may be stated, exhibit the same vice
that distinguishes the unspeakable literature of pathos and bathos now
coming out of fascistic Germany, namely, that of a romantic distortion
of reality. Herr Roth was one of those younger men who, before Hitler
came in, led the attack on Fechter's "new objectivity," an attempted
literary version of the Husserl philosophy. He, with Rudolph Kayser,
Alfred Döblin and others, rose to protest at once against a reportage dis-
guised as literature and (the description is Fechter's) "that highly personal
reality achieved by certain individuals who look out upon the world through
the lens of their own egos"; they spoke up in favor of a "neue Herz-
lichkeit," or new sentimentalism, and Roth gave us his Job, the Story of
a Simple Man. As for the author of Class Reunion, he had started out
as a dramatic Expressionist (in his Spiegelmensch, of 1920), but would
appear to have thrown it off fairly well in the course of three or four
years (cf. his Juarez and Maximilian of 1924), in favor of a vague all-
embracing humanitarianism that is not unréminiscent of French Unanim-
ism. Distinct traces of the Expressionist influence nevertheless remain in
his work, in the form of a romantic distortion and an animating romantic
spirit. From all of which it may be seen that both writers have decided
tares in their past, which are ever threatening to trip them up with their
clinging tendrils. As to how far either of them escapes, is a question.
The "new objectivity," the "new sentimentalism," Expressionism, an im-
ported Unanimism—the case-histories of most contemporary German
writers are not promising ones.
One of the sharpest notes the ear catches is that of evasion, evasion
in choice of subject as in the thought behind the handling of the subject,
the same evasion (geographic and temporal displacement of scene, etc.)
that is to be met with in the sorry product turned out by Hitler's writing
henchmen. Until one feels like rising up and shouting, if they mean
Hitler and we know they do then why in Hell don't they say so, as
any exponent of socialist realism would do? But they don't. Instead,
the exiled Herr Roth must compose a blood-and-thunder "legend," in the
tradition of that "myth-making" which Mussolini's Novecentisti are always
talking about. A hero who is something like M. Céline's Bardamu turned
petty Hitler, which is a thing, incidentally, that Bardamu might readily
become. This semi-conscious personage, Russian by birth and an émigré
to America, is led on by a Coney Island gypsy to return to Europe and
the World War and to wade through diminutive oceans of blood, in order

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PARTISAN REVIEW

to fulfill her prophecy that he would become first a murderer and then
a saint; and after tearing out an old Jew's beard following a pogrom, he
does become a pious-yearning beggar and dies what is presumably intended
to be an edifying death, thus bringing the "legend" to a close.

Herr Werfel, for his part, has provided the Book of the Month Club
with an ideal Xmas trade volume of more than 800 pages, with all the
impressive accoutrements in the way of maps, glossaries, etc. And into
those 800 plus pages he has packed plenty of excitement, romance, ad-
venture, along with several bits and passages that would do credit to a
William Seabrook. It is true, he has chosen a big theme, the attempted
annihilation, in the guise of transplantation, of the entire Armenian people
by the Turks under cover of the War, and the heroic stand made by a
handful of Armenians on the summit of Musa Dagh. It is a theme out
of which a master of socialist realism would have shaped a masterpiece
for all time. As it is, Herr Werfel has produced-an excellent Book of
the Month Club selection. If this is so, it is due to the fact that he has
not had the courage to let realism suffice, but must introduce stale old
romantic love-elements and similar trappings, pages of the merely pictu-
resque, whimsical and humorous touches that are out of key, etc.; but
most of all, it is due to the false thinking behind the book, the kind of
thinking that might be expected of one who "conceives tragedy as the
basis of life"-which is not, after all, at such a far remove from the
"eschatological pathos" of a Gottfried Benn. The suicidal murder of the
hero at the end, after he has saved the remnants of the colony, utterly
unmotivated as it is save by a false romanticism, is a good index to the
character of the novel.

Franz Werfel's thinking, so nearly as one can make it out, is to the
effect that, while a bad nationalism is bad, the nation in itself is a good
and even a divine thing, and that while a racialism that results in the
bloody oppression of minorities is to be deplored, yet blood (race) is after
all thicker than water, as in the case of Gabriel Bagradian, the Paris-bred,
and his half-French, half-American son. (There is likewise a certain tacit
racial chauvinism in the author's attitude toward Juliette, Bagradian's
French wife). If the Armenians were massacred, it was on account of
the Young Turk of the Enver Pasha brand, who is the product of Europe's
interference with the slumbrous "spirituality" of the old Mohammedan
East, through the introduction of modern improvements, commerce and
the like.

All this, it may be repeated, is simply heaping confusion upon con-
fusion. And it all helps to explain how Hitlerism happened. There is
no faintest hint of underlying social causes behind the phenomena of ram-
pant nationalisms and radicalisms, nothing, in short, to disturb the Book
of the Month Club reader, who was doubtless pro-Ally during the War,
as he revels in this tale of the Terrible Turk's atrocity (the anti-Hitlerian
writer seems to have, often, an almost Hitlerian fondness for blood), with-
out suspecting or caring to suspect the presence of not dissimilar if better
concealed horrors at home, for which he himself has his share of social
responsibility.

SAMUEL PUTNAM

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THE DEPRESSION GENERATION

YOU CAN'T SLEEP HERE, by Edward Newhouse. Macaulay. $2.00.

This is the first novel by a member of what might be called the "de-
pression" generation—as distinguished from the preceding "speakeasy"
generation, whose autobiography has been recorded in Exile's Return.
The difference between these two groups is traced in the only "philosophi-
cal" passage which adorns You Can't Sleep Here:

"I had not been accustomed to consider myself part of a gen-
eration, so-called, but staying in Central Park and in the libraries
and passing street corners in Manhattan, how could I escape it?
"This was not a lost generation. These young people had
never found themselves....
"I had not consorted with my generation. Usually there
were ten to fifteen years' differences between my friends and me.
My friends had been the lost generation, and I did not completely
understand them because their limitations were not my limita-
tations....
"I was the crisis generation who had never been absorbed
into industry or the professions. ... We had all the old prob-
lems.... But we had also something new, the passing of eco-
nomic security. We college and high school and public school
graduates were certain of our economic future. The pile of lum-
ber and cement under the billboards [to be used for building a
shack in a Hooverville] was Connie's immediate economic future
and mine. The public comfort station down the block and left-
over buns at the automat and hourly supervision by twirling bats
were our certainties."

Such a passage tempts the critic to regard this novel as a testament of the
newest literary generation, as a sort of inverted This Side of Paradise of
the early nineteen-thirties. However, there is little else in the book which
would relate it in the same way to its generation as, say, Mooncalf is
identified with the literary radicals of two generations before.

As a matter of fact, the passage is altogether misleading, for the
novel does not record moods and reactions typical of the new literary
generation, or of any other sector of American youth.

The reasons for this are not very difficult to discover. In the first
place, Newhouse has not set out to write a book which encompasses the
range of experience one is accustomed to find in a "social" novel like
Pere Goriot or The Shadow Before. Indeed, You Can't Sleep Here is
hardly a novel in the traditional literary sense. It is limited to a slight,
racy story, which skips through a brief period of time and a single series
of events. Moreover, these experiences are new and unfamiliar to the

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PARTISAN REVIEW

protagonist and he is thrust abruptly into them; and he doesn't stay in
them very long before the book ends! Thus there is little opportunity for
the development of character, and little chance to dig into the problems
familiar to revolutionary youth today. The book is done in the technique
of a Hollywood talkie or a drugstore novelette-although, of course, it is
decidedly different from such confections by virtue of its fresh writing
and realistic handling of material.

Even the events which make up the story of You Can't Sleep Here
do not seem to be typical of the experiences of the "depression" generation.
The book does not possess that quality which classical literary criticism
called the "universal" but which we more accurately term the "social."
The scenes of the novel and the attitude of the characters do not make
the reader say: "Here are experiences characteristic of a certain type of
white-collar worker in the depression," or "Here are the typical moods
and feelings of revolutionary youth today." It is impossible to consider
You Can't Sleep Here in the same way one thinks of To Make My Bread
as a social document describing the evolution of the Southern peasant into
an industrial proletariat or to find in Newhouse's novel the mood and
material which enables a poem like Alfred Hayes' In A Coffee Pot to catch
the typical reactions of unemployed white collar workers in the great
economic crisis.

Certainly this is not due to the social reality of the events themselves:
the contents of You Can't Sleep Here center around like in a Hooverville,
a flophouse, a hobohemia, a strike, a demonstration. Nor is it the
result of an unrealistic description of these scenes; as a whole, they develop
naturally in the plot of the novel.

Then what is it due to? I believe it must be attributed largely to
the intensely personal perception of the author. To be sure, it is this
individualized way of looking at things which is responsible for the fresh
writing and delightful gags and mannerisms to be found in the book. This
breezy sensibility of Newhouse is an adaptation of the hardboiled manner
of the speakeasy generation (with whom he tells us his hero "consorted"
but did not "completely understand" because their "limitations" were not
his and he did not have to "go through their extremes"), plus the sense
of social awareness which has come to members of all extant literary gen-
erations during the past three or four years. The result is something more
than a combination (conceive it if you can!) of Ernest Hemingway, Ring
Lardner, and John Spivak! But it is this peculiar outlook which makes
Newhouse look for light and striking things even in social scenes whose
description demands something like deep earnestness and a sense of the
tragic.

His mode of perception is, therefore, definitely limited when he ap-
proaches such material. It is, I think, far better adapted to satiric essays
of upper-class practises than to profound stories of workingclass struggles.
While You Can't Sleep Here is full of fresh, clean writing which could
never be dull and ordinary, it fails exactly where the plodding and un-
literary manner of To Make My Bread succeeds.

ALAN CALMER

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OLD HORIZON

HORIZONS OF DEATH, by Norman Macleod. Parnassus Press,
New York. $1.75.

An important book of verse is rarely chamber music; usually it in-
tegrates fragments of the poet's experience into a legend with a starting
point and a destination. Horizons of Death is divided into four sections
which trace an emotional and intellectual journey from the brilliant land-
scapes of Macleod's Southwest through the industrial jungles of the city;
but it stops short of a destination, and there is no hint of any future but
death. This is the great disappointment in this eagerly expected first
volume by one of America's most gifted and prolific writers.

Perhaps Macleod merely selected forty-five pieces from his hundreds
of poems to justify a strange title, but I am moved to wonder if the
reason for his choice do not amount to an abandonment of his position
close to the revolution. The rigid demands of unity in Horizons of Death
required omission of many poems, of course; yet the addition of a fifth
section to the book could have included Cotton Pickers In Alabama, Pur-
gatory For The Rich and Coal Strike, revolutionary poems which are
among his best work.

The first two sections deal with the poet's background, his native
New Mexico. In glittering words and startling, multicolored phrases,
Macleod interprets the color and ritual of his Southwest, the slow rhythm
of his lines giving mystical feeling to the calm and agelessness of the
deserts and hills. His images are clear and direct, he captures the moods
of these scenes well, the nobility and vastness of the desert, the black hills
and turquoise skies.

But nobility and silence do not evoke images of life to Macleod; it
calls forth dreams of death. Constantly he speaks of "the sadness of
dying: the death of all love."—

"And the hills are dead and will not rise again:
And the wind is the sorrow of death."

From the warm peace of New Mexican hills the poet is driven among
the steel and stone canyons of an industrial city, and becomes terror-
stricken by the uncertainty and complexity of his new existence. Life
is hardly bearable; for "there was no peace in the heavens ... not even a
bluebird can venture forth without fear of being electrocuted." The
desire for death becomes an obsession, a constantly recurring refrain, and
the book ends on the motif suggested by the title.

Thus we see that Macleod has not gone far enough in his journey
toward that satisfying totality, the revolutionary position, which alone
can make life worth while. Despite an occasional outburst of rebellion
his poetry voices aspirations of a confused and alarmed middle class looking
for an escape from today. Indeed the entire third section is a prayer to
"Those days of our hardihood: We were strong with silence. I wish we
could go back beyond the years." The desire to submerge himself, to

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92 PARTISAN REVIEW

resign from responsible action, is too strong for this poet haunted by nos-
talgia for desert and prairie, for the imagined simplicity of mountain life.
Alone and confused in the bewildering labyrinth of times that have grown
beyond him, he regrets the missing scenes of his nativity.

For his confusion and terror Macleod blames the frenzied tempo
of the "age of machines," and looks to the golden desert of Tajikistan
not with the glance of an inspired builder but with defeated eyes of one
eager to escape into the silence and security of tribal life. This feeling
may be justifiable as a momentary impulse of a poet hemmed in by the
feeling of living in a commercial civilization, but it is hardly a healthy
content for a book by a young writer who professes adherence to Marxism-
Leninism. I fear that Macleod is one fellow traveller who has not as
yet packed his baggage.

WILLIAM PILLIN

MAGAZINE REVIEW

INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE, organ of the International Union
of Revolutionary Writers, Nos. 1-4, 1934. Moscow, U.S.S.R. Amer-
ican Representatives, International Publishers, 381 Fourth Ave., New
York, N. Y.

It is heartening to note that International Literature does not seek to
define itself from bourgeois magazines by superficial experimentation in
literary forms, and that it has dropped for good the trick format which
made the reading of the first issues so difficult. Formal distinctions be-
tween a revolutionary journal and a bourgeois magazine are not necessary
when the difference in content and intention is so great. Most bourgeois
literary magazines, however "advanced," do not play a creative rôle in
culture. They may encourage or reflect a literary trend, but they remain
sectarian and minor, because they are individual ventures, and not the
weapon of a dynamic mass group. International Literature, on the other
hand, does not merely present the end-product, proletarian fiction, but it
creates and directs this fiction by functioning as a forum for revolutionary
writers, throughout the world, by furnishing, in its critical reportage,
articles, letters from writers, autobiographies and chronicles, the soil on
which this fiction may nourish itself.

While it is not directly a magazine of polemic between the proletarian
and the bourgeois world, there is material on every page to refute the
common misconceptions of bourgeois critics. Those who confuse an art
of propaganda with the art of falsifying detail and seeing through rose-
colored glasses, are referred to the fiction in International Literature.
They will not find here the pretty-pretty pictures of Soviet life such as
they expect from writers who have, in their opinion, abnegated their
powers of observation in favor of a political allegiance. These stories
reflect all the terror and confusion of a society in upheaval and re-creation.
The Soviet writer, like the writer of any period, is committed to a political

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93
ideal; but he has not yielded his integrity of observation, he writes with
a power and freedom and realism such as no longer exists in the work of
writers in capitalist countries.
The first issue of 1934 contains a criticism of James Joyce by Mirsky,
a revolutionary interpretation of Joyce, but not the facile application of
Marxian yardsticks such as our enemies accuse us of making. An article
by Kataev, On the Threshold of Socialism, takes up the problems of the
Soviet writer. It has that warmth of expression and imagery which is
present in all the critical writing that comes out of the Soviet Union, and
which revolutionary writing in this country still lacks. This warmth,
however, is not a mystic quality, peculiar to Soviet writers and inacces
sible to us. But it can develop here only with the growth of the revolu
tionary movement, because the factor that creates it is not so much the
writer as the audience. As yet, in this country, the revolutionary critic
lacks a major audience, and our writing is, therefore, still too intellectual
and formalistic, still lacking in the power of observation.
The article in number 3, by the Russian writer Stork, on Calverton and
his Friends, is the best-informed unscrambling of the Calverton-Eastman-
Trutsky melee to date. In number 4 we find John Strachey's Fascism and
Culture. Those who did not hear Mr. Strachey's address before the
John Reed Club of New York, or who gained an impression of the speech
only through the flip and superficial reviews of Mr. Strachey's book in
the newspapers and literary supplements, should go to this issue for the
original sources. One may not agree with all of Mr. Strachey's evaluation
of bourgeois writers and proletarian writers; but the analysis of the relation
between fascism and culture is a lucid and basic statement.
Much criticism has been launched against International Literature for
its Soviet orientation, and the preponderance of Soviet fiction and criticism.
Eugene Gordon and Robert Carr, American writers, are represented in the
fiction of the first four issues of 1934; and in the articles and criticism
there are Early American Labor and Literature by Alan Calmer, Philip
Rahv's Marxist Criticism and Henry Hazlitt, and an article on Jack
Conroy by Anna Elistratova. I am not familiar with the policy of the
magazine on the question of national representation, but one can conjecture
that there is a statistical reason for this. The output of proletarian fiction
is naturally greater in the Soviet Union than in any other country, and
the stories are no doubt better on the average, because there is a more varied
and universal revolutionary experience there.
GERTRUDE DIAMANT

=== Page 95 ===
THE COMING WRITERS CONGRESS
A CALL TO PARTICIPATE in a Writers Congress, to be held May 1,
1935, in New York City, is being sent to a number of American authors
and will be published in various revolutionary and liberal publications.
This call, which has been endorsed by Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank,
Josephine Herbst, Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, Robert Cantwell,
Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, Horace Gregory, and many others,
is printed below.

This congress will represent a synthesis of the experiences of revolu-
tionary literature in this country, and will clear the way for a wider and
more systematic application of our problems. It will attempt to unite all
writers who are against capitalism and who are endeavoring to create
a new literature rooted in the dynamics of social development.

One of the richest sources of such experience is the activity of the
John Reed Clubs which, during the past five years, have helped to build
the foundation of a proletarian culture in America. At their last national
Convention, the John Reed Clubs instructed their National Committee
to work for such a broad, united Writers' Congress.

The editors of Partisan Review not only endorse this Congress but
also offer the pages of this organ for a thorough discussion of the problems
which will be analyzed at this gathering of proletarian and sympathetic
authors. Essays dealing with the problems of style and theme, articles
dealing with the general questions of the relationship of literature to
society, as well as a discussion of the economic status of the artist under
capitalism, will be among the subjects treated and should help to prepare
the basis for sound discussion at the Congress. The very next issue of
Partisan Review will contain a number of articles on the subjects enu-
merated. The call follows:

"The capitalist system crumbles so rapidly before our eyes that, where-
as ten years ago scarcely more than a handful of writers were sufficiently
far-sighted and courageous to take a stand for proletarian revolution,
today hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers
and journalists recognize the necessity of personally helping to accelerate
the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a workers' govern-
ment.

"We are faced by two kinds of problems. First, the problems of
effective political action. The dangers of war and Fascism are everywhere

94

=== Page 96 ===
THE COMING WRITERS CONGRESS
95

apparent; we all can see the steady march of the nations towards war and
the transformation of sporadic violence into organized fascist terror.
"The question is: how can we function most successfully against
these twin menaces?
"In the second place, there are the problems peculiar to us as writers,
the problems of presenting in our work the fresh understanding of the
American scene that has come from our enrollment in the revolutionary
cause. A new Renaissance is upon the world; for each writer there is
the opportunity to proclaim both the new way of life and the revolutionary
way to attain it. Indeed, in the historical perspective, it will be seen that
only these two things matter. The revolutionary spirit in the ranks of the
creative writers has made a beginning. This beginning must be victoriously
carried forward.

"Many revolutionary writers live virtually in isolation, lacking op-
portunities to discuss vital problems with their fellows. Others are so
absorbed in the revolutionary cause that they have few opportunities for
thorough examination and analysis. Never have the writers of the nation
come together for fundamental discussion.
"We propose, therefore, that a Congress of American revolutionary
writers be held in New York City on May 1, 1935; that to this Con-
gress shall be invited all writers who have achieved some standing in their
respective fields; who have clearly indicated their sympathy to the revolu-
tionary cause; who do not need to be convinced of the decay of capital-
ism, of the inevitability of revolution. Subsequently, we will seek to
influence and win to our side those writers not yet so convinced.
"This Congress will be devoted to exposition of all phases of a
writer's participation in the struggle against war, the preservation of
civil liberties, and the destruction of fascist tendencies everywhere. It
will develop the possibilities for wider distribution of revolutionary books
and the improvement of the revolutionary press, as well as the relations
between revolutionary writers and bourgeois publishers and editors. It
will provide technical discussion of the literary applications of Marxist
philosophy and of the relations between critic and creator. It will solidify
our ranks.

"We believe such a Congress should create the League of American
Writers, affiliated with the International Union of Revolutionary Writers.
In European countries, the I.U.R.W. is in the vanguard of literature and
political action. In France, for example, led by such men as Henri
Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Andre Malraux, Andre Gide and Louis
Aragon, it has been in the forefront of the magnificent fight of the united
militant working class against Fascism.