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PARTISAN REVIEW
PR

Volume IV, No. 2 1938
January

© Trustees of Boston University

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THE U PARTISAN REVIEW
A LITERARY MONTHLY

Volume IV, No. 2

JANUARY, 1938

THE LAWRENCE MYTH
LOVE LIES SLEEPING
MIGRATORY WORKER
SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE U.S.S.R.
THE BALLAD OF THE CHILDREN
OF THE CZAR
ART CHRONICLE
HURRY, HURRY
AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS

THEATER CHRONICLE

BOOKS

The Brown Book of Heinrich Heine
Populist Realism
The Tower Beyond Politics
Art in the Second Empire

RIPOSTES

3
14
16
21

William Troy
Elizabeth Bishop
John Dos Passos
André Gide

29
32
33
40
44

Delmore Schwartz
George L. K. Morris
Eleanor Clark
Kenneth Burke
Sidney Hook

48

Mary McCarthy

50
53
58
59

Harry Levin
Meyer Schapiro
Dwight Macdonald
George L. K. Morris

61

Editors: F. W. DUPEE, DWIGHT MACDONALD, MARY MCCARTHY,
GEORGE L. K. MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV.

PARTISAN REVIEW is published monthly at 22 East 17 Street, New York, N. Y.
Subscriptions $2.00 yearly; foreign rate $2.50; Canada, $2.25. Manuscripts will
not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copy-
right January, 1938 by PARTISAN REVIEW. Entered as second-class matter, No-
vember 12, 1937, at the post office at New York, N. Y. under the Act of March
3, 1879.

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CONTRIBUTORS

WILLIAM TROY, a contributor to The Nation, The Symposium, and other
periodicals, is working on a volume of criticism. His study of D. H. Law-
rence in this issue is the second essay in our series on modern literary
figures. . . . ELIZABETH BISHOP, a graduate of Vassar College, has con-
tributed verse and prose to Trial Balances, New Letters in America, Life
and Letters Today, and other magazines. She is now living in Paris. . . .
JOHN DOS PASSOS, author of 1919, The Big Money, and other well-
known novels, has contributed to former issues of PARTISAN REVIEW. . . .
ANDRE GIDE visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1936. The report
of his trip was contained in Return from the U.S.S.R., published by
Alfred A. Knopf last year. His new book, Retouches à mon Retour de
l'U.R.S.S., from which we are printing excerpts in this issue, was re-
cently published in Paris. It is an answer to the critics of his first report.
This is the first time that any parts of it have appeared in America. . . .
DELMORE SCHWARTZ, whose story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,"
was published in our last issue, is now at work on a novel and a long
poem. . . . ELEANOR CLARK was associate editor of the anthology, New
Letters in America. She has contributed to The New Republic and other
periodicals. . . . HARRY LEVIN, a research fellow in literature at Harvard
University, has written for The Nation, The Sewanee Review, and other
magazines. . . . MEYER SCHAPIRO, a member of the faculty of Columbia
University, is an editor of The Marxist Quarterly.

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THE LAWRENCE MYTH

William Troy

OF THE many examples of the artist as "suffering hero" thrown
up by the 19th century and afterwards (Blake, Hölderlin, Baudelaire,
Wagner, Melville, Van Gogh all belong to the tradition), D. H. Law-
rence is perhaps the only one who took the next logical step and iden-
tified himself overtly with a mystery god. That this is not a conceit
but actually what happened in Lawrence's case is apparent from
even the most casual survey of his career. The process was a gradual
one, to be sure, and the special aura that surrounds such early heroes
as Birken in Women in Love and Lilly in Aaron's Rod condenses only
by degrees into the unmistakable halo of The Man Who Died. But
already in The Ladybird (1921) Lawrence had given to one of his
most autobiographical of his heroes the name of Dionysius himself.
In his poetry this is to be traced out through the change from the
rather conventional nature imagery of his early verse to the recondite
symbolism of Last Poems. The whole process may also be correlated,
of course, with the shifting of his intellectual interests from Freudian
psychoanalysis to anthropology and comparative religion, from one
type of mythology to another and much older one. For most people,
however, the most striking evidence will be the biographical: the
persecutions and humiliations, the journeys by water, the agonies in
the wilderness, the betrayals and final apotheosis at the hands of his
disciples. Catharine Carswell, in her account of the burlesque Last
Supper at the Café Royal, does not quite explain how Lawrence ever
came to lend himself to such a disgusting performance; and if Law-
rence is finally forced to advise the editor of the Adelphi to wipe away
the "Judas slime" the casualness of the implied relationship is rather
astounding. But nothing could be more revealing than those last paint-
ings of himself and his family which the British censor was required
to bar on the grounds of blasphemy. Because these belong so clearly
to biography rather than to art, because they represent self-expression
at its most naive and irresponsible, they leave no doubt as to the image
of himself which Lawrence came to realize at the end. He had become,
as he put it in a deathbed fragment, "like a Lord!" As for his posthu-
mous reputation, a literary analogy is fortunately available and will
suffice: the last scene in Le Rouge et le Noir in which the lovely

3

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PARTISAN REVIEW
ladies, gathering at Julien's tomb at midnight, join forces in building
up a little shrine.

Lawrence is, to a remarkable degree even among contemporaries,
a "case," and he has received drastic treatment as such from all quar-
ters. But it is really not helpful to be told by the psychoanalysts that
he suffered from one or another malady, or by a theologian like T. S.
Eliot that he was possessed of the Devil, or (what perhaps amounts
to the same thing) that he was an unfortunate product of the capital-
ist system. All of these interpretations have their relevance; but none
of them quite explains away the phenomenon which, in the first place,
has compelled our attention. So much is true for any writer and for
any phenomenon, of course, and even leaving aside the matter of
special bias every critical approach is limited ultimately by the cate-
gories of the thinking mind itself. The problem is always to discover
the approach that will do least violence to the object before us, that
will reconcile the greatest number of the innumerable aspects that
every object presents to the understanding. It merely happens that,
in Lawrence's "case," criticism has been more than ordinarily handi-
capped by a certain difficulty in determining exactly what the object
itself really is. Although Lawrence speculated in several fields of knowl-
edge, and contributed many valuable insights, he did not leave a sys-
tematic body of thought; yet some people base their approach to him
almost exclusively on what they call his ideas. On the other hand, if
he is treated as an artist, there is the hard fact to get around that all
but a few of his poems and novels are lacking in some of the most
prominent features usually associated with works of art. To add to
the confusion, if his so-called art is as often as not admired or con-
demned for its thought, his so-called thought is either accepted or re-
jected because of the art through which it is expressed. It does not
help to draw parallels with Whitman and Melville; for these figures
too have been singularly viscuous objects for criticism. Perhaps the
biographers and memoir-writers have been closest the mark, after all,
in almost ignoring Lawrence the thinker and Lawrence the artist for
Lawrence the man.

In any case, Lawrence's hold on the contemporary imagination
seems to have been as much the effect of his reputation as of his
accomplishments; and to say that it was based on the total image
presented by his career is perhaps to take everything into account.
This is not to dismiss his accomplishments but to put them in their
proper relation to something else. "What a man has got to say is
never more than relatively important," Lawrence remarks in the
Letters; and, while this may not be true for everyone, it was true
enough for him to suggest an approach that will undertake at least

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THE LAWRENCE MYTH
to describe what it was to which his confused mass of writings may be
related. What is here suggested is a view of Lawrence based on the
view that he finally came to take of himself, the view of himself as a
kind of contemporary reincarnation of the dying god.

Such an approach may seem far-fetched; but no other enables us
to reconcile so much of what is admirable and silly, sincere and false,
profitable and dangerous in the Lawrence "case." For example, the
formlessness of his writings, to which the purely aesthetic critic in-
variably turns his attention, is immediately seen as not so much a
technical deficiency as a function of his role. "They want me to have
form," he complained, "that means, they want me to have their per-
nicious, ossiferous, skin-and-grief form." Or, as he put it in Fantasia
of the Unconscious, "As soon as I have a finished mental conception,
a full idea even of myself, then dynamically I am dead." How such
a dynamic view of the self is to be related to the practice of an ob-
jective art is of course the question; and the answer that Lawrence
gives elsewhere is unsatisfactory: "One sheds one's sicknesses in books
-repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them."
But as an artist one successfully masters one's emotions only by giving
them aesthetic form and Lawrence has already had his say about
form. In his handling of the allegory perhaps, he most clearly reveals
his predicament; for, if this is the inevitable vehicle for revelation, it
also requires the most deliberate manipulation of concepts. But since
Lawrence will have nothing of concepts, most of his novels, from The
Rainbow to Kangaroo are allegories whose morals are either confused
or postponed. When, in Lady Chatterly's Lover, he does for once
keep to a simple and consistent pattern the result is significantly the
deadest writing of his career. He is at his best when he is most faithful
to his rôle-in the apocalyptic passages of the novels, in the "Osiris-
cries" of his successive resurrections, in his sermons on the mount. In
The Man Who Died he wrote a moving and terrible story because
he turned from allegory to myth-to the one and only myth to which
he had been conforming all along. All of his formal vicissitudes are
traceable to the intellectual difficulties in the way of being at once
a functioning divinity and a practitioner of the arts. He was not a
religious poet, as someone has said, but a self-induced earth god who
sometimes wrote verse.

Both in his life and in his works Lawrence illustrates what Nietzsche,
in his well-known analysis of the Dionysius myth, calls "the agony of
individuation." This will have an unpleasantly metaphysical sound to
modern ears; but it must be recalled that to the generation to which
Lawrence belonged life still presented itself in terms of of metaphysical

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PARTISAN REVIEW
problems. To these problems any serious discussion of Gide, Proust,
Mann and Joyce must likewise sooner or later be conducted. No mat-
ter into what unpopularity metaphysics has fallen, it is the only rel-
evant approach to these writers. So much seems necessary before
offering the following interpretation of Nietzsche's phrase: Nature
(the undifferentiated flux of phenomena) takes on form; every form
involves limitations; and as a result every individual must exist in a
state of perpetual inner strife which can be terminated only through
dissolution into his original substance. We need not ask what these
limitations are, whether there is any less drastic mode of solution, or
even whether this is in fact an accurate statement of the problem of
being. It will have to be enough to suggest that Lawrence's career
was like a ritualistic exhaustion of the paradoxical ambition to enjoy
nature, in the sense defined above, and to preserve the character of his
individuality at one and the same time.

Nature in Lawrence is commonly supposed to be identified tout
court with sex; but there are innumerable passages in which it is care-
fully explained that sex is but the medium or agency of a power still
greater than itself. For this reason he is so hard on those who, like
Benjamin Franklin, profane it in terms of hygienic "use." Nor is it a
pastime for a jaded epoch: "Buy a king-cobra and try playing with
that." Contrary to the general belief, Lawrence is more truly moral
on the subject of sex than on any other subject. Also it is made clear
that sex is not to be considered an end in itself, a solution to the indi-
vidual problem; this is the thesis of The Rainbow and Women in Love.
What the power that it represents actually is Lawrence attempts to
reveal through a variety of means. In his best poems and novels this
power is rendered for us through an interfusion of characterization
and description: the early poem "Fireflies" and the scene by the pool
in Women in Love are examples. Lawrence's specialty as a novelist,
it may be noted, is in the recording of such "vibrations." This power
is also personified in the familiar little dark man who remains so iden-
tical throughout the long roll-call of the novels. But it is perhaps most
clearly indicated through the metaphorical light-dark antithesis. By
contrast with the world that he rejects Lawrence gives us the sharpest
impression of the world that he would put in its place. If the light
symbolizes the over-spiritualized, over-intellectualized, and wholly
devitalized "white consciousness" of our time, which it should not be
difficult for most readers to recognize, the dark can only stand for its
opposite the unspiritual, unintellectual and wholly vital world of
nature. The darkness materializes into "the dark gods" and finally
"the dark god"; it invests itself in the innumerable forms of dragons,
birds, insects, and little black men. But what it really amounts to

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THE LAWRENCE MYTH
throughout is something that no church father would have any dif-
ficulty in calling by its right name.
"My great religion," Lawrence wrote, "is a belief in the blood,
the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect." This sums up so com-
pletely his attitude toward nature that we can pass to his actual
handling of the problem of individuality. None of the so-called indi-
vidualistic writers of recent generations, it may be said, projected the
problem with the same deliberation and insistence. "Insofar as he
[man] is a single individual soul, he is alone-ipso facto. Insofar
as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I, insofar I am inevitably
and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to
accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self-knowledge." This
is typical of any number of pronouncements on the subject. In the
brilliant Studies in Classic American Literature the attack is con-
sistently directed against what Lawrence believed to be mankind's
reprehensible passion for "merging." All of the novels, as a matter of
fact, are object-lessons in the consequences of losing self-identity. In
Sons and Lovers spiritual love, in most of the other early novels up to
The Rainbow sexual love, and in Women in Love and Aaron's Rod
friendship between men are successively examined and rejected as a
possible means of individual fulfillment. Beginning with Kangaroo,
however, we get a new and more positive note.
For if Lawrence through his heroes is so jealously defensive of
what he calls his "life-form" he exhibits all along an equally strong
counter-impulse toward just that sort of "merging" which he con-
demns in others. The character Aaron replies to the statement in the
above paragraph: "But I can't stand by myself in the
world and in the middle of people and know I am quite by myself,
and nowhere to go, and nothing to hold on to. I can for a day or two.
But then it becomes unbearable as well." This dialogue between Aaron
and Lilly, who represent the two poles of Lawrence's nature, objecti-
fies the conflict by which he was tormented from beginning to end and
which was the real source of his astonishing energy. The other side of
his eccentric individualism is seen in his life in the febrile quality of
his personal relationships and in his numerous projects for a model
colony-in Florida, Cornwall, Sicily, Mexico, and again in England.
It is interesting that the latter desire seems to have been more powerful
than his judgment, for he had been annihilating in his ridicule of the
Brook Farm experiment in the book on American literature. Law-
rence's social need was so intense that it is not only the main theme of
his Letters but the motive-power behind them-the reason that he is
one of the great English letter-writers. But nothing could be franker
than the following confession to Dr. Trigant Burrow: "What ails me
is the absolute frustration of my primeval societal instinct.... I think

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societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct—and societal repression
much more devastating. There is no repression of the sexual individual
comparable to the repression of the societal man in me, by the indi-
vidual ego, my own and everybody else's. I am weary even of my own
individuality, and simply nauseated by other people's.”

Apparently “fulfillment” involves the satisfaction of other needs
of man's nature than his purely private sense of communion with the
darkness. In the posthumous Apocalypse Lawrence begins to make
a distinction between the personal and the collective man, but this
soon evaporates in a blast of red dragon's breath. Lawrence never
really faced the question, for it would have taken him right out of the
realm in which the assurances of the blood are sufficient. It would
have required intellectual evaluation and moral choice. But we may
consider the general solution that he came to offer for the relationships
involved in sex, society, and politics. This may be indicated through
an inaccurate analogy with the medieval doctrine of grace. Through
sex the separate individuals in any relationship are restored to an
organic union with the processes of nature; and through this experience
they are strengthened, in the best religious sense, both in themselves
and in their relations with others. At least this is the only meaning
that emerges through the banal conversations and tirades of Lady
Chatterly's Lover, which belongs late in the Lawrence canon.

Politically, of course, such a doctrine leads straight into the very
dark burrow of fascism. But it may be worth while to trace out
Lawrence's political development, if it may be called such, a little
more carefully. As a coal miner's son, as a suffering artist, and as an
intelligent observer of contemporary life, he could never have been
very sympathetic to the ideal of modern bourgeois democracy. All of
his work is an implicit, and much of it an explicit, criticism of mass-
production in ideas, emotions, and men. He was a revolutionist, there-
fore, in the sense that every Bohemian artist under the bourgeois
regime has been a revolutionist. But it does not follow that he could
have turned to the Fabian socialism of pre-war England or, later, to
Soviet communism. What he objected to in communism was its failure
to provide any ideal better than the one to which he had been opposed
all along: “The dead materialism of Marx socialism and soviets seems
to me no better than what we've got.” In Apocalypse communism is
defined as a power-driven movement in which the proletariat is moti-
vated entirely by the desire for revenge on the ruling class. It is “the
old will of the Christian community to destroy human worldly power,
and to substitute the negative power of the mass. . . . In Russia, the
triumph over worldly power was accomplished, and the reign of saints
set in, with Lenin as chief saint.” To Lawrence power, the only real

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9

power, is to be achieved, as we have seen, through identification with
nature; he is against the intellectual will expressing itself in any sort
of active dogma. But this power would seem to be considerably vari-
able between individual and individual. In such a situation the in-
ferior men must bow down in homage before their acknowledged
lords and masters; only in this way will a continuous "stream of life"
be maintained. In other words, it is the old medieval hierarchy, with
grace (sex) once again thrown in as a safeguard. In Kangaroo the
fascist labor leader wins the support of his followers only to renounce
it because he is still not on good enough terms with "the dark gods."
The same notion is repeated in the diffuse and hysterical Plumed
Serpent. Led into confirmation of a political religion with whose only
practical expression he would have been the first to quarrel, Lawrence
illustrates the dangerous foolishness of his logic once it is applied.

Only by courtesy of course is it to be called logic at all; here
surely it is the blood and not the intellect that is doing the thinking.
For sex is not the equivalent of medieval grace, in the sense of being
a mode of communication between two absolute orders of being, but
something common to both man and nature. Grace was invented by
the theologians because it was necessary to establish some bridge be-
tween the human and the divine by which man could receive some
assistance in controlling the forces of his nature; but in Lawrence sex
is indistinguishable from these forces themselves. To attempt to im-
prove human relationships through sex is therefore like attempting to
improve nature by lifting it on its own bootstraps. It is an attempt for
which Lawrence could have found a discouraging precedent in a much
earlier representative of the tortured Anglo-Saxon Protestant mind,
who sought "the perfection of nature" only to end his days with a
Yahoo babble in his brain. Swift belied human nature by projecting
it too purely on its Houyhnhnm side, Lawrence by giving too much
scope to its Yahoo side; but both pictures equalize in their common
injustice to the reality.

In his remarkable essay on Poe, Lawrence demonstrates how the
Western will, become converted into the "will-to-know," turns in on
itself and becomes an instrument that ends by destroying its own
object, as the hero of Ligeia wills the death of his beautiful young
wife. It never seems to have occurred to him that his own version of
the Schopenhaurian "will-to-live," despite its up-to-date anthropolog-
ical trappings, could also turn in on itself and blight the very sources
of its energy. Yet in a story like The Ladybird there is an odd am-
biguity in the manner in which the hero, Count Dionys Psanek, vacil-
lates between being a sympathetic avatar of his mythological namesake

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PARTISAN REVIEW

and a somewhat sinister emissary of Avernus. In fact, there is some-
thing rather sinister about all the little black heroes, and Dionys is
selected only because he is the blackest and smallest and most obvious-
ly sinister of the lot. A German army officer imprisoned in England,
he renews his friendship with a childhood acquaintance, the pale and
virginal Lady Daphne, whose husband is away at the war. Through
a series of distinctly cruel conversations he manages to persuade her
that she is a "whited sepulchre" and that her husband is probably no
better. Upon the latter's return, he induces her, through the spell of
his singing, to come to his room at night. There he is "seated in flame,
in flame unconscious, like an Egyptian King-god in the statues." At
first he hesitates but then decides: "Take her into the underworld.
Take her into the dark Hades with him, like Francesca and Paolo.
And in hell hold her fast, queen of the underworld, himself master
of the underworld." He informs her, "In the dark you are mine.
And when you die you are mine. But in the day you are not mine,
because I have no power in the day. In the night, in the dark, and in
death, you are mine."
This talk of intermingled love and night and death-we have
heard it all before. Nineteenth century romanticism had been a death-
ward movement, as Mann shows in his Wagner essay, and through
the Nietzsche influence it is simple enough to relate Lawrence back
to the sources of Poe, Wagner, Baudelaire, and the other great cele-
brants of the tomb. Despite the superficial exaltation of birds and
beasts and flowers, despite the eloquent stressing of the natural beauty
and power in man, his life and work are rooted in an irrepressible
yearning for the grave. For to what can this extinction of the daylight
world, this abandonment of reason, lead but to a surrender of the
finite human self to the infinite nothingness of the flux? For the ro-
mantic there is always the moment when Life, with a capital L, must
be equated with death; it is the moment when the expanding sense
of nature in him causes him to break irrevocably the limitations which
alone guarantee his identity. "Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-
knot called life," cries Whitman. "Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death."
If this loosening was indeed what had been desired all along, it was
of course foolish to talk so big on the subject of life. For if life, hu-
man life, is a knot, reason is one of the two controlling cords. To
discard reason is to throw over the only thing that can give life defi-
nition. Lawrence's program is, in the last analysis, a program for a
mystery god-but hardly for a man. And Dionysius in every age can
terminate his agony only by dissolving into his native element.
These considerations are so obvious that they would not be

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THE LAWRENCE MYTH
raised if they had not been ignored by Lawrence right up to the end.
Toward the last the strain is quite evident in the paintings, poems, and
tales, so that as the affirmative note became more emphatic the under-
lying despair rose more and more to the surface. Like Melville's
whale, "life dies sunwards full of faith." Sometimes the longing comes
through as clearly as this:

Life is for kissing and for horrid strife,
The angels and the Sunderers,
And perhaps in unknown Death we perhaps shall know
Oneness and poised immunity.

But Lawrence's importance is that of a cult-leader, a kind of
latter-day mystery god, as we have said, and to disinfect his ideas is
not to reduce the objective importance of his myth as a whole. It is
perhaps an empty characterization to say that he was, in any case,
one of the great personalities of his generation. For the isolated qual-
ities of honesty, courage and intensity there was perhaps not a man in
England worthy to touch the hem of his much battered garments. To
say that he possessed integrity is to strain the meaning of that term;
but we can say that he kept to his rôle with an irreproachable consist-
ency. Even as an artist his least successful organ notes proved more
penetrating than the tinny whistles of the Shaws, the Wellses, and
the Huxleys. He was a necessary antidote, for the parched young
of two continents, to the salty fare of a superior artist like T. S. Eliot
both in the latter's wasteland and holy water phases. "Man seeks the
perfection of the life or the work," as Yeats has said, and Lawrence's
life was very nearly perfect of its kind. It was a perfect example of
what it is to be a mystery god in our time.
What then is the value of the Lawrence myth to a generation
that is now perhaps far enough removed from it not to fall into the
danger of a facile self-identification? It is the value, in the first place,
of any myth: the vicarious exhaustion of possibilities that are in-
herent in the human being in every time and place. Lawrence over-
played one impulse of human nature on a scale and in a fashion to
stand as a highly moral experience to anyone willing to follow him
through to the end. Although he never achieved real tragedy in any
of his works, he was himself a tragic figure in a drama that lacks a
chorus. To appreciate him, we must try to supply this chorus and the
proper language for it. In the second place, his story includes elements
that should contribute to a deeper realization both of ourselves and
our surrounding world. If we distinguish between its positive and its
negative aspects, we must admit that the latter constitute an impres-
sion of the contemporary world which no honest and sensitive person

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can fail to recognize. As a reflection of the formal and qualitative
disintegration of human life at present, it is more compelling than the
jeremiads of the reformers, the analyses of the psychologists, or the
charts of the economists. Lawrence was not primarily a social critic,
as some people have insistently maintained, but his epos is a damn-
ing criticism not only of our socio-economic organization but of our
whole culture to its roots. This is not to say that he was a mere product
of this culture; the psychoanalysts can make an equally convincing
case along quite different lines. After all, the pattern to which he
conformed was something much older even than our culture. It is
necessary to make this point very clear because the conclusion must
not be, as Lawrence himself insisted, that we can solve everything by
an immediate fiat of the intellectual will. Finally, the meaning of his
myth is that whatever rational program we do undertake to alter the
external situation must take sufficient account of that side of life to
which he gave such fanatical allegiance.

In his last years Lawrence was much fascinated by a conception
which, if he had lived long enough to develop, might have led to a
different solution to his many problems. It is the notion of the Greek
"gods of limits," the Dioscouri, or Heavenly Twins, who divided all
things between them-earth and sky, Heaven and Hades, the upper
and lower regions of consciousness. In Apocalypse Lawrence tells us
a great deal more about them: they were "witnesses," for example,
to Adonai, the lord of life. They were "rivals, dividers, separators, for
good as well as for evil: balancers." But, characteristically enough,
Lawrence is more impressed by their negative aspect as sunderers or
destroyers than as balancers between opposites. To him they seem
to appear at successive moments of time rather than simultaneously.
They tend to cancel each other out rather than to define the unity of
whatever is the organism in which they are present. But to the Greek
mind, to which they were above all witnesses to something, their
principal function must have been that of definition. From such a
brief summary it may or may not be evident how such a notion may
be related to the dialectic or process type of thinking, which in its
various expressions, is perhaps the characteristic type of thinking of
our time. With little difficulty "the gods of limits" can be appropriated
to the needs of much modern philosophy, psychology, politics, and
science.

For the present discussion they are useful as another restatement
of the nature-reason antithesis that has been suggested as the real
problem behind the Lawrence myth. If human life is a process that
is in turn defined by these two processes, if it is divided between them,
it is something that can be supported only if we can imagine at least

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temporary states of comparative stability. This solution has points of
resemblance both to the Whiteheadian "event" in physics and to
Dewey's "equilibrium" in psychology. But the question is always to
what extent such a resolution involves a virtual capitulation of one
or the other of the contending parties. Lawrence was someone who
spent his entire career combatting what he believed was an undue
balance in the structure of human life at the expense of the animal
nature in man. In his reaction against the scientific rationalism of the
latter nineteenth century he undoubtedly plunged himself into the
most abject nature-mysticism. But the reaction against Lawrence in
turn need not be anything so simple as a renewed assertion of pure
scientific rationalism. For scientific rationalism, in any of its current
forms or derivatives, does not really provide a resolution of the con-
flict of which Lawrence's career was the rather sensational rehearsal.
Insofar as it is applied to the kind of problems with which he was
concerned, it can only lead to an unequivocal victory of the one side
of man's nature over the other. It can only lead to a further building
up of precisely those structures under which the individual has been
buried for centuries. The only real resolution would be a redefinition,
in terms of what both man's reason and his nature are at present, of
man himself. It may be that such a redefinition may be accomplished
within one or another of the available contemporary programs; or it
may be that none of these quite avoids falling over into one of the two
extremes. But what is certain is that no definition will be satisfactory
that does not take into important account all those values to whose
defensive assertion Lawrence felt obliged to devote his career.
13

=== Page 15 ===
LOVE LIES SLEEPING

Earliest morning, switching all the tracks
That cross the sky from cinder star to star,
Coupling the ends of streets
To trains of light,

Now draw us into daylight in our beds;
And clear away what presses on the brain:
Put out the neon shapes
That float and swell and glare

Down the gray avenue between the eyes
In pinks and yellows, letters and twitching signs.
Hang-over moons, wane, wane!
From the window I see

An immense city, carefully revealed,
Made delicate by over-workmanship,
Detail upon detail,
Cornice upon facade,

Reaching so languidly up into
A weak white sky, it seems to waver there.
(Where it has slowly grown
In skies of water-glass

From fused beads of iron and copper crystals,
The little chemical "garden" in a jar
Trembles and stands again,
Pale blue, blue-green, and brick.)

The sparrows hurriedly begin their play.
Then, in the West, "Boom!" and a cloud of smoke.
"Boom!" and the exploding ball
Of blossom blooms again,

=== Page 16 ===
LOVE LIES SLEEPING 15

(And all the employees who work in plants
Where such a sound says "Danger," or once said "Death,"
Turn in their sleep and feel
The short hairs bristling

On back of necks.) The cloud of smoke moves off.
A shirt is taken off a thread-like clothes-line.
Along the street below
The water-wagon comes

Throwing its hissing, snowy fan across
Peelings and newspapers. The water dries
Light-dry, dark-wet, the pattern
Of the cool water-melon.

I hear the day-springs of the morning strike
From stony walls and halls and iron beds,
Scattered or grouped cascades,
Alarms for the expected:

Queer cupids of all persons getting up,
Whose evening meal they will prepare all day,
You will dine well
On his heart, on his, and his,

So send them about your business affectionately,
Dragging in the streets their unique loves.
Scourge them with roses only,
Be light as helium,

For always to one or several morning comes,
Whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed,
Whose face is turned
So that the image of

The city grows down into his open eyes
Inverted and distorted. No. I mean
Distorted and revealed,
If he sees it at all.

ELIZABETH BISHOP

=== Page 17 ===
MIGRATORY WORKER

John Dos Passos

IF SOME CRAZY GALOOT had walked up to Ike Hall while he was sitting under the watertank at Ash Forks waiting for them to make up a train of empty orecars and told him that the first thing he was going to do when he hit Phoenix was get married, Ike would have called him a goddam liar.

Ike Hall felt sick and tired of the whole woman business. He'd been working in a pick and shovel gang on an irrigation project near Needles in a temperature of 110 in the shade, all right for spicks but no work for a white man; his neck was burned till it was like a piece of raw steak, and the hard water had brought back an old dose he'd thought he'd been cured of for years. The foreman had told him about a crackerjack clapdoctor in Phoenix who was part Indian, "and you know, son, the injuns are hell's own physicians," so Ike had drawn his pay and rolled his bundle and hopped a fast eastbound freight on the trunkline. But waiting at Ash Forks he got to feeling sick and feverish; hell, he'd done too much of that in his time, so when a passenger train came along he went to the ticketoffice and bought him a ticket like a respectable citizen instead of waiting for the empty orecars they kept shunting back and forth on the siding. Three things he was through with, he told himself as he sat in the smokingcar rolling himself cigarette after cigarette from his packet of Bull Durham, were easy women, hopping freights and pick and shovel work.

He got to talking with a sallowfaced guy with a threedays' growth of beard who was dressed in a dusty blueserge suit with dand-ruff on the shoulders and said he was an electrician on his way from Albuquerque to take a job with the electrical company in Phoenix on account of the big money they were paying. "Doan' know why it is," the guy said, "but there ain't an electrician in the state of Arizona." Just a week before Ike had been helping the foreman wire the new bunkhouse so he decided that maybe he was an electrician too. Ike asked the guy did he think he could get him a job and the guy said sure, anybody could tell by the cut of Ike's jib he was mechanical. "Would he join the union?" said the guy. "Sure, I'm a union man,"

16

=== Page 18 ===
MIGRATORY WORKER 17

said Ike. "Shake," said the guy. "I'll take you around to see the bird
who does the hiring."

That was how Ike met Jinny Connor. He'd been sent out one
morning with his toolkit on his shoulder to see what the trouble was
with the lights in a row of unpainted bungalows on the dusty hill
across the river. In the first of them there was this pale looking girl
with big brown eyes and brown curls. She wore a blue apron and
was washing dishes in the kitchen. She was shy but mighty civil
spoken. First thing Ike did when he started monkeying with the wiring
was give himself a shock that just about dropped him to the floor and
blew out the main fuse into the bargain. The girl gave a yell when
she saw the flash. A hunched old woman with a face that would
curdle milk shuffled in from the other room and said she smelt smoke
and was he trying to set the house on fire and please to be quiet
because the mister was sick in bed. Ike took off his cap and said he
was sorry, ma'am, but he'd had to test the insulation. The old woman
hawled the girl out for not getting the kitchen cleaned up quicker
and shuffled out into the front room again.

Ike's eye caught the girl's and they got to laughing. It took him
all day to finish up the job because he had to learn the business as
he went along and by the time the job was finished he knew all about
her, how her folks were dead and she had to live with her aunt and
an uncle who was a lunger and how the old woman drove her like
a nigger and how she wanted to run away and get a job waiting in a
café only she was scared to. When Ike got back to the office the boss
hawled him out for being so long on this one job, but Ike didn't give
a damn, he was just figuring how he could fix it to go out there again
next day.

He did what the doc had told him about laying off the women
until he'd dried him up, although the married women in some of the
houses he went to sure did make passes at him. In the old days when
he was out looking for it, he'd never known you could get it so easy.

Evenings when Jinny could slip away from the old folks who
watched her like a hawk they would meet down at the drugstore at
the corner and walk out together, just like brother and sister. Her
real name was Virginia. The first time they walked out she put her
head on his shoulder and said she trusted him because he was such a
cleanlooking boy or maybe because his eyes were blue. He said he
guessed he was as much of a bum as the next guy but he knew a nice
girl when he saw one.

There wasn't any place they could go because all the hangouts
were too tough to take a nice girl like that to, so they would scramble
over the rocks and along irrigation ditches in the valley of the Salt

=== Page 19 ===
18 PARTISAN REVIEW

River and stand around listening to the toads singing and looking at
the moonlight and kinder hemming and hawing mostly. He did his
best to keep his hands off her. Having that dose made him feel awful
ashamed.

The minute the doctor said he was cured it was different, but
she said, George . . . she’d found out his real name was George and
always called him George now . . . she couldn’t unless she was mar-
ried, she didn’t know why but that was how she’d been brought up.
So before Ike knew what he was doing he’d said they’d have to get
married, then, and had bought her an engagement ring for fifteen
dollars from a Jew salesman he met in a poolroom.

The old folks raised holy hell when they got wind of it and
the old woman called up the sheriff and tried to get Ike arrested but
the sheriff must have said the girl was free, white and twentyone and
it wasn’t the law’s business who she married, because the old woman
hung up the receiver and ran screeching into the old man’s bedroom
yelling that he had to throw Ike out of the house. Ike felt sorry for
the old geezer when he tottered in with a blanket round his shoulders
coughing as he came and waving a big Colt in his shaky blueveined
hand. “I guess you folks want me to get out of here,” Ike said with
a grin and turned and walked out of the house. He never turned
around as he walked down the dusty hill towards the bridge but his
back sure tickled at the thought of that damned automatic shaking
in the old man’s hand.

Next morning when he went to work there was Jinny waiting for
him outside the shop. He went in and told the boss he had to have a
day off to get married and they went right down to the Justice of
Peace and took the fatal step. Ike had had the license in his wallet
for a week in case he might need it quick.

Jinny said they’d have to go someplace else than Phoenix be-
cause she’d be scared all the time on account of her aunt Maggie who
she knew was crazy as a hootowl. She said she’d always wanted to go
back to Kansas City where she’d been raised when she was little.
Ike hated to give up that good job now that he was just beginning to
learn something about electrical work but it had to be done. Ike
didn’t have enough jack to get sleepers so they sat up in the day coach
all the way happy and kidding and giggling and holding hands and
looking out at the scenery like a couple of schoolkids. “In K. C. we’ll
settle down and plant ourselves among the weeds,” he kept telling
Jinny.

Kansas City sure was a mistake. Jinny’s folks had all moved away.
The electrical workers local wasn’t taking in any new members on
account of the slump and before Ike could say Jack Robinson there

=== Page 20 ===
SECOND THO. MIG RATORY WORKER
19
he was smashing baggage at the Railway Express and Jinny was
countergirl in a onearmed lunch. Between them they could only make
twenty dollars a week. Every week they changed their furnished room
trying to find one that wasn't filthy dirty or didn't have bedbugs.
Still Ike was happy. He'd never had a girl all to himself like that. In
bed he'd be awful careful not to hurt her; he'd never known he could
bashful and never let on she knew what they were doing, but she
thought the world of him. All day he'd be looking forward to evening
when they'd walk around the town a little holding hands before going
to bed. Waking up in the morning with her head all rumpled with
sleep on the pillow beside his it would give him quite a turn to re
member that here he was a married man.
Every week they put a little cash away to get something ahead so
that they could pull out and go someplace where Ike could get him a
decent job and they could have some kind of a shack to themselves.
But when it came on to be the third month and there wasn't any more
going to have a baby, Ike made up his mind
something had to be done real quick.
They sat up half one night in their little hallbedroom whispering.
They couldn't talk out loud because every time they raised their voices
some bloke next door banged on the wall. Winter was setting in early
that fall and their feet and hands were cold and they didn't have
enough covers, and they couldn't get to sleep they were so worried.
There wasn't a living soul they could call on for help. At last Jinny
curled up in the blanket and went to sleep like a baby with the tears
still running out from under her eyelashes. Ike sat up in the chair
looking at her and wondering what the hell he could do; he had half
a mind to walk out on her and hit the road again, but, Jesus, how
could a stiff walk out on a nice girl like that who thought the world
of him?
Next morning Ike started for work early. His eyes stung and he
felt dead tired from not getting enough sleep. The November morn
ing was frosty and he had to step right along because he didn't have
any overcoat. Passing the damn fink employment agency on the cor
ner opposite the freight depot he saw a new sign on the bulletin board.
HIGH PAY WIDE AWAKE MEN TO LEAVE AT ONCE FOR OILFIELDS. He
went in and found they were paying four dollars a day for donkey
enginemen and machinists.
Sure he could run a drill and hadn't he been engineman on that
coaster out of Seattle. Right away he felt there was something phoney
about the job and the blackjawed onearmed guy named Riley who
was in there hiring the crew. "Kin you ship out to Oklahoma tonight?"

=== Page 21 ===
20 PARTISAN REVIEW

“Sure,” said Ike. Then he turned red. “I got the missus with
me.... You’ll have to pay her fare too.”
He didn’t like the look the fink gave him. “A henpecked hus-
band.... That’s great.... That’s what we want, good steady married
men that won’t walk out on us.” “Say, Mister Riley, this ain’t a
scabbin’ job, is it?” Riley looked Ike straight in the eye with that
nasty look he had. “Take it or leave it,” he said, “I’ve not got time
to talk philosophy with nobody.”
“All right,” said Ike. He went around and resigned at the Rail-
way Express and drew a couple of dollars they still owed him and
that night he and Jinny went down to the train. She was carrying
a floor lamp she’d won at a shooting gallery and he had their ratty
wicker suitcase in one hand and a paper package under his arm.
The fink was waiting for them with the tickets.
After he’d settled Jinny in the daycoach he went back to the
smokingcar to take a look at the bunch. The minute he saw them he
knew it was a scab job, a worselooking bunch of scissorbills he never
had seen. They were drinking and yelling and raising cain right there
in the smokingcar. Ike felt worse than he’d ever felt in his life, but
what the hell could he do? Looked like it was scab money or no
money.
He went into the toilet and took out the red card he still carried
in his inside pocket and tore it up and dropped it down the johnny.
He stood there a minute looking at himself in the cracked mirror. He
looked pale and thin and he had circles under his eyes from not sleep-
ing last night but he didn’t look very different from how he’d always
looked. He looked himself right in the eye and whispered “Ike Hall,
you’re a married man and a skunk.” Then he sat down on the johnny
and covered his face with his hands that were sore and rough from
baggage smashing in K.C. The train made a cheery racket over the
ties in the windy night. Now and then from way up ahead the engine
hooted at him. “Just a lousy scabbin’ scissorbill.”

=== Page 22 ===
SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE U. S. S. R.

Andre Gide

THE PUBLICATION of my book, Return from the U.S.S.R., has
won me a good deal of abuse. Romain Rolland's part in it pained
me. Though I have never had much taste for his writing, his moral
character, at least, commands my respect. I was distressed because the
incident demonstrated how rare it is for a man to reach the end of
his life without having previously reached the limit of his powers.
The author of Above the Battle, would, I believe, pass a harsh judg-
ment on Rolland grown old. This eagle has made his nest, and there
he lies.

Besides the vituperation there were a few criticisms made in
good faith. It is to answer them that I am writing this book. . . .

A superficial survey, a hasty judgment, my book has been called.
As if it were not precisely on first sight that the Soviet Union is so
attractive! As if one did not have to go deeper before catching sight of
the worst!

In the heart of the fruit the worm hides. But when I told you this
apple of yours was wormy, you accused me of poor vision, or of not
liking apples.

If I had been satisfied to be an admirer, you would certainly not
have reproached me with superficiality. Then, however, I would have
deserved it.

I have met your criticisms before. They are practically identical
with those provoked by my Trip to the Congo and my Return from
the Chad. Then I was found fault with on the grounds that:

(1) the abuses to which I called attention were exceptional and
irrelevant;

(2) there was every reason for admiring the present régime, if
one would only compare it to the previous régime, to the
days before the conquest (I almost said, before the Revolu-
tion);

(3) everything I deplored had its profound raison d'être, which
I had not been equipped to understand-was but a tem-
porary evil in anticipation of a greater good.

At that time, the criticisms, the attacks, the abuse all came from
the right; and you, adherents of the left, did not for a minute dream
of making a to-do about my confessed "incompetence." You were

21

=== Page 23 ===
22 PARTISAN REVIEW
only too happy to seize upon my statements as long as they fitted in
with your ideas, as long as you could make capital of them. And in
any case, today, this incompetence of mine you would never
have held against me had I only praised the U.S.S.R., and declared
that everything there was going rapturously well.
All of this in no way alters the fact (and this is the only thing
that matters to me) that subsequently the commissions of inquiry set
up in the Congo confirmed all my observations. So now, the quantity
of evidence which keeps coming my way, the reports which I have
been able to read, the stories of impartial observers (however great
"friends of the Soviet Union" they are, or were before they went
there to look at it), together bear witness to the reality of my picture
of the Soviet Union, together reinforce my fears for it. . . .
One of the most legitimate objections made to my Return from
the U.S.S.R. is that it seems to lay too much stress on intellectual
questions, which one must be willing to see relegated to second place,
so long as other, more pressing problems remain unsolved. The reason
for this is that I had felt obliged to include the few speeches I had
been persuaded to make in Russia, and which had given rise to some
controversy. In such a little book these speeches took up too much
space and drew attention to themselves. They date for the most part
from the beginning of my trip, from a time when I still believed (yes,
I was that naïve) that in the Soviet Union it was possible to speak
seriously about culture and to debate straightforwardly, from a time
when I did not yet realize how primitive and uncertain the social
equilibrium was.
But I protest the attitude which has insisted on regarding
what I said as the mere special pleading of a literary man.
When I spoke of intellectual freedom, I meant something much more
general. Science is compromising itself quite as badly as literature by
its complaisance to authority.
Such-and-such a scholar finds himself forced to repudiate a
theory in which he believed but which had a not-quite-orthodox
look. Such-and-such a member of the Academy of Science disavows
"his former errors," since they "were susceptible of being used by
fascism"—so he himself has just declared in public (Izvestia, Decem-
ber 28, 1936). Such a man is compelled to admit the veracity of
charges launched, under orders, by a journal like Izvestia, which
smells out in his researches the dreadful symptoms of "counter-revolu-
tionary delirium."
Eisenstein is halted in the middle of his work. He must
acknowledge his "errors," admit that he has made a mistake and that
the new film, which he has been two years getting ready and on

=== Page 24 ===
SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE U.S.S.R.
23
which two million roubles have already been spent, does not measure
up to doctrinal requirements, and was therefore quite rightly banned.
As for justice! Do you think that the last trials in Moscow and
Novosibirsk are going to make me regret having written that sentence
that infuriates you: "I doubt whether in any other country today,
even in Hitler's Germany, the spirit is less free, more cramped, more
fearful (terrorized), more enserfed"?

I had for three years been too thoroughly steeped in the literature
of Marxism to feel very much out of my element in the Soviet Union.
Besides I had read too many accounts of trips, enthusiastic descrip-
tions, apologies. My great mistake was that I believed too willingly
in the hymns of praise. This was partly due to the fact that every-
thing I came upon might have put me on my guard was so
clearly bad-tempered in tone. . . . I would more willingly trust love
than hate. Yes, I subscribed; I had faith. Likewise, in the Soviet
Union I was never so much disturbed to find imperfection as I was
to encounter straight off the very prerogatives I wanted to get away
from, the privileges I hoped were abolished. Certainly, it seemed
natural to me that they would try to treat a guest as well as possible,
to give him the best of everything. But what amazed me was the
enormous disparity between this "best," and the common lot, that
such excessive privilege should exist side by side with a mass standard
of living so mediocre or so bad.

Perhaps this is an eccentricity peculiar to my mind and its
Protestant conditioning, but at any rate I distrust ideas that pay
dividends, and "comfortable" opinions; I mean opinions by which
the holder can hope personally to profit.

And I can see very well indeed how much the Soviet govern-
ment stands to gain from doing the handsome thing by artists and
writers, by everybody who could possibly sing its praises-though
there may be no definite attempt at corruption. But also I see only
too well how the writer stands to gain by endorsing the government
and a constitution which favors him to this extent. And so at once I
am on my guard. I am afraid of letting myself be bribed. The un-
heard-of profits they offer me in Russia actually terrify me. I don't
go to a Soviet Union to rediscover privileges. Those that were waiting
for me there were scandalous.

And why shouldn't I say that?

The Moscow newspapers had informed me that in a few months
more than 400,000 copies of my books were sold. I leave it to the
reader to calculate the author's royalties. And the fat pay for maga-
zine articles! Had I written a dithyramb on the U.S.S.R. and on
Stalin, what a fortune would have been mine!

=== Page 25 ===
24 PARTISAN REVIEW

Such considerations could not have made me withhold my praise;
no more will they silence my criticism. Yet I confess the extraordinary
favoritism (greater than in any other country in Europe) shown to
everybody who wields a pen, provided they write grammatically, did
more than a little to put me on my guard. Of all the workers and
craftsmen of the Soviet Union the writer is by far the most pampered.
Two of my traveling companions (each had a translated book on the
press) scoured the antique shops, the curiosity shops, the second-hand
stores, not knowing how to spend the advance of several million
roubles they had just received and which they knew they could not
take out of Russia. As for my own case, I could hardly make a dent
on an enormous bank-account, for everything there was given me free
of charge. Yes, everything, from the trip itself to packages of cigarettes.
And whenever I would take out my wallet to settle a restaurant or
hotel bill, to pay an account, to buy stamps or a newspaper, the ex-
quisite smile and imperious gesture of our guide would stop me:
"You're joking! You are our guest, you and your five companions
too."

Indeed I had nothing to complain of during the course of my
trip through the Soviet Union, and of all the malicious explanations
that were concocted to invalidate my criticisms, the one that tries to
pass them off as the expression of a personal dissatisfaction is by far
the most absurd. Never before have I traveled in such ostentatious
style. If by train in a private car, otherwise in the best automobiles,
always the best rooms in the best hotels, the most plentiful and select
table-fare. And what a reception I got! What pains were taken!
What attentions were paid me! Everywhere cheered, flattered,
pampered, fêted. Nothing was considered too good, too exquisite for
me. I would have been graceless indeed to have repulsed these ad-
vances; I could not; and I retain a marvelous memory of them, and a
lively gratitude. But these very favors continually conjured up the
idea of privileges, of differences, where I thought to find equality.

When, having escaped with great difficulty from the supervised
world of officialdom, I had rubbed elbows with some piece-workers
whose earnings were no more than four or five roubles a day, how
was I expected to feel about the banquet given in my honor, which
I could not avoid attending? An almost daily banquet, where there
was such a quantity of hors d'oeuvres alone that one was three times
surfeited before starting on the meal proper, a six-course repast which
lasted over two hours and left one absolutely stunned. What an out-
lay! Since I was never allowed to see a bill, I cannot be specific about
the cost. But one of my fellow-travelers, well informed about prices,
estimates that each banquet must have come to more than 300 roubles

=== Page 26 ===
SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE U.S.S.R.
25
a head with the wines and the liqueurs. Now there were six of us,
seven, counting the guide, and there were often as many hosts and
guests, sometimes many more.
Throughout the whole trip we were not, properly speaking,
guests of the government, but of the rich Union of Soviet Writers.
When I think of the expense they went to for us, I doubt whether
the gold-mine of my author's royalties, which I now resign to them,
can possibly suffice to reimburse them.
Evidently they were counting on a different return from such
generous advances. And I think that part of the spite I am conscious
of in Pravda comes from the fact that I was a rather bad investment.

I insist that there is something tragic in this Soviet adventure of
mine. I had come as an enthusiast, I was totally convinced, I was
prepared to admire a new world, and they offered me, as seductions,
mind you, all the prerogatives I abominated in the old.
But you don't understand, an excellent Marxist told me. Com-
munism is opposed only to the exploitation of man by man; how
many times must I tell you that? Once exploitation is ended you can
be as rich as Alexis Tolstoy or a great opera singer if only you acquire
your fortune by your personal work. In your scorn and hatred for
wealth and possessions I detect a very regrettable trace of your early
Christian ideas.
That may well be.
Which, let me tell you, have nothing in common with Marx-
ism.
Alas! . . .

As long as man is under the yoke, as long as the repression of
socially vicious forces keeps him prostrate, one correctly keeps on
hoping for a future flowering of all that he carries in him. One
similarly expects great things of children who grow up quite ordinary.
One has often the illusion that man in the mass is made up of
individuals superior to the rest of humanity. I believe only that he
is less spoiled; but money will rot him quickly enough. And look
what is happening in the U.S.S.R.: the new bourgeoisie forming there
has all the faults of ours. No sooner has it escaped from misery than
it scorns the miserable. Avid of all the good things of which it was
for so long deprived, it knows how to go about acquiring them and
protecting them. "Are these really the people who made the Revolu-
tion? No, these are the people who profit from it," I wrote in my
book, Return from the U.S.S.R. They may be Party members but
there is nothing of communism in their hearts.

=== Page 27 ===
26 PARTISAN REVIEW

But the fact is that the Russian people appear to be very
happy. I am entirely in accord with the testimony to this happiness
made by Vildrac and Jean Pons, whose books on Russia I cannot
read without nostalgia. Because, and I too have said so, nowhere
except in the U.S.S.R. do the masses of people, the people you meet
in the street (at least the young people) the workers in the factories
you visit, the crowds who swarm the places for rest, culture, amuse-
ment, present so smiling an an appearance. How reconcile this appear-
ance with the frightful poverty in which the great masses are plunged?
Those who have travelled widely in the U.S.S.R. tell me that
Vildrac, Pons, and myself would have been quickly disenchanted had
we quit the big centers and the beaten paths of tourists. They speak
of whole districts where misery hits you in the face. And where. . .
Misery in the Soviet Union is difficult to find. It hides itself like a
guilty thing. It cannot attract pity or charity, it is exposed only to
scorn. Those who exhibit themselves are those whose well being de-
pends on this misery. When one does come across numbers of people
who are obviously starving, they are smiling too, and their happiness,
as I said, is made "of confidence, ignorance, and hope."*
If everyone we see in the Soviet Union appears to be spirited,
it is equally true that anyone who has the audacity to lack spirit is
immediately suspected. It is extremely dangerous to be sad, or to
indicate that you are sad. A complaint cannot be lodged in Russia
-it goes to Siberia.

Russia is prolific enough not to show the terrible depredations
among her human herds. These ravages are all the more terrible for
being hardly noticeable. And those who disappear, who are spirited
away, are very likely the most worthy, if not with respect to their
practical capacity then in so far as they dare to disagree, differ,
distinguish themselves from a mass which insures its unity only by
means of a mediocrity which becomes more and more ignoble.
In the Soviet Union what is called "opposition" is in reality
courageous criticism, freedom of thought. Stalin demands applause

* It is necessary to remark once more on the Russian people's prodigious
capacity for life. Astonished at having endured inconceivable vicissitudes,
having suffered so greatly without being diminished by suffering, Dostoyevsky at-
tributed to himself the "vitality of a cat." A love of life which conquers pain as
readily as indifference or apathy, a welling up of amusement and lyricism, of
unexplained, inexplicable joy; no matter when, where, how, . . . I shall have to
call it an extraordinary propensity for happiness. And in spite of everything it is
this quality which makes Dostoyevsky so representative of Russia. It is this
quality which attracts me so profoundly and fraternally, and which, through him,
directs me to the whole Russian people. It is doubtful whether any other people
would have given themselves so generously to so tragic an experience.

=== Page 28 ===
THE BAS SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE U.S.S.R.
27
and treats those who do not join in as enemies. Often enough it
happens that Stalin adopts as his own some measure suggested by
somebody else; but first, the better to appropriate the proposal, he
gets rid of the proposer. This is Stalin's way of being right. So that
very soon he shall find himself surrounded exclusively by men who
can hardly annoy him with critical ideas since they shall have no
ideas at all. Such is the traditional fate of despots: to be surrounded
not by values but by an empty servility.

Whatever the issue which brings before any Soviet court work-
ers of any category, whatever the justice may be of the workers'
cause, where is the lawyer who will dare defend them if the rulers
have decided on condemnation?

And the thousands deported . . . those who have not bowed in
the way prescribed.
I do not have to imagine myself in their boots as M., the other
day, was saying, "The devil! It could happen to me, too...." These
victims I see, I hear, I feel right near me. It is their gagging cries
which wake me in the night; it is their silence which today dictates
these lines. Because I have dreamed about these martyrs I have had
to write words against which you protest, and whatever assistance my
book can bring them means far more to me than all the praises and
imprecations of Pravda.

Nobody intervenes on their behalf. All the right-wing journals
simply exploit their fate to censure a regime which the reactionaries
detest; the Barbusses and Rollands, those who love liberty and justice,
who fight in behalf of men like Thaelmann, are silent; around the
martyrs to criticism the immense proletarian mass is blind.

But when I become indignant, you explain (and still in the
name of Marx!) that these definite and undeniable evils (I refer not
only to the deportations but also to the profound poverty of the
workers, the enormous disproportion of incomes, the reconstituted
privileges, the furtive reestablishment of classes, the liquidation of
Soviets, the progressive liquidation of everything conquered by 1917)
you show great skill in explanations as you point out that these evils
are inevitable, and that you yourself, as an intellectual inured to the
contradictions (the sophistries) of the dialectic, regard the evils as
provisional pauses on the road to a greater good. You, the intelligent
communist, know of these evils and deem it best to hide them from
those who, being less intelligent than yourself, are very likely to dis-
approve....

=== Page 29 ===
28

PARTISAN REVIEW

I cannot prevent people from finding my writings useful to
them, and if I could I should not want to do so. But to write anything
at all in the direct interests of a particular political party—no, that
I cannot do. I warned my new Communist friends at the very begin-
ning of our relations: I would never be a satisfied recruit, a recruit
to repose.

I have read a statement somewhere to the effect that “intel-
lectuals” who come over to communism ought to be regarded by the
Party as “unstable elements” useful on occasions but not entirely to
be trusted. How true, how very true! I said the same thing many
times to Vaillant-Couturier; but he would not believe it.

There is no party which can keep my loyalty—which can prevent
me from preferring truth to the Party itself. When falsehoods inter-
vene I am ill at ease; my role is to denounce them. I attach myself
only to truth; if the Party rejects truth then I must reject the Party.

I know well (and you have instructed me often enough in this
matter) that from the “Marxist point of view” Truth does not exist;
at least not in an absolute sense; that there are only relative truths;
but it is precisely these relative truths which are here in question;
which you falsify. And I believe that in questions of such weight and
import one only deceives oneself by seeking to deceive others. For
whom are you fooling now? Those you pretend to serve: the people.
One serves the people ill by blinding them.

It is necessary to see things as they are, not as one would have
liked them to be:

The U.S.S.R. is not what we hoped it would be, what it gave
promise of being, what it still tries to appear to be; it has betrayed
our hopes. If we do not want our hopes to fail too, we must attach
them elsewhere.

But we shall not turn our face from you, O glorious and griev-
ing Russia. If first you were an example to us, now, alas! you show
in what engulfing sands a revolution can sink.

=== Page 30 ===
THE BALLAD OF THE CHILDREN
OF THE CZAR

1

The children of the Czar.
Played with a bouncing ball,

In the May morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it back and forth;

It fell among the flowerbeds,
Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up
In the western sky, bald white.

Like Papa's face, said Sister,
Hurling the white ball forth.

2

While I ate a baked potato,
Three thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,
Aged two, irrational.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt
Was an Arrow Collar Ad.

O Nicholas! Alas! Alas!
My grandfather coughed in your army,

Hid in a wine-stinking barrel
For three days in Bucharest,

Then left for America
To become a king himself.

=== Page 31 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW
30
3
I am my father's father,
You are your children's guilt,

In history's pity and terror
The child is Aeneas again,

Troy is in the nursery,
The rocking horse is on fire,

Child labor! the child must carry
His fathers on his back!

But seeing that so much is past,
And that history has no ruth

For the individual
Who drinks tea, who catches cold,

Let anger be general:
I hate an abstract thing.

4
Brother and sister bounced
The bounding, unbroken ball,

The shattering sun fell down
Like swords upon their play,

Moving eastward among the stars
Toward February and October.

But the May wind brushed their cheeks
Like a mother watching sleep,

And if for a moment they fight
Over the bouncing ball,

And sister pinches brother,
And brother kicks her shins,

Well! the heart of man is known:
It is a cactus bloom.

5
The ground on which the ball bounces
Is another bouncing ball,

=== Page 32 ===
THE BALLAD OF THE CHILDREN OF THE CZAR 31

The wheeling, whirling globe
Makes no will glad.

Turning in its clouded darkness,
It is too big for their hands.

O pitiless purposeless Thing,
Arbitrary and unspent,

Made for no play, for no children,
But chasing only itself.

The innocent are overtaken,
They are not innocent,

They are their father's fathers,
The past is inevitable.

6

Now, in another October
Of this tragic star,

I see my second year,
I eat my baked potato,

It is my buttered world,
But poked by my unlearned hand,

It falls from the highchair down,
And I begin to howl,

And I see the ball roll under
The iron gate which is locked.

Sister is screaming, brother is howling,
The ball has evaded their will.

Even a bouncing ball
Is uncontrollable,

And is under the garden wall.
I am overtaken by terror

Thinking of my father's fathers
And of my own will.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

=== Page 33 ===
ART CHRONICLE: Hans Arp

HERE are probably many reasons, social as well as aesthetic, why
the New York critics should have ignored the most interesting and im-
portant event on the current art-calendar. A large Hans Arp exhibition
was held at the Museum of Living Art during the month of November;
yet only two mentioned that it was taking place, and none gave the
slightest indication of having been there.

The extent of Arp's achievement had been difficult previously to
appreciate in America. The Museum of Modern Art has displayed his
work magnificently; but the approach was historical, and there was
only one work later than 1930. The Museum of Living Art, on the
other hand, emphasizes the final fruition; of the eighteen works on dis-
play there are none earlier than 1930. And the leading feature is the
first showing anywhere of the new 1937 papier collé series.

The name of Arp is probably most familiar as one of the founders
of Dada at Zurich in 1916. The Dada movement was for Ernst, Picabia,
and others, the end of an aesthetic road from which they took off toward
various literary extremes. For Arp on the other hand it was a starting-
point in a long way backward, and his subsequent career has been a
constant search for an ever greater expressiveness through simplification.
Along the way Arp's influence has gripped whole sections of the modern
movement to an extent that few, perhaps, have realized. It has been
through his renewed emphasis on form, shape, and (particularly) position
of shape, that Arp has cleared an approach for his contemporaries. He
has attacked the very roots of that language which the painter must have
under complete control if he can ever hope to raise his voice without
a strain. The fine Miró Compositions of 1933 would have been impos-
sible without the researches of Arp; Picasso, Léger, Braque (who had
earlier influenced Arp in turn) and countless younger painters and sculp-
tors, incorporate his work into their consciousness.

It is the recent papier collés, however, that give the exhibition its
final importance. Several other contemporary artists might achieve a
formidable impact through a retrospective show; but the segregation of
their recent works would invariably betray a falling off in quality.
Arp is the exception. In the reliefs of 1930-35 the accent and the
aesthetic system have become firmly realized. He has laid the founda-
tion and can turn anew to the intensification of quality. With complete
sureness the emotion deepens; and the voice is never in danger of be-
coming forced. Surely the simplest means will ultimately be found ade-
quate for a genuine aesthetic tone. A broken piece of pottery will often
bring us closer to Greece than the Laocoön. Some day it may appear that
among the purest and most authentic comments on the post-War Europe
we may find these elusive and reticent compositions of Arp.

GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

32

=== Page 34 ===
Hans Arp Exhibition, Wood R-liefs

MUSEUM OF LIVING ART, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

=== Page 35 ===
HANS ARP; Papier Collé 1937
Collection, Museum of Living Art, New York University

=== Page 36 ===
HANS ARP: Papier Collé 1937
Collection, Museum of Living Art, New York University

=== Page 37 ===
HURRY, HURRY

Eleanor Clark

NO ONE WAS THERE when the house began to fall. It was a beau-
tiful June day, warmer than it had been. I remember that people had
been particularly expansive that morning as after a thunder storm.
They had gathered on the porch steps at mail-time, exclaiming over
and over on the warmth of the sun and the color of the tiger-lilies
that had just sprung out all over town. One of the ladies, receiving
a long-awaited letter from her nephew, had suddenly become very
witty and had kissed everyone in the store, and this could never have
happened on an ordinary day. Naturally it occurred to no one that a
disaster was about to take place.

The only creature that might have given some warning was the
French poodle, de Maupassant, who had been locked in the house
and should have sensed that everything was not quite right, but he
gave no sign of life until the end. Probably my mother had spoiled
him too much by that time. Certainly she loved the dog, especially
since the accident that paralyzed one of his paws, so that it was hard
for her to deny him anything. People laughed at her for this, and she
laughed at herself, but she could always find something in him to
excuse her behavior. She loved the aristocracy of him, the way he
tossed his luxurious black mane-Louis Quatorze she called it-or
drew his shoulders a little together and pointed up his slender glossy
snout. In the evening he snuggled at her feet, and then, though in
the daytime her profile was too sharp and her green-flecked eyes leapt
too quickly to the defense, there was something almost of a madonna
in my mother's face. But she had spoiled the dog. In the end he was
incapable of serious thought and must have played or slept through
the whole catastrophe. The servant spent most of his time writing
love letters to the village saxophonist.

I too was of no use, partly because I was walking on the hill
about half a mile from the house. The other reason is simply that I
was not interested. Later when I saw all my mother's property tum-
bling to ruin I did try to concentrate on the tragedy of it: shook
myself, rubbed my arms and legs, even kicked my shins and jumped
up and down as if my feet were asleep, but with no effect. I spent
the entire time-two or three hours it must have been-under a maple
tree, and rescued nothing but one silver-backed hand mirror which

33

=== Page 38 ===
34 PARTISAN REVIEW
fell out of an upper window and happened to land in my lap. I
think that I was also the last person in the village to be aware that
the house, where I was born and spent most of my childhood, was
beginning to collapse. I noticed it quite by accident from the hill. The
house was swaying very gently, the top of the cobblestone chimney
with a graceful and independent motion, rather like the tail of a fish,
and the foundations with a more irregular ebb and swell as if the
stones were offering a futile resistance to their downfall. The kitchen
and the woodshed had already gone down, tearing an ugly wound
in the north wall and leaving the servants' quarters exposed.
Naturally I made my way back as quickly as possible, but the
lane had become so overgrown with sumach and brambles that it
was almost half an hour before I reached the road. By that time the
whole town was present and the lawn was already clotted with little
groups of people (in one place the ladies of the Altar Guild, in an-
other the three families that lived off the town, and so on) debating
the causes of the collapse and the possibilities of doing something
about it. My mother was running from one group to another, shaking
hands with everyone, receiving advice and expressions of sympathy.
She had been at a cocktail party and cut an especially charming
figure, with her white picture hat and her flowered print. So much
so that for some time—until the front wall actually began to bulge
out over the lawn, like a paper bag slowly surcharged with water—
most of the people were unable to keep their minds on the disaster
and acted as if they were attending an ordinary funeral or tea.
Now and then my mother paused in her rounds as hostess, tuck-
ing the minister's arm under hers, and while appearing to cast down
her eyes, with one of her green calculating upward Victorian glances
managed to caress his face. "Ah Padre," she sighed, plucking at the
black cloth under her fingers, "what a good friend you are," and
added, turning to the church ladies, "He's the best Democrat any of
us has ever seen." The minister, who had also been at the cocktail
party and whose cheeks were somewhat flushed, gazed with sly ben-
evolence over his flock, laughed his deep-bellied indifferent laugh,
and kissed my mother's hand. "Ha ha ha," rattled the church ladies,
and with one motion, as from a released spring, began to run in tiny
circles around him, pointing delightedly at his full chest and the
rather uncouth vigor of his jaw. "Always joking," said the minister,
"here her house is on the verge of collapse and she talks about de-
mocracy! What a woman!" At this the church ladies could no longer
control themselves, they rolled and pivoted with laughter, poking
each other's corsets and smacking their lips enviously toward my
mother. "It's true, upon my word it's true!" she cried, one arm to

=== Page 39 ===
HURRY, HURRY
35
the sky. "He treats us all the same, rich and poor alike! Here's to
Padre!" And she raised her empty hand still higher in a toast. "The
best friend this community has ever had!"
In the meantime the disintegration of the house was becoming
more and more apparent. From the upstairs bedrooms, and even in
the pantry and dining-room, beams could be heard falling, and al-
ready a wide crack was beginning to open diagonally across the front
living-room wall, exposing the dust-covered leaves of books, first the
historical works and later the vellum-bound editions of Dante, Bau-
delaire and Racine. It was this, I think, that first awoke my mother
to a real awareness of what was happening. It was not only that the
books were threatened with destruction: it was also obvious to every-
one that their pages had not been cut. Even the town servants noticed
it, even Myrtle who was hired for the lowest and heaviest form of
cleaning, but Myrtle was a poor half-deformed creature and she
would not have dared to smile behind her fingers as the others did.
One by one the books fell among the barberry bushes, raising
a cloud of greyish powder so stifling that the people nearest were
forced to stumble back over the flowerbeds, holding handkerchiefs
to their mouths. "Oh good Lord! the books! the books!" my mother
gasped. She ran up under the crack in the wall, and holding her
white hat with one hand, with the other attempted to catch the
volumes as they toppled from their shelves. But they were coming
too fast. Many of them, too, fell apart immediately against the outer
air, leaving only something like silica dust midway to the ground,
so that my mother was soon taken with a violent fit of coughing. At
last, reeling and choking under the rain of classics that were now strik-
ing her head and breasts and shoulders, she was obliged to stagger
back toward the road. "A wonderful woman," the ladies said, and
they began to scamper to and fro, picking little bunches of sweet
william, wild roses and delphinium for my mother's hair. Gratefully
she closed her eyes and was nestling her grey curls more warmly
against the Padre's ample lap, when the cobblestone chimney tore
itself loose from the main beams of the house and crashed through
the lower branches of the elms and across the lawn.
Immediately my mother sprang up.
"George! Burt! Albert!" she called. "Somebody's got to save
my things! Where's the Fire Department? Fire Department!" The
Fire Department was not really a department at all, but a group of
farmers who no longer farmed, so they had nothing better to do than
to jump on the fire engine as it went by. They were now lying on the
grass passing around a bottle of beer and laughing at some story or
joke. "George!" my mother wheedled. "Albert! Burt!" and she ran

=== Page 40 ===
36 PARTISAN REVIEW

from one to another, prodding and kicking them with her white
pointed toe. The firemen looked up slowly at the waving roof and the
colonial columns which were beginning to bend like wax candles in
the sun, then hoisting their quids all together to the other side of their
faces they announced, "It ain't a fire," and lay down again, covering
their necks against the afternoon sun. "But the highboy!" my mother
cried. "The highboy! It belonged to my grandfather, it's been in my
family for two hundred years, my little old Aunt Mary left it to me
in her will. She was so weak she could hardly hold up her head, and
she whispered to me"—here my mother's voice broke—"she said, 'I
want you to have it, because it's the loveliest thing I have, and you're
the only one that's stood by me all these years.' "

This recital so moved my mother that for a full minute she stood
with her face in her hands, sobbing, but perceiving that she had still
had no effect on the Fire Department she whipped away the last
traces of her grief and turned to hunt out Cedric the servant. Cedric,
however, was in no condition to be called upon. The collapse of the
kitchen ell, taking with it the entire outer wall of his room, had re-
vealed him stark naked playing pinochle with one of the summer
residents, an incident that he was now trying to explain to the sax-
ophonist. "Cedric!" my mother shouted. "Come here at once!" But
just then a shutter fell on Cedric from the attic window and with a
moan he dropped to the ground, followed by his friend. Fortunately
my mother was spared this scene. She had just remembered De Mau-
passant and was threatening to run into the house for him when she
was assured that someone had seen someone taking him away.

In the end it was Myrtle who went in for the highboy. She was
not at all anxious to go, even cried a little when it was first suggested,
which was rather a surprise because everyone knew that her life was
not worth anything. She had lost four fingers in a meat-chopper, so
perhaps it was the pain she was afraid of, or the noise: it was hard
to tell. At any rate, as soon as she heard that the Selectmen had
chosen her for the job she began to whimper and for several minutes
stood twisting her fingers in her apron, made out of an old pair of
bloomers my mother had given her, and chewing her hair. "Oh no,"
she muttered to herself, "you don't see me going in there"—she had
the habit of talking to herself while she worked, even told herself
long stories sometimes as she cleaned out the toilets—"Not me, nossir!
They come up to me all together and they says, 'Now Myrtle,' they
says, 'you just run along in there and bring out that heirloom. Tain't
as heavy as it looks,' they says, kind of coaxing-like, 'and mind you
don't smash it on the way out.' I like that! Mind you don't smash it,
they says, on the way out! And there was the whole house rolling

=== Page 41 ===
HURRY, HURRY

37

around and a crack in the front big enough to drive a Ford through.
Why you could watch the ceiling come down in the parlor, and all
the upstairs furniture coming down too, bang! bang! bang! Mind
you don't smash it, they says, on the way out! And do you want to
know what I said?" Myrtle placed her crippled hands on her hips and
with her eyes fiercely lit up she went on, raising her voice to a scream
in order to hear herself above the splintering and crashing of the
house. "I says to them, 'No!' I stood right up to them and I says, 'I
ain't going into that house, not if you give me a million dollars I ain't!
And as for what I think of you . . . Yes," her lower lip began to
twitch and her voice dropped suddenly, "as for what I think of
you. . . ." But she was now surrounded by all the important people
in town, including my mother, the minister, and the school-teacher-
a tiny knifish man with a cone-shaped head and glasses-and realizing
that she had been overheard she was taken by a fit of trembling and
was unable to go on. "I just got the habit of talking to myself," she
apologized, letting out a choked laugh, and then she began to cry
again, with her head hanging and her red stubs pressed into the hair
over her eyes.

"I have no sympathy with any of them," said the school-teacher.
"They ought to be horse-whipped, they don't want to work." He
strode through the crowd, receiving with a wrinkling of his beagle's
nose their murmurs of agreement, tore off a stout black cherry switch
and with little nasal shouts, like a cheer-leader, began to slash at
Myrtle's ankles. "Oh mercy," said Cedric. He giggled a little, then
with a sob turned back to hide his face. "Oh darling," he moaned,
waving his fingers in the direction of Myrtle who was now hobbling
toward the doorway, "It has such dreadful feet!"

My mother was not wholly in sympathy with the school-teacher's
tactics. She pushed her arm under Myrtle's, and half dragging, half
comforting her, pressed a dollar bill between her thumb and what was
left of her forefinger. "I want you to take this, my dear, and get
yourself something pretty." Without raising her eyes Myrtle took the
money and poked it in her shoe.

In the doorway a new difficulty arose, the columns and the
door-frame itself having already collapsed, leaving only an irregular
space no bigger than the entrance to a small kennel for Myrtle to
pass through. However several white-flanneled husbands now sprang
into action, lifted Myrtle over the debris on the stoop, and twisted
and heaved her head first into the hall. In less than a minute there
was nothing to be seen of her but one soleless shoe with the crisp cor-
ner of a dollar bill sticking out at the side. "It seems rather a pity,"
the minister murmured, looking at my mother. "Yes," she hesitated.

=== Page 42 ===
38 PARTISAN REVIEW

"Poor dear Myrtle, she's such a pitiful little creature really and she
has so little.... But of course I can make it up to her." She smiled,
grabbed the dollar, and with a hidden ladylike gesture forced it into
the Padre's reluctant hand. "For the new altar cloths," she whispered.
"I have so little these days, but this much I can do for the com-
munity."
For almost half an hour Myrtle fought her way through the
wreckage inside the house, trying to reach the highboy in the down-
stairs guest-room. From time to time we could see her face in an up-
stairs window, perspiration dropping from her hair, or her arm
through one of the cracks that were now widening on every wall.
"Hurry!" my mother shouted, with increasing anger as one by one
her treasures-a Russian ikon, the Dresden china coffee cups, the
Renaissance desk brought so tenderly from Florence-fell and were
crushed. "Hurry up, Myrtle! Hurry up!" And every time
a part of Myrtle came into view the school-teacher's eyes brightened
and he danced back and forth cracking the black cherry whip above
his head. "She's a good worker but terribly slow," the ladies agreed,
twisting their handkerchiefs and criticizing Myrtle's progress through
the house. Some of them, the old New England stock, filled the time
more usefully: dusted the grass and bushes where the books had fallen
and arranged those that had remained intact in neat piles along the
flagstone walk.
During this time the front of the house had been bellying more
and more out toward the lawn so that it was no longer possible to
see into the guest-room. "It's gone!" my mother cried. "Ah, Padre!"
and she leaned against the minister. But a moment later Myrtle ap-
peared again, this time on all fours, crawling up the circular staircase
with the highboy on her back. "Bring it down! Down, Myrtle!" All
the downstairs exits, however, were blocked: the lower half of the
staircase too was caving in, leaving Myrtle hanging by two fingers
while with the other hand she struggled to keep the massive piece of
furniture from slipping back into the pit. Now and then over the
sounds of falling timber we could hear her groaning and crying out,
"Oh Holy Virgin, help.... Oh blessed mother of God.... "Then
the whole front of the house squeezed down slowly, and we heard
nothing more but the breaking of beams and an underground com-
motion of water as heavy objects fell through to the cellar.
The next and last time that we saw Myrtle she was trying to
reach one of the attic windows, still struggling under what must have
been a part of the highboy, though it was bashed to a skeleton. Her
face was dreadfully distorted, as if she had been pinned under some
heavy weight and in freeing herself had pulled her features half off.

=== Page 43 ===
HOOK Y HUXLEY BURNETT
HURRY, HURRY
39
Of her nose there was nothing left but a bloody splinter of bone, and
her chin, which had been rather underhung, now stuck out in sharp
diagonal, forcing her mouth into an enormous grin. Yet in spite of
this it seemed as if she were trying to smile, perhaps out of pride in
having salvaged as much as she had. She kept pointing at the ma-
hogany ruin on her back, nodding continually and working her man-
gled features in an effort at communication. "I can't bear it," Cedric
said, "they oughtn't to allow such things," and he turned yellow and
vomited in a patch of lilies. Everyone else was shouting at Myrtle-
"Don't throw it!" "Wrap it in a blanket!" "Let it down here!"-but
she had suddenly let go her load. Even from the ground one could
see the wild look that came into her eyes, a brilliant hatred aimed
down at the crowd. Yet perhaps there was some confusion in it too,
for before the wall crashed her face changed again-for a moment
she resembled a small wounded animal crying for its life-and she
fell with her torn-off wrists lifted up in prayer.

The rest of what happened was so sudden that I have no clear
recollection of it. I remember that shortly after Myrtle's death the
ladies set to gathering flowers again and made a kind of tiny monu-
ment of them on the grass, with POOR MYRTLE written in English
daisies across the top. The school-teacher scoffed at this, saying there
might have been some sense to it if she had done what she was sent
for, but the general opinion was that the ladies had been very kind
to think of such a thing. "She was very bitter," the minister said, "but
a good soul too," and he took the carnation from his buttonhole and
tossed it on the mound.

I think it was at about that time that the French poodle suddenly
clawed its way up to the window of my mother's bedroom, the only
part of the house that was still standing. Yapping and rolling his eyes
he perched on the swaying sill, his bandaged paw held up and a
large drop of yellow liquid rolling down his aristocratic nose. "Moppy!
Moppy!" my mother cried, running up under the wall. "Did you think
your mummy had forgotten you? Oh Moppy you did, you're crying!
he's crying," she repeated, almost crying herself. "He thought I was
going to leave him there all by himself. Come to me, my darling, come
to your mummy, jump!" I remember the two of them that way: the
dog afraid to jump, tossing his ruff and his long silken ears, and my
mother in a new flowered print and a picture hat, holding up her
arms, with an expression of love, almost-I thought at that moment
but I am not sure now-almost a look of fulfillment in her face, which
at times made one think of a madonna though the profile was too
sharp. And then the last of the house fell and buried them.

=== Page 44 ===
KENNETH BURKE and SIDNEY HOOK:
An Exchange
IS MR. HOOK A SOCIALIST?

Y
OU HAVE allowed me two thousand words in which to answer Hook's
review of my book Attitudes Toward History in the December issue of
PARTISAN REVIEW. My problem, in its simplicity, is this: Hook has so
framed his report of the book's contents as to attack a work that doesn't
exist and I am invited to waste my time and your readers' time by
answering this attack upon a work generated in Hook's not very in-
ventive fancy. To carry on a long, minute, point-by-point altercation
of the "I did not you did so" sort would be a bore. I know, because
I have already written a 3,200-word reply of this sort.

There is a preponderant area of my book concerned with the
psychology of art. Hook, as his published work gives ample evidence,
has never paid attention to such matters. Accordingly, in his review,
he passes over this material completely.

This material, as Hook aptly says, deals with "attitudes toward
life anytime, anywhere." But I also attempt extending or projecting
my analysis of art, to show its bearing upon the analysis of social rela-
tions in general. It is a couple of such extensions that Hook completely
misrepresents by the rudimentary expedient of refusing, in his report,
to realize for his readers the context from which they are drawn.

My general perspective is pro-socialist, anti-capitalist. I believe
that moments of crisis, or transition, provide the best entry into an
understanding of cultural processes and that a socialist perspective is
the handiest from which to approach such moments, both for diagnostic
and hortatory purposes. Attitudes Toward History attempts to motivate
this choice of perspective by giving, as far as I am able, evidence of
the perspective's scope and relevancy. Naturally, I cannot answer with
much profit an attack that doesn't even consider the book from this
standpoint.

The readiest way I can see, to convey the general tenor of my
concerns, is to quote at some length a passage that Hook quotes mis-
leadingly. I shall let him set his own rules for the contest. I shall, that
is, pass over without discussion the core of my book (an analysis of
symbolism, and of the relation of symbolism to reality, as revealed in
such art forms as tragedy, comedy, satire, propaganda, burlesque). I
shall simply take one of my "projections" from this field into the general
field of social relations:

"Gide has said somewhere that he distrusts the carrying-out of one

40

=== Page 45 ===
AN EXCHANGE
41
possibility because it necessarily restricts other possibilities. Call the
possibilities "imaginative." And call the carrying-out of one possibility
the bureaucratization of the imaginative. Some imaginative possibility
(usually at the start Utopian) is bureaucratized when it is embodied
in the realities of a social texture, in all the complexity of language
and habits, in the property relationships, the methods of government,
production, and distribution, and the development of rituals that reen-
force the same emphasis.
"It follows that, in this "imperfect world," no imaginative possibility
can ever attain complete bureaucratization. Even capitalism, as Sombart
has pointed out, has not attained its "ideal" perfection. Capitalism
would not be ideally perfect until we had a monetary equivalent for
everything, until every last bit of material exchange among friends were
done for profit, until every casual greeting were given at a price (and
that price as high as the traffic would bear).
"In bureaucratizing a possibility, we necessarily come upon the
necessity of compromise, since the human being is not a complete fit
for any historic texture. A given order must, in stressing certain em-
phases, neglect others. A bureaucratic order approaches the stage of
alienation in proportion as its "unintended by-products" become a
stronger factor than the original purpose. The heightening percentage
of alienation corresponds with an intensification of class struggle be-
cause, at the point where the accumulation of unintended by-products
is becoming impressive and oppressive, there will be a class of people
who have a very real "stake in" the retention of the ailing bureau-
cratization. From this you get a further alienation-as the dispossessed
are robbed even of their spiritual possession, their "right" to be obedient
to the reigning symbols of authority.
"Obedience to the reigning symbols of authority is in itself natural
and wholesome. The need to reject them is painful and bewildering.
The dispossessed struggle hard and long to remain loyal-but by the
nature of the case, the bureaucratic order tends simply to "move in on"
such patience and obedience. Eventually, sectarian divergence becomes
organized (as thinkers manipulate the complex forensic structure, to
give it a particular emphasis in one direction). But those in possession
of the authoritative symbols tend to drive the opposition into a corner,
by owning the priests (publicists, educators) who will rebuke the op-
position for its disobedience to the reigning symbols. The opposition
abandons some of the symbolic ingredients and makes itself "ready to
take over" other symbolic ingredients.
"Insofar as it can unite in a new collectivity, progressively affirming
its own title to the orthodoxy, tendencies toward the negativistic, satan-
istic, sectarian, disintegrative, and "splintering" fall away. But insofar
as its own imaginative possibility requires embodiment in bureaucratic
fixities, its necessary divergences from Utopia become apparent.
"Many persons who scorn the very name of Utopia become wounded
as the "imperfect world" of bureaucratic compromise is revealed. They

=== Page 46 ===
42 PARTISAN REVIEW

are simply Utopians-scorning-the-name-of-Utopians. At other times, the
doctrines of Zweck im Recht is required to understand their policies.
By this doctrine, we are advised to "discount" the face value of their
statement by noting what "interests" it protects. The principle of the
discount advises us to note that many advocates of socialism, for in-
stance, can gain asylum for their views by interlardng their appeal
with attacks upon Russia. Thereby they can advocate an unpopular
philosophy by "sharing" with their audience the usual capitalist aver-
sions. They need not be hampered by the realistic problems involved
in the "bureaucratization of the imaginative." In explicitly condemning
Utopianism, they can conceal from both their auditors and themselves
the underlying Utopian pattern of their thought.
"We concede the close relationship between this concept and
Spengler's culture-civilization dichotomy. But we should hold that every
individual man, at any period in history, must develop his own mature
"civilization" out of his own childhood "culture." Again, Spengler's
use of the formula vows him to an overly mystical notion of historic
absolutes, with one reigning at one time and the other reigning at an-
other, a schematization that makes for a false philosophy of purpose.
Yet it is undeniable that the accumulated by-products leading to "alien-
ation" are greater in some periods than others. And our concept might
offer a method of conversion whereby Spengler's formula could be
sufficiently "discounted" to make it useful for a Marxist critique of
social relationships.
"In the modern laboratory, the procedure of invention itself (the
very essence of the imaginative) has been bureaucratized. Since the
time of the Renaissance, the West has been accumulating and perfecting
a methodology of invention, so that improvements can now be coached
by routine. Science, knowledge, is the bureaucratization of wisdom."
The citation is long. But I assure you that, after many tentatives,
it is the quickest way I know of correcting the falsities of emphasis in
Hook's simplified report of the tenor and contents of my book. Hook
makes my whole book appear like a mere off-shoot of the Stalin-Trotsky
controversy, an issue to which he devotes more space in his 5 pages
than I do in my 480 pages. I freely state, in this sentence, my sympathy
with the momentous tasks confronting the U. S. S. R., and my ad-
miration for the magnitude of its attainments. But by far my major
interest is with the analysis of cultural processes as revealed by any and
all kinds of historical and personal situations. And I believe that this
quotation, despite the fact that it contains many terms requiring dev-
elopment elsewhere in my book, is sufficiently clear in itself to make
my perspective apparent. In passing quickly by the core of my book,
its concern with the psychology of art, Hook says that it deals with
"attitudes toward life-anytime, anywhere." But when discussing, by
garbled and misleading quotation, a single projection I make from this
material, he seeks to give the impression that it is the most restricted

=== Page 47 ===
AN EXCHANGE
43
kind of party politics. So you have your choice between these two
mutually exclusive pictures which Hook offers in the same review (a
club offer if there ever was one). I heard him the first time.

Hook does bring up one technical point, however, that I consider
reputable. So far I can see, it is mainly directed against another book
of mine, Permanence and Change, a general study of perspective, inter-
pretation, communication. In the course of this study, I illustrate my
notion of perspective by giving many examples of different and conflict-
ing perspectives that overlap one another on the bias. And while show-
ing a representative lot, and explaining how they operate, I also select
the one I consider best for the charting of social relationships. It is a
perspective stressing communication, coöperation, participation-a pro-
communist, anti-capitalist perspective. I seek to motivate the choice by
showing the relevancy of this perspective to our current experience and
the scope of its inclusiveness. Hook would interpret the display of the
general list to be "subjective"; and my selection from the list, with the
displaying of its relevance as a justification for the choice, he would call
a shift to "absolutism." After reading Hook's review, I can see why he
should consider it a tremendous give-away on my part to put my cards
face-up on the table by revealing that a perspective is a choice. But I
take such presentation of the whole story to be a normal practice of
discourse (normal, that is, once we get outside Hook's orbit of reporting).
But if, after revealing representative items from which a choice may be
made, we then make our choice, and proceed to show the evidence of
its scope and relevancy, if that is a shift from "subjectivism" to "abso-
lutism," will Hook please tell me what more reasonable mode of dis-
course is possible? I grant that many of our present concerns (due to the
"revolutionary psychosis" of a highly transitional era) will probably
seem irrelevant to some subsequent era of history characterized by great
stability. But is it "absolutist" for one to show their relevance for us and
our necessities (which are as real as anything can be)-and is it "sub-
jectivist" to admit that the "us" and the "necessities" of some other era
may require a different perspective?

In closing: is it not noteworthy that never once, not even to answer
in the negative, does Hook ask whether there is one single ingredient in
my book that might be used (either as it is, or after such-and-such im-
provement) for anti-capitalist diagnosis and exhortation? He never even
thinks of approaching the book from that angle. He might have damned
it just as heartily as he does; that's not the point. The point is that he
spontaneously ignores such concerns. If a writer, supposedly of the Left,
writing in an American magazine that would consider itself of the Left,
does not review books from the standpoint of their function as adjuncts
in the changing of capitalist values (their function in promoting shifts
in allegiance to the current symbols of authority, and in showing the
qualities of experience revealed by such a perspective) it is a misnomer
for him to designate himself a partisan of the Left at all. Let him con-
demn as much work as he cares to; no writer can call for quarter on the

=== Page 48 ===
44

PARTISAN REVIEW

grounds that his heart is in the right place (on the Left side of his body);
but if the attack itself is not Leftist in perspective, if it loses all interest
in the analysis of capitalist dilemmas and the ways of surmounting them,
the attacker thereby incidentally adopts a position that "places" him
decidedly elsewhere.
KENNETH BURKE

IS MR. BURKE SERIOUS?

IN
N MY review of his book, I paid Burke the respect of taking his work
seriously. His rejoinder makes me wonder whether he desires me to do so.
I cannot understand him except on the assumption that despite his
statement to the contrary he does believe allowance should be made for
the fact that his heart is politically in the right place. Now were I evalu-
ating Burke's intentions, as distinct from the validity of his assertions,
I certainly would have given him credit for them. Provided, of course,
I believed his heart was politically in the right place. In my review, at
any rate, I did indicate its location accurately enough. But it so happens
that I do not believe it is in the right place. Therefore in a serious attempt
to do him justice, I addressed myself to what might more legitimately be
regarded as the off-spring of his mind, i.e., his ideas.

Burke's protest includes other things besides the demand that his
intentions and allegiance be evaluated. He also claims (1) that I have
completely misrepresented the nature of his book (2) that my criticism
of his relativism is without merit, and (3) that my own position is suspect
because I do not approach his position from the proper angle. I wish to
consider these claims before returning to his intentions and allegiance.

(1) Primarily the function of a critic is to consider, not whether
the author says what he means, but the meaning of what has been said.
Burke may be the best judge of what he wanted to say. But on the mean-
ing of what he has said he is not necessarily more competent than
other intelligent readers. Every reader can test the accuracy of my de-
scription of Burke's position by reading the book and my review of it.
I invite the comparison.

Burke's own evidence that I have misread his book does not establish
his claim. I did not "pass over" the material concerned with the psy-
chology of art because I "have never paid attention to such matters."
Does Burke really believe that my published work is "ample evidence"
of my inattention to such matters? What a wordy world this would be
if the only way we could show we were interested in anything was to
rush into print about it! Indeed, I wish to assure him that I pay a great
deal of attention to such matters. And precisely because I do, I found
his psychology of art not worth more than the casual reference I made

=== Page 49 ===
AN EXCHANGE
45

to it. Were I reviewing Burke's Counter-Statement I should have had a
great deal to say about his psychology of art, some of it quite apprecia-
tive. But in his present book, the detailed discussion of the poetic meta-
phors, in which the individual frames of reference are expressed, runs
out into the thinnest vagaries. More important, these aesthetic discussions
are matters of detail. They do not concern, as Burke implies they do,
the central theme of his work.

Nor is it apparent what the citation of his prize passage about the
"bureaucratization of the imaginative" proves. In my review I gave a brief
analysis designed to show that his position here reduces either to a truism
or an absurdity.* Then I applied to Burke his own principle that a key
metaphor is a better clue to understanding an author than his arguments,
and explored the consequences. Although I do not share Burke's prin-
ciple, the absence of developed argument in his work, justified this ap-
proach. I gave some indication of how it was used on several concrete
occasions, and then proceeded, on Burke's own recommendation, "to
discount" the face value of the phrase, and to note the "interests" it
protected. The few concrete situations in which practical social conclu-
sions are implied by this metaphor involve Russia. They are directed, not
only in the cited passage but in others, against socialist critics. If every
venture of the human spirit can be regarded as a bureaucratized com-
promise-even science and the imagination!—any specific bureaucratic
outrage is part of the natural order of things. Criticism can be dismissed
as Utopianism. This is a cunning but none the less fallacious linguistic
device to attach the emotional associations of authoritative symbols-
science, art, invention to a specific form of political despotism. Em-
ployed by commercial advertisers, it is a technique which Burke has
castigated elsewhere. Instead of using the hedonic overtones of a sensuous
female in a bathtub to sell a bar of soap, Burke uses the poetical over-
tones of recondite metaphors, whenever his discussion touches concrete
issues, to sell the ideas and practices of totalitarian communism under
Stalin.

(2) Burke has so completely missed the point of my criticism of his
shifts from subjectivism to absolutism that I must repeat it briefly here.
An element of arbitrary choice inheres in any perspective or point of
view. I can look here or there; accept this set of social ideals or that.
But what can be seen after I decide to look here or there, what follows
as a result of actions for or against certain ideals, does not depend upon
my choice. I can change my point of view but not the consequences of
a point of view. The gravamen of my criticism of Burke is that he gets
his relativism and absolutism in the wrong place. When his particular

* In passing I wish to point out that to speak of science as the bureaucratization
of wisdom is not only a misleading but a dangerous metaphor. The methods of
science are the only reliable methods by which new knowledge (and the wisdom
relevant to knowledge) are won. Because it never considers any question as closed,
bases its conclusions on verifiable evidence, recognizes no authority except that of
experiment and logic, it represents, where it is free, the end of all bureaucratic
creedal dogmatism.

=== Page 50 ===
46 PARTISAN REVIEW

social perspective is confronted by others, he forgets his own theory and
tends to regard it as "true," as something assimilable to fact. He abso-
lutizes what cannot be absolutized. But just as soon as anyone holds him
to the consequences of his point of view and uses them as evidence of
what he is committed to, Burke either denies their relevance or what is
still worse, as his airy references to the Moscow trials show, interprets
facts and evidence as he pleases. Here he relativizes what cannot be
relativized.
Burke asserts that I seek to give the impression that his point of
view is that "of the most restricted kind of party politics." He must have
read my review very hastily. I quoted him as accepting, with direct ref-
erence to Russia, a communist frame "of ideological homogeneity, to be
corrected by a methodology of latitudinarianism." Latitudinarianism, he
says, "is another word for casuistic stretching." This works out in prac-
tice as follows. Any major policy or action sanctioned by the official
interpreters of communist ideological homogeneity must be accepted. But
it need not be defended or justified in the official way. Usually the official
defense repels intelligent and sensitive people. Burke's "latitudinarianism"
in practice amounts to thinking up persuasive rhetorical apologias for
conclusions for which there is no objective evidence. Burke does not fol-
low a party line to a party conclusion. He follows his own line to a party
conclusion. Few know how he will get there, still fewer can understand
the amazing ways by which he gets there, but all know he will get there
—and that's the main thing.

(3) Burke's private bull of excommunication against me because I
did not give three socialist cheers in my review of his book, to show
where I stood, is amusing. (It's the party line on Hook all right but in
Burke's own way.) It is also a little saddening because it verifies in part
the prediction I made about the consequences of his political perspective
upon his critical powers. His argument is not only ad hominem but dis-
ingenuous. First, the truth or falsity of my criticisms does not depend
upon my socialist opinions. Second, my socialist opinions good, bad or
indifferent have been expressed in numerous other writings. Third,
Burke is acquainted with these writings as his references to them in his
own books show. Fourth, for a socialist audience, such as the PARTISAN
REVIEW attempts to reach, I regard the exposure of Burke's technique
of mystification as necessary in the interests of clarity, truth, and so-
cialism.

I now return to Burke's intentions and allegiance which, he insists,
must be considered. Very well, I shall oblige him. Nowhere, complains
Burke, have I allowed for the fact that his general perspective is pro-
socialist. A strange complaint! When Burke attacks socialist critics of
Stalinism, does he call attention to their anti-capitalism? He does not!
Or when he criticizes Trotsky, or Dewey, or Farrell? He does not! But
just as soon as his own position is probed, he makes loud outcry that he
is not being given sufficient credit for his socialist intentions. Is Burke
really serious?

=== Page 51 ===
AN EXCHANGE
47

I cannot give Burke credit for his socialist intentions—not yet. I
am prepared to give him credit, if he asks for it, for not taking pennies
from a blind man's cup or not scalping his grandmother. But I refuse
to give him credit for his "socialism"—until I know what kind of social-
ism he believes in!

Does he believe in a socialism in which judicial and extra-judicial
frame-ups are the order of the day? If not, why does he accept and
defend the most monstrous frame-ups in all history—the Moscow trials?

Does he believe in a socialism in which the dictatorship of a minority
party, subject to the dictatorship of a bureaucracy, subject in turn to
the dictatorship of its secretariat, enjoys a monopoly of all political
power? If not, why his impatience and scorn for those whom he calls
Utopians—who affirm that socialism without democracy is not socialism?

Does he believe in a socialism in which all art, science and philoso-
phy are regimented by party-dogmas, imposed by authority and imple-
mented by the threat of force? If not, why has he failed to protest the
literary pogroms of the Communist Party, of which he is a leading
fellow-traveller, against socialist intellectuals who hold that critical in-
tegrity is part of the socialist way of life?

Does he believe in the apotheosis of Stalin to a point which makes
every political cult of adoration in the past, including that of Czarism,
pale in comparison? If not, why does he write of him as he does? Why
does he add his stammering note of spite to the Communist Party abuse
of socialists who hold that Stalin's actions must be evaluated by socialist
ideals? Why, when I charge him with accepting the political perspective
of Stalinism, does he retort that he loves the U.S.S.R.? Are Stalin and
the U.S.S.R. one and the same to him? What would he think of an
American patriot who would meet a political criticism of Roosevelt with
the retort that he loved America?

There are many other questions I would like to have answered be-
fore I can give Burke credit for his socialism.

In closing I wish to repeat the conclusion of my review. There are
some social and political perspectives to-day which a critic cannot take
without doing great harm to his craftsmanship. We have a right to ex-
pect more from Burke than from people like Granville Hicks whose intel-
lectual reach, by a divine charity, extends no further than their near-
sighted piety. That is why I took Burke seriously.
SIDNEY HOOK

=== Page 52 ===
THEATER CHRONICLE

AS SHAKESPEARE has been said to have populated all corners of
history and legend with "deathless Englishmen," so Clifford Odets seems
to have resettled America and even China (The General Died at Dawn)
with citizens of the Bronx. The salient feature of Golden Boy (Belasco
Theater), which is supposed to be a play about an Italian boy named
Bonaparte who wanted to be a violinist but became a prizefighter instead,
is that it is not at all about an Italian boy but about that same talkative,
histrionic Jewish family to which Mr. Odets has introduced us before.
Golden Boy again demonstrates the lesson of Paradise Lost: that Mr.
Odets appears to be psychically glued to the material of his first play.
He cannot advance beyond Awake and Sing; he can only revive it with
different costumes, scenery, and (sometimes) accents. That the refur-
bishing of the material implies its adulteration seems not to concern
Mr. Odets, who perhaps imagines that he is exploring genuinely new
horizons; but to those who have admired Awake and Sing, each new
play seems a more shocking caricature of the first.

It is well known that actors who have been playing for a long time
in the same play will, unless disciplined by a vigilant stage manager,
"hoke" their performances more and more. A giggle becomes a laugh;
a catch in the throat, a sob; a tremor, a spasm. This is a form of auto-
intoxication which is psychologically necessary for the type of player
who must "feel" his performance. He must behave more and more
violently in order to sense that he is acting. This law of diminishing
returns from a given stimulus is, of course, observable in every field of
sensibility, and its workings are particularly striking in the case of Mr.
Odets. The narrowness of his invention, the monotony of his subject-
matter have anaestheticized him to the point where he must wade in blood
and tears in order to feel that he is writing a play; he must turn the
Belasco Theater into a Grand Guignol to believe it a play-house.

Thus the simple Bronx apartment-dwellers of Awake and Sing appear
in Golden Boy dressed up as gangsters, prizefighters, and tarts. Mr. Odets
has taken a collection of types out of any underworld film, and on them
he has grafted the half-ludicrous, half-touching cultural aspirations, the
malapropisms, the pride in material possessions, the inarticulate longing
for sunny life, that make up the Odets formula of frustration. The
Chekhovian baggage of middle-class futility with which Mr. Odets
equips these low-life stereotypes is, of course, fearfully inappropriate to
the milieu of lust, murder, crime, and perversion in which they must
travel. The voices are the dreamy, ineffectual voices of the little people
of the world; the deeds are the deeds of the headliners. This contradic-
tion between form and substance gives the play the aspect of a fancy-
dress ball; there is the same grotesquerie, the same stridency, the same
laughable yet indecent incongruity.

48

=== Page 53 ===
THEATER CHRONICLE
BOOKS 49

Golden Boy is a much more popular play than Awake and Sing.
The melodramatic nature of the characters and events would alone
guarantee its success at the box-office. But Mr. Odets has taken out
double insurance against the failure of his work by stuffing it with
familiar Jewish low-comedy jokes and ancient wheezes out of vaude-
ville. Yet, though the stale luridity of characters and plot and the stale
gag-comedy of the lines have been sufficient to keep audiences in the
alternate shivers and stitches to which the underworld films have habitu-
ated them, it is not these qualities which have commanded the deferential
attention of both critics and playgoers. Serious people have sat unflinch-
ingly through this play, because they knew or thought they knew that
Mr. Odets had Something To Say, that somewhere in this theatrical
grab-bag there lay a treasure.

Mr. Odets has a theme which in the last century would have been
stated as Money Does Not Bring Happiness. But Mr. Odets conceives of it
in more modern terms. He would summarize it, I suppose, by saying that
the struggle for financial success which the capitalist system tends to im-
pose on the individual is detrimental to personal happiness and to culture.
Stated thus abstractly, the theme does Mr. Odets credit. Concretely
visualized as a choice between playing the violin and fighting in the
prize ring, it already becomes a little obvious, a little tawdry. But,
granting Mr. Odets the virtue of this rather simple-minded antithesis,
one finds that here it has been distorted out of all truth and vulgarized
out of all nobility. In the selection of a superman for a hero lies the es-
sential hollowness of the play, for the choice between culture and money
cannot be valid for a character who possesses two such remarkable gifts.
If Mr. Odets' hero were a potentially great violinist, he could have
become rich or at least prosperous via the concert stage, and he need
never have considered prizefighting as an alternative career. If he
were not, then his abandonment of the violin was surely no tragedy.
But Mr. Odets' juggling of his theme does not stop with this original
false alternative; it eats deeper into the plot. What is the cause of
Bonaparte's downfall and death? His greed for money, his selection of
prizefighting as a life work? Not at all. A purely accidental, non-social
circumstance: the fact that the girl he loved felt pity, loyalty, and ten-
derness for another man. One assumes that, were it not for the girl, Mr.
Odets' hero would have been as successful and as long-lived as Jack
Dempsey, Mickey Walker, Gene Tunney, or any other well-known
fighter. He might have even become a restaurateur, or perhaps had
some very satisfying musical conversations with Yehudi Menuhin. Mr.
Odets' social theme, like his formula for the manufacture of characters,
is a carry-over from his first and most sincere play. It is clearly in-
operative in the world of macabre melodrama into which he has im-
ported it. That he was forced to use a fortuitous, melodramatic device to
dissolve the elements of his play and bring it to its falsely tragic curtain
is itself an exposé of the play's "serious" pretensions.

MARY MCCARTHY

=== Page 54 ===
BOOKS

THE BROWN BOOK OF HEINRICH HEINE

HEINRICH HEINE: PARADOX AND POET. By Louis Untermeyer.
Two volumes. Harcourt, Brace. $6.00.

Strictly speaking, there are two books and they are blue. Neatly
packaged, gaudily displayed, highly seasoned, expensively put up, ready to
be hastily purchased and casually consumed, they constitute a choice
item for the delicatessen trade. One volume, a revision and enlargement
of the translation published twenty years ago, contains almost half of
Heine's verse. The other is a life, the product-according to the jacket-
of a lifetime of study. The biographer and translator is described as "the
American Heine." In a preface Louis Untermeyer demurely meets this
description half-way. In an appendix he intrepidly includes an original
poem, an imitation of Browning which presents the prostrate Unter-
meyer-Heine dying in the bosom of the synagogue.
Pareto called Reinach's Orpheus a history of religions in the light
of the Dreyfus case. Here, then, is a biography of Heine in the light of
the Hitler terror. The timeliness of this theme, the motives of the author,
the implications of his Pan-Hebraism-these red herrings are easily re-
sisted. But since Untermeyer is inclined to make Heine the vehicle for
his own particular Judenschmerz, and since his interpretation is likely to
be much publicized, there is some excuse for calling attention to the
limitations of his equipment and the distortions of his point of view.
A critic who can detect "spiritual nostalgia" in Heine's picture of Moses
Lump eating gefüllte fish (page 177) is bound to be led astray by so
elusive and embattled a writer. And it is characteristic of Untermeyer,
even in this instance, that he should tamper with the bill of fare.
A further glance at his documentation will not inspire confidence.
He cites, on page 157, Heine's celebrated remarks about Liberty: the
Englishman loves her as his lawful wife, the Frenchman as his chosen
bride (Untermeyer has "mistress"), and the German as his old grand-
mother. Yet the irritable Englishman, translates Untermeyer, "in a fit
of temper (seines Weibes überdrüssig?), may put a rope around his wife's
neck."--Und bringt sie zum Verhauf nach Smithfield, adds Heine. She
is not to be hanged, she is only to be auctioned off. In the course of a
lifetime of study one may forget that Smithfield is a cattle market, but
one ought to pick up a reading knowledge of German. One ought to
pick up, indeed, a certain familiarity with Heine's writings. It would be
impossible to assert that Heine never set down his impressions of Paganini
(192) if one were familiar with the Florentinische Nächte.

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51
The works are often consulted, but only to squeeze out the last drop
of personal revelation. Thus Untermeyer finds Heine's mistress in his
Shakespearean criticism (263) and his first love in Die Lorelei (117)—
even though this ballad is scarcely more than a paraphrase of a poem by
Graf Loeben. Attempts to reach a wider orientation prove embarrassing.
It is a nice question whether the statement that Wordsworth and Cole-
ridge were at their height in 1827 (156) proceeds from lack of historical
background or of critical insight. The very names of Shakespeare's plays,
and of the kings of England as well, suffer a sea-change (264). There
are footnotes on Jewish cooking (135f.), but no explanation of Saint-
Simonism. There are pages on venereal disease, and a single paragraph
on those brilliant polemical achievements, the Romantische Schule and
Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (225). There are lavish intro-
ductions to Jewish student friends, but great teachers like Wolf and
Bopp, who helped to shape the modern mind, are dismissed with wise-
cracks (70). Heine—to labor the point no longer—has fallen into the
hands of a philistine.

And he is shorn of his distinction. The shabby story is there—the
debts and diseases, the malice and vanity, the shrill audacity and nervous
compliance. Virtually a blackmailer, conceivably an agent provocateur,
a verruchter Abenteuer Gertz called him, and he was a connoisseur of
such matters. Yet Heine remains an exciting figure because his adventures
took place in the realm of ideas, a realm which Untermeyer's ignorance
of the landmarks prevents him from entering. Hence he exhibits Heine's
wounds, without giving us any notion of the battles in which they were
gained. He is at home with Heine's weaknesses. In terms of kosher
domesticity and boulevard lubricity he can explain everything except
what is important, what differentiates Heine from any cloak-and-suit
dealer. The paradox is that Heine, as an intellectual adventurer and
literary technician, is constantly contradicting these initial factors of
environment and temperament. This volume can account for the sordid
compromises of his life, but not for the flashing contradictions of his art.

Nor can the other volume, since Untermeyer's versions of Heine's
poems betray the same trivializing Tendenz. Take, for example, the lines
on Germany, Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland. By the expedient of
twisting a neuter subject to the second person, Untermeyer insinuates a
femme fatale into the second stanza, and touching reminiscence becomes
erotic fantasy. Uniformly the fatherland is soft-pedalled and the flesh-
pots are played up. Hyperion's sensuality becomes a satyr's leer. One
celebration of feminine charms, beginning Welch ein zierlich Ebenmass,
terminates with Aphrodite rising from the sea,

Anmutblühend, schönheitstrahlend,
Und, versteht sich, wohlgewachsen.

The last word is translated "well-developed," having evidently been con-
fused with wohlgewachsen. Untermeyer can be forgiven for his Freudian
lapse, but not for missing the point. For sheer palpable grossness, how-

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52
BOOKS
ever, the first stanza of the Schöpfungslieder is to be recommended:
Hierauf schuf er auch die Ochsen,
Aus dem Schweisse seiner Stirne.
Here, where the Old Testament would be really relevant, Untermeyer
has a surprise for us:
Thereupon he fashioned cattle
From his excess perspiration.
As a suggested exercise, compare the translation of Geh nicht durch die
böse Strasse with the original; see how Untermeyer-unaware that Heine
is addressing himself-starts off on the wrong tack, is forced to transpose
sexes throughout, and achieves nonsense.
It is hardest to translate the poet who, like Heine, uses the simplest
language. To satisfy the exigencies of rhyme and meter, and of meaning
wherever possible, sooner or later requires recourse to the far-fetched
and the artificial. Translation has no power over Heine's crucial quality,
his natural diction, which is notably more idiomatic within the attenuated
compass of the songs than in the free verse of Die Nordsee. Untermeyer's
English versions have one of the virtues of Lieder: they can be sung.
Somehow or other he has coaxed, cajoled, cabined, cribbed, confined,
and crammed them into the original measures. Often he has thrown
everything else overboard, in the attempt to capture some slight nuance.
It is a Pyrrhic victory to have retained the rhymes of Die Erde war so
lange geizig, when it has cost him the whole effect of the poem, the
contrast between Madame and Leibchen, gallicized, gentility of style
and downright emotion of content.
It would have been fairer to Heine and himself if, instead of concen-
trating on youthfully romantic lyrics, he had rendered some of the more
loosely-knit topical pieces-Deutschland, Atta Troll, or more of the mock
heroics and grim realities of Romanzero. The encyclopaedic doggerel of
Jehuda ben Halevy is all there, except for a final fragment that bore
traces of Heine's antisemitism. But, since Heine the critic and satirist
is neglected by Untermeyer's canon, we have no grounds for considering
his development and maturity, or for reconsidering his place in litera-
ture. So we are left with the Jewish Nightingale of Düsseldorf, that
agonizing, attitudinizing, impossible young man who had such sleight-
of-hand facility in appropriating a vocabulary of symbols and a repertory
of gestures for his own selfish purposes. Easy and melodious we find him,
but full of conceits and echoes. For freshness and intensity he cannot
stand up beside Goethe at his straightforward best-Freudvoll und leid-
voll or Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass. It is significant that Heine's
greatest popularity has been outside Germany, just as his disciple, A. E.
Housman, appeals chiefly to those who have no particular interest in
poetry.
Seeking comparisons, we get a sharper impression by looking ahead
to Baudelaire than by harking back to the inevitable Burns. In both
Heine and Baudelaire we encounter a poetry of streets and attics, an

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53

essential modernity, a sophisticated technique of cutting through con-
ventions. The past is always with them, but only to throw into relief
their sense of the present; coal barges now ply the Thames where once
Elizabeth and Leicester rode in state. Heine is fond of graves and visions,
of spooks and poltergeists, but in no Keats-like dedication to the spirit
of romance. He is always spoiling the Grimm fairy-tale and showing up
the Wagnerian stage-machinery. Consider his most obvious success, Die
Grenadiere, where he creates a legend out of the stuff of contemporary
politics by the striking adaptation of folklore motifs and tricks of bal-
ladry. Remember the portentous rhythms that make his song of the
Silesian weavers a kind of witches' incantation for textile-workers. By
Heine the doubts and decisions of the nineteenth century are orchestrated
to the horns of Elfland.
Heine, in other words, is a counter-romanticist. His relation to the
romantic school is like that of Feuerbach to the Hegelian philosophy.
The continuity is complete, but the direction has been reversed. Marx
and Engels saw this, and for Heine's wayward career as a soldier in the
Befreiungskrieg they had little but indulgence and admiration. Byron,
Pushkin, and Stendhal are also paradoxes, men who were so psycholog-
ically enfranchised that their work is a contradiction of their time. Like
Heine, they professed the culture of the enlightenment, the cult of Na-
poleon, and the pretensions of a dandy. In contradistinction to the
romanticists, they preferred cosmopolite liberalism to nationalistic reac-
tion, rationalistic irony to mystical sentiment. Byron was a club-footed
peer as Heine was a paralyzed Jew, and what is extraordinary is what
they shared. Wit and radicalism are complexities that cannot be exor-
cized by the application of a Jewish label, any more than literary achieve-
ment can be set forth in other terms than its own. Heinrich Heine:
Paradox and Poet is the cruellest of Louis Untermeyer's well-known
parodies. It is a Heinesque irony that, for all his good intentions, he
should give us a caricature which Julius Streicher could hardly fail to
approve-the grotesquely crooked nose, the bestially slobbering lips, and
an unmistakable suggestion of garlic.
HARRY LEVIN

POPULIST REALISM

AN ARTIST IN AMERICA. By Thomas Benton. McBride. $3.75.

Benton's autobiography is a manifesto addressed to abstractionists,
radicals and true Americans. He tells how he grew up in a philistine
Missouri community at the end of the last century, became an artist
from sheer bravado, fled to Chicago and then to Paris and New York,
and painted abstractions until the war when he turned to objects and

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54 PARTISAN REVIEW

conceived the historical murals for which he is famous. Through this
conversion he regained a sense of solidarity with the world about him
which he painfully lacked when he was struggling as an abstract artist.
But New York in the '30s, with its radical intellectuals and sectarian
criticism was too much for him; he felt isolated in the big un-American
city. Knowing America as he did, the communist theories seemed inef-
fectual and foreign and threatened his liberty as an artist. In the last
chapter he packs up and returns to the Middle West where he hopes to
be free of such pressure. He had travelled in the South during the years
after the War and come to like the plain people, the farmers, boatmen,
Negroes and cowboys; he found in them the subjects for his new realistic
art. The greater part of the book consists of anecdotes of these travels,
stories of odd encounters and conversations, and some general reflections
on the people and the country.

Others have written of the South with more pungency and insight
and with less self-consciousness. But the book has a special interest as the
experience of a painter converted from a formalizing to a realistic art
and as an account of the impact of the economic crisis on an artist with a
stabilized manner. But of his own experience as a painter, Benton says
very little; and despite his frankness and his admission of doubts, the
story of his pivotal decisions and their effects is too much on the surface,
too rationalized, to be altogether convincing. The reader is disposed to
penetrate it with his own suspicions. Benton brusquely disavows his ab-
stractionist past and presents his later experience in facile antitheses to
illustrate his theoretical oppositions of the country to the city, the native
to the foreign and realism to abstraction. Towards the large movement
of modern art he adopts a purely philistine attitude, judging it not by its
best works or in the light of problems posed by the time, but by his own
uneasiness with it and by the personalities of secondary rival painters.
He ignores its distinctive character as an art and describes it as a product
of neurotic minds or simply as a theory, an exhibition of principles
formulated in talk. His own obvious indebtedness to it he veils by refer-
ring naively to the time when he finally rid himself of all its traces. “We
were essentially Bohemians adrift from the currents of our land.”

In turning from geometrical forms to objects, Benton imagines that
he has entered fully into the life of his time. The mere representation
of railroad trains and farmers gives him the illusion of a mystical rap-
port with a superior American reality. Just as he once assumed that
geometrical forms brought the artist in touch with the inner structure
of the world or the essence of art, so he now seems to believe that by
depicting native objects he is grasping the essence of American life.
But this essence is only an aspect or a segment, and its claim to perman-
ence or inherence or primacy is refuted by its own history. We have
only to read Benton's story of his conversion, short as it is, to see the
limitations of his view.

When America entered the War, he and Craven "were well aware
of the fact that the country was out to defend the affairs of citizens with

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whom we had little or nothing in common. We could see no point in
taking risks for dollars which we could never share.” Through a friend
of the family—the Bentons had been politically important in Missouri—
he managed to be placed as a draftsman in the Norfolk naval base,
making pictures for the architects. “My interests became, in a flash, of
an objective nature. The mechanical contrivances of building, the new
airplanes, the blimps, the dredges, the ships of the base, because they
were so interesting in themselves, tore me away from all my grooved
habits, from my play with colored cubes and classic attenuations, from
aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns. I left for good the art-for-
art’s sake world in which I had hitherto lived.” He got along well with
the southern boys at the naval base, feeling more secure with them than
with “the cultivated people of the art worlds”; they were like his child-
hood friends in Missouri. “They were objective. They were interested
in things, rather than in selves.” After the War, returning to the city,
he “proclaimed heresies around New York. I set out painting American
histories in defiance of all the conventions of our art world. I talked
too much, and trod on all sorts of sensibilities and made enemies. But I
didn’t care.” Apparently, in substituting blimps for cubes he was still an
abstracting eye, remote from the “main currents of our land.” He still
belongs to this art world that he affects to despise; and his work remains
infected with a clumsy, stiff formalism inherited from his abstractionist
days. His objectivity as a painter, limited to buildings and machines and
the picturesqueness of native “types,” exacted no deeper insight into
American life. And although his conversion was a result of the war on
which he held such decided and penetrating views, he disavows any
need to reconcile his new sympathy for the
people with his indifference to their betrayal in the War.

His idea of a realistic art is expressed as an opposition to two ex-
tremes. In criticizing abstract art, he isolates objects as the true field of
painting; in criticizing a realism guided by radical values and a desire
for change, he poses the stable, unpolitical everyday world and the cor-
responding historical past as the proper subjects for art. If we must not
escape from this world, neither should we try to change it. He thus
implies a “just middle,” like the academic compromise in the last cen-
tury. Benton’s vehemence against both sides, his constant assertion of
individual freedom and his petty unconventionalism conceal his essential
conformity. The common energy of his figures, each moving in its own
way, a vast perspective field, resembles the optimistic idea of an ex-
panding American world in which everyone is active and free to follow
his own ends in a limitless space. His reduction of the tense historical
reality of our time to fragmentary candid shots, interchangeable in-
cidents, figures and machines in a formally supervised panorama of un-
focused activity has also its political parallel. It corresponds to the
liberal conservatism (resting especially on the support of the lower
middle class) which addresses the people as a unity without classes,
which admits only an accidentally privileged, immoral minority of

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56 PARTISAN REVIEW

wealth and idealizes an earlier stage of popular rule as a norm of
democracy constantly threatened and regained.

Although Benton talks as if he represents the people as a whole,
this fiction disappears when we regard his comments on oppressed groups
or his particular choice of material and even his style of painting. In
describing the South he is forced in 1937 to observe the oppression of
the Negroes and the poor white farmers; in his earlier realistic painting
their misery is for him a local and picturesque affair. If it is now a
condition to be improved through good will, the chief obstacle is the
peculiar psychology of the southern masters. He may at one point praise
the liberals who try to improve these conditions; but against those who
wish to organize the Negroes politically, he argues that the Negroes are
too uneducated and that this will only antagonize the whites and bring
on fascism. The conciliation which underlies this view appears in other
details. In the face of insecurity and discontent he hopes to recreate a
respect for old ways, for local history and peculiarities, to win people
back to native traditions. The division into regions becomes more im-
portant than the division into classes. The more crucial history, including
our own time, is obscured or fractioned into bits of local genre. If he
represents a political meeting in dramatic linear contrasts, it is without
reference to the clash of interests, but has the sense of a local domestic
custom; the kids squabble and a mother changes the baby's diaper. His
theory of art, like the liberal aesthetics of the colleges, supports the
same attitude, though it hardly does justice to the complexity of his own
art. The real purpose of painting is to get people to see the qualities of
things, apart from their use. This is a domestic impressionist view which,
in opening our eyes to our surroundings (a value we must not under-
estimate), detaches art from fantasy and drama and from the more
massive and disturbing reality of passions and conflicts. It admits change
only at the expense of history, by infusing all things equally with the
same phenomenal motion.

If Benton's Middle West was once intolerable to him as an artist
because its hard practicality made a disinterested love of nature and art
impossible, he now regards it as the region most favorable to art because
it seems to offer him an escape from the demands of the crisis. How-
ever much he may attribute radicalism in art to the influence of un-
American intellectuals, he himself cannot evade the conditions which
have given a new value to these foreign ideas. But how pitiful and inept
are his alternative conclusions! and how they illuminate the character
of his art! This man who speaks of having read Marx and Dewey
builds a new American culture on the "failure of capitalism" and on the
"great change which is already taking place. "The age of raging greed
is past. . . . Approaching death leads to reflection and reflection leads to
appreciation of the drama of life, of the values of simple existence which
arise from ends and purposes." And this in turn promotes a new
interest in art in the Middle West, which bears the promise of a great
American art, "for it is in the drama of things that are that art must

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57
take its first original steps." The future lies in the small towns and the
country. "The great cities are dead. They offer nothing but coffins for
living and thinking."
The first steps are the murals of Benton of which the originality lies,
I think, in the coincidence of homely popular genre and artificial,
energetic, monumental effects. He aspires to create an official art, local
in content, national in scale. It is monumental about small things, small
about crucial momentous changes, full of activity, but with little move-
ment of ideas and sentiments. His murals are enlargements of intimate,
trivial and amusing scenes, well adapted to the casual eye of the tourist
or hearty philistine spectator. The small occasions of life are not
deepened as in older genre painting, but simply magnified. In his most
recent murals, reproduced in part on the jacket of the book, the fore-
ground is filled with ingratiating domestic details the dogs, the mother
wiping her baby's bottom, the munching, overalled boy beside the mother
rolling the dough, and the naked muscle-bound backs of the men, one
sawing wood away from the spectator, the other washing his neck to-
ward the spectator. These are arranged in a banal symmetrical scheme,
unrelated to any larger meaning of the figures, and are cast in a visual
melodrama of diagonal perspectives, strained, insistent, metropolitan,
with the formal strategy of a piece of advertising. The visceral involve-
ment of groups is a formalized linking of essentially disconnected ob-
jects. Since the composition of Benton has been compared with Rubens',
it must be observed that in Benton the analogy and contrast of adjacent
lines is relatively inexpressive, at any rate has little to do with the human
connections of the represented figures. It relates to Rubens' as modern
blank verse to Shakespeare's. The exaggerated awkward energy is the
male counterpart of the effeminacy that he cannot tolerate in homo-
sexuals and that he cheaply denounces in this book as a menace to the
coming American culture. It is a mannered art, for Benton imposes his
tics and ambitions on everything. His lack of delicacy, of refinement and
of pathos make us regret that he is not more feminine. The coarse,
sweetish coloring reminds one of commercial painting; its absence from
his black-and-whites make these at once more agreeable and releases their
touch of honest poetry.
Benton has been criticized as fascist, but such a judgment is pre-
mature. To accept his ideas and art on their face value, to welcome them
as an expression of "democratic individualism," would be no less absurd.
Benton repudiates European fascism, but fascism draws on many streams
including the traditional democratic. The appeal to the national senti-
ment should set us on guard, whatever its source. And when it comes as
does Benton's with his conceited anti-intellectualism (he has also his own
pretentious intellectuality), his hatred of the foreign, his emphasis on
the strong and the masculine, his uncritical and unhistorical elevation
of the folk, his antagonism to the cities, his ignorant and violent remarks
on radicalism, we have good reason to doubt his professed liberalism
and to expose his inconsistencies.
MEYER SCHAPIRO

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PARTISAN REVIEW

ART IN THE SECOND EMPIRE

THE JOURNAL OF EUGENE DELACROIX. Translated from the
French by Walter Pach. Covici-Friede. $7.50.

The Journal of Delacroix offers perhaps the most complete glimpse
into the 19th century's aesthetic workings that has come down to us. For
this reason it may suggest a certain tedium and banality, particularly to
those attuned to the contemporary outlook. On nearly every page will
appear one of those incredible aesthetic judgments and attitudes toward
society that we are still trying to forget. Page 215 offers an example:
"In the evening went to see Mme. Jaubert. Saw portraits and Persian
drawings which caused me to repeat what Voltaire says somewhere,
more or less like this: there are vast countries where taste has never
penetrated; they are those countries of the Orient in which there is no
society, where women are degraded, etc. All the arts are stationary there.
In these drawings there is neither perspective nor any feeling for what
is really painting, that is, a certain illusion of projection. The figures are
motionless, the poses awkward, etc."

Yet the picture is so complete that the various sections of the book,
which often seem as irrelevant as a piece isolated from a puzzle, become
full of meaning in their context. For Delacroix was a man of the world
to an extent that makes our artists seem provincial. He mingled freely
with the bourgeois society of the Second Empire. Many of the important
figures were his intimate friends. He attended the opera and the con-
certs, he read the books of the period, and he commented on everything
he saw and heard. Above all, despite fame and flattery, he retained an
astonishing humility. He devoted pages to the exaltation of Raphael,
Rubens, Correggio, as magicians he never could hope to approach. With
his own work he is sometimes "pleased," at other times his opinion is
very modest. "Tuesday, Dec. 30, 1823.... Meanwhile I have sold my
wretched Ivanhoe to M. Coutan, the collector of Scheffer's work. Poor
man! and he says he will buy others from me." And in criticism he takes
infinite pains to record the dicta of his friends, usually putting them
forward as the final comment.

Typical of the Romantic era is Delacroix's slowness to mature. The
Journal falls roughly into two halves; the first section includes the years
1822-53, the second (longer and more complete) from 1853-63. The
first comprises largely unfelt generalizations tedious panagyrics on the
greatness of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rubens-alternating with attempts
to pursue some pulchritudinous waitress who had served him at a
friend's dinner. His celebrated trip to Morocco in 1832 makes one of
the dullest portions of the book; most of it are jottings for future illus-
trations. It has long been the fashion for critics to look upon this ex-
cursion as a turning-point in Delacroix's career; but unhappily he

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59
grasped only the picturesque aspects of the Moslems, with no trace of
feeling for their character or the organic qualities of their art.

Then, about 1853, at the age of 55, the painter matures and becomes
conscious. He outgrows his uncritical outbursts and starts to analyze the
basis of aesthetics. From now on it is the limitations of the period of
which we are conscious, and these he occasionally transcends. On music,
for instance, his comments are pleasingly unexpected; with true Second
Empire inconsistency he extolls Mozart and Cimarosa, and thunders
against Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and Verdi, who are the true counterparts
of his paintings. It is probably in music that our tastes today still have
most in common with those of the 19th century. In painting, certainly,
our horizon has broadened considerably. Delacroix's background was
limited to the art of later Greece and the Renaissance; the vast stores
of Egypt, the New World, and the Far East, lay as yet untouched.
Equally unappreciated was the Marxian critique and the effects of the
historical environment on the artist; Delacroix's single note for July 24,
1854, seems a trifle naive today: "What Rembrandt and Michael Angelo
would have been in our period!"

The remarks on the technique of oil-painting will be of inestimable
value for an understanding of Renaissance art. One can learn from
their beginnings the chiaroscuro principles of turning form through the
broad high-light, the shadow, and the half-tone rub-in. Delacroix also
analyzes figure-composition as far as it can be realized through the
juxtaposition of light and shade. Such comments usually come to him in
museums; he is a student until the end, and (like most painters) his own
researches are irksome for him to write down. Occasionally, however,
he emerges as the true precursor of Impressionism: "a scalawag had
climbed up on the statues; I saw him in full sunlight: dull orange in
the light, very lively violet tones for the passage from the shadow, and
golden reflections in the shadows turned toward the ground. The orange
and violet dominated alternately or mingled. The golden tone had a
tendency toward green. Flesh gets its real color only in the open air, and
especially in sunlight."

It was to the advantage of his journal that Delacroix immersed
himself in Second Empire society. Yet it is apparent from the many il-
lustrations which accompany the text, that the painter, except for an
occasional fragmentary sketch or water-color, is handicapped by a
curious lack of distinction. Such paintings as were at the time so stir-
ring (in their subject-matter) seem displeasingly ordinary in their quality
today. (Manet, the painter of the grande bourgeoisie, was to fall through
the same deficiency.) A man who was so thoroughly an artist as this
text reveals, should have achieved a more profound expression. It is
perhaps significant that the 19th century painters who succeeded in
achieving the full poise of the great masters (Cézanne, Seurat) were the
relationists.

GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

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60 PARTISAN REVIEW

THE TOWER BEYOND POLITICS
SUCH COUNSELS YOU GAVE TO ME & OTHER POEMS. By
Robinson Jeffers. Random House. $2.50.

This latest volume of Jeffers can hardly be called “disappointing.”
For disappointment implies expectations, and these only the most in-
veterate Jeffers enthusiasts can still cherish. The decline which set in
after Cawdor (1928) had already reached serious proportions with
Thurso's Landing in 1932. But Thurso was really excellent compared to
Jeffers' more recent work. There is something grotesque and pathetic in
these recent volumes, like the return to the stage of some long-retired
actress. The mannerisms, the gestures, the intonations of the cracked
voice are just recognizable enough to be cruel caricature. Here in these
poems are the same rolling, surflike lines, the same grandiose metaphors
developed at Homeric length, the same stark, cruel, perverse human
beings, the same noble landscape, which once were so enchanting. But
each of these elements is a little out of focus. The verse still thunders, but
confusedly and at times even prosily; the Homeric similes smell of the
lamp; the people are perverse to the point of insanity; and the land-
scape, like many noble things, is a bit dull. It is not that Jeffers has
changed, but rather precisely that he hasn't changed. His poetic values
and his technical devices have persisted with remarkably little change
(i.e., development) since he published Roan Stallion in 1925. But such
things apparently don't keep well on ice. This poetry gives off an odor
of decay, faint but unmistakeable.

Jeffers' failure to develop poetically is parallel to his political
development or rather, lack of it. From the beginning of his career he
has constantly expressed a high contempt for humanity, hence for society,
hence for politics. As political issues have grown more crucial even in
the lives of poets, Jeffers has protested ever more violently against this
encroachment. In the shorter poems of this volume he seems to be
obsessed with politics. His contempt for political prophets is expressed in
the most prophetic language. The same rigidity and intellectual limita-
tions which have prevented his poetical development have acted to make
of him a self-appointed anti-political Messiah iterating his “message” the
more insistently as its sterility becomes the more evident. It is a curious
illustration of the impossibility of the modern writer's escaping his social
responsibilities.

DWIGHT MACDONALD

=== Page 65 ===
RIPOSTES

The Temptation of Dr. Williams

As our readers know, the Communist
Party seems to consider the destruction
of PARTISAN REVIEW as important an
effort as the destruction of Franco-
perhaps a bit more important. The cam-
paign seems to have two aspects: (1)
open denunciations in the Party press;
(2) a whispering campaign of slander
supplemented by backstairs intrigue.
Last month we gave some examples of
the press attacks. And now we are able
to present amateurs of literary politics
with the interesting case of Dr. William
Carlos Williams.

PARTISAN REVIEW regards Dr. Wil-
liams as an extremely accomplished
poet. Consequently, when we set about
reviving the magazine, we asked him to
contribute. He replied:

Sept. 8.
Your note of Aug. 20 rec'd. I shall
have a poem for the PARTISAN REVIEW
in a week or ten days. Thank you for
asking me to contribute. . . . Sincerely
yours, W. C. Williams.

A few days later we received a poem
from him. We kept it in our files, but
wrote him again asking to see others.
"O.K." he wrote back, "Try this on
your victrola!" and he enclosed a poem
called "The Defective Record." On the
strength of all this, we announced Dr.
Williams as a future contributor. After
consideration, we decided that neither
of the poems in our possession re-
presented his work at its best, and so
we returned them, explaining our
reasons and asking him to submit others.
In reply he sent a postcard: "Your
patience will make the flowers bloom."
This was cryptic but seemed friendly
enough.

We were, therefore, astonished to
read in the NEW MASSES of November
16 last:

Watch for these articles next week
or later: . . . (2) a study of the writ-
ings of contributor H. H. Lewis, by

William Carlos Williams, author of In
the American Grain and other works.
Incidentally, some of our readers may
have seen an advance notice of the
Trotskyist PARTISAN REVIEW, announc-
ing the anti-Soviet, anti-Communist
contents of the first issue. William
Carlos Williams is listed as a contribu-
tor, but he writes to the NEW MASSES
that "the PARTISAN REVIEW has no con-
tribution of mine nor will I send them
any."

So it appeared that PARTISAN REVIEW
was using Dr. Williams' name without
any license! And the NEW MASSES liked
this idea so well that they repeated it
in their next number. Now it happened
that at this time PARTISAN REVIEW had
not appeared; we knew of nothing that
might have prompted Dr. Williams to
make such a statement. So we wrote
him asking for confirmation. He re-
plied:

Your letter of yesterday calling at-
tention to a quotation from a letter of
mine which appeared in the current
issue of NEW MASSES reached me this
morning. I hasten to reply-not that
there is any need for haste but out of
courtesy to all concerned.

You know, of course, that I have no
reason for liking the PARTISAN REVIEW.
I have, at the same time, no partisan
interest in the NEW MASSES. I had oc-
casion to appear as a writer, for a
special reason, in the NEW MASSES and
it looked as though I might appear also
in the PARTISAN REVIEW. As my con-
tribution to the NEW MASSES was of
longer standing and of more import-
ance to me than the other and since I
found the NEW MASSES violently opposed
to you on political grounds, so much
so that they refused to print me if I
remained a contributor to PARTISAN
REVIEW, I made my choice in their
favor.

Their quotation from my letter was
correct.

61

=== Page 66 ===
62 PARTISAN REVIEW

If this letter is to be quoted will you
please quote it entire.

This is plain enough. Seldom, in fact,
has a transaction of this nature been
avowed more frankly. The New Masses
refused to print him unless he boy-
cotted PARTISAN REVIEW—a condition
in itself humiliating enough for a writer
of Dr. Williams' standing. Apparently
it was further stipulated—it is hard to
believe that Dr. Williams volunteered
for the job—that he also allow his rela-
tions with us to be publicly misrepre-
sented. (It is, of course, literally true
that we have no contribution of his—
since we sent both poems back to him.
But the implication is, to say the least,
misleading.) We are distressed that Dr.
Williams should lend himself to such
shenanigans. And we are puzzled when
he writes, "You know, of course, that
I have no reason for liking the
PARTISAN REVIEW." All we know is
that he thought well enough of our
venture to send us two poems and to
promise others.

In its efforts to stifle independent left-
wing expression, the New Masses has
so far been signally unsuccessful. The
Williams episode is its first triumph, so
far as PARTISAN REVIEW is concerned.
But what a victory! Conditions!
Threats! Pressures! These are the tactics
of the underworld. And it is now clear
from which quarter factionalism in the
left-wing literary movement issues.
When Dr. Williams was invited to con-
tribute to PARTISAN REVIEW he was not
asked to boycott any other publication;
nor would we for a moment presume to
put any such conditions on our writers.
When the real situation becomes clear
to Dr. Williams, as in time it must, we
hope he will send us some more poems.

A Letter to the Editor

I just read your editorial statement
in the December issue of the PARTISAN
REVIEW. Upon completion I promptly
consigned the issue to the garbage pail.
All additional numbers of the
PARTISAN REVIEW sent to me will be
relegated unopened to the same place.
When a 'Left' magazine in its

=== Page 67 ===
RIPOSTES
63

editorial statement attacks the Com-
munist Party, as your magazine does,
the hand of Trotskyism and its Fascist
allies are clearly visible.

I am a class-conscious worker, Trot-
skyism and all it stands for is abhorrent
to me. Remove my name from your
mailing list and save me the nauseating
experience of receiving any more copies
of your vile publication.
Yours truly,

SOL RUBINSTEIN
New York City
P. S. I just noticed that my garbage
pail regurgitated.

And Three More

Permit me to be one member of the
Communist Party to congratulate you
on a very distinguished editorial job on
PARTISAN REVIEW. There has been a
great need for a magazine free from or-
ganizational sterility and I hope it will
have the great success it deserves.

I admire your purpose in putting it
out and your courage in stating your
principles.
Sincerely yours,
RONALD LANE LATIMER
New York City

I have just had the pleasure of read-
ing through the first issue of the Re-
view. I particularly like your Editorial
Statement insofar as it refers to the bit-
terness and venom that the C.P. will
heap upon you.

The cover suggests what the con-
tents should be-P.R. (Proportional
Representation). If you can achieve
that in a literary and cultural magazine,
devoted to a revolutionary ideal, you're
going some. But-it's worth the try.
Sincerely,
BEN B. NAUMOFF
Labor Research Front
New York City

Nothing is more heartening to me than
to see the rise of a more critical spirit
when so many people are going with-
out reflection into one of the extreme
camps. It disturbs me especially because
this new fanaticism is the rejection of

the scientific method that was just get-
ting a foothold in other areas beside
the exact sciences. . . . Your review de-
serves a large reading public. . . .
Sincerely,
FREDERICK REUSTLE
Van Myck Avenue
Congregational Church
Jamaica, N. Y.

First Issue Reactions

JOHN DOS PASSOS: I'm very glad you
are starting up the PARTISAN REVIEW
again. Something is certainly needed to
keep a little life in the left, which is
rapidly merging with the American
Legion. It won't be long now before
the boys are selling Liberty Bonds and
pinning the white feather on anybody
who doesn't enlist for the next war for
democracy.

DELMORE SCHWARTZ's story is dandy-
and Macdonald's analysis of the New
Yorker is real social criticism. Con-
gratulations and good luck.

IGNAZIO SILONE: Je suis à présent trés
occupé par un grand travail (la con-
tinuation de Bread and Wine), mais
sitôt j'aurai un peu de temps je vous
enverrai quelque pour votre revue, pour
laquelle je vous fais tous mes souhaits.

LOUIS M. HACKER: I want to com-
mend you for the courage, intelligence
and high literary qualities of the
PARTISAN REVIEW. It serves a necessary
function and I am sure it will win the
support from intelligent people which
it so richly deserves.

EDMUND WILSON: I thought the first
number of the Review was very good.
The only thing wrong with it was the
proof-reading, which you really ought
to watch in the next issue.

NATHAN ASCH: I thought the first
number of the Review was swell. . . .
The reviews are the best in any Amer-
ican magazine. . . . Whoever wrote the
comment at the end did a damned good
job. I'd like to see this department en-
larged, and doing what the New Yorker
does, except dealing with life and not
whimsy.

ANDRE GIDE: Tous mes voeux de
réussite pour la PARTISAN REVIEW dont
votre letter m'apprend les projets aux-
quels je m'associe de tout coeur.