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PARTISAN REVIEW
Volume IX, No. 2 1942
March-April

© Trustees of Boston University

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PARTISAN REVIEW
VOLUME IX, No. 2
MARCH-APRIL, 1942
MARIANKA
A Note on Malaquais
98
Jean Malaquais
Justin O'Brien
A LETTER TO THE EDITORS
115
T. S. Eliot
WRITERS AND DEFEAT
117
Frank Jones
ART CHRONICLE
Sweeney Soby and Surrealism
Three Current Art Books
125
George L. K. Morris
127
Clement Greenberg
POEMS
Note by the Editor
130
Palingenesis
131
Isabella Fey
To Whitman
133
Jackson Mathews
The Answer Usually Comes in Words
134
Oscar Williams
The Mirage
135
Oscar Williams
In the Tunnel
136
E. L. Mayo
Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait
137
Dylan Thomas
THE SHAPE OF THE SCREEN AND THE DARK-
NESS OF THE THEATRE
141
Paul Goodman
LONDON LETTER
153
George Orwell
BOOKS
The Moscow Trials, 1942 Version
160
Leon Colbert
One Out of Five
163
Oscar Williams
The British Genius
165
Dwight Macdonald
Shorter Notices
169
William Troy, Sidney
Hook, Etiemble
"DANGEROUS THOUGHTS"
172
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF MEXICO
174
LETTERS
176
Editors: CLEMENT GREENBERG, DWIGHT MACDONALD, GEORGE L. K.
MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV. Business Manager: NANCY
MACDONALD.
Partisan Review is published at 45 Astor Place, New York, N. Y.
Partisan Review is published six times a year. Subscription: $2.50 yearly; Canada, $2.65; other foreign
countries, $2.80. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envel-
opes. Copyright March, 1942, by Partisan Review. Reentered as second-class matter, January 20, 1940,
at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879.

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PARTISAN REVIEW
Marianka
Jean Malaquais

A Note on Malaquais—by Justin O'Brien

THERE ARE SOME of us who would read anything on Gide's recommenda-
tion, the New Testament or Simenon, Blake or Giraudoux or Nietzsche,
because we know his critical work, some of it fifty years old now, and
respect his keen judgment. We know from experience that when Gide
champions an unknown writer, no ulterior motive colors his appreciation.
It was André Gide, in the summer of 1939, who first spoke to me of Les
Javanais. I was not disappointed.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with the East Indies. It gets its
title from the local name for a city of shacks at the head of a mine-shaft
in Provence—the island of Java—probably so called because of its isola-
tion from the rest of the world. Dealing with migratory mine-workers,
refugees from all countries, the novel reveals a social consciousness that
we are unaccustomed to find in contemporary French literature outside of
André Malraux and Jean Giono. The characters and the life depicted
obviously derive from experience, and the scenes of violence, related in a
brutal style that often recalls Faulkner and Steinbeck, make this a very
moving story which is also a social document. In fact, it were only for the
idiot girl and the occasional rape scenes, one could be fairly sure that the
author had read Faulkner. In Books Abroad for 1940, Albert Guerard
said of Les Javanais: "As a tale of misery, it challenges comparison with
Little Man What Now and The Grapes of Wrath. From the literary point
of view, it is better than either. It is as realistic, as human; it has more
genuine humor; and it rises without effort to the level of poetry."
Les Javanais was too good to win the Goncourt Prize, possibly too
juicily realistic for the academicians who timidly perpetuate the memory
of Naturalism by electing Sacha Guitry to sit among them. But it did win
the Renaudot Prize, awarded by a group of Parisian critics who have no
money, but much publicity, to confer. Its young author, Jean Malaquais,
became famous overnight. But this was in December 1939 when Malaquais
was already somewhere at the front with the French army.
There even sprouted a legend that, come recently from Poland, he
had learned French in three years and then written his novel. Now any-
one who has ever taught French, anyone who has ever learned French
knows this to be impossible. In three years Malaquais might, à la rigueur,
have learned to speak French adequately and to handle the special idiom
of his "Javanese" with its intermingling of all the dialects of Europe. But
as for writing of them as he does, that is not possible in so short a time.

98

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MARIANKA
99
His language is eminently racy, vigorous, highly personal. Just read the
opening description of Maniek Bryla, the loquacious, sniffling youth who
wants to go to the station to warm himself against the steam radiators. In
two pages a thin outcast rises up before you in his rags. Or take the final
paragraph of the book with its Célinesque bitterness:
Puis, voilà c'est cuit, il n'y a plus rien à raconter. En trois
tours de passe-passe une Ile a été escamotée, comme une fleur de
pissenlit au vent, et pas une cicatrice n'en reste sur l'un quel-
conque des hémisphères connues pour marquer l'ex-endroit. On
peut toujours fendre l'eau, farfouiller les mappemondes, piquer
du bec dans les traités d'hydrographie: c'est frit flambé, Atropos
la parque y est passée avec son ablateur pour queues de mouton
et c'est fini terminé. Comme l'anaplérose, cette plaie qui fait
naître de nouvelles chairs, Java-Côte-d'Azur a changé de situation
géographique. Porteurs de germe, les hommes sont allés coloniser
d'autres Iles, les pendards sont partis qui dépensaient vingt mille
francs par semaine entre Vaugelas et la Double Pesée soit un
million par an. Ils sont partis emportant leur million annuel ces
caqueux erratiques à la recherche d'une fourrière, ils se sont
décanillés cul par-dessus tête dans la vase cosmique, et au pied
de la cheminée et sous le clapotis de la fontaine ils ont laissé leur
évocation d'excommuniés qui reviennent et se font vampires.
The truth is somewhat less sensational than the legend. Born in War-
saw in 1908, the son of a professor of classical languages in the secondary
school system, he came to Paris at the age of eighteen. After studying law
at the University of Paris for a time, he turned to writing and had articles
accepted by well known periodicals. Soon he had attracted the attention
of such writers as André Gide, Franz Hellens, André Malraux and Roger
Martin du Gard. Somewhere in the thirties he gave his Polish name
Malacki a French ending, which inevitably associated him in everyone's
mind with the beautiful embankment in Paris where Houdon's seated
Voltaire smiles sardonically on passers-by. In September 1939 he joined
the French army and fought against Germany. Taken prisoner, he was
released in October 1940.
At present he is in Marseilles where he has been for over a year now,
trying desperately to get papers and passage to America. This very morn-
ing with his wife Galina Yurkévitch, the young Russian painter, he may
well have made his regular visit to the United States consulate in, if there is
still a United States consulate in Marseilles, to see if there was any news
about his case. A letter of last August says: "To feel that I have friends
in your country is one of the very few, if not the only, reality that allows
me to hang on and to hope."
The "Javanese" whom Malaquais brought to life for us are distin-
guished by the fact that they have no passports, no identification papers.
For a European few things can be more horrible. Consequently they are
continually obsessed, subconsciously as well as consciously, by the feeling
that they are unwanted wherever they are. Today those outcast workers

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are wasting away in concentration camps or slaving on the trans-Sahara
railway. They have no money to spend in Estève's brothel or to buy a
liter of red at Mme. Michel's grocery and wine-shop; there is no more
free baklava from the woman Stapourlos. And the only crime most of
them have committed is that of having no papers.

Today Jean Malaquais knows better himself what it is to want the
necessary papers. His last letter to me, in which he struggles against his
bitterness, says: "J'ai le sentiment d'être devenu moralement un clochard"
-I feel as if I had become morally a bum.

Probably no one over here knows when "Marianka" was written, but
since it has already appeared in a French literary magazine it cannot be
very recent. It shows Malaquais' mastery of the brutal technique necessary
for describing such scenes of violence. Though the story is laid in a vil-
lage in the Ukraine between the rivers Dnieper and Pripret during the
counter-revolution of 1919, the author could not but have thought also of
the crimes being committed every day in his native Poland. Only one other
short story by Malaquais has appeared in English: "Lament for Mimiq!"
in the July 1940 issue of Life and Letters Today published in London.
Like "Marianka," it was translated with the author's permission by Antony
Manton.

LISTEN, it was quite a small village hidden away among the
black soils in Ukraine the Immense, between the arms of the
Dnieper and the Pripret, its tributary, on the Government of Cher-
nigov's Western boundary. A village, if one likes to call it that;
or rather, a scattering of several farms whose population at that
time numbered some thirty souls in all. True, before the war, the
number of inhabitants was higher, possibly double. ... But with
war, revolution, bad harvests, the younger men and the stronger
men had gradually filtered away, and there only remained at
Marianka the old men, the women and us children.

Peasants we were, everyone of us, three Jewish families, two
German families, to one of which I belonged, a few Ukrainian
families. My parents had settled in the land towards the year 90,
at the tail of other emigrants who had preferred to go further
afield, towards the Volga. I was born here, and, at this time, in
1919, was approaching my fifteenth year.

It was a troubled period, there were rumours of revolution,
famine, epidemics. One day, old Hans Kremmer, my father,
brought home with him two deserters, two peasants, who had been

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101
forcibly enlisted in some armed band. One of them died two days
later, following tetanus infection that developed in his left leg,
frost-bitten through and through. The other one, his name was
Kolenko, Mikhail Kolenko, a big ginger-haired fellow with fright-
ened suffering eyes, told us how in November 1918, an autonomous
West Ukrainian State had been proclaimed, with a declaration of
war against Poland; that in the same December, the 14th, I fancy,
a proclamation had abolished the power of the hetman and set up
the Directoire. He also told us how we were going to have a land
that really would be national and self-governing, that Kiev would
be the capital, and a king from a foreign land was about to arrive
and would bring peace. In fact, the 3rd of January, 1919, there
was a "reunion of the two Ukrainian republics" with, as outcome,
war on the two frontiers, East and West.
Today, the "autonomist" movement around the years 1918-
1921 has its niche in history books, with accounts of the parts
played by the Allies and by Germany, so you know its importance.
But, living in Marianka, we were very unenthusiastic about all
these bloody upheavals, first to war, then to the revolution, then
towards this "independence" which did not seem to herald any
good.

Landowners in a modest rural way, our world outlook was
bordered by our garden plot, and we hated the armed bands who
regularly pillaged our harvests and live stock. "Will this dam-
nable business never cease?" my father would moan as he carved
a hunk of bacon from a rib of salted pork hanging from the ceil-
ing. "No...? Never?..." he would ask his cabbage soup, his
favourite heifer, his ploughshare. We did not know that for him
this damnable business soon would cease.
This month of February 1919 was very severe. The cold
weather was exceptional, and the celebrated Priepet Falls which
never interrupt their rowdy cavalcade froze in blisters near the
shore like moist lips in the wind. Chickens froze to death in their
hutches; and the wolves, spurred by the cold weather, marauded
outside Marianka, a nasty gleam in their desperate eyes.
So it was the month of February, a Friday evening, at night-
fall. I was preparing to visit old Master Mellakh, whose house was
some forty steps distant from ours. I liked to watch the mysteries
surrounding the Welcome to the Bride, to hear the rituals and songs

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of the old Rabbi. "Johan, don't be late home," my mother admon-
ished, "the wolves come as far as Marianka itself." I reassured
her, "Of course not, mutti, I shall be home for supper."
Village elder, a pious and simple man, an authority on the
Talmud, a great scholar who could interpret the meaning of the
divine texts, Master Mellakh was the religious head of the Jewish
community in Marianka, the Rabbi, the chanter, the schokhet.
Because his judgments had a reputation for infallibility, he was
asked to settle lawsuits and other quarrels and to shed light on
obscure passages in the law. In him his fellow worshippers saw a
man of God and so they venerated him, as Jews do, through a veil
of sanctity.

A handsome man, still very erect in spite of his seventy-two
years, his oval face framed by a long white silky beard, there was
something seigneurial about Rabbi Mellakh's appearance. After
being twice widowed without children, he remarried late in life for
the third time and, at the ripe age of fifty-five, became the father
of a daughter, Myriam. To have been denied male progeny, had
been the deep sorrow of his life, for who would say the Kaddisch
after him? However, to be granted a daughter when he had ex-
pected to die childless, had gradually transformed this sorrow into
love, into that type of fanatical love that only Jewish fathers know.
It was about half past three when I stepped in to see the aged
Master, and darkness already had fallen over the countryside. His
home was partitioned into one large room, a smaller one where the
Rabbi's wife had her grocery shop and a kitchen. The warmth was
pleasant. The table in the centre of the main room was covered
with a white cloth neatly set for three people. Rabbi Mellakh's
wife-she was a well preserved and pretty enough woman-
brought in two heavy silver candelabras which she laid on the
table. She lit the candles, stood quietly one moment, held her
palms above the flame and then, veiling her face with her hands,
whispered some prayers.

Master Mellakh soon appeared, impressive, a kind smile in
the depth of his good-natured eyes. He was dressed khassidim'
fashion, in a long clinging tunic of black silk, short breeches, white
socks, shiny leather shoes and, for headgear, a massive helmet
moulded in long haired skunk.

He strode towards me and patted my shoulder, affectionately:

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103
“So you have a great love for her, the Bride that God sends to the
sons of Israel? ...”
I agreed with a nod, his Russian was superb, he had the real
Petrograd accent. His bearing had something innately noble about
it, and he diffused a deep peace that steeped the atmosphere in a
wise calm, you know what I mean, like a huge benevolent impulse.
His mere presence seemed to create a holiday atmosphere. I don’t
mean a rowdy, boisterous festival atmosphere, but an intimate
joyousness, a feeling of tranquil happiness, almost exclusively a
spiritual happiness. Truly, the man had a beautiful personality.
Myriam brought in two Sabbath loaves, setting them down in
her father’s place. She covered them with a fringed napkin and
sat down on the old gentleman’s right, pulling her long fair braids
on to her lap. She had inherited her father’s oval face, a slightly
arched nose, and from her mother, the pallid eyes; the delicate
mouth was a vivid scarlet.
She smiled at me, bending her head over one shoulder, and
one of the braids strayed across her cheek. I blushed violently and
turned away, pretending to look for a seat. I noticed a bench
against the wall, right next to the door which gave on to a little
passage way leading into Marianka. My hostess brought in a bottle
of spirits and small liqueur glasses, and Rabbi Mellakh began to
murmur the prayers.
Though this was not a total novelty for me, I gazed with great
concentration. The fantastic guttural sounds uttered by Rabbi
Mellakh, the invocations he seemed to weave in his very soul, the
cadenced rocking of the body, somehow cast a spell over my mind,
a kind of torpid serenity. My fancy roved to the outposts of crea-
tion. I heard the lamentations of a whole nation stranded in the
desert. I was present at solemn mysteries inspired—by what asso-
ciation of ideas?—by the tales of Karl May.
The flickering candle light painted a monstrous liquid shadow
that at each gesture from the old man darted across the ceiling in
both directions like a titanic bat. There, this mobile shadow slyly
creeping about was Satan’s own shadow and, whipped and tor-
mented by the old man’s chanting, Satan writhed in agonies worse
than any that hell could generate.
I watched the frightened shadow and wondered, wouldn’t it
conquer the venerable master? Shroud him in its thick cloak and

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suction him up and fly away with a yell of demoniacal exultation?
I looked at Rabbi Mellakh, longed to cry out a warning, but I saw
his beautiful hand stroke his white beard and on his forehead I
read so perfect a calm that the outcome of the duel at once became
apparent; good would conquer evil. Many years after his death I
would still torture myself over the perfect balance of his spiritual
life, because of the private salvation he so definitely seemed to
have attained. If today I see him so vividly, it is because I saw him
die as he lived, free from all torment, from all doubt. That is what
he was like and doubt had never tainted his soul. He had conquered
his will and for him this conquest was a key to the universe and to
the future, and everything outside his private salvation was vanity.
But I am wandering from my story. . . .
When I heard Rabbi Mellakh chant, I lost all idea of place
and time. Yet, there was no great loveliness in this chanting with
its broken, ambiguous rhythms, but the tones of his voice and the
strange rumble of the words fillipped my imagination, peopled my
mind with heavenly apparitions. When he blessed the bread, his
ritual gestures conjured up for me the primitive dances of the birth
of the centuries, and when he sang "Today is blessed above all
other days" I expected God to come down and be among us. Pic-
tures formed out of the canticle, a natural, intoxicating inspiration
possessed me from the psalms. I too sang, a dumb song about
forests, rainbows, steep cliffs that bathe in the sea, flowers that
drink the sunshine. We were the singers of this world.
* * *
About an hour and a half later, I was preparing to go home
when a woman's shrill cry pierced the atmosphere, heartrending
with anguish. It cut into the room through the walls and the win-
dows simultaneously, long, sustained, as though it had a concrete
material quality. Almost immediately, footsteps thudded in the
dark passage and the door yielded under a strong push. A man
stood still, legs wide apart, booted to his knees, the papaha pushed
back on his head, his right arm clutching an automatic pistol.
Other men were outlined behind him, shrouded in the darkness.
With them, the black North wind poured into the room. I
noticed Rabbi Mellakh get up quietly, and he held out
his arm as though in a Roman salute and he said:
"Peace be with you."

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The man with the revolver scrutinised the old man, looked at
us in turn, stared at the women. He shrugged his shoulders, by now
we all of us were standing, our eyes focussed on his revolver. With
it, he motioned his companions and followed by six men came into
the room. He said:
"Free followers of the hetman Pétloura, fighting for the lib-
eration of the Ukraine."
"Peace be with you," Rabbi Mellakh repeated.
The door had been left wide open on the freezing arctic night.
The country side was blanketed in opaque darkness and you heard
the black wind buffet the trees. I moved forward to close the door
but received a slap full in the face. It hurled me under the table.
Myriam opened her mouth, but stifled the shout with her hand.
The old Rabbi stood and helped me to my feet. He said gently:
"Come, there's no reason for grief, Yaniki.... Stand up....
It did not hurt you, Yaniki, it did not hurt you...."
I rose painfully, the right side of my face was on fire. The
ground slid under my feet and everything rocked in a billow-torn
sea. My tongue was muddied. I spat and a broken tooth tumbled
on the floor, and Rabbi Mellakh pretended to dust my jacket.
"You wanted to close the door, Yaniki.... Why didn't you
say so? Wait, I will close it."
He moved towards the door and before he got there a punch
aimed at his stomach bent him in two. He nearly fell, but des-
perately stiffened himself and grasped the table edge. His wife
and daughter rushed to him, and while the former held the old
man, Myriam brought a chair. They wept, bewildered and terror-
ised, afraid to utter one word, hardly daring to look at the silent
intruders.
Through a screen of tears, I saw seven men standing with
their legs wide apart. The man who burst into the room first and
who evidently was the leader, seemed to be some forty years old,
tall, strongly built. The papaha pushed back on his head revealed
an obstinate forehead, swollen veins and thick flaxen hair, as brit-
tle as blades of corn. I could hardly see his eyes, since they were
deeply embedded under the frontal bones and a beard several days
old smudged his lower chin with gingerish pools. Furtively, I
glanced at his companions; they seemed to have been moulded in
the same cast. Rigged out in an astonishing kit, bulging through

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waistcoats and sweaters that either were too short or too long, they
were dirty, tattered. Some of them had no riding boots, their legs
were swaddled in puttee bands, mud-caked and slipshodly tied, and
only their armaments were in perfect condition.

Muted sounds filtered in from outside, again a woman's
shriek, the clatter of breaking crockery. A horse whinnied. Then
foot-steps crunched on the snow. In the rectangle outlined against
the darkness by the open door, two silhouettes loomed nearer, and
a man entered the room, striding towards the leader. For a minute
they conferred in undertones, laconically, in monosyllables, and
the other men stared at the table.

When they had finished speaking, the red haired man went to
the table and poured himself out a brimming glass of spirits, and
swallowed it in one gulp. He examined his glass through the
candlelight, clicked his tongue and poured himself out another
helping. Several times he repeated this ceremony, painstakingly,
methodically, each time contemplating the contents of the bottle
while his companions looked on, also gauging the level of the
liquid. When this had diminished half-way, he handed them the
bottle, together with his glass, and they helped themselves in turn,
each one drank rapidly, in one gulp, as if their whole bodies
rejoiced. And, loyal to the leader, they clicked their tongues.

The leader picked his revolver up from the table, pretended
to examine the trigger, said:
"Any good?"

"Good," the others replied shuffling their feet.
In the same tones, he pursued:

"So, you bloated cur, you drink good vodka while we fight
against the bolsheviks? . . . You dirty Jew, you are in league with
the bolsheviks, eh? . . . Like all bloody sheenies, eh? . . ."

He grasped Rabbi Mellakh's beard and roughly shook the old
man who looked at him with limpid eyes. Not one groan escaped
him. The women hurled themselves on the fellow's arm but roughly
he propelled them both to the floor. The others exulted loudly, in
merriment, prying eyes rivetted on the women's disordered skirts.
Forgetting pain and fear, I ran to help them to their feet. They
shuddered like birch leaves.

"I-must-have-ten-thousand-roubles-before-one-hours-time-
otherwise . . ." the man chanted.

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107
Still clutching the aged Master's beard, he pulled the Rabbi's
face right close up to his own. Shifty eyes staring into his victim's
wide open ones, he repeated once or twice:
"Ten-thousand-roubles . . . Ten-thousand roubles . . ."
With the barrel of his revolver, he drummed on the old man's
nose, and with his vodka-infected breath, puffed in the Rabbi's
upturned face:
"And those mangy bolshevik dogs won't have that much,
anyway.... And now get me some food and something to drink."
He loosened his grip. Rabbi Mellakh for one moment longer
remained seated on the edge of the chair, his head bent back, in
the attitude imprinted by the other's punch. His well-groomed
beard was tousled. Heavily, he rose, stood very erect, his delicate
bony hand resting on the table. Only now did the shock of the
recent rough handling begin to manifest itself, and I saw his hands
begin to tremble, irrepressibly, convulsively. But his face, nothing
altered its serenity. His lips moved, imperceptibly at first, then
more openly, and I at length understood the modulation of the
words. As a result of my numerous visits to Myriam's father, I
had learnt to recognise many of the prayers and rites: Rabbi Mel-
lakh was reciting the prayer for the dying.
Feverishly, Myriam and her mother busied themselves. Before
you could say knife, the table was covered with the choicest goods
from the grocery shop. Their haste had a tincture of both the
tragic and the grotesque. Crazed with anguish, they ran to and fro
excitedly, their arms laden with dishes and bottles, stumbling
against the furniture and the walls, shivering like sparrows in this
cruel February snow. Rabbi Mellakh was praying.
The man who had remained outside now came indoors, and
the nine of them guzzled like famished wolves; obviously, they
hadn't eaten for at least twenty-four hours. Bottle followed bottle:
no sooner uncorked-no sooner drunk. And as soon as a bottle
was emptied, one of the men would take it by the neck and with a
brittle snap smash it on the corner of the table. Soon the whole
room was tinselled with glass.
The door remained open like the door of a coaching inn
where you have a warm drink between a change of horses. Winter
had invaded the izba with its sharp, giddying bite. Marianka
showed signs of a strange, perplexing activity, unusual sounds

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reached our ears; a rasping of foot-steps on the hard snow, far
away, on the white plain; coarse laughs that seemed to congeal,
made to sound very near owing to the purity of the rarefied freez-
ing air; the noise of shooting re-echoing fitfully, like a ricocheting
ball; then, very far away, a lullaby as old as creation itself, sung
in the soft tones of a drunk man. "You shall look like a bogatyr,
and you shall have the soul of a kozak . . ." was the burden.
"Mikhail Kolenko has been found!"
Like a tornado a man crossed the threshold. The others inter-
rupted their guzzling, mouths full, elbows raised, glasses touching
their lips.
"What's that? . . ." said the leader. "What's that? . . ."
His voice was almost caressing. Gently he stroked his chin.
The fresh arrival quickly added:
"He was hiding in a peasant's cellar, but Matejko can't be
found. Perhaps he too is hiding in somebody's cellar."
"Bring Kolenko! And find me the other bastard!"
The fellow spun round and dissolved in Marianka's glacial
darkness. The leader went back to his drink, taking gentle sips,
puffing out his cheeks before swallowing, slyly watching the four
of us and his companions, a grin on his fleshy lips. With the back
of his hand he continued to stroke his stubbly beard and now and
then he belched sonorously, with relish. Steps soon grated on the
frozen earth and two men appeared, escorting Mikhail Kolenko.
His arms were tied behind him.
Though the candle light was very faint, Kolenko's frightened
eyes blinked as he looked around him. When he recognized the
leader, I saw him grow pale and his long giant arms made an
effort towards freedom. Someone punched him in the back and he
landed up against the table with a thud. At that identical moment,
the leader's revolvèred hand struck his face, and from the top of
his forehead to his chin the revolver butt slashed open the pris-
oner's face. The blood streamed and its jet blinded the man. He
yelled. He bounced backwards, but welcoming arms pushed him
forward. He wept like a birched child.
"Ah, so you are back again . . ." said the leader. "You wanted
to sneak away, you traitor. . . . Ah, you wanted to sneak away. . . ."
He spoke in the honied tone of a man enquiring after your

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parent's health, it was soft and drawling like the dialect of South-
ern countries.
Again with his pistol butt he smacked the prisoner's face. He
would have stunned him, but Kolenko jumped to one side; even
then the metal struck his nose and chipped off a fragment. The
man yelled and fell on his knees. His body pitched forward, he
rocked sideways, the blood still spurting from his wounds. The
others burst out laughing, tickled to see a great tall fellow wriggle
like a worm and all because a miserable little bit of nose was
missing.
You know, when in fancy I travel back to Marianka, accursed
Marianka, under the domination of Pétloura's recruits, I can still
hear their boisterous laugh, so soon stinking of vodka, so soon
husky with delight. I listen: there's no malice in that laugh, it is
the honest and spontaneous laugh that is generated with torture and
with the blood of a man yelling for fear. It is because for them
life held no meaning, neither their own lives nor other people's,
and what we don't drink and embrace today, well, perhaps, we
never shall have a chance to drink and embrace. Instinctively, of
human qualities the only ones they possessed were the inhuman
ones.
The Rabbi's wife felt ill. While Myriam tearfully ran to
fetch more bottles of spirits, the venerable Master and I hurried
to the invalid's side. Though she made heroic efforts to control
herself, she couldn't master a nervous fit that shook her like a bout
of fever. Gasps would escape from her throat, intermixed with
hiccups, seeming to float up from her belly to her mouth, and
suddenly she was sick, luxuriantly sick, a thick jet that bounced
her out of her chair, as if all her insides must gush from her
mouth. She cringed in humiliation and shame. Rabbi Mellakh,
Myriam and I, we stood helpless and perplexed staring at this
ignoble sight, at this lump of living womanhood, horribly tar-
nished. We made her sip water and pushed her into a chair, but it
brought no relief. She continued to hiccup and everytime she was
shaken as though by a tidal wave. The knights of the Ukrainian
Independence gulped the vodka and laughed.
"Hey, Jew!..."
Rabbi Mellakh raised his head. In the old man's eyes shone
the immense serenity of the ancient martyrs: what had just hap-
pened, what would happen, was ordained....

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110 PARTISAN REVIEW

“Come here, you!”
The old man didn’t answer, he stood as if the command could
not have referred to him. I felt nervous for him. “Step forward,
sir, step forward. . . .” I whispered to him. He laid his hand on
my head lightly pulled me towards him, and stroked my cheek, and
I fancied I saw a tear stream down his pale face.
“Come here, Jew!” the hero repeated. And as Rabbi Mel-
lakh still did not answer, he thumped the table:
“Come here, you witch-doctor, or I’ll tear your beard off!
And a bloody fine beard you’ve got, too, ha ha ha! . . . Ha ha ha!”
He laughed boisterously; how he did enjoy laughing. . . . A
glass in his left hand, a revolver in his right, he guffawed lengthily,
with ohs! and with ahs! infecting his companions with his affable
mood. Spell-bound and frightened, I stared at them. How they
did laugh, if you only could have heard them. Never before had
I realised to such a pitch how “laughter disarms.” They were so
unself-conscious, so care-free, great rough sun-tanned children,
innocent even in their cruelty;—or perhaps throw-backs to a stone
age primitiveness, when men merely laughed as they killed. Since
to laugh seemed to them as natural a function as to kill—it came
instinctively—just like eating, drinking, swearing.
At the leader’s feet, Kolenko still bled and moaned, rocking
his great captive body. The men went on drinking the vodka; the
stale sickly fumes dulled their brains and soured the air. You
would have thought you were in a brewery. . . . Mingled with their
laughter, a sentence would now and then emerge, incoherent, more
often than not it was some ridiculous boast, forgiveable for its
colossal inanity. One of them began to sing, in a muted voice, a
voice that was not too unpleasant, an old song about love and
prayer, and he wound up with an oath destined for some real or
imaginary Michka. Another recruit took up the song, the same
tune, but louder, the bottle in his shaking hand, his voice hoarse
with vodka and bestiality. Like the first singer, he ended it with a
low curse. Haggard, he gazed at the bottle, and suddenly he
yelled, he yelled as a wolf yells, the whole burden of his lungs
concentrated in his vocal cords. Bloodshot eyes, yellow teeth
gleaming in parted lips, to me he seemed like a malevolent djinn
clamouring for the destruction of the world.
The effort made him lose his balance. He oscillated, upright,
as a stricken tree totters on its axis before falling. Legs wide apart,

=== Page 16 ===
MARIANKA
111
he threw back his head, stuffed the neck of the bottle deep in his
mouth and drank with a real desert thirst. The alcohol gurgled in
his throat for a long time, and he drank with closed eyes, fearfully
pale, the triangle of his nose so prominent. The vodka poured so
quickly, it overflowed down both sides of his mouth and straggled
in thin rivulets underneath his knitted collar. He withheld the
final mouthful, swilled his teeth with it and spat it out with a
crackling noise. Drops splashed my face and the other men
laughed and Kolenko writhed in his scarlet pool. The drunken
recruit once again contemplated his bottle, now empty, and ener-
getically, he tossed it towards us.
The heaviest fragment hit Rabbi Mellakh's wife in the temple.
One second the woman remained standing, upright, stiff, the hic-
cups had suddenly disappeared, as though you had picked
them off her with your fingers; then she bent forward gracefully
and before we could hold her, slid to the floor, dragging with her
the table cloth. Plates, glasses, bottles, candelabras, everything
toppled down with the clatter of a looted shop window and the
glass panes broke in splinters and blankets of clotted darkness cut
off all light.
Then it all grew hallucinating. The opaque night fencing us
in was like a hand squeezing your throat. The men stopped talk-
ing, suddenly troubled by the cold and darkness pouring in from
the remote, lonely countryside. Space and reality had been blotted
out as if a wall had crumbled on to the vast plains and in a dizzying
flash I visualized the end of the world, a contorted, chaotic, mon-
strous vision. It was as though the earth cracked in every surface
and lay pulverised by a hundred earthquakes. And suddenly I was
mastered by a desire to run away, to flee across the desolate coun-
tryside, desperately, straight in front of me.
The candelabras had only tumbled to the floor one moment
ago and yet this black suspense seemed to have lasted for hours
merging into the ring of silence outside the darkness. Gusts of ice
cold air were needling right through me and my teeth began to
chatter and uncontrollably I was shuddering all over. I wanted to
move forward but my legs were stubborn, magnetised to the floor-
boards. The recruits had not yet recovered, perhaps they too
trembled and longed to escape, perhaps they too thought the end
of the world was at hand. I began a yell but smothered it. The
blood thumped through my temples, and the stillness was pushing

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112
PARTISAN REVIEW
down my throat and strangling me like a man's hand intent on
business. Ah, these heroes who like me were afraid, who had mis-
laid their laughter! Against my will, once again, I yelled.
First I heard shuffling feet. Then, cradled by the battering
wind, the singing of drunken men. Then the oppressed panting of
a straining man. Someone banged his whole weight against the
table, drew away, once more banged against it. I heard boots
scrape the floor-boards, legs treading a circle, and always that
oppressed panting of a horse climbing a steep hill. Someone fought
with the darkness.
All at once, a petal of flame burst in a sheaf of sparks. It
licked the sky, hailed a partner, and together they danced on a
roof. A third linked up with them, then another one, and it looked
as if the corolla of a flower was sailing in the night, hanging from
the sky by sails of fire. The wind, galloping across the country-
side, officiously pranced around the flower, joyfully whistled, flat-
tened the corolla as though to embrace her. She answered with a
sharp crackle, gave him a petal and he scudded off with it, still
galloping. They rested on a neighbouring barn and at once
spawned little live flames, little live shimmering flames. The sky's
hermetic dome blushed with ecstacy and the entire countryside
began to throb in a rhythm of fire and shadow.
In the artificial daylight I could see the man who was en-
tangled in his own legs; Kolenko was trying to escape. He could
distinguish the doorway outlined against the flames and thrust
towards it, head lowered, his entire body weighted forwards. A
bullet lodged in the nape of his neck. He fell head first, his face
squashed against the threshold he had wanted to cross. His arms
tied behind his back contracted, stiffened like stakes driven into
the earth. The binding rope cracked, cracked, and gave. Suddenly
free, the arms slid alongside the body, like dead branches. A man
cleared the back of his vodka-scorched throat and spat on him,
liberally.
All of them, they came back. All, they began to laugh once
more, merriness shook them like willow branches in a singing
wind, a laugh smelling of fire, of the bullet's soft thud, of spittle.
Fire pulsed in their circulations, it set their blood aflame, it set
up a craving for more fire.
Severally they set fire to the bed. Then to the table cloth satu-
rated with vodka. Then, with straw drawn from the mattress, they

=== Page 18 ===
MARIANKA
A Letter to the Editors
set fire to the old dresser reflecting silvered pools. The flames
jumped up to the ceiling, joined together, drew apart, sniffed, said
they liked this sort of thing, and began to spit, to smoke, to eat
with a fine appetite. "You will roast like fleas!" they shouted to
us. "Good luck!" and they would not stop laughing and shouting
with merriment. "Mind your beard, it's going to shrivel up! We
shall pray for your soul, you old body snatcher! Ha ha ha ha!"
Stamping over Kolenko's body, they went out by the little passage
way.
We remained there, the three of us, with the woman's body,
with Kolenko's, and the fire-already a very fierce fire. Almost at
the same time as the men left, the bench caught alight. A flame
ran down the passage as if in their pursuit, blocking the doorway.
It licked Kolenko's head, drew away, came back with reinforce-
ments, stroked it this time, then quickly hugged it in a spiral
movement, twined itself around, gently roasted it. The strong
blacksmith stench of burning hooves burst through the air and the
head seemed to move, its hair become a golden halo.
The first, I regained my senses. The furnace was growing
lethal. Another minute and we should be blazing like Kolenko,
over there. I shouted out:
"Sir, sir, Rabbi Mellakh, we must get away!"
He remained crouching near his wife's body, the flames danc-
ing a frenzied polka in his staring eyes. Myriam lay across her
mother, silent; she never once sobbed; a living creature crucified
on a dead one.
My eyes smarted and I fancied I heard my skin crackle, peel
off me like a fish's scales. A fit of coughing lacerated my lungs
and the smoke and heat were deadly. I grasped the old man by
the shoulders, shook him:
"Master, you will be burnt alive! Get away from here! Get
away from here! Myriam! Myriam!"
The old man slipped through my hands and fell on his daugh-
ter. His lips mumbled prayers. Each little hair in his beard curled
like grass at sunset. I yelled:
"Sir! Sir! Myriam!"
The fire creaked with a noise of tearing muscles. The old
man didn't answer. I felt ready to flare like a torch, like a log of
dry fir-tree. With one last effort, I took Myriam's arm and pulled
it towards me. I wanted to get her away, I didn't want her to be

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114 PARTISAN REVIEW

burnt. I didn't want her to stop living and it was only then I
noticed the knife upright in her throat and all the blood on her
pale holiday dress.
Where I got the strength, I shall never know. I plunged
towards the window frame, head first, with all the strength in my
body, falling through like a pebble. I landed on a hillock of snow
heaped outside by the old Rabbi when he had cleared the cottage
for the Reception of the Bride.
A gust of pure air seemed to restore my wits. Marianka was
dissolving in a firework display, in shouts of joy and in shouts of
horror. Strident cries that pierced high into the sky and coarse,
raucous shouts that grazed the earth. Entirely naked, Marie
Baranko, an old woman of sixty, was hobbling in a pool of melted
snow, and a man stood behind aiming kicks at her backside.
"Dance, you cow, go on, dance!" he said. She danced, bending one
leg, then the other one, her breasts, shrivelled like dry salt fish,
flapping against her stomach in tune. "Ha ha ha!..." the man
said, and he kicked her buttocks apart.
Men were running about, and they were firing rifles, and they
were stabbing, and they were laughing. A great tall fellow stood
silhouetted against the light from a flame, looming like some giant
with the shadow he cast before him. By its legs, he held a squeal-
ing baby, head downwards, also naked. The man stooped over his
burden, delicately kneaded the tiny body as if to test its resistance,
then swung the child round and round above his head, beat the air
with it and threw. The little burden cut through the air like a cata-
pulted stone, described an arc, and landed with a squash on a
flaming wall. One second the man remained tense from the effort,
then he laughed with boisterous delight. He turned round, his
muscles taut. He clutched an escaping woman, at random, as you
might grab a fly in your hand. He bent his prey's neck, saw she
was old, and with one knife thrust slit her throat. And still he
laughed with boisterous delight.
Pursued by his laugh, pursued by the image of the little
naked burden describing an arc under the mauve night sky, I ran
in front of me, with all my strength, with my whole desire for life.
* * * *
At dawn, in a furrow of frozen soil, a detachment of red
soldiers stumbled on a youth half dead from cold.
Marianka was annihilated.

=== Page 20 ===
A Letter to the Editors

I HAVE BEEN SHOWN the text of a lecture by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks
on “Primary Literature and Coterie Literature” and invited to
comment upon it. As for Mr. Brooks' judgements on particular
authors I am impressed by the catholicity of his distaste: but I have
no comment to make except that his description of Dr. I. A. Rich-
ards as “a neurological psychologist who lives in England” does
not suggest a very intimate knowledge of that author's work. It is
not in Mr. Brooks's literary appreciations but in the social implica-
tions of his point of view that I am interested: and in these for the
reason that I detect a similarity with a point of view which has
recently been expressed on this side of the water also. It is a point
of view which may be called reactionary, so long as we remember
that reaction may move in more than one direction and to different
distances; to a more, or to a less civilized condition than that of
contemporary society. I hope I am not influenced by the newspaper
rumour that my own writings have been condemned by the Vichy
Government, as well as by Mr. Brooks: I mention this so that the
reader may not suspect that I have any concealed grievances.

The similarity that I find is between Mr. Brooks's point of
view and that of a leading article in The Times of London on the
25th March, 1941. This article is entitled “The Eclipse of the
Highbrow.” It has, like that of Mr. Brooks, a warmth of feeling
puzzling to those who come under its condemnation, and goes
farther than Mr. Brooks in its disapproval of the morals of con-
temporary writers and artists, whom it characterizes as “often
impatient, self-indulgent, intolerant and touchy,” as well as pos-
sessed of “a weak and arrogant contempt for the common man.”
(The “common man” of a paper like The Times can hardly mean
the proletarian—it must mean the man of the educated upper
classes.) The Times article complains that modern literature is
one of “clever triviality,” that art is brought down to “the level of
esoteric parlour games,” and it draws the now familiar comparison
of modern poetry to the cross-word puzzle. Though it does not use
the term, it holds up exactly the same picture of “coterie” art as
does Mr. Brooks.

115

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116 PARTISAN REVIEW

The reason for the violence of the Times's writer's feelings,
as of those of Mr. Brooks, must remain unknown. If either of
them was anything of a sociologist, he might have been interested
in not merely denouncing modern art, but in enquiring why it is
what it is. The attack is not made precisely on literary grounds,
nor precisely on moral grounds, but upon grounds which are a
confusion of the two. For the Times writer the virtues despised by
the highbrows are "such as endurance, unselfishness and disci-
pline"; for Mr. Brooks "the great themes are those by virtue of
which the race has risen [what race?], courage, justice, mercy,
honour and love." I do not like to be led to underrate or
despise these virtues: but (unless by "love" Mr. Brooks means
charity in the theological sense) they are the natural, rather than
the Christian virtues; and justice, we now know, can mean very
different things to different people. Mr. Brooks further employs
terms "the biological grain," "the life-drive," "race-survival"—
which are depressingly reminiscent of a certain political version of
biology: his literary criterion seems to be conduciveness to race
survival "on what might further be called the best possible terms"
—what these terms are is not stated.

Literature has at some times and in some places been con-
demned for infraction of laws of religious orthodoxy*; in some
places at some times it has been condemned for infraction of laws
of political orthodoxy: but in such a situation we can at least know
where we are; and religious and political criteria need not be con-
fused with literary and artistic criteria. In Britain and America
we are not likely to find our issues defined so clearly as that: what
is more likely is that democracy will be attacked in the name of
democracy; that culture will be attacked in the name of culture,
literature in the name of literature—even, perhaps, religion in the
name of religion. I do not suppose for a moment that Mr. Brooks
is aware of these possibilities, or of the tendencies which his views
may encourage: but there was never a time when it was more
important to think clearly and to define one's terms.

T. S. ELIOT

London
January 5, 1942.

*Mr. Brooks, by the way, confuses heterodoxy with blasphemy.

=== Page 22 ===
117
Writers and Defeat

Frank Jones

HE LITERARY JOURNALS of France are holding up their heads again,
and considering the circumstances of the resurgence-they manifest
astonishing variety and endurance in the intellectual life of the country.
One dares not surmise how long the resurgence will last; much of it may
succumb to a shortage of paper or of patience in high places; but the
tragic and precious evidences it so far affords are to be treasured, whether
or not we draw from them a moral for our own experience.

These, as far as I can ascertain, were the principal events of 1941 in
French literary journalism. In the unoccupied zone, the Cahiers du Sud,
organ of the Southern avant-garde, issued again from its regular Marseilles
office. Esprit, a monthly of liberal-Catholic tendencies, moved from Paris
to Lyons and resumed publication in January, only to be suppressed in
June for views implicit in condemning an anti-Semitic German movie
(interestingly titled Jew Suss) and quoting Péguy, hero of Catholic social-
ists: "I shall refuse to obey, if justice and freedom require disobedience."
Even Le Figaro, quite conservative when a Paris daily, was temporarily
banned after maintaining in Vichy territory not only its high literary
standards but also considerable freedom of expression on the relation of
contemporary literature to society. The venerable Revue des Deux Mondes
moved toward Vichy geographically, no doctrinal migration being re-
quired: it is dull and respectable as ever, and strongly pro-Pétain, pro-
Franco, anti-Marx. The Revue Universelle also continued, in a very un-
universal manner, under the editorship of Henri Massis, an authoritarian
Catholic who had long been of philo-fascist persuasions. In Paris, the
Nouvelle Revue Française, founded by Gide and others in 1909, began a
questionable new life as early as December 1940. The Germans were still
being 'correct' then, and Herr Abetz was anxious to preserve 'intact' such
of the higher things in French life as could be kept politically neutral.
Jean Paulhan, the N.R.F.'s editor, was still in Paris, but not neutral: his
last editorial before the blitz having offended Nazi susceptibilities, he was
imprisoned for a time shortly after Abetz took up the reins of culture.
Abetz accordingly replaced him by Drieu la Rochelle, a man with as many

¹Apropos of the last PR's correspondence about Esprit, a remark of its editor
Emmanuel Mounier in the May issue is eminently quotable. Pierre Gaxotte, in the
course of a plea for press freedom under Vichy, had said: "One cannot imagine a
national revolution having recourse to a lie." Mounier commented: "One cannot
imagine it, but, as the saying has it, truth can sometimes be improbable."

117

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118                                     PARTISAN REVIEW

political colors as literary friends. Under his guidance the journal began
surprisingly well, but it soon took the inevitable course, and Gide, who
published sections of his 1940 journal in the December and February
issues, severed his connection with it. (He has since written a pamphlet
entitled Retour de la N.R.F., which doubtless means both 'return of' and
'return from'-the latter on the analogy of his Return from the U.S.S.R.)
The subsequent tone of the N.R.F. is probably typified by a pronounce-
ment of the greybeard philo-fascist and Academy immortal, Abel Bonnard,
in its March 1941 issue: "France has been delivered from the ideas of the
revolution of 1789, an outburst of every false value." For what this jour-
nal once meant one must look to a quarterly founded by a former asso-
ciate last July in Buenos Aires: Lettres Françaises, edited by Roger
Caillois.

          Through all this gloom, one can discern in the magazines continuing
in France a busy interaction of critical views and political allegiances, in
which the débacle brings out into harsh light what might once have hidden
behind the easy courtesies of literary intercourse. This is true at least of
the few issues of the N.R.F. (Dec. 1940; Jan., Feb. 1941) and Esprit (Jan.,
Feb. 1941) which have reached this country. Not only acceptance of the
New Order, but aloofness from it and even rebellion against it are repre-
sented in the comments made in them by writers known abroad. Even their
expressions of acceptance are extremely guarded and usually leave a door
or two ajar for the winds of independence. Not one of them comes out in
open support of the Pétain regime. But the extent of their fascist poten-
tialities can be gauged in some cases by their political past rather than
their literary present, and in others by the force with which they now give
vent to their feelings about the 'guilt' of pre-war France. Some of them-
Jacques Chardonne, Drieu la Rochelle, Alfred Fabre-Luce-are so obsessed
by these feelings that they regard the New Order not only as a punishment
richly deserved by the sins of the democrats, but as a lesser menace to the
'true spirit of France' than was the Third Republic. Plûtôt Hitler que Blum
is still their slogan. In others-Morand, Claudel, Henri Massis-the note
is primarily one of anger with the old order: no statements or even impli-
cations about the new. Then there are the writers who make it pretty
clear, with whatever caution, that they resent the national humiliation
and see in 'collaboration' little chance of any improvement on the old
France, for all its acknowledged defects. Of this group, Duhamel and
Mauriac content themselves with a vigorous refusal to cry Peccavimus,
while Gide and Montherlant indicate profound disquiet as to the condition
of France, without, however, pointing the finger at any specific aspect of
it. The one rebel in the picture, one who does so point, is Armand Petit-
jean, whose moving comments on his war experiences-reprinted, in small
type, at the very end of the December 1940 Nouvelle Revue Française, from
the Journal des Compagnons de France-conclude with an outcry against

=== Page 24 ===
WRITERS AND DEFEAT
119
the 'national shame' of inglorious defeat: "Only shameful natures can put
up with it; we shall follow our reaction against it to the bitter end."
Of all these groups the most pathetic-and, one might say, the most
significant from an American point of view-is that of the climbers, from
all over, onto the Hitlerite bandwagon. They show how varied are the
approaches to fascism open to modern European man. Mere horror of
modernism in the arts (Kulturbolschewismus); a metaphysical thirst for
the One in the Many; politically authoritarian forms of Catholicism;
rationalization of personal disequilibrium into a continental malady, with
consequent vague calls for 'discipline' as the cure-as one might prescribe
exercise and fresh air for neurasthenics; or, simply, a keen awareness of
the futility of international politics as played by sovereign nations since
1918-all these may lead to a sneaking fondness for Hitler or at least to
a stuffy pretence of nobility and self-sacrifice à la Pétain. Many are com-
bined in Drieu la Rochelle, the new editor of the N.R.F.
Despite his fascist sympathies, Drieu is no contemptible figure.
Besides being a novelist of distinction, he brings a fluid intelligence to
political questions: too fluid, to be sure, but hardly in a class with the
bloated brooding emotionalism of literary fascism as practised in Ger-
many. His diagnoses and prognoses of the European disease are as acute
as his political ideals are confused. Both the acumen and the confusion
are apparent in his most important book, Socialisme Fasciste, a collection
of political essays published by the N.R.F. in 1934. One of them, 'The
Next War,' predicted not only the time of the present cataclysm but many
of its leading events to date. Though vitriolic on French political parties of
all degrees of leftness and rightness, he pointed out the perils of dictator-
ship on the Hitler-Mussolini model as a government for France, and issued
a grave warning against any rapprochement between France and Germany
on the flimsy basis of opposition to communism. All this is sound enough;
and even now one may dare to hope that he has not sunk to the level of
Laval's Anti-Soviet Legion or the conception of Pétain as Our Leader
piously advanced by the Revue des Deux Mondes. But other suggestions
in policy in the crisis he so clearly analyzed at that time manifested the
troubled oscillation which fascism steadies for its own ends. On the one
hand, he deplored the violence inculcated in fascist youth and condemned
militarism in general, even avowing great sympathy with absolute paci-
fism; on the other, speaking of fascism as 'a pure theocracy in which the
spiritual and the temporal are at last commingled,' he declared: "And yet
I want it. Liberty is done for, and man must steep himself again in the
dark foundations of his being. I say this, I, the intellectual, the lover of
1 According to La France Libre, this issue of the NRF was seized by the Germans.
Petitjean's words are doubtless the reason. Over and above their dangerous implica-
tions, he takes as his text a quotation from Malraux' Days of Wrath, which of course
is now banned in France. In general, as La France Libre says, all French accounts of
the late-lamented war with Germany are being suppressed: "Les Français doivent
oublier qu'ils se sont battus contre l'Allemagne hitlérienne." So Petitjean's outburst
joins Duhamel's Chronicle of the Year 1939 and Roland Dorgelès' Return to the Front:
good company. Petitjean has since resigned from the N.R.F., at the same time as Gide.

=== Page 25 ===
120 PARTISAN REVIEW

liberty." He accepted fascism as part of the European destiny because, in
one sense the last outpost of capitalism, in another it seemed to bear the
seeds of 'non-Marxist socialism'-socialism without class war, the cardinal
point of his creed. (Incidentally, he also predicted the fall of Thyssen.)
He was not alone in believing Hitlerism to be a genuine new order, but he
was so impressed by the socialist element in national socialism-and the
nationalist element in Stalinism-that he put Moscow, Berlin, Rome, An-
kara, Warsaw and Washington (as of 1934) all on the same level for
French political parties to look up to. He admitted that the alleged
'dynamism' of Hitler Germany was really static and rigid, but in all these
reform movements he saw 'a moral force, a disposition to sacrifice, a will
to struggle' which seemed lacking in the 'senile corruption' of French
politics. As for the cause of international order, a political union of
Europe, he said: "After all, it seems to me no harder to teach the Euro-
pean necessity to fascist countries in which, willy-nilly, the socialist fer-
ment is at work, than to teach it to hypocritical democracies." And so:
"I shall perhaps work-I have doubtless worked already-for the estab-
lishment of a fascist regime in France; but I shall remain as free toward
it tomorrow as yesterday."

Such is the extraordinary figure who has taken over what was the
best and most advanced literary journal in Europe, a consistent champion
of the greatest names, the freest spirits in French literature from Proust
and Gide to Giono and Malraux. Yet there are several good things to be
said of his editorship-at least up to last February. He went on printing
Gide, Petitjean and Montherlant, presenting their continued independence
and reserve of judgment to the harassed public of occupied France; and
he even planned to print something of Malraux (though this probably
never got beyond an advance notice). In his own editorials he did not
commit himself to any uncritical enthusiasm even for Pétain, let alone
Hitler; nor did he open the columns of literary liberalism to the savage
outbursts against the 'corrupting' literature of the Twenties and Thirties
which resounded through certain other French journals after the defeat.
But, for all that, what a fall from the genuine democratic vitality of the
N.R.F.'s politics under the editorship of Paulhan in 1939 and 1940! Just
before the war broke out it had even published the first French translation
from Bert Brecht's series of fierce dramatic sketches, Terrors and Miseries
of the Third Reich-probably a record in anti-fascism among established
French reviews; and up to the last, Julian Benda, Petitjean and many
others had contributed articles often slashed by the pro-fascist war cen-
sorship-condemning appeasement and preaching all-out resistance to
Hitlerism. Now, of course, existing in Paris on sufferance of an even
worse censorship, forbidden to publish Benda (a Jew) and deprived of
Petitjean (a patriot), the N.R.F. can hardly be expected to keep up that
record. But even Drieu seems to have been undergoing a political crise de
conscience in the early stages of his editorship. At any rate, his editorials
are a good deal less pro-fascist than what he was saying in 1934. In the

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WRITERS AND DEFEAT
121
first of them (written in the shelter of the German-Soviet pact) he even
drops a faint hint of sympathy with the French communists: "If France
had made a revolution in '34 or '36, a fascist revolution or a communist
revolution, she would not have made the war of 1940, for she would have
placed herself in a clearer, more modern position with regard to Ger-
many." This can mean either that France would not have fought the war
of 1940 or would not have lost it: the ambiguity is doubtless intentional.
Nor is there much in his other political comments beyond the familiar
condemnation of France's policy between wars and the familiar com-
mendation of such winning attributes of fascism as free physical culture
for all. ("The evil lies in the forgetting of the body.") Tactfully, he con-
cludes his first pronouncement-a brilliant refutation of the view that the
French are a moderate people-with the words: "I should have liked to
talk about Europe, about today's France in today's Europe. Another time.
There two passions are jostling one another, but they are capable of join-
ing forces." A meaningless enough remark. He seems to be striving to
preserve that "freedom in the face of fascism" of which he spoke eight
years ago. One wonders how long it lasted.
And yet Drieu and men like him are zealously working for fascism
by broadcasting their special views of it through the N.R.F. The oddest
case of this is a 'Letter to an American,' by Alfred Fabre-Luce, in the
December 1940 issue. Fabre-Luce has been a 'collaborationist' for years:
among other things, his dislike of the Versailles treaty and what it stood
for led him early to pro-German sympathies, which now apparently extend
to the invader. Here he purports to be answering a letter in which an
American friend let slip a suggestion that he, Fabre-Luce, might be un-
happy in occupied Paris. The Frenchman unleashes an almost lyrical
description of the 'ennobling' effects of the German occupation on a city
once febrile with 'haste' and teeming with 'parasites'. Haste and parasites
have vanished; quiet and dignity return; "German and Frenchman are
learning many things about one another that proximity did not suffice to
teach them.... Only now, before this new horizon, do we understand that
we had been lacking half the world." French liberty? "Another race is
taking shape, a race that will perhaps be able to enjoy liberty to the full
because it will be worthy of it.... Do not believe that we are thinking of
some sort of revenge. Henceforth we shall seek greatness in a new direc-
tion." The new direction appears to be toward a united Europe, impov-
erished and noble-the impoverishment being laid to the 'guilty men' who
kept France divided, the nobility to the people who have now been freed
of them. In the end, it seems, the Spartan virtues will triumph over eco-
nomics: "Tomorrow the U.S.A. will not be able to withstand the competi-
tion of a disciplined and impoverished Europe." The letter ends on a note
of pity for America, reversing the American's pity for France: unless we
soon get rid of our money and gross materialism, we will be too late for
the New Age. (In summary, the article sounds like some grotesque attempt
at satire, but it is in deadly earnest.) An equally imaginative note is

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122

PARTISAN REVIEW

struck by Paul Morand in the same issue. He likens the Daladier-Reynaud
'war-mongers' to Don Juan: 'men without pity' who kept leading the
bourgeoisie to a fate worse than death, by way of currency devaluations
and things, until Hitler appeared as the Commandant and froze them in his
fist of stone. "France has fallen victim to the warmonger she loved, and
in her death agonies she thinks to save the life of the husband who pois-
oned her. Don Juan and our hero of yesterday-two hypocrites!" (There
is some satisfaction in that this confirms what one one had always felt about
Paul Morand.)

It is the old trouble of the rootless intellectual, which finds as many
'solutions' as there are sufferers: pacifism, mysticism, communism, fascism
embraced primarily as refuges from the torment of separateness, the curse
of Ishmael. The particular pathos of these French converts to fascism
lies in the way they cling to the concept of liberty. "I fear nothing," Drieu
said in 1934, "because I want nothing. Who will ever stop me from talk-
ing? My subtle pen will always elude constraint." Fabre-Luce's 'freedom
from materialism' really means release from the exacting communal needs
of a world whose politics-'election squabbles' as he contemptuously calls
them-reflect the complexity of its economic structure. The sense of
defeat, of helplessness before such a world then brings on a hankering
after the Strong Man. In Chardonne this reaches an extreme of irre-
sponsibility: he becomes aware of the barricades only after their breach,
and promptly scuttles to the safe side. In him the longing for social order
plus individual liberty is a matter of animal faith, having little to do with
the pale cast of thought. So he can say, with a simplisme even Drieu and
Fabre-Luce would be incapable of: "The spirit of France is in safe keep-
ing.... At first events seem dark and terrifying; much later they will be
explained, they will seem natural and almost always favorable." This,
perhaps, is the consolatory process Cocteau has been going through. After
Munich he expressed his outraged feelings in a sombre poem, Les Inces-
dies, which contains these words: "The evil chants from Nuremberg
entered this richly painted landscape. ... And the poet, brought to his
feet by the wind of extraordinary catastrophes which makes the harp of
his nerves vibrate, swore to himself that death would not take him alive."
Now he is reported to be on excellent terms with the authorities in Paris;
and his activities include writing for a new magazine edited by Alphonse
de Chateaubriant, a novelist, fascist and country gentleman who never
missed a Nuremberg rally. The truth seems to be, not simply that these
welcomers of fascism are 'Irresponsibles', but that they are too fond of
their 'freedom' as individuals to shoulder either the responsibility of
active vigilance over the limited liberties accorded them by a limited
democracy or the responsibility of detachment and independence which
they bear as intellectuals. Hence their capitulation to a system which will
grant them freedom from both these burdens. Hence their significance
for Americans exposed to analogous temptations which grow stronger
every day.

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WRITERS AND DEFEAT
123
One turns with relief to that arch-priest of rational detachment, André Gide, who published two new installments from his journal in the I.R.F. before it grew too reactionary for him. His comments have their pathos too, but it springs from integrity, not corruption. Some charac- teristic ones: "If I sense unlimited potentialities of acceptance within me, it is because they do not in any way involve the essential being. Thought runs far worse dangers in allowing itself to be dominated by hate. As for restricting my comforts, my pleasures, I am ready. To tell the truth, my aging body has little use for them. Perhaps things would not be the same if I were twenty, and I think that young people are more to be pitied today than old men." (One younger man's comment on the situation, in an editorial in Esprit, runs: "The war is lost. It remains for youth to bring to fruition the greatest revolution of modern times." More inten- tional ambiguity?) "If, as is to be feared," Gide continues, "freedom of thought, or at least freedom to express thought, is denied us tomorrow, I shall try to persuade myself that art and even thought will lose less thereby than in an excess of liberty.... We are entering a period in which liberal- ism will become the most suspect and the least practicable of virtues. But I am trying to persuade myself that it is in non-liberal epochs that the free spirit attains its highest excellence." The uneasiness of this stoicism is more apparent in a blistering attack of his on Chardonne, which ap- peared in the Figaro. In it he characterizes Chardonne by words appro- priate to the entire group I have been discussing: "In the crucible of this mind everything gets melted down, mixed up, volatilized, muddled and lost. Thanks to this he attains without difficulty (non dolet) a state of superior ataraxia.... Thanks to him, we become fully aware of ourselves. As he delights in his own vagueness he describes it to us so well that he makes us wish, more energetically and deliberately, to get out of it. Before his fluidity, his inconsistency, (if I may judge from myself) we feel more keenly our own firmness, and, before so many hazy acquiescences, our constancy."
The Gide-Chardonne battle is only one aspect of a further develop- ment in French literary journalism under the New Order, a development that is also very close to home. Scarcely a month had elapsed after the blitzkrieg when certain French writers of fascist propensities began to lay part of the blame for the disaster on the main literary trends of the post-Proust era, calling them amoral, over-refined, destructive and other adjectives heard over here recently from people who ought to know better. The leaders of this attack, which, under the slogan 'Les Mauvais Maîtres', raged well on into 1941, were Camille Mauclair, an old art- and Mussolini- mier, Henry Bordeaux, a best-selling novelist and Academician, and Henri Massis, editor of the Revue Universelle, who distinguished himself some years ago by initiating a mock trial of Gide before a 'court' of intel- lectuals to clear up the question of his alleged dangerous influence on French youth (Gide won hands down). The movement gained some support from bigger men, such as Claudel, who reproved the 'barrenness, lack of

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124 PARTISAN REVIEW

charity, and unhealthy and depressing atmosphere' of some post-World
War I French writing, with the qualification that "the good in the higher
spheres of our literature more than compensated for the bad." If this flurry
of recrimination is remembered at all it will be for the retorts it provoked
from Duhamel, Mauriac and Gide: statements of the real values in French
culture, words particularly heartening as coming in these days from France
herself. Duhamel: "French writers were going about the task undertaken
by their forerunners centuries ago: to describe humanity, observe events
and manners, and draw instruction from life. Nothing is more worthy of
their efforts." Mauriac, whose Catholicism is singularly free from the
taint of reaction, published a long and eloquent statement of admiration
for writers as diverse as Bergson, Maurras, Valery, Claudel, Proust, Gide,
Montherlant, Giono and Malraux, concluding with the words: "On the
morrow of a crushing defeat, let us not be taken in by the niggardly,
envious or knavish men who presume to exact a synthetic moralism from
the writers of France. Let us not become accomplices of the impotent
creatures who are convinced, in the great silence after the cyclone, that
their turn has come at last.... After our disaster as before it, great books
will remain great books; and, for all their sublime principles, writers who
are nothing will not cease to belong to nothing." And Gide, as usual, crys-
tallizes the issue in a sentence: "To me it seems as absurd to incriminate
our literature with reference to our defeat as it would have been to con-
gratulate it in 1918, when we were the victors."

Such are the literary repercussions of the force that has wrought havoc
in the senior culture of Europe. A sentence comes to mind from a still
older one, that of the Thousand Nights and A Night: "Mine is a tale which,
were it engraved on the corners of the eyes with needle-gravers, were a
warning to whoso would be warned."

Note
The bulk of this article is based directly on issues of the N.R.F. and
Esprit. The rest comes from sources included in the following list:
The Nation, Dec. 6, 1941: 'Literature of the French Defeat.' Jan. 10, 1942:
'A Letter from France.'
The New Republic, Dec. 22, 1941: Marc Slonim, 'French Writing Today.'
The Living Age, April 1941: Eugene Jolas, 'Letters and Arts in Wartime
Europe.' May 1941: Henri Longa, 'The Eclipse of the French Press.'
Partisan Review, Jan.-Feb. 1941: William Petersen, 'What Has Become
of Them?' Sept. Oct. 1941: Victor Serge, 'French Writers, 1941.'
1941.'
Horizon (London), Nov. 1941: 'Letter from France, II.' Part on N.R.F.
reprinted in Poetry (Chicago), Jan. 1942.
The New Statesman (London), Oct. 18, 1941: 'The Continental Press.'
La France Libre (London), June 1941: 'Chronique de France: Culture et
Société.' Dec. 1941: Denise Aymé, 'Quelques Revues Françaises.'
Lettres Françaises (Buenos Aires), July and Oct. 1941: 'L'Actualité
Littéraire.'

=== Page 30 ===
Art Chronicle
Sweeney Soby and Surrealism

THE PROGRESSION OF MODERN ART differs from that of past periods in
its dependence upon illustrated books. Exhibitions come and go, but
volumes and catalogs (particularly when compiled as ambitiously as those
issued by the Museum of Modern Art*) remain behind for leisurely con-
templation. I dwell upon the writings of James Sweeney and James Soby
rather than upon the shows of Miró and Dali which they arranged respec-
tively and simultaneously last December because they represent a trend
in contemporary criticism which I do not think adequately pursues the
function of the critic. Both writers manage to be specific and accurate
when they are dealing with picturesque details; anecdotes and quotations
are documented in a thoroughly businesslike manner. But when esthetic
matters are approached the writers become either so general or so inaccu-
rate that the public must be very much confused.

The two Spanish painters are quite justly put forward as enemies of
abstract painting. ("Have you ever heard of greater nonsense than the
aims of the abstractionist group?" asks Miró. "This model mental debility
called abstract art" Dali jeers in a chapter called the Abject Misery of
Abstraction-Creation.) To get over some possible obstructions of a per-
sonal order let me say that I do not believe that this has stood in the way
of my appreciation of either artist. Miró I have long considered the most
important painter of his generation; in Dali, on the other hand, I have
never found much beyond a slick presentation of unexpectedly-juxtaposed
objects, double images, etc., that sound much spookier in words than they
appear when realized by Dali. Even so it is not with Dali's platform that
I quarrel, which impelled by a distinguished sensibility might conceivably
produce fine paintings. (But I do not share enthusiasm for his technical
equipment, for before discussing it one should qualify the meaning of
"technique." If it means merely that he paints tightly, without ever slop-
ping over the contour-lines, then Dali is a good technician, along with
Sheeler, Blume, and many others. But this is not so difficult a feat as it
is usually considered by non-painters if one uses fine sable brushes after
sandpapering the canvas, and particularly if one cares nothing for keep-
ing the parts keyed into any sort of structural fabric. For me technique
is something more complicated and internal than this.)

Let us now return to the manner in which the two painters are being
presented. I support Sweeney and Soby in emphasizing their anti-abstract
tendencies but I feel that they both present the crucial point in a way

*Joan Miró, by James Johnson Sweeney; Salvador Dali, by James Thrall Soby.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. $2.00 each.

125

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126 PARTISAN REVIEW

which is thoroughly misleading. Each devotes considerable space to main-
taining that his respective artist passed through a period when he under-
stood and followed the Cubist and abstract tradition which he later saw
through and rejected. Whereas in reality neither artist ever penetrated
very deeply into the subject at all. Miró obviously acquired his ability to
coordinate shape, color, and line from abstract painters (particularly Arp)
but his work always depends strongly on representational suggestions. He
never got very far inside the picture surface and he added nothing to the
solutions of the abstract problems. Had he done so it would have seemed
quite out of key with an expressive range which has always fitted his very
direct realization without a strain. Sweeney quotes him as announcing
“for a thousand men of letters, give me one poet!” Had Miró been just a
little more a man of letters perhaps his work would not have been declin-
ing so sadly since 1933; but this is neither here nor there, because only
a very pure poet could have produced the fine mural-canvases of that year.
It is Sweeney who misleads by putting him forward as something he
is not.

Dali is inflated even more preposterously, for he never imbibed any-
thing from abstraction either through instinct or study. The barren and
feeble 1925 Harlequin plainly shows that he was never even aware of the
problems, although Soby tells us that “he showed remarkable virtuosity in
painting Cubist works.” Just the rendering of a lob-sided object at some
point in his career is not proof that an artist knows all about Cubism and
abstraction. Benton, Biddle, Rivera, etc., tell us similarly that they passed
through the “isms” and found that they were all the bunk; if one disinters
their efforts in this direction one easily agrees that they are the bunk. The
illustrated sample of Dali’s abstract period performs a similar service.

It is perhaps natural that from such an external method of art-pres-
entation a book upon Dali should provide more interest than one on Miró.
Certainly a sort of obtuse “fun” is provided by standards that so com-
pletely affront any known canon of taste. Dali exclaims “One thing is
certain, I hate simplicity in all its forms.” He loathes all modern architec-
ture except what he calls the “undulant-convulsive style.” Anything func-
tional or mechanical that surrounds him he conceals in living shapes; his
sofa is made to resemble Mae West’s lips, a telephone is hidden within a
plaster lobster. The trouble with all this is that it is never as funny in
reality as it sounds in print. Soby takes it all very seriously and poses the
quaint question: “one may ask which type of architecture more accurately
diagnosed the hidden psychosis of the years just before the war: machines
à habiter, with their flat white roofing and broad areas of glass; or the
small, dark, womblike houses which Dali proposed to build as retreats
from a mechanical civilization and which now, as portable air raid shelters,
cover the landscape of England.”

The gravest charge against Soby is his ignorance of modern painting.
Unlike Sweeney, Soby does, to be sure, grant that Surrealism has not

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ART CHRONICLE 127
demolished the abstract movement, which "continues to thrive, nourished
on Picasso's boundless energy, Mondrian's dogma, and Miro's inventive-
ness." But what is any one to say who has just read in Sweeney's book
that Miro's inventiveness is directed against abstraction? Who knows
further that Picasso's energy is also directed against abstraction, and that
Mondrian's "dogma" produced some beautiful Mondrians but not much
else? On another page he talks of Bérard's "enigmatic, central position in
recent Parisian art." I do not pretend to have penetrated all the Soby
circles in Paris, but I did visit many exhibitions; I never saw a canvas by
Bérard or even heard his name mentioned.

Sweeney is stylistically more confusing than Soby. He employs the
most ambitious figures of speech which, for me at any rate, never quite
have any meaning. When the intent is to be just picturesque I find it
merely pompous: "within the rhythms of his compositions the slow move-
ments of a Spanish dance will suddenly burst into those of a Catalan Sar-
dana with its intoxicating swing and wistful skirl of pipes." The real
danger is more evident when the question becomes one of esthetic
approach, as when he is telling us how the cubists and others went "dan-
gerously far" in denying the descriptive possibilities of painting, until
Miró's generation "recognized the importance of a renewed stress on
spiritual values in painting." Evidently Sweeney denies spiritual values
to Cubism; but what are spiritual values anyway? I think a question is
opened up here which cannot be dismissed so summarily.

Because of such general terms I find many of the points difficult to
argue. "Gaiety, sunshine, health-color, humor, rhythm; these are the
notes that characterize the work of Joan Miró." I can only suggest that
Miró's finest works are for me gloomy, nocturnal and neurotic. Sweeney
continues on his first note until this final wistful skirl: "Miró's vitality,
laughter, naive lyricism and love of life are, today, auguries of the new
painting in the new period which is to come." This does not make me
look forward very eagerly to the future; perhaps he was thinking of the
present exhibition at the Metropolitan entitled On the Bright Side, in
which the director has selected a large number of cheery American paint-
ings with which to cover the cases of Japanese porcelains.

GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

Three Current Art Books

Vlaminck. By Klaus G. Perls. The Hyperion Press-Harper. $3.50.
Paul Klee: Paintings, Watercolors, 1913 to 1939. Edited by Karl Nieren-
dorf. Introduction by James Johnson Sweeney. Oxford University Press. $6.
They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century.
By Sidney Janis. Dial Press. $3.50.

It is possible to get away with murder in writing about art. In the
text which he supplies for this latest book of Hyperion's series on modern

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128 PARTISAN REVIEW

artists, Mr. Perls discharges himself disingenuously of the obligation to discuss Vlaminck's painting. There is so much disagreement in matters of taste, says Mr. Perls, so few fixed criteria, and it is so hard to pin a work of art down, as it should be, by definition in terms of emotional experience, that "it follows that a book on Vlaminck should not contain a discussion of his artistic qualities." Instead we get biographical facts, valuable enough in themselves, and gush. Mr. Perls should be ashamed of his book. He must have seen much more of Vlaminck's work than all but a few of us, and he should have felt an obligation to describe the development of Vlaminck's art, at least factually, for the benefit of his admirers, most of whom like myself wonder by just what steps this great but not greatly publicized artist came to paint the way he has for the last fifteen years or so. I know, Vlaminck is a repetitious painter, and it is difficult to describe a progression through repetition. But as difficult as that may be, one does not write about art in the first place without being ready to confront the difficult. The physical qualities of this book are of a piece with its text. However, as bad as the numerous color plates are, their colors are so uniformly off that an indication of their abstract rela tionships to each other in the original survives, and thus you can get some notion or souvenir of Vlaminck's real quality.
They Taught Themselves is first-hand writing about art. It contains a series of descriptive monographs and biographical sketches covering thirty "naive-primitive" American painters of this century, with black and white reproductions of their work. Many of these artists, and some of the best of them, were discovered by Mr. Janis himself, and his book is a record in a way of the operations of his taste, which is spontaneous, culti vated, and of a catholicity that must mean an immense delight in painting for its own sake. I have many objections to the way Mr. Janis writes and to some of his assertions, but behind every one of his choices is a good reason, even if each is not, as André Breton claims, "an intellectual event, or a landmark in the direction of mystery and fire." Nevertheless, it is my opinion that save for the matchless Rousseau-who was, I suspect, more a deliberate than a naive primitive-most contemporary primitive painters are overrated, especially the French: Bombois, Bauchant, Vivin, Eve, et al., all of whom are somewhat spoiled. Cultured painting, for all the crimes of its exponents, has a power to multiply sensations and sugges tions that very little primitive painting can equal. And if it is true that some of Mr. Janis's artists can take a place in the front ranks of American painting, it is a sad reflection on our painting. Yet it is true, and it is sad. Morris Hirshfield, to whom Mr. Janis rightly gives the most space, would hold his own against any competition, but if Pickett, Sullivan, Frouchtben, and Tourneur, as good as they are, (not Kane, who is over rated) seem so good by comparison to what is shown at the annual Whit ney exhibitions, then American painting is in a bad way.... I wish Mr. Janis had given more space to Tourneur, whose work I discovered for

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ART CHRONICLE
129
myself in Washington Square at about the same time Mr. Janis did. His
small pinkish landscapes are even more remarkable than "The Siwanoy
Night Patrol," which is reproduced in this book. Tourneur's case points
out the need to make some generic distinctions between these self-taught
painters. There are those whose art is closer to that of children and primi-
tive peoples, dateless in everything except subject matter; these are true
primitives or naifs; and then there are those who have acquired some-
thing of the technical competence of our civilization yet retain an essen-
tial naiveté because of their isolation from culture; these I would call
eccentrics. There are also intermediary cases. It is significant that most
of the naive-primitives began painting in earnest relatively late in life
when they were too old to become professional and no longer adaptable
enough to turn commercial. It is this late start which has preserved them.
The Klee book is made up of sixty-five well-executed black and
white reproductions in chronological order. The only fault to be found is
that over half of the pictures reproduced date after 1932, when Klee's
best work was behind him, and his style had begun to harden and lose its
precious lightness. But this hardness and this heaviness are somewhat
attenuated in black and white; the most characteristic perfection of Klee
may be missing, but there is enough else. Mr. Nierendorf's biographical
and bibliographical notes are informative and, refreshingly enough,
written with restraint. And Mr. Sweeney in his introduction goes directly
to the center of critical gravity, resorting to almost none of the subter-
fuges of impressionistic appreciation by which most writers on art try to
evade the arduous responsibilities of analyzing it. I object, however, to
his insistence upon the "poetry" in Klee's art. It is possible to say that
all art is successful by virtue of its "poetry," but it does no good then to
attribute a large amount of it to one great artist and a lesser amount to
another equally great one. Is Beethoven more poetic than Bach? If Klee's
poetry is produced by an "ambiguity of plastic relations which speaks
through all its elements instead of merely relying on what it means," is
Renoir's art any less poetic?
CLEMENT GREENBERG

=== Page 35 ===
Poems
A Note by the Editor

Most of the younger contemporary poets have to hurdle the overlap-
ping barriers of fashion and taste. One is inescapable, and the other neces-
sary. We all recognize the dangers of fashion, of not being able to sur-
mount it, but little is said about the no lesser dangers of not being able to
surmount good taste. This is an age of good taste in literature, and what
displeases me in so much of the competent work of our younger poets is
the timidity good taste enforces. These poets go no further than a general
good taste, which has been established for the moment by their admiration
of Yeats, Stevens and Auden, will take them. Their care to be smooth and
correct outweighs every other concern, and they smooth and correct out of
their over-contrived verse all the resistances of the personal, tempera-
mental, all the necessary awkwardness and faux pas of original creation.
But the poet who allows himself to write only in the way he feels he must
write, regardless of taste and fashion, and who wrestles with and exploits,
rather than evades, the difficult material offered by his own temperament–
such a poet goes further than taste can guide him. And for this reason,
whether or not he really is a poet is decided very quickly.
By taste I do not mean the discipline of poetry; in going beyond taste
the poet does not go beyond discipline, but extends it to new areas, incor-
porates new regions into the domain of poetry. Nor do I necessarily mean
by this Experiment. The poet writes in a new way only because he has to,
not because he wants to. And often he does not have to write in a new
way in order to write new poetry.
Except for Thomas' ballad I have selected the poetry here from
unsolicited manuscripts. It represents no one tendency, but it avoids, I
hope, two: the tendency of current good taste and the tendency of the
enthusiastic ego. None of these poems point out as definitely as would
certain poems by Auden and Barker the directions in which for the lack of
anything better I hope English poetry will go, but they do point them out
to some extent. They have in common, I believe, spontaneity, the com-
paratively successful digestion of influences, and they show distortions
that result from the effort to deal with resistant material. What is more,
in accepting form they accept it as something to be emphatic with, not to
be surrendered to.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
130

=== Page 36 ===
NEW POEMS
131
Isabella Fey
PALINGENESIS
Eros, once winged and beaked and spurred
In the full regal panoply of bird,
Plunged out of heaven through unrestraining skies
(uttering such keen tumultuous cries)
He struck at earth with space-engendered shock,
Rutted the soil and crushed resistant rock,
Shattered great deeps that cleft the planet's core,
Furrowed new seas where lands had stretched before,
Clawed up whole forests, devastated plains,
Made deserts green with pinion-driven rains—
Thus did the heavenly groom with swift, death-gaitered stride
Trample the splendor of his own appointed bride.

Deafened and amazed
The old gods gazed:
'Is he of us? Is this the flightsome beast
Through whom ourselves released
A secret, devious immortality?
Let us bind him with flesh and muffle him with sad banality.'

Behold now Eros as the midnight groom,
Prisoned in flesh and bound to the narrow room,
The licit cubicle, the lawful wife,
Skulking progenitor of rich-crawling life.
Yet what can she know of outer wings and space
Who takes the body, guessing not the face?
She, slumbering bride, the designated ground
Wherein new forms and wild new deaths abound?
She, the poor earth, forbidden to behold
The countenance of her midnight lover bold?
Silence and darkness check his golden flight,
The bird of noon constrained to move in night.

So do they meet in dull cohabitation
To spawn a grovelling breed with each new visitation
And all her many-chambered mansion teems

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132 PARTISAN REVIEW

With furtive flow of dank subluminous dreams;
She sleeps in a pale sunless watery bloom,
In shallow seas or deep pelagic gloom,
Submerged in the lifting of an endless tide—
Yet now she feels strange agitations ride
Those lunar frequencies—she stirs
Breathing a life familiar but not hers;
The sweet-stabbing knowledge of an alien breath
Lifts her from slumber as from drowning death;
Out of millenniums the separate moments rise
To pluck at her eyelids and her darkened eyes;
Rising from ocean's blind profundities, she breaks
Into the glittering present—and awakes.
Through sleep's yet clinging mist
She sees him: Only the flexing wrist
And knee and elbow bent
Tell of his aquiline descent.

Vision of space! The lineal god revealed
Of cosmic road and interstellar field!
His beaked narrow profile testifies to flight
Through rage of suns and parabolas of light;
So the unfeathered angel sleeps beneath her gaze
Still faintly radiant with a cometary blaze.
Vision of space! And weeping woman bent
Over this unguessed royal lineament;
Not one of her billion-billion tried, discarded forms
Took shape of suns or deliverance of storms;
All her vast brood through paleozoic time
Prisoned in radial symmetry and lime—

She bends and broods; her slow tears drip
Hot wax upon his cheek and lip.
Scalded from dream he leaps to meet the eyes
Forbidden by gods most ancient and most wise;
And in the abrupt second, all his archangelic shape
Returns: the aquilated head, each arm a cape
Of heaven-defying feathers, while his feet
Make tattered fury of the bridal sheet,

=== Page 38 ===
POEMS
133

And the wide beak shrieks planetary calls
That split her drums and crack the sentinal walls;
He flutters in air, repels with merciless tine
The clutch of this rapt concubine;
Ribboned with blood she falters, and the bird
Screaming in pitch too piercing to be heard,
Assaults the low ceiling, topples stone on stone
And mounts upward through sunlight to his natural throne.

O Thou! Mother of being, rise to thy new-found feet,
Blinded by light, yet drink this sunlight sweet,
Bright airs of heaven animate thy breath,
Disclose new heavens in the midst of death!
Tight in one hand that trembles still
She grasps a long bronzy quill,
Red witness torn from that aspirant wing,
Cloud-scrivener, the pen of gods, seraphic thing
Sharpened for new inscribings on her heart.
O lancet hostage, O celestial dart!
Rise, foam-born wonder, charioted on shells,
Landward thy winds are set, and air-borne bells
Supplant the old music of the ocean waves.
Deserting old reefs and myriad salty graves`
She moves triumphant—O be swift
Towards those who wait upon thy sovereign gift;
Dear Psyche, newly-waked, set forth to hill and plain
On thy long, incomparable odyssey of pain.

Jackson Mathews

TO WHITMAN
Good old miracle man walking with a wand
Like a walking-stick, breathing a warm wind
To panic the buds with new life, the birds
With heavenly wonder, last of the bards,

You waved your stick, chanted your oracle
Till even the cheapest sparrow felt the logic

=== Page 39 ===
134 PARTISAN REVIEW

Brighten among his feathers like a magic
Making him nothing but a miracle:

You willed us, Walt, in your miraculous codes
'Real gardens with imaginary toads.'

But the comfortable curl of cur on my hearth
Points an ear at phantoms that he hears
Keening above the range of his master's ears,
And winks. He knows what a miracle is worth.

The miracle is that matter is so hard:
Falling stars are now more real than fireworks
Though less dangerous than other skyworks
That can come to earth right here in my yard.

It's not a matter, reader, of being right.
Only tell me, which do you prefer:
"The streetlight hangs in the evening like a star"
Or "the star hangs in the evening like a streetlight"?

Oscar Williams

THE ANSWER USUALLY COMES IN WORDS
The answer usually comes in words, but this is a basket,
A man all covered in straw lying deep in the bulrushes,
And Pharaoh's daughter, her face a benign lamp of love,
Shines over him, surrounded by a province like a future.

The adult is fully armed, though embalmed in the sleep
Of his senses, the latest newborn feeding at the instant;
The servants must ask no questions, the king never know,
A new source has fallen on the grounds of our problems.

Come, are you strong enough to walk, to talk, to climb
The giant beanstalk shining now with new manufacture?
A gulf with mossy sides is the pride of our public park,
Faraway snow covers the pavements that run to horizons.

=== Page 40 ===
POEMS
135

Pharaoh's soldiery is playing checkers in the glass-gold
Greenhouses, and Pharaoh's daughter is wearing drugged bees
In her hair, and honey flows like a river beside the taxes,
The whole world will wait until you die ere it buries you.

Get up and out, my man, the day is bursting with moments,
The attendants have kitchens stored up in the distance,
The river weaves in among the bulrushes its minnows of music
To charm the fount of halfsouls gathering within you.

Ah, Pharaoh's soft daughter walks like a pair of seraphs
Topped by the bounty of her face, a nosegay of dazzles,
She shall lead you by the hand to the waterfall's wall,
Into her chamber of twilight papered with real birds—

Into her secret chamber where her emotions like birds
Shall fly around her probable heart in a ring of parables,
You shall pick from her halo a favored one with your finger,
And two birds will fly straight into your eyes to find you.

Rise from the basket in the bulrushes for time is shining
Like a kingdom with lights, and in time you shall be king,
Your love wear the northern lights' ceremony like a crown;
Rise my good man, from your bed of straws in the wind.

Oscar Williams
THE MIRAGE

I lived a life without love, and saw the being
I loved on every branch; then that bare tree
Stood up with all its branches up, a great harp
Growing straight out of the ground, and there I saw
A squadron of bright birds clothing the bare limbs;
The music notes sat on the harp; it was all love.

This was the heart inside the starved body,
Love grew images like cactus, and planted roses
On the walls of the mirage, and the garden grew
Shining with perfume and the senses dwindled to dew,

=== Page 41 ===
136                                          PARTISAN REVIEW

The century was rolled into one formation aloft,
A cloud, like St. Veronica's handkerchief of love.

There I saw the face of the one without whom
I lived, two soft jewels implanted in her face,
Her hair pouring around her face without sound,
And her love for me sprang on her skin like dew,
Pearl-grey as the flower of the brain she lay
Quivering on the soft cushion of the great day.

I heard a roar of buildings at my conscience,
I looked up and saw a wall of windows glowing,
And there my love leaned out of each window,
There she leaned out multiplied like heaven
In that vast wall of lights, every light her face,
Suns of a thousand mornings ranging on one day.

And all the machines were running, and yes, great
Was the sound of their running downward and down
Into the blind chutes of their rooted feet,
And all of the windows quivered with my many loves,
Like apples they fell off at one windfall, all,
And I awoke on the starved pavements of no love.

E. L. Mayo

IN THE TUNNEL
I knew I should be here
Oh long ago
I saw myself sitting here, scribbling here
Ten years ago,
But when I get up and leave this tunnel
I do not know where I shall go.

Thunder and spark,
Whistle cleaving the night,
Glittering procession of light;
Then doubly
Dark.

=== Page 42 ===
POEMS
137

Without the occasional sound
Of wheels going round,
Of trains going through,
Whistle, and bell,
I should not know where we were;
I should not know;
I should sleep too well.

But here by sad commuters compassed round
In the long tunnel,
In blown foul air, waiting the quickening sound
Of wheels going round, I have seen

Soiled paper, torn
Newspaper softly blown
Down the long tunnel, I have known
The vision of crumpled paper and cannot go home.

Dylan Thomas
BALLAD OF THE LONG-LEGGED BAIT

The bows glided down, and the
coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-
blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles
for luck.

Then goodbye to the fishermanned
Boat with its anchor free and fast
As a bird hooking over the sea,
High and dry by the top of the mast,

Whispered the affectionate sand
And the bulwarks of the dazzled
quay.
For my sake sail, and never look
back,
Said the looking land.

Sails drank the wind, and white as
milk
He sped into the drinking dark;
The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl
And the moon swam out of its hulk,

Funnels and masts went by in a
whirl.
Goodbye to the man on the sea-
legged deck
To the gold gut that sings on his
reel
To the bait that stalked out of the
sack,

For we saw him throw to the swift
flood
A girl alive with his hooks through
her lips:
All the fishs were rayed in blood,
Said the dwindling ships.

Goodbye to chimneys and funnels,
Old wives that spin in the smoke,
He was blind to the eyes of candles
In the praying windows of waves

But heard his bait buck in the wake
And tussle in a shoal of loves.
Now cast down your rod, for the
whole
Of the sea is hilly with whales,

=== Page 43 ===
138 PARTISAN REVIEW

She longs among horses and angels,
The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,
Floated the lost cathedral
Chimes of the rocked buoys.

Where the anchor rode like a gull
Miles over the moonstruck boat
A squall of birds bellowed and fell,
A cloud blew the rain from its
throat;

He saw the storm smoke out to kill
With fuming bows and ram of ice,
Fire on starlight, rake Jesu's stream;
And nothing shone on the water's
face

But the oil and bubble of the moon,
Plunging and piercing in his course
The lured fish under the foam
Witnessed with a kiss.

Whales in the wake like capes and
Alps
Quaked the sick sea and snouted
deep,
Deep the great bushed bait with
raining lips
Slipped the fins of those humpbacked
tons

And fled their love in a weaving dip.
Oh, Jericho was falling in their
lungs!
She nipped and dived in the nick of
love,
Spun on a spout like a long-legged
ball

Till every beast blared down in a
swerve
Till every turtle crushed from his
shell
Till every bone in the scuttled grave
Rose and crowed and fell!

Good luck to the hand on the rod,
There is thunder under its thumbs;
Gold gut is a lightning thread,
His fiery reel sings off its flames,

The whirled boat in the burn of his
blood

Is crying from nets to knives,
Oh the shearwater birds and their
boatsized brood
Oh the bulls of Biscay and their
calves.

Are making under the green, laid
veil
The long-legged beautiful bait their
wives.
Break the black news and paint on
a sail
Huge weddings in the waves,

Over the wakeward-flashing spray
Over the gardens of the floor
Clash out the mounting dolphin's
day,
My mast is a bell-spire,

Strike and smoothe, for my decks
are drums,
Sing through the water-spoken prow
The octopus walking into her limbs
The polar eagle with his tread of
snow.

From salt-lipped beak to the kick of
the stern
Sing how the seal has kissed her
dead!
The long, laid minute's bride drifts
on
Old in her cruel bed.

Over the graveyard in the water
Mountains and galleries beneath
Nightingale and hyena
Rejoicing for that drifting death

Sing and howl through sand and
anemone
Valley and sahara in a shell,
Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy
Thrown to the sea in the shell of a
girl

Is old as water and plain as an eel;
Always goodbye to the long-legged
bread
Scattered in the paths of his heels
For the salty birds fluttered and fed

=== Page 44 ===
POEMS
139

And the tall grains foamed in their
bills;
Always goodbye to the fires of the
face,
For the crab-backed dead on the
sea-bed rose
And scuttled over her eyes,

The boat swims into the six-year
weather,
A wind throws a shadow and it
freezes fast.
See what the gold gut drags from
under
Mountains and galleries to the crest!

The blind, clawed stare is cold as
sleet.
The tempter under the eyelid
Who shows to the selves asleep
Mast-high moon-white women naked

See what clings to hair and skull
As the boat skims on with drinking
wings!
The statues of great rain stand still,
And the flakes fall like hills.

Walking in wishes and lovely for
shame
Is dumb and gone with his flame of
brides.
Susannah's drowned in the bearded
stream
And no-one stirs at Sheba's side

Sing and strike his heavy haul
Toppling up the boatside in a snow
of light!
His decks are drenched with mira-
cles.
Oh miracle of fishes! the long dead
bite!

But the hungry kings of the tides;
Sin who had a woman's shape
Sleeps till Silence blows on a cloud
And all the lifted waters walk and
leap.

Out of the urn the size of a man,
Out of the room the weight of his
trouble
Out of the house that holds a town
In the continent of a fossil

Lucifer that bird's dropping
Out of the sides of the north
Has melted away and is lost
Is always lost in her vaulted breath,

One by one in dust and shawl,
Dry as echoes and insect-faced,
His fathers cling to the hand of the
girl
And the dead hand leads the past,

Venus lies star-struck in her wound
And the sensual ruins make
Seasons over the liquid world,
White springs in the dark.

Leads them as children and as air
On to the blindly tossing tops;
The centuries throw back their hair
And the old men sing from newborn
lips:

Always goodbye, cried the voices
through the shell,
Goodbye always for the flesh is cast
And the fisherman winds his reel
With no more desire than a ghost.

Time is bearing another son.
Kill Time! She turns in her pain!
The oak is felled in the acorn
And the hawk in the egg kills the
wren.

Always good luck, praised the finned
in the feather
Bird after dark and the laughing
fish
As the sails drank up the hail of
thunder
And the long-tailed lightning lit his
catch.

He who blew the great fire in
And died on a hiss of flames
Or walked on the earth in the eve-
ning
Counting the denials of the grains

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140 PARTISAN REVIEW

Clings to her drifting hair, and And thunderbolts in their manes.
climbs; O Rome and Sodom Tomorrow and
And he who taught their lips to sing London
Weeps like the risen sun among The country tide is cobbled with
The liquid choirs of his tribes. towns,

The rod bends low, divining land, And steeples pierce the cloud on her
And through the sundered water shoulder
crawls And the streets that the fisherman
A garden holding to her hand combed
With birds and animals When his long-legged flesh was a
wind on fire
With men and women and waterfalls And his loin was a hunting flame
Trees cool and dry in the whirlpool
of ships Coil from the thoroughfares of her
And stunned and still on the green, hair
laid veil And terribly lead him home alive
Sand with legends in its virgin laps Lead her prodigal home to his ter-
ror,
And prophets loud on the burned The furious ox-killing house of love.
dunes;
Insects and valleys hold her thighs Down, down, down, under the
hard, ground,
Times and places grip her breast Under the floating villages,
bone, Turns the moon-chained and water-
She is breaking with seasons and wound
clouds; Metropolis of fishes.

Round her trailed wrist fresh water There is nothing left of the sea but
weaves, its sound,
With moving fish and rounded stones Under the earth the loud sea walks,
Up and down the greater waves In deathbeds of orchards the boat
A separate river breathes and runs; dies down
And the bait is drowned among hay-
Strike and sing his catch of fields ricks,
For the surge is sown with barley,
The cattle graze on the covered Land, land, land, nothing remains
foam, Of the pacing, famous sea but its
The hills have footed the waves speech,
away, And into its talkative seven tombs
The anchor dives through the floors
With wild sea fillies and soaking of a church.
bridles
With salty colts and gales in their Goodbye, good luck, struck the sun
limbs and the moon,
All the horses of his haul of mira- To the fisherman lost on the land.
cles He stands alone at the door of his
Gallop through the arched, green home,
farms, With his long-legged heart in his
hand.
Trot and gallop with gulls upon
them

=== Page 46 ===
The Shape of the Screen and
The Darkness of the Theatre

Paul Goodman

IN A CONTROVERSY some ten years ago on the best shape for the
cinema screen—the occasion was the abortive introduction of the
Grandeur screen—Sergei Eisenstein contended for the Square as
against the Flat Oblong (5:3, 8:5, etc.) His interest was to give
the director more latitude for “vertical compositions.” In practice,
as it turned out, he lost the argument, for altho a few theatres have
square screens, all film-frames remain oblong. Partly to explain
this outcome, so far as it can be done on merely psychological and
esthetic grounds, I should like to discuss the Screen-shape in a
more fundamental context than was at that time proposed.*

For the sake of thoroness, perhaps I can first add a few notes
to the old discussion. Eisenstein summed up the arguments for the
oblong under three heads, which he then refuted: theatre-structure,
physiology, and esthetics. 1. The overhung balcony requires a
screen lower than the square in order not to interfere with the line
of sight of the rear seats; but the new theatres, argued Eisenstein,
could dispense with such balconies (which were indeed invented
for audition without amplification, for reasons of rent, etc.) But
other architectural considerations must also be kept in mind which
militate against the Square, namely the pitch of the seats to insure
a good direct line of vision, and the avoidance of obstruction from
the heads in front. 2. More crucial are the physiological argu-
ments: that the field of stationary vision is broader than it is high,
and that the moving eyes cover a wider angle horizontally than
vertically. It seems to me that these are refuted too cavalierly by
the great Russian when he says that the head itself can be moved;
for it is all very well to look up and down at a painting, but for the
ninety-minute-long attention to a movie, every cause of strain or
effort must be absolutely minimized before any other considera-

*Quite apart from this entire discussion, I should say that a sufficient explanation
is the physiological one that the field of vision is broader than it is high, so that the
flat oblong presents a larger easily visible area than the square.

141

=== Page 47 ===
142

PARTISAN REVIEW

tion. 3. Thirdly, the esthetic arguments are twofold: that the
majority of paintings are oblongs, and that the oblong (e.g. the
golden rectangle) is demanded by dynamic symmetry. Let us pass
over Eisenstein's remarks on the mysteries of dynamic symmetry.
As to the other point, first he denies the statistics, then goes on to
not the influence of painting that made the screen
say that it was
oblong, but of the stage-opening. But cinema must cease to copy
the stage (this was of course just at the commencement of the
calamitous retrogression of the talkies). Whereas the stage must
be an oblong because human action spreads out horizontally, since
men don't fly, the cinema, he argues, is not restricted to action in
this sense. These points are capital and certainly true; but the
question must still be asked whether there is not a basic affinity
between the stage and most cinema as spectacle as well as action.
The entire question of how the screen is and is not like the stage-
opening, and again, the relation of the screen-frame to a picture-
frame, is just what I want to go into more fundamentally.

I. The Illusion of the Total Field
Reverting to the physiological fact of the field of vision: since
this field is a kind of broad ellipse flattened at the top and bottom,
the question must first arise why the screen, or again the picture-
frame or the stage-opening, is not elliptical rather than square
or oblong.
Now of course the scene, whether in cinema, drama, or paint-
ing does not fill the whole field of vision, but only the center of
attention. The scene is not identical with our spatial reality, but
is an object in the space, which also contains the walls, other spec-
tators, etc.; and there is no doubt that the restriction of the audi-
ence to psychological participation in the scene rather than overt
participation, and to a kind of psychological participation rather
than the total psychological participation of dreams, depends on
the persistent sense of this spatial discontinuity.
At the same time the scene is not a mere object in our vision,
as a man or a chair might be an object, for the scene is (in most
cases) an imitation of the whole visible field. If this were not so,
we could not project ourselves into its world without asking our-
selves, What other objects are there alongside the scene? and such
a question would be destructive of dramatic illusion and the self-

=== Page 48 ===
THE SHAPE AND THE DARKNESS 143
containedness of the spectacle. That is, the illusion, the self-con-
tainedness of the spectacle, and the discontinuity of the scene-
reality with the physical reality are mutually involved; and an
artist bent on avoiding one of these, must also do something about
the others.

The original ellipse of the physical total field to be imitated,
therefore, must always bear some influence on the shape of the
screen or frame. The degree of this influence, however, will be
great where the real space and the action of the actors in it is a
major object of imitation-the case in most landscapes or in pre-
senting the world of the drama; but the degree will be less where
a more particular body is the major object, as in the portrait of a
man or in the recitation of a soliloquy. There are thus three cases:
On the one extreme, where total and even overt participation of the
audience is required, as in the "audience-participation theatre,"
the ellipse broadens out to become identical with the physical
space; there is no frame or proscenium. On the other extreme,
where the attention is to be centered on a particular object in itself,
the ellipse is irrelevant. In the middle, where the illusion of a
world is required, there is a frame and it is elliptical.
But why the flat oblong then (as nearer than the square to
the ellipse) rather than the ellipse itself?

In the second place, granting that in a given case the illusion
of the total field is the effect aimed at, nevertheless the visible arts
in general exploit interesting objects as their most immediate pres-
entation. These are for the most part men, animals, trees, build-
ings, all seen with relation to the horizon and the foreground, that
is in a system of verticals and horizontals. A composition whose
members have no rectilinear relations-e.g. a group of shapes by
Miró-at once seems to be in the vacant sky or in the depths of the
sea; and such a picture often seems more "real," to hang together
better, in an irregular oval frame. But to the degree that the hori-
zon-line and its system of perspective belongs to the objects of
interest, and these objects are the immediate presentation, the scene
as a whole will come under a rectilinear influence; the frame cor-
respondingly-for in the end the function of the frame is to con-
firm the spatial system of the scene-will be square, vertical oblong
(as in the portrait of a man standing), or flat oblong.
If we would then require the combined effects of illusion of

=== Page 49 ===
144 PARTISAN REVIEW

the total field and immediate presentation of terrestrial objects,
perhaps the flat oblong is the most serviceable simple shape. Given
a single problem, a peculiarly appropriate shape is always most
expressive, for instance a little upright oval for a miniature of a
face; but the movie-screen, we must remember, is the common-
denominator of an indefinite number of usual problems. For a
very special effect we may work within the common-denominator,
for instance mask the screen to isolate a figure or iris down to
a detail.

2. The Square and Synthetic Montage
When I speak of the "illusion of the total field," I do not
mean that the scene-space must be illusory in the sense of repro-
ducing the very same spatial properties of the physical space. For
instance the scene may have different laws of perspective, as in
many Chinese paintings, or be the space appropriate to phantastic
space-time juxtapositions quite different from the world we are
used to seeing. And in all painting, in abstract painting especially,
the illusory space tends to become two-dimensional and none other
than the space of the canvas itself.

Nevertheless, all these scenic arts, which begin from the real
space and either reproduce it relatively unmodified (the case where
the frame is like a window), or distort it to create effects of unreal-
ity (as in Caligari or the paintings of Chirico), or abstract it to the
two-dimensional conditions of the canvas, - all these are to be
distinguished from those arts which from the outset disregard the
existence of a persistent space and construct objects and designs
without determining their space at all. Léger's Ballet Mécanique is
of this sort and the so-called non-objective paintings like Kandian-
sky's (as opposed to abstract paintings). And to understand
Eisenstein, I think it is in this direction that we must look.

Consider the following series of effects in cinema: Scenes of
cinema often achieve the pictorial, e.g. much of Murnau's Sunrise
is Dutch landscape or chiaroscuro interior, and the poses in Dov-
zhenko's films are certainly portraits. In such cases the screen-
shape is not unlike the corresponding picture-frame, and it has the
pictorial function of bounding the determined space, guilding the
eye back into the composition, and completing the static whole. (By
"static" here I do not exclude motion across the scene but only the

=== Page 50 ===
THE SHAPE AND THE DARKNESS
145

movement of cutting from scene to scene.) Such active preoccu-
pation with a single shot as a completed whole, however, tends to
destroy the temporal flow of the sequence of scenes, and is there-
fore eschewed in most cinema, for instance in any ordinary story-
telling film. Here the screen-shape is looked thru rather than
looked at; it offers the means for looking out, so to speak, at the
world behind; that is, it acts purely as a window. But now suppos-
ing no illusion of the total world is desired at all: then the screen-
shape may simply be disregarded as a part of the spectacle, and
the compostion may be formed of objects succeeding each other as
if in an indeterminate space or even in no space. This effect, most
obvious in the light-play films, sometimes moves so far from the
conditions of ordinary vision as to be analogous to music, cf. the
efforts of Scriabin or such imbecilities as Anitra's Dance. But if
the presentation is not to be mere play of lights, but objects deter-
mined by an horizon, then the Square shape might be just the most
suitable space, for, as Eisenstein insists, it allows the greatest quan-
tity of expansion in the relevant directions; as a rectangle, it sup-
ports the design of each shot of objects; as not an ellipse or flat
oblong, it neutralizes the sense of an actual visible space. Now any
one who has admired the marvelous synthetic montage of this
director, which is not the turning of a scene before the camera
(illusion of the actual total field), nor yet the posing of a static
composition (picture-frame), but a unity of cutting and synthesiz-
ing a sequence of images of objects by means of their psychological
and philosophical associations, will easily understand why Eisen-
stein asks for the Square. The square is the convenient screen for
synthetic montage.

The square neutralizes not only the illusion of the actual
visible world, but also the sense of visible spectacle altogether,
for it does not play to the visual potentialities of the spectator,
but retracts from the largest area that he could conveniently rest
his eyes in. This leaves the way open to the non-visual play of
attention, unconscious, visceral, and theoretic, that Eisenstein so
much delights in exploiting. He does not speak to the sight. It is
then in this double sense, first as getting away from the limitations
of physical visible reality and secondly from the sentiment of
spectacle altogether, that Eisenstein says the cinema must not copy
the stage. But expressionist staging tries at the same freedom-

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PARTISAN REVIEW
let me mention the expressionist dictum that "vertical motion is
more interesting than horizontal," so that actors somewhat "fly"
after all.
We now ask, however, How are the sequences, whether of
pictorial images, synthetic montages, or dramatic episodes, organ-
ized into the ninety-minute-long film? In answering this, we shall
again have to return to the relation of the screen and the stage-
opening in a more fundamental way. But let me first indicate
another possibility.
The ideal for Eisenstein would no doubt be that the whole
should be one vast synthetic montage of parts of synthetic montage.
This result is even somewhat achieved in Old and New, where the
overall changes of tone and rhythm is a direct expression of the
general theme, while the narrative is reduced almost to a story-
framework for the montage. But certainly for the most part in
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Trauberg, or any of the others, the organ-
ization of the sequences of montage is not itself montage but either
narrative or drama. As such, it draws again on the illusion of a
whole visible world. Do not misunderstand me: the narrative and
drama may themselves be symbolic and not the chief expression,
which may be an idea; but the point is that this idea is not presented
directly by the montage, but indirectly thru the narrative and
drama, with their sense of a self-contained illusory world.

3. Some Kinds of Stage
Let us now broaden our scope from the screen or stage-open-
ing itself to the more inclusive whole of the scene-opening in the
theatre, with its conditions of light or darkness, silence or music,
and other spectators. My contention is that the flat oblong screen
and the ordinary dark cinema-theatre are conditions for the same
kind of illusion. But I can analyze this out better first in terms of
some kinds of stage.
The argument against the peep-hole or absent-fourth-wall
stage has generally been wrongly proposed as an absolute rejec-
tion, but the correct formulation should be: The peep-hole has an
expression incompatible with the theme or attitude that we now
wish to express; or again, the peep-hole produces a psychological
state in the audience that makes impossible such and such a com-
munication; or again, putting it formally, such and such a stage

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THE SHAPE AND THE DARKNESS 147

and theatre-conditions are good for such and such a plot or prob-
able sequence.

Consider some properties of the peep-hole theatre. The house-
lights are dimmed, the audience is silent. Not only are the stage-
lights always brighter, but they belong to an independent system
of lighting and they illumine an independent space. The stage-
space is made distinct from the audience-space in other ways also:
is raised above it, framed in a proscenium, etc. Further, the sense
of an absent fourth wall gives the stage-incidents an independent
time and causality, for the stage-events can no wise act on or be
reacted on by the physical audience. But since the dimly-lit and
silent audience has no life of its own, its entire activity must con-
sist in mental projection into the stage-world. There, of course, it
has the liveliest interests, interests which are indeed intimately
personal to each member of the audience; but these interests assert
themselves and are gratified under the conditions of phantastic
projection. In short, we might say the following: (1) The peep-
hole stage expresses an illusion of the total visual field. (2) It
keeps the audience all eyes. (3) The probability of the plot on
such a stage seems to be given entirely thru the actors, who are
self-subsistent and on their own, for there is no other continuous
reality. (3) The scenery must also add up to a self-subsistent
reality, tho of course it need not be realistic; but bare stage-boards
in the manner of Orson Welles' Julius Caesar will not do. (4) The
audience-interest is given under the psychological conditions of
projection, as in day-dreams.

Now contrast such a stage with a daylight performance (of,
say, a masque) on a lawn or in an amphitheatre. Here there is a
continuity between the visible audience and the stage and actors;
and this might express, depending on the ethical tone of the plot
and the occasion, the sense that the actors are amateurish neigh-
bors, subject to running comment; or that they are heroic surro-
gates of the audience, perhaps in a religious act like the mass; or
that the play is a mere spectacle or pageant, an interesting object
alongside the other sights in the total field of vision. The unity of
the whole, we must then say, is partly given by the audience's sense
of its relation to the play. (I do not mean this to be a description
of the Greek theatre, where the Chorus both unified and divided
the play and the public.)

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148 PARTISAN REVIEW

Consider, again, the Elizabethan stage with much of its
action on the apron;—I am speaking more of the stage of Marlowe
than of Shakespeare, and more of the chronicle-plays than of the
tragedies. Suppose on this stage the poet violates the unities of
space and time at will, brings forth his speakers on the apron or
on the inner-stage as suits his purpose, etc. Such a stage makes
more indirect the illusion of a presented world, it introduces effects
of narration into the drama. (At the same time there is still the
illusion of a world, tho with indefinite geography and perspective.)
Psychologically, there is a more direct communication between
the poet and the audience; the unity is partly in the poet's inter-
ventions and juxtapositions, whether for rhetorical or lyrical effect,
or reportage, or to tell a story. Here elaborate asides to the audi-
ence and topical jokes do not seem out of place. It is interesting
to observe how the conventions of the Living Newspaper, like
vaudeville before it, have tried to adapt the architecture of the
peep-hole stage to the direct communication of the Elizabethan
platform.

The expressionists, as I have mentioned, sometimes neutralize
the sense of an (imitated) physical world entirely. The revolving
stage, the spiral stairs that rise from the flat on which men ordi-
narily converse, the timeless masks and costumes—these all speak
in terms of theory or inner perceptions; there is still a self-con-
tained visual pattern and therefore the imitation of a total field,
but the pattern is more abstract and indeed tends to spread out to
include the architecture of the theatre itself, which is preferably
styled according to the same canons.

Quite another effect, again, is that of the audience-participa-
tion theatre, for here not only are the play and the public physi-
cally and psychologically continuous, but—in the ideal case—the
overt reactions of the audience ought to alter the events of the play.
Strictly speaking, this is not a "theatre" at all. Here we enter the
realms of political meetings, religious revivals, and parlor con-
versations; and have come a long way from the hush, the three
knocks, and the footlights lit, before the curtain rises.

I have introduced these few remarks only to demonstrate that
the flat oblong of the peep-hole stage is by no means due merely to
the fact that human-beings do not fly, but especially to the fact
that its peculiar properties, which are not the properties of the

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THE SHAPE AND THE DARKNESS 149

Stage in general, strongly call for imitation of the total field and
illusion of the physical space.

4. The Darkness of the Theatre
The movie-theatre is darkest of all. The movie audience con-
sists preeminently of individuals in isolation. And the discon-
tinuity between the audience-space and the space of the scenes is
of course absolute. If the effect of the brightly lit stage is a con-
trolled phantasy, the flickering lights of the screen working on the
ninety-minute attention unrelieved by intermissions produce what
is nearer to hypnosis (where it is not perfect sleep). Certainly,
especially in a small theatre, the stage is warmer and more inti-
mate in appeal than the screen, so long as the phantasy is more
nearly like what we are used to or consciously desire; the actors
are flesh, the shadows are only shadows. But let the cinematic
attention become fascinated, as it does as the minutes flow by, and
these huge shadows press in closer to the mind at this deeper level
than the sight of real flesh can penetrate. The disjoined and com-
posite space created by cutting from scene to scene is more like
the space of dreams than the quiet stage can hope to imitate.

These circumstances explain easily enough why cinema has
devoted itself almost exclusively to the excitement of ordinarily
repressed feelings and even unconscious connections; and why, tho
clearly visible and therefore more patently absurd than literary
phantasies, its world of desire is not immediately rejected. Adding
the mass-production and the enormous audience, we have the
principle of selection of these feelings, and we understand the
usual plot, the star-system, the surrealist interiors, etc. Indeed,
the real difficulty is to see why the movies have not more directly
imitated the actual technique and contents of dreams-consider,
e.g., the extraordinary compulsion of Le Sang d'un Poète, where
this is done. But the reason for this abstention may well be audi-
ence fear and modesty, which are even stronger than audience
desire. To put this another way: the public moving-picture that
the audience talks about after the performance, or reads about
before it in the reviews, is not the same as the actual experience
of the solitary spectator; but this actual experience is hinted at in
the advertising.

How far this tepid bath is from the intellectual synthetic mon-

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150 PARTISAN REVIEW

tage of Eisenstein! His constructions are passionate and rich with
dream-symbolism to be sure, but like other artists he gives these
in effortful stabs to a disturbing depth, at which the audience
cannot rest.
It would be further still from a "film of political participa-
tion," whatever such a thing might be.
The hypnotic absorption, again, was immensely aided by the
continuous and not independently interesting musical accompani-
ment of the old films. This music neutralized the audience noises,
lulled the muscle-jitters, and restricted the only possible field of
sensuous interest to the eyes. Its continuity provided just the matrix
needed for the scene-space, to keep it one despite the often kaleido-
scopic cutting; when the music stopped, the mechanism at once
became apparent. But this subject, and the question of the various
possible relations of the speech and the music, is very intricate and
must be studied independently. It seems to me that the talk in the
American films is somewhat destructive of the illusion, it is too
loud and lifelike; contrast it with the whispering and mumbling
often affected by the French (originally because of imperfect
technique).
The fact that both the peep-hole stage and the movie-screen
imitate the total world in conditions of phantasy is a chief cause,
it seems to me, of the remarkable phenomenon of audience-interest
in the personalities of the actors themselves, a phenomenon not
apparent with respect to other arts and spectacles, even musical
performances or oratory. The conception of "Hollywood" is of
course pat for this argument: here is a distant and paradisal world
inhabited completely by the beings of the world of phantasy, but
come to "life." And the machinery of Hollywood publicity is
designed precisely to controlling that life so as not to jar with the
properties of the other world.
Let me make still another sociological observation, a point
of the highest importance, but almost completely disregarded by
the critics of stage and screen. I have mentioned the "drama of
political participation." Now certainly the most determined essays
in both stage and cinema have been made towards direct rhetorical
appeal, for ends both high and low. By "direct rhetorical appeal"
I mean both the rousing of feeling and the presentation of argu-
ments, especially by dramatic example, for or against something

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THE SHAPE AND THE DARKNESS
151
with the end of producing appropriate overt action on the part of
the audience. But first: is it the fact that the excitement roused in
the theatrical condition of phantasy can bridge the discontinuity
and survive in the public world? might not the contrary be partly
true: that the energy attached to such theatrical symbols is thereby
fixed at that level, permanently submerged beneath the political
level? (This is the old story of the women who exhaust their
unction of benevolence in the esthetic splendor and sexuality of
religious ceremonials.) Secondly: is it likely that the desired
reactions, whether of horror or enthusiasm, when fixed in the phan-
tastic world, reappear in the public world with the same positive
or negative value? Perhaps with even the opposite value! as a
child frightened by a gangster film or by images of the horrors of
war may retain, when he "awakes," the sentiment of a forbidden
thrill. Certainly the American public, presented with the usual
images of filmic luxury (still, in 1941, in the style of the Paris
Exposition of 1925), does not react with either emulation or
resentment, but rather with a dreamy delight in these ideals, which
exist in the mental world somewhere near the ideals of honor and
divinity. What then? Am I arguing that these arts can not or ought
not to aim at rhetorical ends? Certainly not; but that from such
rhetorical calculations we must not omit a dimension which may
turn out to be absolutely vital. A necessary safeguard is the
analysis of the expressive medium.

5. Conclusion
To sum up: I have tried to distinguish between artistic imita-
tions of the seen world as a whole, discontinuous from the self-
conscious spectator, and seeming to exhaust the field of vision,
and those other imitations which are merely part of the total field
and preserve a certain continuity between the object and the spec-
tator. I have touched on a few differences of the two types in plot
and psychological appeal. I have argued that the flat oblong of
the screen was not taken over from the stage merely by an histori-
cal influence, but that there is a common cause in the medium of
expression of both. And I have tried partly to explain the chief
explanation, I would maintain, is physiological the almost uni-
versal success of the flat oblong by the somewhat simplist formula
that it is a compromise between the imitation of the total field of

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PARTISAN REVIEW
vision and the rectilinearity with which we compose the terrestrial
objects within the frame.
Again, what then? The conclusion of this line of argument
is by no means that cinema can not or ought not aim at effects of
synthetic construction, or participation, or anything except spatial
illusion;-God forbid that a critic should argue for the status quo,
and what a status quo! Rather, that such non-illusory effects require
the invention of new technical resources and manners of handling,
the work of creative directors. We have seen, for instance, how
Eisenstein's Square is one such invention, more far-reaching in its
expression than one might have thought, intimately related to the
achievement of a non-illusory effect. An invention along another
line is Herr Gropius' "Space Theatre," a plan to project films
simultaneously on several different screens. The exact expressive-
ness of such a medium would have to be discovered by exploration,
but it seems to me-on the analogy especially of the Grandeur
screen-that at least an effect of pageantry could be directly
achieved by this means, for the several spaces would destroy the
illusion of the unique illusory space, restore the relation of the
spectacle as spectacle, and give the spectacle great
magnitude. Another technique for overcoming illusion-but one
which seems to me to sink even deeper into illusion-is the employ-
ment of news-reels or news-reel atmosphere in documentaries.
Another, thrice-familiar, technique is the direct address to the
audience by a huge close-up of a face-but almost always this
particular sequence in the film merely clashes with everything
that has gone before; let me give no examples.
CONTRIBUTORS
JEAN MALAQUAIS is the author of Les Javanais. See the note beginning
page 98 for further information.... JUSTIN O'BRIEN is a member of the
Department of Romance Languages of Columbia University.... FRANK
JONES, co-editor of Diogenes, is working on a Fellowship at the Yale School
of Drama.... ISABELLA FEY lives in Brooklyn.... JACKSON MATHEWS,
whose verse has appeared before in PARTISAN REVIEW, lives in New York
City.... OSCAR WILLIAMS's latest book of verse is The Man Coming
Towards You.... E. L. MAYO lives in Fargo, N. D.... DYLAN THOMAS is
the author of the recently published Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
The ballad printed here was originally published in Horizon.... The Colt
Press will shortly bring out PAUL GOODMAN'S novel, The Grand Piano, or
The Almanac of Alienation.... LEON COLBERT is the pen-name of a
French historian and expert on Russian affairs who is now a refugee in
this country.... RENE ETIEMBLE is a refugee who is a member of the
Exchange Faculty of the University of Chicago.

=== Page 58 ===
London Letter
London, England
Jan. 1, 1942

Dear Editors:
At this moment nothing is happening politically in England, and
since we probably have ahead of us a long exhausting war in which morale
will be all-important, I want to use most of this letter in discussing certain
currents of thought which are moving to and fro just under the surface.
Some of the tendencies I mention may seem to matter very little at present,
but they do I think tell one something about possible future developments.

I. Whom Are We Fighting Against?
This question, which obviously had to be answered sooner or later,
began to agitate the big public some time in 1941, following on Vansit-
tart's pamphlets and the starting of a German daily paper for the refugees
(Die Zeitung, mildly Left, circulation about 60,000). Vansittart's thesis
is that the Germans are all wicked, and not merely the Nazis. I don't need
to tell you how gleefully the blimps have seized upon this as a way of
escaping from the notion that we are fighting against Fascism. But of late
the "only good German is a dead one" line has taken the rather sinister
form of a fresh drive against the refugees. The Austrian monarchists have
fallen foul of the German leftwingers, whom they accuse of being pan-
Germans in disguise, and this delights the blimps, who are always trying
to manoeuvre their two enemies, Germany and Socialism, into the same
place. The point has now been reached where anyone who describes him-
self as "anti-Fascist" is suspected of being pro-German. But the question
is much complicated by the fact that the blimps have a certain amount of
right on their side. Vansittart, badly though he writes, is an able man
with more background than most of his opponents, and he has insisted on
two facts which the pinks have done their best to obscure. One is that
much of the Nazi philosophy is not new but is merely a continuation of
pan-Germanism, and the other is that Britain cannot have a European
policy without having an army. The pinks cannot admit that the German
masses are behind Hitler any more than the blimps can admit that their
class must be levered out of control if we are to win the war. The contro-
versy has raged for four months or more in the correspondence columns
of several papers, and one paper in particular is obviously keeping it
going as a way of baiting the refugees and the "reds" generally. No one,
however, airs any racial theories about Germany, which is a great advance
on the war propaganda of 1914-18.

Ordinary working people do not seem either to hate the Germans or
to distinguish between Germans and Nazis. Here and there there was
violent anti-German feeling at the time of the bad air-raids, but it has
worn off. The term "Hun" has not caught on with the working classes this

153

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PARTISAN REVIEW

time. They call the Germans Jerries, which may have a mildly obscene
meaning but is not unfriendly. All the blame for everything is placed on
Hitler, even more than on the Kaiser during the last war. After an air
raid one often used to hear people say "He was over again last night"—
"he" being Hitler. The Italians are generally called Eyetjes, which is less
offensive than Wops, and there is no popular feeling against them what-
ever, nor against the Japanese as yet. To judge from photos in the news-
papers, the land girls are quite ready to get off with Italian prisoners
working on the farms. As to the smaller nations who are supposed to be
at war with us, no one remembers which is which. The women who a year
ago were busy knitting stockings for the Finns are now busy knitting
them for the Russians, but there is no ill feeling. The chief impression
one derives from all this chaos of opinions is how little the lack of a
positive war aim, or even of any definite mental picture of the enemy,
matters to people who are at any rate at one in not wanting to be governed
by foreigners.

2. Our Allies.

Whatever may be happening among the higher-ups, the effect of the
Russian alliance has been a tremendous net increase of pro-Russian senti-
ment. It is impossible to discuss the war with ordinary working-class and
middle-class people without being struck by this. But the enthusiasm that
ordinary people feel for Russia is not coupled with the faintest interest in
the Russian political system. All that has happened is that Russia has
become respectable. An enormous hammer and sickle flag flies daily over
Selfridge's, the biggest shop in London. The Communists have not caused
so much friction as I expected. They have been tactful in their posters and
public pronouncements, and have gone to unheard-of lengths in support-
ing Churchill. But though they may have gained in numbers as a result
of the Russian alliance, they do not seem to have gained in political influ-
ence. To a surprising extent ordinary people fail to grasp that there is any
connection between Moscow and the Communist party, or even that Com-
munist policy has changed as a result of Russia's entry into the war. Every-
one is delighted that the Germans have failed to take Moscow, but no one
sees in this any reason for paying any attention to what Palme Dutt and
Co. may say. In practice this attitude is sensible, but at the bottom of it
there lies a profound lack of interest in doctrinaire politics. The ban has
not been taken off the Daily Worker. Immediately after it was suppressed
it reappeared as a factory sheet which was illegally printed, but was
winked at. Now, under the title of "the British Worker," it is sold on the
streets without interference. But it has ceased to be a daily and has lost
most of its circulation. In the more important parts of the press the
Communist influence has not been regained.

There is no corresponding increase in pro-American sentiment—the
contrary, if anything. It is true that the entry of Japan and America into
the war was expected by everyone, whereas the German invasion of Russia

=== Page 60 ===
LONDON LETTER
155
came as a surprise. But our new alliance has simply brought out the
immense amount of anti-American feeling that exists in the ordinary low-
brow middle class. English cultural feelings towards America are compli-
cated but can be defined fairly accurately. In the middle class, the people
who are not anti-American are the declassed technician type (people like
radio engineers) and the younger intelligentsia. Up till about 1930 nearly
all “cultivated” people loathed the U.S.A., which was regarded as the vul-
gariser of England and Europe. The disappearance of this attitude was
probably connected with the fall of Latin and Greek from their dominant
position as school subjects. The younger intellectuals have no objection
to the American language and tend to have a masochistic attitude towards
the U.S.A., which they believe to be richer and more powerful than Britain.
Of course it is exactly this that excites the jealousy of the ordinary patri-
otic middle class. I know people who automatically switch off the radio
as soon as any American news comes on, and the most banal English film
will always get middle-class support because “it's such a relief to get away
from those American voices.” Americans are supposed to be boastful,
bad-mannered and worshippers of money, and are also suspected of plot-
ting to inherit the British Empire. There is also business jealousy, which
is very strong in the trades which have been hit by the Lease-Lend agree-
ment. The working-class attitude is quite different. English working-class
people nearly always dislike Americans when in actual contact with them,
but they have no preconceived cultural hostility. In the big towns they
are being more and more Americanised in speech through the medium of
the cinema.
It is uncertain whether English xenophobia is being broken down by
the presence in England of large numbers of foreigners. I think it is, but
plenty of people disagree with me. There is no doubt that in the summer
of 1940 working-class suspicion of foreigners helped to make possible the
internment of the refugees. At the time I talked with countless people,
and except for Left intellectuals I could find no one who saw anything
wrong in it. The blimps were after the refugees because they were largely
Socialists, and the working-class line was “what did they want to come
here for?” Underlying this, a hangover from an earlier period, was a
resentment against these foreigners who were supposedly taking English-
men's jobs. In the years before the war it was largely Trade Union opposi-
tion that prevented a big influx of German Jewish refugees. Of late feel-
ings have grown more friendly, partly because there is no longer a scram-
ble for jobs, but partly also, I think, owing to personal contacts. The
foreign troops who are quartered here in large numbers seem to get on
unexpectedly well with the population, the Poles in particular being a
great success with the girls. On the other hand there is a certain amount
of anti-semitism. One is constantly coming on pockets of it, not violent
but pronounced enough to be disquieting. The Jews are supposed to dodge
military service, to be the worst offenders on the Black Market, etc., etc.

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156 PARTISAN REVIEW

I have heard this kind of talk even from country people who had probably
never seen a Jew in their lives. But no one wants actually to do anything
to the Jews, and the idea that the Jews are responsible for the war never
seems to have caught on with the big public, in spite of the efforts of the
German radio.

3. Defeatism and German Propaganda.
Appeasement of the Chamberlain type is not "dead," as the news
papers are constantly assuring us, but is lying very low. But there exists
another school of rightwing defeatism which can be conveniently studied
in the weekly paper Truth. Truth has had a curious history and is a
distinctly influential paper. At one time it was a non-political factual
paper specialising in a genteel form of muckraking (exposure of patent
medicine frauds, etc.), and was taken in as a matter of course in every club
and regimental mess throughout the Empire. So far as I know it still has
the same circulation, but latterly it has taken a definite political and eco
nomic line and become a stronghold of the worst kind of rightwing Tory
ism. Sir Ernest Benn, for instance, writes in it every week. It is not only
anti-Labour, but in a discreet way anti-Churchill, anti-Russian and, more
markedly, anti-American. It opposed the exchange of naval bases for
American destroyers, the only other opposers being the Blackshirts and
Communists. The strategy it advocates is to avoid entangling alliances,
keep out of Europe and concentrate on self-defence on sea and in the air.
The obvious logic of this is to make a compromise peace at the earliest
possible moment. The quantity of advertisements for banks and insurance
companies which Truth contains shows how well it is thought of in those
quarters, and recently questions in Parliament brought out the fact that it
is partly owned by the Conservative Party machine.

Leftwing defeatism is quite different and much more interesting. One
or two of the minor political parties (for instance the British Anarchists,
who followed up the German invasion of Russia with a terrific and very
able anti-Soviet pamphlet, The Truth about Russia) follow a line which
by implication is "revolutionary defeatist." The I.L.P. is preaching what
amounts to a watered version of the "Ten Propositions" set forth in the
Partisan Review, but in very indefinite terms, never clearly stating whether
or not it "supports" the war. But the really interesting development is
the increasing overlap between Fascism and pacifism, both of which over
lap to some some extent with "left" extremism. The attitude of the very young
is more significant than that of the New Statesman pinks who war-mon
gered between 1935 and 1939 and then sulked when the war started. So
far as I know, the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are anti
don't believe in any "defence of democracy," are inclined to prefer Ger
many to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are
somewhat older feel. The entry of Russia into the war didn't alter this,
though most of these people pay lip-service to Russia. With the out-and

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LONDON LETTER 157
out, turn-the-other-cheek pacifists you come upon the much stranger
phenomenon of people who have started by renouncing violence ending
by championing Hitler. The antisemitic motif is very strong, though
usually soft-pedalled in print. But not many English pacifists have the
intellectual courage to think their thoughts down to the roots, and since
there is no real answer to the charge that pacifism is objectively pro-
Fascist, nearly all pacifist literature is forensic-i.e., specialises in avoid-
ing awkward questions. To take one example, during the earlier period of
the war the pacifist monthly the Adelphi, edited by Middleton Murry,
accepted at its face value the German claim to be a "socialist" state fight-
ing against "plutocratic" Britain, and more or less equated Germany with
Russia. Hitler's invasion of Russia made nonsense of this line of thought,
and in the five or six issues that have followed the Adelphi has performed
the surprising feat of not mentioning the Russo-German war. The Adelphi
has once or twice engaged in Jew-baiting of a mild kind. Peace News,
now also edited by Middleton Murry, follows its old tradition of opposing
war for different and incompatible reasons, at one moment because viol-
ence is wicked, at another because peace will "preserve the British
Empire," etc.

For some years past there has been a tendency for Fascists and cur-
rency reformers to write in the same papers, and it is only recently that
they have been joined by the pacifists. I have in front of me a copy of the
little anti-war paper Now which contains contributions from, among
others, the Duke of Bedford, Alexander Comfort, Julian Symons and Hugh
Ross Williamson. Alexander Comfort is a "pure" pacifist of the other-
cheek school. The Duke of Bedford has for years been one of the main
props of the Douglas Credit movement, and is also a devout Anglican, a
pacifist or near-pacifist, and a landowner upon an enormous scale. In the
early months of the war (then Marquis of Tavistock) he went to Dublin
on his own initiative and obtained or tried to obtain a draft of peace terms
from the German Embassy. Recently he has published pamphlets urging
the impossibility of winning the war and describing Hitler as a misunder-
stood man whose good faith has never really been tested. Julian Symons
writes in a vaguely Fascist strain but is also given to quoting Lenin. Hugh
Ross Williamson has been mixed up in the Fascist movement for some
time, but in the split-off section of it to which William Joyce ("Lord Haw
Haw") also belongs. Just before the war he and others formed a fresh
Fascist party calling itself the People's Party, of which the Duke of Bed-
ford was a member. The People's Party apparently came to nothing, and
in the first period of the war Williamson devoted himself to trying to
bring about a get-together between the Communists and Mosley's followers.
You see here an example of what I mean by the overlap between Fascism
and pacifism.

What is interesting is that every section of anti-war opinion has one
section of German radio propaganda, as it were, assigned to it. Since the

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PARTISAN REVIEW

outbreak of war the Germans have done hardly any direct propaganda in
England otherwise than by wireless. The best known of their broadcasts,
indeed the only ones that can be said to have been listened to to any appre-
ciable extent, are those of William Joyce. No doubt these are often extrav-
agantly untruthful, but they are a more or less responsible type of broad-
cast, well delivered and giving news rather than straight propaganda. But
in addition the Germans maintain four spurious "freedom" stations,
actually operating on the continent but pretending to be operating illegally
in England. The best known of these is the New British Broadcasting
Station, which earlier in the war the Blackshirts used to advertise by
means of stickybacks. The general line of these broadcasts is "uncen-
sored news," or "what the Government is hiding from you." They affect
a pessimistic, well-informed manner, as of someone who is on the inside
of the inside, and go in for enormous figures of shipping losses, etc. They
urge the dismissal of Churchill, talk apprehensively about "the Communist
danger," and are anti-American. The anti-American strain is even stronger
in Joyce's broadcasts. The Americans are swindling us over the Lease
Lend agreement, are gradually absorbing the Empire, etc., etc. More inter-
esting than the New British is the Workers' Challenge Station. This goes
in for a line of red-hot revolutionary talks under such titles as "Kick
Churchill Out," delivered by an authentic British working man who uses
plenty of unprintable words. We are to overthrow the corrupt capitalist
government which is selling us to the enemy, and set up a real socialist
government which will come to the rescue of our heroic comrades of the
Red Army and give us victory over Fascism. (This German station does
not hesitate to talk about "the menace of Nazism," "the horrors of the
Gestapo," etc.) The Workers' Challenge is not overtly defeatist. The line
is always that it is probably too late, the Red Army is done for, but that
we may be able to save ourselves if only we can "overthrow capitalism,"
which is to be done by means of strikes, mutinies, sabotage in the arma-
ment factories, and so forth. The other two "freedom" stations are the
Christian Peace Movement (pacifism) and Radio Caledonia (Scottish
nationalism).

You can see how each strain of German propaganda corresponds to
one existing, or at any rate potential, defeatist faction. Lord Haw Haw
and the New British are aimed at the anti-American middle class, roughly
speaking the people who read Truth, and the business interests that have
suffered from the war. The Workers' Challenge is aimed at the Com-
munists and the Left extremists generally. The Christian Peace Movement
is aimed at the P.P.U. I don't want to give the impression, however, that
German propaganda has much effect at this moment. There is little doubt
that it has been an almost complete flop, especially during the last eighteen
months. Various things that have happened have suggested that since the
outbreak of war the Germans have not been well informed about internal
conditions in England, and much of their propaganda, even if listened to,
would fail because of simple psychological errors on which anyone with

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LONDON LETTER
159
a real knowledge of England could put them right. But the various strains
of defeatist feeling are there, and at some time they may grow. In some
of what I have said above I may have seemed to mention people and fac-
tions too insignificant to be worth noticing, but in this bloodstained harle-
quinade in which we are living one never knows what obscure individual
or half-lunatic theory may not become important. I do seem to notice a
tendency in intellectuals, especially the younger ones, to come to terms
with Fascism, and it is a thing to keep one's eye on. The quisling intellec-
tual is a phenomenon of the last two years. Previously we all used to
assume that Fascism was so self-evidently horrible that no thinking person
would have anything to do with it, and also that the Fascists always wiped
out the intelligentsia when they had the opportunity. Neither assumption
was true, as we can see from what happened in France. Both Vichy and
the Germans have found it quite easy to keep a façade of "French culture"
in existence. Plenty of intellectuals were ready to go over, and the Ger-
mans were quite ready to make use of them, even when they were
"decadent." At this moment Drieu de la Rochelle is editing the Nouvelle
Revue Francaise, Pound is bellowing against the Jews on the Rome radio,
and Céline is a valued exhibit in Paris, or at least his books are. All of
these would come under the heading of kulturbolschewismus, but they are
also useful cards to play against the intelligentsia in Britain and the U.S.A.
If the Germans got to England, similar things would happen, and I think
I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would
go over.

Not much news here. All is very quiet on the literary front. The
paper shortage seems to be favouring the appearance of very short books,
which may be all to the good and may possibly bring back the "long-short
story," a form which has never had a fair deal in England. I wrongly told
you in an earlier letter that Dylan Thomas was in the army. He is physi-
cally unfit and is doing jobs for the B.B.C. and the M.O.I. So is nearly
everybody that used to be a writer, and most of us rapidly going native.

The food situation is much as before. We had our puddings on
Christmas day, but they were a little paler than usual. The tobacco situa-
tion has righted itself, but matches are very short. They are watering the
beer again, the third time since re-armament. The blackout is gradually
relaxing in the absence of air-raids. There are still people sleeping in the
Tube stations, but only a handful at each station. The basements of
demolished houses have been bricked up and turned into water tanks for
use in case of fire. They look just like Roman baths and give the ruins an
even more Pompeian look than they had before. The stopping of the air
raids has had some queer results. During the worst of the blitz they set in
hand huge schemes for levelling waste pieces of ground to make play-
grounds, using bomb debris as a subsoil. All these have had to stop in
the middle, no more bomb debris being available.

All the best. Yours ever

GEORGE ORWELL

=== Page 65 ===
Books
THE MOSCOW TRIALS, 1942 VERSION
LIKE LADY MACBETH'S BLOODSTAINS, the Moscow Trials are an inex
pugnable moral stain which no amount of washing seems to affect. To
judge by the repeated efforts that have been made to alter the widely
unfavorable public opinion on the Trials and their attendant massacres,
one might think that the perpetrators and their acolytes had uneasy
consciences. However, it's really not at all a matter of bad conscience,
but simply of political calculation.
The terrible reality of the world war apparently is not enough for
these students of history. They also feel they must rake up the Moscow
Trials again, as though some new data had appeared on which to base a
revision of previous opinion on these pseudo-judicial monstrosities. The
pretext is the Nazi-Soviet war and the hasty and superficial deductions
drawn from the fact that the U.S.S.R., with a population more than
double that of Germany and an army in proportion, was not conquered
by Hitler as easily as Denmark, Greece or France.
A myth is being created and popularized, skillfully nurtured by the
Stalinists and their veteran fellow-travellers, that the relative fighting
power of the Red Army is due to the previous extermination of all poten
tial opponents of Stalin, conveniently amalgamated under the generic
term, "Fifth Columnists."*
The note was first struck by the Hon. Joseph E. Davies, former Ameri
can ambassador to the Soviet Union. Speaking in Chicago last June, three
days after Hitler's invasion of Russia had begun, Mr. Davies declared:
"There were no Fifth Columnists in Russia in 1941-they had shot them.
The purge had cleansed the country and rid it of treason." This is to be
found, with other observations on the same level, in the anthology entitled
Mission to Moscow.*
This work is a mixed salad composed of official dispatches selected
by the author and often edited by him, mingled with extracts from his
private journal also chosen and edited by him, and seasoned with topical
comments on the intellectual level of an election speech. It goes without
saying that we have no guarantee even of the authenticity of the fragments
reprinted: a diplomatic publication is always carefully edited for reasons
of state, and furthermore in this case the job has been done not by per
*Every age has its catchwords which relieve us of the painful duty of thinking,
and one cannot help wondering how we got along, for so many centuries, without this
invaluable term, "Fifth Columnist." But, as Goethe's Mephisto observes, "Where
ideas are lacking, words come to the rescue."
*Mission to Moscow. By Joseph E. Davies. Simon & Schuster. $3.00.

160

=== Page 66 ===
BOOKS
161
sonally disinterested officials but by the very individual who hopes to
gain intellectual and moral credit from the work. This having been said,
let us nevertheless consider this extraordinary work entirely in itself. And
let us consider in the same way, without looking too closely behind the
scenes, two other current books of similar tendency, those by Anna Louise
Strong and Walter Duranty."
These two books pretend to describe the Soviet Union on the eve of
its entry into the war, but are written specifically, like Mr. Davies' work,
to whitewash Stalin's crimes, from the Moscow Trials and the purges to
the pact with Hitler, the stab in the back of Poland, the aggression against
Finland, the extermination of the three small Baltic nations, and other
exploits equally devoid of risk and glory.
Mrs. Strong's book is harmless in the sense that it is a resumé of
official Stalinist propaganda, recognisable at first glance. The author
earnestly recites her well-learned lesson, in a flat, dull and colorless
style which would discourage the most sympathetic reader. Mr. Duranty's
book, on the other hand, is lively and clever, and if one finds it rather
nauseating, it is because of the combination of whimsicality and cynicism
with which the author treats the most painful themes, and the sinister
jokes he makes, with a remarkable lack of tact, about matters not at all
suitable for pleasantries.
For all their agreement on the Trials and the purges, the two authors
show some interesting differences, so that one book to some extent refutes
the other. Thus Mrs. Strong solemnly recites her lesson about the peas-
ants: "Today the traditional bearded, illiterate, superstitious Russian
peasant has practically vanished." The implication is that, thanks to
Stalin, the peasants are shaved, educated and enlightened. But here is Mr.
Duranty, apparently franker but in reality cynical and no less dishonest:
"He [one foreign friend] did not understand the sad but realistic fact
that all those who had opposed collective farming in the villages were
dead or exiled. ..." Mr. Duranty doesn't say how many were "dead"
(more precisely, executed) or "exiled" (more precisely, condemned to
forced labor under conditions so horrible they died like flies). Nor does
he mention how many women and children suffered the same fate. Never-
theless, the contrast with Mrs. Strong is striking.
Mr. Duranty's technique is to concede a minimum the better to con-
ceal, in equivocal language, the terrible reality. Mrs. Strong, on the other
hand, prefers to avoid all difficult questions and recite unweariedly her
little lesson. She speaks quite seriously of "the Stalin policy of non-inter-
ference by the Soviet Government in other nations' internal affairs." She
informs us that "the foundations of the modern Red Army were laid in
1924-5 by Mikhail Frunze and elaborated after his death by Klimenty
Voroshilov." This is the classic formula, in Stalinist historifying, for
* The Soviets Expected It. By Anna Louise Strong. Dial Press, $2.50.
The Kremlin and the People. By Walter Duranty. Reynal & Hitchcock. $2.00.

=== Page 67 ===
162 PARTISAN REVIEW

blotting out the memory of Lenin and Trotsky, the real creators of the
Red Army, and of Tukachevsky, who modernized and motorized it. But
since she mentions Frunze's death, why doesn't Mrs. Strong also mention
the peculiar circumstances in which it took place. As for Voroshilov, why
has Stalin relieved him of his command? Mrs. Strong, who knows every-
thing, misses many such opportunities to demonstrate her knowledge.
Neither she nor Mr. Duranty nor Mr. Davies are any more enlighten-
ing on the Moscow Trials. In all three books one finds very little new
either as information or argument. And the few new departures ventured
by these authors cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny.
Mr. Davies, for example, is particularly anxious to exculpate Stalin
personally: "Moreover, generally speaking, in diplomatic circles here
responsibility for these executions, in a strictly personal sense, is not
attributed to Stalin." (Which is important evidence about . . . diplomatic
circles.) But Mr. Duranty writes:
In Moscow after the trial I was told that Ordjonikidze, the
late Commissar of Heavy Industry, one of Stalin's oldest and
nearest friends, went to Stalin to beg Piatakov's life. "I need
him," he said, "the country needs him. I know that he is guilty
of treason, but nevertheless he's the brains in our heavy industry.
Surely, what he has done for us can be balanced against what he
has done against us." "No," said Stalin. "But I need him,"
Ordjonikidze insisted, "and what's more, I will answer for him
personally." "No," said Stalin. "He must die."
Whether this story is true or not, everybody except Mr. Davies and
his "diplomatic circles" knows that Stalin decides everything. Mr. Davies
present-day ignorance is all the more inexplicable in view of the fact that
Mr. Duranty, to whom he pays his respects several times in his book, was
one of his chief sources of information while he was in Russia.
Mr. Davies' book has at least this to be said for it: in his innocence,
the author sheds some light on one aspect of the Trials. We are told that
at the time of the Radek Trial, Mr. Davies personally saved the life of a
certain Vladimir Romm, former Tass correspondent in Washington, who,
like all the rest, had confessed to all sorts of imaginary crimes. This inter-
vention he made at the request of Mr. Arthur Krock of the N. Y. Times,
acting in the name of "all members of the Washington newspaper corps"
to guarantee the perfect Soviet loyalty of Romm. Despite the overwhelm-
ing guilt indicated by Romm's confession, the intervention was successful.
Naive, ignorant and . . . diplomatic as Mr. Davies is, he cannot even
pretend to believe that Molotov made the decision. It was Stalin, and
Stalin alone, who could make it. That is to say, Stalin refused Ordjoni-
kidze's plea for Piatakov (and, in fact, had Ordjonidze himself "liqui-
dated," something Messers Davies and Duranty forget to mention). But
he spared Romm at Mr. Davies' request, so as not to provoke the members
of the Washington newspaper corps, whom at the time he had his own
reasons for cultivating. Where is the justice in all this?

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BOOKS 163

For if Romm was guilty, why did Mr. Davies save this "Fifth Col-
umnist"? If leniency was proper in his case, why not in others? Because
Romm had powerful connections in the United States? In that case, Mr.
Davies' whole thesis as to the quality of Soviet "justice" collapses. And
there are others cases like Romm's: Rakovsky was not condemned to
death because a French politician intervened in his favor. And if Radek
and Sokolnikov also benefitted by a similar bit of sleight-of-hand, inex-
plicable and unjustifiable from the point of view of the executioners for
whom Mr. Davies is the apologist, it is also for reasons quite foreign to
justice. For, according to the official reports and their own confessions,
which Mr. Davies accepts at face value, they were all just as guilty as
those condemned to death, if not more so.

Mr. Duranty, who strikes his own peculiar note in the fellow-travel-
lers' concert, will no doubt make some such reply as: Don't worry, Stalin
was smart enough to have those defendants executed secretly whom it was
impolitic to condemn publicly. We agree entirely. But in that case, what
becomes of Mr. Davies' thesis? Over 300 alleged accomplices were named
in the course of the Trials who have not yet been publicly tried.

One more essential point must be made apropos Romm: all his
American colleagues refused to believe in the crimes to which he con-
fessed. The same scepticism, even better grounded, was expressed in
other instances: Leon Blum, the celebrated Fifth Columnist, the Social
Democrats and the Russian Social Revolutionaries now refugees in New
York-all who could speak from their own personal knowledge have
agreed on the fraudulence of the charges. They have also agreed that the
confessions are curiously identical, so uniform indeed as to betray the
trade-mark of the same factory: the GPU. Has such agreement ever before
been seen, in fact, between several dozen defendants and witnesses? On
Broadway or in Hollywood, it takes many rehearsals to obtain such a
smooth performance. How could it have been done without a scenario
learned by heart? If Mr. Davies had taken the trouble to look into pre-
vious Soviet trials, he would have found that the same scenario had
already done duty, with Poincaré in the role of Hitler and the British
Intelligence in the part of the Gestapo. And he might then have hesitated
to endorse so unreservedly Stalin's legal methods.

There is hardly a sentence in Mr. Davies comments on the Trials
which cannot be shown, with equal ease, to be false and improbable. It
would take another book to set the record straight. If Mr. Davies really
has at heart the interests of his country and of "democracy" in the world,
he will realize it is his duty to rise above any considerations of personal
vanity and see to it that Simon & Schuster publish such a book as a
companion volume to his own. The preservation of democracy, or of
such little of it as remains to us, is inseparable from simple truth, and the
United States cannot collaborate safely with the Soviet Union without a
realistic understanding of its partner.

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PARTISAN REVIEW

For, far from having "smashed the Fifth Column," Stalin has rather
wiped out the most intelligent section of the population, the most reso-
lutely hostile to Hitler and determined to fight him, the most deeply
opposed to any pact with Hitler—that pact undertaken on the initiative
of Stalin and broken not by Stalin but by Hitler. The massacre of the
cream of the Russian Communist Party by Stalin was the first victory by
Hitler over the U.S.S.R.

LEON COLBERT

ONE OUT OF FIVE

5 Young American Poets, Second Series 1941: Paul Goodman, Clark Mills,
Jeanne McGahey, David Schubert, Karl Shapiro. New Directions. $2.50.

In war they tie a metal tag around the soldier's neck to identify the
individual and his blood, and in games such as football there is a large
number on the back of each player. But in the great mêlée which is
modern poetry, the onlooker is not so fortunate as to be handed a tag with
each poet. The poetry lover is asked to differentiate between the talents
melting into each other in the blur of activity, usually under the cover of
"influence" which hides a multitude of petty thieveries. The result is that
it becomes extremely difficult for the reader to figure out what poet is
capturing a pill-box or making a touchdown.

Paul Goodman has thrown away his "influence," from the modern
poetry direction, anyway. He comes a stranger and a soldier of peace
into the armed camp, fresh from the bland and neutral province of prose,
all rosy and breathing humanism. It is unfortunate that he has seen fit to
divide his excursion among the Five Young Poets by including a verse
play which takes up half his allotted space. Cain and Abel, a play for
dancers, is very interesting, almost exciting, but not worth its weight in
poems. Perhaps the proof is in the dancing, for which we must wait. I
find in the few poems under consideration that Mr. Goodman is a cogita-
tor, a philosopher, a thinker, thoroughly concerned, but not a poet. He
knows what he should write, why, how and when, all the classic angles,
but he hasn't written it. I quote in full a short piece showing him at his
poetic best:

Relying on disasters o' the war
to minimize my misery; and counting
those penalties that none can doubt as such
as the proof and the price of private vices I
otherwise do not believe in—

No!
I'll rather say it was our public crimes
that caused the world-wide calamity,
and that my private lapses get their wages

=== Page 70 ===
BOOKS 165

(small sins small death) & the very defect
of feeling that needs such a grandiose
analogy to burn me!

Yet my pleasures
are moderated almost to the death
by the embarrassing imagination of
the agony of Europe. How is this?

This teeters on the border of good poetry, but refuses to fall on either
side. Faults: self-conscious self-blame, pleasures had to be italicized
(there are no italics in poetry), the perplexed thinker asks the question
the poet cannot answer, the insight is acute but not memorable.

Clark Mills on the other hand, showing the full effects of today's
mêlée, is beating many poetic and romantic drums, waving unauthorized
trophies from Yeats, Rilke, Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Rimbaud, etc.
including a sprinkling of preposterous fainting spells by Harold Vinal.
The synthesis is highly polished (they look, read and smell like poems)
but fall apart under a penetrating look. In the main this is harmlessly
bogus poetry (as against the viciously bogus poetry of, we'll say, Harry
Brown), literary, pompous, watery, meaningless, honest kitsch. I quote a
short passage from "Aerial":

Her feet glance not on boards but air, when beautiful
as a torch hurled, she soars beneath her canvas heaven,
when weightless as a meteor whose lives are seven
she wears the speed and motion of the lark and gull.

She floats, and with her hair unloosed and lips apart,
high in the white light, brilliant in the blue and gold,
turns like a slow phrase uttered, or a jewel rolled
on velvet, or a knife that seeks and finds the heart.

This sample shows all the faults and virtues of Clark Mills' poetry.
Nice, is the word.

The next two poets don't interest me at all. Miss McGahey seems
colorless, and as for Mr. Schubert, he writes: "A poet who observes his
own poetry ends up... by finding nothing to observe." If Mr. Schubert
is referring to his own poems, I am inclined to agree with him—a small
talent wisely buried in dull verse.

Karl Shapiro who is last in the book seems by far the best of the
five. That he is able to evaluate society in fresh poetic terms is no mean
achievement today. He has an eye for social and psychic detail, as Louis
MacNeice has an eye for description of things. ("obscene civics of our
self-distrust," "Falls open like a dishonest look, /And shows us, rotted
and endowed, /Its senile pleasure," "He is only a good alien, nominally
happy.")

The majority of Mr. Shapiro's poems are longish lyrics, all built on

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166 PARTISAN REVIEW

the same pattern, with a tendency toward monotony, but in the aggregate
a unity of tone. Oddly enough, the "just cause" that he is espousing and
which is brought forward validly enough in warm imagery is responsible
for his failures. "Conscription Camp" is more tirade than poem. A poem
carries no banners (poets may), is reformless, itself an art and an end
if political reform is to follow the poem, the poem hasn't finished its
work. But Karl Shapiro is distinctly worth reading, as poet.
OSCAR WILLIAMS

THE BRITISH GENIUS
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius. By George Orwell.
Secker & Warburg (London). 2 shillings.

In its virtues and in its defects, The Lion and the Unicorn is typical
of English leftwing political writing. Its approach to politics is impres-
sionistic rather than analytic, literary rather than technical, that of the
amateur, not the professional. This has its advantages. Orwell's conscious-
ness embraces a good deal that our own Marxists have wrongly excluded
from their data (though Marx himself most decidedly didn't): such as
that British army officers wear civilian clothes off duty, that the British
are a nation of flower-lovers and stamp-collectors, the contrast between
the goose-step of the German Army and the "formalized walk" of the
British. There is also a human quality to Orwell's political writing; you feel
it engages him as a moral and cultural whole, not merely as a specialist.
For this reason it has a life, an ease and color which our own Marxist
epigones seem to feel is somehow sinful; and its values are rarely
inhuman, however muddled they seem at times.

But there are also the defects of the amateur: if Orwell's scope is
broad, it is none too deep; he describes where he should analyze, and
poses questions so impressionistically that his answers get nowhere; he
uses terms in a shockingly vague way; he makes sweeping generalizations
with the confidence of ignorance; his innocence of scientific criteria is
appalling. What can one make of a statement like: "No real revolutionist
has ever been an internationalist."? On page 62 he writes: "It has become
clear in the last few years that 'common ownership of the means of pro-
duction' is not in itself a sufficient definition of socialism. One must also
add the following: approximate equality of incomes... political democ-
racy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education."
Six pages later he speaks of "Russia, the only definitely socialist country."
Obviously not a single one of Orwell's three necessary additions exist in
Russia. Since Orwell's anti-Stalinism is well-known, one can only con-
clude that he is using the term "socialist" in very different senses in the
two passages.

With most of Orwell's generalizations about the present war, I find
myself in agreement. "What this war has demonstrated is that private
capitalism does not work." "Either we turn this war into a revolutionary

=== Page 72 ===
BOOKS
167
war or we lose it, and much more besides. . . . It is quite certain that with
our present social structure we cannot win. Our real forces, physical,
moral or intellectual cannot be mobilized." "We cannot establish any-
thing that a Western nation would regard as socialism without defeating
Hitler; on the other hand, we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain eco-
nomically and socially in the nineteenth century." Recent events in
Libya, Malaya, and the English Channel amply document such proposi-
tions. Most of Orwell's program, also, seems in general sensible as a first
step: nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major indus-
tries; democratization of education; equalization of personal incomes;
freedom for India.

But most of us on the left, from liberals to Trotskyists, would agree
on some such program. The real question is Lenin's What Is To Be Done?
Specifically, what classes or social groups can be mobilized to win such a
program; what should be their attitude towards the existing political
regimes and economic systems in England and America? Although Orwell
seems to be politically closest to the left Labor Party group of Cripps and
Laski, he hardly mentions the workingclass in his book and pins his hopes
instead on a new middleclass of technicians, doctors, state employees, etc.
which has made "the old classification of society into capitalists, prole-
tarians and petit-bourgeois almost obsolete." This tendency exists and
has often been noted. Nor is there any novelty in the conception of this
new "classless middleclass" as the heir of the future. But Orwell is as
deplorably vague about just how this new class will take over (and what
specific indications already exist that it will) as all the other prophets of
such a future have been. He seems to conceive of it as a gradual, osmotic
process proceeding steadily within the old social framework. This class-
less revolution marches under the banner of nationalism, furthermore.
Hence it is clear that Orwell, though, oddly enough, he never explicitly
says so in the book, favors critical support of the existing Churchill war
government.

As one who thinks that only a socialist government can defeat totall-
tarianism either within or without, and that the only road to such a state
is for the workers to insist on replacing the antiquated capitalism repre-
sented by Roosevelt and Churchill with their own government, as such a
one I can see in the history of the last three years no evidence for Orwell's
easy confidence in this gradualist "revolution." He recognizes that before
his program can be put into effect, "there will have to be a complete shift
of power away from the old ruling class." But is any one today, including
Orwell, able to see any indication of such a shift in England in the last
two years? "Within a year, perhaps even six months," writes Orwell, "if
we are still unconquered, we shall see the rise of something that has never
existed before, a specifically English socialist movement." This was writ-
ten at the end of 1940. Over a year has passed, and there are no signs of
the English socialist movement Orwell so confidently predicted. Despite

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168 PARTISAN REVIEW

an almost unbroken string of humiliating defeats, in Africa, Malaya and
now the English Channel itself, the reins of power are still firmly in the
hands of Churchill, the former admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, the chief
organizer of armed intervention against the infant Russian revolution, the
leader of the British ruling class in smashing the 1926 general strike.
(Orwell has plenty to say about poor old Chamberlain, but is silent on
Churchill.) This great democrat has been able since Dunkirk, further-
more, to turn the government back to the old Tory gang and to emasculate
-true enough with their enthusiastic cooperation-the Labor Party leader-
ship. There has been a gradualist revolution, all right, but in reverse.
Perhaps the clue to this odd combination of acuteness as an observer
and infantilism as a theorist may be found in Orwell's general intellectual
orientation. He reacts so violently against the admittedly great defects
of the leftwing intellectual tradition of the last two decades as to deny
himself as an intellectual. Like Messers Brooks, Mumford, MacLeish and
Chamberlain over here, Orwell is bitterly hostile to both internationalism
and intellectualism, preaching the virtues of patriotism and denouncing
"Europeanized intellectuals." He echoes the Brooks-MacLeish Thesis when
he criticizes the intellectuals for being "negative," "carping" and "irre-
sponsible," and when he writes, "If the English people suffered for several
years a real weakening of morale, so that Fascist nations judged they were
'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage
from the Left was partly responsible." Now it is true that the postwar
Marxist tradition was over-schematic and timidly 'orthodox,' that it under-
estimated psychological and cultural factors and tried to apply a mechani-
cal-materialistic yardstick to everything, and that it was purist to the
point of sterility. But a reaction to the opposite pole is not the solution,
either. A retreat to the kind of common-sense Philistinism which Orwell
embraces in matters of theory seems to me even less calculated to pre-
serve the values we both want to preserve than the sectarian Marxism it
rejects. There are, of course, as I tried to show in my article on Van
Wyck Brooks, deep historical reasons for the rise of this attitude today.
There is a dangerous tendency, shown in several of the comments on the
issue printed in the last number, to assume that it is mostly a matter of
the personal stupidity of Brooks and Co. I would be the last to deny Mr.
Brooks' mental incompetence, but the roots of the matter unfortunately
go much deeper, as we can see when a man of the intelligence and good-
will of Orwell joins the parade.
I'd like to add a few words, finally, on the format of Orwell's book.
Why are British books so much more physically attractive than our own?
And why do short, cheap books-really long pamphlets-apparently "go"
so much better in England than here? First published in February 1941,
this is the first of the "Searchlight Books," a series of inexpensive little
pocket books on war issues. It is printed on the pleasantly lightweight
book paper the English use, has a light binding of unbleached cloth, fits

=== Page 74 ===
BOOKS
169

easily into a suit pocket, and altogether is a sensible and unpretentiously
attractive little volume. If it were published over here, it would weigh
twice as much, would be just too big to fit into the pocket, and would
therefore be three times as expensive and half as good-looking. But it
probably wouldn't be published here anyway because American publishers
seem to think the public won't buy short, cheap original editions. What-
ever the formal merits of the argument, the war may well have changed
things. The 150-200 page book is the ideal medium for political pam-
phleteering, more topical and pointed than a full-length book and yet
offering enough space to go deeper than a magazine article. The time
would seem overripe for a "Searchlight Series" of our own.
DWIGHT MACDONALD

Design for Power. By Frederick L. Schuman. Maps by George D. Brodsky.
Knopf. $3.50.
This book provides additional confirmation of Frank Trager's analysis
and exposure of Schuman in his article, "F. L. Schuman: A Case History,"
in PARTISAN REVIEW for March-April, 1940. The maps by George Brodsky
are useful but not worth the price of the volume. SIDNEY HOOK

The Language of Poetry. By Philip Wheelwright, Cleanth Brooks, I. A.
Richards, Wallace Stevens. Edited, with a preface, by Allen Tate. Prince-
ton University Press. $2.
This collection of four lectures by a professional philosopher, a
literary critic, a psychologist, and a poet-each of the highest distinction
in his field-is more important for what it undertakes and promises than
for what it manages to accomplish. One may or may not agree with the
editor that there is going on "in America today an exhaustive study of
poetic language such as criticism has not attempted either here or in
Europe in any previous age." There was, after all, Coleridge, not to men-
tion Hopkins in his notebooks and letters, and none of our critics are quite
up to these two at their best. But certainly there are more serious and
hard-thinking people at work than ever before; the general level is higher;
and the only thing in the way of a first-rate body of criticism is an insuf-
ficient coordination of effort-a parochialism of approach. (Unfortu-
nately, critics as a breed are among the least cooperative and fraternal
of mortals, filching from each other with the most brazen insouciance.)
Philip Wheelwright points out at the beginning that discussion of
poetic language apart from the whole "cultural consciousness" out of
which language, when it is used poetically, must emerge is pretty futile.
And since this consciousness expresses itself most comprehensively in
ritual and myth it is to these forms that we must return. Such a view is
so like this reviewer's remarks on "Myth as Method" in the PARTISAN
REVIEW a few years ago that to endorse it is sheer narcissism. But Mr.
Wheelwright, alas, brings to the direct discussion of myth more enthusiasm

=== Page 75 ===
170 PARTISAN REVIEW

than insight, more logic as to its claims on our attention than illumination
of its nature. What can he mean, for example, by the "myth of love"?
Properly analyzed, are not all myths concerned with love-the formaliza-
tion of man's relations to his various objects of love? Or does he refer
only to "romantic" love? And to use a phrase like "the myth of tragedy"
is enough to addle the brain if one knows, as no one knows better than
Mr. Wheelwright, that tragedy is based on myth-indeed, is myth. Despite
this confusion as to the actual thing that he defends so brilliantly against
the semanticists and logical positivists, his paper is the most ambitious
and far-reaching of the four; it lays the ground-work for the rest.
Cleanth Brooks develops the notion that the language of poetry is a
language of paradox. This makes possible some high-powered but not
always convincing exegetical operations on Wordsworth and Donne. But
to such a thesis one must object on two counts: (1) Words like "paradox"
and "analogy" refer to logical propositions and therefore belong to the
realm of intellectual discourse and not to that of the imagination; they
throw the road wide open to the Philistines. (2) Not all poets, despite
Mr. Brooks' understandable admiration for Donne, do actually rely very
much on paradox. (Isn't it time for someone to say a decent word for
Blake and Keats-or even Shakespeare?) I. A. Richards adds little to
his previous discussions of "the interaction of words"; his is a set piece,
and a very fine set piece. It is interesting also in that it reveals how much
more respect he is now paying to the insights of classic philosophy. But
Donne, once again Donne, is the prime exemplar. And what is there to say
of Wallace Stevens' Report on the State of the Universe except that it
demonstrates conclusively that poetry has all along been his proper
medium. For Mr. Stevens states much more neatly and bitterly in his verse
the conflict that has racked him all these years-a conflict between the
imagination and something that he calls "reality." What precisely he
means by reality is never certain; perhaps he should be recommended to
read Mr. Wheelwright, who is excellent on the subject. Surely Mr. Stevens
is among our half-dozen best poets. But he is also the only poet in history
perhaps who has made of the distrust of the imagination the theme and
subject of poetry. Indeed, there trembles through all four of these essays
the sense that it is somehow necessary to make an honest woman out of
poetry.
WILLIAM TROY

Canibales Politicos. By Julian Gorkin. Quetzal, Mexico City. Pesos: 3.50
A Donde Va Francia? By Marceau Pivert. Publicaciones Panamericanas,
Mexico City. Pesos: 3.00
Hitler Contra Stalin. By Victor Serge. Quetzal, Mexico City. Pesos: 2.50
From Mexico, where they now live as political refugees, three leading
left-wing fighters weigh the causes and consequences of three major epi-

=== Page 76 ===
BOOKS
sodes of this World Civil War No. 1: the Spanish prologue (this prologue
being an epilogue, too), the French defeat, and the Nazi-Russian war.
A prominent member of the POUM, Gorkin had a narrow escape from
the GPU jails. In the most vivid part of his book, he relates his Odysseian
experiences: heart-grinding anecdotes are mixed with oversimplified
psychological portraits, and with politico-philosophical commentaries
which, although often verging on a wordy conception of "dialectics," do
not impair the value of the facts. No historian of the Spanish civil war
can neglect such a rich (although passionate) source of information. The
introduction provides a sound analysis of the mistakes and acts of treason
which led the legal government to a fateful end. Everyone in Spain
(except the anarchists, Poumists and Trotzkists), every nation in Europe,
including the papal State, has a share of responsibility. This is not news,
but it is true.

In so far as he refused to help the Spanish Republic (and so far only)
Léon Blum is to be reckoned among the architects of the French defeat.
Marceau Pivert agrees with Gorkin. He was one of those "reds," or "Cas-
sandras," or "warmongers," who understood that the so-called "non-inter-
vention" meant France's hara-kiri, and a dirty deed, too. From Daladier's
and Blum's electoral machines to the Stalinist groups and the fascist
"leagues," everyone in France (except the members of the PSOP, Marceau
Pivert's own party) is differently but definitely to be blamed. Slightly
biased, but honestly, A donde va Francia, will help the American reader
to understand the "collapse" of France.

If almost every leader of opinion was wrong in the democracies,
Stalin, for his part, led Russia through a series of purges and blunders to
its present plight: having doomed 30,000 out of 80,000 officers, 3 out of
5 Field-Marshals, having ruthlessly crushed honest as well as treacherous
opposition, how could Stalin expect from his army precisely what he him-
self thought to be the very weapon of victory: the strategic offensive, the
fight on foreign soil? Having double-crossed the Spanish leftists, the
Yugoslavian government, the French Republic, every nation but Nazi Ger-
many, how could he be unwise enough to wait until Hitler was ready to
strike? These are Stalin's secrets. But the past is past.

As for the present, Serge is able to appreciate the good and evil of
the Russian system: the Soviet resistance, he says, "demonstrates the supe-
riority of a revolutionary society, even the one which is dominated by an
internal counter-revolution, as compared to a traditional democracy where
the reactionary forces are free to sabotage." The same was true in 1793.
The same will always be true, in cases of emergency.

It seems to me that we are quite aware, now, of the main errors which
have been perpetrated. However, we do not yet know how to avoid more
mistakes, once Hitler is defeated. "Let us make a balance sheet and pre-
pare for the future"-such were, according to Gorkin, the first words
uttered in Paris by the Executive Committee of his group, after Franco's
victory. A good idea. But is it enough to offer, as a remedy to our unrest,
171

=== Page 77 ===
172 PARTISAN REVIEW

the concept of "Marxist dialectics"? Is it an adequate panacea to repeat
that the "only function of fascism is to aggravate the agony of capitalism"?
If we are to profit at all from this World Civil War No. 1, our first task,
an imperative one, is to get rid of all ready-made notions, all remnants
of contemporary scholastic theology. "From the excesses of slavery,"
writes Marceau Pivert, "a new freedom will surge." This is scholastic
theology. For, if Hitler wins, how many decades, how many centuries of
serfdom must we foresee? We are not interested in a liberty that will
blossom in 2548, or even in 2200. "It's true that this world is pretty bad,"
says the average Catholic; "but wait a minute, ten thousand years, for
example; then Christianity will have permeated all human souls, justice
and happiness will have come." I prefer Victor Serge's political realism,
which is neither Realpolitik, nor cynicism. When he sketches the near
future, he feels as if mind were "closed up in an infernal circle." Such
is our future, though. In order to shape it, we must face it however ugly it
may be. Many surprises are waiting for us: unless we dissociate politics
from metaphysics, we are committed to dissociate politics from ethics;
unless we think a little more about "liberty" and "authority," we are likely
not to understand how it is possible to foresee "the birth of new republics,
harsh to their enemies, both libertarian and authoritarian." And still,
Serge's forecast might be our truth; his antinomies, our values.

ETIEMBLE

"Dangerous Thoughts"

Editors' Note: War and freedom of
thought have never been easy bedfellows.
This war is no exception. In our last issue
we wrote: "Our main task now is to pre-
serve cultural values against all types of
pressure and coercion. Obviously we can-
not even speak of the survival of demo-
cratic civilization apart from the survival
of our entire cultural tradition. This in-
cludes the fullest freedom of expression
on political matters." It seems to us that
it may be useful, in the struggle to pre-
serve cultural values, to establish a new
regular department, a "listening post" to
give publicity to the more significant in-
stances of suppression of free thought
from month to month. Our readers are
invited and urged to send in material for
this column.

The entry of the United States into the
war caused a number of significant cas-
ualties on the journalistic front. The non-
interventionist news-letter, Uncensored,
ceased publication because, according to
a note from its editor, Sidney Hertzberg,
"It is no longer possible to get contribu-
tions to make up our deficits." The Insti-
tute for Propaganda Analysis shut down
"for the duration," and part of its staff,
headed by Harold Lasswell, moved down
to Washington to begin manufacturing, in-
stead of debunking, propaganda. Oscar
Ameringer's radical-populist weekly The
American Guardian, widely read for twen-
ty-five years in the south and middle west,
had to suspend publication when its read-
ers protested violently against the editors'
attempt to change its line from anti- to
pro-war after Pearl Harbor.

Error of opinion may be tolerated where
reason is left free to combat it.-Thomas
Jefferson: First Inaugural Address.

It is important to note that all the
instances noted this month, are cases of
voluntary suppression. So far, official
censorship, in the field of freedom of
thought and expression, has played little
part. Many editors, publishers and jour-
nalists seem to share the attitude ex-
pressed by the veteran liberal, William

=== Page 78 ===
LETTERS
Allen White, who recently explained why
his Emporia Gazette had dropped the
syndicated "Washington Merry-Go-Round"
column: "We felt the authors, Mr. Pear-
son and Mr. Allen, were too anxious to
print...matters which would offend the
censor and possibly give aid and comfort
to our enemies.... These young men are
good reporters. They are honest and con-
scientious but just a shade too enterpris-
ing for these troublous times."
•
"Miss Rothe's discussion of Russian
music under the Revolution was written,
and accepted for publication in these
pages, before Russia entered the present
war."-Editors' Note at the end of an
article on Russian music in the Winter,
1942, issue of Kenyon Review.
•
Freedom only for the supporters of the
government, only for the members of one
party-however numerous they be-is no
freedom at all. Freedom is always and ex-
clusively freedom for the one who thinks
differently.... Only unobstructed, effer-
vescing life falls into a thousand new
forms and improvisations, brings to light
creative force, itself corrects all mistaken
attempts.... Without general elections,
without unrestricted freedom of the press
and assembly, without a free struggle of
opinion, life dies out in every public insti-
tution, becomes a mere semblance of life,
in which only the bureaucracy remains as
the active element.-Rosa Luxemburg:
The Russian Revolution.
•
Editors, The Nation
Sirs:
We think your readers will be inter-
ested in our recent experience with the
Post Office News Co., a large book and
magazine store at 37 West Monroe St.,
Chicago.
From the time PARTISAN REVIEW first
appeared under its present editorship
four years ago, P. O. News has been our
biggest Chicago outlet. Last summer they
increased their order by one-third. On
December 15 last, they wrote us as fol-
lows (complete text):
"This letter will serve to cancel our
standing order for PARTISAN REVIEW. Re-
turns will follow."
We replied, asking why this sudden
cancellation. Receiving no answer, we
wrote to the Union News Co., of New

173
York City, which is P. O. News's parent
corporation. Union News, has to date,
been equally uncommunicative.
A friend in Chicago advises us that
after Pearl Harbor, P. O. News purged
its shelves of all left-wing publications.
He adds, incidentally, that even The Na-
tion and The New Republic were at first
banned.
Government censorship can be bad
enough, but unofficial censorship is to
the official variety as lynching is to legal
execution. We see no good reason for
P. O. News Co. to assume the functions
of the Department of Justice.
Thank you for giving this affair a little
healthy publicity.
Sincerely,
THE EDITORS OF PARTISAN REVIEW
Feb. 17, 1942.
•
Three books, either critical or definite-
ly hostile to the present regime in Russia,
have been withdrawn from publication
after having been publicly announced.
Doubleday, Doran has cancelled the pub-
lication this spring of One Who Survived,
the reminiscences of a former Soviet
diplomat, Alexander Barmine. Harper has
withdrawn My Year in the U.S.S.R., by
the former N. Y. Times Moscow corre-
spondent, G. E. R. Gedye, and also Trot-
sky's Life of Stalin. The latter book was
actually sent out for review, only to be
recalled a few days later (on December
12) by a note signed by President Cass
Canfield which concludes, "We hope you
will cooperate with us in the matter of
avoiding any comment whatever regarding
the biography and its postponement."
•
There be who perpetually complain of
schisms and sects, and make it such a
calamity that any man dissents from their
maxims.... They are the troublers, they
are the dividers of unity, who neglect and
permit not others to unite those dissevered
pieces, which are yet wanting to the body
of truth. To be still searching what we
know not by what we know, still closing up
truth to truth as we find it (for all her
body is homogeneous and proportional);
this is the golden rule in theology as well
as in arithmetic, and makes up the best
harmony in a church; not the forced and
outward union of cold and neutral and in-
wardly divided minds.-John Milton: Areo-
pagitica.

=== Page 79 ===
Letter to the President of Mexico

Editor's Note: The letter printed below is, we think, self-explanatory. It was signed by more than 200 prominent liberals, trade union leaders, writers, educators, clergymen and political leaders, including the editors of PARTISAN REVIEW. We regret that considerations of space prevent us from printing the full list of signers.... We might add that the New York daily press, with the exception of the N. Y. Times, failed to print a single line on the story, despite the eminence of the signers and despite energetic publicity efforts. Fortunately, however, the letter seems to have produced a considerable effect in Mexico City, where the local Stalinist apparatus has been forced for the moment to slacken its persecution of the refugees in question. But although the weapon of slander has broken in the hands of the Mexican Communists, the danger of a GPU-inspired attack on the lives of one or more of these refugees still remains. Continued support from this country will be their best protection.

New York, February 9, 1942

Excmo. Sr. Don Manuel Avila Camacho
Presidente de la Republica de Mexico
Mexico, D. F.
Your Excellency:
We trust you will not think us presumptuous if we call your attention to a campaign of slander that has been initiated against certain refugees in your country. These refugees, of widely varied political faiths, are united only in being opponents of the Communist International and of Fascism. Outstanding among them are: Marceau Pivert, Victor Serge, Julian Gorkin, Gustave Regler, and Grandiso Muniz.

Against these individuals a slander campaign has been initiated by Mundo Obrero, mouthpiece of the Mexican Communist Party. This campaign has since spread with increasing violence to other sections of the press. The Communists have been able to prevent these refugees from getting any aid or publicity for their reply to the fantastic charges made against them.

It is alleged that the persons in question are "agents of Hitler," "shock troops of the Nazi Fifth Column," "gangsters," "spies," and "saboteurs." On the basis of these charges a group of deputies sympathetic to the Communist International has introduced into the Chamber of Deputies a resolution demanding that these refugees be either expelled from Mexico or put into a concentration camp.

These charges—suddenly whipped up months after these refugees were granted asylum in your country—are without any foundation in fact. It is a matter of public record that all of these men have for years been active anti-fascists. Specifically:

Marceau Pivert, now actually charged with having "collaborated with the French fascist group, Croix de Feu," was once the secretary to Leon Blum and was the former secretary of the P.S.O.P., a Socialist organization of workers and intellectuals now working against Hitler in France.

Victor Serge, now called "an agent of Otto Abetz," is a left-wing

174

=== Page 80 ===
LETTERS

175

novelist and journalist who escaped from Russia in 1935 with the aid of
Andre Gide, Ignazio Silone and other writers.

Julian Gorkin was a leader of the Spanish workingclass party, the
P.O.U.M.

Gustave Regler was also prominent, as a high commander in the mili-
tary forces, in the heroic struggle of the Spanish Republic.

Grandiso Muniz was a Spanish revolutionary Socialist who worked with
the P.O.U.M. in the Spanish Civil War and narrowly escaped execution
by Franco.

Such are the records of these refugees, now accused by the Mexican
Communist Party of being Hitler's agents. As American anti-fascists, we
have greatly admired the Mexican government for its generous hospitality
to Europe's anti-fascist refugees. We have every confidence that your
government will not allow itself to be influenced by this disgusting cam-
paign of vilification.

We must also point out the need for utmost vigilance by the Mexican
authorities against possible murder attempts. Already the Communist
press is calling for the formation of "Vigilante Committees" to deal with
these alleged "Nazi Fifth Columnists." We need hardly remind your
excellency that it was a "Vigilante Committee," led by David Siquieros, a
leading member of the Mexican Communist Party, that perpetrated the
machine-gun raid on Trotsky's house and later murdered one of his body-
guards.

We are confident the Mexican Government will know how to deal
with this reign of terror against refugees whose only "crime" is that they
are opponents of the Communist International.

In closing, allow us to congratulate your country, through yourself, on
its enlightened, humane, and generous policy of hospitality to the lovers
of freedom from all lands where freedom has temporarily vanished.

ED. NOTE: Among the more than 200 signers of the letter were:

Louis Adamic
George Baldanzi (executive vice-president,
Textile Workers Union)
Roger Baldwin
Ralph Bates
William E. Bohn (editor, The New Leader)
Anita Brenner
André Breton
Dorothy Dunbar Bromley
Van Wyck Brooks
James Burnham
Walter B. Cannon (professor of physiology,
Harvard University)
John Chamberlain
George S. Counts (president, American
Federation of Teachers)
Walter Damrosch
Maurice P. Davidson (director, N. Y. State
Power Authority)
Ned H. Dearborn (dean of adult educa-
tion, New York University)
John Dewey
John Dos Passos
David Dubinsky
Max Eastman
Irwin Edman
Ethel P. Epstein (labor secretary to Mayor
LaGuardie)
James T. Farrell

Waldo Frank
Samuel H. Friedman (editor, The Call)
Carl J. Friedrichs (professor of govern-
ment, Harvard University)
Miguel Garriga (vice-president, Hotel &
Restaurant Employees Union)
Harry Gideonese (president, Brooklyn Col-
lege)
Frank P. Graham (pres. U. of North Caro-
lina; member, the President's War Labor
Board)
John Green (president, Industrial Union of
Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of
America)
Adolph Held (president, Amalgamated
Bank; chairman, Jewish Labor Commit-
tee)
Granville Hicks
Julius Hochman (general manager, Joint
Board, Dress & Waistmakers Union of
Greater New York)
Sidney Hook
Quincy Howe
Stanley M. Isaacs (member, N. Y. City
Council)
Freda Kirchwey
Gertrude Weil Klein (member N. Y. City
Council; general organizer, Amalga-
mated Clothing Workers)

=== Page 81 ===
176

PARTISAN REVIEW

Hans Kohn
Layle Lane [columnist, Harlem Age; vice-
president, American Federation of
Teachers]
Algernon Lee [N. Y. City Chairman, Social
Democratic Federation]
Max Lerner
James Loeb, Jr. [executive secretary,
Union for Democratic Action]
Ludwig Lore [foreign news commentator,
New York Post]
Ferdinand Lundberg
Eugene Lyons
Thomas Mann
Margaret Marshall
R. M. McIver [professor of sociology,
Columbia University]
Morris Milgram [executive secretary,
Workers Defense League]
Rev. A. J. Muste
Louis Nelson [manager-secretary, Local
155, International Ladies Garment Work-
ers Union]
Reinhold Niebuhr
Culbert L. Olson [Governor of California]
Walter Pach
David Pinski [president, Jewish National
Workers Alliance]
Katherine Anne Porter
Rev. A. Clayton Powell, Jr. [Negro leader;
member, New York City Council]

A. Philip Randolph [president, Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters]
Edward G. Robinson
James Rorty
Alex Rose [N. Y. State secretary, Ameri-
can Labor Party]
Gaetano Salvemini
Meyer Schapiro
Harry Scherman [director, Book of the
Month Club]
Joseph Schlossberg [member, Board of
Higher Education of N. Y. City; secre-
tary, emeritus, Amalgamated Clothing
Workers]
Rose Schneiderman [secretary, N. Y. State
Department of Labor]
Vincent Sheean
W. Warren Smith [president, Tobacco
Workers Union]
Norman Thomas
Dorothy Thompson
Carlo Tresca
Robert Watt [international representative,
American Federation of Labor]
James Wechsler [labor editor, PM]
Edmund Wilson
Bertram D. Wolfe
Matthew Woll [vice-president, American
Federation of Labor]

Note: The affiliation of the signers are given for purposes of identification only.

Letters

WANTED: MORE ARMY LETTERS
Sirs:

Your letters from soldiers are so inter-
esting and so important I think I will
have to tell you my obsession hoping you
may be enough in agreement to give it
some sort of a boost. It is that there
should immediately be an organization for
a Soldiers and Workers Peace. I have
been met with the objection anything to
do with soldiers can be construed as
treason, but my idea is not to propagan-
dize the soldiers, but to hear from them,
to let them tell us what they want, and
to listen mighty careful. If you can re-
ceive letters from soldiers, if they can
know there is someone to listen to them,
there might be some hope for a decent
peace after the war. They have been told
to die without being asked. Must they
also be told how to live after the war in-
stead of being asked, those that survive?
The workers are more articulate, but they
should also be assured of continued at-
tention. Do you agree?

Sincerely,
MARGARET DE SILVER
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

We do agree and hereby invite our
readers in the armed forces to write us
their reactions and impressions, for pub-
lication here.-ED.

POET EXPLAINS
Sirs:

May I make a point of structural an-
alysis about my poem Winter 1939 that
appeared in your last issue. The poem
was written on and as of that date and
the meaning of the last line, "now at last
they have their war" was therefore the
following: that certain Americans, pre-
viously described, now have the satisfac-
tion of the war in Europe.

Obviously, if this poem were written
now, the last line would have to read:
"now at last they have our war," or more
sardonically, "now at last we have their
war." But in such a case-and here is
the point of structural analysis-the whole
rest of the poem would likewise have to
be altered, for the unresolved note of
"their" and "our" cannot be the conclu-
sion of the preceding description of tor-
por and dead-end. Given the line "now at
last they have our war," the poetic at-
mosphere may well be wintry, but it can-
not be an atmosphere of ending. It is the

=== Page 82 ===
PARTISAN REVIEW

beginning of something, even if probably
the beginning of much worse. . . .
In a deeper sense, alas a sense too
deep for excited little poems it is, and
was, necessary to say: "now at last we
have our war."

PAUL GOODMAN

NEW YORK CITY

SUMMER SCHOLARSHIPS

The Trustees of the Cummington School
announce a competitive scholarship for
summer study in Writing, the conferences
being under the leadership of some of the
most eminent writers of our day. These
scholarships give advanced training on
the levels of professional, graduate and
undergraduate study. Candidates must
have completed secondary school and
have done considerable work in their
fields. Each scholarship provides living
and instruction for ten weeks. These are
open both to young men and women, but
only to those who cannot finance their
study without full aid.

All applications must be filed complete
before March 21, 1942. Candidates should
send for application blanks and instruc-
tions: they should not send examples of
work until notified to do so. Address
Registrar, Cummington School, Cumming-
ton, Massachusetts.

THE PREVENTION OF MALARIA

"The mosquito is a definite host to carry mala-
ria from one patient to another, and man is an
intermediate host. The prevention of malaria is
thus concerned with the extinction of the mos-
quito." Bulletin from Britain.

Watson, Gorgas, Ross, and Harvey
Fought the pupae and the larvae.
The godlike intellect of man
Has now evolved a simpler plan.

ROBERT DANIEL

NEW HAVEN, CONN.

WHO ARE THE IRRESPONSIBLES'?

SIR:

On my desk this morning, along with
the full Roberts and Truman reports, is
the red-white-and-blue pamphlet, "Report
to the Nation," issued by Archibald Mac-
Leish. I have long had a theory that the
key to his deflection is to be found in
his poetry particularly the abruptly ter-
minated "Hamlet" and I would like to
see this handled, psychologically, by some
able writer.

One can keep from too great bitterness
about politicians, and the 'pickers and
stealers' who have moved in on Washing-
ton to get their profits at the expense of

our sons. But when poets and writers re-
act as have MacLeish, Mumford, Brooks
and others that is cause for despair.
They are the real 'Irresponsibles' and I
hope you will continue not to let them
forget it.

RUTH ROBERTSON

CHICAGO, ILL.

In his two articles on MacLeish in
PARTISAN REVIEW last year, Morton D.
Zabel analyzed the connection between
MacLeish's poetry and his politics. There
are also, of course, Julien Benda's The
Treason of the Clerks and Randolph
Bourne's fine articles in Seven Arts on
the conduct of intellectuals in the last
war. ED.

WHITTIER ON BROOKS

SIR:

This should answer Van Wyck (Back
to Whittier) Brooks:

"Too cheaply truths once purchased
dear
Are made our own.
Too long the world has smiled to hear
Our boast of full corn in the ear
By others sown."

(J. G. Whittier: Anniversary
Poem, 1863)

KENNETH REXROTH

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.