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PARTISAN REVIEW
PR
Volume VI, No. 5 1939
Fall

© Trustees of Boston University

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PARTISAN REVIEW
Volume VI, No. 5
THIS QUARTER
POEMS
AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE
ART CHRONICLE
AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
WHO ARE THE FRIENDS OF SEMANTICS?
RACHEL'S SUMMER
22ND AUGUST, 1939
THE POETRY OF PAUL ELUARD
TWO POEMS
THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
SOME AMERICANS STILL IN SPAIN TO SOME
STALINISTS STILL IN AMERICA
THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
(SEVEN QUESTIONS, PART TWO)
FALL, 1939
3
16 Clark Mills
17 James Daly
18 Theodore Roethke
19 John Wheelwright
20 Winfield Townley Scott
22
31 George L. K. Morris
34 Clement Greenberg
50 Albert Wohlstetter
M. G. White
58 C. R. Jackson
73 Kenneth Rexroth
76 Louise Bogan
86 Paul Eluard
90 James Rorty
102 E. W. and M. McC.
103
104 Sherwood Anderson
105 Louise Bogan
108 Lionel Trilling
112 Robert Penn Warren
113 Robert Fitzgerald
117 R. P. Blackmur
120 Horace Gregory
LETTERS AND COMMUNICATIONS
Editors: F. W. DUPEE, DWIGHT MACDONALD, GEORGE L. K.
MORRIS, WILLIAM PHILLIPS, PHILIP RAHV. Business Manager:
NANCY MACDONALD
PARTISAN REVIEW is published at 117 East 10th Street, New York, N. Y. Please address mail to:
P. O. Box 34, Station D, New York, N. Y.
PARTISAN REVIEW is published quarterly. Subscription: $1.25 yearly; Canada, $1.35; other foreign countries,
$1.50. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Copy-
right October 1939, by Partisan Review. Entered as second-class matter, November 26, 1938, at the post
office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of March 3, 1879.
123

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Contributors
CLARK MILLS teaches in the Department of Romance Languages of Cornell
University.... JAMES DALY has published poems in Broom, transition, The
Dial, The Nation and other magazines. His most recent book is One Season
Shattered.... THEODORE ROETHKE is on the faculty of Penn State Uni-
versity.... JOHN WHEELWRIGHT'S Political Self-Portrait: Poems 1919-1939
will be published shortly.... WINFIELD TOWNLEY SCOTT'S most recent
book of verse is Biography for Traman.... CLEMENT GREENBERG lives in
New York City. This is his second appearance in Partisan Review....
ALBERT WOHLSTETTER has contributed articles and reviews to The Phil-
osophy of Science and other periodicals. M. G. WHITE is an assistant in
logic at the College of the City of New York.... C. R. JACKSON whose
Palm Sunday appeared in our last issue, lives in New York City....
KENNETH REXROTH is a frequent contributor of poetry to liberal and left-
wing magazines. He lives in San Francisco.... LOUISE BOGAN'S most
recent volume of poetry was called The Sleeping Fury.... JAMES RORTY
is well known to all readers of the left-wing press. He is the author of His
Master's Voice, a study of advertising, Where Life Is Better, and the re-
cently published American Medicine Mobilizes.... SHERWOOD ANDERSON
is now living in Marion, Va.... LIONEL TRILLING is the author of a biog-
raphy of Matthew Arnold which was widely commented upon when it
appeared last year.... ROBERT PENN WARREN is one of the editors of The
Southern Review. His novel, Night Rider, appeared last year.... DUDLEY
FITZGERALD'S most recently published work was a translation, with Dudley
Fitts, of Sophocles' Antigone. He is on the editorial staff of Time magazine.
... R. P. BLACKMUR is at present living in Maine and working on a life of
Henry Adams.... HORACE GREGORY, poet and critic, is a frequent con-
tributor to The Nation, The New Republic, and other magazines.

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This Quarter

THE WAR OF THE NEUTRALS

T
HE WAR ABROAD, at the moment of writing, is like a movie that
has abruptly been struck into immobility by the jamming of the
projection apparatus. The film started off briskly and portentously
enough, with the ratification of the Stalin-Hitler Pact by the Soviet
Congress, and the first German guns roaring in Poland a few hours
later; the ultimatums of England and France to Hitler, followed by
formal declarations of war; the swift, brutal German blitzkrieg in
Poland; the massing of French troops in the Maginot Line; the
disappearance of the British High Fleet into the North Sea on war
duty; the torpedoing of the Athenia; the nightly blackouts in Paris
and London. It seemed that the final cataclysm, long expected, was
at last here.

But once the Reichswehr and the Red Army had divided
Poland amicably between them, the film jammed. For weeks now,
the great European powers have been facing each other on the
Western front, their furious gestures of hostility frozen into fan-
tastic rigidity. And while the armies, ranked in battalions and divi-
sions and corps from the North Sea to the Alps, face each other
expectantly behind their fortifications, the politicians of the bellig-
erents wage a desperate, last-minute struggle behind the lines for
the support of neutral powers. Here, for the present, is the real
struggle. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, as
Clausewitz said, politics can also be temporarily substituted
for war.

This suspension of serious warfare has cast an air of ambi-
guity over the whole business. It is clear that the players in the
game, whose stake is nothing less than world power, are not yet all
lined up. Until the final crystallization takes place, only the most
provisional sort of analysis can be undertaken. These pages are an
attempt to throw some light on the positions of the two great-and

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PARTISAN REVIEW
decisive-unknown factors in the equation now being worked out
abroad: the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and the United
States of America.
The ambiguity in the American position is solely in the condi-
tions and timing of our intervention on the side of the Allies. There
is no question that a German victory would be a disaster to Ameri-
can capitalism, and that, when and if the Allies seem to be in
serious danger of losing the war, the United States will come to
their aid with whatever manpower and munitions seem necessary.
But our sister "democracies" are are also our rivals for world power
and our competitors in those export markets which monopoly capi-
talism finds ever more essential. The more the Allies are exhausted
by the war, the better for the interests of American capitalism. The
aim of our diplomacy, therefore, is to wait until the last possible
moment, but not to delay our entrance into the war so long that the
Allies are defeated before American aid can reach them. It is a
nice calculation, and in working it out, the Roosevelt Administra-
tion will be guided primarily by the interests of big business. It is
not a question of the United States letting itself be used as a pawn
by French and British imperialism, as the isolationists charge. Nor
is it the reverse of the medal, as maintained by the liberal weeklies
and the left-wing New Dealers: a matter of an idealistic America
bringing aid to its sister democracies in order to save the world
from fascism. No, the United States is also an imperialist power,
the mightiest of them all, it also has a huge economic stake in the
struggle, and it will intervene for one purpose only: to protect its
own imperialistic interests.

I.
The position of the Soviet Union, the other great "neutral," is
more ambiguous, and requires more detailed analysis.
So far the most important result of the war has been the
exposure of the real political content of Stalinism. Ever since Hit-
ler came into power, the Third International has posed as the great
champion of the democratic masses against the menace of fascism.
But with the first gun fired in Poland, its big pretensions fell away,
its humanitarian vaporings condensed into cynical realpolitik. The
transition was made in the abrupt and whole-hog style habitual to

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THIS QUARTER 5

the Kremlin bureaucracy. A few weeks ago, the Comintern was
agitating for a world crusade against Hitler. Now that the crusade
has taken place, it is discovered to be an imperialist adventure.
Stalin has been transformed overnight from an international phil-
anthropist, whose pipe was an index of his philosophical benevo-
lence, into a Metternichean power politician, his pipe-puffing now
signifying preternatural guile.

The liberals and fellow-travelers have been shocked at last
into recognizing that the Kremlin's interests are not those of the
international working class but rather those of—the Kremlin. They
have been able to make this long overdue adjustment only because
Stalin has rejected democratic imperialism in favor of fascist im-
perialism. But to those of us who make no such fundamental dis-
tinctions between the various forms of imperialism, the Kremlin
years ago revealed the true nature of its foreign policy when it
entered the League of Nations and made common cause with the
Versailles powers.

There are many who insist that this final betrayal of the inter-
national working class was implicit in the 1917 Bolshevik revolu-
tion, that the logic of Leninism leads "inevitably" to Stalinism. We
believe, on the contrary, that the Soviet government has been
obliged to go in for power politics because it long ago abandoned
the Leninist conception that the defense of the Soviet Union was
inseparably bound to the liberation of the masses in other coun-
tries. The degeneration of the 1917 revolution is not to be under-
stood in terms of the free, unhampered working out of Bolshevik
theory to its "logical conclusion." The principal factors in the rise
of Stalinism, on the contrary, seem to us to have been the impact
of such largely uncontrollable phenomena as the devastation and
demoralization caused by the protracted armed intervention of the
Allies, the economic and cultural backwardness of Russia, and the
failure of the revolution to establish itself in any other major
country. The isolation of the revolution in turn led to the rise to power of
the Stalinist bureaucracy, which meant increasing clashes between
the interests of the bureaucracy and those of the masses, both inside
and outside of Russia, which in turn led to the bungling or the
outright sabotage of world revolution by the Comintern, from
China in 1927 to Spain ten years later. Since a successful revolu-
tion abroad would have had repercussion inside Russia which

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PARTISAN REVIEW
would have shaken and perhaps overthrown the bureaucracy, the
Kremlin was unable to base its foreign policy on the international
working class and had no choice except to look for support among
the capitalist governments of Europe, playing one off against an-
other in the usual manner of imperialist power politics.

This fear of the Soviet masses and the international prole-
tariat is the key to Stalin's foreign policy. Realizing the insecurity
of his regime, Stalin, like Chamberlain who also fears revolution
above all things, has one basic objective: to avoid war at all costs.
An alliance with the democracies last summer would probably have
meant that the Reichswehr, after mopping up in Poland, would
have marched against the Soviet Union. On the other hand, as is
now being demonstrated, it was possible to make common cause
with Hitler without provoking any military intervention from the
Allies. Both political and geographical considerations made Hitler
the preferable ally for a Russia which above all else wanted to
avoid war.

The swindle perpetrated on those who for years sincerely
believed in the Comintern's "collective security" policy was on a
Staviski scale. This formula for saving the world from fascism
now turns out to have been all along nothing more dignified than a
club for Stalin to use in his bargaining with Hitler-or, at best, in
case Stalin found himself finally unable to come to terms, a fire
escape. It is now clear that Krivitsky and others were right when
they charged that Stalin has been the persistent suitor and Hitler
the indifferent maiden in the long courtship that has at last achieved
success. As long as France and England, fearing war and possible
revolution more than they feared Hitler, stuck to appeasement,
Hitler had no need of Stalin either as an ally or as a friendly
"neutral," since he could get what he wanted without war.* In this
period, there were no lengths to which Stalin would not go to con-
vince the democracies that his regime was not revolutionary and
could be trusted as an ally. This policy culminated in the betrayal
of the Spanish revolution in order to signalize the respectability of
the Kremlin to the French and British foreign offices.

When Germany moved into Czechoslovakia last winter, France
and England realized that Hitler would set no bounds to the expan-

* The Stalinists now claim it was the appeasement policy of the "Munichmen" which drove Stalin
into the arms of Hitler. Actually, the situation was precisely the reverse: Stalin was unable to make an
alliance with Hitler, despite his earnest efforts, until appeasement had come to an end.

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7

sion of the Reich, and that if their own imperialisms were to sur-
vive, the Nazi bid for world power must be crushed. They prepared
for war. Hitler at once became receptive to the overtures of the
Kremlin, and at last, step by step, each perfectly timed to produce
the maximum effect on the "democratic" front, the solidarity of
Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany was published to the world. And
step by step, the American Communist Party has been dragged
along the road, its end not yet in sight, protesting at each sharp turn
to the right that the next turn would be leftward.

At the end of August, the Russo-German trade agreement is
announced. The Daily Worker first rejects the news as a bourgeois
canard, then declares this is a purely economic matter with no polit-
ical implications. A few days later the mutual assistance pact is
published. The Daily Worker is sure there is an escape clause in
the full document. It turns out there is none. Well, anyway, the
pact means a peaceful solution of the Polish issue and is thus a
mighty blow for peace. Germany masses her troops on the Polish
border. The Soviet Congress will never ratify the pact! The Red
Army will defend Poland! At 10:40 on the night of August 31,
the Soviet Congress votes unanimous ratification; at 5:45 the next
morning, the Reichswehr crosses the Polish border. One thing, at
least, is clear: Stalin has no imperialist ambitions. He will never
invade Poland! The Red Army annexes the Eastern half of Poland.
By now the American friends of the Kremlin are digging in at
their last-ditch position: it is all a Machiavellian scheme of Stalin
to lure Hitler into a war that will destroy him. But already Pravda
has urged the Allies to accept the peace terms which were drawn up
by Ribbentrop and Molotov, that is, to appease Hitler on a scale
compared to which Munich was a heroic battle.

II.

When the shattering news of the Pact was announced, one of
the American comrades is said to have remarked triumphantly to
a bourgeois friend, "I guess this will prove to you that we don't
have any pipeline to Moscow!" But even this modest gain cannot
be extracted by the Party from the wreckage caused by the Pact.
It is probably true that the American Party hierarchy were not
informed in any detail as to just what was going to happen-and

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when. But, judging from a significant change in Party propaganda
in the months immediately preceding the Pact, the chiefs at least
knew something was in the air. In the daily ritual anathemas of the
Daily Worker, Hitler and Mussolini began to yield their places of
honor to Chamberlain and Daladier. In any well-ordered bour-
geois household like the Third International, the butler may not
know exactly where—or how far—the master is going, but he
knows enough to pack the bags and call a cab.
For all their premonitions, however, the Party chiefs seem to
have been unprepared for the abruptness with which Stalin executed
his about-face. For weeks the ideological bedlam was something
extraordinary even for the Communist Party. In a single interview
given out by Browder there might be counted from three to five
mutually exclusive "explanations." For a while, the Party stood
firm on two major political lines in sharp conflict with each other.
The stirring peals of anti-fascist unity of all men of good will con-
tinued to boom out, the Pact being presented as the bombshell that
shattered the Rome-Berlin-Tokio axis and the death-blow to Hitler-
ism, and the newborn war being supported with the same old ardor.
At the same time, a new note, reminiscent of the "Third Period"
days of ultra-revolutionism, began to be heard: this is an imperial-
ist war... the Munichmen are the tools of finance capital... the
Soviet Union is well out of the whole bloody mess.
Even in the Communist Party, such a state of confusion could
not safely be allowed to last very long. To the surprise of many
observers, the Party bureaucracy has chosen to stick by Moscow—
and Hitler—rather than to break away and continue to function
as the extreme left wing of the New Deal war machine. This choice
is of the utmost significance in estimating the nature of the Party
and its relation to the American scene. If the Party had cut loose
from the Comintern in favor of the New Deal, it would have meant
that its social base—both as to jobs for its bureaucrats and the real
inner life of the Party—had shifted to indigenous reformism of
the New Deal and American Labor Party variety. But, although
such a course would have enabled the Party to continue its rapid
growth of recent years and its friendly relations with the New Deal,
this course was not taken. Instead, the Party has clung to Moscow,
and is now denouncing the war and calling for peace at any price.
It has moulted almost its entire brilliant plumage of fellow travel-

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9
lers and "innocent" organizations, has sacrificed much of its influ-
ence over the labor movement, and has not only lost its favored
position with the government in Washington but has at one stroke
become a prominent object of governmental persecution.
That in spite of all this, the Party bureaucracy found itself
unable to break with Moscow, shows how thoroughly Stalinized the
Party apparatus has become. Indeed, it is misleading to speak of
Browder and the rest having made a "choice." For all their long
cohabitation with native American reformism, they remained the
loyal agents of the Kremlin in American politics. It is also remark-
able that the rank and file of the Party seems to have stood firm
in these trying weeks. There were defections, but apparently not on
a mass scale. And a recent Party rally was able to fill the twenty
thousand seats of Madison Square Garden with a reasonably en-
thusiastic, all things considered, crowd of comrades. The dis-
ciplined, monolithic character of the Party organization shows up
most dramatically.
There is something really terrifying about this mindless, pas-
sive acceptance of directives, however irrational, from above, this
abdication on the part of tens of thousands of more or less sincere
radicals of all critical judgment. One feels that if the Party were
ordered by the proper authorities, of course to march over a
cliff en masse, it would obey. And this, metaphorically speaking, is
just what the American Party has been ordered to do. Even in the
best of periods, the Party has a very large turnover of members,
some say as much as thirty or forty per cent a year. Even if the
ranks hold fast on this issue now, it seems likely that the Party will
waste away rapidly as old members drop out and no new people
come in to replace them. For the present Party line, acceptable
though it may be to disciplined members, has practically no attrac-
tion for those outside the Party.
The present C. P. line on war is a weird mixture of pseudo-
isolationism and pseudo-revolutionism. We say "pseudo" because
it all boils down to a tactic directed toward no more elevated end
than the protection of the mutual interests of Moscow and Berlin.
The Party's "isolationism" can be dismissed in a few words. It has
nothing in common with the indigenous midwestern variety, which
is naive and provincial but is at least honestly concentrated on
keeping this country out of a European war. The Party, too, now

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advises the American masses to keep out of the imperialist blood-
bath, which in itself is excellent advice. But what the Party, as
Moscow's agent in this country, is really interested in is not peace
or isolationism but the victory of Hitler-Stalin over the Allies, just
as last winter, when it was shrieking for a democratic holy war
against Hitlerism, it was really concerned not with any such high-
flown business at all but quite simply with the implementation of
the Kremlin's ultimately successful attempt to force Hitler into an
alliance. C. P. "isolationism" has nothing to do with the interests
of the American masses, and will be chucked overboard tomorrow
when and if the Kremlin's foreign policy takes a new turn.

The "revolutionary" line on the war is a smokescreen to
obscure two awkward realities: (1) the Moscow-Berlin alliance;
(2) the Red Army's division of Poland with the Reichswehr, and
the more recent imperialist diplomatic drive against the Baltic
states. The general idea is that the Soviet Union is a socialist state
and that, in the interests of the world revolution, anything goes.

The comrades explain away the alliance with Hitler as a smart
trick: Stalin doesn't "really" trust Hitler and is merely "using"
him for the time being, to betray him later on. Thus the Soviet
Union is not committed to the fascist side. But this is nothing
more than normal, everyday imperialist power politics. No one
"really" trusts any one else, and every one "uses" their allies as
much as he can, and betrays them whenever it is to his interest to
do so. Stalin made a pact with Hitler, and if the Allies seem to be
winning later on, Stalin will probably betray Hitler and return to
the democratic camp. Mussolini also made a pact with Hitler, and
he, too, if the Allies seem to be winning, may be counted on to turn
traitor to the Axis and become as ardent a democrat as-Daladier.
In that case, according to the Party line, Il Duce will have also
struck a mighty blow for world socialism.

As for the Red Army's recent exploits, these are also hailed as
mighty strokes for socialism. Nothing is more ludicrous than the
attempts of the Stalinists to picture these "provincial conquests,"
in Trotsky's phrase, as though they represent the spreading of the
October revolution to the rest of the world. Even as imperialist
burglars, they are not very impressive. The Polish "campaign"
in which the chief excitement was provided by
the tanks getting stuck in the mud or running out of gas, was the

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sort of hollow victory over a prostrate and inferior foe that the
Fascist legions won in Ethiopia. And like the Ethiopian campaign,
its chief utility was for internal consumption to soothe the grum-
bling masses and to inflate a little the collapsed morale of the
Red Army.
As for world revolution, it is noticeable that the Third Inter-
national, in its current anti-war phase, has not dared to raise any-
where the classic Leninist slogan, the only possible basis for a
revolutionary opposition to war: Turn the imperialist war into
civil war! The Kremlin is no more anxious for world revolution
than is Downing Street or the White House.
But Trotsky propounds the final and unanswerable question:
"If the Kremlin wants to foment world revolution, how could it
sacrifice its influence over the international working class for the
sake of occupying some border territories?" "Eleven million more
people enjoy socialism!" exults the New Masses. But what of the
hundreds of millions of French and English and Indian and
Chinese and American and German and Italian and other workers
throughout the world whose faith in socialism has received this
ultimate betrayal by the Kremlin gang and its agents throughout
the world? The exposure of Stalinism as the implacable enemy of
the international working class had to come sooner or later, and it
will be, in the long run, a healthy and progressive development. But
the immediate effects are shattering and demoralizing. The labor
and socialist movement the world over has hardly been in a century
in such a state of collapse as today. For this tragic situation the
Kremlin and its dupes and agents-the Browders and Pollitts and
Thorezes, the Lamonts and Stracheys and Cowleys and Lerners and
Hickses and Schumanns and Brouns-must bear full responsibility.
Some of these have already broken with Moscow, though for the
most part in a hypocritical and disingenuous way, and more will
do so in the future. Those who keep silent or who continue to sup-
port the policies of the Third International must from now on be
called bluntly what they are: agents of the Kremlin and, for the
present at least, of Hitler.

III.

The shift of Stalin to the side of Germany was temporarily
embarrassing to the liberals who had so long accepted his regime
as a mainstay of the "democratic" front. But already they are

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recovering from their first pained surprise and boldly denouncing
“Red Totalitarianism” and “Communist Imperialism.” Some one
who first began to read the liberal weeklies a month ago would
never suspect there was a time when these journals were, to say the
least, on intimate terms with Stalinism. For the pact has really
simplified the whole pro-war liberal position. For some time now
the liberals have been made uncomfortable by the increasingly
plain indications of the totalitarian nature of the Stalinist dictator-
ship. Neither the Czar in the last war nor Stalin in this one could
be called ideal bed companions for the defenders of democracy.
The liberals, of course, put up with them as long as they seemed to
be necessary for the great crusade. But there is a remarkable
similarity in the editorial reactions to the defection of the Soviet
Union from the democratic front this time and the liberal weeklies'
editorials on the overthrow of Czarism in 1917. Now, at last, is
the general idea, the battle line is sharply drawn between the forces
of freedom and of tyranny. No longer must they labor to explain
away or suppress the crimes and corruptions emanating from the
Kremlin.

More clearly than ever do they see this war as essentially an
ideological conflict, a clash of ideas translated into military terms.
The life-principle (democracy) is locked in mortal—or at any rate,
soon-to-be-mortal—combat with the death-principle (fascism)
between the Maginot Line and the Westwall, and the full rhetoric
of freedom, slightly motheaten by now, is enlisted on behalf of the
Allied arms.

The first world war opened an era in which imperialist strug-
gles for power are presented, by both sides, as Armageddons fought
out to decide eternal principles. This is a refinement in the art of
war peculiar to the twilight of capitalism. In the formative cen-
turies of European capitalism, wars were publicly recognized as
instruments of commercial and territorial aggrandizement. No one
thought it necessary to amalgamate cultural values and military
objectives. It was typical that Frederick the Great entertained Vol-
taire and immersed his court in the superior French culture at the
same time as he was prosecuting war against France. These wars,
of course, were little more than duels between professional armies,
with the normal processes of life going on behind the battle-lines.

War in our time, however, is totalitarian, requiring the coor-
dination into the military machine of the whole civil life of the

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THIS QUARTER
13
nation. Furthermore, war today being so vastly more destructive in
its effects on life and property than past wars, and also being so
increasingly inconclusive and futile even in terms of power politics
-what did the last war settle?-it is all the more essential to create
powerful ideological sanctions for the slaughter. The basic sanction
of this sort is the myth of national unity, the patriotic love of
fatherland which is supposed to rise above material and individual
interests, uniting all classes in the defense of a common cultural
ideal. This nationalist sanction reached its full development in the
last half of the last century. To it our own century has added
another, one which is especially potent in liberal and intellectual
circles. This is a sort of "international patriotism," so to speak-
the idea that the world is divided between the forces of "democ-
racy" and "autocracy" (1914-1918), or, this time, "freedom" and
"fascism."
The old-fashioned nationalist arguments in favor of our par-
ticipation in the war are not particularly dangerous in liberal-labor
circles. It is the internationalist doctrine which is really seductive.
We are faced, its advocates assert, with a concrete threat to the
free institutions of Western civilization, and we cannot remain
indifferent to the possible victory of fascist Germany. Many of
them admit the last war was a doctrinal fraud, but this war, they
say, is "different," since fascism is incomparably more threatening
than Kaiserism ever was. Some will even admit that the Allied
cause is tainted with imperialism, but, as Freda Kirchwey of the
Nation recently put it: "The qualified blessings of old-fashioned
imperialism must be preserved as a bulwark against the spread of
fascist domination." Fascism is the brute fact, and all theories
must be adapted-read "perverted"-towards the great end of
its defeat.
The general idea is that the Kaiser made war for the simple
aims of what Miss Kirchwey with nostalgia calls "old-fashioned
imperialism": to get colonies, to break England's mastery of the
seas, to open up new markets; while Hitlerism has all these aims
plus another of a quite different and more sinister category: to
extend the fascist political system throughout the world. It is true
that there are still important differences between political life in
France and in Germany, but this is not because France has not yet
been conquered by Germany, but because French capitalism has
not yet reached the crisis stage of its German prototype. As we

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14 PARTISAN REVIEW

pointed out in our editorial last spring, fascism is produced by the
internal development of monopoly capitalism, not by any force of
arms from outside. In the same way, the foreign policies of the
fascist nations are determined, as are those of the "democracies,"
by the needs of their internal economies, which are still based on
capitalist property relations. The differences between this war and
the last are mostly to be found in new diplomatic forms and alli-
ances which merely play over the surface of events and can be
understood only as reflections of the basic imperialist antagonisms
among the great powers of Europe. If fascism turned to aggression
as a matter of principle, spreading the true faith with fire and
sword in Islamic fashion, one would expect to find Italy and Ger-
many fighting together in this war. Actually, of course, the eco-
nomic and geographical differences between the two nations have
proved to be decisive, and Italy is not only neutral but may very
well repeat her performance of the last war and join the Allies.
Last spring we noted that no one looked forward with any
real enthusiasm or even confidence to the outcome of the second
world war. Now that the war has come, this is still true. The
embattled "democracies" have not ventured to define their war
aims any more specifically than, "Hitlerism Must Go!" (And what
must Come?) On both sides, the morale of the population is low.
For this is the tragedy's second performance. We have seen it
all before! This is where we came in! And it is impossible to
muster the same emotions of horror and surprise which the first
showing exacted from us. In the very novelty of the thing, in the
feeling, moreover, that an event so unprecedented must belong to
the order of natural calamities, the 1914 generation found some
little comfort. They had discovered, as Paul Valéry said, that "the
most beautiful and ancient things, the most formidable and best-
ordered, are perishable by accident." But even the attitude of
discovery, the shocked surprise of the old-world humanist to
things undreamt of in his philosophy, is denied to us today. And it
is a fact that the newspapers, the cartoons, and even those shrines
of moral indignation, the liberal journals, have so far shown a
curious restraint. It is not the restraint of scientific detachment,
however, nor does it arise from a settled sense of rectitude; it is
the low-toned voice of the guilty conscience. For most people know
today that war is not a cosmic accident, nor the result of cruel
impulses rooted in human nature. On the contrary they know that

=== Page 16 ===
THIS QUARTER
15
it belongs among those phenomena which, properly understood,
are subject to human control.
This control, however, cannot be exercised by the ruling
classes in the great imperialist democracies, for it is the economic
system which serves their interests which also must resort to these
periodic military bloodlettings in order to resolve economic con
flicts otherwise insoluble. Within the perspective of capitalism, the
best that can happen if the Allies win the war is a new Versailles,
followed by the same round of political convulsions as ended up
in the triumph of fascism. For it seems impossible that the war will
not bring on immeasurably greater economic crises than any we
have yet known, and that the mass desperation which these will
provoke can be curbed by anything short of the abandonment of
all democratic forms.
Many liberals, of course, are aware of the precariousness of
the pro-war position. But they cling to it because they profess to
see no alternative to entrusting the anti-fascist cause to the armies
of imperialism. This is not surprising, since they reject the Marxist
analysis of war and fascism as products of the capitalist system
itself. But in their recoil from the revolutionary socialist program,
they are forced back, step by step, to the most naked apologetics
for imperialism. As the war has drawn nearer this country, the
space between the revolutionary and the imperialist positions has
steadily shrunk until it will soon not be big enough for even a New
Republic editor to balance himself upon.
It is notable that the pro-war liberals can still support one
cause with real enthusiasm: the revolutionary mission of the Ger
man people to overthrow Hitlerism. But even here they are in
volved in a hopeless contradiction. For an Anglo-French invasion
is bound to arouse German patriotism, rallying all classes behind
Hitler in a war of "national defense." Thus French and British
nationalism cancel out German nationalism in favor of the impe
rialist interests dominating both camps. In fact, an imperialist
war can be waged only so long as national unity is maintained on
both sides of the firing line. The international solidarity of the
workers, with the masses in each nation fighting not against their
brothers across the border but against their own capitalist govern
ments, is the only force that can either bring into being real democ
racy or make war and fascism unnecessary. This is the alternative
which our liberals find either too Utopian or too bloodthirsty.

=== Page 17 ===
Clark Mills

PASTORAL FOR POLAND

Now have the cries of bombed and drowned
a gentle, elegaic sound;
rumor of grief and news of pain
drench the dull mind like autumn rain.

And now the innocent and wise
crouch from the menace of blue skies
till they lie broken, or in flight
towards the ignorant shield of night.

The burning forest of the nations
wheels under the constellations;
the iron birds roar the bomb-routes; deep
in the explosions children sleep.

Together in the cool of day
the placid, great-limbed beasts of prey,
strong at the twilight hour, and feeding,
rend the sweet flesh before them bleeding,

and formless forms in slippers and cowl
watch with the still, round eyes of the owl,
soar from the tree of faith to bless
the perfect act of ruthlessness,

and crickets ring the leafing fire
chirping with terror and desire,
and the rest, under the shadowed hill,
rustle and scurry and are still.

—In the exhausted hour of peace
whom shall we honor among these?
The martyrs bleeding by the wall,
the humble, who cry out and fall,
and these are all, and these are all.

16

=== Page 18 ===
James Daly

AFTER SHIPWRECK

Then, then when

Beyond jagged cluster of rocks
The beach
surpassing terror's forecast
Plunged desolate toward our raft

We remembered
hands, hands
O the seen suck and those
Eyes emerging, those sodden
Braids

Explosion had torn those
Mouths, even the glazed eyes were bloody
We the alive remembered

Fragments of bodies
A dead rat clutching a dead woman's hair

Wide away gone ripplings
Stricken with smoulder
The of-shrieks the of-steel the
Of-smoke
phantasmal memory while

Beach plunged toward us, bleakest
(Except for a distant bird that winged up,
It seemed a flamingo)
Bleakest paradise that ever
Heart cried out to

When its cry was Land

17

=== Page 19 ===
Theodore Roethke

BALLAD OF THE CLAIRVOYANT WIDOW

A kindly Widow Lady, who lived upon a hill,
Climbed to her attic window and gazed across the sill.

“O tell me, Widow Lady, what is it that you see,
As you look across my city in God’s country?”

“I see ten million windows, I see ten thousand streets,
I see the traffic doing miraculous feats.

The lawyers all are cunning, the business men are fat,
Their wives go out on Sunday beneath the latest hat.

The kids play cops and robbers, the kids play mumbley-peg,
Some learn the art of thieving, and some grow up to beg;

The rich can play at polo, the poor can do the shag.
Professors are condoling the cultural lag.

I see a banker's mansion with twenty wood-grate fires,
Alone, his wife is grieving for what her heart desires.

Next door there is a love-nest of plaster board and tin,
The rats soon will be leaving, the snow will come in.”

“Clairvoyant Widow Lady, with an eye like a telescope,
Do you see any sign or semblance of that thing called 'Hope'?”

“I see the river harbor, alive with men and ships,
A surgeon guides a scalpel with thumb and finger-tips.

I see grandpa surviving a series of seven strokes,
The unemployed are telling stale unemployment jokes.

18

=== Page 20 ===
POEMS
19
The gulls ride on the water, the gulls have come and gone,
The men on rail and roadway keep moving on and on.

The salmon climb the rivers, the rivers nudge the sea,
The green comes up forever in the fields of our country."

John Wheelwright

A FUNERAL PALL IN CELLOPHANE

An evil Boston woman loved the Virgin
with merely nearly mediaeval marvel.
When she grew old, she stuck together a junk shop
the texture of whose court, unfortunately,
inspired the taste of Alice Stone Blackwell
(I mean Alice Foote Macdougal) Restaurants.
Fed by the interior court's interior life
she lived off canned baked beans and cold corned beef
and bore false witness at the Customs House.
Her "guests" at restaurants paid their checks for dinner.
She threw nothing away. She was a mummy.
She gave good folks hysterics at the Opera
poking her magenta-ed hair and ostrich-plumed
monkey face at them between box curtains.
She scrubbed down Altar steps every Good Friday;
Sandow received her and her friends stark naked;
She had a Requiem Mass sung every Christmas,—
for the Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary.
"It's not a hospice; but a hoax," she said,
"There's not a charitable eye or ear in Boston"—
all this because they christened her Isabella.

She took as lovers Boston's public citizens;
Opera and Drama flourished in her life time
while Politics became brutal and dull,—
all this because her maiden name was Stuart.

=== Page 21 ===
20

PARTISAN REVIEW

Women whose pretty faces had no bodies
women with ugly faces without beauty
women whose power depended on each other
said she was not a LADY, that no LADY
with any moral sense could leave cards on her;
but she kicked up rubied heels and thanked the Lord.
When young, because her things-in-law were Gardners,
she was invited to my grandmother's party.
Her footmen bore her on a light white satin litter
straight up the flying stair Bulfinch designed
and set her down, thump-thump, in the back parlor.
Thus did she lie on lilies and on roses
in a white satin cuirass she could not stand in
with parma violets at either hip bone
while men crossed and uncrossed their legs all evening,
like bees who cluster round a honey cluster;-
all this because she said she sprained her ankle.

The levee ended when her footmen entered
and my grandfather said: "Recumbent Lady,
I hope that when you come again you will be
perpendicular, not horizontal."

Winfield Townley Scott

INDIAN SUMMER - BUFFALO SUMMER

Opened like a big new colored-picture book,
The morning took us early with the summer wind
Coming over the streets and yards from the harbor.
There was no game good enough for that morning.

=== Page 22 ===
POEMS
21
By 10 o'clock my mother put on her new shirtwaist
And Aunt Essie was there in her black hat with the cherries.

I ran ahead of them, all the way to the corner
Clutching my cap-pistol, ran out of the sun
And climbed a bench in the little park under the walnuts.

It must have been time: on the curbs all fathers and mothers,
Even Miss Pitman and her cane, old Mr. Kaull and his pipe,
Baby Shea, the big policeman, in the middle of Broadway.

Just as I caught my sister and pulled out her hair-ribbon
O then we stood still and amazed, hearing far off
The sweet incredible fife, the murmur of coming drums.

Every now and then a cop on a motorcycle.
But at last over the dust, out of the shade and light,
The Indians rode before us their arrogant horses.

Ah I had no genuine breath for such word made flesh—
The brown torsos, cheekbones, streaked with warpaint,
The head-dresses blowing wide like unfurled turkeys.

Then came the squaws, then came the little Indians,
And cages with buffalos, wolves, hyenas, coyotes,
An ancient stage coach waddling, and then the scouts—

The scouts with lashed-leather gloves and buckskin jackets,
Bearing their rifles bravely across their knees,
And then just behind them an old man in an open carriage.

Old, old Buffalo Bill, bowing and smiling,
Lifting his hat from his long white hair, and riding
Right up Broadway in a little yellow-wheeled cart.

=== Page 23 ===
An Interview With Ignazio Silone

Editor's Note: While he was in Europe last summer, Clement
Greenberg spent an afternoon with Ignazio Silone in Zurich, Switz-
erland. The following article was later written out by Silone, based
on Greenberg's notes of the conversation and his own recollections.
It has been translated from the French by Nancy and Dwight
Macdonald.

In the event of a war between Italy and France, which country
would you favor?

Tunisia.

What do you mean?

The world is now divided into two great fronts: one composed
of the conservatives, that is, of the democracies and other partisans
of collective security; the other composed of the revisionists or
fascists. Neither of these two fronts is capable of assuring peace
or of solving the economic and political problems now confronting
the world. Real peace depends today on the rapidity with which a
third front is created, on the rapidity with which revolutionary
workers all over the world regain their political autonomy and
resume the struggle to overthrow capitalism. This third front did
once actually exist in the form of a revolutionary Russia and of
militant workers' parties elsewhere, but at present it exists only
in potentiality.

Do you, as an anti-fascist, look forward to, and favor, a war
as the quickest means of overthrowing the present regime in Italy?

22

=== Page 24 ===
AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE
23
Personally, I do not share the opinions of many of my fellow
political emigrés. A "liberty" brought to Italy and Germany by
foreign armies would be nothing less than disastrous. However, I
do not deny that it would be easier to create revolutionary situa-
tions in Italy and Germany during a war, but these situations
would have to be exploited by Italian and German revolutionaries
themselves, and by no one else.
What, in the light of their relations to political parties, do
you think should be the role of revolutionary writers in the present
situation?
Although until 1930 I was a member of the Central Commit-
tee of the Italian Communist Party, at present I do not belong to
any political organisation. I do, however, consider myself an anti-
fascist partisan in the civil war that is now being waged more or
less throughout the world. As an anti-fascist partisan, I believe that
the true function of the revolutionary writer today is to herald and,
so to speak, to represent in its ideal state that third front to which I
just referred. This means that the revolutionary writer must risk
isolation. For example, there are many writers who have only a
superficial understanding of the questions involved in the "col-
lective security" policy, precisely because they believe the Stalin-
ist parties to represent truly the interests of the masses and pre-
cisely because they fear the isolation that would result from a
break with Stalinism. But today it is necessary to have the courage
to stand alone, to risk hearing oneself called Fascist Agent, Hitler
spy, and so forth, and to persist nevertheless in one's course. The
third front, existing as yet only in an ideal state, must be kept pure
as an ideal. And for that too, courage is required.
The reactionary trend of our epoch is shown precisely by the
absence of such a "third front." They try to force on us the
dilemma: status quo or regression? Most of the progressive forces
have already accepted this Hobson's choice. They are content to
struggle to preserve the existing order, lest they fall under the
fascist yoke.
One thing I must make clear at the outset: I think it would be
a serious mistake to put bourgeois democracy and fascism on the
same level, in view of the great difference between these two forms

=== Page 25 ===
24 PARTISAN REVIEW

of political organization. The Stalinists, who until 1934 denied
the existence of any such difference and who fought against social-
democracy and liberal democracy as the equivalents of fascism,
these gentlemen in actuality made possible Hitler's victory.
But it would also be a mistake, through fear of fascism, to
turn conservative. Fascism's power, its mass appeal, its contagious
influence, all are due to the fact that fascism means false solutions,
easy solutions, ersatz solutions—but, all the same, solutions of the
real problems of our time. We can conquer fascism only by pro-
posing and carrying out other solutions—just, humane, progressive
solutions of these same problems. But conservative democracy
denies the existence of these problems. She does not see them, does
not wish to see them, is unable to see them. That is why, in spite
of her military strength, her material wealth and her monopoly of
raw materials, when conservative democracy is brought face to
face with fascism, she is forced back onto the defensive. That is
why she has until now been beaten by fascism. That is why she is
weak. The democrats are right when they call the Nazi "abolition
of unemployment" fictitious, unstable and a stop-gap measure, but
their criticism will be more convincing when they themselves find
and carry out a healthy and permanent solution of the same prob-
lem. It is true that Fascist nationalism conflicts with that peaceful
collaboration of all peoples which is a historical necessity, now
that the economic integration of the globe has laid the foundation
for a progressive world-unity. But the Versailles system is also
based on nationalism, it too is opposed to historical development,
and so it cannot be set up as an effective barrier against fascism.
When the socialists, with the best possible anti-fascist intentions,
renounce their own program, put their own theories in moth balls,
and accept the negative positions of conservative democracy, they
think they are doing their bit in the struggle to crush fascism.
Actually, they leave to fascism the distinction of alone daring to
bring forward in public certain problems, thus driving into the
fascists' arms thousands of workers who will not accept the
status quo.

In short, I see the struggle against fascism as primarily not
a military but a political and social question. We anti-fascists have
been beaten by the fascists in political and social spheres; it is
cheap to seek revenge in the military sphere. War will not make

=== Page 26 ===
AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE
25

an end of fascism. It is even probable that the first result of war
will be the fascistization of the democratic countries.

But don't you think the military defeat of Hitler and Musso-
lini will inevitably mean the end of their regimes?

I think that the establishment of a truly free regime in Italy
or Germany depends entirely on the Italian and German people.
If they cannot free themselves, no one else can free them. Freedom
cannot come as a gift from a foreign army: to pay for liberty, a
people must dig down deep into its own pocket. Obviously, a war
can produce certain favorable conditions for revolution. The same
conditions can also be produced by cholera, earthquake, famine.
But the advocates of liberty have never been the advocates of
cholera nor of earthquakes nor of famine, and they cannot any
more be the advocates of war, even though they stand to profit by
favorable conditions which it may produce. The worst misfortune
which could happen to German socialism-which achieved power
in 1918 under such unfortunate circumstances-would be for it to
regain power after the next military defeat of Germany and as a
natural result of the defeat. Nothing worse could happen to social-
ism than to become synonomous with national defeat.

When you speak of liberty, do you mean socialist liberty?

Yes, I think of socialism as an element from now on indis-
pensable to a regime of real freedom-that is to say, of liberties
that are concrete and actual, not formal and "constitutional." Big
business and political liberty have become incompatible. But I do
not see liberty as the necessary, natural and predestined conse-
quence of socialism: I do not consider economics, politics and cul-
ture to be as mechanically interrelated as many Marxists seem to.
Just as we have very different political regimes growing from the
common soil of capitalist production, so too Russia warns us that,
on the base of state socialist production, there can arise a culture
of cannibals, a culture much inferior to the culture which bour-
geois democracy had created. Socialism rids us of one enemy of
human liberty, but it can also introduce new ones, unknown to past
history. And there is no formula which can protect us from these

=== Page 27 ===
26 PARTISAN REVIEW

new enemies, no automatic mechanism, no constitutional guaran-
tees. There is nothing, that is, which can force men to be free.
Fortunately! Perhaps after I have finished writing the novel I am
working on now, I will try to write a "School for Liberty" as a
sequel to that School for Dictators you already know.

What is your opinion of contemporary left-wing literature?

Left-wing literature? You must admit that the expression is
ambiguous. One should reserve the adjectives "left," "right,"
"center" and their nuances for political parties and their propa-
ganda. However, I understand what you are referring to. There
are a few great left-wing writers and there is a left-wing literary
industry, nourished by a left-wing literary philistinism which has
become especially abundant and vulgar since the Kremlin dis-
covered literature as "instrumentum regni."

Stalinism is really the horn-of-plenty of this literature.
Writers find themselves flattered in all their vague aspirations and,
into the bargain, they risk nothing. In a society where they were
accustomed to being considered merely a luxury, they are now
given the illusion of playing a leading role. They are called
together in congresses, they sign appeals, they are "popularized."
All that is asked of them is that they approve everything the Party
does or at least that they do not disapprove in public. Nothing
more!

There are also a good many writers, essentially bourgeois and
reactionary in the quality of their writing, who conform to the
etiquette of anti-fascism. Their hostility to fascism has this particu-
lar quality: they address themselves always to far-distant fascist
regimes and have not a word to say about fascism and reaction in
their own country. Truly, a platonic and tactful anti-fascism! Their
socialist convictions are also strictly export commodities: these
writers are partisans of socialism in Russia but not in their own
country. They are most eloquent about the victorious revolutions
of the past-1789, 1848, etc.-but are silent on the revolutionary
tasks of our own epoch. Already this whole left-wing literary indus-
try is going to pieces as the result of the collapse of "popular
front" politics.

The true left-wing writers are distinguished by characteristics

=== Page 28 ===
AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE
27

the very opposite of those I have just described. They are, first of
all and above all, opposed to fascism and reaction in their own
country. They feel themselves bound in sympathy, first and fore-
most, with the working class and peasantry of their own country,
and, through them, with the workers of every country in the world.
They submit to no discipline beyond what every honest conscience
and sincere thought provides of itself. And so they will tell the
truth to every one, at all times, to enemies and to friends, even
when the friends do not want to hear disagreeable truths.

Have you read Trotsky's pamphlet, Their Morals and Ours?
What do you think of it?

The pamphlet has only recently been translated into French
by Victor Serge. I have read it, along with a number of critical
articles it provoked. The criticisms as well as the pamphlet left me
with a painful impression, because of a fundamental evasion. In
spite of the limiting title of the pamphlet-a title which might sug-
gest that the author wanted to confine himself to a justification of
bolshevist political morality-Trotsky gives the impression, in
certain passages of his essay, where he wishes to theorize, that he
does not know or does not recognize the difference between ethical
standards and moral sentiments on the one hand, and actual morals
on the other-though these two concepts are well-differentiated
both theoretically and in practice. Trotsky's critics, those I have
had a chance to read, add to the confusion. They put a pin through
this or that episode in the history of bolshevism and declare: You
see! Two thousand years after Christ, and what sort of ethical
principles these Asiatics bring us to! But just as there is a differ-
ence between Christian morals and the ethical principles of Chris-
tianity, there is a similar difference between all morals and all
codes of ethics.

I should be hard put to it if I had to list the ethical principles
laid down by Lenin. Perhaps he formulated them in some work I
don't know about. But, quite apart from any intellectual formula-
tion, it is beyond question that the heroic life of Lenin and his
limitless devotion to the cause of socialism were guided by an
inward moral intuition into life and society which, as he matured,
he buttressed with the concepts of Marxist socialism. In a general

=== Page 29 ===
28 PARTISAN REVIEW

sense, we can say that socialism has an ethical content which is not
to be confused with the morals of socialist parties, even though it
more or less contributes to the shaping of these morals.

This way of putting it may not be clear to those who have not
thought very much about these matters. Let me give an illustration.
We should look for the same relationships between ethics and
morals as between a work of art and its beauty. Every authentic
work of art is beautiful, but it is not only and not solely beautiful.
More often than not, it has been conceived with an end in mind
which is useful or educational or amusing or didactic or religious
or political or patriotic or humanitarian. A work of art is thus
beautiful quite apart from the intentions of the artist, the school,
the party, the church or the government which called it into being.
It retains its beauty even after the utilitarian ends it was designed
to serve have become obsolete. None of us venerate Zeus or
Minerva or Apollo, but the ancient statues which represent them
still move us with their pure beauty. They have lost, these statues,
their original function, and now they are only beautiful. There are
certain art critics who dishonor Marxism because, in the name of
their sham Marxism, they see in works of art only fortuitous
sociological influences. Poor men and indeed to be pitied, poor
people who do not know the meaning of beauty!

The same influences shape and deform the ethical ideal of
man, whether it be inherited or whether, because of existing con-
ditions, it includes the need for reform or revolution. That which
results and which serves more or less as a guide in practical life,
that we call “morals.” A valuation of morals which confined itself
exclusively to judgments of utility would be inadequate and, in
fact, contrary to their nature. Morals must also be considered in
relation to the ethical ideal which they embody—or pretend to
embody. I consider all utilitarian morality bourgeois and reac-
tionary. Being utilitarian, it is not morality. It is a theory which
is helpful in criticising the decadence of the bourgeois order, but it
is entirely inadequate for the construction of a new society. That
is to say, it becomes the opposite of utilitarian. A socialist move-
ment which, in order to win and keep power more easily, makes
hay of the ethical principles of socialism, is doomed to see the chief
springs of its vital force dry up. Behind the mask of the most
democratic constitution in the world, the new society without pri-

=== Page 30 ===
AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE
29
vate property will be ruled by the ancient law of the forest: homo
homini lupus.
What are, in your opinion, these ethical principles of socialism?
I want to tell you what I have learned and felt in my contacts
with socialist workers and peasants, with men who during the war
chose to go to prison rather than to bow to the cult of patriotism,
with men who were ruined because of their opposition to fascism,
with men who had conquered all fear in themselves-fear of hun-
ger, fear of being tortured, fear of death. I felt in them a complete
reversal of all bourgeois values, a strong feeling that men come
before money, a feeling of detachment from all considerations of
career, family, advancement, a condemnation of capitalist society
based on hate, on fear, on a sense of injustice, and a constant appli-
cation of moral criteria in their judging of technical and economic
data. Remember, I am speaking of Marxist workers. All this I
learned from them in friendly chats, for they did not open their
mouths in public meetings, considering themselves too stupid.
Above all, I sensed in them a great feeling of fraternity.
Obviously, in the history of philosophy and of ethical ideals,
these poor workers have contributed nothing new or original. I
must even add that, as a rule, their ethical ideal seems to be rather
antiquated. But among these workers the old Christian message of
equality and fraternity has taken on a meaning that is concrete,
modern, living-chiefly by the extension of the principles of indi-
vidual morality to a collective morality, and by their insistence on
a just reorganization of society. In the various countries I have
lived in, I have tried to know the socialist movement, by forming
friendly ties with workers. After feeling my way a little and after
getting over the reserve which every man naturally feels when it
is a matter of confessing the secret of his own life, I found that for
every socialist worker, for every Marxist worker the strongest base
for his socialist faith was the sentiment of justice. I am convinced
that in justice lies the greatest power of socialism, and that because
of it socialism will survive the present crisis.
To seek out the moral content of socialism is equivalent to
plumbing the inward and immanent truth of the socialist move-
ment. The "ought to be" is comprised in the "being." The mistake

=== Page 31 ===
30
PARTISAN REVIEW

of moralists and idealists is to wish to attribute to the movement
principles which are alien and strange to it. The mistake of the
"vulgar" Marxists is to go no farther than the surface of the move
ment, thus fragmenting reality by seeing spiritual activities as
simple reflexes of economic action. Finally, there is something
even worse than "vulgar" Marxism, and that is a certain "tactical
morality" of the Stalinists, who, while still believing that Justice,
the Dignity of Man, and Truth are petty-bourgeois illusions, have
ended up by taking them into their vocabulary "to help in the
struggle against fascism"! A stupid Machiavellianism which isn't
worth thirty cents!

Socialism does not need to lie in order to give itself a moral
ity. Its moral content lies in its insistence that man comes before
nature and industrial technique, and in its demand for a society
where this primacy of the human shall be assured. Socialism is not
technocracy, but rather anthropocracy. The distinction of Marx is
that he demonstrated that such a revolution, from technocracy to
anthropocracy, has been made historically possible (not inevitable,
for nothing is inevitable) by the development of capitalist society,
and that this revolution would be, in our epoch, in harmony also
with the requirements of technological progress.

=== Page 32 ===
Art Chronicle
Recent Tendencies in Europe
C
ULTURAL ACHIEVEMENT has usually been regarded as a happy
by-product of national peace and security. On this assumption it
might be supposed that nothing could prove more dislocating to the
progress of art-movements than a general world war. The years
1914-18 were to show, however, that when an esthetic evolution
has been fertilized by an expanding creative instinct, not even the
proximity of the conflict itself will entirely restrict its advance.
The outbreak of the last war came at the height of what Apolli-
naire had called the heroic period of Cubism. It was probably
luck which proceeded to spare the leading painters (more gener-
ously than the writers, for instance), many of whom underwent
service in the trenches, but what never ceases to astonish is the high
quality of work to come down to us from the years 1915, 16, and
17. Naturally the output was very much curtailed. Yet the im-
pressive war-records of Braque, Léger, and de la Fresnaye among
others, did not preclude them from the production of important
paintings during brief periods of leave from the front.
The continued evolution of the modern movement would
hardly have been possible had the Great War come a decade
earlier. The painters were indeed fortunate in having transcended
the first feverish years of experiment. By 1914 the new paths that
they were to follow were thoroughly open and secure; thus the
works of the Cubist painters (both Frenchmen and non-combat-
ants like Picasso and Gris who were immersed in the war-atmos-
phere of northern France) could appear quite different in char-
acter from what the external conditions might normally lead one
to expect. One would have prophesied results notable for their
violent projection of horror and confusion. Yet the nightmare
which attended the creation of the war-pictures seems to have
directed them toward a realization which was, if anything, more
internal and considered than ever before. It may be that an envel-
31

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32 PARTISAN REVIEW

oping chaos imposes upon the artist a new demand for order. We
can perhaps thus account for the strongly-built Byzantine esthetic
which attended the break-up of the Roman Empire.

As soon as the pressure of the last world-conflict was relaxed,
the artists who had persevered received a very prompt reward.
With a surprising swiftness the new directions in painting, sculp-
ture, and architecture began to reach sections of the public that
had been hitherto quite closed to any esthetic advance. In Moscow
the Russian constructivists continued their work, and were consid-
erably encouraged by the new régime. Germany and Austria,
although economically wrecked by the war, began the most pro-
ductive period they had shown in modern times; while in Paris the
important painters and sculptors were very soon achieving results
that have probably remained the finest of the Twentieth Century
to date. (The Three Musicians of Picasso is dated 1921.) Abstract
movements likewise developed in Poland, Italy, Switzerland, and
Holland. It is interesting to note that England and America, who
emerged from the war as the dominant world powers, failed to
react creatively, until after the world depression had set in, to
anything more daring than an occasional expressionist hang-over.

The end of the last decade introduced a new and pervasive
insecurity, which was accompanied in the art-world by a gradual
shift in its center of gravity. A culture which might survive actual
war-conditions is powerless to combat the forces which precipitate
war, as most tellingly expressed by the new European dictatorships.
Gabo and Pevsner had started the westward drift early in the last
decade, when they left Moscow for Berlin. The German artists and
their elaborate educational systems were dispersed in 1933. The
outbreak of the present war found the movement which had so
swiftly spread eastward throughout Europe, backed down at last
upon London and Paris. And even in these once open-minded capi-
tals the repeated crises had begun to dull the public's receptivity
to any serious art at all. People were in a condition to tolerate only
pictures that might with slight effort distract for a moment; they
craved no more plastic interest than could be provided by Dufy,
Rouault, and the Surrealists.

Many artists, however, have managed to retain their integrity.
And there have been compensations. The abstract movement has
become clarified as the painters, in default of a public, have

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=== Page 35 ===
HANS HARTUNG, Iron Sculpture
Paris, 1938

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Ben Nicholson, Painted Relief

=== Page 37 ===
ART CHRONICLE 33

grown increasingly dependent upon each other; while lack of
remuneration, coupled with the rise of surrealism, has been quick
in purging the ranks of many who had once pursued non-objectivity
for the amusement of the bourgeois gallery-goers. In London,
where the plastic arts have rarely in history passed the bounds of
literary over-meanings, the sturdy remnants of the abstract move-
ment have become integrated into an intensity that could not have
been foreseen a decade ago. The presence of Gabo and Mondrian
has provided the most uncompromising leadership now available;
and of the native painters, Ben Nicholson succeeds in expressing
the genuinely English response to spatial combinations that has lain
dormant since the Georgian architecture of Wren and Inigo Jones.
Many other British artists have already made contributions to the
London School, notably Stephenson, Jackson, and the sculptress
Barbara Hepworth.

The Paris scene exhibits an equally striking reorientation,
marked by the waning influence of the Cubist pioneers upon the
younger generation. It is indeed rare to find still practicing artists
who have been retired so securely behind the nimbus of 'old-mas-
tership.' Of the contemporaries of Picasso, Léger, Braque, and
Delaunay, it is the sculptors, those who are shaping their esthetic
out of actual materials,─Gonzalez, Pevsner, Brancusi,─who have
most to teach through their present work. Of the next generation,
Arp has at last stepped entirely through the dada and surrealist
stages that he once helped to create, into an abstraction that he
approaches with a new economy of means. Hartung incorporates
a sensitive calligraphic ease in both painting and sculpture, which
has brought back the 'touch' that had been the life-blood of Cubism,
and that the Constructivists had rejected in their zeal for rivalling
manufactured objects; Magnelli has in Paris mastered an almost
classical balance which strongly opposes the superficial Futurist
mêlée usually designated as Italy's contribution to modern art; and
Hélion, who has more than any one, perhaps, influenced the
younger generations of Paris, London, and New York, returns from
his two years in America, not to show the fruits of his sojourn amid
new surroundings, but to take his place on the Maginot Line.

GEORGE L. K. MORRIS

=== Page 38 ===
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
Clement Greenberg

ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two
such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley
song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover.
All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the
same culture and products of the same society. Here, however,
their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by
Eddie Guest—what perspective of culture is large enough to
enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other?
Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a
single cultural tradition, is and has been taken for granted—does
this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of
things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?
The answer involves more than an investigation in aesthetics.
It appears to me that it is necessary to examine more closely and
with more originality than hitherto the relationship between
aesthetic experience as met by the specific—not generalized—
individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that
experience takes place. What is brought to light will answer, in
addition to the question posed above, other and perhaps more
important ones.

I.

A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of
its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms,
breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must
depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It
becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by
religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and
the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his
audience to the symbols and references with which he works. In
the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a

34

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AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 35

motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really
important issues are left untouched because they involve contro-
versy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the
small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the
precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically
varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is pro-
duced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux Arts
painting, neo-republican architecture.

It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our
present society that we—some of us—have been unwilling to accept
this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alex-
andrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced
something unheard of heretofore: avant-garde culture. A superior
consciousness of history—more precisely, the appearance of a new
kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism—made this
possible. This criticism has not confronted our present society with
timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history
and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions
of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present
bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, "natural"
condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social
orders. New perspectives of this kind, becoming a part of the
advanced intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of
the nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets,
even if unconsciously for the most part. It was no accident, there-
fore, that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically—
and geographically too—with the first bold development of scien-
tific revolutionary thought in Europe.

True, the first settlers of Bohemia—which was then identical
with the avant-garde—turned out soon to be demonstratively unin-
terested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulation of revo-
lutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been
able to isolate their concept of the "bourgeois" in order to define
what they were not. Nor, without the moral aid of revolutionary
political attitudes would they have had the courage to assert them-
selves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards
of society. Courage indeed was needed for this, because the avant-
garde's emigration from bourgeois society to Bohemia meant also
an emigration from the markets of capitalism, upon which artists

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36 PARTISAN REVIEW

and writers had been thrown by the falling away of aristocratic
patronage. (Ostensibly, at least, it meant this—meant starving in
a garret—although, as will be shown later, the avant-garde re-
mained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed
its money.)
Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in
“detaching” itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and
repudiate revolutionary politics as well as bourgeois. The revo-
lution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological
struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it
begins to involve those “precious,” axiomatic beliefs upon which
culture thus far has had to rest. Hence it was developed that the
true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to
“experiment,” but to find a path along which it would be possible
to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and
violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or
artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrow-
ing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all rela-
tivities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the
point. “Art for art's sake” and “pure poetry” appear, and subject-
matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.
It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has
arrived at “abstract” or “non-objective” art—and poetry, too. The
avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating
something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature itself is
valid, in the way a landscape—not its picture—is aesthetically
valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, simi-
lars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into
form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole
or in part to anything not itself.
But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what
he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very
values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative
values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating,
not God—and here I use “imitate” in its Aristotelian sense—but
the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This
is the genesis of the “abstract.” In turning his attention away from
subject-matter or common experience, the poet or artist turns it in
upon the medium of his own craft. The non-representational or

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AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH

"abstract," if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary
and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy con-
straint or original. This constraint, once the world of common,
extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in
the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have
already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject
matter of art and literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art
and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation
of imitating. To quote Yeats:
"Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence."
Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even
Klee, Matisse and Cezanne, derive their chief inspiration from the
medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie
most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and
arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclu-
sion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. The
attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Eluard, Pound,
Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centered
on the effort to create poetry and on the "moments" themselves of
poetic conversion rather than on experience to be converted into
poetry. Of course, this cannot exclude other preoccupations in their
work, for poetry must deal with words, and words must communi-
cate. Certain poets, such as Mallarmé and Valéry, are more radi-
cal in this respect than others leaving aside those poets who have
tried to compose poetry in pure sound alone. However, if it were
easier to define poetry, modern poetry would be much more "pure"
and "abstract." . . . As for the other fields of literature the defi-
nition of avant-garde aesthetics advanced here is no Procrustean
bed. But aside from the fact that most of our best contemporary
novelists have gone to school with the avant-garde, it is significant
that Gide's most ambitious book is a novel about the writing of a
novel, and that Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake seem to be
above all, as one French critic says, the reduction of experience to
expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering
more than what is being expressed.
That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating the
fact itself calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true
that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexan-

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38 PARTISAN REVIEW

drianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from Yeats above
referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in
a sense this imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrian-
ism. But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde
moves, while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is
what justifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary.
The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possible
today to create art and literature of a high order. To quarrel with
necessity by throwing about terms like "formalism," "purism,"
"ivory tower" and so forth is either dull or dishonest. This is not
to say, however, that it is to the social advantage of the avant-garde
that it is what it is. Quite the opposite.
The avant-garde's specialization of itself, the fact that its best
artists are artists' artists, its best poets, poets' poets, has estranged
a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and
appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwill-
ing or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The
masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in
the process of development. But today such culture is being aban-
doned by those to whom it actually belongs-our ruling class. For
it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can
develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income.
And in the case of the avant-garde this was provided by an elite
among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself
to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an
umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is
rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living
culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in
general is thus threatened.
We must not be deceived by superficial phenomena and local
successes. Picasso's shows still draw crowds, and T. S. Eliot is
taught in the universities; the dealers in modernist art are still in
business, and the publishers still publish some "difficult" poetry.
But the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming
more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and com-
mercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean
only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the
audience it depends on the rich and the cultivated.
Is it the nature itself of avant-garde culture that is alone

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AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 39

responsible for the danger it finds itself in? Or is that only a dan-
gerous liability? Are there other, and perhaps more important,
factors involved?

II.

Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-
guard. True enough—simultaneously with the entrance of the
avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the
industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonder-
ful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with
their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and
pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood
movies, etc., etc. For some reason this gigantic apparition has
always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into its whys
and wherefores.

Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urban-
ized the masses of Western Europe and America and established
what is called universal literacy.

Previous to this the only market for formal culture, as dis-
tinguished from folk culture, had been among those who in addi-
tion to being able to read and write could command the leisure and
comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some
sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy.
But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read
and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no
longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations,
since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.
The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bour-
geois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they
did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of
the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for
the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and dis-
covering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new
urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a
kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of
the new market a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture,
kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine
culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture
of some sort can provide.

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40 PARTISAN REVIEW

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized
simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insen-
sibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and
operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked
sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always
the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of
our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers
except their money—not even their time.

The pre-condition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch
would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully
matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions and
perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its
own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, strategems, rules of
thumb, themes, converts them into a system and discards the rest.
It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumu-
lated experience. This is what is really meant when it is said that
the popular art and literature of today were once the daring,
esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course, no such thing is
true. What is meant is that when enough time has elapsed the new
is looted for new "twists," which are then watered down and served
up as kitsch. Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic, and conversely,
all that's academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as
such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the
stuffed-shirt "front" for kitsch. The methods of industrialism dis-
place the handicrafts.

Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become
an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true
culture could never be except accidentally. It has been capitalized
at a tremendous investment which must show commensurate
returns; it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets.
While it is essentially its own salesman, a great sales apparatus has
nevertheless been created for it, which brings pressure to bear on
every member of society. Traps are laid even in those areas, so to
speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not enough
today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the
latter; one must have a true passion for it that will give him the
power to resist the faked article that surrounds and presses in on
him from the moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers.
Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them

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AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH

are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.
A magazine like the New Yorker, which is fundamentally high-
class kitsch for the luxury trade, converts and waters down a great
deal of avant-garde material for its own uses. Nor is every single
item of kitsch altogether worthless. Now and then it produces some-
thing of merit, something that has an authentic folk flavor; and
these accidental and isolated instances have fooled people who
should know better.

Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation to the
avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this
temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work
under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely.
And then those puzzling border-line cases appear, such as the pop-
ular novelist, Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country.
The net result is always to the detriment of true culture, in
any case.

Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in which it was born,
but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture.
Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national-cultural
boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has
gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing
native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is
now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal
culture ever beheld. Today the Chinaman, no less than the South
American Indian, the Hindu, no less than the Polynesian, have
come to prefer to the products of their native art magazine covers,
rotogravure sections and calendar girls. How is this virulence of
kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained? Naturally,
machine-made kitsch can undersell the native handmade article,
and the prestige of the West also helps, but why is kitsch a so much
more profitable export article than Rembrandt? One, after all, can
be reproduced as cheaply as the other.

In his last article on the Soviet cinema in the Partisan Review,
Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in the last ten years
become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. For this he blames
the political regime-not only for the fact that kitsch is the official
culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular
culture; and he quotes the following from Kurt London's The Seven
Soviet Arts: "... the attitude of the masses both to the old and

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42
PARTISAN REVIEW
new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature
of the education afforded them by their respective states." Mac-
donald goes on to say: "Why after all should ignorant peasants
prefer Repin (a leading exponent of Russian academic kitsch
in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at least as rele-
vant to their own primitive folk art as is the former's realistic
style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow's
museum of contemporary Russian art: kitsch) it is largely because
they have been conditioned to shun 'formalism' and to admire
'socialist realism'."
In the first place it is not a question of a choice between
merely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think-but
of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new.
The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. In the
second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West
do the masses prefer kitsch simply because their governments con-
dition them towards it. Where state educational systems take the
trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters, not
kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalent
on our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover,
as Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet
regime was encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses
continued to prefer Hollywood movies. No, "conditioning" does
not explain the potency of kitsch....
All values are human values, relative values, in art as well as
elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or less of a gen-
eral agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to
what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but not beyond
certain limits: contemporary connoisseurs agree with eighteenth
century Japanese that Hokusai was one of the greatest artists of his
time; we even agree with the ancient Egyptians that Third and
Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy of being selected as their
paragon by those who came after. We may have come to prefer
Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny that Raphael was one of
the best painters of his time. There has been an agreement then,
and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant distinction
made between those values only to be found in art and the values
which can be found elsewhere. Kitsch, by virtue of rationalized

=== Page 47 ===
AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 43
technique that draws on science and industry, has erased this dis-
tinction in practice.

Let us see for example what happens when an ignorant Rus-
sian peasant such as Macdonald mentions stands with hypothetical
freedom of choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the other
by Repin. In the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors and
spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique-to accept
Macdonald's supposition, which I am inclined to doubt-reminds
him somewhat of the icons he has left behind him in the village,
and he feels the attraction of the familiar. We will even suppose
that he faintly surmises some of the great art values the cultivated
find in Picasso. He turns next to Repin's picture and sees a battle
scene. The technique is not so familiar-as technique. But that
weighs very little with the peasant, for he suddenly discovers values
in Repin's picture which seem far superior to the values he has been
accustomed to finding in icon art; and the unfamiliar technique
itself is one of the sources of those values: the values of the vividly
recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic. In Repin's pic-
ture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he
recognizes and sees things outside of pictures-there is no discon-
tinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say
to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to represent
Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man. That
Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident
immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator-
that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of
self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: "it tells a
story." Picasso and the icons are so austere and barren in com-
parison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it dra-
matic: sunset, exploding shells, running and falling men. There is
no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repin is what the peas-
ant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky, however, for
Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of American
capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday
Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.

Ultimately, it can be said that the cultivated spectator derives
the same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from Repin,
since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on how-
ever low a scale, and he is sent to look at pictures by the same

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44 PARTISAN REVIEW

instincts that send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values
which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at
a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate
impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recog-
nizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not
immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must
be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react suf-
ficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the “reflected” effect.
In Repin, on the other hand, the "reflected" effect has already been
included in the picture, ready for the spectator's unreflective enjoy-
ment.* Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin pre-
digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with
a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily
difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature:
it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater
immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. And Eddie Guest
and the Indian Love Lyrics are more poetic than T. S. Eliot and
Shakespeare.

III.

If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now
see, imitates its effects. The neatness of this antithesis is more then
contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendous interval
that separates from each other two such simultaneous cultural
phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch. This interval, too great
to be closed by all the infinite gradations of popularized “modern-
ism” and “modernistic” kitsch, corresponds in turn to a social
interval, a social interval that has always existed in formal culture
as elsewhere in civilized society, and whose two termini converge
in fixed relation to the increasing or decreasing stabil-
ity of the given society. There has always been on one side the
minority of the powerful—and therefore the cultivated—and on
the other the great mass of the exploited and poor—and therefore
the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while
the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary
culture, or kitsch.

In a stable society which functions well enough to hold in
solution the contradictions between its classes the cultural dichot-

=== Page 49 ===
AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 45

omy becomes somewhat blurred. The axioms of the few are shared
by the many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former
believe soberly. And at such moments in history the masses are
able to feel wonder and admiration for the culture, on no matter
how high a plane, of its masters. This applies at least to plastic
culture, which is accessible to all.

In the Middle Ages the plastic artist paid lip service at least
to the lowest common denominators of experience. This even
remained true to some extent until the seventeenth century. There
was available for imitation a universally valid conceptual reality,
whose order the artist could not tamper with. The subject matter
of art was prescribed by those who commissioned works of art,
which were not created, as in bourgeois society, on speculation.
Precisely because his content was determined in advance, the artist
was free to concentrate on his medium. He needed not to be phil-
osopher or visionary, but simply artificer. As long as there as
general agreement as to what were the worthiest subjects for art,
the artist was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive
in his "matter" and could devote all his energy to formal problems.
For him the medium became, privately, professionally, the content
of his art, even as today his medium is the public content of the
abstract painter's art-with that difference, however, that the
medieval artist had to suppress his professional preoccupation in
public-had always to suppress and subordinate the personal and
professional in the finished, official work of art. If, as an ordinary
member of the Christian community, he felt some personal emotion
about his subject matter, this only contributed to the enrichment of
the work's public meaning. Only with the Renaissance do the inflec-
tions of the personal become legitimate, still to be kept, however,
within the limits of the simply and universally recognizable. And
only with Rembrandt do "lonely" artists begin to appear, lonely
in their art.

But even during the Renaissance, and as long as Western
art was endeavoring to perfect its technique, victories in this realm
could only be signalized by success in realistic imitation, since
there was no other objective criterion at hand. Thus the masses
could still find in the art of their masters objects of admiration and
wonder. Even the bird who pecked at the fruit in Zeuxes' picture
could applaud.

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46

PARTISAN REVIEW

It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general when
the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly to the
reality recognized by the general. Even then, however, the resent-
ment the common man may feel is silenced by the awe in which
he stands of the patrons of this art. Only when he becomes dissatis-
fied with the social order they administer does he begin to criticize
their culture. Then the plebeian finds courage for the first time to
voice his opinions openly. Every man, from Tammany aldermen
to Austrian house-painters, finds that he is entitled to his opinion.
Most often this resentment towards culture is to be found where the
dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which
expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, in
fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the
same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood's
health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-
smashing commences.

IV.

Returning to our Russian peasant for the moment, let us sup-
pose that after he has chosen Repin in preference to Picasso, the
state's educational apparatus comes along and tells him that he is
wrong, that he should have chosen Picasso-and shows him why.
It is quite possible for the Soviet state to do this. But things being
as they are in Russia-and everywhere else-the peasant soon finds
that the necessity of working hard all day for his living and the
rude, uncomfortable circumstances in which he lives do not allow
him enough leisure, energy and comfort to train for the enjoyment
of Picasso. This needs, after all, a considerable amount of "con-
ditioning." Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all
human creations, and the peasant finds no "natural" urgency
within himself that will drive him towards Picasso in spite of all
difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he
feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without
effort. The state is helpless in this matter and remains so as long
as the problems of production have not been solved in a socialist
sense. The same holds true, of course, for capitalist countries and
makes all talk of art for the masses there nothing but demagogy."
Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural
policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official ten-

=== Page 51 ===
AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 47
dency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because
their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but
because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it
is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another
of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to
ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes can-
not raise the cultural level of the masses even if they wanted to
-by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they
will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level.
It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so
much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical cul-
ture. (Whether or not the avant-garde could possibly flourish under
a totalitarian regime is not pertinent to the question at this point.)
As matter of fact, the main trouble with avant-garde art and litera-
ture, from the point of view of Fascists and Stalinists, is not that
they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too
difficult to inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is more
pliable to this end. Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with
the "soul" of the people. Should the official culture be one superior
to the general mass-level, there would be a danger of isolation.
Nevertheless, if the masses were conceivably to ask for avant-
garde art and literature, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin would not
hesitate long in attempting to satisfy such a demand. Hitler is a
bitter enemy of the avant-garde, both on doctrinal and personal
grounds, yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932-33 from stren-
uously courting avant-garde artists and writers. When Gottfried
Benn, an Expressionist poet, came over to the Nazis he was wel-
comed with a great fanfare, although at that very moment Hitler
was denouncing Expressionism as Kulturbolschewismus. This was
at a time when the Nazis felt that the prestige which the avant-garde
enjoyed among the cultivated German public could be of advantage
to them, and practical considerations of this nature, the Nazis being
the skilful politicians they are, have always taken precedence over
Hitler's personal inclinations. Later the Nazis realized that it was
more practical to accede to the wishes of the masses in matters of
culture than to those of their paymasters; the latter, when it came to
a question of preserving power, were as willing to sacrifice their
culture as they were their moral principles, while the former, pre-
cisely because power was being withheld from them, had to be

=== Page 52 ===
48 PARTISAN REVIEW

cozened in every other way possible. It was necessary to promote
on a much more grandiose style than in the democracies the illu-
sion that the masses actually rule. The literature and art they enjoy
and understand were to be proclaimed the only true art and litera-
ture and any other kind was to be suppressed. Under these circum-
stances people like Gottfried Benn, no matter how ardently they
support Hitler, become a liability; and we hear no more of them in
Nazi Germany.

We can see then that although from one point of view the per-
sonal philistinism of Hitler and Stalin is not accidental to the
political roles they play, from another point of view it is only an
incidentally contributory factor in determining the cultural policies
of their respective regimes. Their personal philistinism simply
adds brutality and double-darkness to policies they would be forced
to support anyhow by the pressure of all their other policies—even
were they, personally, devotees of avant-garde culture. What the
acceptance of the isolation of the Russian Revolution forces Stalin
to do, Hitler is compelled to do by his acceptance of the contradic-
tions of capitalism and his efforts to freeze them. As for Mussolini
—his case is a perfect example of the disponibilité of a realist in
these matters. For years he bent a benevolent eye on the Futurists
and built modernistic railroad stations and government-owned
apartment houses. One can still see in the suburbs of Rome more
modernistic apartments than almost anywhere else in the world.
Perhaps Fascism wanted to show its up-to-datedness, to conceal the
fact that it was a retrogression; perhaps it wanted to conform to
the tastes of the wealthy élite it served. At any rate Mussolini seems
to have realized lately that it would be more useful to him to please
the cultural tastes of the Italian masses than those of their masters.
The masses must be provided with objects of admiration and won-
der; the latter can dispense with them. And so we find Mussolini
announcing a “new Imperial style.” Marinetti, Chirico, et al. are
sent into the outer darkness, and the new railroad station in Rome
will not be modernistic. That Mussolini was late in coming to this
only illustrates again the relative hesitancy with which Italian
fascism has drawn the necessary implications of its role….

Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still
capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own
existence. Advances in culture no less than advances in science and

=== Page 53 ===
AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 49

industry corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made
possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes neces-
sary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look
towards socialism for a new culture—as inevitably as one will
appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism
simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have
right now.

NOTES

1 The example of music, which has long been an abstract art, and which avant-garde poetry has tried
so much to emulate, is interesting. Music, Aristotle said curiously enough, is the most imitative and
vivid of all the arts because it imitates its original—the state of the soul—with the greatest immediacy.
Today this strikes us as the exact opposite of the truth, because no art seems to us to have less refer-
ence to something outside itself than music. However, aside from the fact that in a sense Aristotle may
still be right, it must be explained that ancient Greek music was closely associated with poetry, and
depended upon its character as an accessory to verse to make its imitative meaning clear. Plato, speaking
of music, says: “For when there are no words, it is very difficult to recognize the meaning of the harmony
and rhythm, or to see that any worthy object is imitated by them.” As far as we know, all music origi-
nally served such an accessory function. Once, however, it was abandoned, music was forced to withdraw
into itself to find a constraint or original. This is found in the various means of its own composition
and performance.

2 I owe this formulation to a remark made by Hans Hofmann, the art-teacher, in one of his lectures.
From the point of view of this formulation surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is
attempting to restore “outside” subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent
the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium.

3 See Valéry’s remarks about his own poetry.

4 T. S. Eliot said something to the same effect in accounting for the shortcomings of English Roman-
tic poetry. Indeed the Romantics can be considered the original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited.
They showed kitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effect of poetry upon himself?

5 It will be objected that such art for the masses as folk art was developed under rudimentary condi-
tions of production—and that a good deal of folk art is on a high level. Yes, it is. But folk art is not
formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuries, its
Athens, and it's Athens when we want:
large comprehension. Besides, we are now told that most of what we consider good in folk culture is the
artistic survival of dead formal, aristocratic, cultures. Our old English ballads, for instance, were not
created by the "folk," but by the post-feudal squirearchy of the English countryside, to survive in the
form of literature. Unfortunately, until the machine age culture was the exclusive prerogative of a society
that lived by the labor of serfs or slaves. They were the real symbols of culture. For one man to spend
time and energy creating or listening to poetry meant that another man had to produce enough to keep
himself alive and the former in comfort. In Africa today we find that the culture of slave-owning tribes
is generally much superior to that of the tribes which possess no slaves.

=== Page 54 ===
Who Are The Friends of Semantics?

Albert Wohlstetter and M. G. White

R. S. L. HAYAKAWA in the New Republic of August 2 under-
takes to defend semantics. Convinced that its attackers have badly
misunderstood this study, he proceeds to a long, very imposing
counter-attack on their "primitive two-valued orientation." He
says: semanticists do not believe they can save the world; and
people who claim they do are guilty of the very linguistic errors
semantics is supposed to eliminate. Such errors flow from a "two-
valued" approach; we must use a many-valued logic and surrender
Aristotle's law of the excluded middle. Another savage survival we
must get rid of is the identification of things and their names.
Now these recondite warnings, so we are told, have enormous
practical significance. For example, they furnish unique scientific
support for institutions of democratic capitalism. We learn that
such familiar doctrines as the separation of the judiciary and the
legislature are "multi-valued" in orientation. The above is far from
a complete account of Mr. Hayakawa's article. The points listed
are only those of general importance. They illustrate a widespread
tendency which is very influential in contemporary political dis-
cussion. Consequently the issues involved are larger than the mere
settlement of a debate between Mr. Hayakawa and PARTISAN
REVIEW. The bearings of semantics on our day-to-day opinions
deserve more serious consideration.
In his eagerness to embrace semantics in general, Mr. Haya-
kawa has lumped figures of the most disparate abilities and beliefs.
The result has been a pernicious blurring of the meaning of
'semantics' although we are promised clarification of that very
term. Any heading that covers groups of thinkers so sharply sep-
arated as: (1) Chase, Arnold, Jerome Frank, Korzybski and (2)
Carnap, Tarski, Felix Cohen, Malinowski, is bound to result in
intellectual confusion. What is more, it perpetuates the confusion
created by Korzybski and Chase themselves. Like them Mr. Haya-
50

=== Page 55 ===
WHO ARE THE FRIENDS OF SEMANTICS?
51

kawa reveals an ignorance of the authorities he cites and an
extreme technical incompetence in semantics. This does not aid his
explanation. It is time that a clear-cut division be made between
two groups of people avowedly engaged in this much-talked-of
discipline. On the one hand we have certain distinguished logicians
and experimental scientists like Carnap, Tarski and Philipp Frank
interested in the formal and procedural aspects of inquiry. On the
other, Count Korzybski and the authors of the latest best-sellers on
the subject. Whatever their individual attainments in the fields of
law, journalism, or accounting, Chase, Jerome Frank, and Arnold
are admittedly amateurs in semantics. (The case of Count Korzy-
bski is more difficult. He is certainly not a best-seller. However,
one should not infer from this that he is a scientist.) The second
group has offered semantics as a more or less get-rich-quick scheme
for intellectual success in the social sciences. Unfortunately, in
the general view they have succeeded. Witness the reception of The
Folklore of Capitalism, The Tyranny of Words and Save America
First.

Serious exponents of the study of meaning are concentrated
for the most part in the Unity of Science Movement. Predominantly
anti-metaphysical, the group aims at an integration of science to
be illustrated in the collective project of many scientists, the
Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Their work, though it may be of
great consequence for social inquiry, has so far been of an
extremely specialized character. It has been phrased mainly in the
notation of logistic and logical syntax, and has found its major
applications in mathematics and physics. One formal work on biol-
ogy has been done by Woodger, and there are are a few programmatic
treatments of sociology and economics. As yet neither concrete
social investigations nor sound popularizations of the general
method. (Nothing like Einstein and Infeld's Evolution of Physics
has appeared.) These circumstances have left the door wide open
for cure-alls. The opportunity has not been lost. We have had many
peddlers of semantic panaceas, shortcuts to the analysis of
social ills.

But there are no shortcuts that successfully dispense with
careful inquiry. Exactly what control over social affairs semantics
provides is not clear. Yet the claims have been considerable.
Korzybski offers one of the best illustrations of this point, though

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52
PARTISAN REVIEW
it applies equally to all the men we are treating. A few quotations
are necessary since this has been questioned:
"... the older systems with their linguistic methods of handling our
nervous system led inevitably to 'universal disagreement.' In indi-
vidual life this led to pathological conflicts with ourselves; in private
life to family strifes and unhappiness, and so to nervous disturb-
ances; in national life, to political strifes, revolutions; in interna-
tional affairs, to mutual misunderstanding, suspicion, impossibility
to agree, wars, World Wars, 'trade wars,' ultimately ending in slaugh-
ter, general unemployment, and an unnecessarily great amount of
general unrest, worry, confusion, and suffering in different degrees
for all" etc. (Science and Sanity, pp. 45-46.)
The cause found, the solution follows:
"When all is said and done, one cannot but see, at least as far as the
white race is concerned, that a change from an Aristotelian to a non-
Aristotelian system must be momentous. Such a change will mark
the difference between a period when the mystery of 'human knowl-
edge' was not solved and a period when it has been solved ... (it)
... will open a new era ... of sanity ... human general adjustment,
agreement, and cooperation. The dreams of Leibnitz will become
sober reality." (Ibid., p. 52.)
Nevertheless, Mr. Hayakawa, in his eager but confused account
denies, (not unequivocally!), "that semanticists believe they can
save the world." Korzybski, on the other hand, is confident of
saving at least the white part of it. Nor is Korzybski alone. Stuart
Chase, with certain self-contradictory qualifications, would also
hold that Supreme Court battles, revolutions, wars, etc. are in large
part due to confusions in language. They are, so to speak, all
terrible misunderstandings.
"Endless political and economic difficulties in America have arisen
and thriven on bad language. The Supreme Court crisis of 1937 was
due chiefly to the creation by judges and lawyers of verbal monsters
in the interpretation of the constitution. They gave objective, rigid
values to vague phrases like 'due process' and 'interstate commerce.'
Once these monsters get into the zoo, no one knows how to get them
out again, and they proceed to eat us out of house and home." (The
Tyranny of Words, p. 22.)
The explanation of war is a semantic specialty. Thurman
Arnold: "Most of the interesting and picturesque wars have been
fought not over practical interests but over pure metaphysics."
(The Folklore of Capitalism, p. 90.) Jerome Frank: "Our own
Civil War was a conflict brought on by words." (Save America
First, p. 418.) Surely if most of our problems are in essence ver-

=== Page 57 ===
WHO ARE THE FRIENDS OF SEMANTICS? 53

bal, one enormous step in their solution would be to clarify the
linguistic situation. This is the revolutionary way out!

“The thinking of the American people is in danger of being impris-
oned by Ambiguous Words. We are often the dupes of Nouns, the
slaves of Substantives. Our capacity to face realistically and intelli-
gently our gravest national problems, is frequently paralyzed by a
few terrifying combinations of the Alphabet. We are indeed in need
of a devastating attack on a certain Kind of Capitalism—the kind
that consists of the tyranny of misunderstood Capital-letter Words.
The time has come to Overthrow the Dictatorship of the Vocabulary.”
(Save America First, p. 15.)

These Pan-linguistic assumptions explain the semantic cure-
alls. Except for certain modes of expression, neither has anything
in common with the discoveries of Carnap and Tarski. And even
these expressions have been badly mangled by Chase, Hayakawa,
and Frank. It is necessary to be blunt to clear up the current con-
fusion. The essential distinction between the pseudo-semanticists
and the analysts they cite is that the former do not use logical
analysis as part of the scientific method. Rather they have used
badly garbled semantic phrases and the prestige of these great
scientists for essentially anti-scientific ends. Their work cannot be
considered a genuine application of this new study. It is rather a
fad, in the case of Korzybski—a cult. This is indicated by their
misunderstandings of even the most elementary points in the theory
of meaning. They have perpetrated a series of errors and confu-
sions that have become so current as to be generally identified with
the assured results of semantics. We select a few of the outstanding
factual errors and erroneous inferences.

1. “The two-valued versus the infinite or multi-valued orientation.”
This is the battle promoted by Mr. Hayakawa. In one cramped
corner, the two-valued corner, we have the savages—PARTISAN
REVIEW and Mr. Hayakawa's other opponents—people with the
“two-valued orientation” who are handicapped by the belief that a
statement is either true or false. In the other corner we have the
advance-guard, those who recognize that a statement may be true,
or false, or both, or neither, or any of an infinite number of things.
Tarski and Lukasiewicz are presented as the mentors of this
“infinite-valued” position.

Anyone acquainted with the literature on so-called n-valued

=== Page 58 ===
54 PARTISAN REVIEW

calculi would find it difficult to decide where to begin setting right
Mr. Hayakawa's caricature. For one thing, the subject itself is too
complex and specialized for adequate statement in anything but a
technical journal. Mr. Hayakawa's treatment is not merely as
unintelligible to the general public as, for example, a string of
formulae from quantum mechanics. It would be equally mysterious
to the creators of the n-valued calculi themselves. First of all it is
inaccurate to equate semanticists with non-Aristotelians, opponents
of the law of excluded middle. Tarski, in a fundamental mono-
graph on the subject, explicitly postulates that a statement is either
true or false, and not both; a two-valued scheme is definitely pre-
supposed. The n-valued logics are nothing like the descriptions of
them offered by Chase, Hayakawa, or Korzybski. They are in no
sense incompatible with the 2-valued calculus. Actually, it has been
demonstrated that the n-valued calculus is completely translatable
into a 2-valued one; in short, it has been proven that they are
equivalent.

2. Non-Aristotelianism.

Mr. Hayakawa is professedly a non-Aristotelian. One would
expect a writer on such an important subject as non-Aristotelian
logic at least to understand what he is opposing. Mr. Hayakawa's
rejection of the two-valued law of excluded middle does not fulfill
one's expectations in this regard. Here Hayakawa is no worse than
the people he defends. The principle of excluded middle says of
two contradictory sentences that one must be true and one false and
that there is no third alternative. While some of Mr. Hayakawa's
explanations do take it in this sense, his entire account is so foggy
that it is hard to see just what middle he is refusing to exclude.
For he maintains in one place that the opposition involved is the
opposition of 'all' and 'none.' As if anybody ever maintained that
either all men are red-headed or none are red-headed and that no
middle ground is logically possible.

Any elementary text-book, traditional or modern, is at pains
to point out that 'all'-statements and 'none'-statements are con-
traries, not contradictories: both may be false. Mr. Hayakawa is
not only unable to understand the advances in logic of the last
century; it would seem that he is unacquainted with the very first
steps in traditional logic: the square of opposition.

=== Page 59 ===
WHO ARE THE FRIENDS OF SEMANTICS? 55

3. Infinite-valued politics.
This distortion of a seemingly narrow technical discovery has
its political uses. Mr. Chase and his colleagues have drawn some
amazing political inferences from the existence of the n-valued
logics. They seem to think that this logistic invention has estab-
lished the error of asserting an 'either-or' sentence where only two
alternatives are presented. No one would deny that there are
instances where more than two alternatives occur. You frequently
can swim, fly, walk, or roller-skate home. But this does not imply,
as Hayakawa would have us believe, that there are never circum-
stances where only two alternatives face us. Sometimes we either
sink or swim. This confusion makes a very handsome facade for
the well-worn political beliefs of Chase, Hayakawa, et al. The
correctness of these beliefs is not in question here. What interests
us is the attempt to justify them on purely logical grounds and
similarly to reject opposing views. Whether communism and fas-
cism are the only alternatives facing us today, or whether there are
many other alternatives, are matters which can be determined only
by empirical investigation. They cannot be settled by a high-
handed appeal to the n-valued calculus. One cannot refute the so-
called extremists of either the left or right merely because they
claim that there are less than three alternatives. In the case of Mr.
Hayakawa the "multi-valued orientation" is a fancy name for his
inability to say 'yes' or 'no.'

4. The Emotive and the Scientific.
The distinction between the emotive and scientific aspects of
a symbol is a valid one. It has done good service in discussions of
language and is generally accepted today. However, some of our
semantic friends have converted the distinction into a divorce; also
into a device for fleeing serious controversy. They have assumed
that if a symbol is emotive it is not scientific, and vice-versa. Thur-
man Arnold has made a profession of this confusion. And this is
taken as the last word on the subject in many contemporary jour-
nals. But perfectly scientific statements like "Streptococcus
infections frequently result in deaths" may have powerful affective
consequences. The purely descriptive word 'fire' when uttered in a
jammed theatre can, as has been celebrated by semanticists, panic
an audience. It is also true, and equally familiar, that two words

=== Page 60 ===
56 PARTISAN REVIEW

with the same meaning frequently evoke different emotions. Seman-
ticists have sometimes recognized this last, and inferred illegiti-
mately that meaning and emotional effect are totally unrelated. The
result has been very convenient for purposes of argumentation and
polemic. If your opponent uses a scientific expression which has
an emotional color (and most words do), just refuse to answer.
Say his words are emotive. It supposedly follows that they are non-
sense, and don't require an answer.* But disputes containing words
like ‘fascism,' ‘communism,' ‘capitalism,' are not myths or folk-
lore merely because they arouse men's passions. Many great scien-
tific statements have been very disturbing. The assumption of a
divorce between the emotive and the scientific controls all of The
Folklore of Capitalism: "When we attempt to analyze the actual
operation of creeds in society, we discover the surprising fact that
their content and their logic are the least important things about
them." (p. 21) Precisely because they are creeds or fundamental
beliefs we are told to disregard their logic and content. The utter-
ances of economists, radical and conservative alike, are on exactly
the same footing as a cry of pain or a bellow of anger. They are
merely evidence, to Thurman Arnold, of some internal disorder.
For empirical refutation he would substitute a pathology of politi-
cal beliefs: an elaborate method of calling one's opponents crack-
pots. This is one of the most effective ways to avoid scientific, politi-
cal, or economic controversy. An even more effective method is the
attack on "abstraction."

5. High-order abstractions.

The confusion about abstractions is perhaps the most power-
ful anti-scientific distortion made by Chase and some of the others.
Convinced that the only definitely significant words are those that
name things like Bossie, Bessie and Rosie, Chase has called words
such as ‘capitalism,' ‘value,' ‘unemployment,' ‘fascism,' meaning-
less. They are all much too abstract. "A thing ‘capitalism' is not
to be found stalking with gigantic hooves and horrid scales over
any market place" (The Tyranny of Words, p. 274). Nonsense,
there is no such animal. Radicals who hate capitalism, hate noth-

*A gross example of this device was the New Republic's dismissal of PARTISAN REVIEW's protest about
Hayakawa. The New Republic editors merely returned: "Our readers will notice the semantic sins in the
foregoing letter: Vulgarian,' 'populartian,' 'basic economic and political realities,' 'liberals.' That was
the end of that discussion.

=== Page 61 ===
WHO ARE THE FRIENDS OF SEMANTICS?

57

ingness. No capitalism, no unemployment, no wars, no fascism.
No worries. Wonderful! On this same basis Chase rejects all state-
ments of political economists dealing with general characteristics.
These are so much blab-blab. For this rejection he claims the sup-
port of Einstein, and all of modern physics. Yet the abstractions of
physics are of a considerably higher order than those of political
economy. The formulae of both classical and modern physics con-
tain some of the most powerful abstractions ever made. Neverthe-
less we may be reasonably certain that no physicist has ever seen
space-time stalking the market place with or without horrid
scales. (Nor, we may venture, have any of them been disap-
pointed.) If Mr. Chase were consistent, and of course he is not, he
would not only have to reject physics. Since every significant state-
ment ascribes a property or treats the relation of properties, Mr.
Chase would have to reject any statement whatsoever as containing
an abstraction, being so much blab-blab. He is left with the final
clarity of silence.
But some of us will not be satisfied by silence. Mr. Chase is
included here. For this reason he must contradict himself. Contra-
diction might have been avoided by greater care in using semantic
instruments. Our intention has not been to deprecate the importance
of semantics. On the contrary both the authors of this article are
actively interested in using the results of this discipline. Our objec-
tion is rather that Chase et al. have not used it.

The task is admittedly an important one. Besides demanding
technical facility of some sort, serious semantics will not obviate
the necessity for experiment. There are no short-cuts to scientific
accomplishment. Mr. Chase, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Frank and Mr.
Hayakawa have not advanced social science one whit by their inept
exploitation of the theory of meaning. It is important to distin-
guish their utterances from the science of semantics.

=== Page 62 ===
Rachel's Summer

C. R. Jackson

MY SISTER RACHEL was dead at sixteen. It was a tremendous
event in our town, and in our family too, of course; and though it
all happened more than twenty years ago, now, I believe I could
remember, and set down, every thing that was said or done in our
house during those three days between her death and the funeral.
Even conversations I can remember; and who was there, of all our
relatives and neighbors; and what people wore and how they
behaved—during every hour from Sunday afternoon, when the
thing happened, till the funeral was over on Wednesday. I well
knew that we had all been thrown into the limelight, as it were, by
Rachel's death, and that we were the talk of the town. Conse-
quently when I spoke I was careful to speak with effect, and act as
people expected me to act, with the proper amount of drama, so
that nobody would be disappointed. That is probably why I remem-
ber everything so clearly. I was so busy thinking about myself and
the impression I made that I didn't have much time to think of
Rachel.

It had happened on Sunday, late in October—one of those
amazing warm and lovely days that return suddenly, just before
winter, to tell us of the end of summer long after summer is ended.
In those days people drove out in their cars on Sunday, inviting
friends or neighbors for a drive into the country, or to call on
someone in the next town. Rachel had been asked to go riding by
the Gove family, Wilson Gove and his father and mother; and
about three o'clock they drove away, Mr. and Mrs. Gove in the
front seat, Rachel and Wilson in back. An hour later, returning to
town from nearby Palmyra, the car overturned coming down the
East Palmyra hill and Rachel was thrown out and killed.

It was a tragedy in the town for many reasons, and I was old
enough to know most of them. Rachel was the only daughter in a
family of four boys. She was young, of course, and very beauti-
58

=== Page 63 ===
RACHEL'S SUMMER

ful: people used to stop Mother on the street and tell her how
beautiful Rachel was getting to be, and Mr. Brittain the minister
would say Rachel was going to be a beautiful woman "almost any
day now," wagging his finger at Mother in playful warning; and I
myself remember how sometimes I would look at her across the
supper table and suddenly think that Rachel-my own sister that I
quarreled with so much-was the most vivid and alive creature I
had ever seen.-And another reason was that my father had left
home that year and his absence made my sister's death a greater
tragedy for my mother. The day after Rachel died that wonder-
ful Indian-summer Sunday-winter descended at once, with a
heavy snowfall in the night, so that we looked out in the morning
to white lawns and streets, and the sidewalks had to be shovelled,
and kids got out their sleds, and chains had to be put on the cars
that drove us over Asylum Hill and down to the cemetery that
freezing Wednesday afternoon. Mother said it seemed only fitting
and proper that winter should come now: summer was indeed over.
The night before Rachel was buried we were taken in for one
last look at her, as Mother didn't want us to be around downstairs
on the day of the funeral, when the house was filled with inquisi-
tive neighbors and townspeople and all the hundreds of school
children who filed in and out of the front room for an hour and a
half before the service. We stood around the open coffin, Mother
and we four boys and our father, who had come home for a few
days just to make things look right, and I remember Mother didn't
cry or make a sound as we stood there. The room was heavy with
the smell of floral pieces, almost sickish with it. I looked at Rachel,
lying so still and beautiful in her white dress with the yellow
flowers in it, and all I could think of was Elaine or Juliet, and I
mind and I had to hang onto myself hard to keep from saying it:
"Death lies on her like an untimely frost,
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field"
-which is exactly the way it was, but for once I had enough sense
to keep my mouth shut. After awhile Mother said, "And now you'd
better go to bed, boys. Grandma'll get you something to eat if you
want it." We left the room in silence, acutely uncomfortable
because our father had begun to weep.
The next night, the funeral over, we were having supper in

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60

PARTISAN REVIEW

the dining room. There was a neighbor there by the name of Mrs.
Kirtle, and our grandmother, father, the four of us boys, and
Mother. Mrs. Kirtle had been very busy the past three days doing
things for us, running in with hot dishes, ordering this and that
for the house, telling callers how wonderfully Mother was bear-
ing up, and taking charge generally. She was a very active woman
in the town, and was president of the Garden Club and also of the
Shakespeare Club. People said she had been an opera singer in
her youth, and there was a picture of her on her parlor wall
dressed in a Japanese kimono, with a fan, and paper chrysanthe-
mums behind her ears. It didn't look like her now, but those small
beady eyes peeping over the fan were Mrs. Kirtle's all right.

I was looking at a pin Mother was wearing on her black silk
blouse and Mother must have thought I was looking at the blouse,
because she said, "Don't worry, son. I won't be wearing black
after today." She turned to my grandmother and said, "The boys
don't like me in black-" and then she began to cry, the first we
had seen her cry since Sunday.

My father got up from the table and came around to Mother
and put his hand on her shoulder, saying, "That's right, Ellen, let
yourself go. It's just what you need."

"Yes, it will be good for you," my grandmother said. "Don't
mind the boys."

Mother sobbed on and on, shaking her head from side to side,
her fingers held to her temples. Tears fell to the table-cloth and
Mrs. Kirtle got up and pressed a handkerchief into Mother's hand.
The sobbing continued unabated for it must have been three or four
minutes, when Mrs. Kirtle said the thing that made Mother stop
crying.

"Think how good it was of God," Mrs. Kirtle said, "to keep
Rachel home with you all summer. You must comfort yourself
with that, Ellen."

We knew what Mrs. Kirtle meant. Every year since Rachel
was a little girl she had spent the summer at grandmother's farm
in the Catskills-every summer, from the first of June, till school
opened in September. But this year, for some reason that we boys
didn't know, Rachel stayed home. Mother had planned to let her
go, the same as usual, and all during the spring Rachel had talked
about it and looked forward to her summer at Grandmother's farm.

=== Page 65 ===
RACHEL'S SUMMER
61
Then, the last of June, just a few days before she was to leave,
Mother changed her mind, saying that Rachel would have to stay
home for the summer the same as the rest of us. I remember we
didn't think much of it at the time; but I remember, too, that Rachel
was hopping mad, at first, and cried a lot when she couldn't go,
and cried often during that summer too. It seemed that she changed,
then, and became a little older and more grown-up-she acted sort
of aloof and thoughtful all the time, and wouldn't play with us the
way she used to, or go for hikes into the country with us, as we had
been doing since we were little kids-those wonderful hikes that
she had always loved before. Or maybe she didn't really change at
all and I only say this because of what I know now. I don't know.
I only know that though she didn't go away that summer, and so
could have gone on more hikes with us than ever, she never went
on another hike again. Anyway, when Mrs. Kirtle said that, about
God keeping Rachel home with Mother, we knew what she meant,
and it did seem right, too. It seemed God must have known what
was going to happen and so kept Rachel home for what was to be
her last summer. It made me feel kind of good, even, when I
thought of this; you could feel almost happy about it, if you
wanted to, and it wouldn't be wrong, either.
Mother put her hands down from her head and sat straight
up. There was no sob or weeping in her voice now. "It wasn't God
who kept Rachel home this summer," she said. "You know that as
well as I do, Doris Kirtle."
"Why, Ellen, don't misunder- You know what I mean,"
Mrs. Kirtle said. "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
I knew the rest of that. "His wonders to perform," it went,
because I had heard Mr. Brittain say it during the funeral service
and I thought it the most wonderful thing I had ever heard.
"Rachel's summer Rachel's summer," Mother went on.
"That's all I've been able to think of since it happened. That's the
whole-"
"Now now, Ellen," interrupted my father. "You mustn't
think of it."
"My darling Rachel, and that terrible terrible summer," my
mother cried. "If God had had his way, Rachel wouldn't have
stayed home. Oh, why didn't I let her go?"
My grandmother got up from the table. "Come on, boys," she

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62 PARTISAN REVIEW

said. "I think we'd better go upstairs, don't you? Your mother's
tired out."
Mother reached up and took Grandmother's arm. "Wait a
minute, mama, I want to say something." She looked at us-for
quite awhile, it seemed-and then she said, "Listen, boys. Your
sister was a wonderful girl. Do you hear?" She nodded, as if
answering herself. "A wonderful girl. I want you to remember
that." It was a dreadfully solemn moment, I don't know why. My
knees were shaking, and then my little brother, who was eight,
began to cry.
"Don't cry, son," Mother said. "I only want to tell you-and
you to know-what a wonderful girl Rachel was. You must be
proud that you had such a sister."
"Never mind, Ellen," my father said. "Look, you're scaring
them."
"No I'm not-am I, boys. And some day, when you're older,
I want to tell you something about Rachel, something you should
know. You're not old enough now, but some day you'll know what
a wonderful sister you had."
My grandmother patted Mother's shoulder. "Yes, dear," she
said. "They know now, don't you boys? - But look, it's past our
bedtime. Come, I'll go up with you."
We went up to bed and for an hour thereafter, and maybe
longer, I lay in my bed in the dark, thinking of what Mother had
said. I knew all about this I'll-tell-you-when-you're-older stuff. It
was Mother's invariable answer to questions that were embarrass-
ing or that she didn't know the answer to. I had heard it ever since
I was old enough to ask questions, and now I didn't pay any atten-
tion to it anymore. When Mother would say, "I'll tell you when
you're older," I knew she was putting me off and also that it didn't
matter: sooner or later I'd find out for myself. Like the question
about babies. For some years I had been asking where babies came
from (Mother has told me that I asked earlier, and more often,
than any of the other children) and she would answer, "You're too
young. I'll tell you when you're old enough to know." Maybe it
was wrong of her not to tell me, but at least she didn't give me those
silly answers about storks and things, that other boys' mothers
gave them. I was answered, and I guess it was as good a way
as any.

=== Page 67 ===
RACHEL'S SUMMER 63

So now when she said this about Rachel, I didn't think of it
much, believing it was just another one of those things that I'd
discover for myself before Mother got around to it. I didn't even
thing of it at all. Instead I lay thinking of something else that
Mother had said: "Your sister was a wonderful girl. I want you
to remember that."

I'd remember it, all right. I'd never forget it. I was well
aware of Rachel's distinction, both in the town in general and in
our own house. She was easily the outstanding member of the
family, everybody noticed her all the time, everywhere, and I
remember my mother used to say that she got tired of being known
simply as "Rachel's mother" when people stopped her on the street
and said "You're Rachel's mother, aren't you" and went on to tell
her how proud she must be to be the mother of such a wonderful
girl. She was wonderful, but I knew many reasons why she was
wonderful that my mother didn't know at all.

I knew that downtown when boys whistled at her, boys from
the other side of the canal, Rachel didn't get cross or blush or look
away or stick up her nose and refuse to notice, the way other girls
did. Instead, Rachel would look up and see who it was had
whistled, and smile right back, and even wave, maybe. They
thought this was swell, and I did too.— I knew that when all we
kids went on a hike into the country, even though there were boys
in the bunch, and some of us almost as old as she was, Rachel was
the one who would be first to go into a field where there was a cow
that might be a bull. We'd all stand on the outside of the fence,
looking into the field, but Rachel would climb right over, the first
thing, and go right up to the cow and pat it or hand it some grass,
and then when we saw that it was all right, we'd climb over too. I
don't know whether or not she always knew, but anyway she wasn't
afraid.

And then there was another thing I knew that Mother didn't
know and I was glad she didn't. Rachel told a lie once and all of
us knew that it was a lie but Mother, who wasn't sure. That was a
couple of years before, when Rachel was about thirteen or four-
teen. Mother thought maybe it was a lie but she didn't have proof,
and so she asked Rachel if she would swear on the Bible that she
was telling the truth. Rachel said yes, she would. Mother said,
"All right, bring me the Bible." We kids were all scared to death—

=== Page 68 ===
64 PARTISAN REVIEW all of us, that is, but Rachel. She walked right into the dining room and got the Bible from the lower shelf of the sideboard and brought it to Mother. Mother asked Rachel if she knew the seriousness of what she was doing and Rachel said yes. Mother took the Bible and set it in her lap. Then she said, "Put your hand on this and swear that you're telling me the truth." I almost didn't dare look, but I had to. Rachel put her hand right on the Bible, looked straight at Mother, and said, "I swear." There was a terrible silence. I think Mother was scared too. She looked it. Or maybe not scared, but something like it-worried, maybe. "You swear what," she said. "I swear I'm telling the truth," said Rachel. Mother looked back at Rachel for a minute and then she sighed, probably glad that it was over. We were. Then she said, "All right, you can put it back now." Rachel took the Bible from Mother's lap and walked back to the dining room with it, looking just as she had before. There had been no lightning or thunder or anything, and she hadn't changed a bit. These are the things I was thinking of as I lay in bed that night after the funeral. But only for a little while, because then I remembered that tomorrow I was going back to school and I was glad. I looked forward to that, seeing all the kids and having them see me. I was a hero, kind of, and they would all pay a lot of attention to me. I mean there had been a death in the family and everybody knew it, and all the school kids, and the teachers too, would want to look at me and watch me and see how I acted. Only the day before, when I was returning some dishes to Mrs. Kirtle's house, I met one of the kids who lived up the street and he stopped and wanted to talk with me. He stood there on the sidewalk looking at me in a funny way, and then he said: "I saw something on your front door when I came home from school yesterday." There was a kind of gleam in his eye, and he was almost grinning. "It's still there," he said. I didn't say anything and he kept on staring, peering at me closely as if he expected me to do something. I turned and walked on. "I guess it won't be there tomorrow," he called after me, as I went into Mrs. Kirtle's house. We kind of pretended the next day that we didn't want to go back to school. Mother said it was customary for children to stay home a week when there had been a death in the family, and we could have, too, and it would have been all right with our teachers,

=== Page 69 ===
RACHEL'S SUMMER
65
but she said we must return to school the day after the funeral
because she wanted us all to get back to normal as soon as possible,
just as if nothing had happened. So we did. But it wasn't as if
nothing had happened, of course.
One morning about a week later the teacher called me up to
her desk and asked if I didn't want to look at a certain book she
had, with beautiful colored pictures in it. I said yes and thank
you and started to take it back to my seat. She said, "No, sit here
and look at it, at my desk;" and because it was an honor to sit at
the teacher's desk I sat down feeling proud and began to look at
the pictures, all the while thinking this was just part of her being
extra nice to me, as she had been all week, ever since I came back.
Then I began to realize that something was happening in the room.
The kids were all completely still, there wasn't even any whisper-
ing, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that something was being
passed from seat to seat, up one row and down another. "See, isn't
this a nice one," the teacher said, leaning over my shoulder and
pointing to one of the pictures. I looked at it, wondering what was
happening in the room, what was going on. And then, somehow, I
knew. It was the card of thanks that Mother had had printed and
mailed to all the people who'd sent flowers when Rachel died, and
of course one had been sent to each class in school. Now it was
being passed around the room for the kids to read. I knew then
why everyone was so solemn and quiet, and why each one of them
looked up at me as he finished reading the card and passed it on
to the next one. I pretended I didn't know, though, and after a
minute I turned away from the book as if I had lost interest in it
and looked out of the window, staring into the sky with a sad far-
away look till the business of passing the card was finished and the
teacher said it was now time to take up geography.
This was the sort of thing that happened often after the
funeral, a lot of things like that the first few months, and longer,
even, so that for years afterward we were were always kind of conspicu-
ous because of Rachel's death, and treated with special kindness
by people, or special attention. Most of all we were noticed by Mr.
Brittain, our minister, who always stopped us kids in the street
whenever we met him and wanted to talk with us. He would stand
there for some time, holding our hands and asking how Mother was
and how we were, though he must have seen us only a few days

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66 PARTISAN REVIEW

before at Sunday school and saw us regularly every week there.
This was the more odd because Mother, for some strange reason,
had given up going to church after Rachel died, and never went
again. I thought it was maybe because seeing Mr. Brittain up in
the pulpit reminded her too much of the funeral and Rachel; and
I thought so all the more when one afternoon, some months later,
Mr. Brittain called at our house and Mother asked me to answer
the door and tell him she wasn't home. She didn't want to see him
again, and as far as I know she never did. At least she didn't go to
church anymore and after a couple more trys he never called on
Mother again.
All this is so long ago that it seems something I have heard
about rather than lived through. When I go home now it is hard to
tell whether I really remember these things or whether I just know
about them from Mother. It is still the same town in many ways,
and in others it is different; but when I go home I am only con-
scious of the town as it used to be when I lived there, and of the
things that happened then. Mr. Brittain isn't there anymore but
Mrs. Kirtle is—still living up the street, still as busy as ever: a
little old white-haired lady running around the neighborhood doing
things for people, managing the affairs of sick ones, and taking
charge generally as she always did. And down below Asylum Hill
is the cemetery where Rachel lies buried: a lovely spot, grown up
now with rose bushes and shrubbery, quite different from the time
when we first bought the lot in what was then called the "new part"
of the cemetery and Mother used to mind it so much, because the
"new part" was all barren and unplanted and very forsaken-look-
ing compared to the “old part.”
The last time I was home I was going through an old desk
drawer, looking at papers and photographs I had long since for-
gotten, when I came upon something that made me laugh with
delight. It was a note, on ruled paper, written in a childish but
plain hand—a note my sister had written to someone in school and
which had been passed back to her, with an answer. What delighted
me was the postscript that Rachel had added. It read: "Have you
heard that Kathleen McMahon is in a fix. You know what I mean."
My mother was sitting near me, sewing, and when I laughed
she said, "What have you found now?"

=== Page 71 ===
RACHEL'S SUMMER

67
I said, "It's a note Rachel wrote to somebody. Listen," and I
read it aloud.
I saw Mother smile, but she said, "What's so funny about
that?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "It just seems funny after all these
years. I didn't have any idea that Rachel would know-" I
stopped, not knowing how to explain what I meant, and added:
"She was a wise kid, wasn't she."
After a moment Mother said, "Yes, she was."
I was pleased, somehow, with the whole thing. I liked the
idea of knowing that Rachel was-well, sophisticated. It made her
kind of a contemporary, less a girl who had been dead more than
twenty years-and it made me know her and understand her better
too, in a way that I couldn't have known her when she was alive at
sixteen and I was three years younger. "If Rachel had lived," I
said, "she'd probably have married in a year or two and be the
mother of twenty kids by now."
"Probably," Mother said.
"Either that, or been married and divorced ten times over."
"What makes you say that," Mother asked.
"Nothing, except that's the kind of person she was, or would
have become. She was so full of life-so ready for life, wasn't
she. Just waiting for it."
Mother said nothing. I folded the note and stuck it back in
the drawer. "It seems such a pity that that wonderful vitality, that
wonderful talent for life, couldn't have been used, somehow.
Because that's what it was, a real talent," I said. "Gosh, God
doesn't order things very well, does he, when he permits such
waste."
Mother went on sewing for awhile and then, without looking
up, she said, "Are you asking me something?"
I didn't know what she meant and I said so.
"Are you trying to find out something, son? Have you ever
heard anything?"
"Mother," I said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Well, then," Mother said, "I'll tell you."
I was so surprised by all this that I was uncomfortable. I felt
as though I had intruded in some way. I knew I had stumbled upon
something I had no right to know, and I wished I hadn't. But there

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68 PARTISAN REVIEW

was no going back now. Mother wanted to tell me, and I passion-
ately wanted to know, even though I honestly wished it hadn't
happened.

Mother told all that she had to say in a quiet voice, unemo-
tional, unmoved by the story—not so much telling it, it seemed, as
merely reminiscing out loud. She went on with her sewing, and
only stopped her recital when she laid aside a piece of work to
pick up another, or when I, occasionally, interrupted her.

"Do you remember when Rachel died," she said, "I told you
boys there was something I would tell you someday, something
about Rachel, something you all should know."

I remembered, now. I remembered the supper after the fune-
ral, and Mrs. Kirtle there, and the black silk blouse of my mother,
and her saying this. I remembered how solemn and scared we were
and how my brother began to cry when Mother said we were too
young to know, now, what a wonderful sister we had, but some-
day— My poor funny Mother! At thirty-some, I was, apparently,
at last old enough.

"Rachel didn't go to your grandmother's that summer before
she died," Mother said, "and I think I should tell you why. Do
you remember that she didn't go, and that she always had gone
before, every summer? But maybe you don't. That's a long time
ago."

"I remember," I said.

"She was going to go, the same as always," Mother said, "but
a few days before she was to leave, something happened. I'll tell
you as plain as I can, though it may be difficult."

"Don't, Mother, unless you really want to," I said. "It doesn't
make a bit of difference."

Mother paid no attention to this but went on as if she hadn't
heard me. "You children had gone off into the country for the day,
on one of your hikes, you boys and Rachel and I think the two
O'Connell children and the Lincoln girl. Yes, I know that Helen
Lincoln was along too. After you had gone, I lit the gas under the
heater to take a bath, rather glad to have the house to myself for
the day, and just as I was going to get into the tub, the 'phone rang.
It was Mrs. Kirtle. She asked if I was alone and I said yes. She
said she wanted to come right over, she had something to tell me.
I told her why didn't she wait till later, as I was going to take a

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RACHEL'S SUMMER
69
bath now, but she said no, she had to come right away, it was very
important. So she came."
I could see Mrs. Kirtle hurrying over from her house, I could
even hear her high little voice on the 'phone, but more than that, I
saw all us kids on our hike and I remembered the very day: the
hot dry road over Asylum Hill and down past the cemetery to the
brook, and how we left the road there, and followed the brook
through the fields to our favorite place up further where it was deep
enough to swim.
"Mrs. Kirtle told me her news right off, without prelimi-
naries," Mother went on. "Rachel was in trouble-she said it just
like that. It came so sudden that I couldn't believe it at first or take
it seriously, because Mrs. Kirtle was so excited about it. I said
how can you possibly know any such thing, and she said that Mr.
Brittain had told her about it and had asked her to tell me-I ought
to know about it, he had said. I began to understand, then, what
she was saying the seriousness of it, I mean-and asked her to
tell me the whole story. I can't tell you how thankful I was that
you children were away at the time. It's funny, but it seemed I
couldn't wait for Rachel to come back, I would die of anxiety-and
yet I dreaded it too. I knew that when I spoke to Rachel, or even
looked into her eyes, I would know. But you children were away
on your hike, and I had to wait."
I listened to the story and it didn't seem real. Much more real
was the brook and the big willow tree and the enormous snake we
saw there, so big that it seemed it must be Africa, and Rachel said
that it was.
"Mrs. Kirtle had heard the story at the Ladies' Aid," Mother
said. "During their meeting the day before, Mr. Brittain came in
and told a couple of the ladies about it, saying that somebody
ought to tell Rachel's mother. He asked which one of them knew me
the best, and Mrs. Kirtle said she guessed she did. That's how she
came to me. I never did know who told Mr. Brittain, or how the
story got started in the first place. When I went to him about it that
week, he wouldn't tell me, though I begged him to, and begged him
many times that summer. After Rachel was dead, he did come to
see me, but it was too late then and I wouldn't talk to him."
Mother was looking down at her sewing, she didn't once look
at me during the whole story, and my heart jumped with pity as I
recalled that day and knew how it was with her. And all that while,

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PARTISAN REVIEW
we kids were off at the brook, moving in single file along the bank
to our swimming place, a mile or more from the road.
“About four o'clock or half-past, you children came down
the street,” Mother said. “I was sitting in the porch-swing. I hadn't
been able to do anything all day, and I was never so glad to see
anybody, never in my life, as I was to see you children."
“Mother, I remember,” I said, and I did. I remembered
exactly, and could see Mother sitting there now, watching for us
through the vines.
“Rachel had a big armful of wild iris,” Mother said. “Flags,
you children called them-white ones and blue ones and she said
she was mad at you boys because you wouldn't bring some home
too. I could have had the whole field of them, she said, if you had
only helped her.”
“I remember, we wouldn't,” I said, “I don't know why.”
“Rachel was beautiful that day, son,” Mother said. “She was
only fifteen then, but really she had begun to look like a woman,
almost. Maybe she only seemed more beautiful because of the
terrible day and what I had to tell her. You'll know what it's like
when your own children begin to grow up."
The old phrase how many times I had heard it, and with
what impatience each time. But it was right, it was true, and I was
ashamed of my amused tolerance of my mother on many occasions
before. “What did you do,” I said, to cover my embarrassment,
“—how did you tell her?”
“I simply told her,” Mother said. “We went upstairs to her
bedroom and I asked her to sit down. We sat beside each other on
the bed. Rachel saw that my eyes were red from weeping and
suddenly she threw her arms about me and said, 'Who's been mak-
ing my mother cry!” Then I told her what Mrs. Kirtle had said-
what Mr. Brittain had said but I didn't tell her who said these
things. I couldn't, though it was the first thing she asked, the very
first. Who told you,’ she cried in rage, ‘who said that! I wouldn't
tell her, I didn't think I should."
“Oh, Mother,” I said, “you should have, you should.”
“Well, I didn't,” Mother went on. “I never did, even to the
end, though she kept on asking me all summer, almost every day.
Anyway, then I said, ‘Rachel, is this true, are you in trouble,’ and
she almost shouted. ‘No!’ she cried, and I told her she'd have to
be more quiet on account of you boys, I didn't want you other

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RACHEL'S SUMMER
71
children to know anything was wrong. Rachel was very angry-
you know what a spirited child she was and kept saying, 'I'll kill
them, I'll kill them!' I tried to calm her, and said the only thing
that was important was that I should know the truth. And then,
between tears and outbursts of anger, Rachel told me the thing
that made me know the story was not true. Do you know what
it was?"
I shook my head. I didn't know but I couldn't ask, remember-
ing Rachel too well, and remembering, too, the episode of the
Bible.
"Rachel said, 'Mother, it isn't true, because listen. Today I
couldn't go in swimming. All the other kids went in, every one but
me. I didn't because I couldn't. Ask the boys.'"
I could have cheered. It was true, I remembered it perfectly.
Thank God for that old-fashioned idea, I thought, and good for
Rachel that she knew it. It told Mother without a shade of doubt-
and me too, now-that Rachel was telling the truth.
I remembered it all, and said so: how Rachel had sat on the
bank waiting for us, while we kids splashed around in the stream,
begging Rachel to come in, and calling her a sissy for not doing so.
I remembered, too, but didn't tell Mother this, how Helen Lincoln
didn't have a bathing suit and went in with her white middy blouse
and bloomers, and how her middy got all wet and showed the points
of her nipples when she stood up. And I remembered how I tried
not to look at her too much, and that I was glad that Rachel, who
wore a middy blouse too, hadn't gone in with us after all.
"Mother, for heaven's sake," I said, "why didn't you ask us?
It was true, Rachel didn't go in, and we could have told you so!"
"I didn't need to, son," Mother said. "I believed her." She
sighed deeply, but went on with her sewing. "Of course the damage
had been done," she said. "It didn't matter that Rachel was inno-
cent, the story was around town and the only thing to do, then, was
to keep Rachel home for the summer. I wanted to let her go to
your grandmother's, as we had planned, but I couldn't. I wrote to
your father, asking him what to do, and he wrote back to keep her
home, not to let her go away once during the summer, not even for
a weekend. And all during that long summer, her last summer,
poor Rachel wasn't allowed to go away once, not even in September
when the Lincolns invited her to the lake for Labor Day weekend.
She had to stay home with me the whole time, and almost every

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72 PARTISAN REVIEW

day she'd ask who had told me the story, and she'd swear that
someday she'd know and that she'd kill whoever it was, or do some-
thing awful to them."
"So she should have, too, if she'd known," I said. "But
Mother, why didn't you let her go? How could you have cared so
much what people said, especially when you knew better?"
"If she went away, people would believe the story," Mother
said. "She had gone away to have the baby. But if she stayed home
-stayed home long enough- But son, you see-you see, she
didn't stay home long enough-"
"What do you mean," I said, "she didn't go away once."
"I mean," Mother said, "you see, Rachel never- No, she
didn't go away, but you see, she didn't live long enough, either."
I got up and walked to the window. I didn't trust myself to
speak, and I knew I would have to wait quite awhile. I looked out
of the window at the street-this street I had played in, it seemed,
all my life-and across the way was the house that always
resounded to the thumping of a player-piano, and next to it was
the O'Connell's house, and next to that was Mrs. Kirtle's neat little
home, kept neat and trim and painted for her every year by the son
who now lived in New York, the same as I did. What drew us back
to this town, anyway, and why did we ever come home? But we
loved it too, we who had moved away, and though we never saw
each other in New York, we met often at home during the year, in
summer vacations or at Christmas time, bored to death through the
long holidays, anxious to get away again, and thanking our stars
that we didn't have to live here.
"Mother," I said, after awhile, "I'm going out for a walk. I
think I'll go over to the library and see what it's like."
"All right, son," Mother said. "But be back in time for sup-
per, don't stop in anywhere. I've got vegetable soup cooking."
"I won't stop in anywhere," I said. I smiled to myself,
because I knew that if I did stop in at somebody's house, and be
late, Mother would begin calling up.
And then, just as I kissed her goodbye, Mother said, "Son, I
want to ask you something before you go out."
"What is it, Mother," I said, "have I got my rubbers on?"
She looked up at me beseechingly. "Is it true," she said, "that
Rachel didn't go in swimming that day? Tell me-do you really
remember it, or are you just saying that? I've got to know."

=== Page 77 ===
22nd August, 1939

Kenneth Rexroth

“... when you want to distract your mother from the
discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do.
To take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gather-
ing wildflowers here and there, resting under the shade
of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the
gentle tranquillity of the mothernature, and I am sure she
will enjoy this very much, as you surely will be happy
for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of hap-
piness, don't use all for yourself only, but down yourself
just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that
cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim; because
they are your better friends; they are the comrades that
fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell
yesterday, for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all
and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will
find more love and you will be loved.”
Nicola Sacco to his son Dante, Aug. 18, 1927

"Angst und Gestalt und Gebet”—Rilke

What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Twenty years at hard labor,
Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante,
Indian chants and gestalt psychology;
What words can it spell,
This alphabet of one sensibility?
The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression,
The thin air of fourteen thousand foot summits,
Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality,
The fire of poppies in eroded fields,
The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest,
The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought,
Life streaming ungovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.

73

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74 PARTISAN REVIEW

All the centuries have changed little in this art,
The subjects are still the same.
"For Christ's sake take off your clothes and get into bed,
We are not going to live forever."
"Petals fall from the rose"
We fall from life,
Values fall from history like men from shellfire,
Only a minimum survives,
Only an unknown achievement.
They can put it on all the headstones,
In all the battlefields,
"Poor guy, he never knew what it was all about."
Spectacled men will come with shovels in a thousand years,
Give lectures in universities on cultural advances, cultural lags.
A little more garlic in the soup,
A half hour more in bed in the morning,
Some of them got it, some of them didn't;
The things they dropped in their hurry
Are behind the glass cases of dusky museums.

This year we made four major ascents,
Camped for two weeks at timberline,
Watched Mars swim close to the earth,
Watched the black aurora of war
Spread over the sky of a decayed civilization.
These are the last terrible years of authority.
The disease has reached its crisis,
Ten thousand years of power,
The struggle of two laws,
The rule of iron and spilled blood,
The abiding solidarity of living blood and brain.
They are trapped, beleagured, murderous.
If they line their cellars with cork
It is not to still the pistol shots,
It is to insulate the last words of the condemned.
"Liberty is the mother
Not the daughter of order."
"Not the government of men
But the administration of things."
"From each according to his ability,
Unto each according to his needs."

=== Page 79 ===
22nd AUGUST, 1939

We could still hear them,
Cutting steps in the blue ice of hanging glaciers,
Teetering along shattered aretes.
The cold and cruel apathy of mountains
Has been subdued with a few strands of rope
And some flimsy iceaxes,
There are only a few peaks left.

Twenty-five years have gone since my first sweetheart.
Back from the mountains there is a letter waiting for me.
"I read your poem in the New Republic.
Do you remember the undertaker's on the corner,
How we peeped in the basement window at a sheeted figure
And ran away screaming? Do you remember?
There is a filling station on the corner,
A parking lot where your house used to be,
Only ours and two other houses are left.
We stick it out in the noise and carbon monoxide."
It was a poem of homesickness and exile,
Twenty-five years wandering around
In a world of noise and poison.
She stuck it out, I never went back,
But there are domestic as well as imported
Explosions and poison gases.
Dante was homesick, the Chinese made an art of it,
So was Ovid and many others,
Pound and Eliot amongst them,
Kropotkin dying of hunger,
Berkman by his own hand,
Fanny Baron, biting her executioners,
Mahkno in the odor of calumny,
Trotsky too, I suppose, passionately, after his own fashion.
Do you remember?

What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Do you remember the corpse in the basement?
What are we doing at the turn of our years,
Writers and readers of the liberal weeklies?

75

=== Page 80 ===
The Poetry of Paul Eluard

Louise Bogan

PAUL ELUARD, one of the original members of the Dada "school,"
moved into Surrealism, under the leadership of André Breton,
when “the Dada anarchy” was outlawed. He has held closely to
the tenets of Surrealism through all their hardening and stiffening,
in spite of the fact that his gifts seem perfectly opposed to all that
Surrealism once stood for, and all it stands for now. The reasons
for his alliance with Dada would be somewhat difficult to deter-
mine. It was natural, certainly, that a talent like Eluard’s—simple
and sensitive, quite unclouded by the fumes of the macabre, and
undisturbed by the sardonic horse-play and involved cynicism of
his sturdier contemporaries—should be forced, during the post-
War years, to take on some kind of protective coloring, make some
defensive alliance, in order to exist. Such a talent was of the exact
kind to move his contemporaries to parody. Eluard's complete
complaisance to Surrealist doctrine, before and after Surrealism’s
alliance with "the revolution," permitted him to go on writing; but
his passivity has lapsed, at times, into a kind of masochism, vitiat-
ing his work and making his “thinking” ridiculous. He has never
rebelled against Breton’s manifestos and excommunications; he is,
in fact, the complete complement of Breton, who has been called
the Saint-Just of Surrealism. He obediently became a Communist
when Surrealism, the party wedded to complete non-utilitarianism
and to the exploration of the wayward subconscious, automatism
and the dream, developed a dogma equally unyielding, and in
many ways paralleling Communist dogma. Eluard has obeyed, it
is true, without once changing his fundamental poetic nature. He
stands today in the peculiar position of a poet who has remained a
depository of one kind of poetic expression (a kind, as we shall
see, which is not particularly French), while paying more than lip-
service to doctrines in every way inimical to the development of
that expression.

76

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THE POETRY OF PAUL ELUARD
77
Surrealism has received little analytical discussion in English.
Because it cast back for exemplars through the 1870 generation in
France (Rimbaud and Lautréamont), to Baudelaire, it seemed to
gather up Symbolist functions, and, moreover, extend them by
adding Freudian theory to the Symbolist base. Actually, this widen-
ing and deepening never occurred, and Symbolism was contracted
rather than extended, by Surrealism. Since Eluard's poetry is so
symptomatic of one result of adherence to Surrealist theory, it is
necessary to outline briefly the nature of the Surrealist revolt
against Dada, and the uneven history of Symbolism (which did not
proceed in an unbroken line, as is generally supposed) after
Mallarmé.

In 1898 Mallarmé's chief pupil, Valéry, entered the silence
which was to remain unbroken for twenty years. And although the
influence of Rimbaud was not entirely dead, it was subjected to
traditional distortions, chiefly at the hands of Claudel and Rivière,
who endeavoured to prove Rimbaud a Catholic character and an
embodiment of angelic (though fallen) innocence. A regression
toward convention and traditionalism had set in. Marcel Raymond
describes it in his De Baudelaire à Surrealisme:

"Writers seemed prisoners of their culture. Psychological or
physiological drama, recitals of sociologists, physicians and
geographers, poems by archeologists or men of erudition, the
literary jests and divertissements of mandarins - all these
[pre-War] works rested on a base of positive knowledge, con-
sidered unshakable and untouchable. Literature was . . . limed
in the mass of facts, laws and hypotheses which the remarkable
development of human knowledge had heaped up ... during the
19th century. The great majority of the works of the period pro-
posed to demonstrate something, whether by describing, analys-
ing, explaining individual or collective phenomena, or by decom-
posing them into rational elements. . . . These works were clear
and satisfied the needs of a simple logic. . . . All were determinist
or finalist. The creative freedom of the artist could not function
except between walls of truth, utility or good sense. . . . Poetry,
from the early epoch of Parnassianism, had been towed along
behind philosophy and history. Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Prud-
homme and Herédia had wished to condense in their verse a
world of ideas and facts. It is true that the Symbolists, coming
after the Parnassians, had . . . opened literary windows and
allowed the fog of mystery to come into the study of the man of
letters. But, after 1895, the Symbolists were violently attacked

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PARTISAN REVIEW

neo-classicists . . . wrote erudite poetry. . . . All the writers joined
in a common cult of the intelligence: between a poem by Mme.
de Noailles and certain pages of the novels of Regnier, between
the phrases of Anatole France, Maurras, Barrés, and the poems
of Moréas, between the tirades of Paul Adam, the invectives of
Mirbeau and certain social poems of Verhaeren, the difference
was only one of meter and rhyme. . . .
In this situation, it is interesting to remember, it was foreigners
like Rilke and Yeats who received refreshment from whatever
feeble sparks of Symbolism remained alive. (Villiers de l'Isle
Adam was such a spark. Rilke went back to Baudelaire.)

The birth of Dada coincided with the renovation of the “con-
ception” of the universe, and of the spiritual life, by the scientists
whose work, conceived and tested before the War, became generally
available thereafter. “Relativist hypotheses made absolute truth
recede far beyond the touch of human reason”; the Freudian
hypotheses broke down and complicated "the grossly simplified
analyses, in the moral field, of the preceding era.” Art, always
acting as a symptom, and always well before the event (even in its
least energetic periods), had already announced the change (Rim-
baud, two generations previously). An undercurrent of revolt
against officially respectable literature, colored with occultism,
interest in the supernatural, the erotic and the sadistic, had begun
before the war. Jarry was its chief mystificator. Apollinaire, of
Polish blood, born in Rome, brought back into French literature a
forgotten interest of the Symbolists: an interest in “popular
poetry,"—the literature produced by everyday life. Popular songs
and the machines and apparatuses then beginning to change the
technique of European living appeared in his poetry more often
than the esoteric trappings of the macabre. He rarely tried to ele-
vate his tone to match the sublimity acceptable to French writing.
He worked best on the level of wit. He was able “to create an
atmosphere wherein the banal, the daily, the threadbare theme was
transfigured.” He was also capable of true pathos, and it was his
wit and pathos which were deleted almost entirely from the Sur-
realist movement whose name derived from one of his invented
terms. “It was things themselves [which interested Apollinaire],
happenings which ought continually to become 'the marvelous,' if
looked at with a certain bias."

Dada, soon dead and denounced by Surrealism, was, in its

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THE POETRY of PAUL ELUARD

79

beginnings, a far more vigorous assault against logic and the weight
of bourgeois ideals, than Surrealism, fixed, humorless and from
the beginning out for the dead-end effects of madness and mystifi-
cation. Symptomatic of post-War derangement, hysteria and
despair, Dada nevertheless contained elements of control over and
insight into its aberrations. Its working resembled the forms of
hysteria, but it was the hysteria of an intelligent living entity suf-
fering from shock. It never developed the paranoid symptoms of
Surrealism. It was able to laugh at its own jokes, be cynical with
its own cynicism and cruel to its own sadism, and its dogmatic and
persecutory symptoms were mild, if they existed at all. It found
room for Max Jacob's macaroniques and bold parodies, and for
Eluard's pathos. Surrealism, on its first appearance, immediately
showed signs of a sobering up process. It was announced by a call
to order, disguised as a manifesto for more freedom. Its cham-
pionship of automatism, its great show of dives into the depths of
the subconscious and flights into the empyrean of le merveilleux
were accompanied by a reciprocal tendency to law-making, litany-
singing, and the issuance of marching orders. Breton's litany on
"the marvelous" might be set to four-four time: "Le merveilleux
est toujours beau, n'importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n'y a
même que le merveilleux qui soit beau."

It would be simple to produce an analogy between the func-
tioning of Surrealism and the mechanisms discoverable in a person
suffering from a psychosis. The more the irresponsibility of the
"subconscious" is given rein, the more an increasingly rigid and
authoritarian set of rules is thrown up, which parallel the work-
ings, in a psychotic individual, of a super ego, or too harsh con-
science. The "jacobin and jansenist logic" superimposed upon
Surrealism allowed it to remain detached from reality, and worked
off the guilt of artists who had reduced their work to a kind of col-
lection of picture postcards or a parlor game. Art, under these con-
ditions, must become more rather than less fixed; its forms become
monotonous. The monotony extends to the work of those "rage
types" who take it out in invective (Surrealism is rich in these); it
shows itself in the reduction of form to the bleak list and the tire-
some juxtaposition. Not only is growth impossible, but recession
is probable.

Breton and Eluard at one time collaborated in the writing of

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80 PARTISAN REVIEW

a book of poems which imitated the speech of “victims of mental
debility, acute mania, general paralysis, etc.” They “hoped,” in
their notes to these productions, “that attempts to simulate the
maladies for which one is usually confined, may one day replace
the ballad, the sonnet, the epic. . . .” Breton wished his recitals of
dreams to be stenographic, and his approach to “madness, the dream,
the absurd, the incoherent, the hyperbolic and all that opposes the
summary appearance of the real” is one of “precise experiment.”
The truth is, that in surrealism, the dream is treated in the most
primitive way: it is recounted or imitated; Surrealist poets have
gone into the subconscious as one would take a short trip into the
country, and have brought back some objects of grisly or erotic-
sadistic connotation, or a handful of unrelated images, in order to
prove their journey. It has not occurred to them that the journey
has been taken many times, that human imagination has, before
this, hung a golden bough before the entrance to hell, and has
described the profound changes the true journey brings about. It is
a journey not to be undertaken lightly, or described without ten-
sion of any kind. And the aller et retour, if merely approximated,
produces approximate expression: the sulphurous, the sadistic, the
luxurious macabre, the Grand Guignol; or the childish, fatuous
game.

II.
“Give the initiative to words,” said Mallarmé, and if this
command is followed to its logical conclusion, the subject dis-
appears. It is (or has been) a surrealist pleasure to take the kernel
of meaning out of forms into which meaning is most closely com-
pressed. Here are three surrealist proverbs by Eluard and Péret:
Les éléphants sont contagieux
Les cerises tombent ou les textes manquent.
Les grands oiseaux font les petites persiennes
Or the definition. Here are two Eluard “définitions”:
Un homme vivant monté sur un cheval vivant rencontre
une femme vivante tenant en laisse un chien vivant.

Une robe noire ou une robe blanche? Des grands
souliers ou des petits?
If the fortuitous brings in (by chance?) a semblance of wit
(as it does, certainly, in the above quotations), this wit must be
countered by the “fortuitous” poem dull as a flat joke:

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THE POETRY OF PAUL ELUARD
81

Un grand feu dans la cheminée
Un bon tapis par terre
Quelques chaises autour de la table
Des brosses des charrues des clairons des dentelles

Le tout soigneusement enduit de glu.
(Cours Naturel, 1938)

It is plain that Eluard is not perfectly freely "giving the
initiative to words"; the element of choice is working, if in a
reverse direction. In the two early poems which follow, Eluard's
purity of diction, his taste (comparable in many ways to the taste
of the Parnassians), and his pathos are evident:

LEURS YEUX TOUJOURS PURS
Jours de lenteur, jours de pluie,
Jours de miroirs brisés et d'aiguilles perdues,
Jours de paupières closes à l'horizon des mers,
D'heures toutes semblables, jours de captivité,

Mon esprit qui brillait encore sur les feuilles
Et les fleurs, mon esprit est nu comme l'amour,
L'aurore qu'il oublie lui fait baisser la tête
Et contempler son corps obéissant et vain.

Pourtant, j'ai vu les plus beaux yeux du monde,
Dieux d'argent qui tenaient des saphirs dans leurs mains,
De véritables dieux, des oiseaux dans la terre
Et dans l'eau, je les ai vus.

Leurs ailes sont les miennes, rien n'existe
Que leur vol qui secoue ma misère,
Leur vol d'étoile et de lumière
Leur vol de terre, leur vol de pierre
Sur les flots de leurs ailes,

Ma pensée soutenue par la vie et la mort.
(Capitale de la Douleur, 1926)

("No play with words," Eluard says. "Everything is comparable
to everything, everything finds its echo, its reason, its resemblance,
its opposition, its transformation. And this transformation is
infinite.")

LA NECESSITE
Sans grande cérémonie à terre
Près de ceux qui gardent leur équilibre
Sur cette misère de tout repos
Tout près de la bonne voie

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PARTISAN REVIEW

Dans la poussière du sérieux
J'établis des rapports entre l'homme et la femme
Entre les fontés du soleil et le sac à bourdons
Entre les grottes enchantées et l'avalanche
Entre les yeux cernés et le rire aux abois
Entre la merlette héraldique et l'étoile de l'ail
Entre le fil à plomb et le bruit du vent
Entre la fontaine aux fourmis et la culture des framboises
Entre le fer à cheval et le bout des doigts
Entre la calocédoine et l'hiver en épingles
Entre l'arbre à prunelles et le mimétisme constaté
Entre la carotide et le spectre du sel
Entre l'araucaria et la tête d'un nain
Entre les rails aux embranchements et la colombe rousse
Entre l'homme et la femme
Entre ma solitude et toi.

(La Vie Immédiate, 1932)

It is a limitation in Eluard that he is aiming at one kind of
poetry and producing another. Loose form and the continually
changed image must have beneath them-or rather, must rise from
the very existence of a ground-swell energy, wildness and feroc
ity in the poet. When the poetic gift is sensitive, and its projection
mild, on the other hand, it is form alone which gives edge to its
nuances. Eluard is far closer, as Jean Cassou has pointed out, to
the German poet's nostalgia and "suffering" than to the French
poet's sublimity and lucidity. And he is certainly more close, in
nature, to the Parnassians than to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or Lau
tréamont in all of whom ferocity is present. The French classic line
intersected, in Baudelaire, with the macabre and Gothic; classic
form was fused with passionate feeling and imagination and the
results are superb and inimitable poems. Rimbaud and Lautréa
mont charged language with such force that it broke through form;
even Hugo's rhetoric was not adequate for these personalities. Even
in Mallarmé the reverberation of emotion sounds through his
designs for fans, and his preoccupation with his furniture and
lace-curtains; the grandeur of glaciers, thunder and rubies invades
the poetry from which actual "meaning" has been barred. When
Rimbaud wished to express pathos, he immediately and instinc
tively went back to form (in the poems Bonheur and Chanson de la
Plus Haute Tour, for example). The results of imitating a poet,
whose form is distorted because it is bearing more condensed

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THE POETRY OF PAUL ELUARD
meaning and emotion than it can bear, may be observed in the
imitators of Hopkins. The tricks are managed, but the true effects
not in any way approached.
Emotion, when it rises above pathos, immediately takes on
complexity. Eluard, well below the complex level, and attempting
to work with the automatic and hallucinatory, at the end is left
with his vocabulary (simple, exquisitely chosen), his syntax (also
of the simplest), and his one emotional effect: "an amorous and
dolorous obsession of an infinitely pathetic character."
Eluard is incapable of the poem of revolt. When he feels that
such a poem is required of him, he writes the following undis-
tinguished and adolescent lines:
CRITIQUE DE LA POESIE
C'est entendu je hais le règne des bourgeois
Le règne des flics et des prêtres
Mais je hais plus encore l'homme qui ne hait pas
Comme moi
De toutes ses forces
Je crache à la face de l'homme plus petit que nature
Qui à tous mes poèmes ne préfère pas cette CRITIQUE DE LA POESIE
(La Vie Immédiate, 1932)
The kindest of Eluard's critics have warned him against the
traditional French affectation into which his writing can so easily
be led. He shows this tendency in his comparisons, which are likely
to compare something of emotional weight to something pretty or
abstract, or charmingly strange. Or delicate attributes are given to
creatures and objects of a certain natural energy and strength:
Birds perfume the woods
Rocks their great nocturnal lakes
And it is possible, in Eluard, as in any poet, to detect the faked
phrase, put in to make things harder, or to render matters, to the
casual glance at least, more profound. All the manifestoes in the
world cannot infuse import into "agile incest," or "fishes of
anguish." This sort of thing, if persisted in, becomes mignardise
and confiserie.
Eluard's virtues are apparent, and his influence, if not strong,
might be importantly pervasive. His basic naturalness, existing
uniquely among his contemporaries, preserves in French literature
(at a time when such a delicate ingredient might be entirely lost)

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84 PARTISAN REVIEW

a pathétique equally as valuable as the sublimity, wit, irony, malice
and corrosive rhetorical splendors with which that literature has
always been so well supplied. Apollinaire combined this pathos
with wit; he has moments which go back to Villon. Pathos alone,
or in combination, is contrary to the self-conscious, anti-sentimental
and synthetically tough spirit of the time; but it is a valuable civil-
ized and salutary element, none the less. That Eluard's gifts should
have been forced, by the fashion or neurosis of his period, to dis-
guise themselves as “unconscious” (so that their true imaginative
flights will not lie open to scorn), and be reduced to the level of a
word game, is peculiar enough. That they should have been twisted
into the use of propaganda, and made to function under mani-
festoes, literary and otherwise, will certainly amuse future critics
and diagnosticians of his era.

TRANSLATIONS OF POEMS QUOTED IN THE TEXT

A fine fire in the fireplace
A good carpet on the floor
Chairs around the table
Brushes ploughs bugles laces
All smoothly covered with bird-lime

THEIR EYES FOREVER PURE

Slow-passing days, days of rain,
Days of broken mirrors and lost needles,
Days of eyelids closed to the seas' horizon,
Of hours all alike, days of captivity.

My spirit which still glitters on the leaves
And the flowers, my spirit is naked like love,
Its forgotten dawn makes it lower its head
And look upon its obedient and vain body.

Nevertheless, I have seen the most beautiful eyes in the world,
Silver gods who hold sapphires in their hands,
Actual gods, birds in the earth
And in the water, I have seen them.

=== Page 89 ===
THE POETRY OF PAUL ELUARD
85

Their wings are mine, nothing exists
But their flight which shakes off my unhappiness,
Their flight of star and light
Their flight of earth, their flight of stone
On the tide of their wings,

My thought sustained by life and death.

NECESSITY

Without great ceremony on earth
Near those who keep their equilibrium
Upon this unhappiness without risk
Very near the good road
In the dust of serious people
I establish relations between man and woman
Between the smeltings of the sun and the bag of drones
Between enchanted grottoes and the avalanche
Between eyes surrounded by dark circles and the laugh of desperation
Between the heraldic female blackbird and the star of garlic
Between the leaden thread and the noise of the wind
Between the fountain of ants and the cultivation of strawberries
Between the horseshoe and the fingertips
Between chalcedony and winter in pins
Between the tree of eyeballs and verified mimicry
Between the carotid artery and the ghost of salt
Between the araucaria and the head of a dwarf
Between rails at a junction and the russet dove
Between man and woman.
Between my solitude and thee.

CRITICISM OF POETRY

It is certain that I hate the rule of the bourgeois
The rule of cops and priests
But I hate even more the man who does not hate it
As I do
With all my strength.

I spit in the face of the man smaller than nature
Who does not prefer to all my other poems this CRITICISM OF POETRY.

=== Page 90 ===
Two Poems by Paul Eluard

Sur quel mur suis-je gravé
Si profond que le jour y passe

Toutes les couleurs du printemps
Tous les mourants rebelles
Et leur chaleur muette
Jettent leurs sages ombres
Aux orties des gros rires
Aux heureux frénétiques

Sur quel grabat suis-je couché
Quelle verdure naît en moi
Où sont les ruines qui m'inspirent
De vivre malgré toute ruine.
(Cours naturel, 1938)

PAROLES PEINTES
à Pablo Picasso

Pour tout comprendre
Même
L'arbre au regard de proue
L'arbre adoré des lezards et des lianes
Même le feu même l'aveugle

Pour réunir aile et rosée
Coeur et nuage jour et nuit
Fenêtre et pays de partout

Pour abolir
La grimace du zéro
Qui demain roulera sur l'or

86

=== Page 91 ===
Translated by Louise Bogan

Upon what wall am I engraved
So deeply that the light of day does not reach me

All the colors of spring
All those who are dying rebelliously
And their mute ardor
Throw their wise shadows
To nettles of loud laughter
To the frantically happy

Upon what pallet do I lie
What greenness is born in me
Where are the ruins which inspire me
To live in spite of all ruin

PAINTED WORDS
to Pablo Picasso

In order to understand everything
Even
The tree compared with the prow
The tree adored by lizard and liana
Even fire even the blind man

In order to reunite wing and dew
Heart and cloud day and night
The window and all the countryside

In order to abolish
The grin of zero
Which today rolls upon gold

87

=== Page 92 ===
88
PARTISAN REVIEW

Pour trancher
Les petites manières
Des géants nourris d'eux-mêmes

Pour voir tous les yeux réfléchis
Par tous les yeux

Pour voir tous les yeux aussi beaux
Que ce qu'ils voient
Mer absorbante

Pour que l'on rie légèrement
D'avoir eu chaud, d'avoir eu froid
D'avoir eu faim d'avoir eu soif

Pour que parler
Soit aussi généreux
Qu'embrasser

Pour mêler baigneuse et rivière
Cristal et danseuse d'orage
Aurore et la saison des seins
Désirs et sagesse d'enfance

Pour donner à la femme
Méditative et seule
La forme des caresses
Qu'elle a rêvées

Pour que les déserts soient dans l'ombre
Au lieu d'être dans
Mon
Ombre

Donner
Mon
Bien
Donner
Mon
Droit

(Cours naturel, 1938)

=== Page 93 ===
THE POETRY OF PAUL ELUARD
89
In order to cut off
The little tricks
Of giants nourished on themselves

In order to see all eyes reflected
In all eyes

In order to see all eyes as beautiful
As though they looked upon
An absorbing sea

In order that one may laugh lightly
At having been hot at having been cold
At having been hungry at having been thirsty

In order that to speak
May be as generous
As to embrace

In order to mingle bather and river
Crystal and dancer of the storm
Dawn and the season of the breasts
Desires and the wisdom of childhood

In order to give a woman
Meditative and alone
The kind of caresses
Of which she dreams

In order that deserts may lie in shadow
Instead of lying in
My shadow

To give
My
Good
To give
My
Right

=== Page 94 ===
The Socialization of Muckraking
James Rorty

SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED to muckraking. One finds repeated
recognition of this fact in current social criticism. For example,
in the Summer, 1939 issue of Partisan Review, F. W. Dupee, in
reviewing the career of Van Wyck Brooks, makes several stimu-
lating references to the “respectable profession of muckraking.”
In the early nineteen hundreds, according to Mr. Dupee, the
muckraker was the “standard intellectual type” of the intelligent-
sia. After the war, this type was displaced by the Menckenesque
debunker and the expatriate “artist.”

The observation would seem to be just enough. Yet since
muckraking is not only a respectable profession but, like street
cleaning, an essential function of any going society, it did not
wholly disappear. Something happened to the profession and to
the institutional apparatus at its disposal; something closely
related to the sequence of major economic changes and the shifts
in class alignment that came about during the three crucial decades
of 1909-1939.

To use the current sociological argot, the ecology of the social
and economic environment became less and less favorable to the
muckraker per se. But since muck accumulates, and the arteries
of social and economic traffic have to be kept more or less open,
new kinds of literary White Wings appeared, under various dis-
guises, the chief of these being the government investigator and the
social scientist.

To call what happened to muckraking “socialization” is to
be ironically suggestive rather than exact. When government is
forced to take over and discharge an essential but financially
unprofitable social function, it does not necessarily socialize it. A
public receivership is not socialization. Moreover, the ordinary
receivership is notoriously inefficient as well as frequently corrupt.
On the whole, our contemporary socialized — or politicalized —

90

=== Page 95 ===
THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING

muckraking gives the customers less for their money and holds
back more than did the solvent muckraking businesses that flour-
ished at the turn of the century.
This is not surprising. The evolution of muckraking parallels
the enfeeblement and atrophy of many other social functions dur-
ing the declining period of American capitalism. Here is the
sequence of this evolution as it appears to a writer who grew up
during the heyday of American muckraking, who read Samuel
Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, the Steffens of The Shame
of the Cities, Thomas Lawson (billed as the Wolf of Wall Street),
Harvey W. Wiley, David Graham Phillips, and many others as
they appeared serially in Colliers, American Magazine, Hearst's
Metropolitan, McClures, Hampton's, Everybody's, and Cosmopoli-
tan; who at the age of nineteen was excited by H. G. Wells' Tono-
Bungay; who has been himself a practicing muckraker for the past
fifteen years.

1. Muckraking Was Good Business.
The Golden Age of Muckraking lasted only about fifteen
years: roughly, from 1900 to the outbreak of the Great War. It
was during this period that monopoly capitalism completed its
conquest of power in America. In a sense, the outstanding muck-
rakers were like war correspondents engaged in reporting, to a ter-
rified and struggling audience of little business men, with their
employees and other peripheral dependents, the progress of this
conquest. It was a large and vitally interested audience. Muck-
raking became the accepted method by which magazines piled up
circulations of 500,000 and upward. In effect, muckraking was
one of the going capitalist industries of the period, attracting the
energies of some of the most brilliant business entrepreneurs and
demagogues-S. S. McClure is an example of the first type; Hearst
of the second-and employing at good wages many of the best lit-
erary and journalistic talents. The latter had two year contracts
and fat expense accounts. They hired leg men, secretaries, research
assistants, and other stooges like contemporary Fortune editors and
radio news commentators. As the chief breadwinners of the periodi-
cal journalism of the period, they could afford even such things as
a modicum of idealism.
Undoubtedly there were sacred cows in most of these maga-

=== Page 96 ===
92 PARTISAN REVIEW

zines, but the business office was not yet dominant. Although adver-
tising income was important in the economics of newspaper and
periodical publishing, it had not yet become primary and decisive.
Moreover, the internal competitive conflicts of the business com-
munity were still so varied and intense that a publisher could afford
to attack one or even several business high-binders at once, without
risk of calling forth effective reprisals by an organized and inte-
grated business interest. Although in reality the era of small com-
petitive business was passing, the magazine-reading middle class
did not realize this. Monopoly capitalism was powerful, but not
yet respectable. The "Uncle Trusty" of Opper's cartoons was a
bandit, an obstructor of normal competitive economic traffic. It
was the business of the muckrakers to expose and denounce these
obstructors, and it was the business of the commercial magazines
to publish the muckrakers; Fortune had not yet been born to glorify
monopoly capitalism.

Then as now there were Congressional investigations and
other forms of public muckraking, but government competition
with private industry in this field was not yet onerous; we lacked
the multitudinous New Deal agencies. Ordinarily government
entered the field only toward the end, to achieve the legislative
reforms for which the magazine muckrakers had prepared the way.

2. Muckraking Became Bad Business

Although the story of what happened to the muckraking
periodicals of the nineteen hundreds has been told repeatedly,
social historians have yet to deal adequately with this period.
Briefly, Big Business, having consolidated its power, became exas-
perated by the clatter of the muckrakers and shut them off, quite
simply, by buying up or otherwise eliminating the magazines that
published them. Increasingly, journalists of the "disruptive" sort
were obliged to write a book or hire a hall. Upton Sinclair sur-
vived, not as a magazine writer, but as a book writer who has fre-
quently been obliged to publish his own books.

Most of the muckrakers made practical adaptations to the
new order of things. Samuel Hopkins Adams became a popular
fictioneer. David Graham Phillips had turned wholly to the novel
some years before his death. Ray Stannard Baker became for an
interval the pastoral David Grayson, author of Adventures in Con-
tentment, Steffens went heavily philosophical and mystic.

=== Page 97 ===
THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING

93

The war extinguished what was left of the earlier muckraking
tradition. Socialists like Upton Sinclair and William English
Walling joined the Wilsonian crusade. Others of the muckraking
tribe went into more or less complete retirement.

Not only were they without magazine markets; it would seem
that to a degree at least their audience had shifted its allegiance.
The moment of tension that the muckrakers articulated was one of
transition between two phases of the American capitalist evolution.
During this period, large corporate business progressively liqui-
dated and absorbed the small manufacturing and mercantile
proprietors. It was they, with their various peripheral groups,
who constituted the middle class magazine-reading audience. It
may be hazarded that these readers became less interested in
muckraking. The battle was over, and consciously or unconsciously
they had changed sides; the on-coming generation at least, knew on
which side its bread was buttered. Both the muckraking journals
of the nineteen hundreds and the post-war compendia of escape
fiction and "inspirationals" had large audiences; the interesting
thing to note is that, in terms of social and economic status, they
were pretty much the same audiences, although the policy of the
magazines changed categorically.

3. The Birth of a Magazine: Modern Style

In the field of social communication, the growth of monopoly
capitalism through the processes of merger, syndication, etc., has
tended to give both newspapers and magazines the character of
business properties and advertising media. Formerly, it was cus-
tomary for a magazine to be started by an editor. Today, such
enterprises are more likely to result from the pecuniary and intel-
lectual cohabitations of bankers and advertising men. The idea is
to find an unoccupied sector in the spectrum of periodical publish-
ing: a group of buyers whom an appropriate editorial formula
may serve to assemble and hold, so that they may be sold at so
much a head to advertisers. The editorial formula is more or less
of an after-thought; frequently it is purchased ready-made from a
de luxe "publisher's consultant," who is merely a special kind of
an advertising man. The latter may not be a genius, but he is never
so naive as to suggest a bona fide muck-raking formula. If it is
desired to assemble a "class" audience, the editorial formula is

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94 PARTISAN REVIEW

likely to be either a-social and a-political or frankly reactionary.
If it is to be a mass magazine, it is planned, naturally, as a medium
of mass advertising; the formula must then fit the lowest common
denominator of both advertisers and readers. Being itself a busi-
ness property, owned and operated by business men and financed
by bankers, it necessarily supports the status quo of business and
finance, regardless of the interests of its readers. The prevailing
formula is one of a-social and a-political "entertainment," consist-
ing chiefly of escape fiction and pluck-and-luck "inspirational"
articles.

4. Muckraking the Health Field: Before and After
Take, for example, two publications: Colliers and Good
Housekeeping. At the turn of the century, both these publications
were oriented primarily toward their readers, whose interests they
more or less consistently expressed and implemented. The expos-
ures of Harvey W. Wiley in Good Housekeeping and of Samuel
Hopkins Adams in Colliers served to bring about the enactment of
the first food and drug legislation, some thirty years ago. But in
1933, when the rash Mr. Tugwell undertook to extend and stiffen
this legislation, these and other mass magazines played a quite
different role. As inheritors of the mantle of Wiley and Adams,
writers like Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink found themselves vir-
tually without magazine outlets. They had to publish books and
even to create their own consumer organizations and consumer
press, both rather ineffective, compared to the mobilizations of
opinion achieved by the muckraking popular magazines of the
earlier period. Hence, with respect to their attempted advance on
the consumer front, the New Dealers soon found themselves out on
a limb, with the enraged wolves of the advertising-supported daily
and periodical press — and the radio — leaping and baying around
them. Both by what they printed and by what they failed to print,
Good Housekeeping and Colliers — all the mass magazines for that
matter — seemed to express the interest of their advertisers rather
than that of their readers. But the contradiction was probably not
as complete as it seemed. Consciously or unconsciously the editors
of these magazines may have perceived and expressed a certain real
identity of social and political convictions shared by both adver-
tisers and middle class readers: a common belief that their interests

=== Page 99 ===
THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
95
lay in the preservation of the system of monopoly capitalism upon
which they were both dependent, no matter how much waste, decep
tion and exploitation in the production of consumer goods this
system embodied. What the New Dealers learned, or might have
learned from this experience, was that it was later than they thought
-too late, at least, for reformism on the consumer front; that they
were no longer dealing with a free economy; that the senile con
stipation of monopoly capitalism can be relieved only by the strong
cathartic of force (state capitalism, which tends to become either
fascist, or "communist"). In theory at least a genuine socialism
would institute a different and a healthier metabolism.
As a free lance muckraker I did my best to rouse the country
side during the Tugwell Bill agitation. But since I had at my dis
posal only the penny whistle of the Nation, instead of sirens like
Good Housekeeping and Colliers, I didn't get very far, nor did
anybody else.

Four years later, when I became interested in the economics
and politics of medicine my education concerning the status of
muckraking in our time was considerably advanced. I thought the
rise of the politico-economic dictatorship which Dr. Morris Fish
bein had imposed upon the American medical profession was an
interesting and significant story. Indeed, it had been a good story
for at least a decade. It had been documented by the report of the
Committee on the Costs of Medical Care and by the attack directed
at that report by Dr. Fishbein in 1932. It had been further docu
mented by the symposium, American Medicine published by the
American Foundation. These foundation-subsidized enterprises in
fact-finding and opinion-measurement were notable examples of
the philanthropic, sociological ersatz which had largely displaced
commercial magazine muckraking during the post-war period; the
sociologists were much more thorough in their compilation of data,
but relatively timid and limited in their analysis and synthesis of
findings.

If the medico-economic conflict had matured during the early
nineteen hundreds, it would have been covered, one ventures to
say, by at least one and probably several of the mass magazines of
the period, especially after the social scientists had found the facts
-and buried them with the customary rituals of academic publica
tion. As it was, I had to make shift with the Nation, Common Sense,

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96                                               PARTISAN REVIEW

the Bulletin of the American Association for Social Security, and
later the New Leader. Groggy from threats of libel, the Nation
faded before the last round, although the threats were wholly bluff,
as later experience showed. As for book publishers, the first two,
as the going got hotter, incontinently broke their contracts and
abandoned their advances. By the time the last one turned his
option into a contract, Thurman Arnold's anti-trust prosecution of
the American Medical Association and Dr. Fishbein had scooped a
considerable part of my story, thereby supporting the principal
thesis of this article: That monopoly capitalism in the present
period reveals a progressive atrophy of essential functions, muck-
raking being one of these functions; hence government is forced to
take over muckraking to a greater degree than formerly.

5. The Sociological Ersatz

        In the atmosphere of confusion and apprehension that char-
acterized the post-war period, sociological "fact-finding" had an
obvious appeal. Serious muckraking was no longer possible with-
out attacking the whole existing set-up of capitalist ownership and
control, and it was not permissible to use major channels of social
communication for this purpose. But it was necessary to relieve
the growing social tensions. The fact-finding, more or less onan-
istic technique of the statistical sociologists not only served this
purpose admirably, but gave profitable employment to the job-
hungry "social scientists" who were being turned out in increasing
quantities by the universities. During the Hoover administration
several million dollars went into the production of the denatured
and footless compilation entitled Recent Economic Trends. The
Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, subsidized jointly by
several large foundations, consumed four years and a million dol-
lars. A long sequence of factual studies was produced by the
National Bureau of Economic Research, founded and endowed by
big business for the purpose of "finding the facts" and so narrow-
ing the zone of social and political controversy. The National
Bureau's studies of the panic cycle have been going on for at least
two decades to such good effect that a well known social scientist
recently opined that in a hundred years from now something may
be known about this characteristic phenomenon of the capitalist
economy. Meanwhile, however, Dr. Wesley C. Mitchell, director

=== Page 101 ===
THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING

97

of the National Bureau, and our foremost authority on the panic
cycle, declines to advise anxious statesmen who seek enlightenment
in this quarter, on the ground that he does not yet know enough.
The advantages of this position, from the point of view of
aggrandizing the prestige and emoluments of the social sciences
as a profession, need scarcely be pointed out. The more the social
scientist abstains from considering problems of social evaluation
and management and confines himself austerely to the quantifica-
tion and measurement of social phenomena, totally removed from
any context of attitude, tendency, or program, the safer he is. By
imitating, sometimes to the point of burlesque, the methods of
the physical scientists, he comes within the aura of sanctity that
surrounds the practitioners of these older scientific disciplines.
Objective as the angels in heaven, he abstains from taking sides as
a matter of principle. His not to reason why. He tells you that four
hundred and sixty-five and a half citizens of Gopher Prairie
answered "yes" to the question: "Don't you think the New Deal is
not so hot?" You can take it or leave it.

Obviously, the statistical sociologists will never run out of
phenomena to measure, particularly in this declining period of
monopoly capitalism. The more you avoid doing anything about
social problems except to measure them-or rather, such parts of
them as may be safely examined-the more social problems you
have and the richer the symptomatic manifestations that must be
measured exactly before anything can be done about the problems.
By applying a static technique to a dynamic process you not only
mark time, but march triumphantly backwards, like the Sabine
men, with the stainless banner of Objectivity going on before-that
is to say, behind. Only recently have American sociologists-
notably Robert Lynd-begun to recognize the implications of the
fact that the social scientist is himself a part of the process which
he is measuring; that "objective" out-of-context measurements are
not merely futile but frequently come under the head of propa-
ganda by omission and suppression. Only recently have they seen
in the fact that Thorstein Veblen, with his
genius for synthesis, was one of the most tendential social scientists
of his generation-and remains today perhaps the most durable
and usable of them all.

Meanwhile, however, nothing succeeds like success, and the

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98 PARTISAN REVIEW

methods of these sociological measuring sticks remain admirably
calculated to make work, and recruit followers. Most surveys are
“exploratory.” They are designed to obtain some hints as to
methods that might be practicable for the measuring of such and
such social phenomena. The first hundred years, concerned solely
with methodology, are the hardest. After that it becomes necessary
to evaluate the methods used in making these methodological deter-
minations. Next it is in point to evaluate the methods of the evalua-
tors. By this time the original sociological pair have multiplied by
a process of normal academic proliferation to three hundred thou-
sand six hundred and sixty-six, and if they had been rabbits, the
exasperated ranchers would have driven them into the Grand
Canyon long ago.

6. Community of Interest
This, in the end, is what the muckraker dies of. Sooner or
later he finds that he cannot attack anything without attacking
everything; simultaneously, he discovers that this creeping com-
munity of interest of a defensive, dying economy has robbed him
of his means of production, which are a pay check and an avenue
of publication. Accordingly he ceases to function, while muck
accumulates, and the society moves nearer to the pseudo-catharsis
of fascism.
Commercial magazines have sacred cows, liberal and radical
non-commercial magazines have sacred cows, government keeps
sacred cows and is kept by them. The cigarette industry, for
example, combines a maximum of sanctity with a maximum of
anti-social noxiousness. As the hard-boiled Westbrook Pegler
pointed out in one of his most acrid columns, “we live by our
vices.” Since our Federal, state and municipal governments derive
important revenue from the various cigarette taxes, they all have a
vested interest in the perpetuation and extension of the vice. This
interest is shared by the newspaper, magazine, and radio busi-
nesses, to which the Big Four cigarette manufacturers contributed
well over thirty million dollars worth of advertising in 1938.
Although cigarette tobacco contains a multitude of drugs, includ-
ing several active poisons such as nicotine, carbon-monoxide,
ammonia, pyridine, prussic acid, wood-alcohol, collidine, formal-
dehyde, tar, lead and arsenic, the Food and Drug Administration

=== Page 103 ===
THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
99

declares that it has no jurisdiction over the manufacture and dis-
tribution of cigarettes. Although the cigarette has long ago been
outlawed by medical science, cigarette manufacturers are permit-
ted to advertise heavily in the medical press, which from time to
time prints scientific articles proving beyond question that cigarette
smoking shortens life and that the vice is an important contributing
cause of the illnesses and diseases which doctors are employed to
prevent and cure. In the case of the Philip Morris Company, the
Journal of the American Medical Association and its editor, Dr.
Morris Fishbein, became the principal instruments by which this
company was enabled to bolster its dubious claims with subsidized
research, and harness the prestige of the American medical profes-
sion to one of the boldest, most unscrupulous promotion campaigns
in the history of American advertising. Since this campaign was
based on the Philip Morris' substitution of diethylene glycol for
glycerine as a moistener, the very foundations of business were
shaken when the papers reported, in October, 1937, that seventy-
two people had died as a result of taking this chemical, used by an
irresponsible drug house as a solvent for the valuable drug, sul-
fanalimide. But not for long. Quickly the imperilled vested inter-
ests joined forces to repair the breach. The Journal of the A. M. A.
announced editorially that there was no evidence that diethylene
glycol when used as an ingredient in the manufacture of cigarettes
is harmful. The National Better Business Bureau sent out a hush-
hush bulletin quoting this statement and sternly denouncing an
alleged "whispering campaign" against Philip Morris cigarettes.
No commercial magazine would take an article from me setting
forth the facts of this situation. The Nation rejected three such
articles on advice of counsel, who contributed the astonishing
opinion that "this article cannot be revised to make it non-libelous."
In the end I was forced to tell the story from the platform of the
1938 conference of the American Association for Social Security.
Nobody sued me for libel then or since, but also, no newspaper
published what I said.

I have cited this example at some length because it illustrates
so perfectly what lies back of Mr. Pegler's pseudo-profound dic-
tum. It is not quite true that "we live by our vices." What really
happens is that we anchor a particular vice in the very bedrock of
our exploitative economy, so that we are obliged to die of it. What

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100 PARTISAN REVIEW

is more, in the interest of good business, balancing the budget, and
practical politics, we had better not even talk about it.

7. The Not-Muckraking Business
The muckraker's chief remaining asset today is his nuisance
value, and even that is not easy to exploit. So firmly integrated is
the existing community of interest that the muckraker is rarely
very dangerous no matter how authentic the muck that he uncovers.
Moreover, blackmail is a dangerous business for both parties con-
cerned. At various times I have received verbal suggestions that I
might enjoy a subsidized trip to the Riviera or to Mexico. It has
also been suggested that I do some highly paid "research" for cer-
tain commercial companies. But I am confident that if I had
yielded to any of these blandishments, the payoff would have been
meagre. All that a briber needs is one small scrap of evidence that
the muckraker is corruptible. By threatening exposure he can then
eliminate the muckraker's nuisance value.

What is more likely to happen, judging from the writer's
experience is that the muckraker enables public relations experts
and lawyers to turn a neat profit by protecting, or pretending to
protect, their clients from damage. In such situations, the public
relations counsel invariably assures his client that the muckraker
is twice as dangerous as he actually is, just as the professional stool
pigeon tells the boss that the shop is full of "reds." Naturally, the
public relations counsel has a friendly and grateful feeling for
those ardent spirits, the muckrakers, since they are, after a fashion,
his collaborators. I recall one occasion when, after I had been very
expensively dined by a very expensive public relations counsel, he
shook my hand fondly in farewell and said: "Go home, now; don't
get hit by a taxi, and cover your precious self up tight. You're my
Dionne quintuplets."

Toward the Coordination of Muckraking
While the foregoing roughly sketched sequence is scarcely
sufficient to prove a trend, the general drift of the facts is a matter
of common observation among journalists and politicians. Serious
economic and social muckraking-naturally one takes no account
of run-of-the-mill gang-busting and scandal mongering-has ceased
to be a profitable department of commercial newspaper and
periodical journalism. As for the newer forms of communication,

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THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
101

the modern “community of interest” of monopoly capitalism was
well established before the movies and radio appeared on the
scene; we have seen only few and ephemeral examples of movie
and radio muckraking, the present tendency being overwhelmingly
to iron out these media into profitable conformity with the needs of
the business community. For media, therefore, the muckraker is
reduced to the book, the pamphlet, the platform, and the increas-
ingly partisan-political radical and liberal press—the latter being
of relatively negligible circulation.

Muckraking is being increasingly socialized in the sense that
the costs are paid out of the public purse or out of the surplus
social value which has been segregated and doled out by the philan-
thropic foundations. A substantial amount of muckraking is being
routinely performed by such government agencies as the Federal
Trade Commission, the Food and Drugs Administration, the Secur-
ities Exchange Commission, the Works Progress Administration,
and the Labor Relations Board. The net production of the founda-
tion-subsidized sociologists is also still considerable and by no
means without value despite the tendency toward intellectual onan-
ism and job-racketing already noted. Most of the foundations have
been chased out of most of the “hot” fields of inquiry—medical
economics for example. But since their executive staffs have vested
interests in their jobs they often don the asbestos suits of an increas-
ingly “scientific” argot and return like moths to the flame.

The combined production of the public and philanthropic
muckrakers is quantitatively very large; almost, if not quite as
great as the total volume of commercial magazine muckraking
during the first decade of the century. Unfortunately the produc-
tion of both these contemporary muckraking mills, especially the
former, is highly selective, censored, and politicalized, which
means that it is functionally stultified. Honest muckraking, like
honest plumbing, is no respecter of muck; the idea is to construct
and maintain efficient economic and social drainage. Political
muckrakers are concerned on the one hand with muckraking their opponents, and on the other
with concealing and deodorizing the deposits that accumulate in
their own back yards.

There is only one thing worse, and less habitable than a social
order with bad drainage, and incompetent drain men. That is a

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102 PARTISAN REVIEW

social order with no drainage whatever, and no drain men. A
totalitarian state is such a social order. True, it resolves, after a
fashion the conflict of economic vested interests: partly by the
harassment of scapegoats, partly by armed coercion applied to all
classes, especially the workers. But the economic and social metab-
olism drops to lower and lower levels, and new centers of corrup-
tion are established. Meanwhile the population is forbidden even
to hold its nose in public, this being the totalitarian substitute for
adequate social plumbing.

It is not a satisfactory substitute and seemingly it cannot be
long endured. What will come after? Speaking as muckraker, not
as prophet, I am permitted to say only this: that Marx and the
Marxists in general have rather conspicuously neglected to write
specifications for the social plumbing of the Socialist common-
wealth; or, to my knowledge, have such specifications been written
by anybody. Perhaps I am influenced by professional bias, but I
am convinced that such specifications are necessary.

SOME AMERICANS STILL IN SPAIN TO SOME
STALINISTS STILL IN AMERICA

You sent us here, and here we rot:
The fight we propped has gone to pot.
The Pope and all his priests in Spain
Are safe as in the Vatican;
And you who sent us, safe at home,
Are pliant to the Pope of Rome.
—Now tell us plainly, teachers dear,
Which folks our comrades most shall fear:
Grandees who boast the Pope their boss
Or Communists who kiss the Cross?
E. W. and M. McC.

=== Page 107 ===
The Situation in American Writing
Seven Questions (Part Two)

1. Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a
"usable past"? Is this mostly American? What figures would
you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example,
that Henry James's work is more relevant to the present and
future of American writing than Walt Whitman's?

2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience?
If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say
that the audience for serious American writing has grown or
contracted in the last ten years?

3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has re-
ceived? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary
supplements by advertising-in the case of the newspapers-
and political pressures-in the case of the liberal weeklies-
has made serious literary criticism an isolated cult?

4. Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort
of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches as
teaching and editorial work? Do you think there is any place
in our present economic system for literature as a profession?

5. Do you find, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any alle-
giance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or
system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the
expression of yourself as an individual?

6. How would you describe the political tendency of American
writing as a whole since 1930? How do you feel about it your-
self? Are you sympathetic to the current tendency towards
what may be called "literary nationalism"-a renewed
emphasis, largely uncritical, on the specifically "American"
elements in our culture?

7. Have you considered the question of your attitude towards the
possible entry of the United States into the next world war?
What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are
when and if war comes?

103

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104 PARTISAN REVIEW

Sherwood Anderson:

1. I am afraid I do not know what you mean by "usable past." It seems
to me that for the story teller everything is usable. I am afraid that my
difficulty in trying to answer these questions is that I spend little time
thinking of either the past or the future. It is my passionate desire to live
in the NOW. Mine is not a very critical mind. No, I do not believe that
Henry James's work is more relevant to American writing than Walt Whit-
man's. There is more of the earth in Whitman's. No matter what fool
things man does the earth remains.

2. This is also difficult for me to answer. I do not believe that I ever
think of an audience as a definite thing. I often sing to myself in bath-
rooms. I tell myself stories, but just the same no man could go on working
in any of the arts without a response.

You ask whether the audience for serious American writing has grown
or contracted in the last ten years and frankly I do not know.

3. Yes, I do place value on criticism my own work has received. I have
been helped by criticism. I know well enough that good criticism is rare
but hasn't it always been rare. Of course the literary supplements have
been corrupted by advertising. For nearly fifteen years I had to spend my
own time as an advertising writer because I felt myself not strong enough
physically to stand day labor and couldn't make a living by my story tell-
ing. I sincerely believe that all advertising is corrupt.

4. It seems to me that the answer to this depends upon what you mean by
making a living. I have had to do all sorts of things to keep going but
believe also that men working seriously in any of the arts have always had
a hard time making a living. Now that I have been writing for twenty or
twenty-five years enough does usually trickle in to keep me going. It has,
however, been a long hard pull.

5. I am sure that all my writing has always been simply an expression of
my own feelings as an individual. I have a notion that any writing done
for the purpose of propaganda is basically corrupt.

6. Like most writers I am really not a great reader. I did most of my
reading before I began writing. Now I am chiefly interested in the lives of
people immediately about me. If you are an American how can you help
emphasizing what you feel and see in the particular portion of America
immediately about you. My mind cannot go beyond that. From time to
time I have made efforts to think nationally and internationally but it has
always seemed bunk to me.

=== Page 109 ===
THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 105

7. I suppose I am an isolationist. I do not believe in any war. I think
that in any war both sides lose. In a time of war any man working in the
arts is sunk. His lamps are out. A new and strange ugliness comes into
everyone about him. It is for him a time of death.

Louise Bogan:

1. Because what education I received came from New England schools,
before 1916, my usable past has more of a classic basis than it would have
today, even in the same background. The courses in English Literature
which I encountered during my secondary education and one year of col-
lege, were not very nutritious. But my "classical" education was severe,
and I read Latin prose and poetry and Xenophon and the Iliad, during my
adolescence. Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement, and the French
poets read at its suggestion, were strong influences experienced before I
was twenty. The English metaphysicals (disinterred after 1912 and a lit-
erary fashion during my twenties) provided another literary pattern, and
Yeats influenced my writing from 1916, when I first read Responsibilities.
-The American writers to whom I return are Poe (the Tales), Thoreau,
E. Dickinson and Henry James. Whitman, read at sixteen, with much
enthusiasm, I do not return to, and I never drew any refreshment from his
"thought." Henry James I discovered late, and I read him for the first
time with the usual prejudices against him, absorbed from the inadequate
criticism he has generally received. It was not until I had developed some
independent critical judgment that I recognized him as a great and subtle
artist. If civilization and great art mean complexity rather than simplifi-
cation, and if the humane can be defined as the well understood because
the well-explored, James' work is certainly more relevant to American
writing, present and future, than the naive vigor and sentimental "think-
ing" of Whitman.

2. I have seldom thought about a definite "audience" for my poetry,
and I certainly have never believed that the wider the audience, the better
the poetry. Poetry had a fairly wide audience during what was roughly
known as the "American poetic renaissance." It has been borne in upon
me, in the last ten years, that there are only a few people capable of the
aesthetic experience, and that, in this group, some persons who are able to
appreciate "form" in the graphic arts, cannot recognize it in writing, just
as there are writers who cannot "hear" music, or "see" painting. This small
element in the population remains, it seems to me, more or less constant,
and penetrates class distinctions. People may be led up to the threshold

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106 PARTISAN REVIEW

of the aesthetic experience, and taught its elements and its value, but I
have never seen a person in whom the gift was not native actually experi-
ence the “shock of recognition” which a poem (or any work of art) gives
its appreciator. And it is individuals to whom the aesthetic experience is
closed, or those who know what it is, but wish to load it with a misplaced
weight of "meaning" (and it seems incredible that such people as the last
named exist; it is one of the horrors of life that they do)—it is such people
who think that this experience can be “used.” —Certainly the audience for
the disinterested and the gratuitous in writing was never very large, in
America. The layer of American "culture" has always been extremely thin.
And it has not deepened in itself, but has been subject to fashions hastily
imposed upon it. And the American “cultural” background is thick with
ideas of "success" and “morality.” So a piece of writing which is worth
nothing, and means nothing (but itself) is, to readers at large, silly and
somewhat immoral. "Serious writing" has come to mean, to the public, the
pompous or thinly documentary. The truly serious piece of work, where a
situation is explored at all levels, disinterestedly, for its own sake, is
outlawed.

3. No.—The corruption of the literary supplements is nearly complete,
but who would expect it to be otherwise, when publishers admit that they
are selling packaged goods, for for the most part: that their products, on the
whole, stand on the same level as cigarettes and whiskey, as sedatives and
pain-killers? —I have written criticism for liberal weeklies and can testify
that in the case of one of them, no pressure of any kind has ever been put
upon me. I have also been left perfectly free by a magazine which makes
no claim to be anything but amusing. . . . Serious criticism is, now in
America, seriously hampered by the extraordinarily silly, but really (on
the sentimental public at large), amazingly effective under-cover methods
of certain pressure groups. But if there is no one who has the good sense
to see the difference between warmed-over party tracts and actual analysis
—if the public swallows such stuff whole—perhaps that is what the public
deserves. Perhaps there is a biological bourgeoisie, thick headed and
without sensibilities, thrown up into every generation, as well as an eco-
nomic one. I discovered, long ago, that there are human attributes the
gods themselves, as some one has said, cannot war against, and some of
them are stupidity, greed, vanity, and arrogance.

4. I have never been able to make a living by writing poetry and it has
never entered my mind that I could do so. I think the place in our present
American set-up for the honest and detached professional writer is both
small and cold. (But then, it was both small and cold for Flaubert, in 19th
century France.)

5. My writing reveals some "allegiances" (if this term means certain
marks made upon it by circumstance). I was brought up in the Roman
Catholic Church, and was exposed to real liturgy, instead of the dreary

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 107

"services" and the dreadful hymnody of the Protestant churches. There
was a Celtic gift for language, and talent in the form of a remarkable
excess of energy, on the maternal side of my family. And I was handed out,
as I have said, a thorough secondary classical education, from the age of
twelve through the age of seventeen, in the public schools of Boston. I did
not know I was a member of a class until I was twenty-one; but I knew I
was a member of a racial and religious minority, from an early age. One
of the great shocks of my life came when I discovered that bigotry existed
not only among the Catholics, but among the Protestants, whom I had
thought would be tolerant and civilized (since their pretentions were always
in that direction). It was borne in upon me, all during my adolescence,
that I was a "Mick," no matter what my other faults or virtues might be.
It took me a long time to take this fact easily, and to understand the situa-
tion which gave rise to the minor persecutions I endured at the hands of
supposedly educated and humane people. I came from the white-collar
class and it was difficult to erase the dangerous tendencies-the impulse to
"ripe" and respect "nice people"-of this class. These tendencies I have
wrung out of my spiritual constitution with a great deal of success, I am
proud to say. Beyond these basic influences, I think of my writing as the
expression of my own development as an individual.

6. The political tendency of American writing since 1930 is, I believe,
more symptomatic of a spiritual malaise than is generally supposed.
Granted that the economic crisis became grave; it is nevertheless peculiar
and highly symptomatic that intellectuals having discovered that "free-
dom" is not enough, and does not automatically lead to depth of insight
and peace of mind, threw over every scrap of their former enthusiasms, as
though there were something sinful in them. The economic crisis occurred
when that generation of young people was entering the thirties; and,
instead of fighting out the personal ills attendant upon the transition from
youth to middle age, they took refuge in closed systems of belief, and
automatically (many of them) committed creative suicide.... "Literary
nationalism" has valuable elements in it; it opened the eyes of writers,
superficially at least, to conditions which had surrounded them from
childhood, but which they had spent much effort "escaping." But when
this nationalism took a fixed form (when it became more fashionable to
examine the situation of the share-cropper, for example, than the situation
of slum-dwellers in Chelsea, Massachusetts, or Newark, New Jersey) its
value dwindled. And the closing of one foreign culture after another to
the critical and appreciative examination of students, is one deplorable
result of thinking in purely political terms. Any purely chauvinistic enthu-
siasm is, of course, always ridiculous.

This is the place, perhaps, to state my belief that the true sincerity
and compassion which humane detachment alone can give, are necessary
before the writer can pass judgment upon the ills of his time. To sink one-
self into a party is fatal, no matter how noble the tenets of that party may

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108 PARTISAN REVIEW

be. For all tenets tend to harden into dogma, and all dogma breeds hatred
and bigotry, and is therefore stultifying. And the condescension of the
political party toward the artist is always clear, however well disguised.
The artist will be "given" his freedom; as though it were not the artist
who "gives" freedom to the world, and not only "gives" it, but is the only
person capable of enduring it, or of understanding what it costs. The artists
who remain exemplars have often, it is true, become entangled in politics,
but it is not their political work which we remember. Nonsense concerning
the function of the arts has been tossed about for centuries. Art has been
asked, again, as the wind changed, to be "romantic," "filled with sensibil-
ity," "classic," "useful," "uplifting" and whatnot. The true artist will
instinctively reject "burning questions" and all "crude oppositions" which
can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with his world. All this
has been fought through before now: Turgenev showed up the pretensions
of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against "useful-
ness" all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever
written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: "Let us
[as writers] remain the river and turn the mill."

7. In the event of another war, I plan to oppose it with every means in
my power. The responsibilities of writers in general, I should think, lie in
such active opposition.

Lionel Trilling:

7. I should like to answer the last question first because I find that it is
the only one that I "face." The other questions are interesting but this one
is immediate and crucial. The possibility of war is the great objective and
subjective fact which confronts every writer.
Whether or not he is wholly conscious of it, the writer lives by his
faith in continuity. He must feel that he himself will go on indefinitely to
practice his craft; he must suppose a connection between himself and the
past; and he must assume, however modestly, that he has some connection
with the future. This sense of continuity is, of course, attenuated or
destroyed by the possibility of war. Perhaps tomorrow, the writer feels,
he will cease to be a writer—and immediately it becomes infinitely more
difficult for him to be a writer today. He knows what war will mean: for
the war-period, at the very least, there will be a cessation of literary activ-

=== Page 113 ===
THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 109
ity in any true sense; and perhaps indeed, most likely the post-war
political situation will discontinue the culture of the past and prevent the
culture of the future: there is every likelihood that the writer will be
either silenced or enslaved. This possibility of war must be sitting like a
raven on many a literary desk. But it is not sitting on all the desks and
that, now, is almost a worse fact than that it is sitting on some.
I conceive that in the event of war the writer's responsibilities are: to
survive, to remain undeceived, to keep others from being deceived.

6. This last question may be followed most appropriately by the penal-
timate one, for the willingness even the eagerness of so many intellec-
tuals to accept war seems to me to be the direct outgrowth of the political
tendency which has dominated American literature since 1930. This ten-
dency began as a furious romantic revolutionism and is continuing as an
angry self-righteous reformism of which war is to be an instrument. The
literature dominated by this tendency has been enormously influential; for
a large and important part of the intellectual middle class it has provided
what is nothing less than a culture and an ethics. It has given these people
"something to live for," a point of view, an object for contempt, a direc-
tion for anger, a code of excited humanitarianism. Perhaps this literary
movement, politically effective rather than artistically successful, cannot
be wholly reprobated, for it has stimulated a kind of moral sensitivity.
But this is a moral sensitivity which seems to me dangerous in its insuf-
ficiency. The subject is too complex and too delicate to be treated briefly
but what I feel about this literature of social protest is that, however legiti-
mate and laudable is its intention of arousing pity and anger, in actual
fact, because of its artistic failures, it constitutes a form of "escapism,"
and offers a subtle flattery by which the progressive middle-class reader
is cockered up with a sense of his own virtue and made to feel that he lives
in a world of perfect certainties in which critical thought or self-critical
feeling are the only dangers.

The literary nationalism we are at present experiencing is of course
an intensification of the ideology I have just commented on. All national-
ism, like all conscious virtue, stands on the edge of vulgarity, and by
nationalism I do not mean the love of one's land, language and literature;
nor do I even mean patriotism; but I do mean these emotions employed to
prove that there is an intrinsic and nearly exclusive rightness in one's land,
literature and language. No doubt there are some political situations not
so many as we suppose, however where nationalism serves truly good
ends. I think the present American leftist nationalism, so much of it the
reaction to the cold contempt of American life which was current a few
years ago, so much of it the calculated policy of a party line, cannot be
anything but vulgar and, in the end, downright chauvinistic.

1. This leads, of course, to Question 1, about the "usable past." I think
it can no longer be said, as Henry James said in his biography of Haw.

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110 PARTISAN REVIEW

thorne, that the American writer lacks the sense of a rich past. There is a
superb "thickness" about the feel of American life; and in any such
"thickness" there must be a strong, even though unformulated, sense of
the past. And part of this is a sense of a literary past. I do not mean by
this a special consciousness of the canonical American writers. In my own
case, for example, though I have great admiration and affection for the
American classics and an increasing interest, I know that they have been
far less important to me than the traditional body of European writers.
What I do mean is that I have a fortifying sense that there is, simply, a past
of literature which makes a present all the more possible; and this is some-
thing that, at various times in our history, our writers have not felt. As for
the traditional body of world literature, I find that it becomes, for me,
more and more "usable" and seems less and less in the past at all.

If I answer the question about Henry James and Walt Whitman by
saying that I think James likely to be the healthier influence upon Ameri-
can writing, I must disclaim meaning any derogation of Whitman himself.
For Whitman is a very great poet and subtler and more beautifully modu-
lated than most people care to discover. But his influence is likely to be
that of a mood and a manner and likely to encourage the simplified social
emotions and the nationalism I have just spoken of. On the other hand, any
influence that Henry James may have will be through the suggestiveness of
his method. James is essentially critical and moral and therefore more
energetic than Whitman. He is concerned with upsetting preconceptions
and clichés; he sees the difficulties and dangers of the moral and social
life; he is interested in the shadings and contradictions—in drama in the
old sense, which is what I feel lacking in contemporary American fiction
—and he stands against the black and white, the de haute en bas, simpli-
fied morality now so common. Clearly the complexity of the kind of judg-
ment he uses and suggests will not be attractive to the group that puts John
Steinbeck among the American classics and that is preparing for the
"action" of war.

5. In Question 5 the disjunction is obviously not a valid one. I think of
my work as the expression of myself as an individual and (not or) as
revealing an allegiance to a group and to a system—or, rather, a tradition
of thought. It seems to me necessary to conceive one's work in this way.
The vulgar—but not ineffective—attack on "individualism" a few years
ago accounted for the dullness, the lack of distinction (the word is signifi-
cant here) of so much of the creative and critical writing that was done
when the idea of the collectively written novel was seriously discussed. I
suppose that one does not have to explain that, in a certain limited sense,
there is no such thing as an individual—that a mind or a talent, almost by
definition, is a social thing. But once we illegitimately extend that certain
limited sense we run into confusion in morality, in politics, in literature.
As for literature, I am quite willing to say that it is absolutely essential
for the writer to cultivate his individuality to the top of its bent, and to

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 111

resist all attempts to thwart it. If his "social consciousness" requires him
to give a social reason for this, he can say that it is only as he varies from
the usual that he has any social usefulness. And exactly because there is
such a thing as an "individual" there is such a thing as an "allegiance."
My own literary interest-and I suppose that in a writer this is an
allegiance-is in the tradition of humanistic thought and in the intellectual
middle class which believes that it continues this tradition. Nowadays this
is perhaps not properly pious; but however much I may acknowledge the
historic role of the working class and the validity of Marxism, it would be
only piety for me to say that my chief literary interest lay in this class
and this tradition. What for me is so interesting in the intellectual middle
class is the dramatic contradiction of its living with the greatest possibility
(call it illusion) of conscious choice, its believing itself the inheritor of
the great humanist and rationalist tradition, and the badness and stupidity
of its action.

2. By and large, it is for this intellectual class that I suppose I write. It
is a class that has grown enormously in the last decade. And no doubt the
market for serious writing has grown with it. Naturally, a great deal of
this writing is serious only in the sense that its publishers consider it to be
serious or only because moral earnestness and intellectual pretension pass
for seriousness. But then real seriousness is at all times a very rare quality.

4. Perhaps I am not qualified to answer the first part of Question 4,
because I have never tried to make a living out of writing. I have little
doubt that it would be for me next to impossible. I should like to say,
however, that I have found teaching something more than a "crutch."
Perhaps I have been exceptionally lucky, but I have found it not only a
pleasant but an exciting and instructive kind of work despite its bad repu-
tation. For criticism, at any rate, it seems invaluable to have to deal, on
the one hand, with freshmen who are relatively intelligent but either
ignorant of literature, or naive about it or even inimical to it, for it forcibly
reminds the critic how small a part literature plays in our world and it
makes him bring his assumptions out of their professional cave; then, on
the other hand, it is very salutary to have to face talented seniors who will
give one no quarter; and the subject matter, the most interesting work of
the past, is always a refreshment.

The problems of literary economics are too complex to be written
about briefly. When we remember how the best writers of an age are some-
times commercially the most successful, how, again, they are sometimes
the most obscure, or think of themselves as hacks, or depend on inherited
wealth or position, or do their best work when they are fashionably taken
up by a "decadent" society, or when they are neglected-when we consider
all these contradictions and many more, we can speak of the ideal situation
for the writer only with the greatest diffidence. I find it hard to imagine
a condition in which literature will not be (in one sense, in the sense that

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112 PARTISAN REVIEW

medicine, say, need not be) a most competitive profession and one always
forced to face social resistance. This seems to me to be in the nature of the
literary activity; any artist in the degree that he is notable must always
be making minor revolutions or supporting them, revolutions in taste and
feeling. He is therefore always going to be rejected and resisted both by
some part of his profession and by some part of society. No doubt this
entails a certain amount of social waste. And no doubt the present social
system wastes far more literary talent than other conceivable systems
might; it wastes everything. On the other hand, it must be confessed that
it allows and even encourages a great deal too.
I think I should be more willing to attack the literary waste in our
present system (I mean apart from the general waste of human life and its
best possibilities) if I had a clearer notion of how I should like to see the
economic life of the writer organized. But whenever an alternative to
literary laissez faire is put forward which undertakes to be more rational
and thoroughgoing than WPA, it contrives to theorize literature into being
more important than it is and should be, to make it into a form of religion
and to bring it into the service of the state and eventually under the control
of a bureau. It is hard to imagine a condition in which, as someone said,
the state will pay the piper and the piper will call his own tune.

Robert Penn Warren:

I simply haven't had the time to do a proper set of answers to your
questions. They are good questions, I think, and being good, they are not
questions which can be answered in an hour or so. But I may give you a
few jottings now, which, possibly, may have some statistical interest
for you.

1. Yes. Or rather, after a thing is done, I can see its relation to a "usable
past." In poetry, this "usable past" is not American, for I feel that Ameri-
can poetry has very little to offer the modern writer-except some of Emily
Dickinson and a very little of Emerson. But in fiction the picture appears
very different. Certainly, I feel that the work of James is much more rele-
vant to the present and future of American writing than the work of Walt
Whitman. On the technical side, the work of Whitman has, it seems to me,
been exercising a very destructive influence.

2. I suppose that every writer wants an audience, but I could not under-
take to describe the audience which I want at the time when I am actually

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING
engaged in writing a poem or a story. The nature of the poem or story is
conditioned by many much more immediate concerns.

3. In general, no. I would agree with your statement about the news-
papers and liberal weeklies, but I think that your diagnosis is not quite
complete. There is a great deal of reviewing which is just stupid without
reference to advertising or political pressure; it is probably the result of
careless editing, of throwing books out to any reviewer who happens along.
The reviewing of poetry is in a worse state than the reviewing of fiction, it
seems to me; probably because the reviewers of poetry put on more airs.

4. I haven't tried, but I am sure that I would not have been very success-
ful at it. As for the second part of the question: is there a place in our
present economic system for literature as a profession? A lot of money is
spent for writing; the trouble is that most of the money which is spent is
spent to encourage bad writing.

5. God knows, I don't.

6. The political tendency of American writing since 1930 has been, I
suppose, in the direction of social protest. As for my own feelings, I have
been in sympathy with the protests, but have not liked most of the litera-
ture which the protests have produced. A lot of writers seem to have felt
that if the protest was all right the writing would automatically be all
right. And there has been, of course, a lot of faddishness; for instance, if
you will call the roll, you will find names of people who have been on
every bandwagon from flaming youth to communism, through humanism
and dada. But this is inevitable.

7. I think that if we get into the next war we are suckers.

Robert Fitzgerald:

The questions seem fuzzy to me, and by their imprecision not very
flattering to the writers of whom they are asked. Some are leading ques-

113

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114 PARTISAN REVIEW

tions, a presumption which I think you should regret. I should like to
take up No. 1 at some length and the others more briefly.

1. "Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a 'usable'
past?" The trouble with this is that it does not call for an answer; it con-
tains an answer, and worse, it contains two or three answers. If it had been
merely, "Are you conscious of the existence of the past?" there would
have been merely one possible answer. In that case the interrogation would
have been merely rhetorical; you would in fact have been stating a prop-
osition. I will not go into the ambiguity of the phrase "in your own writ-
ing" further than to point out that if it means "as you write" it is super-
fluous. But the words "a 'usable'" introduce confusion. They imply that
there are pasts and pasts; that one sort is "usable" and another sort is "not
usable"; and further that by "usable" we must understand some other
quality, since the word is in quotation marks and therefore does not mean
what it says.

Well, but this is literary shop talk, as everyone knows. Precisely; but
let literary shop talk remain where it belongs, in the literary shops, and
not be made the language of serious discussion. For if you are using
"usable past" in the sense in which literary businessmen understand it, no
writer of devotion can accept your terms. But I take it that the quotation
marks are marks of deprecation; that what you mean to ask is something
like this: "Is your consciousness of the past such as to enrich your writing,
or are you merely helplessly conscious of it?" Confronted by these alter-
natives (and you make no suggestion of degree) no writer this side of
sterility can return any answer but one; the self-answered question dis-
solves. You knew it would, else you would not have asked:

"Is this [past] mostly American?" Now we come to the point, which
is again not a question but a proposition, since it is American writers whom
you are addressing. How can the past which nourishes them be anything
but "mostly American" if America has been their home? And in the rare
event that it has not been their home, is not the answer likewise implied?
But now something happens:

"What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say,
for example, that Henry James' work is more relevant to the present and
future of American writing than Walt Whitman's?" Up to this point we
have been considering the past, that past whose infinity of charm and
unhappiness each man inherits and remembers. Now as exam-
ples of "Figures" in that mostly American past you propose two writers
and two bodies of literature. Without warning the midnight lamp is lit;
the topic narrows down to that of literary presences and models. This
seems strange to me; it seems strange that you should be thinking of the
American past in terms of Whitman and James instead of Calhoun and
Hanna and Gould and Gary and Debs. And it appears now that by the
"mostly American" past of the second question you meant past literature.
I do not think it would be wilfully naive to expect you to say so.

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 115

The literature from and about which a man may generalize must
consist of the books he has read, and for an American those are commonly
books in English, of which there is a longer line by English writers than
by American. In this sense the past is less likely to be "mostly American"
the more literature a given person has read. I do not see what purpose
would be served were I to confide my own range of reading. To designate
any (especially valued) elements in it would be to trot out a list of no
particular interest beyond the fact that it happened to be mine. As for
Henry James and Whitman, it would require more critical mastery than I
possess over present and emergent writing in America to analyse their
respective relevancies. It seems to me rather a pedantic task to do so, and
I'm damn well tired of hearing the two of them built up into Antithetical
Forces in American literature. That isn't what they wrote for; it certainly
isn't what they wrote as; and in an English-American literature which
likewise accommodates Chaucer and Yeats, Shakespeare and Pope and
Hardy, it seems to me fruitless to fence up a couple of 19th Century cate-
gories and herd every American writer into one or the other of them.
Finally, "the present and future of American writing" is a pompous mouth-
ful which sounds empty to me.

2. Whatever I am able to write as an artist is responsive to the known
existence of minds sensitive to language and capable of imagination. I
have written little or no verse deliberately to gratify or affect any one per-
son or group of persons. On the other hand, I believe it is impossible to be
a writer without being conscious of possible readers; indeed, an exact idea
of how different people read is part of a writer's necessary knowledge of
his predicament. It seems to me certain, however, that the sense of life and
the sense of art, when they exist together at full intensity, leave little room
for consideration of any but the abstract, loved-because-all-potential,
reader. I put this down because it is a permanent truth which your ques-
tions lead away from, not toward. Such writing as we are here engaged in
is obviously directed at a very palpable "audience" of Americans versed in
literature and disposed to think their way through current political and
social obsessions. This must be the audience for serious American writing.
As to whether it has grown or shrunk in the last ten years, that is a
question to which nothing that anyone would say could provide an answer,
failing purely statistical research.

3. You must realize how heavily baited this question is. Writers com-
monly affect amusement or worse at the public observations of their critics,
and it is certainly true that unless criticism is technical, personal and fairly
frequent it is not likely to engage a writer's enthusiasm. One reason is that
the public kind of criticism is usually concerned with finished work in
which the writer no longer has much interest. Another reason is that if the
writer is a scrupulous one he has usually, in the course of writing, threshed
out as best he could every issue raised by the critic and a great many more

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116 PARTISAN REVIEW

besides. Among the reviews my own work has received, there have been
several which seemed to me well-studied, careful and probably useful to
readers. One was useful to me in showing me that two lines ought to be
dropped from a poem; but not very useful, since the poem will probably
never be reprinted. One, by its fine misunderstandings and general fertility,
was a spur to do a particular kind of thing better next time (this was a
review by Edmund Wilson of Fitts' and my translation of the Antigone).

But public criticism must always, I should think, have its function in
accurately informing and awakening readers and by analysis reminding
them of the exactions of fine art. This is a difficult and peculiar labor, and
the conditions of newspaper reviewing are unfavorable to it. They are not
so unfavorable, however, as to justify the assignment of important poetry
to the New York Times' Percy Hutchinson or the publication of such full-
blown, miraculous nonsense as Robert P. T. Coffin recently achieved in a
review of a Millay book for the New York Herald-Tribune. Taking these
two as examples, I cannot attribute either directly to corruption through
advertising; editorial hum-drum and literary insanity in the reviewers are
as much or more to blame. Likewise in the weekly liberal journals, the
quality of a specific review may be attributed largely to the person who
writes it. It is his own fault, nobody else's, if he yields to "political pres-
sures" and writes dishonestly; it is also his fault if his writing lacks taste
and precision. It seems to me unfortunate to shift too much responsibility
from individuals to the abstractions of "politics" or "advertising," prev-
alent though these admittedly are. Sainte-Beuve had his staggering super-
ficialities. It is true that the newspaper supplements badly need invigora-
tion and that belle lettristic and Marxist myopia need equally to be cor-
rected. It is also true that to discuss works of art with clarity and justice
is a job that exceptional men only will ever perform. But it is scarcely
true that serious literary criticism has now become an "isolated cult,"
whatever that means. There is nothing any more Eleusinian about Wilson,
Eliot and Blackmur than there was about Erasmus and Scaliger, Arnold
and Brunetière.

4. No. Yes, obviously.

5. Groups, classes, organizations, regions, religions and systems of
thought have, like the starry universe, environed me since birth, and to
those of my immediate environment I have paid whatever allegiance seemed
appropriate or necessary. Even were my writing a chemically pure expres-
sion of myself as an individual it yet must yield out the elements of those
allegiances: my family (a group); my occupations of baby, child, student,
etc. (classes); my university (an organization); my regions, religions and
systems of thought. The question poses false alternatives.

6. As I have indicated before, I cannot discuss "American writing as a

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 117

whole" with any sense of knowing what I'm talking about. It seems to me
healthy that good intelligences should be focused on political issues, and
certain political and social writing has interested me a great deal. So far
as I am concerned, however, salvation lies neither in political action nor
in indifference to it. I would not admit sympathy for uncritical emphasis
on anything, but I am certainly sympathetic to Americans who wish to
articulate as much as possible of their own environment. It is necessary as
usual to discriminate between the pure discoverers and those who vulgar-
ize what has been discovered.

7. For at least seven years the question has been inescapable. As a burn-
ing question it is now about as dismal as "Have you considered the ques-
tion of your attitude towards jazz?" The general wrong which burdens the
world must be fought and suffered in each individual life; it is an evil
inclusive of but immeasurably greater than war; its manifestations are
more constant and closer to home. As we understand, condemn and weep
for private wrongs, by the same token we condemn, though we may have
to live through, the mass denial of life which is war. Writers who have
access to the knowledge of the world now know much more than ever before
about the causes and characteristics of war; it is their responsibility to
write what they know and to keep on writing it, not with delusions of
power but with respect, war or peace, for the truth.

R. P. Blackmur:

1. It is only when asked that I am conscious of a Usable Past; when I
feel that it exists, and that I am its product. When not asked I do not dis-
tinguish it as a separable question; and even when asked the distinction
seems artificial, made for purposes of discourse, and not otherwise ger-
mane to any problem in any writing I have done or expect to do. In short,
I believe that the Past is Usable and is Used without regard to my precise
consciousness of it but just insofar as it is available to me. As it happens,
Henry James is more available to me than Walt Whitman, not because of
a difference in magnitude which might be unfavourable to James, but
because James got more of his intention on the page than Whitman did; at
least for me. On the other hand, I know that for many, intentions are more
useful than actualities; and I do not mean to be invidious: I should say
that intentions predominated in the New Testament. What is actual is very

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118 PARTISAN REVIEW

far from motivating thought or action; it is only their result; so it may be
that what we mean when we say Whitman is more relevant as motive power
for American writing, present and future, than what we mean when we
say James. . . As to the part of your question which asks whether or not
the usable past is mostly American, I should say that it ought to be so in
history and that it ought not to be so, and cannot be so, in other allegiances.
I cannot imagine John Bunyan and Mark Twain as not thoroughly English
and American; but I cannot imagine either of them without the Greek and
Hebrew Testaments. As for myself I should not like to feel that I could
only use Hawthorne at the expense of Dostoieffsky or Melville at the
expense of Shakespeare or Emerson at the expense of Montaigne. Is not
the Past an institution like the Common Law?—intricate, devious, desul-
tory, confused?—yet shaping the patterns by which we act and feel and
itself modified by the patterns it newly shapes?


2. I should like to think of myself as writing for a wide audience in all
of my imaginative work; I know that as a fact I write for a limited, scat-
tered, largely accidental audience. I believe that it is due to my own
defects—of style and sensibility and scope—that my audience is so lim-
ited; I have no personal justification for complaint. On the other hand I
know that most of my contemporaries whom I admire suffer from neglect
through no personal defect; the lack of deep interest and performance in
the readers' not the writers'. I assume that this condition has always pre-
vailed; that it is due in our day partly to the money cost of reading, partly
to anthology-minded teaching of literature, and partly to plain incapacity.
I suppose thirty or forty thousand persons a year may read Moby Dick or
Tom Jones; that is an accident of education. A hundred and twenty odd
thousand copies of Santayana's Last Puritan were sold in the year of pub-
lication; that is an accident of fashion. The potential audience for serious
reading if money and the anthology-mind are ignored should be some-
where between those figures: say seventy-five thousand readers of imag-
inative literature—hardly enough to support fifty writers at the rate of a
book every other year. Fortunately for the writers, the meretricious audi-
ence reads serious books for the wrong reasons; like voters. In my own
case, and for the record: most of what I publish is literary criticism: it is
deliberately addressed to a small audience. I do not see how aside from
journalism serious and technical literary criticism can command more
than an audience of a few thousand, unless it is taken up in the colleges.


3. I have been unusually lucky in the criticism my own work has received
both in magazines and in the New York newspapers; over half of it ha
been honest and helpful. I should say that the corruption of the literary
supplements by advertising—which is conspicuous—is no more damaging,
and perhaps less so, than the damage due to the selection of ignorant or
patronising reviewers and the lack of editorial discipline, applied before

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING

119

hand, as to what constitutes a fair review. Political pressure in the Liberal
weeklies is something I have surmised and heard about; I have never expe-
rienced it, although I have contributed to three off and on for some years.
Corrupt or not, political pressure is to be expected; I think most of it is
honest and convinced; the corruption is of taste and the critical faculty
itself: bigotry and hope-worse evils to combat, by far, than intellectual
venality.... Whether these corruptions have made serious literary criti-
cism an "isolated cult" I do not know. I should doubt it. Being on occa-
sion a serious critic myself, I find it hard to tell whether I am isolated and
part of a cult, or working cooperatively and a functional part of a culture.
One varies in sentiment to different reactions.

4. I have never found it possible to earn a living entirely by writing what
I prefer to write. Except for a few successful novelists I know no one of
my generation who has. I don't know any painters or composers or sculp-
tors who have either. Journalism, lecturing, teaching, and editorial work
seem to go with being an artist in any sort. Part of the rub comes not in
the structure of society but in the weakness of the individual. The average
man who thinks of himself as a writer wants to live like his betters in
money, and so far thinks he ought to that he deserts his own profession for
theirs; that is the great reason why the average writer does not count much
as a writer. The bums of the literary world, who do no work at all, seem
to me better examples of the profession than that. This is another way of
saying that Americans have not yet tried writing as a profession except on
the lesser levels. But so far as the economic system goes it gives a place
to the writer exactly as precarious as to the lobster-fisherman, and with less
investment, or any man of odd jobs. I do not mean that I think this situa-
tion laudable or comfortable; I mean that the writer who has talent and a
little recognition has a pretty good chance of getting along as well as the
lobsterman with only a few odd jobs thrown in. The writer without talent
or without recognition has no chance at all.

5. I do not believe that I feel any allegiance to a group, class, organiza-
tion, region, religion, or system of thought. I do not conceive my writing
as expressing myself as an individual. It may be one or both; but I
neither believe nor conceive, and if I did I should try to change my habits.
I try to express what I am writing about. The attempt at objective expres-
sion naturally involves all sorts of personal attitudes and allegiances-
they may be the skeleton of the work, even-but these are never of primary
concern during the exercise of the craft.

6. I suppose the leftist tendency in writing since the depression began is
partly due to emphatic and unavoidable observation of the insecurity and
confusion of the individual and the group in our society: social aware-
ness; and partly due to the inoculation, variously reacted to, of one con-

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120 PARTISAN REVIEW

centrate or another of Marxism: the problem of society. I don't know how
I feel about it; I feel it as something that happened. The only "how" in my
feeling concerns the abuse of acquired political insight in fields where it
has no actualising application; where the stiffening of thought became
rigid, formulaistic, brittle: not to be touched: set. The artist and the critic
cannot set except dead. It is the old story of the chaos of life ordered in
art; if you order life first, there will be nothing to enliven your art. But it
is a pleasant and warming thing to see writers and artists aware of greater
areas of the life around and behind them. . . . Literary nationalism is no
help any more than German nationalism. The specifically American ele-
ments in our culture are good material for the historian and critic; the
practicing writer has them anyway and does not need to know what
they are.

7. Ever since as a sophomore in high school I discovered-or rather just
had chucked in my face-the personal corruption and cowardice of our
wealthy classes in connection with the last world war, I have had an emo-
tional conviction that war is the very complete debauching devil. I am
therefore, I suppose, though later reading may have had something to do
with it, a pacifist and an isolationist. The responsibility of the writer
towards a general war is just his responsibility as a citizen without office:
to work against war and the war spirit: even to witch-hunt that debauchery
if he can. But if war comes and is made popular I do not see that he can
do much more than shut up and keep his head. There will be no escape. If
the war is not popular and the regime collapses there will be another sort
of war and he will be in it anyway.

Horace Gregory:

1. a.) "Usable past" is a beautiful trick phrase, meaning as little or as
much as "Ivory tower" and is to be distrusted because it has entered the
jargon of current criticism without proper evaluation. Am I conscious of
using a "usable past"? Certainly not while I am writing: the imagination
doesn't function that way. The "usable past" is realized before or after
writing a poem and is sometimes made "conscious" as the poem is edited
or rewritten. Mr. I. A. Richards, in his "Coleridge On Imagination" makes
a partial explanation of the phenomenon. I have found something that
may be called a "usable past" in a number of my poems: and the most
deeply hidden is an influence of Latin verse (of which I am "conscious")

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THE SITUATION IN AMERICAN WRITING 121

but how deeply it runs, I cannot know consciously. Other elements of a
"usable past" may be found in the titles of my poems and in the names of
men and places mentioned within them. b.) Most of the names of men and
places in my poems are American: I would say that every writer is con-
ditioned by his time and place and language. c.) Emerson, Randolph
Bourne, Concord, New Milford, New York, Cassandra are among the fig-
ures and places named, but this list does not include the perhaps more sig-
nificant American names I have invented. d.) Is James more or less
relevant than Whitman today? This is a question that excites prejudices
and makes hash of critical values. A good writer can create a "usable
past" out of "The Child's Book of Knowledge"-and make it relevant.
One of the most distinguished of contemporary poets has already done so.
A bad writer can read Shakespeare and come away from the reading with
nothing but the iambic pentameter and high-flown rolling through his
head. As for James and Whitman, it depends upon the ability of the writer
who reads them to make them seem relevant to what he has to say.

2. a.) Never, while I am writing. The poor hack writer or the routine
journalist has to, and that is why most of his writing is at times dishonest
or unclear or both. He has to keep his mind on what the boss will say-in
some cases, this may be necessary discipline, but this is true only on the
lowest levels of writing. Every writer who has something to say is con-
cerned with the art of communication-it is that concern and not the con-
cern of "audiences" that makes his writing clear and forceful. If he writes
well, his so-called "audience" will be glad to listen to his play, his speech
by radio, or to read his book. This last statement is a resounding platitude
that fairly shrieks at me from the four walls of the room, but it should be
said again today. I might add that no one reads a book and truly values
it merely because it is something called "literature": the writer's first
concern should be with human beings, and he should write well enough
to prevent himself as well as those who read him from being bored. A
writer should write from his "audience," rather than hope to write for or
to or at it. He should write out of whatever people, environments, places,
ideas, or emotions have given him a sense of reality, and therefore he
should write out OF the conviction of being identified with them. b.) The
most reliable description of an American "audience" may be found in
Helen and Robert Lynd's "Middletown" and "Middletown In Transition."
c.) Without definite figures at hand, I would say that the quality of sec-
ondary school and university education in the U. S. has improved within
the last ten years and that therefore a potential and perhaps an actual
"audience" for "serious" writing has increased.

3. a.) That depends upon the source of the criticism, or rather, the
sources of it. Its "value" depends upon the places where it appears and
for each I have a different set of values. I am not one of those writers who
makes a profession of quarreling with his critics: with a few exceptions, I

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122
PARTISAN REVIEW
believe my critics have done their best, in both praise and blame, and I
have also done my best in giving them something to write about. As each
book is published, the writer has, for the moment, a particular advantage
over all who write about it: he has had his say. Even the most adverse or
venal critic cannot unsay it. Therefore, I believe it foolish for any writer
to find fault with his adverse critics, or to attack them-when he might
better employ his time by continuing work on his next book. b.) "Serious
literary criticism" has always been a rarity. And in America perhaps the
last twenty years has produced more critics worth reading than any equal
period of time in our literary history. Of those who have published books
since 1919 the names of such diverse and excellent critics of literature, such
as Vernon Louis Parrington, Paul Elmer More, Ezra Pound and George
Santayana are almost certain to be remembered. A more detailed sum-
mary of this period may be found in M. D. Zabel's anthology, "Literary
Opinion In America." c.) Unless one has a private income or a subsidized
paper for which to write, I agree that it is extremely difficult to find time
or place for "serious literary criticism." This does not mean that critics
and reviewers are writing dishonestly for New York newspapers and lib-
eral weeklies: but their wings are often clipped and, in most cases, they
are docile and easily persuaded individuals. Among them there are always
the few who write for "audiences" with both eyes on the boss and who
must do so, either for a living or political advancement-or both. The
difference between the newspapers and the liberal weeklies (I am still
speaking of their literary reviews) is slight, but well defined: and that
difference may be measured by the higher quality of an occasional essay
appearing in The Nation or The New Republic. Such an essay, when it
does appear, is obviously exempt from the demands of a business depart-
ment or an advertising agency and is of greater "value" than anything one
reads in the literary sections of a newspaper. Whenever "political pres-
sure" has been exerted upon the literary policies of a liberal weekly, it is
also clear that these very policies have been modified by the greater forces
of New York literary politics which is a subject too complex, too enervat-
ing, too destructive and yet too effete and trivial for any writer to waste
his time evaluating it.

4. a.) No. The only other alternative is a system of patronage, whether
from individuals, or grants or funds or publishers. b.) I doubt it. But has
there ever existed an "economic system" that supported writers merely
because they were poets? One always returns to the alternative of patron-
age or earning one's living: and it depends upon the character or moral
strength of the writer as to whether or not either alternative becomes
dishonorable.

5. a.) I have answered this question in answering questions 1 and 2.

6. a.) Frankly, I don't know what a "political tendency" "as a whole"

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LETTERS
123

has been, and this is a question that should be answered with a fair degree
of accuracy. Perhaps Charles and Mary Beard's book, "America In Mid-
passage" would be of assistance here; it does contain one kind of answer
to the question, yet even here the statement concerning literary contribu-
tions to the last ten years is clouded by inaccuracies of time sequence and
of emphasis on certain kinds of writing. This question should be answered
by Mr. Gallup and his corps of investigators. b.) I believe that a "political
tendency" in writing moves far more slowly than some people think it
does. The contradictions within it tend to cancel each other, and I believe
it is still too soon to define the actual meaning of the "political tendency"
of the past ten years. That kind of phenomenon is always less important
than phenomena of cultural relevance. A "political" relevance is always
contained within the more general (and at times, more specific) cultural
relevance. A writer should keep his eye on human beings or human
behavior or on himself as a human being rather than on any one political
tendency or movement. It is only in so far as a "political tendency" affects
himself or those around him that a writer should evaluate its meaning.
c.) A writer's home and environments are always important; these are his
"roots"; but he should also have enough sensibility and curiosity to realize
that he is also a citizen of the world. Much of the strength of our own
culture has been gained from a particular adaptation and interpretation
of European attitudes. In one sense, to be an "American" is also to be
concerned with European cultures; in that sense, Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot are never more "American" than when they are most "European."
For the writer, his true "nationality" is the language in which he writes;
and even this rule has had its notable exceptions.

7. a.) I cannot know until the next war arrives. Has the last world war
actually ceased? I doubt it. b.) The writer's responsibility is to go on
writing.

LETTERS
FOR AN ANTI-WAR JOURNAL

Sirs:
I'm writing you merely to express the
hope—and in the expectation there are
others with the same hope—that PARTISAN
REVIEW will serve continuously as an anti-
war journal. I have read again "War and
the Intellectuals: Act Two" in the Spring
1939 number. It still seems to me ex-
cellent—more so now; it indicates the
'usable past,' the reference—The Masses,
The Seven Arts, and perhaps best of all
Randolph Bourne. ... Some legends ex-
plode of themselves—for example, the
official Soviet-Communist Party legend
(of 48 hours) that the Berlin-Moscow
anti-aggression pact would halt Nazi in-
vasion and protect Poland. But there are

other legends, such as that Chamberlain
and Hitler represent anything but two
sides of the same coin, such as that ever-
recurring one that this war is at last the
Holy War to liberate the world: they will
not diminish but increase. There must be
active work against the lies, and its best
action will be a preparation for pacifism.
So, at least, I believe, and I hope PARTI-
SAN REVIEW believes also.
Sincerely,

WINFIELD T. SCOTT,
Providence, R. I.
—As Marxists we don't believe in "paci-
fism" as it is usually defined. But we do
intend to expose and oppose the war in
PARTISAN REVIEW, and welcome Mr.
Scott's letter.—THE EDITORS.

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124
PROTEST FROM ARKANSAS
Sirs:
It is my impression that the more re-
putable literary publications assign books
to reviewers who may be presumed to
have some previous knowledge of the sub-
ject matter, yet I find that in your current
issue THESE ARE OUR LIVES is re-
viewed by Dwight Macdonald, who con-
fesses that "many of these stories seem as
remote as tales of some tribe in the in-
terior of Africa."
Aside from its superb literary excel-
lence, the importance of the book is due
very largely to its amazing veracity. These
are the people speaking. These stories are
typical not of isolated individuals but of
literally thousands of people living
throughout the South. If your reviewer
had had any knowledge whatever of the
South, he would not have criticised the
editor for giving "no indication of the
grounds of his selection beyond that he
chose what seemed to him 'the most typi-
cal and most important'," for he would
at once have recognized the authentic
voice of the Southern people speaking.
If you are going to label your periodical
"A Quarterly of . . . Marxism," you had
better get down to earth and find out
something about the hundreds of thou-
sands of the poor, the hungry, the home-
less, and the oppressed in the South. Cer-
tainly you should not publish reviews on
such subjects by one who writes smugly
that he "lives in a big city and has always
had enough to eat." Why don't you stop
this petty sniping at "Stalinism" and do
something really important for present-
day Marxism?

Sincerely and indignantly yours,
JOHN T. APPLEBY,
Cotter, Arkansas.
-It is unnecessary for Mr. Appleby to de-
fend either These Are Our Lives or the
oppressed hundreds of thousands-mil-
lions would be more accurate-of South-
ern people, against any attack by me. I
praised the book highly, and my review
made clear where my sympathies lie as to
the people presented in the volume. The
statements about my having enough to eat
and about the remoteness of the social
milieu of the book from my own urban

PARTISAN REVIEW
experience were intended not as gibes or
smug boasts but as an indication of the
orientation from which I approached the
book. Nor can I see any reason why only
Southerners are competent to deal with
books on the South.-D.M.
WANTED-MORE KAFKA, SILONE, STEIN
Sirs:
May I say that I enjoyed greatly your
first three issues, but not so much your
doldrum (last) issue. Somehow my con-
cept of a quarterly envisages a weightier
central feature than a lot of catch-as-
catch-can opinions by writers as to audi-
ences, usable pasts and the like, which
are good enough for supplementary pages
in the rear. . . . Let's have more of Kafka,
Silone, Gertrude Stein in fiction; more of
the authoritative analyses of the cultural
endeavors throughout the world, not ex-
cluding the U.S.A. (I mean films, plays,
art and music development); more of
analyses of works on economic theories
and social findings; for instance the last
issue missed a fine chance of discussing
the state of theoretical science, especially
Russia's attitude to genetics. In brief,
your quarterly should aim to become a
real ART, SCIENCE & SOCIETY. What
do you say?

Sincerely,
A SUBSCRIBER,
Chula Vista, Calif.
-We say we agree-though not as to the
"doldrum" issue-and we refer "A Sub-
scriber" to the present number as to some
extent conforming to his standards.-THE
EDITORS.

WANTED-SUCCESSIVE PAGINATION
Sirs:
Why not page-number successive issues
of PARTISAN REVIEW consecutively and
publish an index per volume for con-
venience in binding and reference? The
present arrangement is exasperating.

GRATTAN FREYER,
Trinity College,
Dublin, Eire.
-We are glad to adopt this suggestion.
Beginning with the next issue, the first of
the six-times-a-year PARTISAN REVIEW,
pages will be numbered consecutively
throughout each volume.-THE EDITORS.

=== Page 129 ===
War Is The Issue!
EVERAL MONTHS AGO the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism
addressed its founding statement "to all artists and writers concerned about
the present drift of the United States to reaction and war."
"Cultural circles, formerly progressive," we wrote then, "are now
capitulating to the spirit of fascism while ostensibly combatting its letter.
... To the war drive of the fascist powers, they reply with a war drive of
their own. ... Inspired by Stalinist and social-reformist propaganda, they
advocate a new war for 'democracy.' Yet this war must give birth to
military dictatorship and to forms of intellectual repression far more
violent than those evoked by the last war."
Since this was written, the Stalinist regime has joined hands with
Hitler, and Poland has been partitioned between Nazi Germany and Stalin-
ist Russia. The thunder of the second world war is now shaking Europe.
These great historical events have shattered old alignments over here and
are creating new groupings. Less than a week before the Berlin-Moscow
pact was announced, for example, four hundred American writers, artists,
educators and intellectuals signed their names to a statement of faith in
the Soviet Union as a bulwark of "democracy." Clearly worried by the
formation of the LCFS and similar groups, the four hundred sharply
rebuked all critics of Stalinism as friends of fascism. This document has
now become a historical curiosity.
But this is no time for crying, "We told you so!" The actual outbreak
of war in Europe has reduced even the Stalin-Hitler pact to a second-rate
question. The great question now is: what is the attitude of American intel-
lectuals, regardless of past illusions, towards American participation in
the war? War has become the issue.
It took almost three years to swing the United States into the last war.
Already the Roosevelt administration has served notice that it will attempt
to do in months what the Wilson administration took years to achieve.
Already it is devoting its chief energies not to domestic reform but to
foreign policy. So far as it lies in the power of the New Deal, American
blood and treasure will be lavishly expended to help France and England
crush once more their ancient imperialist rival.
We loathe and abominate fascism as the chief enemy of all culture,
all real democracy, all social progress. But the last war showed only too
clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom
to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of "Stop Hitler!"
would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over
here. Only the German people can free themselves of the fascist yoke. The
American masses can best help them by fighting at home to keep their own
liberties.

125

=== Page 130 ===
126 PARTISAN REVIEW

The war issue most intimately concerns American intellectuals. Par-
rington summarizes the effects of the last war on our culture: "With the
entry of America into the war came a sharp change in literary develop-
ment. Regimentation due to war psychology destroyed the movement of
social criticism. ... The liberal movement in economics and politics came
to an abrupt end." Nor can we have any illusions about the effect on our
cultural life of American entry into this war. It will mean corruption for
those who accept it, spiritual if not physical imprisonment for those who
refuse to conform. Every branch of our culture will be set back for
decades.

What can American artists and writers do at this time?
In a practical, immediate sense, they can help make articulate the
strong opposition which the great majority of the American people still
feel to our entry into the war. The masses, who have nothing to gain and
everything to lose from another war, are far from endorsing the Presi-
dent's foreign policy. But this sentiment can again be cheated, deceived,
propagandized out of existence as it was in the last war, unless it is made
conscious and given organized expression. Here the intellectuals can be
of the greatest service.

In a more general sense, American writers and artists must put them-
selves on record against the war as a symbol of their acceptance of the
responsibilities of their profession. In the last war, a whole generation of
writers committed spiritual suicide by taking part in the orgy. If only for
the sake of their own integrity, American intellectuals must now signalize
their opposition not only to war in the abstract but specifically to Ameri-
can entry into this war. It would be a betrayal of the human spirit for
them to keep silent at this time.

War is the great issue today. We call upon all American artists,
writers and professional workers to join us in this statement of implacable
opposition to this dance of war in which Wall Street joins with the Roose-
velt administration.

(Signed)
LIONEL ABEL
KAY BOYLE
JAMES BURNHAM
V. F. CALVERTON
ELEANOR CLARK
JAMES PETER COONEY
JAMES A. DECKER
DAVID C. DEJONG
PAUL DOBBS
F. W. DUPÉE
JAMES T. FARRELL
CHARLES HENRI FORD
PHILIP H. GRAY, JR.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
WILLIAM GRUEN
ESTHER D. HAMILL
ROBERT HIVNOR
MELVIN J. LASKY
JAMES LAUGHLIN IV
DWIGHT MACDONALD
JOHN MCDONALD
SHERRY MANGAN
RALPH MANHEIM
ALAN MATHER
CLARK MILLS
NORMAN MINI
GEORGE L. K. MORRIS
CULBERTSON MYERS
GILBERT NEIMAN
HELEN NEVILLE
GEORGE NOVACK
LYMAN PAINE
KENNETH PATCHEN
CARL PETERSON
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
ARTHUR PINCUS
FAIRFIELD PORTER
PHILIP RAHV
KENNETH REXROTH
T. C. ROBINSON
JAMES RORTY
HAROLD ROSENBERG
HARRY ROSKOLENKO
MEYER SCHAPIRO
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
WINFIELD T. SCOTT
GORDON SYLANDER
JOHN WHEELWRIGHT
WILLIAM CARLOS
WILLIAMS
BERTRAM D. WOLFE

–––for the LEAGUE FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM AND SOCIALISM

=== Page 131 ===
STATEMENT

127

The following non-members of the League have also signed the above
statement:

LOUISE BOGAN
ANITA BRENNER
JOSEPH CORNELL
RICHARD EBERHART

ROBERT FITZGERALD
BALCOMB GREENE
GERTRUDE GREENE
WELDON KEES

VICTOR LAWSON
GORHAM B. MUNSON
KATHARINE ANNE
PORTER

Please address all communications to: DWIGHT MACDONALD, 117 East
10th Street, New York City.

A Letter To The L. A. W.

Secretary, League of American Writers,
381 Fourth Avenue, New York City
Dear Sir:

October 5, 1939.

Until August 21st, 1939, the League of American Writers functioned
as the most active political organization among American writers and intel
lectuals. Through its national and regional congresses, public meetings,
pamphlets, questionnaires, and statements to the press, it made known its
position on every important issue.

The official call to its congress held last June stated that the League
supported "cooperation of this country with other nations and peoples
opposed to Fascism-including the Soviet Union, which has been the most
consistent defender of peace" and "in general, the defense of a free world
in which writers can function." In numerous statements and resolutions it
called for the organization of a "democratic peace front" against Fascism,
etc., etc.

Despite the world-shaking events that have occurred since August 21st,
the formerly eloquent and ubiquitous League of American Writers has not
been heard from. Nothing on the war, nothing on the Nazi-Soviet pact,
nothing on the partition of Poland, in fact, nothing. Does this organization
still exist? If so, has it anything to say to American writers and intellec
tuals on the following questions?

1. What is the character of the present war? Is it an imperialist war
or a war of the democracies against Fascism?

2. What is the role of the Stalin regime in this war? Did the Stalin
Hitler pact advance the cause of world peace or did it promote
Fascist aggression? Does the League approve of the partition of
Poland between Germany and Russia?

=== Page 132 ===
128 PARTISAN REVIEW

3. Does the League still hold that the United States should cooperate
with the Soviet Union in order to stop the onward march of
Fascism?
4. Does the League still maintain that the United States should adopt
a "collective security" policy? If so, what countries should be
included in such a common front?
5. Does the League of American Writers still consider the Communist
Party to be a force for peace, democracy, and socialism?
If the League of American Writers can recover its voice, we shall be
glad to hear its replies.

Yours truly,

JOHN DEWEY
F. W. DUPEE
JAMES FARRELL
B. D. N. GREBANIER
LOUIS M. HACKER

SIDNEY HOOK
SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE
FERDINAND LUNDBERG
EUGENE LYONS
MAX NOMAD

WILLIAM PHILLIPS
PHILIP RAHV
MEYER SCHAPIRO
BENJAMIN STOLBERG
FRANCES WINWAR