PARTISAN REVIEW
impersonality of method which, if selectively assimilated, could prove of
great benefit to the proletarian writer who more often than not is over–
powered by the immensity of his theme.
Hemingway represents an important variation in modern bourgeois
sensibility. His work re-creates the types of man for whom the problems
of social existence in the chaos of the capitalist order are so trying that
they finally disintegrate in him any attempt at an intellectual apprehension
of causes. Merely looking at effects, this type develops a hankering for
the primitive innocence of sensual life and surrenders to a personal moral–
ity embracing a few simple facts. Hemingway's obsession with the theme
of death and the psychology of pure, rather than conspicuous, consump–
tion pervading his stories and novels flow from the amoral and asocial
ideology of the top section of the bourgeoisie in the era of moribund
capitalism. The character of his people has always been marginal to the
class whence they spring; he has never faced a class type in his essence,
in the sense that Clyde Griffiths, Stephen Daedalus or Hans Castorp are
such.
Klaus Mann has spoken of Hemingway's charm as being that of "an
Ameri can boy."
J
f we understand Mann's phrase in relation to the exist–
ing class domination in America, as meaning an a\'erage bourgeois-minded
American boy, then it is quite dear that this sort of charm speaks eloquent–
ly of severe intellectual limitations. And to become a devotee of the ut–
terly quixotic ideal of life as a "clean cut" private
sport
from whose orbit
everything is excluded save drill king, hunting and copulating is to illustrate
the point.
PHILIP RAHV
LEFT FRONT, Revolutiollary Art of the Midwest. Organ of the John Reed
Clubs of the middle west, published bi-monthly at 1475 South
Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Edited by Bill Jordan. Volume I,
Number 3. 10 cents.
THE ANVIL, Stories for Workers. Edited by Jack Conroy in Moberly,
Missouri. Volume 1, Number 4. 15 cents.
BLAST, Proletarian Short Stories. Edited by Fred R. Miller in New
York City. Volume 1, Number 3. 20 cents.
Dn,r\i\IO, A Journal of RevolutIOnary Poetry, .:dited by S. FunaroH,
Herman Spector, Joseph Vogel and Nicholas Wirth, New York City.
Volume 1, Number
1.
15 cents.
HERE ARE FOCR little ma gaz ines, all of them recent arrivals
011
the
American literary scene, which prove-despite the sneers and sarcasm. of
the literary liberals-the growing vitality of revolutionary writing in
60
