PARTISAN REVIEW
the past year has been steady and certain, and he is gradually eliminating
some of the immaturities which marred his earlier stories. The verse in
The Anvil
is painfully sincere but, with the exception of two poems by
Walter Snow and Edwin Rolfe, of little value as poetry.
Three unusual stories appear in the third number of
Blast
edited
in New York City by Fred R. Miller. W.
C.
Williams'
Th e Dawn of
Another Day
is an erratic, unclear, but nevertheless significant story
about a penniless young man, one of the middle class ruined by the crisis,
who realizes his new class pos ition in society through a sensuous-mystical
r.ontact with a woman of the working class, a Negro woman. The story
is pictorially effective, and makes use of conversation in a manner which
very few American writers, least of all revolutionary writers, have master–
ed. But the disparity between the satisfying prose and the amorphous, un–
clear ideological approach maI.:.es this story a failure, if we are to take
Blast's subtitle. "proletarian short stories" seriously. Because of the un–
resolved nature of his approach, 'Villiams uses the figures of the Negro
woman as the symbol of uprooted identity with reality. D. H. L awrence
attempted a similar semi-personal, semi-mystical identity with reality, and
failed. Even though to Williams the reality of woman symbolizes class–
consciousness, the connection is .far too tenuous and personal to hold mean–
ing for the reader.
Richard Bransten has something of the same respect for sensuous
detail that Williams possesses. The use of it in his story
Misdeal
partly
redeems the stereotyped si tuation with which he deals-that of a young
man whQ, losing his job, is forced into the growing mass of workers who
begin to question the very basis of capitalist society. But the occasional
vigor and fine observation of the earlier parts of the story are lost sight
of in the trite culmination of the tale.
Alfred Morang's contribution to this issue of
Blast
is a short and
slight but well-integrated short story,
Free Slaves.
One other story
should be listed here, H
ac.tman
by Harry Kermit, a competent
n~rrative
the imaginative meagreness of wnich is redeemed by excellent reportorial
detail.
The first issue of
Dynamo, a journal of revo lutionary poetry
justifies
the long period of its preparation, during which many of its well-wishers
thou ght it had met a pre-natal end. It is the smallest of all the magazines
we have discussed, and at the same time the most mature, sober, unpreten·
tious. Not only have its editors collected in its 24 small pages some ex–
tremely significant literary contributions; they have also, as these very
contributions reveal, set a high standard of literary merit which is sorely
needed in revolutionary literature.
It
is a standard which proves that
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