50
PARTISAN REVIEW
a portrait of disintegrating capitalist society in America.
As he grows
away from yesterday, as all three writers here considered repudiate their
legacy-will
they grow into the heritage of tomorrow·
NATHAN ADLER
THE NOVELIST AS A PARTISAN
PARCHED EARTH,
by Arnold B. Armstrollg.
The Macmillan Co. N.
Y.
$2.50.
THE SHADOW BEFORE,
by William Rollins, Jr.
Robert
./III.
McBride
&
Co. N.
Y. $2.50.
For some years lVlarxist critics in America have busied themselves
with the building of a theoretical scaffolding for a partisan literature ex-
pressing the revolutionary reconstruction of society.
Their efforts have
not been in vain; in fact they could not have been in vain.
But now
there can no longer be any doubt about it. The new class novels coming
off the press month after month, the new literary magazines springing up
all over country-all
these are signs of a promise fulfilled.
They prove:
the fusion of theory and practice in American revolutionary literature and
its leaving behind the incipient phase of creative helplessness.
N a hue
and cry of propaganda, no lugubrious head-shaking of wiseacres, and no
amount of sneering on the part of those who persist in tracing their pal-
sied hieroglyphics on the fly-paper of bourgeois class impotence, can
arrest its progress.
The primary merit of
Parched Earth
and
The Shadow Before
lies
in the fact that their authors are acutely conscious of the
m,aterial
reality
of act and character. And it is precisely this consciousness of the economic
factor as the leading factor in the determinism of life under capitalism
that makes it possible for them not merely to state the mounting con-
tradiction between the classes but also to resolve it. In both novels the
solution is definitely established: not externally, through the well-known
device of preaching and finger-pointing,
but internally,
through the
inevitable logic of social necessity materializing in highly articulate images
of existing life· Hence both novels, though the sensibilities of Armstrong
and Rollins are poles asunder, postulate one solution: the proletarian
revolution.
True, in
Parched Earth
this implicit solution flows out of
the total complex of events and characterization with much less effective-
ness than in
The Shadow Before;
and this, I believe, can be directly
traced to Armstrong's inadequate mastery of literary art and to his some-
what outdated sensibility, which slashes with a 19th century blade.
All
too often the drama of social conflict in Caldwell, the typical California
fruit and cannery town which is the novel's locale, boils over into melo-
drama, and the action and portrayal contain too many elements that are
