BOOKS
Sl
mainly moralistic in emphasis.
These weaknesses, however, should not
prevent the reader from seeing the large human panorama revealed in the
book, and its merciless probing into the horror, the truly monstrous cor-
ruption of this small town, this Main Street seen not through the eyes of
a Sinclair Lewis, who is nothing but Main Street's stool-pigeon, but
through the eyes of a revolutionist pulsing with that "noble proletarian
hate" towards the exploiting class, which, as Lenin once said, is "the
beginning of all wisdom."
In
many ways the catastrophic character of the story of
Parched
Earth
reminds one of Robinson J diers'
repertory of violent sequences.
When Wally, the idiot son of Belle Vasquez, the town prostitute, and
Everett Caldwell, the syphilitic capitalist in control of the town, blows
up the dam and lets loose a flood that puts an end to most of the characters
as well as to their physical setting, one feels the same moral and esthetic
pleasure as in reading the chapter on Sodom in the Bible.
But the
awaresess of this similarity ends in revulsion.
One beg:ns to question the
author's choice of principals among his characters.
\Vhy should Hattie
Rathbone: the old maid yearning for a child, consume so many pages,
while Washburn,
the Communist organizer of the cannery workers, is
drawn so sketchily, never being allowed to develop the action immanent
in his presence and repeatedly intimated? The recent agricultural strikes
in California draw attention to the organic fitness of such action to the
locale and to the times. Moreover, the entire symbol of horrible physical
disease, though at times successfully energized in a class manner, seems
somewhat arbitrary.
And Everett Caldwell, the town magnate, is never
seen in relation to his superiors, the bankers in the big cities, but is drawn
as a self-sufficient force, towering over the human landscape of the novel.
The story of
The Shadow Before
revolves around the Bauman-
Jones Mills at Fullerton, New England.
\Vith a psychological realism
unexcelled in any revolutionary novel as yet written by an American, we
are shown how the role of each individual involved in the great mass strike
organized by the Communists is motivated by his class interests.
Rollins
employs the psychological method in revealing the working out of these
interests in the detailed action, and he does this successfully because each
of his psychological perceptions is a projection of social character, and as
such is rooted in class reality. This method is especially well realized in
Harry Baumann, the mill-owner's son who joins in with the strikers,
whose act of renunciation is seen in all its contradictions, an act by no
means integral,
but impregnated with all the mad adventurism and
neurasthenia induced by a life of excesses. A type of "pure fascism" is
effectively shown in Benjamin Thayer, the mill-superintendent who heads
the vigilantes; and in Micky Bonner, whose progress to class-conscious-
ness is so convincingly portrayed, the author has illustrated the man-
ner in which this all-important
thematic element in revolutionary fic-
tion can be used without jarring on the credibility of skeptical readers.
One of the significant aspects of
The Shadow Before
lies in the fact
