54
PARTISAN REVIEW
includes, of course, in Eliot's majestic sweep, both sociological and Marxist
criticism. In an appendix of quotations in
After Strange Gods,
supposedly
exemplifying types of heresy in modern thought, Eliot includes a state-
ment on Communism (choosing, as might be expected, John Middleton
Murry, a self-titled Communist, as the spokesman).
Eliot seems to rccognize that one of the most important questions in
criticism is the rdation of art to "life." But he characteristically reasons
all around the qucstion, granting the relation abstractly, but denying it
concretely, and muffiing all the essential implications.
Taking Trotsky
as spokesman for Marxism on art, he grants Trotsky's conceptions of art
as "handmaiden," and then uses Trotsky's anti-proletarian views to
separate revolutionary ideas from art, to deny the revolutionary power
of proletarian art, and to argue that "a period of revolution is not favor-
able to art." But the most shameful piece of juggling is Eliot's derision
of Shelley's revolutionary ideas as adolescent,
borrowed from that
"humbug" Godwin.
Eliot then uses obvious defects in much of Shelley's
poetry as an example of how immature ideas wreck native talent.
And
with a great gesture of fairness, he admits prejudice against Shelley's ideas,
but insists that it is their immaturity,
and not his inability to accept
them which keeps him from enjoying Shelley's poetry, as he does Dante's
and that of other "mature" and religious poets.
Eliot is rubbing shoulders with every myth and dagma which is used
by capitalism to maintain itself. His gods are the caricatures and monsters
of fascism.
WALLACE PHELPS
FROM SMITH COLLEGE TO PIT COLLEGE
I
WENT
To
PIT COLLEGE,
by Lauren Gilfillan. The Viking Press, $2.50.
A 22-year old girl, Smith College '31, cannot find a job in New
York. She goes to the mining town of Avelonia, 35 miles from Pittsburgh,
to get material for a book. She eats and sleeps with the miners, spends a
day down in a mine, marches on the picket line, hangs around the relief
kitchen, participates in demonstrations, listen in an a YCL mecting, and
witnesses class justice administered with the jailing of militant miners and
Communists on brazen, trumped-up charges.
Lauren Gilfillan's experiences will undoubtedly give thousands oi
readers their first real picture of life in a mining town.
They will see
the mass unemployment, the hunger, diseases, squalor, illiteracy, the ter-
ror and dumping of workers like slag on the heap, all in the shadow of
the giant tipples. They will become aware of the importance of the N a-
tional Miners Union, the Communist Party, and the
Daily W'orker
ir,
