BOOKS
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the daily struggle of Avelonia's workers to free themselves from actnal
serfdom. For these reasons the book has its value.
Unfortunately,
Lauren Gilfillan is first and only a "writer." She
can never forget that in her life with the miners.
Her equipment con-
sists of a typewriter, a pad and pencil, a college education which probably
taught her English, and a notion that the writer must keep his role of a
detached observer even tho it kill him in the end.
Such an equipment
does not prepare a writer for an understanding of the class struggle.
Gilfillan honestly admits her "abysmal ignorance and indifference to inter-
national economy." She can call Communism a religion as tho Lenin,
Marx, and Stalin with their tremendous scientific contributions to a new
life are theologians.
Not once in all her book does she aim at or mention
the mine operators who are responsible for all this exploitation and misery.
And that is ,vhy despite the praise of liberal reviewers the book has a lot
of shooting in the air, some shooting at the workers which will give
comfort to the exploiters.
This lack of equipment does not fit the writer to understand a class-
conscious worker.
It puts her on a high horse and lets her write with
amused tolerance about a YCL meeting.
It blunts her pen when she
writes of "mining town justice." In writing of the most outrageous in-
justice, she keeps her temper, she does not even scratch blood.
On the
contrary, she admits feeling: very much bewildered in the court room, much
like Alice in Wonderland;
"they were all turning into figures out of a
ridiculous fairy story." This of workers who are going to be sentenced
to years in jail! Her very style suffers because of this lack of under-
standing, this foreignness to her material.
Her imagery, pulled from her
middle class life, jars one with its inappropriateness.
Workers must be
dealt with in terms of their own class and experience.
But Gilfillan
generally stands between her readers and the workers. To get her picture
she will often give you a lump which she crumbles into bits for your
understanding whereas a revolutionary writer can give you this under-
standing in a flash. This limited equipment often finds her digging around
with a toothpick where a jackhammer is required.
Gilfillan's fetish to be objective goes to such lengths as to defeat its
own purpose.
When she yells to the police to come back after they've
broken up a meeting in order to get their point of view, she is naturally
branded as a spy. The workers force her to leave town, thereby bringing
up her story short when it possibly might have gone on to add more
strength.
Again when one of the Communists brands her in a powerful
speech an art-for-art's saker, all she answers is, "Shirley, you're gorgeous."
She is responsible for the expulsion from the YCL of the boy miner,
Johnny, who is in love with her. Johnny is thus cut off from the Party,
the feed cord that liberates and strengthens the spirit and makes life
humanly possible in that brutalized tOWIl. She does nothing to intercede
with the comrades or explain she's to blame.
The last evening she tells
Johnny she is not in love with him, and then with a bang, grabs pencil
and paper and fires questions at him for material.
To such indecency and
heartlessness will a writer go worshipping objectivity.
