56
PARTISAN REVIEW
The hunger for stuff to fill her book is the hunger to fill the author's
belly.
She writes to earn a living.
The obsession which drives her so
feverishly to avoid taking sides is that by taking sides she will make her
loaf small. She says to herself that the workers "hate what they think you
stand for-and you do stand for it, and you can't get away trom it, no
matter what your material condition." The daughter of poor social
workers, having worked in a corset factory, Gilfillan shows no under-
standing of the present situation of her own class, of how it is being ground
down, of how it can save itself only by uniting forces and following the
aroused working class. And Gilllian must further understand that even
such books as hers will be banned and burned on the public square if the
Blue Eagle with its fascist wings succeeds in battering down lower the
workers, the farmers, the petty bourgeoisie of this country.
She will go
hungry and be riddled in the crossfire between the revolutionary workers
and the capitalist class unless she joins the only side that will give her
honest bread and a chance to develop as a creative writer-the working
class.
BEN FIELD
GORMAN'S PICTURESQUE PUPPETS
JONATHAN BISHOP,
by Herbert Gorman.
$2.50.
Farrar
&
Rhinehart, Inc.
HOLLYWOOD,EISENSTEIN ONCE REMARKED,sees a revolution as a
picturesque background for a love story.
The erstwhile biographer and
imitator of such diverse writers as James Joyce and Alexandre Dumas,
however, attempts to retell the history of the Franco-Prussian War and
the Paris Commune to illustrate a dilettante's sermon on how a young
American becomes disillusioned with revolution.
Although structurally this novel clings leech-like to a biographical
pattern, with every event seen only through the hero's eyes, no motives
are given for any of his actions olltside of a single, brief love affair.
Jonathan Bishop is just an omnipresent sightseer, with no goal in life, a
mouthpiece for the author's maudlin sentimentalism over the debacle of
the Second Empire and the attempted destruction of the bourgeois state.
Gorman's hatred of the "heaven stormers" of 1871 is so violently
bitter that he does not grant that the Parisian masses had a single cause
for complaint with the
status quo.
There are no convincing explanations
of how the various historical and fictitious revolutionary characters arrived
at their "fanatical beliefs," or why Bishop, even for a brief time. should
have had radical sympathies. As a result the hem and the protagonists of
the Commune remain wooden puppets and they are juggled arounu so
clumsily that the illusion of reality is never created.
