58
PARTISAN REVIEW
Delescluze, the heroic Civil Delegate for War, "was an old man, with
long hair, unclean, unshaven, and dressed in a shabby coat.
His hands
were dirty and the nails were black: rims to his fingers.
About his neck
he wore a coarse scarf loosely tied
a
la mode de Marat.
Washburne watch·
ed him swagger back to the table." Flourens is "fierce-eyed." A fictitious
character, Denyse Zinh, accuses the brilliant Raoul Rigault, procurator for
the Commune, of having lecherous designs on her. Even a revolutionist's
picture causes Gorman to fume about "degenerate lion faces like Bakunin."
Le us hope that P. Pavlenko's recent novel,
Barricades,
will be trans-
lated and published soon in America to popularize the real history and
significance of the first dictatorship of the proletariat.
WALTER SNOW
WHOSE TRAGEDY?
A
MODERN TRAGEDY,
by Phyllis Bentley.
Macmillan.
$2.50.
Miss Bentley chooses as the thematic frame of her third novel the
interwoven lives of representative characters of a typical industrial textile
town of rural England.
In Hudley, its chimneys smok:ing along the
York:shire hills, Miss Bentley's people, old and new school textile manufac-
turers, young middle class aspirants, domestic politically-indifferent work·
ers, and fiery union leaders, move in well-regulated Victorian patterns
through the years of the crisis, their destinies knitted by the machines, to
climax a "tragicless" modern tragedy.
For after following the fortunes of the characters, one can justly ask
"whose tragedy is this modern tragedy?"
Miss Bentley has her answer.
It is the tragedy of all.
Speculator
and union organizer. Manufacturer and textile worker. "Outside, hungry
and desperate men paraded; within, the men who had most experience in
organizing their industry were being tried for a crime of personal greed."
The town of Hudley, to Miss Bentley, as well as all the industrial towns
of the world, is torn with tragedy because of a "limitation of vision" on
the part of those "who had most experience in organizing their industry"
and those "who never thought of anyone but their own class." The modern
tragedy is therefore a tragedy of waste.
Milner Schofield, instead of
leading the unemployed in a hunger-march on London, might have been
spending his valuable time turning out excellent clothes for the Messrs.
Lumb. Marx defined "normal" capitalism as meaning a "normal" inflow
of profit i.e. "normal" exploitation.
This essential liberalism expresses itself not only in Miss Bentley's
social welfare worker's political pleas for class harmony but also reveals
itself in the weak dramatic structure of the novel and in the shoddy,
false, sentimentalized psychology of her people.
Drama and tragedy do
