THREE GENERATIONS
53
to assimilate the whole past and to integrate the strata: in our audience,
is flanked by "leftists" on one side, and rightists on the other. The
"leftists" repudiate the bourgeois heritage, and fall into primitive, over–
simplified and pseudo-popular rewrites of political ideas and events. Since
a complete repudiation of the past is impossible in practice, they really
continue the traditiollj of primitive, "popular" writine;. The rightists are
principally those who have not completed their transition, and who seek:
to assimilate the methods and sensibility of writers like Joyce asd Eliot
without a clear sense of the revolutionary purposes to which these in–
fluences should be bent. Unless a writer strikes boldly in a revolutionary
direction, this "influence" and "assimilation" is dangerously near Imitation.
Since all critical judgments are rooted
in
an immediate outlook and
in some specific creative practice, it is impossible to speak for the entire
proletarian generation in commenting on its attitude to the past. An
attempt to steer this course between "leftism" and rightism will be
implicit in every subsequent judgment.
Since the last generation was, in a sense, a swing away from the
preceding sociological one, we find ourselves returning to some of the
more d.irect and linear methods of men like Dreiser. As the later novels
of Dos Passos have shown, a tangential treatment of characters and inci–
dents which are so causally bound up with the whole make-up of modern
life can never be entirely successful. In this respect,
The Land of Plenty,
the stories of Whittaker Chambers, or the poetry of Alfred Hayes, mark
a break with the oblique treatment of, let us say, Cummings or Hem·
ingway. We are more aware of the naturalists and realists than was the
last generation. But our approach to them is colored, nevertheless, by
the lens of the intervening literary epoch.
T. S. Eliot is one of the strongest literary influences on us. This is
so probably, because he is the only really important poet of the immediate
past. And this is an impression which no writer, however revolutionary,
can entirely ·escape. Though not properly a member of the lost genera–
tion, Eliot represents essentially the. same literary' milieu. In his poetry,
however reactionary its ultimate implications may be, Eliot has perfected
a new idiom and tighter rhythms for expressing many prevailing moods
and perceptions. A proletarian
Eliot
would, of course, be an anomaly,
but many of ou11 younger poets-Funaroff, Spector, Rolfe, for instance–
have often successfully employed some elements of Eliot's sessibility.
Occasionally, however, the measure of their revolutionary failure lay in
the fact that the
poem~
as a whole, did not possess a new sensibility and
