BOOKS
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also simply because he has cut his story off too soon.
If
his hero's turn
from taking his work casually and his sex seriously to his taking sex more
as a matter o"f course and his relation to his fellow workmen as a new
vital beneficial expansion of his interests: if this turn had gone on further
in a third part of the novel, a true development in the action would have
been achieved and the novel would not have ended in the mere possibility
of a new orientation. But, depite these criticisms, the novel becomes fairly
significant to the Marxian critic as a symptom. For undoubtedly iu writing
it, Bodenheim has moved at one and the same time in the direction not
only of a more realistic technique but also of a political attitude that i:J
more proletarian. We may take this two-fold change, I think, as a reflec–
tion of the growing self-consciousness of the working class which is demand–
ing more and mor(! freedom from illusion and distraction in its fiction.
The pulp magazine must tend to become a truly human interest story and
the popular novel at least honest reportage. Bodenheim may well be the
prophet of this transformation.
Edward Dahlberg's
Those Who Perish
really belongs in the same
category as Bodenheim's novel. In fact both in a political and in an
esthetic sense, it is in one respect actually worse, for it ends with an un–
expected preposterous burst of deaths and defeatist suicides. But Dahlberg
has been one of the very white hopes of proletarian fiction. Without
question his
From Flushing to Calvary
showed him more sensitive to its
possibilities, more alert to surrender no value of bourgeois sensibility pos–
sible of utilization, than almost ·any other writer who might be named .
It is only charitable to assume that he has in this novel become the vtctim
of not recollecting in tranquillity. His very commendable anti-Nazi venom
has for the time being cut through all his former hesitations and nuances.
It
has debased his power of characterization almost into caricature and left
him quite incapable of constructing a plot. The one character who i:J
sincerely anti-Nazi commits suicide in despair of winning h.er fellow Jews
to the anti-Nazi cause. The novel is not proletarian, and its exposure of
the many types of Jewish personality that are indifferent to the menace
of anti-Semitism is so through and so hostile as to lay the book itself open
to the charge of anti-Semitism. The many subterfuges invoked by im–
mediate seli-interest, the pretense of Zionism coi1cealing the desire for one
more German contract, the unctuous belief that one's own prosperity is
beyond attack; everything that has made the Jew represent to his enemy
rugged individualism at its bourgeois worst, is laid bare with a snarl of
irony, sometimes with direct lashes of the pen, but most often in a style
whose carelessness is unexpectedly checked by a laborious astigmatic
metaphor.
De Voto's
We Accept With Pleasure,
on the contrary, does not pre–
tend to be proletarian.
It
is written from an even loftier social height
than our middle classes. It proceeds from that segment of our bourgeoisie
which conceives itself to form an aristocracy. Since it accepts to the full
this pretention of Harvard and Beacon Hill, it has cut itself off from the
literary aid of satire, and if there is any argument implicit in the novels
