42
PdRTISdN REVIEW
Bucks
Df Hemingway's cold acceptance of the world's unscrupulous
brutality. And yet one distils from these stories a quality lacking in these
other writers; a rich understanding of those who have never known money
or education that docs not withdraw into cynicism or
b~come
demoralized
in pathos. Farrell is young and capable of development. He has already
three novels to his credit but has never turned out a pot-boiler. Esthetically
his direction is towards the tight style of Hemingway, but he escapes
belonging to the hard-boiled school because he has already a deeper insight
into personality than Hemingway ever had. The finest stories in this
collection are not proletarian in any political or class-conscious sense.
The ScarecrO'w
is a study of a young girl who attempts to compensate
for the mistreatment of a mother and her own plainness by p-romiscuity.
And
lust Boys
gives the sensations of a guileless illiterate Negro seduced
by a white homosexual. No one except Gertrude Stein in her early days
and in a different technique has been able to bring the reader more pro–
foundly within the complex psychology of the bottom dog. To do this
at all is to do sympathetically. And this is a more essential preparation
for a proletarian novelist than the reading of radical literature. By happy
force of circmustances Farrell finds himself at the start in a strategic
position.
By contrast W ::tldo Frank, who has certainly written the best novel
on the list, is the victim of circumstance. The paradox for him is that he
became a novelist too early and a communist too late. It is the paradox
of Gide, who probably for this reason is drawn to Frank's novel. Life
forms the cast of a novelist's talent early, when he is peculiarly open to it
as experience; it permit3 him a certain amount of development, new experi–
ence running hand in hand with growing comprehension of its meaning.
But there comes the time when the esthetic accumulation of pa:>t meaning
tyrannizes, and either the philosophical or the cre<!tive development stops.
With Frank neither has yet resulted. But the philosophy, which has come
later, and sought to dominate an earlier experience, has been only partially
successful. Frank's technique as a novelist, his novelists's attitude toward
experience, was forming during the period before the war. It was like
Sherwood Anderson's: subjective, escapist, having more than a normal
weakness for the myst_ical, for unanalyzable depths that must be constantly
talked about, for peripheral reaches that one was always in Pateresque
fashion like some self-blinded octopus vainly grasping for. The radical
philosophy that has intruded later has given an edge to this self-examination
by forcing it to recognize in detail its relation to the external environment.
But unfortunately the only detail that Frank as an artist has been able
to realize concretely is that of the America of two or three decades ago,
dominated by a confused liberalism and harboring an anarchic unphiloso–
phical radicalism that was equally confused . Waldo Frank describes this
old America most vividly, but not with the dominating clarity of interpreta–
tion possible to our later moment in history, not with frank and simple
recognition of its confusion. Hence the criticism in radical journals that
the novel ends upon the wrong note is misleading, since the wrong note
