BOOKS
has been struck all
~long.
The hero, after working in the stockyards and
livin~
with a Negro family, returns to his wealth and his respectability, to
his wife and her catholicism, fundamentally because the1·c did not yet
exist and he has not therefore been able to find in this new environment
any crystallizing point of view to give it meaning and free him from con–
tinuing to idealize his own confusion. He realizes that his wife's catholic–
ism has no congruity with existing social patterns, but is only an appearance
of order, a useful sublimation for her of her own sense of being adrift.
But he does not realize that his return to her in her prosperous surround–
ings and the awakening of old ·attachments may lay him open to the very
sublimation one part of his personality has been seeking strange aid to
avoid. He has attained, it is true, a moment when he has been com–
pletely and without reservation of the working class. But it has been an
experience such as Tolstoi may have had, and as such an imperfect ex–
perience because it has been of a working class that by not yet sensing
its potentialities have not yet attained its integrity. But even if it had been
a really integrating experience, it would have been insufficient because it
has been achieved only at the end of the novel and has nut had a chance
to repeat itself over a period of time. .Frank and his hero probably believe
with the mystics that a moment of spiritual union is a permanent conver–
sion. But not simply the Marxian philosophy, the very technique of h1s
novel, the analytical method, insists that such moments, to be real and
useful, must become habitual.
It
it not, then, as a proletarian novel that
The Death and Birth
o,
David l'vfar.kand
is significant. The communist and proletarian must have
his doubts whether David has been really reborn and must desire the
further evidence of a sequel. The tremendous value of the novel is that it
so thoroughiy exposes the thorny road the bourgeois intellectual must
follow if he is to become 'class-conscious of the proletariat.' The proletarian
is rightly suspicious of his bourgeois allies. But his suspicion proceeds in
a sense from the spontaneous protective provincialism of his own class. He
would be hard pressed to articulate his reasons. They are here in Frank
abundantly exposed. The bourgeois ally who is not brought mto sympathy
by being exposed to the same economic and physical environment through
necessity, becomes drawn to the proletariat because he already possesses
~ome
attitude wh:ch is not normal to the ordinary bourgeois environment.
Some, like Strachey, see so clearly the neat application of Marxian philo–
sophy to the problems of modern life that they cannot resist its adoption.
For others, some lurking hatred of their class, its Puritanism, its money–
grubbing, its complete ignorance of art, finds in the social ideal of com–
munism the definition of human life at its richest. But all of these cases
are exceptional and they are all suspicious, for they do m.t reach down
into the very basic demands of existence.
It
is not even enough for a
bourgeois to lose his money. It is natural for him then to become a fascist.
If
he is to become an ally of the working class, the experience of Markand
shows, it is only through the most arduous and gradual re-orientation of his
interests and his personality toward a new basis; and fundamental to this
