re-orientation is the ·reciprocal act1v1ty of progressing towards a new
philosophical consistency at the very time one is becoming part of the actual
daily life of a class-conscious proletariat. .For the bourgeois turned com–
munist is gaining something at the price of upsetting all that he already
has; whereas the bourgeois turned fascist is only trying to salvage with
hate some fragment ot a once more generous total. ·waldo .Frank has
revealed this far-reaching psychological upheaval attendant upon a real
shift from one class to another against the tide of bourgeois belief. Where
his treatment is misleading is that he has put his action at a period when
to make such a shift was least possible and most abnormal. For since the
war the intellectual has had the aid, not to be belittled, because it is of
the very ground-work of belief, that he is not alone in this transfer of his
allegiance.
I am aware that my statements are somewhat unjust to a novel which,
far from having a dull page, can scarcely be said to have an insignificant
one. It brings the bourgeois reader with all his burden of superstructural
necessities and demands for the· first time in American fiction into a living
experience of the misery and the grandeur of the proletariat. And it does
this through the dialectic reaction of subjective and objective, through
the spectacle of the more or less formed bourgeois personality meetmg and
being transformed by the outer impingement of vital proletarian life. But
it should also be repeated that this meeting has taken place at an historical
moment when the outcome could be neither definite nor satisfact<;>ry for
either dialectic opponent.
