BOOKS
93
ideal; but he has not yielded his integrity of observation, he writes with
a power and freedom and realism such as no longer exists in the work: of
writers in capitalist countries.
The first issue of 1934 contains a criticism of James Joyce by Mirsky,
a revolutionary interpretation of Joyce, but not the facile application of
Marxian yardsticks such as our enemies accuse us of making. An article
by Kataev,
On the Threshold of Socialism,
takes up the problems of the
Soviet writer. It has that warmth of expression and imagery which is
present in all the critical writing that comes out of the Soviet Union, and
which revolutionary writing in this country still lacks. This warmth,
however, is not a mystic quality, peculiar to Soviet writers and inacces–
sible to us. But it can develop here only with the growth of the revolu–
tionary movement, because the factor that creates it is not so much the
writer as the audience. As yet, in this country, the revolutionary critic
lacks a major audience, and our writing is, therefore, still too intellectual
and formalistic, still lacking in the power of observation.
The article in num'her 3, by the Russian writer Stork, on
Calverton and
his Friends,
is the best-informed unscrambling of the Calverton-Eastman·
Trotsky melee to date. In number 4 we find John Strachey's
Fascism and
Culture.
Those who di·d not hear Mr. Strachey's address before the
John Reed Club of New York, or who gained an impression of the speech
only through the flip and superficial reviews of Mr. Strachey's book in
the newspapers and literary supplements, should go to this issue for the
original sources. One may not agree with all of Mr. Strachey's evaluation
of bourgeois writers and proletarian writers; but the analysis of the relation
between fascism and culture is a lucid and basic statement.
Much criticism has been launched against
International Literature
for
its Soviet orientation, and the preponderance of Soviet fiction and criticism.
Eugene Gordon and Robert Carr, American writers, are represented in the
fiction of the first four issues of 1934; and in the articles and criticism
there are
Early American Labor and Literature
by Alan Calmer, Philip
Rahv's
Marxist Criticism and Henry H azlitt,
and an article on Jack
Conroy by Anna Elistratova. I am not familiar with the policy of the
magazine on the question of national representation, but one can conjecture
that there is a statistical reason for this. The output of proletarian fiction
is naturally greater in the Soviet Union than in any other country, and
the stories are no doubt better on the average, because there is a more varied
and universal revolutionary exprience there.
GERTRUDE DIAMANT
