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PARTISAN REVIEW
becoming doctrinaire, of losing touch not merely with writers but also
with readers, of handing down from some mist-veiled mountaintop mean–
ingless decalogs. For the revolutionary critic this is fatal. And there can
be no remedy but actual participation in revolutionary activity.
There are yet other problems that deserve discussion. I do not hold
so low an opinion of current Marxist criticism as do Rahv and Phelps,
but I am conscious of innumerable defects, which I should lik:e to see
remedied. The development of an adequate resthetics would undoubtedly
contribute to the improvement of critical writing, but much else is also
necessary.
Obed Brooks:
I was interested to see Alfred Hayes' poem
The Port of New York
cited in this discussion, because it struck me when I first read it as a fairly
crucial example of one kind of proletarian literature, and a k:ind that is
not unlike the Marxian criticism which Wallace Phelps and Philip Rahv
deprecate in the first sections of their article. \Vith remarkable mimetic
talent Hayes reproduces the specific content (I retain the terminology of
this article) of Crane's poetry, echoes the phrases and observations a sen–
sitive reader finds memorable. He mak:es his a proletarian poem, however,
merely by opposing Crane's ideology in the closing lines, by saying of
Columbia, "her myth is done." This is no doubt a just observation, but it
is not the resultant of our reading the rest of the poem. It has no poetic
validity; it is an added judgment coming from other experience not repre–
sented in the poem. Hayes is not using· borrowed elements dramatically,
as Eliot does, to express quite different feelings of his own; he is using
them partly for their merits, partly as certificates of his own right to
criticize. He feels what Crane felt, but he thinks something should be
added.
That this is a conscious method a quotation from a review by Hayes
of a book of short stories seems to show: "With the exception of Heming–
way's 'The Gambler, Nun and Radio', the stories do not answer important
questions." Here I agree with Rahv and Phelps that it is not primarily the
business of literature to answer· questions. When it is complementary to
economic and political influences, a "profound" rendering of even limited
portions of contemporary experience will help to fix a reader's attitude,
will make him feel that only certain kinds of social action are any longer
effective or tolerable. But I believe Rahv and Phelps identify profundity
with Marxism, not Marxism sloganized, but Marxism assimilated, a de–
terminant of perception. That is why I do not agree with what they say
about Hayes and Crane and Eliot.
