CRITICISM
31
It is quite aU right to like Proust and Eliot, and even to imitate them,
but I think one would recognize frankly the pastiche effect of attempts to
proletarianize them. It is true that in their best work they are critical of
modern society, but most great literature has been critical, and there is no
reason why the specific content of these men should influence the reader
more toward Marxism than Fascism or Distributivism. I do not think
a shot gun wedding to the correct line alters the case, and it is certainly
detrimental to literary effect. In accepting the slogan of identification
with the proletariat, writers have often arbitrarily extended bourgeois
culture to embrace all society. Empson, the English critic, thinking par–
ticularly of proletarian novels, has described this as very much like the Theo–
critan or pastoral tradition, the use of intellectualized and intellectual peas–
ants in periods of elaborate literary refinement. It shows how common this
attitude is, that it should be necessary for an American Marxist critic
to say that he would not recommend Proust to the average longshoreman.
Sensibility comes only after the assimilation and practise of ideas.
When men as a result of experience or willful penetration become com–
pletely aware of new relationships in experience, when Marxism is intuitive
and perceptive, sensibility will take care of itself, there will be no problem
of where it can be legitimately borrowed. We see promise of this in work
like Marx's
Eighteenth Brumaire,
Dimitroff's speeches, Cantwell's articles
on the San Francisco strike, Spender's poem
Vienna.
Although such sen–
sibility is qualitatively different from anything in bourgeois literature, it
does respond 'emotionally to other world views.
The ideas of race
and discipline in the mind of a Hitler youth have as real existence in
social struggles as the purposes of a Thyssen. . But a Marxist should have
sufficient imaginative and emotional integrity so that when he reproduces
the consciousness of a Carlyle, a Lawrence or Wyndham Lewis, he gives
them their own proper significance as living elements in a dialectic whole,
as a dramatist uses various characters. But this seems to me very different
from converting bits of Emerson and Eliot as if they were fixed values,
and attaching to them one's own message. Such adaptation is a necessary
stage in proletarian literature before a new sensibility emerges, and it cor–
rectly represents compromises and transitions in the poet's own mind, but
I think: a distinction should be recognized between this and Marxism
more fully realized.
