REVOLUTION AND THE INDIVIDUAL WRITER
57
"publicity" men, men like Ivy Lee, had to spring out of nowhere. Men
had to be told what to write and how to write. A large organization had
to
be built up out of nothing; it was a start from scratch, from the very
bottom. The antiquated order gave way-the rotted fabric of whatever
was
called journalism in old Russia went under, and new men, writers
with a technic not un-American, came into being. These men were
measured by standards of journalism, and had no pretentions of being
more than what they were, nor less than what they were. But one can't
judge their work by the same standards used for Gorky or Tolstoy or
Mayakovsky.
Let me repeat that again there is a difference in
kind,·
the logic of a
news story is quite different from that of a poem or a play or a novel.
The standard is not higher or lower, but
•different.
If
a reporter is sent
out to get a story about John D. Rockefeller and returns with a story on
].
P. Morgan, no matter how wdl written the copy may be, the reporter
deserves to be fired. He is not obeying orders from his city editor; he has
violated one of the terms of his medium; and an inferior piece of prose
as prose would be acceptable.
There is no such clear distinction being made between the function
of journalism and novels, plays and poetry in
The New Masses.
It is
forgotten that in America, in New York, one can find many -examples of
able journalism and that the business of training men to write good jour–
nalistic copy is relatively easy. The expert journalist, however, is always
rare; but no matter how rare he may be his function differs sharply from
that of the novelist or p0et.
Since this
distiuL.~or.
has never been made
(I
remember a long line
of novels from
Generals Die In Bed
to
Parched Earth
all regarded as
"literature" and not as fulfilling the offices of journalism which was their
function in varying degrees) confusion in the status of a writer is still
evident. Edwin Seaver's essay on Hery Roth's novel has done much
toward clarifying a cloudy issue. Mr. Seaver is in a position to realize
the problem from several point of view since he himself has written a
sensitive novel and a few fine poems and has done much writing that is in
the form of journalism.
I feel that this differentiation is not clear to Miss LeSueur, that she
feels that she is now employed at an inferior kind of writing and that some
lind of "sacrifice" is demanded of whatever talent she possesses. I have
but to refer her to Edwin Rolfe's essay in this issue. I happen to
know that Rolfe has been at work in various kinds of political activity
but it has not prevented him from becoming a poet. Nor has such
activity prevented Murid Rukeyser from writing poetry; and I would
say that an entire group of poets in England have been stimulated by the
