BOOKS
87
order his experience that the· reader will have the same response to it that
he had. In giving ourselves up imaginatively to a writer like Proust, then,
are we laying the basis for a counter-revolutionary "adjustment of at–
titude?" Proust's response to his experience was to try to find the under–
lying reality of it in a work: of art which explored all its associations and
sentiments. He regarded himself only as translator, or at times as a
Newton or Einstein of the inner cosmos. Richards' definition does not
hold in this case. Nor is our response "irrelevant to the class struggle"–
one of Eastman's few references to that conflict. Not only do we observe
the decadence of the life described, but we are even more aware of the
plain fact of Proust's own being, of the social premises of his neurosis,
the paralysis of action, the elephantiasis of self. But most important as
direct literary response is the overwhelming consciousness that this is a
terminal point, the end of one line of development, that only when the
whole set-up of which this work is a part is removed, can cultural life
go on.
There must be very little conscious falsification of experience in
Proust or Joyce. But in pursuit of intensity such writers are forced to
follow a logic of development consistent with their social attitude and
class
position, which leads to greater and greater tenuousness and irre–
levance, toward the intelligent meaninglessness (for us) of Sidney's
.lrcadia
or Calvinist theology. The pressure of class conflict mak:es it
constantly more difficult for writers who have not broken with the bour–
geoisie to keep on this narrow road, and they leave it. So when we come
in Eliot's
The Rock,
Pound's
Cantos,
MacLeish's
Frescoes,
to factitious
appeals to prejudice and hope, to solutions that are no solutions, to the
desertion of integrity and experience, and when we compare these with
the grounds on which proletarian writers are building, I think a sufficiently
clear picture of these things is formed so that nothing Max Eastman has
said so far about the necessary complete separation of art from ideas and
action and classes can very much disturb it.
0BED
BROOKS
TIME AND THOMAS WOLFE
OF TIME AND THE RIVER,
by Thomas W of/e. Scribners.
$3.00.
All
the things that were said about
Look Homeward, Angel
can be
said about this new novel by the stone-cutter's son. You remember: an
immense power of description, an unbridled torrent of primitive emotion
in the contemplation of the natural acts of men, a feeling for the land
that is as beautiful and overwhelming as the great nights of the autumn,
an elemental honest sensuousness, a fine humility in the face of the in–
calculable mysteries of art and song, a lust for understanding, for strength,
for freedom; and also huge tracts of lush and empty verbiage, a pervasive
absence of intellectual discipline, a tendency to symbolize and to exaggerate
