MASK, IMAGE AND TRUTH
11
agents of France; the Russian reaction said they were paid agents of the
Kaiser; the American reaction says they are paid agents of Stalin. Every–
where the reaction paints Communism as an alien movement.
It
uses the
power of darlc, ugly, chauvinist hatred against the organized class-conscious
proletariat. And everywhere the reaction says that Communism is a Jewish
movement. It directs the darlc, ugly hatred against the Jew, as old as
western Europe, against the organized, class-conscious proletariat, which
is predominantly gentile. This was the technique of Hitler. The image
Communist-alien-lew
is the fascist image which identifies the "reprehen–
sible" part with the "hateful" whole, which evokes foul, primitive, mur–
derous passions against alien and Jew in order to strike at the proletarian
movement.
Now the poet who symbolizes the Communist by an East Side accent
may not have Hitler's intentions. In that case he is a bad poet. He has
defeated his own ends. He has conveyed a lie when he wanted to convey
the truth.
Lenin and Proust
I happened to have picked on the distorted image of the Jew because
it has cropped up so persistently in recent American literature. But it is
only an example of my thesis, not its core. What is true in this instance
is true in general: the poet defeats his own ends when he uses the accidental
as
an image for the essential, or mistakes the part for tie whole, or as–
sumes unity where there is profound difference and conflict. One does
not have to be a creative writer, a poet, a genius to understand this.
A
good newspaper correspondent knows that you cannot convey a true picture
of a country or region by confining yourself to immediate, accidental im–
pressions. It may be that the people in your hotel- broken remnants of
the old regime-one and all curse Soviet life; but if you cable their com–
ments without
saying
that they are broken remnants of the old regime, a
negligible and hostile handful,. if you conclude that they speak for the
Russian p·eople as a whole, you are falsifying reality.
If
you do not travel
and meet workers, peasants, engineers, economists, school-teachers, etc. in
various parts of the country, if you do not acquaint yourself with the past
of the old RuSllia and the aims of the new one, if you do not measure and
compare and analyze and reassemble the contradictory fragments into
tsuntials,
you will never understand Soviet life. That is why the poet
E.
E. Cummings, turning reporter, gave us such a distorted picture in
Eimi.
The marginal people in the fringe of Soviet life accidentally encountered
on a brief holiday, became for him the image of a vast land, and his own
terror and confusion in the face of something new and powerful became the
"soul" of 160,000,000 people.
