12
PARTISAN REVIEW
The opposite is also true. The average bourgeois correspondent comes
to Mexico laden with exotic presuppositions, the scion of a "superior" race
in a colonial country. He notes and describes the brilliant landscape, the
serapes, the tequila, the jarabe, the frescos at the. National Palace, the
bull-fights, the parading army, the village fiestas, the Aztec legends; he
ignores or misunderstands the life of the workers and peasants, the agrarian
and labor movements, the daily struggle of the peon against the landowner,
of the worker against his native and foreign exploiter. The image of
Mexico which he conveys to his reader is a distortion of the truth; and
though he is "merely" a reporter, he is no different from the average
"creative" artist and writer who ventures south of the Rio Grande. Con–
sider the
final
effect produced by Upton Sinclair's
Thunder Over Me:A:ico.
There is an amazing amount of nonsense about "creative" writing,
anyway. Lenin's writing is a thousand times more creative than Proust's;
Ten Days that Shook the World
is more creative than a lot of fiction pub–
lished today. Anyone who doesn't understand this, doesn't know what
creative means. The men; use of such forms as verse, the play or the novel
does not in
itself
make a writer "creative." There is not a good poet alive
who would not rather have written a single essay by Walter Pater than
all the verse of Edgar Guest, or Milton's political pamphlets rather than
Sam Shipman's plays.
Differences in form are important. We must not fall into the illusion
which speaks both of Shakespeare and Schopcnhauer as "poetry" because
either may arouse emotion. But that aura which a man acquires by doing
"creative" work is certainly not to be won by mere
external form.
Imagi–
nation, perception, insight, intensity, truth and adequate
intrinsic
form are
some of the things required. Effect upon the audience is also important.
The audience may be wrong; writers have often been rejected who turned
out to be geniuses; but just as often the diamond-studded belt has been
handed to the palooka.
If
the critic may be mistaken, so may the poet.
Each must say his say and take the consequences; and in an era like ours,
when basic values are being transvalued, the poet is often critical and the
critic creative.
Lenin pointed out that Tolstoy was an "artist of genius" who gave
an "incomparable picture of Russian life" and contributed great works to
the literature of the world. But Tolstoy was also "a landlord playing the
fool in Christ ... a worn-out hysterical mud-wallower called the Russian
intellectual." Tolstoy on the one hand relentlessly criticised capitalist
exploitation, exposed government violence, lashed the comedy of the courts
and government administration, revealed the gulf between growing wealth
and growing poverty, the achievements of civilization alongside the bar–
barism and suffering among the masses. At the same time he advocated
