14
PARTISAN REVIEW
Who Perish, The Land of Plenty, The Last Pioneers,-the
poems of
Fearing, Hayes, Rolfe, Funaroff, Kreymborg, Schneider, Gessner.
2. Radicals "love money above the common." From an ascetic
idealist who has starved all his life for the salce of sublime and selfless
principles, this is a just accusation. Observe the vast fortunes paid to
editors and contributor;; by the
New Masses, New Theatre, Dynamo, Par–
tisan Review
as compared with the miserable little checks handed out by
The Mercury,
the
Baltimore Sun, Vanity Fair, Fortune
and the
Satevepost.
You will. find the proletarian writers wallowing in luxury while the con–
servative writers starve in Union Square. Or have it the other way: pro–
letarian writers love money but haven't got it; conservative writers have
money but do not
lo ve
it. vVho says the Marxists are vulgar materialists?
The literary reaction. And who discusses important ideas by referring
to money? Ditto.
3. The
New Masses
is "one of the dullest sheets ever heard of";
there "is no more gaiety in it than you will find in the proceedings of the
Lake Mohonk Conference." That is why the literati fell over each other
trying to discover the identity of the unusually humorous Robert For–
sythe, weekly
New Masses
contributor.
4. Many of the proletarian writers bear "distinguished albeit largely
bogus
Anglo-Saxon names."
Abe Jones has taken the name of "Alfred"
by ·viol, TZce, rape and theft/
Moreover, proletarian literature "seems to
be
a bad translation from the Yiddish"; it is writetn in "shaky English." Let
native, nordic one houndred percent Americans like Kenneth Fearing,
Josephine Herbst, Erskine Caldwell, Mericle! Le Sueur, Horace Gregory,
James Farrell, William Rollins, Henry Hart, Malcolm Cowley,John
Hermann, and Robert Cantwell speak for themselves. No Jew, unless
he utters the bourgeois shibboleths, will convince the anti-semite that he is
an American or that he can write English as well as Theodore Dreiser.
In poetry, as in politics, the reaction will continue to manipulate the false
image
Co'mmumst-alien-lew.
5. Most of the revolutionary writers "have failure written all over
them, and are engaged in saving the proletariat only as a surrogate for
doin~
something for themselves." Good examples of this profound ob–
servation are John Howard Lawson, Clifford Odets, John Wexley, John
Dos Passos, Samuel Ornitz, Langston Hughes, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo
Frank and Robert Forsythe. The Baltimore Sage finds that "the so–
called critics of the so-called revolution are even more plainly inferiorities.
Nearly all began on higher levels, trying to do something for themselves."
Noteworthy among these self-seekers are Joshua Kunitz. Oakley Johnson
and Granville Hicks, all fired from university posts, despite their excellent
academic standing, for practicing the "liberation of the lowly."
