16
PARTISAN REVIEW
lifeless, unimaginative, mechanical rewriting of Party theses neither art
nor .revolutionary; that we judge the writer
artistically
as well as poli–
tically.
There, in fact, lies the crux of the matter. The sincere writer who
feels discomfort in the presence of Marxist thought believes he is defending
boundless experience
against inflexible logical formulas which narrow ex–
perience. But the truth is that such a writer mistakes the circumscribed
experience of the middle class for the whole of life. He thinks that the
critical picture which the revolutionary writer gives of bourgeois life is
a distortion; he believes that the experience of workers and farmers is an
invention
twisted to fit into preconceived formulas. Proletarian life is
strange and unreal to him; bourgeois life seems eternal, natural, alone real.
But neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian writer creates out of
a vacuum. At the moment when the creative writer sits at his desk and
composes his verses or his novel or. his play, he may have the illmion that
he is writing his ·Work for its own sake, out of profound, unfathomable
emotion. But without his past life, without his class education, prejudices
and experiences, that particular work would be impossible
Memory, the Greeks said, is the mother of the muses; and memory
feeds not on the general, abstract idea of absolute disembodied experience,
but on our action, education and knowledge in our specific social milieu.
Th~
writer creates out of an imagination colored, in part, by
ideas,
which
he has picked up from the university or factory, from books, from peopk
Experience without ideas which interpret and color that experience is un–
thinkable in an advanced society like ours. When the writer does not
accept Marxist ideas, he accept bourgeois ideas. Such ideas may
be
uncon–
scious; the writer may think he writes
only
out of "imagination" and "emo–
tion"; he may fancy himself free of all "preconceptions" and "formulas."
But this illusion does not alter the facts. The "preconception" is there-and
we get an Abe Jones or a fresco for Rockefeller City.
Art varies with experience; its so-called sanctions vary with experi–
ence. The experience of the mass of humanity today is such that social
and political themes are more interesting, more significant, more "normal"
than the personal themes of the previous decade. Social themes today
correspond to the general experience of men, acutely conscious of the violent
and basic transformations through which they are living, and which they
are helping to bring about. Intellectuals sympathetic to the struggles of
the working class (what Mr. Mencken
urbanely
calls "the woes of the
Chandala") are themselves victims of the general social-economic crisis.
It does not require much imagination to see why they are more interested
today in unemployment, strikes, the fight against war and fascism, revolu-
