4
PARTISAN REVIEW
tionable things about Communists, Jews, etc. He breaks up his editorial
into short lines, calls it a
fresco,
and lo! we have a poem. His prejudices
are now "creative" art, A l\1arxist reviewer analyses a book in sober
prose that plunges into essentials, and he is "merely" a critic-uncreative,
dogmatic, abstract, the propounder of sterile formulas. The good critic
is one who uncritically ballyhoos the productions of his friends, and re–
writes the publishers' blurbs for people with inflated reputations.
But the dividing line between "creation" and "criticism" is not so
simple. I have just been reading Thomas Wolfe's
Of Time and the River.
It is an extraordinary novel, rich in narrative, observation and feeling,
resounding with strong rhetoric; yet it also contains a curious section de–
scribing that "dreary, gray and hopeless-looking Jew" named Abraham
Jones:
"Tho whole flag and banner of /lis race
was in the
enormous putty–
colored nose."
Abe changes his name to "Alfred," and the author roars
that the Jew has "taken
violently,
by
theft
and
rape"
this sacred Aryan
handle. The Jew does not merely grin: he grins "with Kike delight"–
radically different from any other kind of delight. And they say that
Communist writers abuse people and call them names
I
But this is a novel,
a work of "creative" art.
Kike
is a "poetic" adjective.
Do not think it clouts Abe Jones only. The great city swarms with
"the faces,
cruel,
arrogant and . knowing of the
beak-nosed
Jews." The
Hero, Eugene Gant, teaches English at a university; his class consists,
apparently, entirely of Jews; but no one is interested in the course except
Abe Jom·s, who smiles "wearily,
cruelly, contemptuously",-
and the "faith·
ful" Boris Gorewitz, who sits "very close, ah fragrantly,
odorously
close"
to his teacher, turning his
"cruel
grinning Yiddish face" to the Hero with
a "soft Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! of
contemptuous
laughter."
There are references to Jewish lawyers that make Theodore Dreiser
look like Theodore Herzl: "the hordes of
beak-nosed shysters,
poured out
of the law school year by year," who are "adept in every dodge of dis–
honorable trickery, in working every crooked wire"-not as lawyers, re–
gardless of race, color or creed, functioning in a social system based on
fraud, but as
Jewish
lawyers.
Abe-Alfred's spirit is "gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of
Yiddish
murk"-presumably different from the "nordic" murk that drives the
Hero across hundreds of pages shrieking where shall I go, what shall I
do, what is youth, what is love, what is life; getting drunk, going to the
whores, and beating up his friends until they are senseless.
And the Jewish women !-as "old as nature, and as ·round as the
earth: they had a curve in them: they had gone to the wailing walls of
death and love for
seven thousand years."
No less! The Jewish women
waited for our "faustian" hero a la Spengler "with rich yolky cries";
