BOOKS
63
Erskine Caldwell is still coasting along in that easy manner which he
had mastered when his first book,
American Earth,
appeared. I say "man–
ner" advisedly; it is not a style. Unless.he applies himself more painstaking–
ly to his art, unless he attempts larger themes, he may never fulfill any of
his early promise, but end in a literary grave next to another American
writer whom in many ways he resembles, Bret Harte. Harte also emerged
once with a new and racy talent, with a gift for portraying the people of
a strange locale; but he played the same tune on the same guitar over and
over again. His works are almost completely forgotten today.
Caldwell seems to be following too closely this fatal line of least resis–
tance. It is about time he discarded the meaningless guitar for a
sturdier, more intricate and more developed instrument; time that he at–
tempted to study new themes. He may fail at first. But such a failure
will be preferable to the stagnation which threatens him.
EDWIN
RoLFE
THE LOWER DEPTHS
SOMEBODY IN BOOTS,
by Nelson Algren. Vanguard Press.
$2.50.
This is the first novel of a young writer whose literary efforts
originated and took on definite shape inside the revolutionary movement.
As such, this novel merits the particular attention of our critics, as it is
among the first fruit of a literature nurtured and reared on Marxist
thought and direction. Unfortunately, those who do the sowing don't
always show up for the harvest: to be ignored or captiously disparaged
by the gadfly-reviewers of the bourgeois newspapers and periodicals is
often the price of revolutionary integrity, but when our own criticism
reacts with scant interest to a work as powerful as this, it argues a one–
sided awareness of literary currents, a concentration on some schools and
groups of· writers to the exclusion of all others. So far as I know,
Some–
body in Boots
received but two meager reviews in the revolutionary press;
and one of the reviews (in the
Daily Worker)
was supercilious in tone
and, to my mind, wide off the mark in its estimate of the book.
Stories and novels dealing with the jungle-lives of the hobo world–
lives pulverized by hunger and homelessness-are by no means rare in
American fiction. Many of these books, however, have been mere ex–
ploitations of gruesome material, attempts to cash in on the horrible by
turning it into an emotional aphrodisiac for sated readers. Hence the
cruel buffooneries on the theme of the subhuman that every so often hit the
circulating libraries.
Somebody in Boots
differs from these firecrackers
in that it is the first Marxist portrayal of box-car men and their ways.
Here we find no reportorial piling up of explosive scenes, but a careful
shaping and recreation of experience mounting to an exact social correla–
tion. The life of the lumpen-proletariat, which this novel vivifies in valid
images of action and character, is seen realistically as a life that prepares
it "far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue," as Marx
put it, than for active resistance to oppression. Such is the role of this
