A
Letter
on Proletarian
Literature
NEWTON ARVIN
To the Editors:
MY apologies to you; I find that, in the time limits y;ou
have set for me (geIlerous as they are) I can't write a
review of the proletarian anthology- that deserves the name
of a review. At the best I don't believe anyone ever finds
it easy to say something quickly and glibly about any book
except a palpably trashy one; surely the most unassuming
kind of criticism, like the more representational
sorts of
writing, calls for a certain interval between chewing and
real assimilation; and the richer the feast, the more varied
the courses, the truer this seems to be. This anthology is
a big meal and an unusually hearty one, and for the moment
you may be willing to excuse a reviewer for responding
with hardly more than a deep belch of the sincerest approba-
tion.
I say this with what may appear to be light-mindedness,
but you probably realize that that is far from my intention.
On the contrary, though I don't wish to sentiqlentalize,
I
slJspect you agree with me that a reviewer's job, like any
other writer's, is the more arduous the more his feelings are
involved, the more his memories are stirred, and the more
his hopes and fears are called int~ question. Well, those con-
ditions could hardly be more fully met than when an Amer-
ican literary student, with a long anonymous petit-bourgeois
background and leftward sympathies, is asked to comment
on the proletarian anthology. It's far from being one more
"publishing event" that he is required to say a word about.
It's a many-voiced expression of the America of his own
time; an expression of the near and tragic life of his own
people, if not generally of his own class; of their failures,
their bitterness, their anger, their resolution; their abortive
past, their current ordeal, their potentially humane and
communal future. These writers are not recording old, un-
happy, far-off things and battles long ago: if they were, they
would be relatively much easier to talk about in an academic
and analytical manner, and the process of metabolism would
be a shorter one. But the ravaged landscapes in these stories
and poems are the ravaged landscapes of one's own child-
hood; the tortured cities are one's own cities; and the prime-
val brutalities,
the hardly human (yet intensely human)
sufferings these writers represent are the brutalities and suf-
ferings one may have escaped literally but in no other sense.
All this, it seems to me obvious, makes the critic's job--
- Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology.
International
Publishers..
12
part of which is to say what is all wool and what isn't-
a good deal harder here than it sometimes is. Then, too,
there is the more strictly literary trammel that somewhat
clogs the free play of discrimination:
I mean, the fact that
all these writers are doing or trying to do what one has long
hoped American writers would see it was their great chance
to do; hoped it for a long time, even if
too
long in an ill-
defined way. The Emerson who had called for an American
bard of the type he described in "The Poet" could hardly
have been coldly judicious when Whitman sent him a copy
of
Leaves of Grass,'
and, without suggesting any fatuous
parallel, no one can" at once be coldly judicious about a book
like this who has ever hoped that American poets and prose
writers would turn away from nostalgic escapades and barren
satire to the dramatization of our own history as it is really
making; the dramatization of life under capitalism in its
ugly but grandiose decline. There can't be any doubt that
this book announces unmistakably a new and, now, a healthy
chapter in American literature at the same time that it shows
how an old promise, an old potentiality present in our cul-
ture from the beginning, is going to be fulfilled and made
a reality. So I say it is a little difficult to fiddle with the
critical scales in the usual painstaking way.
The anthology is so full of hot life that I should think
even the newspaper critics would have been uncomfortable
in the same room with it. But I don't deny that if, even
in the first enthusiasm of ~eading it, one glances from time
to time at one's literary thermometer,
one will appreciate
that different degrees of creative heat and cold are achieved
in it. This seems to be partly a matter of the mere form of
expression; of the readiness with which certain forms lend
themselves to the direct rendering of social observations and
feelings, and the stiffer resistance of other forms. The pieces
in the section on reportage, for example, are surely the most
successful, on their own terms, of all the things in the book;
so that it is hard to see how John Mullen's "Mushrooms
in the Foundry," or Meridel Le Sueur's "I was Marching,"
or John Spivak's "Letter to President Roosevelt" could say
what they aim to say any more brilliantly than they do. At
the opposite pole, the critics give the strong impression of
working in a medium that has not yet been made plastic
to their new purposes; and the poets seem to have only fewer
hurdles to get over. The critics come nearest to writing
critical
literature
when, like Michael Gold in his classic
tirade against Thornton Wilder, they let their analytical or
judicial functions interfere least self-consciously with their
perceptions and emotions; and of course that tirade never
pretended to be criticism in its most finished form.
As for the poets, they seem to utter themselves most fully
if not most interestingly when, like the reporters, they speak
straight out of the daily struggle and content themselves
with voicing it ingenuously and spontaneously;
so that it is
tempting, if not quite sincere, to say that the best of the
poetry is in the pieces from Gellert's "Negro Songs," in Don
West's unaffected stanzas, in H. H. Lewis's "I'll Say," or
Langston Hughes's ballads. It wouldn't
be either sincere
or true to say this, for "naive" poetry-to use Schiller's
distinction-is
less expressive of the whole modern person-
ality than "sentimental" poetry; and it would certainly be
FEBRUARY,
1936
