an inverted snobbishness to prefer "I'll Say", good as It IS,
to Kenneth Fearing's almost perfect "Lullaby," or to Edwin
Rolfe's imperfect but very moving "Poem for May First,"
or to James Neugass's "Thalassa,
Thalassa." Just the same,
such poets as these, and Schneider, and Hayes, and Patchen,
and several others whose gifts are unquestionable,
still show
signs of battling with obstacles to full expression that the
reporters and the naive poets haven't needed to worry about.
It is of course-it
must be-an endlessly difficult job for
a revolutionary poet to avoid bareness, prosaic literalness and
even doggerel, and at the same time to break away from the
excessive indirectness and allusiveness of the poets who have
just preceded him in American, poetry. I can't honestly say
that I think Stanley Burnshaw's "I, Jim Rogers" or Michael
Gold's "Worker Correspondence" or Alfred Kreymborg's
"American Jeremiad" succeeds in steering off the first rock,
or that Muriel Rukeyser's "City of Monuments" or Robert
Gessner's "Cross of Flame" wholly avoids the second. It is
naturally an exacting matter of finding the images that will
really transmit the whole emotion without either stepping
it up artificially or short-circuiting it with an abortive flash.
For whatever a mere list may be worth, I think the obstacles
have been surprisingly overcome in the three poems I men-
tioned above; in Gold's "Strange Funeral," in Gregory's
"Dempsey, Dempsey," in Kalar's "Papermill," in Patchen's
"Joe Hill Listens to the Praying," in Schneider's fine "To
the Museums," in Genevieve Taggard's "Life of the Mind,
1935,"
in David Wolff's "August
22, 1927,"
and in Richard
Wright's "Between the World and Me."
Neither the writers of fiction nor the playwrights seem
to face quite such stubborn artistic problems, and inde~d
when one sees or reads such pieces as
Waiting for Lefty
Or the scenes from
Black Pit
and
Steved()re
one feels that
the writers for the theatre have almost as genial a medium
for proletarian writing as the reporters.
They are forced
back upon living speech and "real" action, of course, and
when they have a prodigal endowment for the writing of
dialogue, as Clifford Odets has, or a fine sense of what
movement on the stage can be made to signify, as Peters and
Sklar seem to have (I must judge from reading), or a rich
and warm feeling for personality in moments of crisis, as
both Albert Maltz's story ("Man on a Road") and the
scene from
Black Pit
prove he has, they carry the reader
away with them almost as irresistibly as the spectator.
I
don't include John Wexley's scene from
They Shall Not Die,
for the moment, for perhaps no good reason; my first thought
is only that, strong a~ it is, it lacks the inevitable truth and
eloquence of language, of speech, that carry conviction to
the mere reader outside the theatre.
As for the fiction, it seems to me it would be critical pe-
dantry 'to hem and haw very long over a selection that in-
cludes such sound and affecting pieces of writing as Robert
Cantwell's "Hills around Centralia," Ben Field's "Cow,"
Halper's "Scab!" and the passages from,
Jews without
Money, The Disinherited,
The Executioner Waits,
and
To
Male My Bread.
Aside from
Jews Without Money,
which
on its own premises left little to be desired, no one of these
longer books embodies the utmost of which one hasn't the
leut
doubt their authors are capable: it can't be pretended
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
that there is yet an American
Germinal.
But these are the
books that forecast its app'earance with .an almost scientific
finality; and, though I myself should have preferred a pas-
sage from the earlier chapters of Grace Lumpkin's book,
that is a small matter, and the point is that these books had
to be represented somehow.
A Calvinistically conscientious reviewer might be easily
embarrassed by the fact that there is no piece of fiction re-
printed in this anthology which hasn't SOnie .-ce or sharp-
ness of its own. But if I haven't spoken spewically of Far-
rell's "The Buddies," Tillie Lerner's "The Iron Throat,"
Edwin Seaver's "Aarons," or the passage from William
Rollins's
The Shadow Before,
it is because I think Tillie
Lerner's story and Rollins's novel have less sharpness thao
they ought to have, and Farrell's and Seaver's stories, less
force. It
has
been a serious limitation of some proletarian
writers of fiction, hitherto, that they have been either too
much preoccupied with their materials or (possibly) in some
cases too much cowed by the example of the hard-boiled
writers, to let all the beauty or humor or cruelty of their
human materials come out as freely and unreflectingly as
they certainly might and should; they have been afraid of
tenderness, or expansiveness, or the appropriate vehemence;
and a good deal of proletarian fiction has been meagre, dry
and toneless as a result. This particular story of Farrell's
is a case in point, though
T he Young
11,1
anhood of Studs
Lanigan
as a whole certainly isn't; and I am sorry not to
know whether the whole of
The Company
is stylistically
richer than the passage quoted here: this passage, for that
matter, has a spare irony that needs no apology. Tillie Ler-
ner's story and Rollins's novel have all the vehemence they
can stand: what they have in lesser degree is simplicity and
precision of form; the simplicity and precision that come
from a full confidence in the material itself, a sense of how
much can be done and how much can't, and a determination
to be (at the end of the arduous process) utterly natural.
Michael Gold, Robert Cantwell
and Albert Maltz have
shown that a proletarian writer can be free, warm, precise
and natural at once: it can't be too much to ask!
I wish I could say that any of the criticism, or any critic-
ism that has been written in a Marxist spirit here, is any-
thing like so completely fledged as this; on the other hand,
anyone who has tried to write in that spirit has a pretty good
idea what the difficulties are, and is in a position to ap-
preciate what these writers have accomplished. As I see it,
one of the troubles is that too few of the critical writers
on the left have quite realized what a rich and interesting'
form of expression criticism can be, or how truly it can
give voice to just as many kinds of thought and feeling as,
in a wholly dissimilar vein, poetry and fiction do. There is
no reason under the sun why it has to be drily expository
or prosaically analytical, or why it can only be written from
the eyebrows up. Yet that is what too much of it is like.
One can agree wholeheartedly with the point that Phillips
and Rahv are making in their essay, and still wish that they
could make it in a less scholastic manner. One can feel that
what Granville Hicks has done, in the essay here reprinted
and in so many other places, is simply invaluable to the
American movement;
and still wish that when he writes
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