To the Left:
To the Subsoil*
CARL VAN DOREN
MUCH of the best American literature has always inclined
toward the left. This is something we sometimes forget.
Reading older American writers now, we fail to realize how
often they were logically or emotionally revolutionary in
their times. For that matter, the most conservative
01'-
~anization in the United States calls itself the Daughters of
the American Revolution.
Emerson was in a true sense revolutionary, and on almost
every point of opinion he went creatively beyond what most
of his contemporaries believed in: in theology and in phi-
losophy, and as to the whole end and meaning of American
life. Thoreau was an anarchist. 1fe insisted on not being
drawn into the numbing influence of cheerful, thoughtless
majorities. He proposed to live in his own way and so find
out what life at large was about. Whitman, taking liberty
and equality for granted, made himself the prophet and poet
of fraternity, which he thought the earlier revolution had
not sufficiently achieved. Mark Twain, raising the old tall
stories of the West to a form of literary art, grew more and
more passionate in 'his feeling against imperialism, war, dic-
tatorships, greed, baseness, complacency. He was the first of
our realists who greatly enlarged the number of subjects
with which American literature might deal.
This enlarging process has continued increasingly in the
present century. Theodore Dreiser reached down for his
subject to a neglected subsoil of American life. All literature
is like agriculture in that it constantly looks for ways of
getting at the subsoil from which strength comes. Dreiser
realized that there was a whole world of men and women
who had never been written about. Before Dreiser the lives
of such people had not been thought proper subjects for fic-
tion in America. Dreiser made it plain that there is no sub-
ject which is not proper for fiction. What matters is the
mastery a writer has over his subject and the power he has
to make it real or revealing to his readers.
Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis, dur-
ing the war and just after it, again did something new and,
in a literary sense, revolutionary. Masters set a whole school
of writers to work proving that the old-fashioned American
village was not, as it had been usually represented, merely
simple and charming. What Masters did in verse Sinclair
Lewis did in prose. They both dug into the basic common
life of the United States and reinterpreted it.
In our own time, particularly since the cataclysm of 1929,
this process has' been steadily extended. Poets, playwrights
• From an address delivered at a dinner given by the Book
Union, new left-wing book club.
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
and novelists go on reaching to the American subsoil for
materials for American literature. They concern themselves
with the lives of men working in factories and mines, with
starving and drifting sharecroppers, with the dispossessed,
the underprivileged, the unemployed. It is hard to remem-
ber how little attention had been paid to this large part of
the American population by American writers before the
past half dozen years. If it had not been for the depression,
possibly Darkest America might have been overlooked by
literature. But" it has grown until it can not be overlooked.
Consequently writers of generous emotions, of quick and
lively sympathies, have turned to it for their materials, and
many of the best poems, plays and novels of the time deal
with a powerful new theme.
The process is the process which has been going
011
in
American literature from the beginning. I do not mean to
deny originality to our newest literature. After all, liter-
'ature is seldom very original, any more than life is. One
baby is much like another. But babies keep on being born
and becoming new creatures and leading new lives. So with
tlooks. The books which are most aliVe in our age are like
the books which have been most alive in the past American
ages. When they first appear they encounter resistance from
readers. Readers have read other and older books and have
accepted the other and older ideas and forms of expression.
Such readers seem to think that in literature the last word
has been said. The last word will never be said until some
one says that human life has ended. Even' then there will
have to be somebody left to say it. And that somebody maY'
change his mind. Since while life lasts no last words can be
said, new words have to be spoken as new life rises to the
consciousness of men.
Where?
I'd like to go at least a thousand miles from here,
To N'ew Orleans, to the South of France,
To Haiti, to java, to Montevideo, to Waikiki,
To the night-islands lit by the Southern Cross,
Fanned by the Trades and owned by the Powers;
To any place where there's sun and wind and beaches,
To any city or coast or mountain or island,
Valley or plain where the class struggle doesn't
Tick out the long hours of the clock,
Where free breadfruit rolls onto the kitchen stove:
I'd like to find this place, I and the rest of us,
Where depressions don't play tag with war,
And champaigne cocktails come trickling down the rocks,
And the girls never think of your bank-account;
I'd like to go where no dog eats dog,
Where the big fish doesn't swallow the little fish,
Where you don't have to talce it and smile,
And no one's work is bought or sold by any other man-
Take out the atlas, get the microscope; show me where.
JAMES NEUGASS
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