and talkin'." It is this primal materialism that gives
Bury the Dead
its pathos and human lore. In Shaw,
Eliot would probably recognize an articulate mem-
ber of that school of happiness and progress which
to him are synonymous with deterioration.
Yet how
drowsy and feeble Eliot looks in the strong light of
the dead's impetuous will to life. It is not, of course,
as two writers that I am comparing Eliot to Shaw,
but as the mouthpieces of two antithetical
tradi-
tions: and it is the voice of Europe as we have come
to know it since the Renaissance that speaks in
Shaw's play. Elizabethan tragedy echoes with the
cry, "What a piece of work is man
I";
and it is out
of that same humanist impulsion, which makes pos-
sible a tragic attitude, that the revolutionary writer
creates. But the Christian and tragic attitudes are
mutually exclusive. Eliot has cut himself off from the
tradition of humanism.
His heaven is antipodal
to
ours, and though his art is a crooked mirror, we can
nevertheless trace the pattern of our salvation,
al-
beit distorted,
in the perdition it records. For in a
world of warring classes that perdition is the com-
plement to our salvation.
Bury the Dead
has been acclaimed as the best
anti-war play written in America.
It has faults of
structure and failures of feeling, but is is undoubt-
edly that. It seems to me that this is so because the
play goes beyond its immediate subject, giving us a
sense of experience on manifold planes of living, in
the human meanings and universal impulses that any
political situation involves. Under the influence of
vulgar criticism, most revolutionary plays move sole-
ly in the cramped boundaries of the political and
economic issues serving as their direct impetus. That
constricts their possibilities as drama.
In someone
else's hands Shaw's device of the dead soldiers com-
ing to life would have become merely another occa-
sion for speeches. For just as some philistine once
defined French literature as a long talk to the ladies,
so our newest philistines,
if they take what they
write seriously, would define revolutionary literature
as a long speech to the masses.
I have praised Eliot's poetry; and I believe that
its example cannot be ignored by the young revolu-
tionary poets. Precisely as an example of achieve-
ment we should see it, rather than as· an influence
on the actual texture of revolutionary verse. It is a
poetry various and complex. It has an historic sense,
both of language and of events; it summarizes cen-
turies of experiment and discovery; above all, it is
precise, contemporary,
sustained by a sensibility able
to transform thought and feeling into each other and
combine them in simultaneous expression. Our poets
cannot return to the vapid sublimities of Victorian
verse, or to the homespun doggerel of the sectarian
past. Neither is it necessary to encase Marx's titanic
brain in a steel helmet. The variety and complexity
-yes,
exactly that-of
our philosophy and of our
experience, to be recreated,
must command a poetry
14
both various and complex.
I am speaking of the
main body of poetry, not of the ephemeral and im-
mediate forms suitable for specific occasions. Nor
does that mean that obscurity is called for, for ob-
scurity is primarily a quality of certain kinds of
content, and becomes a quality of technic only in a
secondary, conditioning sense.
Pockets Full of
Southwind
JESSE STUART
POLLY said to me: "Thorpin,
come along. We'll
see the Judge. He is to meet his court today. He's
meeting them where Hog Branch Road and Sand
Suck Road make the X at the sycamore tree. They
meet to plan a county bridge. Melvin Sperry said
they did. He ought to know. He's next to the Judge.
You come with me."
Polly and me go down the path. It is a crooked
path. Horseweeds are on both sides of the path. Lord,
how them things sting in the sun. Pizenvines wind
around the Sandy sycamores like baby greensnakes.
The sand is hot on our bare feet. We go uphill and
downhill. Around the slews of sand. I do not mind
so much. But Polly minds. Polly is pregnant.
No,
she is not puffed with wind. She is going to have a
baby. If the child comes alive, we'll have seven liv-
ing. If the child comes dead, we'll have seven dead.
It is a toss-up.
Polly used to be the prettiest woman in the hills.
She's no hag. Time working in the fields had bent
her back. Hoe handles has toughened her hands.
Time and worry has grayed her hair. Her hair used
to be black as a crow's wing. Her teeth was pretty,
too. They are like so many dead stumps, now, in the
clearing.
"But the Judge," I say to Polly, "he is full of
wind. He is full of wind as a hog bladder is full of
wind when it has been puffed to and left in the
smokehouse to blow up on Christmas Day. The
Judge is full of the same kind of wind. Only his
wind stinks a little more. It is the kind of wind that
won't carry a trifle of truth. It won't blow a leaf of
truth across a hollow."
In my pockets there isn't anything but wind. I pull
the lining out. I show you. My pocket lining is like
a small, dark cloud. I show it to you. See. It is a
dirty, shriveled half-moon.
Under it is less than a
breath of wind. You cannot see the wind. But it is
there.
JUNE,
1936
