capacity to "understand" each other. Mabel Dodge, Ger-
trude Stein, lIvIuriel Draper,
each had their own infallible
method of spotting a "genius." And, of course, there was no
other kind of knowledge than this Personal Touch, subli-
mated elsewhere as Intuition,
Organic Wholeness, or Crea-
tive Insight.
There seems little doubt that when John Reed first be-
came involved in the struggles of the working class through
his participation in the Paterson strike, his motives were
characteristic of his group: admiration for the striking per-
sonality of Big Bill Haywood, the attraction of a new type
of activity, antipathy for the police-while for the silk work-
ers there was sympathy, the kind of sympathy by which one
adds to his sense of the richness of his own personality,
a
sympathy supported moreover by the exoticism of poverty,
foreign faces and speech, the exhilaration of mass sorrow and
enthusiasm.
Even the thoroughness of his absorption in the
strike, when for three w('eks "he worked at nothing else,
sleeping little and then with his clothes on," could have been
little more than a successful psychological
tour de force
of
self-projection,
similar to those ecstasies of abandonment cul-
tivated by other thrill-seeking devotees of the What We
Please philosophy. Before the strike was over, he was already
in Europe, whence, in the chateaux of the skilled hunters
of Life's Whole Animal, he could write: "I am not a Social-
ist temperamentally,
any more than I'm an Episcopalian.
I know now that my business is to interpret and live Life,
wherever it may be found-whether
in the labor movement
or out of it." The sectarians of Life, battling in dead earnest
against every form of purpose and responsibility not related
to the immediate oscillations of temperament,
were forever
prepared to reject all external loyalties as sectarian, as "too
serious", "too narrow".
At a critical period in his life, however, Reed had the ex-
ceptional good fortune to have a great education thrust
upon him, and he proved capable, in spite of his generation,
of receiving it. This education had to be tendered to him in
a' very special form: it could not consist of a theory or a
system of ideas. Reed, like his contemporaries,
the backwash
of whose influence can still be felt today, was, at first, pro-
grammatically and emotionally anti-intellectual,
distrustful
and resentful towards generalization.
But his job as corre-
spondent, which carried him into Villa's peon army, into the
trenches of many fronts in the World War,
and finally
into the midst of the vastest event of the modern world, the
Bolshevik seizure of power in October,
instructed him in
the one manner in which knowledge was open to him. He
began to discover meanings, where they lay embedded in
events themselves; he learned to discriminate between adven-
tures, between the merely colorful and the historically sig-
nificant; and having beheld in the unfolding of the daring
October days, a drama bursting with reason and conscious
preparation,
he comprehended,
once and for all, that the
world he lived in was not a world of personalities,
but a
world of forces, and that understanding takes place not
through a sense of rhythm or personal touch, but that it is
made ready by a study of the Marxist analysis of history.
Thus his celebrated volume on the
Ten Days That Shook
The World
became a sober and well-documented report,
unsentimental and purposeful, possessing a discipline and in-
telligence in which there is not the slightest trace of "atti-
tude".
With this education Reed moved out of the current of
PARTISAN
REVIEW
the American literary movement of 20 years ago. The final
period of his brief life was devoted mainly to organizational
work, speeches on labor and political subjects, and contro-
versial articles. Many of his former friends now brought
against him the double accusation, that he could not be seri-
ous in his new role, and that he had lost his sense of humor.
But, whereas, in 1912 he had dedicated his Day in Bohemia
to Steffens in the true mystic-clique style, addressing him as
"one of us; the only man who understands my arguments,"
now in the days of war-hysteria,
repressions and analysis he
was no longer affected by Steffens'
paternalistic counsel:
"You can't plant ideas. Only feelings exist. I think it is
undemocratic to try to do much now." There were now thou-
sands who understood Reed's arguments.
Under the influence of the triumph of the October revo-
lution and the organization of power, Reed stepped clear of
the anti-conventional
thrill-movement
in American thought
towards a dramatic conception of revolutionary history and
theory. And when the world of personalities was trans-
formed into a world of historical forces, then it was no
longer a question of sympathy for the working class but of
identification with it in its historic role. Retaining from his
past an independence of thought and a demand for concrete-
ness, Reed found Marxist
principles as something visible
inside the facts of the modern world; he could not take
them from books alone; but at the same time he studied and
investigated so as to be able to see more. As he wrote to
Upton Sinclair: "I know it is the facts I tell you that you
do not believe; and I must be content to wait for history.
But I know that I am right. I have not dreamed but have
studied and investigated as I never did before ....
" Thus
it is in line with the experience of John Reed that the intel-
lectual life of America' is passing into its next stage.
Secure in the significance of its subject, Granville Hicks'
persuasive study of the life and development of John Reed
makes no effort either to diminish his falterings or to puff
up his accomplishments.
It is a fast-moving, broad-regioned
story, good to read and rich in information.
In a completely
effortless way, Hicks causes to appear an absorbing back-
ground sketch of the history of the period. He performs
gracefully the difficult task of presenting the many-passioned
Reed as a consistently developing type.
There is but one aspect to which more effort could have
been devoted-a Marxian analysis of the ideological back-
ground of Reed's motives. The crises occurring in a con-
scious man during such profound changes of orientation as
Reed experienced can reveal the hopes and fears of a wh:lle
epoch, a whole tradition.
The fact that Re~d was not a
theorist and reached his decisions with a high rlcgree of
spontaneity makes the problem of analysis. more complex
and difficult; yet certain theories did reach a climax and a
turning point in his experience. The question concerning
Reed's development is the question of the relation of the
American intellectual tradition which produced him to revo-
lutionary history and Marxian analysis. The existence of this
question and the need to elaborate it is suggested in the
rather absurd notation quoted from Clare Sheridan's diary
regarding Reed's activities in Moscow as a member of the
E.C.C.I.:
"I understand the Russian spirit, but what strange
force impels an apparently normal young man from the
U. S.?"
HAROLD ROSENBERG
