Only, Pete said, don't come whining to me for
help. If you figure you can marry on a shoestring,
welcome to it. Only you're a sucker for trouble,
that's all. Marry and go on relief,
Pete said. I
couldn't do it, myself. I'm too proud of myself, I'm
too ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed of myself, how
they'll be talking on the block ... that Pete Carney's
son walked out on his father and went and got mar-
ried and went and got relief with the other bums.
A
fellow that's no cripple, nothing wrong with his
two hands to find himself work. I couldn't do it,
I'm too proud of myself, I'm too ashamed of myself.
If I had two young hands on me this day, there
i ;'
no power on earth could stop me from working ...
only I'm old, there's too many youngsters edging me
out. It's a year now I've been sitting at the window,
figuring myself sick. A measly twelve a week. You've
got to stretch it twenty ways, and still there's noth-
ing for light and for coal and for shoes. And every
month wonder.ing if they'll throw you on the street.
Well, I said, Tom's looking. Tom's out looking for
work, he'll find something, soon we'll be in the feed-
bag again. Sat there like a fool, figuring I had a son,
he'd help get me on my feet again. And then he
walks in....
It's coming Tom thought,
it's coming. Christ, all
the cuffing around ....
In the moment that Pete lifted his fist and crashed
it down on the table so that the dishes jumped, Tom
saw the three scared faces of the kids, and Yin turn-
ing the radio dials with a worried look, the way a
doctor looks, examining you, and his mother stand-
ing with her head on one side, foolish-looking.
Christ, he thought,
all the cuffing around ...
day
after day, eating with them, and the old man poison-
ing my mouthfuls.
And then it's a crime if you want
to marry, be your age and marry like the other fel-
lows that got their piece. Whoever it was cuffiing
him around, he'd like to give it back to him, meas-
ure for measure and flowing over. Whoever it was.
... His muscles leaped under his skin, his fists tight-
ened. He knew it was fight. He wanted to knead
yielding flesh with his fists, to strike until the blood-
juice spurted out.
"Get out," Pete shouted. "Li ft your backside out
of here, so I can say I told you get out ....
"
Get out, get out, get out ....
Tom didn't hear
any more, only the words were in his head, over
and over, like a record when the needle jams. And
then he saw his fist fly from him, and Pete was fall-
ing back, with a hand to his face, feeling himself
curiously and looking at the blood on his fingers,
and patting himself like trying to pat the blood back
into place.
They didn't know if he was going to cry. He sat
there, and he started mumbling about Tom all over
again, only half-crying this time. And there was one
thing he couldn't stop saying, looking at each of
them, as if no one would believe him. "I couldn't do
PARTISAN
REVIEW
it myself," he said. "I'm too proud of myself, I'm
too ashamed of myself."
Then he got up and went into the bedroom and
shut the door. They heard him opening the bureau
drawers and dumping things,
looking for God-
knows-what.
His mother made the kids get out of the room.
They went softly, and Yin went too. He said it was
no use staying for the end of the funeral ...
the
old man was a fool, and Tom was another, not un-
derstanding how to handle him. Tom said, What
the hell, you couldn't take everything. It was strange,
speaking to his brother,
and he hated the way Yin
walked out, like saying it was all a mess but he was
clean of it.
Then they were alone, and his mother started
piling the dishes. She looked gray in the face, and
for once she wasn't sighing. She cut bread for Tom
and brought
him water,
and shoved the plateful
toward him. "Eat," she said reproachfully.
"Eat.'"
Down with
"Leftism"
!
ALAN
CALMER
IN THE first few pages of this book,
*
Farrell puts
his finger on a basic error of modern criticism, typi-
fied by impressionism on the one hand and by literary
Humanism on the other. As he shows, the first criti-
cal method has denied the purposive or "functional"
aspect of literature,
while the second has ignored the
esthetic side.
After disposing quickly of these two extremes of
recent bourgeois criticism, he turns to revolutionary
criticism in the United States. He is concerned chief-
ly with a tendency that was first characterized,
I
believe, in
Partisan Review
as "leftism"-the
term
being used, of course, in the sense Lenin used it in
f920,
when he wrote about the "infantile disorder"
of " 'left-wing'
Communism".
Farrell finds this ten-
dency in Marxian critical writing to be guilty of the
same type of extremism committed by Babbitt, More
and Company. "And since it is an extremism hitched
to a progressive force-whereas
literary Humanism
is tied to a regressive one-it
requires correction."
Farrell examines a number of the concepts which
r·eflect this point of view. He assails the way in which
the function of literature has frequently been con-
fused with the purpose of direct action. He criticizes
• 1/ Note On Literary Criticism,
by
James
T.
Farrell. Vanguard
Press. $2,50.
7
