BOOKS
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even the angels of such irresponsible sensibility can be. These writers are
doing something far more important than either of these things: they
are learning successfully to combine the best that came out of the 20's
experiments in sensibility for its own sake with a controlling interest in
the life of their time.
This is no small accomplishment, for while literature in the recent
past has chewed valiantly at the social awareness of our day, it has suf-
fered considerably from its inability to digest this new awareness. To
some extent this failure has been a technical one; mainly, however, it was
the product of an inclination, perhaps natural enough at first, to treat
as revelation the awkward dogmas of official communism. The result has
been a tendency to substitute hagiology for literature and exegesis for
criticism. The young writers Mr. Gregory has gathered together here
show little of this demoralizing inclination to substitute the party line
for their own consciousness.
One consequence of this new attitude is that serious literature is
able, for the first time since it discarded the rationale of Western Cap-
italism, to deal with moral dilemmas familiar to the common reader. In
short, it is once more possible to be entertaining without being insign-
ificant. This fact could be illustrated from any number of stories, but
it is perhaps most apparent in Eleanor Clark's neat comedy
Call Me
Comrade.
It is not that this story is without faults (the description of the
narrator's feelings as she tried to go to sleep in a jail cell, for example,
are completely out of focus) ; what matters is the author's sharp sense
of humanity's inability to live up to its pretensions and her skill in
making us see and feel the humorous impurity of motive behind even
our most admirable deeds. That high comedy of this kind should have
been achieved in terms of the new rationale, not once but several times
in this volume, is astonishing enough considering the quality of most of
what has been passing for 'proletarian literature in the United States.'
But the most interesting consequence of this new emotional balance
is a tendency, as Mr. Gregory notes in his introduction, 'to make ...
verse and prose resemble the quality of a fable.' After reading these
fables it is difficult to avoid the conviction that the tragic view of life
in our day can find expression only in this form, in what Mr. Empson,
who first discerned this tendency
(Some Versions of Pastoral),
describes
as 'pastoral.'
In an age of certainty the tragic view can be expressed
melodramatically. But in an age like ours, when the only escape from
uncertainty is an uninteresting if sometimes pathetic dogmatism, tragedy
must remain, not without conviction, but without assurance. The Eliza-
bethan drama can carry the weight of heroes; but assurance sits on our
tragedy( as it did, for the same reason, on the Restoration's) 'as a silk
hat on a Bradford millionaire.'
This use of fable may appear strange at first glance. In an age of
settled values (that is, when a given social organization still provides
room for expansion) the emphasis in the fable is on the fantastic nar-
rative and it tends toward nonsense, just as melodrama tends toward
tragedy. Thus in Lewis Carroll (but not in Bunyan) the moral references
are for the most part (one is never quite sure about them) subconscious,
and the purpose of the narrative is ostensibly fantasy. In these fables
for our day the emphasis
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on the other side of the balance. None of
them indulges in the simple one-to-one relationship of an Aesop's fable,
