and the C.I.O. Nor does it fail to
point the moral: "This is a typical
counter-revolutionary line, which unites
its exponent with Hearst and the Lib-
erty Leaguers, who also try to smear
Communism as 'foreign'. Rahv's ser-
vices to the fascists should brand him
and his undertakings for what they are
in the eyes of all true workers and
of all honest writers." According to
this line of reasoning, the real friend
of fascism was Marx himself who, not
foreseeing that Communism would be-
come Twentieth Century Americanism,
was gauche enough not to be born in
a Kentucky log cabin.
The second category-misconception
-is best represented by Comrade V. J.
Jerome, who blasts away for three
apoplectic columns at PARTISANRE-
VIEW, which he conceives to be a
fortress, a veritable bristling arsenal of
£ascism. His attack he bases on the
same unsound premise that all these
attacks rest on: that the professed lit-
erary aims of PARTISAN REVIEW
are merely a smoke screen for its "real"
object, which is to spread Trotskyist
propaganda. That we do not consider
ourselves "Trotskyists" and that PAR-
TISAN REVIEW has been founded
precisely to fight the tendency to con-
fuse literature and party politics-
these facts Comrade Jerome chooses to
ignore. He prefers name-calling-and
what names! "Slanderers of the work-
ing class... turncoats ... great revolu-
tionaries (irony here). . .scribblers. . .
amateur literati ... tyros agents pro-
vocateurs ... strikebreakers
:'
In one passage Comrade Jerome,
with his peculiar flair for melodrama,
pictured us as being "wined and dined
as high personalities" by the apprecia-
tive bourgeoisie. This puzzles us. We
respect Comrade Jerome as an expert
in wining and dining, considering his
past services as Commissar to Holly-
wood,where he was,as we hear, lavishly
entertained. But nothing so glamorous
has yet happened to any of us. We
hope the bourgeoisie will realize the
value of our services before long and
do its duty. When the gay round of
cocktail parties and buffet suppers be-
gins,we shall be glad to ask Comrade
Jerome along. Of course, he mustn't
RIPOSTES
75
expect too much-New York isn't
Hollywood.
One must smile at the sweating,
blundering zeal of the Party's commis-
sars of culture, who bring to bear
against PARTISAN REVIEW such a
ponderous machinery of polemic. But
there is more in the situation than
humor. It is painful to us, as radicals,
to realize the intellectual bankruptcy
of the Communist Party leadership.
One of our motives in reviving PAR-
TISAN REVIEW was to struggle a-
gainst the "partyization" of left-wing
letters. We hoped to demonstrate the
degenerative effect of imposing a Party
Line on Literature. The press of the
Communist Party is supplying us,
gratis, with some excellent examples of
just what we mean.
That Man Is Here Again
Ever since Granville Hicks made his
debut as a Marxist critic, he seems to
have regarded himself as a superin-
tendent of American writing. No soon-
er had he announced his own conver-
sion th~ he proceeded to submit
American writers since the Civil War
to an examination in Marxism, which,
of course, most of them flunked. Sub-
sequently he brought his critical meth-
od up to date by evaluating contem-
porary writers according to their
proximity to the official Communist
Party; he banished to a literary Siberia
those who had other political beliefs
or were truly independent; he laid
down a series of rules for young and
newly converted novelists, and set a
quota for the number of magazines
which might publish left-wing writing.
One of his chief tasks, however, was
to deliver pep-talks to those writers
who did not share his blatant cheerful-
ness-his theory being that the class
struggle is expressed in literature as a
struggle between pessimism and optim-
ism; and identifying optimism with the
future of mankind, he set out on a
crusade against gloom in American
writing. Thus in a recent review
(New Masses,
October 4) of
New Let-
ters in America,
Hicks stated that he
was very much disappointed in this
collection because hope was not its
