ism has infected some of the more
critical spirits.
In this period, when the blight of
political meddling in behalf of narrow
party interests makes so much thinking
about literature insincere and super-
ficial, it is good to see vital
literary
dif-
ferences again coming into the open.
But do the sins of naturalism really
offer a sufficient explanation of the
failures of present-day writing? Natural-
ism needs to be put on the defensive,
but it seems to us that the attack on
it, essentially healthy insofar as it pro-
mises a renewal of the creative im-
pulse, has not transcended the formalist
approach to the problem. It is not
primarily a matter of placing anyone
method of representing experience on
the expurgatory index. Compared to
most American practitioners of natural-
ism, Zola was surely a titan of
literary art; and a work as power-
ful as
Studs Lonigan
points once
more to the dangers inherent in a
fetishistic attitude to any given creative
method, whether through this attitude
wenegate or affirm it. Variety, curiosity,
and amplitude of means-all these are
lacking in the American novel as now
written. Its imagination lurks in am-
bush instead of walking ill the broad
ligill of day, and its moral and intel-
lectual sensibilities have neither grown
singlynor have they intertwined into a
net to catch those monstrous modern
presences that swim in the American
deeps. Patently what is at fault here
weighsheavier in the scale of deter-
minismthan a possibly mistaken or in-
adequate method of resolving material
and fashioning it for creative uses.
Provisionally, we tend to agree with
Mr. Baker that "the back of natural-
ismis being broken in many different
ways"and that "a critical, intellectually
organized"point of view on the part of
the novelist or short story writer re-
quires a less primitive mode of pre-
sentation.Also, we were particularly in-
terestedin his statement that natural-
ism "seems to have become the par-
ticular heritage of the Marxists." Be-
foreany such vague opinions, however,
canassume the dimensions of a critical
positionit becomes necessary to analyze
in some detail the social and cultural
RIPOSTES
61
conditions that make for a rise and
decline of naturalism. There are ample
data for such an analysis; but so far
mOle questions have been raised than
amwered. The term itself strikes us as
too loose to describe with any degree
of exactness the diverse works cited as
examples of naturalist formlessness and
indifference to values. In fact, the
whole subject, with its many ramifica-
tions, ought to be done full justice in
a longer and more elaborate discussion.
We promise the readers of PARTISAN
REVIEWsuch a piece in an early issue.
Politics and Partisan Review
We might have guessed that the
Socialist Appeal,
organ of the Trot-
skyists, would criticize our editorial
policy, challenge our concept of in-
dependence,
and charge us with
ignoring the claims of practical politics.
We could not have foreseen, however,
that our gentle contemporary,
Poetry,
A Maga<;ine of Verse,
would come for-
ward to quizz us on the same score.
Both publications seem well-disposed
towards PARTISANREVIEWin general;
yet both of them, reviewing the edi-
torial statement in our December issue,
ask substantially the same question: Is
It Revolutionary?
Poetry
pays its respects to our literary
conten t, then cditorializes as follows:
Formerly associated with the Com-
munist
Party,
this maga<;ine now
pledges itself to fighting "the party-
line in literature." Though some of the
contributors are adherents of Trotsky,
there is no evidence that the review
is an organ of Trotskyism as its
opponents charge; nor is there anything
to indicate a sectarian bias in the plain-
ly mugwump attitude of the opening
editorial. The question arises, however,
whether a maga<;ine professedly revolu-
tionary in character can avoid having
some definite political program, either
explicit or implied. Taken at its face
value, the policy of the
PARTISAN
REVIEW
seems to boil down to this:
that literature, for the present, should
lead not to action but to more liter-
ature. That mayor may not be an ex-
