60
PARTISAN REVIEW
The quantitative tendency is clear. Judgments of literary and intel-
lectual quality are another matter. Certainly one cannot contemplate
Calverton's sex symposia of the late '20s without a shudder, nor do all
Waldo Frank's current declarations exclude wonder that the C.P. re-
gards him as an enemy. But what the young
New Masses
thought of
present-day friends and enemies is not without historical interest.
A
glance at a few issues is illuminating.
Ernest Hemingway was the leading performer at the latest Writers
Congress. In 1926, E. Walsh, reviewing
Torrents of Spring,
called it
"the cheapest book I have ever read," and Dos Passos, reviewing
The Sun
Also Rises,
exclaimed, "What is the matter with American writing?"
In 1928 Gold gave an extended official view: "There is no humanity in
Hemingway," he declared. He is as "heartless as a tabloid" and affects
aloofness as the "last refuge of a scoundreL" "Hemingway will soon
exhaust the illusion that he is a brainless prize-fighter and since he is too
bourgeois to accept the labor world, I predict he will (seek) Nirvana in
the Catholic Church." Did proletarian criticism "save" Hemingway?
Well, today he supports the Spanish People's Front and, perhaps with-
out entirely abandoning pugilistic inclinations, is, I am told, a Catholic
communicant.
Carl Sandburg, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford and Carlton
Beals* are also pillars of the Congress. Sandburg was formerly taken to
task as "a sentimental American nationalist" (Gold, 1926); MacLeish
as a "representative of the class view of the bourgeois intelligentsia"
busily sprinkling "waters of mysticism"
(New Masses,
1932); Mumford
as one who "conceals the actual class-relationships" (Dennen, 1933);
and Beals as a supporter of the Latin-American "capitalist regime with
all its terror and exploitation" (A. Gregory, 1932). How the rakes have
reformed!
Few writers are today as popular with the C.P. as Heywood Broun.
In 1930 Bill Gropper portrayed him as a boozy gambler and Gold, look-
ing on him, exclaimed, "what degeneracy!" Broun had already made an
admirable record in the Sacco-Vanzetti struggle; since then he has ex-
changed compliments with the
Daily Worker,
made his first visit
to the Saratoga race-track, and rebuked Bill Green for not liking Mar-
tinis or understanding horses. Two equally popular European favorites of
the
New Masses
are Thomas Mann, who is praised because he believes
in 1926-27, when the left-wing movement was ignored or despised by most
literary gentlemen, was in a fair way to becoming President of the Writers Con-
gress a decade after? The Congress has had two Presiden,ts. One, Donald Ogden
Stewart, did not publish in the period under consideration. Waldo Frank made
two small contributions; in 1937 he became suspect and disappeared from of-
fice before his term ended.
*
Beals, by the way, has also just been acclaimed by the Berlin organ of
the "Anti-Bolshevik World Movement" for withdrawing from the Dewey Com-
mission of Inquiry into the Moscow charges against Trotsky. Vide
Contra-
Komintern,
1937, p. 423. This ought to make him eligible for the presidency
of the Congress.
