62
PARTISAN REVIEW
ciety, the novel is interesting and often
extremely penetrating.")
-devote a full page to the implica–
tions for The
Time
Community of an
advance of 1h% in the Federal Reserve
rediscount rate.
- set down as an item in a column
headed "View with Alarm" : "A four
to one vote to abolish the Wisconsin
National Guard.... "
-set down as an item in a parallel
column headed "Point with Pride":
Thus in their very first issue the
editors of
Time
struck and held
the
classic editorial note. Thus have
they
held it in the thousands of inter-office
memoranda (disguised as magazines
called
Time, Life, Fortune)
which for
fifteen years they have been distributing
among the high-priced, high-powered•
executives who make up The
Time
Com–
munity. And thus will they continue
to
hold it, full and true, as long as The
Community itself holds together.
DWIGHT
MACDONALD
"Castor oil, a cure for popular indif–
ference to the polls." (A reference to
the Mussolini technique, described in
detail earlier in the issue.)
*
Also: shrewd, able, potent.
SUBSTITUTION, AT LEFT TACKLE: HEMINGWAY FOR DOS PASSOS
Between 1926 and 1936
John Dos Passos:
Served several years as treasurer of
the Communist-controlled National Committee for the
Defense of Political Prisoners. At the request of the
Communist Party served on many other committees,
signed many appeals and protests, journeyed to Har–
lan and other conflict centers, voted for Foster and
Ford. Visited and wrote favorably about the U .S.S.R.
and consequently
June 1932: New Masses,
reviewing
1919,
a section of
what is now the trilogy,
USA,
found Dos Passos sound–
ing "the note of proletarian activism," with "a quality
one might call dialectical," and, esteeming him "a
good enough Marxist' to do justice to both 'destiny'
and 'will'," favorably compared him to Zola, Tol–
stoy-and
Hemingway.
1935:
Granville Hicks, Stalinist super-mandarin,
"capped his book on American literature with
the figure of Dos Passos" (Mike Gold). Again,
Hicks in an official Communist symposium:
"Equipped with a many-sided knowledge of Amer–
ican life, and unhampered either by reticence or
superficial optimism. . . . Dos Passos' fundamental
discovery is that American life is a battleground, and
that arrayed on one side are the exploiters and on
the other the exploited."
August 1936:
The
New Masses
headed a review of
Dos Passos'
The Big Money,
also part of
USA,
with
the simple title : GREATNESS.
and then
Ernest He m in g way:
Fished tarpon off Key
West, hunted lions
in
Africa, cheered bull-fights
in Spain, made whoopee
in Paris, New York, un
peu partout,
socked a
drinking companion.
1928:
Mike Gold re–
viewed Hemingway's
The
Sun Also Rises
in the
New Ma.sses:
"There
is
no humanity in Heming–
way." He is "heartless as
a tabloid," "too bourgeois
to accept the labor
world," and affects aloof–
ness as the "last refuge of
a scoundrel."
June 1932:
A
New
Masses
review compared
H emingway unfavorably
to-Dos Passos.
1935:
Hicks, commenting
in an essay on "well–
known" contemporaries,
failed · to mention
Hemingway.
John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, whose long-standing acquaintance had
survived a head-on clash between the former's sense of social responsibility and
the latter's "pure aesthetics," journeyed together to Loyalist Spain,
