64
PARTISAN REVIEW
"What is the future of Dos Passos? You tell me, Mr. Gingrich!"*
At the same time, Gold, Hicks, Malcolm Cowley and other Stalinist pundits
discover in Hemingway a writer of uncommon merit.
If
he has not yet been
canonized to replace the fallen Dos
Passo~,
once the chief boast of the Stalinist
"critics," he seems to have been beatified. At any rate, one thing is clear to
all
concerned : his product is not
merde,
for it comes from the People's Front.
* *
*
At this point it is customary for some charitable soul to say that Mike Gold
was cockeyed drunk when he did it, and that what he says does not represent the
Communist Party. Far be it from me to suspect Mike of having been sober, but
Jet me record that on March 16 the
Daily Worker
printed a letter from Mike's
comrade, Stavros Savides (of Boston!), which letter reads as follows:
"Mike Gold's penetrating, powerful proletarian criticism of John Dos Passos
in the
Daily Worker,
was the finest literary criticism I have read in many, many
moons. Only a sincere Marxist-Leninist critic could accomplish this tremendous
feat of explaining an author of John Dos Passos's literary dimensions in so few
words.
"Thank God, we have genuine proletarian criticism. Cheer up, Mike, soon we
shall have just as powerful creative literature too. We have the seeds and the soil
for such a literature, and for every seed that is planted on rocks as is the case
with Dos Passos, there will be a hundred seeds planted on fertile soil that
will produce the finest socialist literature we can ever dream of.
"As for the future of Dos Passos, it all depends on his ability to get away
from that 'merde.' He ought to consult a competent psychiatrist.''
Psychiatrist? They do these things better in Moscow.
*
Gold mentions the publisher of
Esquire
(whom, always prefering French
for indecent words, he calls an
entrepreneur)
as an added proof of Dos Passos'
lowness, because Gingrich says he thinks Dos Passos has written a great
book. Gingrich is chiefly famous as the chief magazine publisher of Hemingway's
writings.
HERBERT SoLow
