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PARTISAN REVIEW
to our poetry and stories as "second-hand" Kafka and Mallarme.
Does this imply that Kafka and Mallarme followed a Trotskyist–
Bukharinist line? He also charges that "factional politics has got
into the book review." To date, we have printed 31 reviews, in only
one of which-Sidney Hook's review of Kenneth Burke's book–
is the Stalinist issue raised explicitly. At least two books by writers
close to the Communist arty-Richard Wright and Ernest Heming–
way-were praised.
Mr. Cowley states: "F. W. Dupee ... wrote a long essay on
Andre Malraux and ended up by dismissing
him
as 'the type of lib–
eral Comintern lobbyist thrown up by the stooge politics of people's
frontism'." This is a flat misquotation: Mr. Dupee applied these
words not to Malraux, but to Garcia, the central character in
L'Espoir.
His article on Malraux, furthermore, is not a simple-minded
political diatribe against a write( with whom he is in political
dis–
agreement, but a precise and painstaking analysis which attempts to
correlate the literary and political qualities of Malraux' work. Mr.
Cowley may or may not agree with Mr. Dupee's conclusions, but
he has no right to imply the article is a mere piece of abuse such as–
shall we say?-Mike Gold might have written.
It seems odd to us that Mr. Cowley, whose passion for Pure
Literature burns in every line of his article, has never criticised the
New Masses-which,
with a great show of being fair-minded, he
admits is "more timid and conventional in literary matters than it
used to be"-as he now attacks PARTISAN REVIEW. It also seems odd
that Mr. Cowley should find our literary standards so low when such
non-political and exclusively literary magazines as
Poetry, New
Di–
rections,
and
The Criterion
have printed flattering notices of PART–
ISAN REVIEW.
Who is this Galahad of Pure Literature who is demanding that
PARTISAN REVIEW emasculate itself politically and who can say a
kind word for neo-Catholic literary magazines and Southern Agrarian
literary magazines but not for anti-Stalinist literary magazines? (His
position amounts to this:
if
you're going to touch on politics, be Stalin–
ist; if you can't be Stalinist, then back to the Ivory Tower with
you
! )
Who is this belated mourner at the bier of the
Dial
and the
Hound
&
Horn.
(According to those who followed his writing when
those magazines were still alive, Mr. Cowley's admission that he
"saw both of them go without much sorrow" is a masterpiece of un–
derstatement.) Isn't this the Mr. Cowley who not so long ago wrote
an article defending the political censorship of literature? Isn't this
the same Mr. Cowley we remember exhorting us at Writers' Con–
gresses to climb up on the bandwagon of revolution? Isn't this the
same MalColm Cowley whose use of his position on the
New Republic
to play Communist Party politics has long been a literary scandal?
And could we have mistaken the name signed to a review in the
