TWILIGHT OF THE THIRTIES
9
life lose more and more the interest and significance they once
possessed. The crisis is socializing the art-object. Instead, how–
ever, of the socialization proceeding on a revolutionary basis, as
many of us hoped and expected, it is proceeding in a manner so
retrograde as to force it down to lower levels of awareness and
formal value. Yielding to the reactionary
Zeitgeist,
the art-object
has begun to reflect and express the two great political catastrophes
-profoundly related to each other-of our epoch: the victories of
fascism and the defeat of the Bolshevik revolution.
It is impossible, it seems to me, to understand the cultural
decline except by seeing it in the perspective of this double catas–
trophe, which cruelly and infallibly reveals the true loyalties of
every movement, party, and group. What else will account for the
extraordinary revival of ideas and attitudes, here as well as abroad,
which the radical intellectuals had discarded many decades ago?
Consider the obsolete thinking embodied in books of the kind that
such people as Jerome Frank, Max Lerner, and Lewis Mumford
have recently published and which have been hailed as "tracts for
our times." Jerome Frank, for example, has devised a theory of
capitalism in one country. He tries to prove that the present eco–
nomic system can survive in America in solitary and happy self–
sufficiency; in other words, an inferior brand of Stalinism, for
Stalinism believes at least in socialism in one country, and even
that, as the Russian experience conclusively shows, cannot be
accomplished. Max Lerner advised us that the productive forces
can be collectivized without getting rid of the capitalists, and that
the People's Front (which is dead already both in Spain and in
France, the only countries where it ever came to life) is the sole
means of saving us from fascism. Finally, the really phenomenal
Lewis Mumford assured us, first, that there is no reason to berate
the French and British imperialists, since they have reformed, it
appears, and are now only lightly and gingerly exploiting their
colonial slaves; second, that the last war was not unjustified; and
third, that if perhaps the motives and conseqU.ences of that war can
nevertheless be shown to have been just a little tainted, then surely
the
next war will be wholly noble and just, all in all a romantic
trial of strength between good and evil.
Not since the antediluvian days of the "genteel tradition"
have American writers been so respectable, so anxious to appease
