6
PARTISAN REVIEW
Only one idea promised to re-vitalize literary expression in
this decade. It was the idea of the social revolution in its specific
application to culture, and it gave rise to a radical school of crea·
tive writing and to a Marxist literary criticism. This movement,
however, turned into its very opposite after a brief span of life that
was as blundering as it was exciting. From the start it was held in
pawn by the Stalinists. At first devised for revolutionary ends, it
has now been converted into a means of forcing literature back
into the harness of the old society.
This movement pulled a great many writers into the orbit of
politics. But this only means that a great many writers who were
previously politically indifferent, and hence relatively immune to
certain rabid notions, have been led to accept and even to idealize
bourgeoi~
values at the same time as the catchwords of "progress"
and "democracy" delude them into imagining themselves to be still
radicals. Yet having re-dedicated themselves to society, society
re-dedicates itself to them. Never have the literary lions of the
"left-wing" enjoyed such lavish hospitality from the world at large
as at present, never have they received such bounties, such whole–
hearted recognition, from the very powers they profess to abhor.
As for those writers who refuse to accompany the Comintern
~n
its
travels from one pole of the class struggle to the other, their works
are placed on the expurgatory index and their persons committed
to Satan. And the
New Masses
these days denounces John Dos
Passos and Edmund Wilson as "enemies of the people" in the same
issue in which Hollywood is saluted as a centre of culture.
There is manifestly a lesson about the relation of politics to
literature to be drawn from this experience. For a long time now
it has been held almost as an axiom by left critics that in entering
the political world the artist improves both his mind and his art.
The reverse of this was held to be true by the conservatives, so that
in the controversy about "proletarian literature" that raged in the
early 'thirties they uniformly urged artists to shun -politics and
retain their esthetic purity. But now, paradoxically enough, it
turns out that it is precisely politics which has become the medium
,:>f a new, of an unprecedented affiliation of literature to ideas
historically transcended generations ago and highly congenial to
the present order of things. It should be noticed, also, that the con–
servative critics have ceased arguing against mixing politics with
