TWILIGHT OF THE THIRTIES
7
art; most of fthem have not only become reconciled to the situation
but are actually blessing the official radicals. As to the spokesmen
of the Communist Party, though they have quit handing out revo–
lutionary prescriptions, they still exorcise the demon in the "ivory
tower" and exhort writers to assume political obligations. Obvi–
ously in this era politics has played a contradictory role on the
literary scene.
If
at first it drew the literary imagination closer to
social reality, enabling it to assimilate a series of fresh phenomena,
it is now, conversely, despoiling this imagination and provoking its
self-destructive impulses. And in saying this I am thinking, of
course, of the norms of writing today, of its typical practitioners,
and not of its marginal groupings or exceptional individuals.
Think of all the talent that, due to political pressures, has of
late been misused and distorted. Has Hemingway, for example,
ever written anything as bad, as silly, as
The Fifth Column?
Think
of Louis Aragon, the author of such excellent works as
Le paysan
de Paris
and
Front Rouge,
who is now writing academic novels
exposing the last war at the same time that he disseminates propa–
ganda in favor of the next war. With equal ardor, in his capacity
as editor of the newspaper
Ce Soir,
he is devoting himself to the
defence of the French Empire and Stalin's totalitarian state. Also
there is the salient case of Andre Malraux. Having written a book
as uncommonly good as
Man's Fate,
only a few years later he pro–
duced
Man's Hope,
a novel generally regarded as a truthful record
of the Spanish war. But now that information as to what really
happened in Spain is easily accessible, it should be recognized even
by
the most obtuse for what it is-an invention out of the whole
cloth. This glamour novel of the People's Front is a work of empty
heroics, devoid of a single real character. A cleverly composed
party-pamphlet in the guise of objective fiction, its consummate
rhetoric serves only to swell its illusions. Its pretentious political–
intellectual dialogues represent nothing but the fantasies of a fel·
low-traveler who, no longer capable of thinking for himself or of
eeeing life through his own eyes, has taken pains to substitute an
imaginary drama of hope and fraternity for the black counter–
revolution in Loyalist Spain that swept the anti-fascists to their
defeat. The only parts of the novel that are not false are the plainly
llpOrtorial descriptions of air battles and of the sensations of the
