90
PARTISAN REVIEW
a short, hut overlong, hook of nostalgic intent, with its lack of focua
trained on four young men in New York-a writer-producer in radio,
another writer, a dance-hand musician, and a painter-their girls and
other acquaintances. I suppose that Mr. Smith is an experimental writer
of sorts: he has not only dispensed with dramatic progression, but charac·
terization and motivation as well. Once again we are among old, not to
say moth-eaten, friends: the hero who talks tough but can break down and
cry like a child, the beautiful girls who jump into bed with the gayest
alacrity and willingness, the happy musicians with their marijuana, the
Broadway hearts-of-gold. And certainly never before has the word "fine"
been used, in a 1925 Hemingway sense, with such zest and frequency.
The early hard-boiled novel depended for much of its effectiveness
on shrewd pacing, staccato narrative drive, careful plotting; its heroes
were heartless-gunmen, bootleggers, enemies of society. Cain's postman
and the novels of W. R. Burnett formed an orbit around which their sue·
cessors carefully swung. The latter-day type, of which Mr. Smith's book
is a reprehensible and conspicuous example, is plotless, indirect, and
written in a sluggish, padded prose that derives limply from Dorothy
Baker and Otis Ferguson. Its heroes are witless and passive, softer·
boiled; they behave in what appears to be a return to a quasi-This
Side of
Paradise
manner. They approve of Lionel Hampton and denigrate T. S.
Eliot, and their vulgarity almost eclipses Mr. Smith's: "So we tried talk·
ing in complete sente!lces, we stuck our necks out and liked Van Gogh
even if it
was
stylish to like him, we had read the little magazines once
upon a time, we knew that James Joyce was a giant on this earth."
But let us be fair to our author. Let us look at the other side. The
Boston
Herald,
in its review, mentions Kafka and says that Mr. Smith has
"got something." (As specifie_d, this is quite undeniable.) Miss Kay Boyle
remarks that the book is "touchingly pure ... the very highest praise.''
Otis Ferguson adds that it is "the best of its kind since that particular
mood appeared in the early Hemingway." Yet to this reviewer it seems
merely shoddily pubescent, and its author a writer fully competent of out·
doing even the chronicler of the Beautiful People in brashness, vulgarity,
and collegiate bounce. He whistles too loud.
WELDON KEES
ACommunication
Sirs:
Philip Rahv's article, "10 Propositions and 8 Errors," expresses the
disillusionment of many American intellectuals with the prospects of
socialism and the strength of the workingclass abroad. Everywhere one
runs into these self-styled "realists," who put on a very sceptical air and
insist that, since there are no newspaper headlines about workingclass
activity abroad, none exists. These "realists" seem to me as blind to future
possibilities as their colleagues of twenty years ago were. Real insight
into the making of history can only be grasped through a historical, i.e., a
