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PARTISAN REVIEW
creasingly tends to categorize our literature in terms of rigid decades.
Indeed, Geismar carries to its ludicrous extreme the tendency to regard
the year '29 as a wall of fire separating the thirties from a Gomorrah given
over entirely to "rising stocks and rising skirts." In so hypostatizing a
decade and writing about it in a pastiche lingo imitated from Dos Passos'
Newsreels, Geismar adds his own chapter to the willful oversimplification
of our past. For he quite neglects that on the creative level with which he
is dealing, the twenties were not primarily the realm of American Can
and Can and Peaches Browning, but the period when more good poets
were writing at their maturity than during any other decade in our his·
tory, and when the American theater first took on international stature.
Fortunately Geismar does not indulge in the latest form of romanticism,
now current in the liberal weeklies, where the view prevails that the next
monolithic barrier is '39, and that since change is king, the one thing sure
about the literature of the present decade is that it must have nothing in
common with that of the last.
Both Nuhn and Geismar, in so far as he looks forward rather than
back, are more serious critics than that. Both are occupied with our cui·
tural continuity. They have further in common that both end up discuss·
ing our social structure. They are symptomatic of current politics in that
though both seem committed to some form of socialism, they reject Marx·
ist toughness. They both affirm their hopes with enheartening passion,
even though Geismar sometimes breaks into merely excited rhetoric and
Nuhn into folksy pep-talk. They are both finally vague on how the trans·
formation to their new societies is to be implemented. Nuhn doesn't get
much more specific than that we must act through our tradition of "good
faith" rather than by compulsion. Geismar comes somewhat closer to social
actuality by conjecturing that the popularity of
The Grapes
of
Wrath
might conceivably indicate that the United States will accomplish its
sweeping economic changes "as a new sort of popular fashion." Both
these writers bring new horizons to our criticism, though neither has mas·
tered a method, and both write with the eloquence of innocence.
F. 0.
MATTHIESSF.N
A SLUM ON THE WAY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
Never Come Morning.
By
Nelson Algren. Harper. $2.50
Poverty and degradation have existed in Chicago for a long time.
We have been told so by many authors of the thirties. In
Never Come
Morning
we find the inhabitants of this great American city in the dark·
ness of a now familiar abyss, accentuated and illuminated only by electric
lights, once more unaware of how they came to be there, or what they
should do to get out, if they ever go so far as to realize the peculiar insu·
lation of their crevasse. These people live in the shadow of society as
they live in the shadow of the 'El.' But when the 'El' is torn down, they
will not come forth to a better life. Events of a violent and shocking
