IN THE' DESERT'
421
going,
cannot be considered less than disgusting. It is rooted in a belle–
lettrism which we all share, more or less, as an unhappy heritage from
the nineteenth century. All: it is such a belle-lettrism that permits the
editors of PARTISAN REVIEW, who do not regard art as a sorcerer's trick,
to become uneasy bed brothers across the Atlantic with the editor of
the quite frankly belle-lettrist
Horizon,
who prints odd fag-ends of the
twenties, autobiographical chatter by Augustus John, an occasional good
story or poem, bound together by no organized view of life or society,
no stronger thread than his own erratic intelligence and whimsical Bar–
riesque good taste. Before the war PARTISAN REVIEW, "a magazine of
literature and Marxism", pursued a path well-marked and clear, far
remote from the modish
Horizon
highway. Even now PR is our sharpest
and most intelligent literary magazine;
Horizon
would flinch still at
printing many of PR's articles: but there is a noticeable difference, a
softening, as it were, of the editors' attitude; concessions, less admissible
in wartime than in time of peace, are made, the forces of reaction ad–
mitted. And this is done, overtly or not, in the name of keeping art
(or "independent" thought)
going.
But going where?
*
•
•
•
•
Perhaps this is harsher than is necessary. I do not Il).ean to imply
that PR should shut up shop; but I do mean that, as the pressure of
events drove Burnham away from Marxism to an unwilling formulation
o.f a "new" type of society, so PARTISAN REVIEW has been driven to com–
promise more and more with the petty bourgeoisie who have produced
the characteristic art of our time. The compromise was inevitable, and
will continue: the editors of PARTISAN REVIEW may say, quite truly,
that there is
nothing else to print.
But it is still obvious that the writers of the thirties might make
now a much more respectable and dignified showing, both in their past,
present and likely future, than they do. The highest kind of creative
work likely to be produced today will be satiric: taking as its basis the
visible world and commenting on it with a violence of satire. Such work
might be realistic or fantastic in manner: Rex Warner's
The Wild Goose
Chase
in which the influence of Kafka is used deliberately for a social
end, was a hint of what might be done;
The Orators
was another hint.
But those were hints merely: what book written in English in the last
ten years can compare, on its own ground, with Bert Brecht's
A
Penny
For the Poor?
It remains true that
These times require a tongue that naked goes
Without more fuss than Dryden's or Defoe's.
The times
call out for bitterness, for a comment on our society such
as Jonson was able to make on the Elizabethan, a cartoon as compre–
hensive and sane as Jonson's of the world we live in. But from the
old-stagers, the established and the promising writers of five years ago
we get simply a retreat into the hinterland of the mind, a preoccupation
with one or another abstraction, or more simply, silence; while their
juniors are vocal in reaction. Instead of sanity we face a deliberate cult
of the irrational, far more disturbing and less useful than the destructive
irrationality of Dada and Surrealism: a view of life which is
constructed
