VARIETY
471
similar to Williams' to assert that
intellectuals like Proust caused the
defeat of France.
And this, too, should be said,
that judging by Williams' remarks
he accepts at face value not only
the claims of Stalinism but also
the claims, equally questionable,
of the democratic belligerents in
this war. Perhaps it is because he
is in so much of a hurry to casti·
gate the relatively powerless intel–
lectuals that he has nothing to
say against the policy of those
groups and classes that actually
hold power and determine the
course of events. The truth is that
we might more profitably concern
ourselves with the fault of political
ignorance and intellectual maso–
chism than with the fault of learn–
ing.
We are at one with Williams in
supporting the great war-effort of
the Russian people. But not for a
moment do we believe that the
cause of democracy is served by
suppressing criticism of Stalin's
totalitarian regime.
Grandeur and Misery of a
Poster Girl
Forewarned is forearmed. So
precipitous have been the shifts
and turns of Miss Muriel Rukey–
ser's career that surely a new
category is necessary to account
for one's feelings-the category
of expected astonishment. What
will be Miss Rukeyser's next
move? The latest is a piece in
The New Republic
of August 2
entitled "Words and Images."
But to begin at the beginning.
Let
us think back to the distant
year, 1935, when Miss Rukeyser
published her first volume of
verse. Here she plumped with
romping vigor for the Revolution,
rode the bandwagon of proletarian
literature, flew in an airplane like
a character in Auden's work (}f
that period, and cried Yes like
Molly Bloom to the working class.
So, too, in her second volume
she wrote indignant though fash–
ionable poetry about the plight of
the West Virginian miners-under
the curious impression that to pro–
test against the lack of proper
safeguards in the mines is to tear
at the very roots of capitalism.
One should keep in mind, though,
that the West Virginian miners
were a topic of the day, and
topics of the day are for Miss
Rukeyser the music of the band–
wagon coming.
But soon Marxism had ceased
to be popular, and in addition
Miss Rukeyser had already been
upset by a newspaper interviewer
wh0 asked her if she was a com–
munist. (Her reply was that she
was voting for La Guardia.) Yet
the losing fashion did not leave
Miss Rukeyser at a loss. She
came out in favor of Symbols and
published pooms entitled
A Turn–
ing Wind
in which she said that
people were afraid of Symbols
and of Poetry. In one poem the
turning wind was figured in the
symbol of a man torturing an
eagle. The eagle was not the blue
eagle of the springtime of the New
Deal. Miss Rukeyser was pre–
pared. How else was it possible
to please Stephen Vincent Benet
and Horace Gregory at the same
time?
If
the lines of her verse often
seemed to resemble a bathrobe; if
Kenneth Patchen .was her only
equal in the mastery of the inex–
act adjective and the dangling
participle; if she shifted back and
forth between the orgiastic diction
of D. H. Lawrence at his worst
and a style suggesting that of
Time
