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contact with reality, then the Rus–
sians must be in contact with God
and that therefore the Russians
have of all people on the earth to–
day come to the place where, if
they sing and pray, their prayers
and hymns can have meaning."
(Kenneth Leslie, in
The Protestant)
Dec. 1943)
What War Novels Are Made Of
"I have not come across a single
American novel which tries to say
a word of truth about this war:
those of our novelists who are con–
cerned with the war either write
elaborate fictions about this happy
land worth dying for or take out
their patrioteering in forced re- •
creations of the past, intended to
prove that America through all its
history has been whole-woven of
the purest idealisms. (Diana Tril–
ling, in
The Nation,
Jan. 22, 1944)
The Progress of Cultural
Bolshevism: A Communication
C
ULTURAL Bolshevism is with us
again, and I thought the read–
ers of PARTISAN REVIEw might
want to hear how it is progressing
on this side of the Atlantic. It has
become by now such a common
phenomenon that we ought to be
able to predict with considerable
accuracy what events and opinions
will follow it. We have Italy and
Marinetti, Germany and Rosen–
berg, France and de Montherlant,
from which to cast the horoscope
of Brooks, MacLeish and America,
or Elton, Noyes and England. For
my part, I feel that it is the natu–
ral product of any state of national
policy and social disorganization so
gross that artists are forced to pro–
test against it (and for which the
public demands a scapegoat); and
it is not a very difficult maneuver
to make the objectors and the
scapegoat coincide. Here in Eng–
land, at any rate, it has a very real
object in diverting middle-class
anger away from the Tory party
and focussing it upon writers and
painters whose work is already un–
popular with that class.
This
is
what has occurred here
since I last wrote to you (PARTISAN
REviEW, March-April1943): I said
then that the younger writers were
the butt of a three-pronged attack,
at least one prong of which came
from the traditionalist poets and
journalist-critics of the quasi-liter–
ary press. The new offensive, which
was launched soon after and which
is still going on, began with a book
by Lord Elton, called
St. George
or the Dragon?
The dragon, as
you may have guessed, was the en–
tire body of experimental writing
and painting, from the end of the
Kipling period down. Elton, you
may know, is, or was, a director
of the BBC, and so far as his li–
brary subscription permitted he
covered the ground pretty thor–
oughly. There is a good deal of
similaritv between his list of deca-
. dents
a~d
Rosenberg's-most of
the people who were proscribed in
Germany, and whom Elton hap–
pened to have heard of, including
Zweig (Arnold), who demoralized
England with his pacifist novel
Sergeant Grischa,
Proust, Joyce,
Lawrence, and I think a few paint–
ers (I have not the book at hand,
so I am open to correction) were
at the bottom of the rot. They
sapped the will of English youth
to side with St. George, and very
nearly left us with a public that
would not agree to follow the gov–
ernment into a patriotic war. (In
London in 1939 one had a very
strong impression, perhaps errone–
ous, that the war was forced on the
