220
PARTISAN REVIEW
for. Her "swinging" of these "clas–
sics" is beyond invective. So is her
own manner towards herself, her
work, her audience; it makes the
reading-manner of Edna Millay
seem as decent at least as that of
Little Egypt. As for the manner of
those who accept and applaud her,
it is, if possible, even more noisome;
and is precisely what you must ex–
pect of the sort of "democrat"
who, if he happens to read these
notes, will wish to call me an anti–
Negro, an anti-Semite, a Nazi, and
whatever other overdigested dero–
gatives remain in his vocabulary.
The pity of it
is
that Negroes
themselves seem to be as often
fooled by this' sort of decadence as
whites are. Miss Scott is a concen–
trated symbol of corruptive self–
deceit upon whom I can waste lit–
tle personal regret; but there ·are
others, well-known and unknown,
about whom I feel very badly.
Paul Robeson, I am sure, is essen–
tially a good man, and he has
sometimes used his fortuitous pow–
er bravely and well on behalf of his
race. But what can one think of
the judgment of a man who, over
and over and over, to worse and
worse and worse people, has sung
the inconceivably snobbish, estheti–
cally execrable
Ballad foiJ" Amer–
icans?
And what has happened to
our theatre critics that not one has
observed that the Robeson-Webster
production of
Othello,
and its rec–
ord-breaking success, are both pain–
fully dubious phenomena? What is
one to think of the all but unqua–
lified praise for
Carmen Jones,·
and
what is sorrier than to think of
Negroes in the audience, and in the
cast, who obviously enjoy this tra–
duction and zoo-exhibition of their
race as intensely as the whites do?
Tolstoy's opinion that the onere–
liable judge of art was a clean old
peasant has never convinced me,
but it has strongly moved, in–
terested and unsettled me. But
thanks to our nominal democ–
racy and to the machines for uni–
versal manure-spreading which
have done so much towards mak–
ing it what it is, the "peasants"
themselves, the sources of folk art,
are if possible even more danger–
ously corrupted than the middle–
class audience. Advertising is a
kind of bourgeois-folk art to which
they are quite as vulnerable as the
target audience; and we may have
a jew's-harp President yet. I re–
member how shocking and con–
vincing it was, a few years ago, to
play a ten-years-old and a new ver–
sion of
West End Blues,
to some
Negro high-school children. Both
versions were by Louis Armstrong
and both versions, in their very dif–
ferent ways, were good. But the
older record was pure, sweet, un–
forcedly forceful, and great; and
the new was adulterated, sugared–
and-spiced, forcedly much less
forceful, and sadly urbane, saved
only by the musicians' essential in–
nocence of their decline, and by
their instinctive equilibrium and
scarcely impaired skill, and by what
remained of Armstrong's great
warmth and talent. The children
liked both records. But the one they
played, over and over again, was
the new one. It was in their idiom;
and it was like the difference be–
tween Mozart and Wagner. They
liked the elastic, leaping weave of
the sumptuous saxophone choir
which shrouded the whole perfor–
mance in theatricality, false energy
and stylish self-pity; and they loved
Armstrong's last chorus, which no
longer attempted the simple, squar–
ed, heartfelt declamation of the
old one (though it was built in ref-.
erence to it), but sloped and re–
laxed its dwindled passion along
chromatics, elisions, incompletions
