PARTISAN REVIEW
eve disastrous in .its ultimate results, provided the most significant
p6litical experience of the period and the only experience of its kind
open to the intellectuals of the Western world; and it is not for those
who missed it, who stood aside because of complacence or indifference
or immersion in private lives and careers, to lecture those who came
through it and out of it--came out not simply with a loss of faith
but also with sharpened political instincts and a sense of the pathos
as well as the realities of radical politics which the disengaged people
who now plume themselves on having stayed put would find it very
difficult to acquire.
Moreover, the writers who broke with Communism do not at
all form a group with a unified outlook or program. Some, like Gide
and Edmund Wilson to a lesser extent, have apparently set aside
political interests and returned to the old-style literary life; Malraux
and Burnham have gone in for
Realpolitik
with a vengeance; others,
like Silone, Koestler, Orwell, Farrell, and Hook, tetain, though each
in his own distinct way, a basic hope for socialism, while a few have
adopted an anarcho-utopian position consoling in its purity but
devoid of historical actuality. Hence
it
is misleading to speak of
these writers-and I have mentioned only some of the most promi–
nent among them-as
if
they stood on common ground, even if all
are equally vigorous in their opposition to world Communism and
its masters in the Kremlin.
A case in point is John Dos Passos, the latest of those writers
to come forward with an important statement summing up his present
views. His article "The Failure of Marxism" in the January 19th
issue of
Life
appears to be the product of a disillusionment so strong
that it has carried him beyond radicalism to the other shore. The
location of that other shore is ill-defined, and one's impression is that
Dos Passos himself is none too sure of it. Such terms as "left" and
"right" or "progressive" and "reactionary" have been so debased
by promiscuous use in the liberal press and by the mendacity of Stal–
inist propaganda that it has become very difficult to employ them
with fairness and precision. Still, there can be little doubt that Dos
Passos, in his recoil from the ruinous experience of Bolshevism ,
is
now inclined to abandon the basic premises of leftist thinking and to
put the values of socialism into liquidation.
520
