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PARTISAN REVIEW
aroused this time by apprehension of their own fate. Most young socialist
writers of bourgeois origin carried on a father conflict against Baldwin,
Chamberlain and (when it came to voting in the last election) Churchill.
Politically minded, progressive, internationalist, militant, the literary
movement of the Thirties expressed perfectly the attitude of the bour–
geois revolutionary son to his Tory father, secure in his empire,
his
in–
justices, his blood sports and vintage ports, his complacency and money
bags. With Tory parents socialism was enough (Isherwood); with liberal
parents communism was more desirable (Spender). But though the con–
sciousness of social injustice was for many its own reward, there was
certainly at the back of our minds a vague idea that the going over to
the working class which was in the Thirties a kind of mystical initiation,
a hazardous taurobolium, would also, as was the case in Russia, bring
more solid rewards. This has not happened. King Stork has shown no
favor to those who croaked loudest against King Log. Classical royalist
theocratical Eliot receives the O.M., but no decorations are bestowed
on such socialist campaigners as Low, the cartoonist, or
J.
B.
Priestley,
the playwright broadcaster. The bourgeois revolutionary writers find
that for all tax-paying and other political purposes they are counted in
with the bourgeoisie, with that professional class who always seems to
suffer more in revolutions than any other. In addition the deep instinct
of the artist to oppose the existing order, to face against the powerful
current like game fish, rather than to wriggle or flounder, begins to
operate. The opposition runs the whole gamut from right wing aestheti–
cism (with even some crypto-fascist-dandyism at the universities) through
conventional Toryism and academic liberalism to revolutionary anarch–
ism on the extreme left. (The Communist writers are, of course, in
opposition too but have not made cause with the rest). The writer feels
that socialism is squeezing all the color out of life besides diminishing the
individuality of his own personality, threatening his bourgeois indepen–
dence and leisure and offering
him
no compensations in return. It is a
curious fact that the Government while definitely encouraging the other
arts, subsidizing opera and drama, circulating the work of living painters,
preserving ancient buildings,
has
done nothing whatever for literature.
The
poet
has at no time enjoyed more freedom to starve. Meanwhile
the socialist writers, so brilliant in opposition, who continue to support
the Government, become boring, and we have the extraordinary spectacle
of a socialist revolution in full force which has not inspired a single
work of art, and whose one effort at spontaneous humanitarian legisla–
tion-the abolition by a free vote in the Commons of the death penalty–
was immediately rescinded. Last week new laurels were added when
