MANY THOUSANDS GONE
671
war-which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of the
W.P.A. and the end of the New Deal and at a time when bread
lines and soup kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in
everyone's memory. The rigors of that unexpected time filled us not
only with a genuinely bewildered and despairing idealism---so that,
because there at least was
sornething
to fight for, young men went
off to die in Spain-but also with a genuinely bewildered self-con–
sciousness. The Negro, who had been during the magnificent 'twen–
ties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as one of
the things we were most self-conscious about, our most oppressed
minority. In the 'thirties, swallowing Marx whole, we discovered the
Worker and realized-I should think with some relief-that the
aims
of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were one. This
theorem-to which we shall return-seems now to leave rather too
much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of the slogans of
the "class struggle" and the gospel of the New Negro.
As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most
eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly
committed to the social struggle. Leaving aside the considerable
question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolu–
tionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality
and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human
beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had,
the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some
thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are
not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The
unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the
hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment:
having not been allowed-so fearful was his burden, so present his
audience I-to recreate his own experience. Further, the militant men
and women of the 'thirties were not, upon examination, significantly
emancipated from their antecedents, however bitterly they might
consider themselves estranged or however gallantly they struggled to
build a better world. However they might extol Russia, their con–
cept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed
a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and
badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste.
Finally, the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be
