292
DENNIS H. WRON&
obscurity, as in "All You Faceless Voyagers," a story that yields itself
only on a second reading. Sometimes his eye and ear fail him badly,
notably at points in the novella "Taub East." His rabbinical student,
Taub, strikes me as a pastiche of false gestures and superficially man–
nered tones, an interloper from yet-to-be-written story by Philip Roth.
The collection as a whole is uneven, but Gold is more impressive in
his
unevenness than many established writers in their finish and polish.
These stories proclaim the presence of a major new talent.
Morris Dickstein
READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
THE CONSERVATIVE ENEMY.
By
C. A. R. Cro5lllnd. Schocken Books.
$4.95.
POWER, POLITICS AND PEOPLE.
By
C. Wright Mills. BlIllllntine Book
$1.45.
Crosland and Mills both call themselves socialists, but the
resemblance between them almost ends there. Crosland is a former
Oxford economist who, as one of the British Labor Party's leading
theorists, exemplifies that union of thought and power which Mills so
often extolled as a political aim and sought personally to achieve
in
the last few years of his life in his relations with the Castro regime
in
Cuba and the European New Left. Anyone who wants a clear idea of
what a democratic socialist program might look like in the world of
the mixed economy, managerial capitalism, and an upgraded working
class, can learn more from Crosland than from almost any other writer
on the left. Certainly far more than from Mills, who, even as he
described it, could scarcely bring himself to acknowledge that this new
world existed, and who preferred his own, often pungent, brand of radical
rhetoric to anything so specific or so prosy as a political program.
Crosland is, of course, a "revisionist," and the very specificity of
some of his suggestions restricts their relevance to England, a fact his
American publishers play down. He leaves himself open to the standard
charge of "insularity," which has been growing in England and is a
symptom of its decline. Yet he is writing, after all, not as a commentator
on the "drift" of world history, but as a potential leading figure in the
next Labour government, so the charge is not altogether appr.opriate
except perhaps with reference to the very slight attention he pays to
Britain's international position. Anyway, would that we had a comparable
