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PARTISAN REVIEW
handful of intellectuals-including Meyer Schapiro, Mary McCarthy,
and Edmund Wilson-who stood out against the war after 1941. In
The League of Frightened Philistines
he attacked Van Wyck Brooks,
Archibald MacLeish, and Bernard De VOLO, who were as severe as the
Stalinists about decadent or pessimistic literature, in the name of
patriotism and winning the war.
In 1941 Farrell threw himself into the defense of the leaders of the
Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party brought to trial under the Smith
Act, the first peacetime federal prosecution for sedition in American
history. They had taken the 4000-member Minneapolis Teamsters
Union out of the AFL and got it to oppose Roosevelt's war prepara–
tions. Though Farrell and Dos Passos, among others, vigorously
rallied support, the Trotskyists were sent to jail.
This was the high point of Farrell 's activism. H e was alienated by
the factional squabbles among Trotsky'S followers after their leader
was murdered, and graduall y cooled toward Marxism itself. By 1948 he
favored the Marshall Plan, because "Only American wealth and power
stands in the way of Stalinist expansion." Later he became chairman of
the anti-Communist Committee for Cultural Freedom.
What were the consequences for Farrell and for American writers
generally of these passionate and contentious involvements?
It
is
almost as if they had never occurred.
In
Literature and Morality,
1947, Farrell included six appreciative
essays on Napoleon, Tolstoy, and Tolstoy'S capacity for histori cal
imagination. But in his own fiction after that time, history and
philosophies of history became merely something for characters to talk
about. They are not dramatized forces which take over and inform the
novels as they did with Dos Passos and Malraux. Farrell's scores of
books in the last three decades-readable but repetitious-depended
largely on memories of his earlier years for their unifying principle.
And though Farrell defended Joyce and other experimenters in style
and form against philistines, his own fiction, often published in
unrevised first draft, remained almost totally without formal or stylistic
interest.
Farrell was hardly alone in not integrating or building upon the
experience of the ten years with 1939 at their center, though of all the
major writers at that time, his view of the political Left was probably
the most independent, clear sighted, and courageous. American excep–
tionalism, as it used
to
be called, makes the preoccupations of those
years seem to most people distant aberrations. Even the brief radicalism
of the late sixties failed to revive the old dogmatisms. Writers are
