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PARTISAN REVIEW
dealing here with something real, not with an illusion, and for the
moment I will abstain from interpretation, heaping together
examples that at first glance will have little in common except a dark
coloring.
I hear an objection, and it is my own too. After all, this is a
century of utopian hope . In its name people have been dying, in its
name people have been killing each other-and that hope has taken
the form of a revolution whose goal is to replace the ominous power
of money with a state monopoly and a planned economy. The
vertical orientation, when man turned his eyes toward heaven, has
gradually been replaced in Europe during the last few centuries by a
horizontal longing: the always spatial human imagination has
replaced "above" with "ahead," and that "ahead" is claimed by
Marxism. The Russian revolution unleashed great energies and
great expectations everywhere . There were, however, many
disappointments in store. Artists, writers, and scholars proved most
sensitive to the promise of a new world and of a new man, and so
their hopes were exposed to particularly hard trials . The civil war in
Spain demonstrated their dilemma:
If
you are against fascism, you
are with us; therefore you must approve of the Soviet totalitarian
system. The dilemma is still being repeated. Living for many years
in Paris I observed the desperate efforts of my French colleagues to
maintain their faith in the quick fulfillment of History's goals, in
spite of the obvious facts.
Does this mean that hope pervades our century? Perhaps, but
poetry does not confirm that impression, and it is a more reliable
witness than journalism.
If
something cannot be verified on a deeper
level, that of poetry, it is not, we may suspect, authentic. The
opinions of authors are not, as we know, a reliable key to their work.
Their works may even contradict their opinions. In our century
many writers opted for revolution, but in their writings man has not
been presented as deserving transformation but is depicted instead
as a bedbug, the title of one of Mayakovsky' s plays. They justify that
dark picture by invoking their major task, that of criticizing
capitalism. And yet, in the case of Bertolt Brecht for example,
acidity and scorn so penetrate the very core of his plays, that the
clear consciousness accessible to man as postulated by Brecht
reminds us of the hypothetical salvation in those Christian authors
who in reality delight in descriptions of sin.
One can advance the thesis that the inhumanity of life in the
conditions of a market economy is responsible for the somber image
