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timed and designed to consolidate the formation of the intellectual
popular front, without which the political popular front would have
had a less euphoric reception in the socialist and radical press . The
Congress called in New York one month before the French Congress
had served the same purpose, apparently responding to the same di–
rectives : to politicize the independent, bourgeois
homme des lettres
in
terms of antifascism and "defense of culture ." Gide's case is almost
classic. Benda had written ten years earlier in
The Treason of the In–
tellectuals:
"Essentially ours will have been the century of the intellec–
tual organization of political hatreds ." By 1935 politics was no longer
a pistol shot disrupting the literary concert; it seemed to have
become the concert itself.
This development could not be traced to any spread of the idea,
dear to Herzen, that the intelligentsia was part of the proletariat
because exploited, like the working class, by traditional powers. The
political drive to rediscover the people had somehow fused with the
need to introduce an esthetic attitude into daily life - a tendency
clearly discernible in Freud, dada, surrealism, the Bauhaus, and the
personal journal form of writing to which Gide was dedicated.
It
was
in 1935 that the neglected American writer, Joseph Freeman , ex–
plained and defended proletarian literature with this bald statement,
which neatly answers Benda: "the dichotomy between poetry and
politics had vanished, and art and life were fused."
It
began to sound
uncannily like Huysmans or Wilde stood on his head . But now there
was a social cause to absorb the deep esthetic drive toward adventure
discernible in the anarchist dalliance of many artists before 1914.
• • •
What then was this 1935 Writers' Congress that we should pick
it over for so long? Wasn't it purely and simply a flop? It could be
painted very easily as a monstrous machine for grinding out
worthless copy. It had no effect on history or policy, and the prin–
cipal side effects worked to the benefit of a militant party subservient
to a terroristic foreign state . Couldn't we forget the whole thing?
Shouldn't we stick to our habits of examining individual careers and
major works of art? I think not .
In the past, writers have organized themselves into different
kinds of groups, from official academies to disgruntled cafe cliques.
But, unless one goes back to the great ecclesiastical councils , there
have been no major attempts like the Paris Congress to mobilize all
