New Masses editor Joseph Freeman with some real insights on the culture war/class war dynamic as it played out in the world of 1930s literature. In this major, very modern, essay Freeman explores the responsibility of criticism, particularly Marxist criticism, in exposing reactionary caricature–racist, anti-semitic, etc.–with ‘art’ as its mask. In doing so he takes up the novels of Thomas Wolfe and insidious tropes (many of which are still very much alive) of the ‘Communist-alien-Jew’, defending the whole notion of critique, indeed reasserting Marxism’s insistence of a critique as he goes.

‘Mask, Image, and Truth’ by Joseph Freeman from Partisan Review. Vol. 2 No. 8. July-August, 1935.

Means not, but blunders round about a meaning;
And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad,
It is not poetry, but prose run mad.

—POPE

A FRIEND WRITES ME: “The pogrom on Marxian criticism continues unabated. It is said that a well-known author, sympathetic to the Left-Wing, has written an article in which he assails criticism in general and the Marxian brand in particular. The other day he harangued a group of writers on the necessity of defending ‘creative’ writing against criticism. The word ‘creative’ is beginning to reek with the grease of piety. The other day I was reading in the Literaturnia Gazetta that much the same situation prevails in the Soviet Union, and they even have a special phrase for it which, translated literally, means critic-hounding. Furthermore, the Party there is beginning to see that this pogrom on criticism, aside from certain well-known historical justifications, has its political meaning.”

This news has an ironical side. The author who is said to be leading the “revolt” against criticism is himself a prolific critic who for several years has attacked Marxism. And, as is typical of many people who object mixing politics with literature, he has turned politician. Is not the call against Marxist critics a political and organizational activity? It smacks a little of Technocracy, which urged “scientists” of every shade of opinion to unite against “politicians” of all the social classes.

American literature suffers from strange distortions and confusions. When a Marxist writer describes facts as he sees them, he is a paid propagandist for the Kremlin. When a bourgeois writer utters the meanest, most malicious, most barbarous superstitions, he is exercising his right of free speech, his “intellectual integrity” and his imagined monopoly of truth. We say, with the best western critics from Prosper de Barante down, that literature reflects the social struggle. That makes us “artists in uniform.” They say that our poor, hungry, jobless, coatless, foodless, roomless writers who bum nickles from each other around Union Square for coffee and crullers—that these are living on Moscow gold. That is impartial, aesthetic criticism. Archibald MacLeish says some very questionable things about Communists, Jews, etc. He breaks up his editorial into short lines, calls it a fresco, and lo! we have a poem. His prejudices are now “creative” art, A Marxist reviewer analyses a book in sober prose that plunges into essentials, and he is “merely” a critic—uncreative, dogmatic, abstract, the propounder of sterile formulas. The good critic is one who uncritically ballyhoos the productions of his friends, and rewrites the publishers’ blurbs for people with inflated reputations.

But the dividing line between “creation” and “criticism” is not so simple. I have just been reading Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. It is an extraordinary novel, rich in narrative, observation and feeling, resounding with strong rhetoric; yet it also contains a curious section describing that “dreary, gray and hopeless-looking Jew” named Abraham Jones: “The whole flag and banner of his race was in the enormous putty-colored nose.” Abe changes his name to “Alfred,” and the author roars that the Jew has “taken violently, by theft and rape” this sacred Aryan handle. The Jew does not merely grin: he grins “with Kike delight”—radically different from any other kind of delight. And they say that Communist writers abuse people and call them names! But this is a novel, a work of “creative” art. Azke is a “poetic” adjective.

Do not think it clouts Abe Jones only. The great city swarms with “the faces, cruel, arrogant and knowing of the beak-nosed Jews.” The Hero, Eugene Gant, teaches English at a university; his class consists, apparently, entirely of Jews; but no one is interested in the course except Abe Jones, who smiles “wearily, cruelly, contemptuously”; and the “faithful” Boris Gorewitz, who sits “very close, ah fragrantly, odorously close” to his teacher, turning his “cruel grinning Yiddish face” to the Hero with a “soft Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! of contemptuous laughter.”

There are references to Jewish lawyers that make Theodore Dreiser look like Theodore Herzl: “the hordes of beak-nosed shysters, poured out of the law school year by year,” who are “adept in every dodge of dishonorable trickery, in working every crooked wire”—not as lawyers, regardless of race, color or creed, functioning in a social system based on fraud, but as Jewish lawyers.

Abe-Alfjed’s spirit is “gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk”—presumably different from the “nordic” murk that drives the Hero across hundreds of pages shrieking where shall I go, what shall I do, what is youth, what is love, what is life; getting drunk, going to the whores, and beating up his friends until they are senseless.

And the Jewish women!—as “old as nature, and as round as the earth: they had a curve in them: they had gone to the wailing walls of death and love for seven thousand years.” No less! The Jewish women waited for our “faustian” hero a la Spengler “with rich yolky cries”; they “pressed around him at his table with insistent surge…they pressed on him their sensual wave.”

You understand, of course, that this sensual wave is in the Jewish women, not in the “faustian” hero; at least not at this point, for otherwise he rushes up and down the world boiling with gigantic, heroic, epic, unfathomable, endless, infinite, eternal, wonderful, unprecedented, unparalleled, unique, unheard of, terrible and sacred desire.

You understand, too, the type of Russian who thought the gypsies were more sensual than the Slavs, the white who thinks so about Negro women, the Dutch trader who goes into ecstasies about the Polynesians, the Yanqui who is impotent at home and a Pantagruel in Havana, and the Jewish Eugene Gant whose emotional antennae respond only to the “sensual waves” of gentile girls.

Universal race-prejudice fostered by bourgeois civilization, combined with the sexual taboos and repressions prevalent in the western world, make such illusions common. But it takes a peculiar mind to generalize from this as Eugene Gant does. The Jewish boys stand around our “faustian” Hero with a “sense of acceptance, as if they had known for thousands of years that their women would betray them with a Gentile lover, and yet with a kind of triumph, as if they also knew that they would regain them in the end”—like stolen cows—an image worthy of a culture that looks upon women as private property and upon love as a “triumph” of the masculine ego.

Our Hero considers the Jews and he knows—that they would never be “wild and drunken, or beat their knuckles bloody on a wall, or lie beaten and senseless in the stews”; but he also knows that “with smooth faces they would decant the bottle for some man who did, and that they would read him quietly to his desperate fate with their dark, mocking and insatiate eyes.” He also knows that the Jews can “live completely in a world of cruel and subtle intuitions, unphrased and unutterable intensities of cruelty, shame and horror without lifting a finger or turning a hand.”

The Sacrosanct Oracle

So much for Jesus, Spinoza, Marx and the thousands of Jews who have been imprisoned, executed and murdered for passionate participation in great social movements which seek to improve the life of man; and for Freud who specialised in illuminating the “unutterable horrors.”

Now if the author had written such stuff directly in an article, he would have been damned by everybody from the New Masses to the New York Times. He would have been placed in the same category with Hitler, Goebbels, Strasser and that Aryan Rosenberg who came by his “Alfred” honestly, without violence, rape or theft: he would have been given the merry ha-ha (or should one say Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho?) which the liberal gentile hands those who believe that Jews, Negroes and other “inferior” races are more corrupt, mysterious, cunning, sensual and patient than the “faustian” hero.

But the author did not directly flaunt the beak-nosed banner of the race, the Jewish “soul,” the Yiddish murk, the “kike” grin. He invented a character named Eugene Gant and another named Abraham Jones; and, as we know, an author is not responsible for his characters—even when, as in this case, it is hard to locate the point at which the character stops talking and the author begins. He has given us “art,” and now the illusions of the anti-semite, the blind, stupid, blundering confusion of fantasy with fact, the depiction of subjective “murk” as objective reality, the babbling about the specific as if it were the general becomes sacred and inviolate. You may laugh at the “critical” nonsense of Gregor Strasser; you may not scoff at the “creative” nonsense of Thomas Wolfe.

How careless of Dreiser to write his infantile opinions about the Jews to Hutchins Hapgood! Why did he speak directly, “critically,” in his own name, and rouse the ire of the Jews, the liberals, the radicals? If he had only placed those opinions in the mouth of a “character”; if the libel had only come from “Gregory Butterfiddle,” or better still, “Jake Cohen,” no one would squawk. It would no longer be sentimental confusion, but “creative writing,” holy, infallible, “sincere.”

Under the corrupt standards of current bourgeois aesthetics, the “creative” artist may slander workers, Negroes, Jews, anyone he likes; he may give way to his most reactionary impulses, yet not be called to account as he would be if he spoke directly. The “creative” writer is relieved of the responsibilities which, where art is sound, he has always had from the Greeks to our own day. He is treated as a priest who speaks from on high, the sacrosanct oracle whose god is “art.”

But there is a difference between true art and “murk,” whether that murk be bourgeois or proletarian. There is a difference between character-drawing and caricature. One does not think of Joyce’s Bloom primarily as a Jew, but as a certain type of intellectual who happens to be a Jew. Proust’s Bloch is offset by Swann. Shylock is not wholly a repulsive character; he is redeemed by a certain nobility; and Shakespeare does not editorialise as narrator about the race as a whole.

A writer may dissociate himself from his character provided he does so in the novel itself. How he does it is the secret of art. But he cannot dissociate himself from the effect which his work creates. He selects the theme, the characters, the setting, the action, the dialogue; he chooses all, describes all, evaluates all, consciously and unconsciously. We know that two authors describing the same character will create two different, even opposite effects. This is true in the play, where the author as such does not appear at all; how much more true in the novel, where part of the effect is created not by giving the words or thoughts of a character, but by the author’s direct intervention. In this sense, the author may be said to be, willy nilly, a central character in his novel. Abe Jones’ grin was described as Kike not by Eugene Gant but by the narrator.

Perhaps Thomas Wolfe is utterly free of Eugene Gant’s prejudices about Jews, women, Frenchmen, etc. He may say: “I am describing an imaginary character and I am not responsible for his emotions, thoughts and actions.” He may say this, and we must believe him. It would be foolish for anyone to accuse Wolfe of race prejudice if he openly and specifically denied it. But we have the right to say: “Whatever you may believe in your private life, you wrote this section of the novel so ineptly, you intervened editorially so often in the story, you so mingled the words of narrator and character, that, whatever your intentions may have been, the net effect of that part of your story is anti-semitic.”

Reason and Image

This, indeed, is the function of the critic, who is primarily concerned not with intention but with effect. The author cannot help infusing his imaginary world, which cannot be separated from the real world, with his emotions. He may say:

“This is how these people appear to me.” Why may not the articulate reader who is called “critic” say: “And this is how your book appears to me? Moreover, I know the kind of people you describe, and you have falsified their characters, and you have used them as symbols of their race or class. You may not have intended such a generalization—but in failing to make clear what you were doing, in failing to dissociate yourself from the Hero, in echoing his ideas through those passages in which the anonymous narrator speaks, you become responsible for the impression you convey. We may not question your intentions, of which you alone have certain knowledge; we may be sure that some of your best friends are Jews—but in that case you’ve done a damn bad piece of writing which is false not only to the facts but to your own best intentions.”

Needless to say, disagreement with Wolfe’s treatment of the Jew in no sense constitutes an evaluation of his work as a whole. Great writers, whose work belongs to the finest treasures of world literature, have created images of the Jew distorted by class relationships and literary traditions—among them Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. It is the business of the Marxist critic to trace the social and literary bases of such distortions; and six years ago Joshua Kunitz did so in a brilliant little volume which analysed the changing status of the Jew in Russia and its reflection in Russian literature. Such analyses are invaluable, and no serious writer can object to them. But even if some writers do object to a social interpretation of their work—as is the case with those who have been conducting a persistent agitation against Marxist criticism—why should that deflect us from speaking the necessary truths? Why should we let any writer who happens to be called “creative” delude us into believing that chauvinism and self-adulation, hatred, fear and misunderstanding of everything which lies outside his provincial and class prejudices is either art or American? If a poet may give his views of the revolutionary movement, why may we not give our views of the poet? Is it any less a “creative” act to reflect about a work of art than to slander one’s friends, lovers and benefactors under fictitious names?

We know what happens: the moment the critics stop writing about a certain kind of poet, novelist or playwright, he stands up in the cafes and studios and yells to the four corners of the city that he is the victim of a conspiracy of silence. Citizens, I am being ignored! When the critics do write about him but fail to declare him the equal of Dostoyevsky, Proust, Shelley and Ibsen, they are not good critics; they are merely pompous bigots wallowing in the opium of dialectic materialism. Needless to say, the best poets, novelists and critics do not do this. Neither do they make false and invidious distinctions between “creative” and “critical” writing as if the first were sacred and the second sterile, just as true scientists do not oppose practical to theoretical science.

The Marxist critic interprets, appreciates and applauds good art, but he rips the masks off the priests of art. He exposes the propagandist behind the poet, translates the equivocal images of verse into the lucid concepts of prose, holds the author responsible for his characters when these actually do speak for him. The Marxist critic is not concerned with puffing or blasting reputations, with log-rolling or intrigue. He wishes to promote the best, the most vigorous, the most illuminating art. He seeks to propagate the truth.

But every man sees the world from some viewpoint. Because the Marxist critic sees it from the viewpoint of the revolutionary working-class, a certain type of “creative” writer, anxious not to be disturbed in his allegiances, preconceptions and magic incantations, hates the critic, as the church hates the unbeliever, the industrial baron the labor organizer, the capitalist politician the Communist.

The “united front” against Marxist critics headed by writers fresh from the reactionary camp is a “united front” against the Marxist deciphering of bourgeois symbols. Without the Communist, the propertied classes would unrestricted bamboozle the masses with their “democratic” images. Without the Marxist critic the “faustian” creative writer would unhampered propagate his poisonous ideas in obscure, false but effective images.

These images are effective because they have three thousand years of religion, three centuries of bourgeois ideology, the whole culture of capitalism to sustain them; because they evoke emotional habits, deep, deep in the souls of most of us, engraved there from earliest childhood by the priests, the pedagogues, the journalists, the politicians, the poets of the propertied classes—and by the day to day relations between classes and individuals necessarily imposed by the conditions of capitalist society.

Disraeli’s Wisecrack

Marxist criticism makes such images less effective. It exposes the bourgeois philosopher’s formulas, the poet’s myths, the journalist’s “impartial” reports for what they are—propaganda for the mouldy attitudes of the dying world. The fact that such attitudes are sometimes unconscious, blind, “sincere” does not make any difference. Perhaps Hitler, too, is “sincere.” Certainly, the Big Businessman “sincerely” believes that laws, ideas and actions in defense of monopoly capital are in the best interests of “civilization.” No one in Russia doubted Dostoyevsky’s sincerity, yet how many of the best writers in the various progressive camps arose in chorus to damn The Possessed, his libel on the revolutionary movement—among them the creative writer Maxim Gorki.

For that matter, creation is inseparable from good criticism in modern literature, as a glance at European and American letters will show. Dante was a critic, so were Tasso, Ronsard, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Corneille, Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Sam Johnson, Voltaire, Lessing, Diderot, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Landor, Coleridge, Gautier, Poe, Tolstoy; so are Eliot, Pound, Valery, Yeats, Shaw, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson.

Who sneers at poets? The philistine. Who, ignoring history, said that critics are men who have failed in art and literature? The very clever, very cynical, very adroit but not very profound rhetorician Benjamin Disraeli.

Surely it is no more “creative” to caricature proletarian ideas in verse than to expose bourgeois ideas in prose. When a novel or play or poem describes everyone as a louse except the Hero, who mistakes his own vindictiveness for poetic observation, we have every right in the world to say: this is false art. When someone, in all “sincerity” writes a Hearst editorial in free verse, we have every right in the world to point out its fascist ideas. We cannot permit anyone to bully us into swallowing his values, creeds, or opinions merely because he uses a form which convention calls “creative.” We reserve the right to think.

This goes both ways. The critic, no more than the poet, may pretend to be infallible, laying down the irrefutable “line,” uttering ex-cathedra the last word about life and art. Let the creative writer, or his critical partisans, take issue with a specific critic on a specific question. Thomas Wolfe may say to me: “You are mistaken about Abe Jones. You have read that passage with an oversensitive regard for the negative sides of Abe, and overlooked the tribute I paid him and his race. The Jew in my novel is, like Shylock, not wholly repulsive; he has his noble side; besides, I am under no obligation in this great and free republic of ours to treat minor nationalities according to a Comintern thesis. My Jewish friends have taken no exception to the portrait.”

That, in effect, is what some people said in reply to Michael Gold’s complaint against MacLeish’s Frescos. They went further and said: “But isn’t it true that many of the Communists one meets in New York are Jews who talk English with a foreign accent?” This raises a whole problem of imagery and symbolism in poetry.

Yes, it is true that some Communists are Jews who speak with a foreign accent. But that is no indictment of Communism, Jews or accents. Communism is an international movement of workers, farmers and intellectuals of all races and nationalities, to which Jews have contributed the share of fighters and heroes. There are also Jewish bankers and industrialists whose interests lie with the gentile bourgeoisie as against the workers, Jew and gentile alike. The Communist movement in America, as everywhere else, is not predominantly Jewish. It is no more “disgraceful” for an alien worker to speak English with an accent than for an American tourist to butcher the French language in Paris cafes. The producers of America’s coal, iron, steel, automobiles, clothes, the men and women who labor in heavy industry, are predominantly of alien stock—and they are as American as the parasites who invest their “unearned increment” in foreign princes. The interests and aims of the proletariat transcend racial and national boundaries. In a strike, Negro and white workers, Jews and gentiles, the native and foreign-born American fight side by side against the employers, whose greed for profit transcends race, nationality and language.

A poem, play or novel describing “radicals” which would convey that impression—not in the abstract language of sociology which I have used, but in the living images of creative art—would be telling the truth. A poem, play or novel which presents the Communist only as a Jew with an accent; the Jew only with a beak-nose, a cruel contemptuous, arrogant face, is distorting the truth.

Such a symbol or image is based on a prejudice which the fascists of the world exploit. The German reaction said communists were paid agents of France; the Russian reaction said they were paid agents of the Kaiser; the American reaction says they are paid agents of Stalin. Everywhere the reaction paints Communism as an alien movement. It uses the power of dark, ugly, chauvinist hatred against the organized class-conscious proletariat. And everywhere the reaction says that Communism is a Jewish movement. It directs the dark, ugly hatred against the Jew, as old as western Europe, against the organized, class-conscious proletariat, which is predominantly gentile. This was the technique of Hitler. The image Communist-alien-Jew is the fascist image which identifies the “reprehensible” part with the “hateful” whole, which evokes foul, primitive, murderous passions against alien and Jew in order to strike at the proletarian movement.

Now the poet who symbolizes the Communist by an East Side accent may not have Hitler’s intentions. In that case he is a bad poet. He has defeated his own ends. He has conveyed a lie when he wanted to convey the truth.

Lenin and Proust

I happened to have picked on the distorted image of the Jew because it has cropped up so persistently in recent American literature. But it is only an example of my thesis, not its core. What is true in this instance is true in general: the poet defeats his own ends when he uses the accidental as an image for the essential, or mistakes the part for the whole, or assumes unity where there is profound difference and conflict. One does not have to be a creative writer, a poet, a genius to understand this. A good newspaper correspondent knows that you cannot convey a true picture of a country or region by confining yourself to immediate, accidental impressions. It may be that the people in your hotel—broken remnants of the old regime—one and all curse Soviet life; but if you cable their comments without saying that they are broken remnants of the old regime, a negligible and hostile handful, if you conclude that they speak for the Russian people as a whole, you are falsifying reality. If you do not travel and meet workers, peasants, engineers, economists, school-teachers, etc. in various parts of the country, if you do not acquaint yourself with the past of the old Russia and the aims of the new one, if you do not measure and compare and analyze and reassemble the contradictory fragments into essentials, you will never understand Soviet life. That is why the poet E.E. Cummings, turning reporter, gave us such a distorted picture in Eimi.

The marginal people in the fringe of Soviet life accidentally encountered on a brief holiday, became for him the image of a vast land, and his own terror and confusion in the face of something new and powerful became the “soul” of 160,000,000 people.

The opposite is also true. The average bourgeois correspondent comes to Mexico laden with exotic presuppositions, the scion of a “superior” race in a colonial country. He notes and describes the brilliant landscape, the serapes, the tequila, the jarabe, the frescos at the National Palace, the bull-fights, the parading army, the village fiestas, the Aztec legends; he ignores or misunderstands the life of the workers and peasants, the agrarian and labor movements, the daily struggle of the peon against the landowner, of the worker against his native and foreign exploiter. The image of Mexico which he conveys to his reader is a distortion of the truth; and though he is “merely” a reporter, he is no different from the average “creative” artist and writer who ventures south of the Rio Grande. Consider the final effect produced by Upton Sinclair’s Thunder Over Mexico.

There is an amazing amount of nonsense about “creative” writing, anyway. Lenin’s writing is a thousand times more creative than Proust’s; Ten Days that Shook the World is more creative than a lot of fiction published today. Anyone who doesn’t understand this, doesn’t know what creative means. The mere use of such forms as verse, the play or the novel does not in itself make a writer “creative.” There is not a good poet alive who would not rather have written a single essay by Walter Pater than all the verse of Edgar Guest, or Milton’s political pamphlets rather than Sam Shipman’s plays.

Differences in form are important. We must not fall into the illusion which speaks both of Shakespeare and Schopenhauer as “poetry” because either may arouse emotion. But that aura which a man acquires by doing “creative” work is certainly not to be won by mere external form. Imagination, perception, insight, intensity, truth and adequate intrinsic form are some of the things required. Effect upon the audience is also important. The audience may be wrong; writers have often been rejected who turned out to be geniuses; but just as often the diamond-studded belt has been handed to the palooka. If the critic may be mistaken, so may the poet. Each must say his say and take the consequences; and in an era like ours, when basic values are being transvalued, the poet is often critical and the critic creative.

Lenin pointed out that Tolstoy was an “artist of genius” who gave an “incomparable picture of Russian life” and contributed great works to the literature of the world. But Tolstoy was also “a landlord playing the fool in Christ…a worn-out hysterical mud-wallower called the Russian intellectual.” Tolstoy on the one hand relentlessly criticised capitalist exploitation, exposed government violence, lashed the comedy of the courts and government administration, revealed the gulf between growing wealth and growing poverty, the achievements of civilization alongside the barbarism and suffering among the masses. At the same time he advocated “one of the most odious things in the world—religion.” Lenin further pointed out that Tolstoy’s views were not only “the contradictions of his personal thoughts”, but a reflection of those highly complicated, contradictory conditions which determined the psychology of various classes and various sections of Russian society in the post-reform but pre-revolutionary era.

Why may not a Marxist critic, acknowledging the gifts of the poet, novelist or playwright, point out the manner in which such a creative writer reflects the contradictions of American life today, the manner in which he utters the confusions and prejudices of the class from which he springs? Surely, the rows over Thornton Wilder, Diego Rivera, Archibald MacLeish and Black Fury would never have arisen if only personal, individual, accidental eccentricities had been involved, if there were not a clash of social viewpoints.

The Marxist critic not only may but must interpret the image; and if he is a real Marxist critic he can give that correct evaluation of important literature which is possible only from the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat with “its supreme devotion to the cause of democracy and its ability to struggle against the limitations and inconsistencies of bourgeois democracy.”

Urbane and Plausible

America has no Lenins, but neither has it Tolstoys. Heaven knows there are bad critics. Shall we therefore abolish criticism? There are bad poets, too; why not abolish poetry? There are bad novelists; why not abolish the novel? There are quacks; why not abolish medicine? There are many, far too many, evil men; why not exterminate mankind?

Rhetorical questions. No one attacks criticism as such. On the contrary, the anti-Marxist critic occupies an honored place in conventional literature. He enjoys the full benefits of the Bill of Rights in slinging brickbats at straw men whom he calls “proletarian writers.” Recently the venerable H.L. Mencken celebrated the tenth anniversary of a leading literary gazette by “illuminating” what he called “the abyss” of proletarian literature. He fired all the stale epithets left over from his civil war with the Babbittry of which he is a learned and distinguished member and with which he has concluded a peace without victory. Here are some of the Baltimore Sage’s “illuminating” observations:

1. Proletarian literature in this county has not produced “anything of shining virtue.” So much for Stevedore, Waiting for Lefty, The Black Pit, They Shall Not Die, The Shadow Before, You Can’t Sleep Here, To Make My Bread, Jews Without Money, The Executioner Waits, Those Who Perish, The Land of Plenty, The Last Pioneers—the poems of Fearing, Hayes, Rolfe, Funaroff, Kreymborg, Schneider, Gessner.

2. Radicals “love money above the common.” From an ascetic idealist who has starved all his life for the sake of sublime and selfless principles, this is a just accusation. Observe the vast fortunes paid to editors and contributors by the New Masses, New Theatre, Dynamo, Partisan Review as compared with the miserable little checks handed out by The Mercury, the Baltimore Sun, Vanity Fair, Fortune and the Satevepost. You will find the proletarian writers wallowing in luxury while the conservative writers starve in Union Square. Or have it the other way: proletarian writers love money but haven’t got it; conservative writers have money but do not love it. Who says the Marxists are vulgar materialists? The literary reaction. And who discusses important ideas by referring to money? Ditto.

3. The New Masses is “one of the dullest sheets ever heard of”; there “is no more gaiety in it than you will find in the proceedings of the Lake Mohonk Conference.” That is why the literati fell over each other trying to discover the identity of the unusually humorous Robert Forsythe, weekly New Masses contributor.

4. Many of the proletarian writers bear “distinguished albeit largely bogus Anglo-Saxon names.” Abe Jones has taken the name of “Alfred” by violence, rape and theft! Moreover, proletarian literature “seems to be a bad translation from the Yiddish”; it is written in “shaky English.” Let native, nordic one hundred percent Americans like Kenneth Fearing, Josephine Herbst, Erskine Caldwell, Meridel Le Sueur, Horace Gregory, James Farrell, William Rollins, Henry Hart, Malcolm Cowley, John Hermann, and Robert Cantwell speak for themselves. No Jew, unless he utters the bourgeois shibboleths, will convince the anti-semite that he is an American or that he can write English as well as Theodore Dreiser. In poetry, as in politics, the reaction will continue to manipulate the false image Communist-alien-Jew.

5. Most of the revolutionary writers “have failure written all over them, and are engaged in saving the proletariat only as a surrogate for doing something for themselves.” Good examples of this profound observation are John Howard Lawson, Clifford Odets, John Wexley, John Dos Passos, Samuel Ornitz, Langston Hughes, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank and Robert Forsythe. The Baltimore Sage finds that “the so-called critics of the so-called revolution are even more plainly inferiorities. Nearly all began on higher levels, trying to do something for themselves.” Noteworthy among these self-seekers are Joshua Kunitz, Oakley Johnson and Granville Hicks, all fired from university posts, despite their excellent academic standing, for practicing the “liberation of the lowly.”

6. The “norm” among Marxist critics is “an apostate from more urbane and plausible ideas, and he commonly carries with him the rancor of one who found them unbearably complex and onerous; so he turns to the childish simplicities that are the essence of all quackery.” H.L. Mencken’s ideas on syphilis, beer, the booboisie, the Star Spangled Banner, Methodist ministers, and the Superman are unbearably complex and onerous. The words of Marx, Engels and Lenin are childishly simple quackery. To abandon Mencken for Marx makes you not only an apostate but “a man of the congenitally subordinate and third-rate sort.” Again: to disagree with reactionary writers is to be full of rancor. To say that revolutionary writers are mostly people with bogus Anglo-Saxon names who write shaky English that seems a bad translation from the Yiddish, to accuse them of being tools of the Moscow Holy Office, to call them “reporters who see what isn’t there,” muddle-headed failures who love money above the common—to say this is to be free of rancor. This is urbane and plausible.

7. Proletarian literature was discovered “probably not more than two or three years ago.” So much for The Weavers, Maxim Gorki, the early works of Jack London and Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Joe Hill, Mayakovsky, Martin Anderson Nexo, Berthold Brecht, Erich Miihsam, Ernst Toller et al.

Does anyone in the bourgeois camp question this kind of “criticism”? Does anyone accuse the Baltimore Soapboxer of being Hitler’s paid agent, an artist in uniform? Not at all. Malicious, ignorant, illiterate, anti-semitic slander against revolutionary writers is considered witty and just. No reactionary claims that all criticism is bad. Only Marxist criticism is dangerous for the soul of the “creative” writer,—and only the bourgeois novelist, poet or playwright is really “creative.”

When Upton Sinclair was supposed to be socialist, his works were ignored for years. He was compelled to publish many of them at his own expense. The reaction howled that his novels had no style and no humor. Now that he has produced an Epic and spent a sleepless night of ecstasy because President Roosevelt smiled at him, H.L. Mencken discovers he is both a stylist and a humorist. This is quackery.

Creator and Critic

But there is the sincere type of creative writer who fears that Marxist criticism wishes to torture his imagination into the procrustean bed of communist formula. He believes the reactionary agitators who assure him that when he supports the proletariat in its struggle for freedom his writings will have to meet “the specifications of the Moscow Holy Office.” He is ignorant of our reiterated assurances that we consider the abstract, lifeless, unimaginative, mechanical rewriting of Party theses neither art nor revolutionary; that we judge the writer artistically as well as politically.

There, in fact, lies the crux of the matter. The sincere writer who feels discomfort in the presence of Marxist thought believes he is defending boundless experience against inflexible logical formulas which narrow experience. But the truth is that such a writer mistakes the circumscribed experience of the middle class for the whole of life. He thinks that the critical picture which the revolutionary writer gives of bourgeois life is a distortion; he believes that the experience of workers and farmers is an invention twisted to fit into preconceived formulas. Proletarian life is strange and unreal to him; bourgeois life seems eternal, natural, alone real.

But neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian writer creates out of a vacuum. At the moment when the creative writer sits at his desk and composes his verses or his novel or his play, he may have the illusion that he is writing his work for its own sake, out of profound, unfathomable emotion. But without his past life, without his class education, prejudices and experiences, that particular work would be impossible.

Memory, the Greeks said, is the mother of the muses; and memory feeds not on the general, abstract idea of absolute disembodied experience, but on our action, education and knowledge in our specific social milieu. The writer creates out of an imagination colored, in part, by ideas, which he has picked up from the university or factory, from books, from people. Experience without ideas which interpret and color that experience is unthinkable in an advanced society like ours. When the writer does not accept Marxist ideas, he accept bourgeois ideas. Such ideas may be unconscious; the writer may think he writes only out of “imagination” and “emotion”; he may fancy himself free of all “preconceptions” and “formulas.” But this illusion does not alter the facts. The “preconception” is there—and we get an Abe Jones or a fresco for Rockefeller City.

Art varies with experience: its so-called sanctions vary with experience. The experience of the mass of humanity today is such that social and political themes are more interesting, more significant, more “normal” than the personal themes of the previous decade. Social themes today correspond to the general experience of men, acutely conscious of the violent and basic transformations through which they are living, and which they are helping to bring about. Intellectuals sympathetic to the struggles of the working class (what Mr. Mencken urbanely calls “the woes of the Chandala”) are themselves victims of the general social-economic crisis. It does not require much imagination to see why they are more interested today in unemployment, strikes, the fight against war and fascism, revolution and counter-revolution than in nightingales, the stream of middle-class consciousness, or love in Greenwich Village.

It was not Marxist criticism which compelled this transvaluation of values but life itself. Our criticism has only illuminated the abyss of capitalist existence and tested poetic images by that all-pervading, monstrous reality. To attack Marxist criticism as a whole is to attack the attempt of reason to interpret symbols. The image is a bridge between reality and emotion. Criticism is a bridge between the image and consciousness. The poet intensifies and illuminates life by image and fable; the critics intensifies awareness by interpreting art in the light of the whole of culture. The critic loves art because he loves life; the poet welcomes criticism because he loves truth. Poet and critic nourish each other as they nourish the culture which nourishes them.

Partisan Review began in New York City in 1934 as a ‘Bi-Monthly of Revolutionary Literature’ by the CP-sponsored John Reed Club of New York. Published and edited by Philip Rahv and William Phillips, in some ways PR was seen as an auxiliary and refutation of The New Masses. Focused on fiction and Marxist artistic and literary discussion, at the beginning Partisan Review attracted writers outside of the Communist Party, and its seeming independence brought into conflict with Party stalwarts like Mike Gold and Granville Hicks. In 1936 as part of its Popular Front, the Communist Party wound down the John Reed Clubs and launched the League of American Writers. The editors of PR editors Phillips and Rahv were unconvinced by the change, and the Party suspended publication from October 1936 until it was relaunched in December 1937. Soon, a new cast of editors and writers, including Dwight Macdonald and F. W. Dupee, James Burnham and Sidney Hook brought PR out of the Communist Party orbit entirely, while still maintaining a radical orientation, leading the CP to complain bitterly that their paper had been ‘stolen’ by ‘Trotskyites.’ By the end of the 1930s, with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the magazine, including old editors Rahv and Phillips, increasingly moved to an anti-Communist position. Anti-Communism becoming its main preoccupation after the war as it continued to move to the right until it became an asset of the CIA’s in the 1950s.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/sim_partisan-review_july-august-1935_2_8/sim_partisan-review_july-august-1935_2_8.pdf