The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-11-15
Money Writes

create beauty, and had to live in a
dirty howell, upon a supply of cab
bages which rowdies had thrown at
his mothers door one night. Then he
had to go out into the world of hustle
and graft, to fight for living; he
had to become manager of paint
factory, without the least interest in
that kind of paint. And all the while
the repressed artist in him sobbed and
suffered, and lived its own subcon-
scious life, and occasionally surged up
to the surface, driving the respecta-
bic paint factory manager to actions
which his stenogrpaher and office
force considered insane. 1t drove him
to drop the paint job, all of a sudden,
right in the middle of the debating of
a letter; it drove him to a nervous
breakdown, and the life of a wander
er; it drove him to throw up a first
class advertising job in Chicago; and
finally it made him a man of genius,
the object of alteration of all those
critics who have been fed on warmed
over cabbage soup, and whose test of
great literature is that it shall be
muddled.
This is the age-I was going to say
of Freud, but l correct myself and
say, of Freudians. Freud himself is
a great pioneer of science; but like
many another master, he has raised
up horde of followers who pervert
his doctrine in spite of all he can do.
We know the swarms of Nietzscheans,
who think that the superman is en-
bodied in big-fisted bully; we know
the Whitmanites, who think that
genius means brag and buster and
exhibitionism. In the same way there
are Freudians, who find the cause of
all completes" in failure to follow
every sexual whim. Freud himself
teaches "sublimation," directing the
sexual energy into the channels of
artistic and intellectual creation. l
read his books before any of them
had been translated into English, so
L have watched this cult from the be-
ginning, and have seen my muddled
young friends in Greenwich Village
set out on a crusade to "syke" all the
married couples they know, and dis
cover that they are suffering from
"repressions," and persuade them to
a divorce, or at the least few adul-
teries.
And so came Sherwood Anderson,
right in the Freudian swim; an his
characters are victims of dissertation,
and always they find the solution of
their problem in following a sexual
impulse. Civilization is repressed,
says our novelist, and he writes a long
novel. Ozark Laughter" co show
man and a woman, mentally disorder
ed, and therefore drawn to each other,
as happens with all Inconsistencies, and
discovering in the free, happy laugh
ter of Negroes the state of natural
ness they seek. Mr.. Anderson finds
about the Negroes what Whitman
found about the animals, they do not
worry about their sins; and so his
couple go off together, and we are
left to assume that they will be happy.
But / can tell him that they won't,
because | have lived a good part of
my life among neurasthenics-who
has not, in modern civilization ?-and
| see his two people presently discov-
ering that they have a complex, due
to the fact that one is depressing the
others nature.
There is cancer, eating out the
heart of our civilization; but no one
is permitted to diagnose that cancer,
under penalty Of losing his job and
social standing. No one who under
stands economic inequality as a cause
of social and individual degeneration
is permitted to hold any responsible
post in capitalist society; and so it
comes about that muddlement is the
IDEAL of our intellectuals. Suppose