The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1929-04-13
A Muddled Social View IN
JosebhsOns Book on lola

pany. SIS.
Reviewed by SOL AUERBACH.
EMILE lola, born of bourgeois
II family, at the age of eight saw
the workers in Marseilles revolt
against the bourgeois republic of
l84S they themselves had helped to
create. He lived in the period of
tie expansion of the French bour-
geoisie and its imperialism, a period
punctuated by sporadic uprisings of
workers, marked by the growth of
the socialist party and the trade
unions. He lived through the war
with Germany and the Paris Com
mune. He took a leading part in
the Dreyfus affair, which developed
into a fight between reactionaries
and radicals. Throughout this whole
period, lola, as a writer and public
fighter, was a bourgeois liberal, at
tanning the highest point which lib
cralism could reach in his famous
document on the Dreyfus affair, II
Accuse"
Biography to a great extent has
developed into well-written gossip,
full of interesting moments and
facts, sidelights on personality,
quips, pranks, eccentricities. Bio
graphers embroider bourgeois litera-
ture today by spinning all facts
they can find into finely worked lace
devoid of that essential quality that
makes biography great, as consis-
tent and worked-out a point of view
as is necessary for the writing of
history. To take a figure like lola
out of the nineteenth century, with
out showing the social base of his
greatness, without discussing his
naturalism as a social phenomenon,
leaves him hanging in the air.
While Josephson does in sense
add something to the understanding
Of the man by his tremendous collec-
tion of facts and imaginative organ
ization, his book still remains very
refined gossip. 1t is interesting and
cnhghtening to read this massive
organization of incidents in the life
Of lola if you discount the bourgeois
Interpretation of the Individual.
There are many significant facts re-
corded as, for instance, that after
the Paris Commune had been de-
feated in a hell of bloodshed lola
had remarked: 81 am sorry all the
imbeciles were not killed" That as
a result of the Dreyfus Affair his
honesty and sincerity in his partial
struggle against the reactionaries
had reused the workers to such
pitch that at his funeral they sang
the international" and were imme-
diately ridden down by the police
of the government whose very Of
ficials were at the funeral.
The various dramatic incidents of
his life, his trials, persecution by
the government, his method of writ
ing and working out his novels, are
also treated more from the point of
view of color and making good read
ing than from the point of view of
lola in relation to his
times. It is in a somewhat flippant
manner that Josephson heads his
chapters and pokes fun at lola
without ever fully understanding
him. He dismisses naturalism sum-
marily without trying to explain its
roots, its death and the movement
in literature which followed it. The
bourgeois reading public-its more
serious section-cannot face an
alysis; it demands Eight" stuff,
pleasant reading, cynicism, pessimis-
tically veneered surfaces and lace
reality covers. The liberal writers,
ever aware of the needs" CT the
epoch. trying to keep abreast with
the "currents," themselves part
of this class, give what is wanted.
Take one point-his evaluation OF
Naturalism. Josephson fails to see
its vast significance in the bourgeois
world of the 18th century and its
effect on the literature of today.
While Zola's great contemporary,
Tolstoy, was withdrawing from the
reality of tsarist tyranny and the
of the masses into a
haven cf passive resistance and
"brotherly love" for fear of what
the masses could no in concerted ac-
tion, and insofar as this view al
lowed giving the reality of the Rus
sian scene. lola had been more open
to the social influences. Greatly af
fccted by the wonders of science
and by Taine who in confused way
rsongniyed the inheritance of the So
cial environment. he had program
~ cotton in writing. lola felt con-
,-'-ced IF the important role her.
edity and environment played on the
actions of an individual as pre-
scribed by the confused pyscho-
sociology of the bourgeois scholars,
md he ser out t. rive things "as
they are" in all their minutest de-
tails. Followed the development of
thu. method known as "naturalism."
In pursuit of his "details" lola
stopped at nothine-the cruel hor-
rnrs of war. sex life, slavery in the
mines, prostitutes, corruption. pow
ertv. all the evils Of capitalist So
"iety. He wrote novel year,