The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1934-06-02
''The Unpossessed," q
Novel in the POst-WGr
Tradition Of FutiIity

/ They are ridiculed because they ara
weak, they fail Suppose they Eucs-
/ ceedsd? Suppose Bruno Leonard
got his Magazine and Mississ Flins
J der got her babv-then what? Lock
! 1T the Magazines which the success
ful Bruno Leonards are publishingS
look at the Missis Flinders who
have had their BABIES.
In contrast tn the sharply cart
catured intellectuals. the Black
Sheep never emerge as people. We
get, YOU might say. the COLLECTIVE
ist' touch. The students are like
a young army restless to take
chairs. but they are not human
beings. certainly not Communists,
even if they do go off to a hunger
march as q symbol Nothing thew
say approaches the Communist
viewpoint; much that they sew is
shallow cartoon Of it. How silly "a
make the Black Sheep beat that
poetry is "for forgetting what's
wrong with the world and getting
oil tangled no being lyrical about
birds This Is not q portrait Of
Communist students, but an echo
Of these political paranoiscs vho
leap through the bourgeois edito.
rial Offices shrieking that Commu-
nisn kills art No wonder the reac-
tionary critics spplsuded 50 loudly.
THE basic weakness Of the book
which has many technical vir-
tues-is indicated in the authors
letter 10 the publishers printed on
the bookjscket, which all reviewers
read and from which many Of them
take their cue The idea in my
head" the author wrote, describing
her book. is intelIectuals anywhere
tbut Russial in the twentieth cen
tury." Take John Strachey and
Walter Lippman, two intellectuals
on opposite sides Of the barbados.
or Stephen Spender and Sol Funs-
rolf. two on the same side. They
have vital differences due not only
to differences in personality. back
ground, viewpoint. but due also 10
the fact that. although all four
write in English, there is no such
place as anywhere" This meta
physical notion leads the author in
to one Of the COmmonest errors exc
tant among the intellectuals about
themselves. and among other classes
of the population about the intel
lectuals-the illusion that "intellec-
tuals are class by themselves"
Intellectuals are not a separate
class. They are auxiliary troops of
the various contending social
groups They are an integral part
of the social class into which they
are born or with which. under pres
sure of events or voluntarily. they 80
affiliate. Arthur Brisbane and Karl
Radek, T. S. Eliot and Michael 80
Gold, Noel Coward and Paul Peters, .s
Floyd Gibbons and Jack Spivak.. W
Samuel Untermver and joseph
Brodsky Franklin Roosevelt and -.
Earl Browder, are all intellectusls;. -
but to say that they form one class
apart from the rest Of society is to
say that the soldiers in two oppos~
ing armies are really in the same
group BECAUSE they are all soldiers.
Thst is piece Of abstraction which
leads TO mischief In this case the
mischief has confused the author. =.
The novel is not about Marxist in<
tellectuas lin general" 1t is a mar
rative-study Of one small section Of
the intelligentsia, rather unirnpor-
tant in the u. s. A.. where the
mass Of professional people, from
to authors, are an active,
purposeful, practical, energetic lot. :
chiefly, for the present, on the side =
of the bourgeoisie. The novel is q.
study in social impotence without
any real explanation Of that impo-
tence. We cannot expect such an
explanation from the successful
business man in the book How
much more interesting and real and >.
this novel would have
been had there been, among all the
phony "Marxists," one genuine
Communist.