PARTISAN REVIEW

430 SIXTH AVENUE

TEL. STUYVESANT 9-7092

NEW YORK, N. Y.

October 27,
1937

Editor
The Southern Review
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dear Sir:

I am writing to find out whether you'd be interested in an article I am planning to write about the decline of revolutionary (or "proletarian") literature in this country. The piece is to be called "The Vanishing Proletarian" and it will try to establish, first, the fact that this literature is rapidly disintegrating and, secondly, the political and literary reasons for this disintegration. Strangely enough, criticism has not yet become aware that the most formidable literary movement of our decade has lost its vitality and that writers are beginning to grope for some kind of new direction. It hasn't been noticed, for example, that there have been fewer "proletarian" novels published this year in America than in any year since 1933. I think it is time for someone to record these facts.

As you probably know, I was editor of Partisan Review, a Left literary magazine, for three years. During that period the magazine was within the sphere of the official "cultural front". This year, however, the magazine has declared its independence and will be published, beginning next month, as a Marxist periodical unaffiliated to political parties or groups. During the course of these political-literary activities I was in a position to obtain first-hand knowledge of the workings of Left literature in America and of the forces that contributed to its rise and decline. The problem is extremely complicated and really needs to be aired not so much from the point of view of critical evaluation as from the angle of sheer factual observation.

The piece is to be between 3000 and 3500 words.
I wouldn't expect you to commission the article, but I would
like to submit it to you if you are interested in the
theme.

Philip Rahv
c/o McCarthy
186 East End Ave.
New York, N.Y.

357

PARTISAN REVIEW

430 SIXTH AVENUE

TEL. STUYVESANT 9-7092

NEW YORK, N. Y.

November 22, 1937

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dear Mr. Warren:

Many thanks for your invitation to go
ahead with my projected article on "The Vanishing
Proletarian." It will be ready by the first of January--
I am busy on some other things now and plan to write
it next month.

Have you seen the new Partisan Review?
We are reviewing "A Southern Harvest" in one of the
coming issues. Many of us here were enthusiastic about
the brilliant piece by Hook you printed in your last
issue. It was by all counts the most telling contribution
to the whole Trotsky discussion. I wonder what you think
about his operation on Kenneth Burke in our current number.

With best wishes,
Philip Rahv

PARTISAN REVIEW

22 EAST 17th STREET

GRAMERCY 7-7684

NEW YORK, N. Y.

May 6, 1938

Dear Mr. Warren:

Although I had planned to finish the article on the decline of proletarian literature months ago, new and pressing work has prevented me from touching it. However, I very much want to submit it to you and will have it finished by the end of this month. Because of the topical nature of the piece, I should think (if you accept it) that you would want to publish it your next number. For in another six months the Communists themselves may proclaim the official demise of proletarian literature and the launching of a "democratic" literary movement. I don't think they can do it but it is not possible.

In your last issue I liked particularly the articles by Kenneth Burke and Delmore Schwartz. The latter seems to be getting on pretty well in prose writing, although he keeps on telling me that poetry is his real and only love.

Editors:
F. W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, George L. K. Morris,
William Phillips, Philip Rahv. Business Manager: Nancy Macdonald.

357

PARTISAN REVIEW

22 EAST 17th STREET

GRAMERCY 7-7684

NEW YORK, N. Y.

July II,

1938

Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
Baton Rouge, La.

Dear Mr. Warren:

I have been wondering about the fateneof
my article on proletarian literature, which I sent you
about five weeks ago. If you can't use it, please send
it to me immediately.

357

November 29, 1938

9 Bank Street
New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Warren:

I am sending you herewith a critical essay: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K." It is an experimental piece as far as method goes, and speculative in content. In my study of Kafka which the Kenyon Review is publishing I am mostly concerned with analysing and describing those qualities that make Kafka a "strange" writer, whereas in this piece I try to see him ideologically by relating him to the religious trend in modern literature. This I do by comparing his central character, Joseph K., to a character of Tolstoy's. Please let me know your decision soon.

When you print the article on proletarian literature, I would like you to remove one of the footnotes. It is a topical reference, now out of date, to several books published last year. The reference is to books by Muriel Rukeyser, Sol Funaroff, and someone else I think. Unfortunately I haven't got a carbon copy of the article.

The Partisan needs poems, and we'd very much like to publish some of yours. May we expect you to contribute?

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
The Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

February 23, 1939

9 Bank Street
New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Warren:

Your projected Thomas Hardy Centennial number looks
like a very good idea, and I gladly accept your invitation to contribute.
But before I can choose a topic I will naturally have to do a good
deal of re-reading of Hardy and of his critics, and being now engaged
in other work I won't be able to do so before the summer months.
Fortunately, your plan gives the contributors plenty of time to think
the matter over carefully, and the actual writing can wait till the fall.
At all events, I will be sure to let you know about a definite topic
in a few months; then we can discuss it further.

Prof. Hook's article in your last issue has had a stormy
reception in the Marxist circles here, and your magazine thus came
into the hands of people who had heretofore only heard of it. The
Trotskyites have now excommunicated Hook for his "deviations," but the
heretic seems quite happy in his final exclusion from the orthodox fold.

I think the recent numbers of your Review have been
excellent. Its varied and bountiful content and the freedom and indepen-
dence of its general approach make it all the more valuable at a time
when almost all the intellectual organs have lost all sense of their
real function.

partisan review

45 Astor Place
New York, N. Y.

April 25, 1942

Dear Warren:

Would you care to review for us Mary McCarthy's new book, "The Company She Keeps." We'd very much like to have you do it. The book has just come in, but the review won't be due till June 10th. The book is called a novel, but it's actually a collection of stories dealing with one character--the "modern girl" or the stories you printed in the *Southern*.

The demise of your magazine was a blow. The *Partisan* was also on the skids until the readers came to its rescue with substantial contributions. It looks now as if we won't have any difficulty lasting out the year.

85

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by an obsessive feeling of guilt to burrow into the very foundations of
reality. All the more startling, then, to hear the Tolstoyan cry from above,
from the heights, also issuing from below, from the Kafkian underground.

In associating *Ivan Ilyich* with *The Trial*, the first thing that comes to mind is their common religious basis. Both narratives echo with the Augustinian imprecation, "Woe unto thee, thou stream of human custom!" But the religious basis, though important, is much too general and variable to serve directly as a unifying principle. Patently Tolstoy's system of Christian anarchism excludes Kafka's all-absorbing belief in the incommensurability of the human and divine orders. It is rather on the level of depicted experience, of the applied theory of the real and the unreal, that the correspondence between the two works reveals itself most clearly.

In the midst of their ordinary and, to them, wholly satisfactory lives, Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K., the protagonist of *The Trial*, are stricken down by mysterious catastrophes. Just as K., failing to win his case in the unknown and unknowable Court which tries him on an unspecified charge, is finally executed, so Ilyich, failing to recover from an "unheard of" illness which no doctor is able to diagnose, finally dies in agony after screaming incessantly for three days and three nights. The "case" and the "illness" are variations of the same device, which allows the author to play God so as to confront an ordinary, self-complacent mortal with an extraordinary situation, to put to rout his confidence in reason and in the habitual limits of his consciousness, and in the end to destroy him utterly.

Incapable of distinguishing themselves either for good or evil, neither Ilyich nor K. are sinners in the accepted sense. Nevertheless the inquisitorial art of their authors burns them at the stake as heretics. And their heresy consists simply of their typicality.

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taking shape in the actual plot of the novel, which is really a plot against K.'s life-- and, in the final analysis, against the human faith in visible reality.

The catastrophe which overthrows K. is immaculately conceived, and thus much more mysterious in its nature than the one which Tolstoy inflicts upon Ilyich. Kafka clears in one bound the naturalist barrier to his symbolist art; and insofar as he describes everyday scenes and objects, he does on his own terms, with the aim of producing effects of irony, contrast, and **EKHEMENEHEN** suspense. *The Trial* opens with the sentence: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." This beguilement of the reader continues throughout the story, and though before long he begins doubting the "realism" of what he is told, he is not resentful of having been taken in by a false show, but, on the contrary, finds himself yielding entirely to this mockery of the real. Tolstoy accomplishes the same purpose in a different way, for his realistic method is sober and "heavier". He always proceeds from the external to the internal, whereas Kafka plays, as it were, "both ends against the middle."

In his apartment, one day, Ilyich goes up a ladder to have some hangings draped, misses a step and slips; "but, like a strong and nimble person, he clung on, and only **KHEM** knocked his side against the corner of a frame. The bruised place ached, but it soon passed off." In time, however, he begins complaining of an uncomfortable feeling on the "left side" of his stomach, and soon we see him hovering over the edge of an abyss. While his world is falling apart, his physicians are engaged in balancing probabilities "between a loose kidney, chronic catarrh, and appendicitis." They never manage to come to a decision; nor are they able to mitigate the patient's suffering, let alone to save him from his fate. And as the story goes on, the disease which lays Ilyich low gradually loses its verisimilitude

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years's struggle with my case has taught me anything? Am I to leave this
world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?" And thinking of that
High Court to which he had in vain striven to penetrate, he suffers the
knife to be turned in him twice.

The uses to which Kafka puts the categories of law in _The Trial_ is
to some extent analogous to Tolstoy's use of medicine in _Ivan Ilyich_.
Representative disciplines, institutions, conspicuous structures erected
by man's reason and science, law and medicine are fortresses against which
those who spurn the authority of reason and science must take up arms.
But the assault takes different forms. Whereas Tolstoy makes a frontal
attack, openly jeering at the doctors for their silly airs and pose of
omniscience, and even accusing them of lying, Kafka enters the fortress
disguised as a friend. Psychologically ambivalent, he sympathizes at once
with the divine judge and with the human litigant; hence even as the demon-
strates the meaninglessness of the notion of justice he wears the mask
of legality. His unusual irony converts juridical relations, which we are
accustomed to think of as supremely rational, into the very medium of
irrationality. K. discovers that the enactments and ordinances of the
Court are not motivated by a love of order but by caprice and every kind
of disorderly impulse. Bent on proving the disjunction between justice
and necessity, law and destiny, Kafka created in his myth of the Court
a wonderfully imaginative, albeit emotionally cruel, equivalent of a
philosophical idea.

The device of the mysterious catastrophe requires that before the
final blow is struck the victims be subjected to a process of dehumani-
zation. If to be human is to be what K. and Ilyich are, then to dehumanize
is to spiritualize them-- such is the logic of this process. Kafka ensnares

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K. in the web of an inhuman law; Tolstoy, ever steadfast in his naturalism, crushes his victim physically. The latter method is simpler and quite orthodox as religious procedure. Invoking as it does the old duality of body and spirit, it suggests modern ideas as well. In his essay, *Goethe and Tolstoy*, Thomas Mann, for example, stresses the kinship between disease and spirit.

"Disease," he writes, "has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile; by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his own body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. " And while it may be going too far, he adds, to claim that disease and spirit are identical, still "the two conceptions have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a wilful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her." Mann's observations are supported by Tolstoy's practice in *Ivan Ilyich*. The story, which has the qualities of a rite of purification, was published in 1886, several years after the author's "conversion"; and the disease which ravages Ilyich evidently represents Tolstoy's reaction against the natural world with which he had formerly identified himself and his advance towards ethics and metaphysics.

But *The Trial* is a purer, a more ideal instance of a magical rite.
I have stated elsewhere* my reasons for interpreting in a Freudian manner
the psychology of Kafka's art, which seems to me rooted in a guilt neurosis,
whose "magical" compulsions Kafka formulates in an elaborated imagery of
anxiety and self-punishment. More: aside from sexual obstructions the
Freudian theory notes in this and similar neuroses a regression in time to
the world-pictures of primitive men. The collective representations of the
primitive are reproduced by the neurotic on a subjective and anti-social
basis. Kafka's conception of destiny may be partly understood, I think,
as an example of this type of neurotic regression. His myth of the Court,

*Franz Kafka, an essay, in the Kenyon Review, January, 1939*

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despite the external modernity of its bureaucratic features, recalls us to
remote and primordial ideas of fate, This is even truer of his novel, *The
Castle*, where the sense of fate is expressed in spatial, rather than in
temporal terms. By this I mean that the Castle, which is the abode of divi-
nity, as well as the village, which is the community of men--the crowd of
celestial functionaries as well as the crowd of peasants-- all are subor-
dinate to an even more primary power which has no personification and no
rationale but which is simply the necessary and eternal disposition of
things. This conception of fate is older than *religion* and antedates
the birth of the gods. It originated in the magical and animistic stage
of tribal life. The Greek word *Moira*--fate--as F.M.Cornford has shown in
his book, *From Religion to Philosophy*, once possessed spatial significance.
It refers back to a cosmogony which was developed prior to the Homeric
theogony. *Moira* was an impersonal potency dominating both gods and humans
whose real meaning was portion, allotment, province, domain. To sin meant to
encroach, to cross a sacred frontier, to expose oneself to Nemesis--the
avenger of trespass. This "separation of the world into elemental provinces"
can be traced back, according to Cornford, to the sanctification of "status",
to the projection into myth of the social and economic organization of the
tribe.

It is *Moira*, then, that Kafka represents in *The Castle*, and not fate
*working itself out in time* as conceived by the civilized
mind. Unable to establish himself in the "village", which is the province
of man, the pathos of K. in this novel is the pathos of an alien whose
pursuit of status ends in failure. Status is synonymous with the state of
grace: and he who has a home has status.

It is time to regain the prosaic social air. And as we cease marveling
at myths, whether old or new, what shall be our final reading of the death of
Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K.?

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tragedy their death cannot be described as tragic. Tragedy implies
that its hero, though vanquished by fate, commemorates in his very defeat
the greatness and importance of man. The hero is always sharply indi-
vidualized; his is an ample character. The opposite is true of K. and
Ilyich. They are characterless in the sense indicated by Dostoevsky
when he wrote in his *Notes from Underground* that "the man of the nine-
teenth century must be, is morally obliged to be, a characterless indi-
vidual," and by Marx when he remarked that the advantages of progress
are paid for by the loss of character.

K. and Ilyich are heroes neither on the classic nor on the
Romantic level. Romanticism made of the self the primary criterion
of values, and its hero re-lived the past in terms of the new, critical,
self-conscious bourgeois individuality. But, in times, the abstract modes
of bourgeois life, with their subjugation of all conduct and ideas to
the cash nexus, undermined the self-confidence of the Romantic hero;
and stripped of his hopes and ambitions he sank into anonymity. It is
this historic depletion of man which the fate of K. and Ilyich alike
brings to light. On this basis, having presented civilization and religion,
the present and the past, the city and the country, as incompatible with
one another, Tolstoy and Kafka rejected rationalism and all its works.

Yet from another standpoint is it not possible to say that,
objectively, Tolstoy and Kafka were really protesting against the irra-
tional masquerading as the rational? For to believe in the genuine
rationality of the bourgeois pattern is a profound illusion--
and it is in this illusion that the religious revival in literature is
grounded. The bourgeois era has immeasurably increased man's control
over nature. On that plane society has indeed solved real problems;

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nevertheless behind its facade of official rationality anarchy still reigns in fact. The undiminished power of man over man, disguised as impersonal money and market relations, looms over the individual like those玄 elemental natural phenomena that once drove his primitive ancestor to create gods for his worship. And, at bottom, is it not the same fear which constrains the perplexed descendants of the early god-makers to turn their minds to constructions of divinity?

As against the negations that the religious temper of writers like Tolstoy and Kafka insists on, literature has of late responded to a radical secularism whose ambitions are political rather than metaphysical. The literary radicals take a positive view of the products of rationalism. They hold that in order to resolve the conflicts of modern life, it is not necessary to get rid of modern acquisitions-- science, the machine, the city. On the contrary, to them these acquisitions are valuable as the tangible prerequisites of human freedom. They make the significant provision, however, that instead of mastering society as they do now, these acquisitions 需 need to be mastered by it. But so far this last--the ability of mankind to achieve such an ideal--has remained an hypothesis. It still awaits the pragmatic test of history.