It is for such good reasons, I think, that this new literary movement devotes particular attention to the poignancy of unemployment, and of employment under conditions of intolerable conflict. Turning to the works themselves, you will unquestionably find such subjects painfully overstressed. The strike, the lock-out, bad working conditions, the witting or unwitting agents of “exploitation,” the physical and mental rigors of joblessness, the organizing of protest (whereby the forces of anger and anguish may not be allowed to follow their natural chaotic bent, but may be directed into rational, socially useful channels of expression)—a continual harping upon such grim themes is bothersome to us, insofar as we have been taught that we have a right to anesthesia. And this reviewer admits that, but for the nature of his task, he would not have read the book continuously, but would have turned to it now and then, wisely interspersing it with material more in the “glorification of the American girl” tradition. I know of one critic who, though avowedly “proletarian” in his sympathies, read the anthology while convalescing in a hospital, and developed such a “blockage” that he has not been able to review it at all. Lamentations may be more gratifying to write than to read.
Our resistance, particularly to the work of the less imaginative contributors, is justified for another reason. They are not able to “transcend” the partisan “leads” supplied by their philosophy. Their philosophy makes them quick to recognize a propaganda situation, and they proceed with great efficiency to build a work that emphasizes it. In fact, they become so intent upon the emphasizing of the situation, that they overlook the humane development of character. Their characters are formed in haphazard fashion, for the specific partisan purpose at hand, like the distortions of a political cartoonist. Hence, if the situation itself is burdensome to the reader, there may be nothing else in the work by which the writer can cajole him. One may hypothetically picture the two opposite procedures: that of the “partisan” writer, who begins by discovering a “propaganda situation,” and proceeds to exploit it by inventing characters to fit; and in contrast, there is the “imaginative” writer, who might begin with an attachment to some very appealing character, and in the course of depicting him, might show him at work in some propaganda situation, such as the harboring of a labor leader hunted by vigilantes. Ultimately, there need be nothing at odds between the two approaches: an expression that is not truncated will encompass both. But if the partisan factor is emphasized with too much greed, it may lead to schematization of character, with nothing of appeal insofar as the situation itself lacks appeal.
An extreme instance of this is Philip Stevenson’s story, “Death of a Century.” Some of Stevenson’s stories in the old American Caravan, prior to his “efficient” development of the partisan approach, were very appealing in the subtlety of their humaneness. But here he attempts to project, through an entire piece, a feeling people sometimes experience when seeing pictures and hearing stories of Rockefeller in extreme old age. He imagines a fabulously wealthy capitalist, now in his dotage, a living mummy surviving for a time after a successful revolution in the United States. Venomously, literal in his settling of scores, the author attempts to wreak symbolic vengeance upon his villain by picturing him as a victim of both revolution and old age. Not only is the result childishly repellent in the simplicity of its wish-fulfillments. It is so naïvely partisan that it defeats its purpose as partisanship. One grows indignant at the author’s treatment of senility. In trying to discredit capitalism by identifying it with a decrepit old man, he quite unintentionally reminds us that no social change can remove the pathetic feebleness of age—and the more vengeful he becomes, the sorrier we feel for the scapegoat of his vengeance. Thus, the character is thin at best, and insofar as it takes on fullness, it does so at the expense of the propagandistic purpose.
There is a compensatory feature of the “propaganda situation” that should be noted, however. Whereas, in its overemphasis, it can serve as imaginative restriction, it does contribute one virtue to even the least pretentious contributions in the book. For I think that the strong sense of the propaganda situation is linked with the strong sense of an audience one gets when reading this anthology. This literature is written to people, or for people. It is addressed.
So much by way of introduction. The volume is compendious, and uneven. Yet perhaps we should single out for comment some of the more representative texts.
Robert Cantwell’s story, “Hills Around Centralia,” is a good example of a crucial propaganda situation embodied imaginatively. It is based upon the poignancy of the Crucifixion theme (the “benefactor” persecuted as “malefactor”). Irony of clashing moralities. The author “weights” his material propagandistically by showing us, first, the morality of the vigilantes in action, and then slowly widening our conception of the total scene by a sympathetic portrait of the strikers. Tactfully, he permits us to see how the interests of the vigilantes have led them to misinterpret the nature of a riot, while their grip upon the channels of education and publicity serves to shape “neutral” opinion in their favor. The two opposing worlds (of vigilantes and strikers) are eventually “synthesized” by a bridge device, being brought together when some impressionable boys, who had been bewilderedly subjected to the vigilante views, come upon two strikers hiding in the woods (overtones of the “little child shall lead them” theme). The author’s choice of sides is made atop the ironic, the relativistic—hence, “propaganda” in the fullest sense, because profoundly humane. Strict “proletarian” morality could not be so “shifty.” It would be pitted squarely against the enemy. But the farthest-reaching propaganda (as a device for appealing to the enemy, and not merely organizing his opposition by the goads of absolute antithesis) requires the more ambiguous talents of the diplomat (who talks to an alien camp in behalf of his own camp).
The excerpt from Jack Conroy’s novel, The Disinherited, reveals upon analysis that the author, for all his superficial roughness, can be very sensitive in the delicacy of his formal progressions. For his tendentious situation, he draws upon our sympathies for a courageous, hard-working, but victimized mother. The “argument” falls into three parts: (1) we see the mother rejecting the thin-lipped charity that would separate her from her children; (2) we get an effectively ironic association when the son, resolving to be a “man,” hears the other children playing “hide and seek,” and yearns to join them; (3) the mother rigorously at toil. The chapter is rhetorically rounded off with something that might be called a coda. Apparently at a tangent, Conroy falls to telling of an incident unrelated to the matters at hand—and when he has finished, he suddenly reveals its application to his theme. It becomes a bitter device for rejecting “those canned Western Union greetings” for Mother’s Day. If the reader is not moved by this turn, at once surprising and prepared, he is blessed with a tougher skin than is your present correspondent. Conroy evidently likes to think of himself as a “diamond in the rough” sort of writer; but the correctness of his form reveals a sense of propriety in the best sense of the word.
Ben Field’s “Cow” is interesting as a problem in propaganda because of its vigorous attempt to combat anti-Semitism by destroying the stereotype image of the Jew and assembling a different cluster of traits in its stead. Perhaps he approaches his task a little too head on. Hence, those who respond strongly to the stereotype will tend to feel his portrait as “false,” since his zeal for reconstruction gets him into the “statuesque” rather than the “humane.” But its attainments may be felt despite its defects—and one must recognize the justice of its inclusion in a book of this kind, representing the attitudes of a group which, like the many religious bodies of the Hellenistic period, recruits its members by cutting on the bias across traditional distinctions of nationality and race.
Albert Halper’s “Scab!” suffers from an O. Henry patness in the “well-made” conversion of the last two lines. But it makes one notable contribution in the search for propaganda situations. Halper adds this particular twist: he establishes his own point of view by showing a man who sins against it in spite of himself. He “weights” his material by giving a sympathetic plea for the strikebreaker while at the same time causing the strikebreaker to revolt against his own role. Obviously, such internal conflicts, that match external conflicts, provide a good opportunity for the dramatic—and Halper develops the possibilities with complexity, complexity enough in fact to have spared us the bluntness of the ending.
Albert