Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
death.” Yet the fact that the author built his ominous dreaming about a worker dying of silicosis (his politics prompting him to see the “news” in the West Virginia disaster without waiting for the story to “break” in our headlines) indicates how deep an author’s enlistment in a practical cause may go. We observe how a writer may on occasion tie even his dreams to a party line.
I might close my reference to the story section by a mention of an excerpt, complete in itself, from Edwin Seaver’s novel of white-collar workers, The Company. Seaver has evidently learned much from Sherwood Anderson, whose lyric mode of story-telling he applies to his idylls and laments of metropolitan life. He is particularly good at finding simple themes that suggest complex connotations. In some ways, the tendentious situation embodied in his portrait of Aarons places us strategically at the very “narrows” of the propaganda issue. Aarons works for a public relations counsel—and the public relations counsel is the proletarian propagandist in reverse. He is purely and simply the historic devil. For whereas (the proletarian propagandist would enter the region of overlap between) his group and the people for the purpose of enlisting the people in behalf of social change, the public relations counsel would work in this same marginal territory to obstruct social change. Hence the subtlety of the situation which Seaver economically depicts for us, as we see Aarons, with a revolutionary interest in this region of overlap, employed by a man whose business it is to manipulate this same region for reactionary purposes. We watch Aarons making himself at home in this schizoid state. We see him undermining the simple loyalty of the others in the office, until their self-cynicism impairs the convincingness of their copy, while Aarons has learned to harness his detestation. From the very violation of his own beliefs, he derives a perverse strength, and is finally commended by his boss in the presence of those whose confidence in themselves he has destroyed. The bowing of the head, the theme on which this brief story ends, is mutely eloquent.
I have considered the stories at some length, since they lend themselves particularly well to an analysis of the tactics underlying propagandist art. Turning to the poetry section, we note that the lyrics necessarily possess, in their epistolary, polemic ingredient, a level of relevance beneath which they cannot sink. There are such incidents as May Day, the burning of the books, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti to be commemorated; there is a definite need of encouragement to equip one for the intricacies of “class struggle”—hence the strongly recitative, oratorical note that pervades this form, a form rapidly becoming almost bereft of gravitational pull. To borrow a word from capitalism, we may note that there is a “market” for occasional verse, devotional verse, and the ritualization of dogma. These poets are at the stage where Commodianus was in the upbuilding of Catholic poetry. One feels behind them the pressure and sincerity of hunger (sometimes hunger literally, more often hunger in its wider, metaphorical aspects). Much of this verse is not written merely for the eye, or even for the ear, but for the mouth. Thus, though most of these atheistic poets would be scandalized at the thought, I should say that their verse is primarily concerned, in secular guise, with the mimetics of prayer. For prayer, we are told by the shrewdest of our naturalistic explainers-away derives the force of its appeal from the first experiences of childhood when the child learns “word magic,” the influencing of reality by speech (as when it summons its nurse by calling for her). Its obverse is the anathema. So we get here the building of character by the “magical” devices of petition, plaint, and curse.
Let me mention, “among those present,” such pieces as: Kenneth Fearing’s three declamatory poems, an amalgam of politics and sentiment. Robert Gessner’s “Cross of Flame,” vigorously realizing for us the incidents before the Reichstag fire. Michael Gold’s “A Strange Funeral in Braddock” (“listen to the story of a strange American funeral”); and his “Examples of Worker Correspondence” suggest good possibilities, if the poet can resist the temptation to convert his wise lameness into a mannerism. Horace Gregory’s “Dempsey, Dempsey,” employing for polemic purposes the psychoanalytic account of the “identification” process. Alfred Hayes’ “In a Coffee Pot,” interesting for its transformation from the theme of one man’s unemployment to the theme of organized group resistance, an “extension device” also well utilized in Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of Lenin.” James Neugass’ “Thalassa, Thalassa” (a serviceable “idea,” as he incongruously draws upon our connotations of ancient Greece when celebrating a strike of Greek freighters at Buenos Aires, though it is far better as an invention than in its working out). Kenneth Patchen’s “Joe Hill Listens to the Praying,” a work conducted on three levels: the sermon, Joe Hill, the poet’s comments. Edwin Rolfe’s “Unit Assignment,” a homely but accurate account of an incident in the spreading of the doctrine. Muriel Rukeyser’s “City of Monuments,” the imaginative opposing of tomb and sprout. Isidor Schneider’s “Portrait of a False Revolutionist” (“He’ll chant red song/like a cricket all day long”)—also one should note his use of the Brecht-Eisler “you must be ready to take over” theme in “To the Museums.” The middle class writer’s concern with scruples, in Genevieve Taggard’s “Life of the Mind, 1933” and “Interior.” Don West’s “Southern Lullaby” (which Mr. Brooks had condemned for its sentimentality, an unfavorable diagnosis one could rephrase favorably, or part-favorably, by saying that the author undertakes the strategic feat of incongruously introducing politics into the least political of themes). And two anonymous Negro pieces, which well illustrate how the moods of the spiritual can be drawn upon for “modern” purposes.
The “reportage” section is excellent. Perhaps it maintains the highest average of quality in the whole anthology. Nor is this an accident. I sometimes wonder whether, when Communists speak of “reality,” they mean purely and simply “news.” And there is a notable accuracy here. The early bards were hardly more than news peddlers. Later, when the bourgeois order became established, the resistance to the democratization of news was stubborn and powerful (since private access to news gave one a distinct commercial advantage). And Communists feel, of course, that “the news” is still being tampered with, to an extent that prevents people from seeing, in the proper proportions, the “realities” of the historic process now under way. Each of these eight items has much to recommend it. I should mention in particular the strange circumstantiality of Meridel Le Sueur’s “I Was Marching.” It has an almost mystical cast, that may result from the hysterical suppression of terror. Nor can one read Agnes Smedley’s “The Fall of Shangpo” without being fascinated. She carefully depicts the dreadful upheavals of the human mind as archaic ways of thought are jammed brutally into new situations. John Mullen’s “Mushrooms in the Factory” is brief, with a surprising touch of fancy in its ingenious way of revealing the workers’ attachment to their place of work despite the many good reasons for alienation. Perhaps John L. Spivak’s “A Letter to the President” is the most vulnerable article in this section. Spivak learned his trade doing “sob sister” work for MacFadden. He has brilliance, and the events he is describing make an authentic claim upon our sympathies—but it would take no princess to be disturbed by the pea of his early training beneath the twenty mattresses of his politics.
The inclusion of Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” among the plays would be enough to make the drama section valuable. I spoke earlier of the tendency to begin with propaganda situations and work towards character. This method of construction is more natural to the dramatist—and in “Waiting for Lefty” it flowers. Odets builds characters with strict reference to their functional necessity; his efficiency is sometimes astounding. This functional or formal emphasis prompts him to make unexpected discoveries. When the crooked labor leader says, for instance, that it is “only an hour’s ride on the train” to Philadelphia, a voice pipes up: “Two hours”—and these simple words carry an enormous load. They are eloquent in their place, because they are rich with promise. In their trivial stubbornness, they show you which way the arrows are pointing. You are amused—and there is a strong promise that your attitude of vengefulness towards the crooks will subsequently be permitted fuller expression.
Marxism is above all an inducement to drama. It is a dramatic theory of history, for it clearly and unmistakably names the vessels of good and evil (you can’t make good drama without the assistance of a villain in goading forward the plot). It is loquacious, litigious, rhetorical. In our theatres at least, the revolution has already taken place, as the old hack producers of