vii. The Writer’s Part in Social Revolution

(An address to the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, held at Paris, June 21–25, 1935.)

We are all here, not as Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, but as men of letters who conceive their art as an articulation 280of the human spirit. Each of us bespeaks his class and his country only in so far as he voices deeply his self, and thereby voices mankind. This is the irreducible character of the artist. Whether he knows it or not (and in our day, most do not know it, whence the fragmentary and corrupted nature of their works and of themselves as men), the artist is one who acts on the premise that the universal lives in the particular; that cosmos lives in the person. This is the meaning of the mysterious words “beauty” and “truth” applied to art. As we share the universal in a particular form—a painting of a tree, a story of a beggar—we call it the experience of beauty. We feel the unity between self and some other object, a unity which (far from destroying) heightens and makes true the particularity of both the self and the object. And whether we know it or not, we value this experience of truth and beauty; we love it as somehow good. This is another irreducible trait, beneath our differences, of us all. The conflicts of our actual existence may so weary and confuse us that we believe we long for death; may fill us with distrust and despair: it is love of life, none the less because wounded and twisted, that writes the darkest of our pages. In so far as a man seeks beauty, he knows that life is value; for the recognition of beauty is nothing but the joyous acceptance of our part and our participation in the body of living.

In periods of normal cultural rhythm, when the social body moves moderately well in all its organs, this act of conscious participation in life as a whole, the essential act of the artist, can remain implicit in the quiet body of his story or song or picture. Such times see no Congress of Writers such as this one. But today the forms and modes of human existence, unevenly evolved, have broken the equilibrium which is life itself. Today, the active and aggressive faith in life, the revelation of its intricate harmony, which is the sole science of the artist, is so at variance with the actual world 281that we feel the need of a direct action, transcending the solid, quiet, slow certainty of art, to reinforce our love and our vision in the experience of the people.

All this may seem to you irrelevant esthetics. But you must pardon me, for the application I wish to draw from it (my brief message to this Congress) is relevant.

The revolutionary hour in which we live is but the present phase of the process, centuries old and destined to outlast almost the memory of economic conflict, whereby man (not a privileged, exploiting class, but man as a whole) will emerge into a conscious culture; even as the child at a certain physiologic stage must become adult or go down into degeneration. The key of the present phase of the long process is economic; therefore the importance of the class struggle and the imperative of entering it on the side of the workers. But the process itself, now as ever, is organic. By which I mean that the whole of man, heart and mind, subtlest sense and deepest intuition, as well as belly and loin, must partake of it—or it miscarries.

The orthodox revolutionary creeds, which are the technique of the transition of this crucial hour, do not comprehend the whole man. They stress, rightly, the aspects of mass social-economic action. They slight other parts of man: the intuitive, the intimate, the personal which leads to the cosmic—phases which are the concern of the creative writer. But since the process of man’s growth must at all times be complete, these phases too must enter the revolutionary movement. Since they lag, blame not the political leaders but the writers. Since in consequence even the immediate economic aspect of the whole process lags, and threatens to miscarry, again blame (at least in part) the writers.

Excluding the hordes of parasites and peddlers who dare call themselves “writers” only in a world where illiteracy thinks it can “read,” we might divide our writers into two 282groups. The first stress the sensuous, the personal; strive perhaps after the mystic; ignore utterly the masses of men, and that vast region of each man’s life involved in economic forces. The other group, often recruited or converted from the first, in the enthusiasm perhaps of their discovery of the social-economic factor limit themselves to it or at least permit their awareness of the intimate, infinite dimensions of human life to become dulled. Their work, like the first group’s, is inorganic. And what is worse, the great Cause—man’s rebirth—to which they are devoted continues, because of them, deprived of elements needed to make it whole and to make it live.

Of course, the values of the creative writer, as I have named them, are of the very stuff of the Revolution which, indeed, is the expression in terms of urgent human need of just these values. At the heart of socialism and communism, bequeathed to it direct by romantics like Rousseau who saved it from the contradictory theological impedimenta of the church, lies a view of men and of man which the degenerate humanisms of the eighteenth century and the sectarian Protestant creeds had abandoned. It is the view of human history as one organic body, growing by tragic effort toward consciousness and justice; it is the view of the individual (in so far as he is real) as an integer of this body, so that the health of the whole and the health of every part are one; it is the view that universal meaning is inherent in material behavior, and therefore, that society becomes by its actions the immanent presence of timeless value. This view, which I call the organic view, is implicit in every major artist, however dissident may be his intellectual convictions. It runs with infallible continuity from the Egyptian sculptors and the Hebrew prophets through the patrists, through the builders of the Gothic, through the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century founders of modern science, through the systems of Spinoza 283and Hegel—ineluctably leading to the historical-prophetic vision of Karl Marx.

But in the eighteenth century there had grown strong a countercurrent in the thought of Europe. So successful was the conquest of facts about material bodies, the capture of their movements in the laws of mechanics, that certain men, hungry like all men for simplifications, cut down the organic humanisms of Erasmus and Rabelais, the organic rationalisms of Spinoza and Newton, to a dogmatic empiricism of the five senses. Theirs was a “universe” containing everything that moved by mechanical law—everything, that is, except life. And the victories of applied science were so great that these shallow empiricists swelled in prestige; while the organic view grew enfeebled, being confined to artists with no “scientific” magic to win them credence, to mystics overburdened with theologies that contradicted their intuitions, and to simple men and simple women with no intellectual weapons.

The nineteenth century, of course, brought giants who, in philosophy, literature and the sciences, revived the organic view. In Marx, who belongs to his century’s great tradition, the organic view of man is fundamental, and is complete as in perhaps no other modern thinker except Spinoza and Goethe. But this shallow empiricism was in the air. Marx, overanxious to attack theological creeds and theological metaphysics, at times fell into the use of easy terms borrowed from the vulgar materialists whom he despised as much as he hated the idealists against whom he aimed them. There are contradictions in Marx—great prophet, great historical philosopher, great economist, but too harried a man to be a complete logician. Often on the same page with an unsurpassed word about man’s primal unity, in thought and deed, with the dynamic principle of all life, one will find uncritical outcroppings of sensationalism, phrases from the eighteenth-century materialists 284whom he rejected, implicit denials of the validity and primacy of man’s intuitive organic sense—all of which betray the premise of the Marxist dialectic. These flaws in his work have been stressed as virtues in our Western world by sterile men to whom a dogmatic reduction of life to the report of the five senses offers comfort; and it has been a blight upon our revolutionary growth.

I have no time, nor need, to expatiate upon the symptoms of this blight. The course of socialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, France, England, America, is full of them. Witness the degradation, one might almost say the disappearance, of the true person from revolutionary letters as the individual is shrunk from an organic integer of cosmos to a mere quantitative factor of the collective mass, possessing no inwardness—in consequence of which the human mass likewise becomes denatured. Witness the simplification of the human being to a passive product of environment—a fallacy which any man who has ever planted a carrot seed next to a pea in a garden knows enough to laugh at. And the failure, in judging the course, both hideous and heroic, of contemporary events, to allow, in some adequate modern term, for what our fathers fancifully called the demonic and the angelic aspects of human nature. Witness the degradation of literature from being an integral part of life’s creative process to a mere reflection of events falsely conceived as “objective” or to a mere instrument for some surface action. Witness, in such poor thought as this, the decay of logic and the decay of metaphysics. Witness, above all, the dangerous failure to distinguish between the true essence of religion—its creative role in human culture—its major role, indeed, in the genesis of socialism, and religion’s outworn theological and class superstructures.

All such systems indicate the contempt for human life and destiny which comes when man is cut off from his primitive 285participation in the cosmos without finding a conscious synthesis (the task of the writers!) to replace it: all, regnant in the vulgar revolutionary thought of Western Europe and America, strike at the very heart of revolutionary meaning.

In agricultural lands, such as Russia, China, great sections of America Hispana, the folk have not lost that immediate integration with life, through soil and self, which is the organic sense in its first phase. The revolutionary doctrines of the West, even with their present limitations, tend to free these peoples from the imposed dualism of their priestcraft, to discipline them for technical advance against the cloudy helplessness in which their misery has mired them, and to release their instinctive monism so that it should flow with ease into the organic view and form of a communist order. This procedure is particularly plain in the Soviet Union where, despite an orthodox terminology which frequently sounds mechanistic or traditionally dogmatic, the true foundations of organic Marxism are understood and are being passionately enacted by the people.

In our industrialized countries, the case is different. Science, prostituted and misapplied, has for a hundred years plowed down the primitive monistic intuitions of the masses: the same vulgar empiricism which attaints our literature flouts its obscene excesses in every penny paper, every school, every church. The stress on the “environmental,” the “behavioristic,” the “economic” man, the failure to appeal, in revolutionary terms, to the whole man, stimulates the mechanolatry to which we are already enslaved; dims further our enfeebled sense of wholeness from which alone fertility and power issue; and threatens our whole birth-period with disaster.

I do not deny the economic-political causes of fascism. But only psychological and cultural factors in all the people can explain its spread. Among these factors, pre-eminently in Germany, was the failure of both great revolutionary 286parties to lead forward into fresh forms of loyalty and action those primordial intuitive energies of man which, balked of their future, flow back into the rotted channels of church, state, race, devotion to a Fuehrer mouthing decayed loyalties—there, of course, to be exploited by the sinister high priests of Money.

I do not mean that the revolutionary cause in its present form fails to enlist the heroic loyalties of numbers of men and women. The concentration camps of Hitler give the lie to such a statement, as does every industrial struggle of the world from the Saar to California, where you will find them: the young crusaders for Man, the geniuses of social vision, clear-eyed, quiet of soul. These are the gifted vanguard who, of their own lyric health, absorb and express what is deeply organic in the revolutionary movement. But the world cause cannot rely exclusively on heroes or on the natural poets of action. Its Word must be such as to fire also the more cautious, the more conservatively rooted. And the more subjectively sensitive must also be entrained, those hosts of men and women (teachers, poets, mothers, subtle and humble craftsmen) whose religious and esthetic instincts are balked by the antireligious and antiesthetic conventions of most Marxists. For each youth who is driven into the fascist ranks because he finds it easy to adore his own petty ego magnified in a Fuehrer or a Duce, there are a score of men and women too decent and intelligent to be tempted by these obscene gestures, who yet remain unmoved while the world cries for them, because the appeal of Revolution seems to deny those very depths of man, secret and mysterious, whence the creative will and energy must issue.

The New World of which the old world is in travail is like an embryon. Until it be whole, it cannot be born. What intimate knowing moves the embryon, long after its organs and muscles are complete? This knowing of completeness is 287the final phase of completion. When it is there, and not before, the being issues forth; a new life breathes.... I sometimes feel that all the organs, the limbs, the brain and nervous system, of the New World exist. They are the laws of science, the methods of production and communication, the treasures of literature, art, religious wisdom; and, embodying these, the mass of workers possessed of the will and the power, together with their indispensable leaders, drawn from all classes, the intellectuals, the teachers, and technicians. Why, in this hour of travail, when death threatens the generations of man, does not the new life issue? The final integrality is lacking ... the final completeness which is organic consciousness, the knowing harmony of all the parts, making them move to life, making them breathe together. This, within the ready social body, is the function of the writer.

4. TERRE HAUTE HOTEL

Outside the nine cells^[16] of our ward runs a corridor which is left open part of the day, and through its barred windows I can see the country. Right under my eye is the mellow muddy river that Theodore Dreiser’s brother sang, long ago. On the banks of the Wabash I see a huge pile of discarded cars, rust-rotted fragments of machines, shanties paintless and broken-roofed, the homes of human discards among the industrial refuse. This view outside the jail makes me feel at home in the jail. The bars shut me into, rather than out of, a familiar world.

The men in the ward enhance my feeling of having come more close to the America that put me here. There are details, 288of course, inanimate or crawling, to which I am not used; but like the iron-barred windows, the grated doors, these separating elements are superficial; they do not avail against the growing knowledge that to be in this jail, among these men, and with the police and the chamber of commerce outside, is to be at the heart of a common experience and (given the society we live in) to be in the right place.

The men of our ward have set up a “kangaroo court” to deal with their day-by-day needs, problems primarily of supplementing the vile, scant prison food, of bringing in tobacco, of keeping the ward comparatively clean. The chief of the court is a big fellow whom I’ll call Jack, a natural leader. Jack’s boyhood was rooted in the shanties along the banks of the Wabash; joy for him, from the earliest days, meant escape from everything familiar—and the best means to it, whisky. Jack found a good job in a local gymnasium. One night of payday, he left a bootleg dive and was attacked by a gang who knew that he had dollars in his pocket. There was a fight; a policeman butted in, and a chance blow of Jack’s great fist sent him to the pavement, fracturing his skull. The cop died, and when Jack got out of jail, the police hounded him and no more jobs were open. Jack had to eat, he had to drink, he had to have a girl; so he became a bootlegger. From then on, he has spent half his time in jail. When he’s out, he falls inevitably back into the one way he can think of to make a living: a way of disorder, of course.

But here in jail (where he has more essential freedom than outside), Jack is an orderly man. His cell is clean, his clothes, his toilet articles, his library of magazines, are arranged in shipshape fashion. With a Flit can, he holds the bugs in abeyance. And with his authority as chief of the kangaroo court, he keeps order in the ward, teaching the newcomers and the vags who are let in for the night their duties and their places. Jack is a great reader, and if what he reads is trash, 289the reason is that trash is all he knows—a point in common with the vigilantes. He is the kind of taciturn man who, when he talks, talks well. I note, in his description of his friendship with the little children of his brother, the tenderness that is in him, the kind of tenderness that I have often felt in preadolescent boys for very little children. Utterly wanting in Jack is a critical sense of the society he lives in, is a concept for understanding and bettering his place. Mentally, spiritually, he is a child, because he has been stopped from growing; but in his fixedness of immaturity certain virtues of the boy remain untarnished. I observe this, when he comes into my cell, of his own accord, and shows me the trick of driving the bedbugs to cover. And I shall not forget his bringing out to me, as a spread for my bread, his jar of peach preserve, a homemade gift from his mother; and his sensitive lie, when he feels my hesitation (I know already what good food means in jail): “Go ahead, eat all you want—I don’t eat that stuff much.”

Jack’s right-hand man is Pop, who supervises the ward’s housework, cooking, cleaning, laundry; an old man of sixty doing time for perjury. Pop’s grey face has a beauty difficult to decipher, until one catches its two main elements: a childlike, animal gaiety impervious to experience and an old man’s pain, the two transfused into a mask, sly, ironic, covering them both. Pop also is a child; he’d play treacherous tricks on you if he chose; that is clear. But it is also clear that if you touch his emotions decently, he may not choose. He’s a child brought up among hostile and undiscerning masters. He does not question their authority, nor does he conform. He escapes by remaining in the limbo of his boyhood, a psychological place beyond good and evil but saturated with feeling and humor.

Tony is the kind of chap who affects white buck shoes, and even in stir tries to keep them polished if not clean. He 290wears a saffron necktie and his blond hair is pushed up from his vague blue eyes in a pompadour. Tony is being held for manslaughter—killing a truckman while driving his car in a state of intoxication. He used to be an iron molder; but molding jobs have run thin in the mills since the production of capital machines has dwindled; and bad times have reduced him to the status of a common laborer. He likes the boys in jail; he’s having a good time doing nothing.

In this, he is like the farm boy from the Kentucky border—Willie—who denies the grand larceny charge that has put him here, but visibly enjoys his moratorium from cribbing corn and milking. Willie, with brand-new blue overalls, curled-up amber hair, baby blue eyes, could take the part of the farmer’s son in the melodrama, the youth smelling of clover who comes to the big city to reclaim his girl lured by the wicked traveling salesman. Willie is handsome, nonchalant, illiterate, with many a childish virtue. Back on the farm he has a wife and two kids. He is glad to be free of them for a while, and time for him does not go beyond the vague measure of a season.

When night falls, the lock on the door frequently grinds and the homeless men are turned in for a night’s lodging. Not to dull my story (which has a point, if you’ll be patient), I’ll describe but two of these night-guests. One is an old man, dweller in the filthiest shanties of the Wabash, an aged human body clad in squalor. Sam has been south, picking cotton, and he tells us it doesn’t pay. That’s why he’s back home. He hails the tin dish of malodorous slop called supper with delight; although he has no teeth, the pork chop gets gnawed to the bone.

Beside Sam is a riveter, a young South Indianan who has helped build bridges from Bayonne to St. Louis. He’s broke, but he expects a job tomorrow. Meantime, he shows us where a molten rivet missed his pail and caught him in the belly; 291his clothes ablaze, he jumped to the elevator, dropped to a tank of water and then spent three months in a hospital bed. But he’s all right now: to prove it he takes hold of a steel butt on the ceiling with the forward half of his fingers and chins himself six times. Old Sam jumps up, and chins himself twice, giggling with pride. Sam’s body is still gamy and beneath his dirty unshaved beard is the bland face of a boy, a face essentially sweet....

Do not judge that I am sentimentalizing this common, typical group of failures. There are, of course, vicious men in jails, just as there are vicious men out of jail. They are the exception in both categories, and I’m sure I do not know in which one will find relatively more. Perhaps the vicious among convicts are as rare as the Mellons, Rockefellers, duPonts, among businessmen; as the Hearsts among journalists; as the Hitlers and Huey Longs and Coughlins among politicians. Every broad social group has certain basic traits; in the criminal group not viciousness is such a trait, but childishness. Without a doubt, the percentage of rotten men among criminals is so small it is no wonder that every single man in my ward of the jail happens to be a decent person.

That they were all childish was not accidental. It may help to explain why I liked these men. I have always felt at ease among children. And perhaps this means that I am something of a child myself. And this draws me closer to the point of my story.

Two inmates of our ward, mugged and fingerprinted like the rest of us, I have not yet named. They are the communist organizers, Andrew Remes and Charles Stadtfelt. Stadtfelt is a young man with a playboy’s smile and a body pitifully invaded by tuberculosis. So slight is Stadtfelt’s resistance that every hour or so he must dive into his lousy bunk, under mine, for a rest. When he emerges, there is a cigarette in his 292mouth, a laugh in his eyes and a jest on his tongue. Stadtfelt’s way of curing his consumption is to forget it, and devote his life to bringing on the Revolution. There is no feverish strain in his good humor; it comes from a harmony of the whole man which tubercular bacilli have not yet broken. The second communist, Remes, is studious and unsmiling. Brought in later than I, the first thing he does is to ask me for an explanation of why the Soviet Union does not officially help the Spaniards. Back and forth in the corridor we walked, while he put his questions. But the sobriety of Comrade Remes is not objectionable to the camaraderie of the others. His intellectual preoccupations trouble them no more than his working out the crossword puzzles in the old papers (while they hunt tales of daring gunmen and passionate lovers). Instinctively, they are aware that Remes looks at the bosses with eyes parallel to theirs.

These bosses are the symbolic “fathers” who keep the boys behind bars. They have tools. Lowest are the turnkeys, for the most part men brutalized by long practice of mechanical repression without understanding; men dehumanized to the bare repressive function. A little less low are the police, dull incarnations of conformity to the rules the criminals break; professional opponents, players of the same game as the lawless but on the other side of the line and held in contempt by the crooks, who instinctively sense that to obey the rules of our society means less fantasy, less generosity, less feeling, than to break them. The true fathers are rarely seen by their unfortunate children: they are the respectable citizens, the taxpayers, the makers of the rules, the builders of the courts and jails, the dealers of prison terms. Implicitly, men like Jack, Pop, old Sam and Tony regard them as children regard grownups.

These pillars of society are less childlike than the jailbirds. But they are not the mature men fathers should be. If they 293were mature (and the crooks instinctively know this), there would be less filth in jail, there would be no need of jail at all, there would be less misery, corruption, injustice, in the chaotic outer world which the jail’s false order impotently strives to correct. The lawbreakers are children; the sustainers of the legalized anarchy called the capitalist system are neither children nor grown men. Call them men in a transition between infancy and adulthood: that will explain their natural selection for eminence by a society that is itself an epoch of transition. Capitalism is a transition age between the naïve childhood of the race and that mastering maturity in which alone the dreams, values, inventions of childhood, transfigured, may flower.

This explains why the “children” are in jail; why the men who have not grown up build the jail and place the “children” in it: it explains also why the communists, who are creating a form for maturity, are in jail with the “children.” The two communists in our ward (not to mention the leading communist in a ward belowstairs) legitimately stand for a will, a discipline, a method, whereby men may outgrow the irrational chaos of capitalism, may mature to a society for both grown men and children. By this truth, symbolically, the communists belong in jail. For the values which they strive, through changing the laws, to bring to normal life are kin to the values which the criminals, by breaking the laws, impotently struggle to retain. The mature man rounds the cycle, giving organic form to the lyric impulses of childhood—the need for joy, for play, for freedom, which man outgrows at his peril.

But this natural conjunction of child and mature man in a jail, as against the halfmen who put them in jail, may be still further broadened. After we had been released, Chief of Police Yates came up to us. Yates is a jaunty young man, smooth and hard-eyed, half a machine, a type too common in this 294world, without whom fascism could not function. He is simply the shallow young man, wanting to get along in a hurry, who sells out to the forces in immediate power—the owners of the Machine; and who wants for his reward, not so much a fat pay envelope as freedom to give play to his desires, less destroyed than repressed into sadism by the dull business world of which he also is a victim.

Yates saunters up to us, and tells us with pride of the congratulatory cable he has received from Berlin. Capitalist society has already driven back into infantilism the weakest members of the working class; and you will find some of them in jail. Fascism is a method for finishing the process! Fascism would infantilize all the workers; not in order to put them into jail if they are good boys, but to put them into a brown, black or silver shirt, and stick a slogan in their mouths and call them the fatherland’s army. Fascism is the program for the forced regimented infantilization of the people; implicit or explicit, it must be the program of all rulers under capitalism, since these rulers, by the nature of their transitional order, are themselves caught in a transition before maturity, are not men enough to lead men or to work with men, and are compelled, before the threatening maturity of the masses, to drive them all—through force, falsehood, ill nurture—down to a morbid, regressive, infantile level.

Either down to infantilism or forward to the revolutionary beginning of a human order in which normal men may normally mature: that was the choice, palpable as human bodies, within our ward’s barred windows. In the Terre Haute jail I had our world with me: the atavistic, careless and abnormal; the future, striving to be; the dolorous, dangerous present. I felt at home there....

1936

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