Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Radical Novel in the United States,' A Critical Survey by Walter B. Rideout Walter B. Rideout's The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954...
...The final chapter discusses not only the diminishing number of Communist novelists in the post-Pact period —as Dr...
...For his failure the standards and methods of contemporary university scholarship deserve a good share of the blame...
...The italics are Dr...
...All that can really be said for the formalists is that they were less consistent than their opponents...
...Of course, 1 do not always agree with bis interpretations...
...they started from the same false assumptions but lacked the courage of their convictions...
...The opening chapters discuss some dozens of novels written from a Socialist point of view between 1900 and 1920...
...Rideout's definition, but in a general way the emergence of independent radicalism in the postwar period is important...
...It is only in The Big Money, written after Dos Passos had begun to be disillusioned with the Communist party, that Veblen supplants Marx...
...To say it was an exciting period does nothing, of course, to justify the terrible mistakes that we were making, but unless one has some awareness of the mood of the period one cannot understand either how the mistakes were made or how, in spite of the mistakes, some good writing was done...
...if he had ignored 100 fifth-rate novels to concentrate on the few novels of merit, it would have been said that he was no great shakes as a researcher...
...can report that Dr...
...In addition to examining the numerous left-wing novels published in the years between the Wall Street crash and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he discusses the John Reed Clubs, the League of American Writers, the New Masses, Partisan Review, and some of the extra-literary activities of the radical novelists...
...As one who figures prominently in this middle section—sometimes, indeed, being cast in the role of villain...
...I also think that Dr...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Radical Novel in the United States,' A Critical Survey by Walter B. Rideout Walter B. Rideout's The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (Harvard, $6.00) is a typical academic performance, rather better than average but typical just the same...
...He shows how the policies and the very character of the Communist party constantly threatened the integrity of the writers within its orbit...
...The bibliography lists some 160 novels to which, in the author's opinion, the definition is applicable, and it is with these that the body of the book is concerned...
...But if there had been no definition, his colleagues would have accused him of being unscientific...
...was conceived under the influence of Veblen rather than Marx...
...I think, for instance, that he has been taken in by the notion, circulated by Edmund Wilson and by Dos Passos himself, that U.S.A...
...Being an academician, he has not breathed life into old bones but simply prepared them for a decent funeral...
...Reading it, one would never suspect that this was an exciting period to live and write in...
...Rideout points out, Howard Fast stands almost alone—but also several independent leftists...
...Rideout is not only scrupulously accurate but surprisingly sympathetic...
...Thirties, with a long prologue and a short epilogue...
...As he sees and says, the remarkable thing is not that many of the proletarian novelists were alike in their materials, their formulas, and especially their mediocrity, but that there was considerable diversity and some distinction...
...What the book doesn't get is the spirit of the decade...
...keeps him from coming to grips with the radical spirit...
...But in essentials his account is dependable...
...If what Dr...
...His key definition, for instance, even though he sometimes plays fast and loose with it...
...What the book boils down to, then, is an essay on the proletarian novel of the...
...And if he had tried to capture the mood of the Thirties, he would have been denounced for lack of objectivity...
...Rideout wanted to do was to show an indifferent generation how and why radicalism was once a literary force, he has not succeeded...
...With the exception of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, these novels have been forgotten, and it is Dr...
...Rideout errs in his discussion of the battle over content and form that went on within the radical ranks...
...After a brief look at the confusions of the Twenties, Dr...
...Rideout comes to his principal subject, the rise and fall of the proletarian novel...
...Rideout's conclusion that that is just as well...
...As background, there is an account, necessarily sketchy, of social and economic developments in the 20th century...
...In the same way...
...It begins with a definition: "A radical novel, then, is one which demonstrates, either explicitly or implicitly, that its author objects to the human suffering imposed by some socio-economic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed...
...I am not sure that certain of the novels he examines—for instance, Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door, Joseph Freeman's Never Sound Retreat, and Ira Wolfert's Tucker's People —are radical by Dr...
Vol. 39 • November 1956 • No. 46
