•    Volume VI, No.1 Fall, 1938 brings a “Letter from Paris,” by a “Young Irish Poet,” who was born in 1904 as Sherry Mangan, into an Irish-American family in Massachusetts, so he was 34 when he wrote his wonderfully full and amusing response to the situation in Paris during the late summer of 1938. He was a long-time Trotskyist activist in North and South America, closely tied to the Fourth International, as well as working for those sources of regular pay checks for men such as Dwight Macdonald and other PR writers — Time, Fortune, and Life magazines.

HIs letter begins with the Parc Monceau, which had originally been built in the 1780s as a series of garden arrangements, which displayed small versions of follies and amusements and which drew those ‘fairy duchesses’,  who have been called home to the US to try and earn their own pay through the WPA —  Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal form of state employment during the Depression–  and which gave jobs to over 8 million people between 1935 and 1943. This is a period of the American- Parisian romance with its Duchesses, now ‘tearfully ruined,’ along with those ‘sensitive well-dressed young men, their unfinished novels still unfinished, [who] have sailed home to America to help in Dad’s business.’ 

But it is the remainers (ah…..as most of us still are now in London in 2018) and the Bohemians and the artists who still maintain that special sense of Paris that even now clings to the edges of metropolitan America — and Nina Hamnet, the girl from Wales who came to be known as the “Queen of Bohemia,”

standing up to Robert McAlmon  in a late night Paris argument, by finding him “too intellectual.” They were both part of the 1920s Paris scene.

“Of four practising poets taken at random, one binds books, one proofreads, one lectures, one draws cartoons – and everybody writes articles…the bogus Bohemia based on monthly allowances, duly wept, sung, and only half regretted, has in its turn passed into history, its place taken by a sterner quotidian reality productive in French artists of a remarkably intense, if not always soundly Marxian, pre-occupation with economics and politics.” And he surprises us, not entirely, “Paris is the pleasanter for it.”

Having created the scene — Mangan turns to the current political situation in Paris. The atmosphere is tense and the world of Stalinist trials and executions is taking place right in front of him. Rudolf Klement, who was on the Secretariat of the Fourth Interational has been kidnapped in the centre of Paris by the G.P.U. of the Soviet Union — its State Political Directorate — — Klement has been decapitated and thrown into the Seine.

You might remember that in the first post about Partisan Review Vol.VI, No1,  we looked at the announcement of the founding of IFIRA –The International Federation of Independent  Revolutionary Artists — by Andre Breton and Diego Rivera with some support from Leon Trotsky.  And now, from France, Mangan says that the increasing betrayal of Communist principles by Stalin has resulted in a significant number of French artists joining the anti-Stalinist artists’ federation.

From here he goes on to look at the fortunes of various ex-Communists in Paris. Gide, you may recall from an earlier post {December 25, 2016:“But we shall not turn our face from you, O glorious and grieving Russia”} broke with Communism in 1936. Romain Rolland, after the Czech crisis of 1938 throws off his Communist sympathies in  “a sensational defection from the ranks of the Third International’s literary fellow-travellers, for years its most respectable and revered apologist in international cultural circles.” He broke with the  war-policy of “collective security.” That is, Stalin wanted an international alliance of the Soviet Union with Great Britain and France, which led many to leave the CP, as this approach set aside revolutionary principles.   Mangan writes that given the extent of Rolland’s “moral influence, it is to be supposed that his example will be followed by many French artists.”

Mangan points out, though, that some artists think that Gide was just looking for a way of burnishing his revolutionary credentials by  abandoning the Communists. He offers a poem by Benjamin Peret.

Monsieur Comrade Gide

sings between his arse and his elbow the “Young Garde” song of the Paris youth

tells himself its time to drape his belly with the red flag

Communiste

He loves me, He loves me not

“Not at all”  reply the balls of the choirboy,

Tweezered

like a tomato blown in the breeze

Monsieur Comrade Gide made a red fucking flag

No arse would want a red flag hiding  a cross

bile-sodden

and as French as no  janitor’s dog

licking its balls  to the sound of  the Marseillaise

who shits out Monsieur Comrade Gide

Yes, Monsieur Comrade Gide

You shall feel the hammer and the sickle

the sickle in your belly and

the hammer in your gob.

Mangan concedes… “This is perhaps a little hard on Gide.”  He goes on to skewer the Surrealists, “The  Surrealist pomp funebres have been issuing regularly from the editorial mortuaries and wending their way to the surrealist cemetery where practically every major literary talent in France has been buried”.  But, he goes on, “just when everybody had given up  expecting ever to see the end of Surrealism, internal explosions permit one to observe with relief the first cracks of breakup appear in its structure.”

There are other witty put-downs, and from his position as a bona fide Fourth Internationalist, Mangan demonstrates his political acuity, his literary taste, and his broader sense of humour.  Go read it for yourself.  Can’t imagine a better “Letter from Paris” to read in this terrible Winter of 1938-1939, when a good dose of anarchic wit is just the thing before the anticipated troubles of the coming war. It is in Vol VI. No.1, Fall, 1938  Sean Niall. Letter from Paris. “Sean Niall”– Sherry Mangan

Next Week, and on time, Mary McCarthy again!

Many thanks to Edwin Collard, for cruxes uncruxed.

The debate about Thomas Mann’s novels and his place as liberal or socialist still occupied members of the Partisan Review coterie, and in this follow-up essay by William Troy, also in Vol.6,No 1, he returns to his original topic of Mann & Myth {see this blog,October 14, 2017, & November 4, 2017, for related discussions}. You can cut and paste the link below into your browser to read the entire essay.

http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/detail?id=283915

In this argument about myth, however, he redirects his analysis, looks at the functions and alterations of myth within literature, and by the end of the piece, derives lessons for the contemporary world from within what will seem to be an abstract language.  I find it to be a great improvement on his original discussion of Mann as mythmaker because it clarifies ‘myth’ as a imaginative structure that is, first, not available to what his generation thought of as the scientificity and hence objectivity of Marxism. And he is also able to see what the dreadful possibilities of myth can be in the age of Fascism.

James Burnham’s criticism of Troy’s earlier essay on Mann took as its object Troy’s disparagement of science: “Chucked overboard is all centuries-assembled baggage of laboratory and telescope, of carefully elaborated and ever-revised hypotheses, of plans rationally analysed and predictions precisely made and verified, of theories called ever to account, publicly before the eyes of all who wish to see, by the marshalled evidence. From this Troy beckons us once more to  re-baptizing it as Myth — the dark religion of the blood.”

Troy’s response is to open the ‘scientific’  Marxist method to its own process: “The procedure of the scientific analysis of literature is as follows: the isolation of one or another aspect of the object, the reference of this aspect to an already completed scientific or quasi-scientific structure of logic (philosophical, psychological, or political), and the evaluation of the whole in terms of the latter. The apparent  effort is to replace the original concrete aesthetic structure by an altogether abstract structure of thought.   But, as a matter of fact, the aesthetic  structure has not been affected at all. It retains its original imponderable structure”. The idea that literature can be understood scientifically presupposes, as Burnham does, that “what we call works of literature are material objects produced by the conscious will of man” (Burnham). But, asks Troy, ” Is literature an object like a sewing machine, and of what is it the product? But what that means is that a literary work can be known, just like a piece of paper. 

What Troy offers in place of science is myth, because the production of imaginative literature requires a different mode of cognition: mythic. That is, he writes, myth is found in all the literatures of the world; myth is a method and a body of ordered experience. And, perhaps most importantly, myth is the foundational structure of imaginative literature over time. And through the movement of time, myths are changed and reinterpreted to offer new meanings and are altered from new sources.

“Now the reason that some people respond even to the sound of the word myth with horror and trepidation is that they confuse the notion of myth as the particular equilibriums of the past with the notion of myth as a process. They fail to recognise that  for society, as for the individual, the materials of experience undergo an unbroken process of modification and change. If an individual does not achieve a fresh reordering of these materials, as Freud has explained, he will relapse into a former state of equilibrium, which is indistinguishable from the state of death.” 

“In brief, it must be understood that while every myth corresponds only to a temporary resolution of a conflict, the conflict itself itself is ever alive, ever becoming involved in new terms of experience, and ever seeking a resolution. In every epoch there are the old myths of the past, haunting the present like a fixation of childhood, and the new myths struggling to be born. And it is a mistake not to be able to tell them apart”.

SO Troy not only rescues an analytically persuasive argument for the importance of myth as a literary form, but also weaves into it a warning and a perspective on the fascist myths and their danger as well as their advance into a ‘state of death,’  I think this piece as an addendum to the earlier piece by Troy on Mann and Myth makes a good case for why understanding the structure of myth in literature can indeed be a crucial tool in making sense of one’s own time’s myths– the dead and the living.

Dear Readers:  The next piece in Partisan Review, Vol.6, No.1 is an Anthology of Poems assembled by D.S.Savage.  Having neglected to heed the advice of reason, and hence not getting a flu jab, I am now unable to do much better than wheeze and  cough.  SO I have decided to re-post this week some paragraphs from my earlier post about D.S. Savage, who was such an interesting and somewhat eccentric poet, and which will serve as the preface to the ‘Little Anthology’ in Partisan Review:  I hope this will give you some interesting reading. The poems are by important poets: David Gascoyne, the Surrealist Poet, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, and a few others, and they were all inflected by the malaise and fear of late 1938.

Here are the poems….

 

Phillips charges that Wilson, by placing the dialectic at the centre of his argument, and deriving all parts of the theory from it without regard to the movement of history itself, turns living Marxism into a static polemic. So, while Phillips agrees with Wilson’s argument about the difficulties of thinking of Marxism as a modern science, he thinks that Wilson has chosen the wrong topic: he should be looking at its philosophy of history. Here, Marx indeed thought of the dialectic of history in relation to the stages of his model. And so the historical movement from Greek and Roman slaves systems through feudalism, capitalism, and then to Socialism. Importantly, it was not a natural dialectic at work here, but an historical one – developed through and in relation to actual human consciousness.

“Ignoring this distinction as well as the empirical evidence which Marx cited to prove  his theory, Wilson simply attaches all the odium of the ‘natural dialectic’ to Marx’s laws of history. Yet the actual conclusions of Marx and Engels about the direction of history were not derived from the Dialectic, but were arrived at inductively through a study of political and economic facts. Surely, Mr. Wilson cannot hope to bury all this scientific in the grave of the dialectic..”

Phillips next defends the Marxist approach to ‘inevitability’ against what he takes to be Wilson’s idea that Marx was preaching patience and inevitability in a passive way. He says:
“All that can be said– and all that he did say was that the alternative to [socialism] is barbarism or chaos: nor has the evidence of history from the upheavals of 1848 to the October Revolution and the Spanish Civil War provided any refutation of Marx’s political theories.”  Marx, that is, was a revolutionary activist.  Yes, admits Phillips, Marx may have spoken of the inevitability of socialism, but only if Marx’s model was right, that is.  And anyway, Phillips writes that Marx was an agitator, so give him a little rhetorical slack.

Next in his criticism of Wilson comes the issue of the ‘last instance’ a discussion that is certainly not settled in the late 1930s. You have only to consider Louis Althusser’s insistence on the importance of the ‘last instance’ – which in the 1970s and early 1980s was often seen as the Euro-Communist answer to the brutality of the ‘Tankies’ and their supporters in the  theory-wars —  What Wilson writes is, indeed, vague about the problems of the superstructure, problems which many over the last 50 years have tried to solve or at least model in more productive ways than simply the ‘superstructure ‘reflects’ or more analytically, is produced by the ‘base.’

But what is most galling to Phillips is that Wilson metaphorises Marxism as a ‘myth, ’ which is a serious blow to the status of the model itself.  But this, is a way is part of the problem of the last instance itself. Wilson has just been finishing his history, To the Finland Station, a strong narrative of the philosophical pre-history of the October Revolution, and he is aiming, I would say, to draw in readers who need to know more of what happens in lived experience to ideas and concepts. That he draws on the category of myth for discussing what he sees as a pathway that some accept as the core of Marxist thinking – the Dialectic – and in doing so clarifies that this pathway leads back into Idealism, is an important caveat to the reductionism that has plagued revolutionary Marxism, as we know.

Phillips next defends the Marxist approach to ‘inevitability’ against what he takes to be Wilson’s idea that Marx was preaching patience and inevitability in a passive way. He says:
“All that can be said– and all that he did say was that the alternative to [socialism] is barbarism or chaos: nor has the evidence of history from the upheavals of 1848 to the October Revolution and the Spanish Civil War provided any refutation of Marx’s political theories.”  Marx, that is, was a revolutionary activist.  Yes, admits Phillips, Marx may have spoken of the inevitability of socialism, but only if Marx’s model — that of “social action” was right, that is.  And anyway, Phillips thinks of Marx was an agitator, so we should give Marx a little rhetorical slack.

But what is most galling to Phillips is that Wilson metaphorises Marxism as a ‘myth, ’ which is a serious blow to the status of the model itself.  But this, is a way is part of the problem of the last instance itself. Wilson has just been finishing his history, To the Finland Station, a strong narrative of the philosophical pre-history of the October Revolution, and he is aiming, I would say, to draw in readers who need to know more of what happens in lived experience to ideas and concepts. That he draws on the category of myth for discussing what he sees as a pathway that some accept as the core of Marxist thinking – the Dialectic – and in doing so clarifies that this pathway leads back into Idealism, is an important caveat to the reductionism that has plagued revolutionary Marxism, as we know.

Phillips’s main argument is that Marx’s empiricism was a function of his commitment to what Phillips calls a ‘way of  life.’   The problems that Marxism presents can be avoided “only by seeing Marxism as a philosophy of social action.”

He goes on:  “Marxism is  way of life: a way of  acting, thinking, feeling… it also reflects the moral needs of the proletariat.” Phillips thus finds that cultural and emotional aspects of Marxism are indeed the way in which the superstructure acts as a conduit of creativity to the proletariat.  His polemical voice breaks out here: “The value of Kant’s system, for example is hardly a live issue outside the classroom; whereas the Marxism is debated in the streets, gaining new supporters when the working class is flushed with victories, and losing them after defeats.”  Phillips gives a reading of Marxism here as in movement always and always attached to, as he had said often, the state of consciousness of humans themselves.