>
> Echoed by Auden:
Review of W.H. Auden, "The Age of Anxiety, " by Thomas McGrath (a pretty good proletarian poet, see E.P. Thompson's article on him), New Masses, Sept. 16, 1947, pgs. 18-20.
"It is not surprising that the bourgeois writer, hating this societybut not knowing or unable to accept another, shoul, in these, circumstances, fall back in the arms of God.
In a sense this is an auspicious event. In breaking with the Fustain tradition, the bourgeois intellectual signalizes the total bankruptcy of bourgeois ideological values.Unfortunately, the regression may not stop at this point and, having taken such a backward step, it is not difficult for the writer to take greater ones rearward.Further, since the alienated bourgeois intellectualis a natural - though naturally unstable ally of the proletariat, the movement towrads religious mysticism underlines that the working class has once again to capture and give leadership to this group..."
As Max Eastman put it in 1934, "Artists In Uniform. " Mike Gold of the CPUSA called Eastman a, "Gangster of the Pen."
-- Michael Pugliese