The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 6, 1926, Page 18

a Intellectual y Deli. Doran, New York. $1.00 YD DELL is in a state of -in- cipient arterio-sclerosis of the spir- Vagabondage, By Floyd it. His book, “Intelectual Vagabond- age,” subtitled An Apology for the In- telligencia, tains no hint that its @uthor was not so long ago the world’s gayest and sauciest Bolshevik. In the old Masses-Liberator days Floyd Dell used to show us how to be happy tho revolutionary. He was the liveliest, most sensitive, the most read- able crilic of his day. His criticisms used to move and exhilirate as tho they were so many poems. And come to think of it, they practically were Poems. The best criticism is always essentially poetry. But the author of “Ititellectual WVagabondage” ‘is scarecely apt to write very poetic cri- ticism. He is too old in spirit. But if his revolutionary nerve is gone, the literary scholarship, the es- thetic insight, the social sense are there as of yore. These qualities have made “InteHoctual Vagabondage” worth reading despite the weariness of tone and tepidness of thot that characterize the latter part of the book. The first part, entitled “Litera- ture and the Machine Age” is swell. i is literary history of the sort you don’t find in the textbooks. It aims net merely to recount what the fam- ous figures of modern literature have written, but to explain why they have lic}. why writers are important when they express what that reading pwb- lic consciously or subconsciously feels and desires; and how economic con- ditions and great socio-economic cata- etyems like revolutions and ware de- termine what the reading public and its chosen writers do feel and desire. “Literature and the Machine Age” is incisive, Incid and stimulating. It is well worth reading. Part'Two of “Intellectual Vagabond- age” bas something of these qualities of Part One. it purports to be “A Spiritual Autobiography of My Own Generation in its Literary and Social Aspects.” And its comments on cer- tain literary trends of our time are Meminating, It is Partionlarly ef- fective when Dell strips the fut#itar fan esthetes, the Ivory-Towerites, the Jeunes Joyciaas of thelr pretentious and fine-spun intellectual mantles re- —— them in all their fragile and pathetic nakedness, Bat all too often one catches the gloomy overtones in the voice of the new and “mature” Floyd Dell. And while ho throws his bright light on Present Mterary currents, a stray beam flashing back now and then in feflection revoais him ensconced high and dry on the safe and comfortable reck of bourgeots conformity. And yet, #f the tale he tells of its intelectual experiences is sound, it fs not so hard to understand Awhy as ® whole bis generation has admittedly been « fallure, and why Floyd Dell himself stands where he docs. His “vagabonds” were a weak and self- thelr toes the Vags flitt te wisdom and bestodiianthens Verne, Ingersoll, Omar Khayyam, Thsen, Bel- lamy, Karl Marx, Carpenter, Max Btirner, Kipling, Walt Wakman, George Moore, Henry James and, in- evitably, Wells and Shaw, Naturally, like true vagabonds, they paused along the way now and then for an hour or two of dalliance—somc of them even evangelically took the trouble to expound for the benefit of the ladicg the true feminist gospel, A few “rallled around the soab-box” eag- er to tally up the ballots that would volte dear, swollen old capitalism out of existence. written as they have. And that means considering such matters as the li- terary influence of the Treading pub- vagabonds, oS = But what impresses this reviewer most is this fact that books seem to have been so decidedly the most im- portant factor in the intellectual growth of Dell's literary generation. Books are important, of course. But profound understanding belongs only to them who can assimilate the les- sons of life as well as the wisdom of the printed page. To us of that still younger genera- tion which was in its adolescence dur- ing the war and Russian revolution books did not mean so much. Life was our Great Mentor. Shaw, Wells, Omar Khayyam, and the rest—like Floyd Deli we discovered them too. But they provided the dessert not the meat of our intellectual nourishment. Mr. Britling wasn’t a tithe as inter- esting to us as say Lloyd George or Karl Liebknecht. “Fannie’s First Play” could scarcely hold our atten- tion as well as the little mass play staged in and around Smolny Insti- tute, Petrograd, by the Russian Com- munist Players -headed by the great impressarios, Lenin and Trotsky. And a jug of wine and she beside me in the wilderness seemed very mild stuff with the boom almost i our very ears of Big Bertha dropping shells into Paris from placements sey- enty-five miles away. The eternal drama on the world-stage had mount- od to stupendous climax showing hu- manity doubled up in vital, agony—the birth-pangs, we hoped of 4 new age. In the circumstances “Bookes for to reade” could not much “delighte” us. It never occurred to us te become intellectualor otherwise. We couldn’t run away from the echoes of Europe’s guns. Amd we certainly did not want to flee the inspiring strains that came floating out of Red tragic | Russia—Young Russia Hail Victori- ous! The first great conquest of the world’s dispossessed, the first govern- ment in history to fall from the hands of the insanely selfish, Mighty Ones into those of hard-fisted, keen-eyed idealists, Russia was then, as it still is, a source of inspiration to us who saw in the working class the great instrument of destiny to break down the old economic order and build the world anew. But to the Intellectual Vagabonds the Russian revolution was a disap- pointment apparently because it fail- ed to convert by some Red Magic the wreck of old Russia into a house for Men Like Gods. The revolution has; in fact, made a fetish of the Vagabonds’ bugaboo, Duty. As Mloyd Dell sees it, they failed as artists be- cause they were derelict to their duty “to explain life in terms of the arts 80 as to make living more compre- hensible and more enjoyable in its widest sense.” Failing in this artist- ic duty, it is no wonder that they suddered at the prospect of infinitely more arduous revolutionary duties. The worki war gave the Intellectual Vagabonds intellectual shell-shock. Their Hberal-radical movement, Del further points out, is bankrupt. His literary generation—himself included, I take it—has left a record of “mere pain chagrin, disgust, cynicism, de- feat and failure.” This from the same Floyd Dell who used to cavort so gracefully, so brightly, so world-hope- fully, in the columns of the old Mass- es and Liberator. Isn’t it positively pathetic? Yet he is not entirely without hope now. There is still the younger ge- neration to be heard from. It may make over “the shattered social, poli- tical and economic ideals” inherited froth the Vagabonds. “These up and coming youngsters may remake the world by beginning “to formulate and erect into socially accepted conven tions and where possible into laws some healthy modern ideals of ma» rlage, divorce and the relations of the sexes.” My gosh! Won't that be grand? Wot a vision! “It may not be difficult for them,” he goes on, referring td the rising generation of artists, “to find the pol tical terms upon which they can ac cept, serve, and use a machine civil- ization.” Join the Republican Party and the Author’s Club, I suppose. If not, then what? Once Floyd Dell himself made the discovery that only in and thru the revolutionary labor movement is it possible to “accept, serve, and use & machine civilization.” That discov- ery seems to mean little to him now. It does not occur to him that some, at least, of the rising generation of intellectuals and artists, as well as workers, will make that same dis covery, as he himself made it; as the youthful Shaw made it fifty years ago, as old Bishop Brown made it only yesterday; ag John Reed made it; as Lenin made it; as Mike Gold, Albert Weisbord and unnumbered mit lions the world over have made it. That discovery means courage, power and insight for the artist. Out of touch with the vital social and eco- nomic currents, the artist’s work is apt to be tenuous, timid, ephemeral Floyd Dell’s own writing exemplify the point. His criticisms, conceived ia catalytic contact with the revolution ary movement, will live. Who will read his novels twenty years from nowt ~ & 6& Adamson, Cartoons in the Soviet Union Press The Famous Geneva Orchestra Piaying the Pepuiar Tune, “Disarmament’ ON THE BRIT ISH STRIKE. On the first (from left) ploture William OpKectop Bb Menerne Green of Labor and Stanley Baldwin, British prime minister, are certain American labor wiil not support the British striker, On they know different and feel accordingly The Modern Statue of Liberty own