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The Spike or Victoria College Review 1940

Editorial

page 7

Editorial

The Editor of Rostrum Remarked in his report that most of the short stories submitted to him had a flavour, if not a rank aroma, of William Saroyan and Dos Passos, both contemporary American writers. He might also have remarked that the resemblance extended only to particularities of style and technique; their spirit, for lack of a better term, is something unapproachable and even indefinable. Yet it is present in a large number of American and some few English writers.

There is no call on Marxian dialectics to persuade us that a writer and his audience interact upon each other to produce a progressive series of change. Students of literature can observe the interaction in the literature of the Greeks, the Romans, of Elizabethan England, restoration England, and the present day. A writer answers the need of his unseen auditors; if they are cultured, his manner is cultured; if they are decadent, he is decadent; it is like the action of the moon on the waters of the world.

In no other age has the audience open to a writer possessed such unlimited boundaries, such empty spaces craving the watchful hand of genius. The spread of education has netted countless millions into a reticulation of readers served by lending libraries and newspapers. To this enormous and imminent power, to this tide of good or evil, the writer has to attune his ear. His responsibilities end with the last person on the outermost fringe.

America first, after the unknown quantity of Russia, has realized this. There are writers in the U.S.A. who, consciously or unconsciously, have perceived the nature of their audience, and the needs of a great and varied people. So there are writers like Saroyan, Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, MacLeish, and so there are documents like "Land of the Free," which are redolent of class struggle and the famished lust of the dispossessed. This element of class struggle has its ultimate crux in our society. Throughout the last hundred years of industrialism it has gradually crystallized; frozen like a black wave in 1918, broken up by a temporary thaw until 1939; now to be hardened again.

Already in England the barriers of class are breaking down to secure a greater unity. Labour leaders hold the key positions in the state. Quo vadis, might one ask? Where? When the war is won, if it is won, will this relapse, will the iron hand of the ruling classes assert itself, accompliced by years of direct control and centralization? Or will the workers sustain their rights to control industry, and their own existence? Will they do so without blood in the gutters?

Perhaps the writers of America are premature. But they are a mirror of the unseen currents swirling and eddying among the underground millions. What is reflected in them will surely come to pass, whether to-day or to-morrow, whether in blood or in peace. For we know, we can sense, that the vast power of their audience, the proletariat, is in motion, and is moving toward its goal.