from The New Masses
“Not So Slow”
Reviewed by Edwin Seaver

SLOW VISION. By Maxwell Bodenheim.
Macaulay. $2.

Slow Vision is easily Maxwell Bodenheim’s best novel, perhaps because he has now found something worth while writing about. This something is the class struggle, which not only is quite a different matter from the struggle to replenish Jessica, but is also large enough to include an understanding of “New York Madness.” What our liberal critics still can’t accept without gagging—they have such tender systems—has become a simple truth for many of our novelists, that the Marxian analysis of society, far from limiting the author’s vision, opens up new possibilities for his talents.
The significance of Bodenheim’s title for his new book obtains from the alleged slow process by which a realistic vision of life in the United States comes to his principal char- acter. But considering that Bodenheim’s hero is of that borderline unleavened lump most handicapped and most degraded by petty bourgeois illusions, and remembering that in less than a year’s time this politically unborn boy is ready to join a red union and to strike, he’s not so slow at that. Compared to the progression of most intellectuals to the left, and remembering their opportunities, Ray Bailey’s pilgrimage has something of the velocity of a comet.

Bodenheim succeeds very well in giving us the children of the city’s streets, the children of the anonymous millions who neither starve nor live decently, but somehow manage to
struggle along, disillusioned and embittered Micawbers of capitalism. These kids want what any normal kid wants — a chance to work and play and live and love, a half-way
decent break in life. Thanks to our economic barbarism, however, life for them is at best a confidence game, a matter of dog eat dog, and love something to be snatched in a dark hallway or a park bench. Bodenheim rightly presents the whole picture as a pretty heart- breaking affair, with all its tragic implications of human waste and corruption and suffering.

Ray works as a bell-hop in a hotel; Allene as a stenog, when she can find work. They would like to get married, live like human beings, maybe have children. But the cards are stacked against them; they face blank, forbidding walls wherever they turn. When finally Ray tells Allene that he’s going down to the red union to sign up for the hotel strike, the reader experiences a great relief, as in the play Stevedore when the white dock wallopers come to the rescue of their Negro comrades. This is the real release in our present stage of the proletarian novel, and we might as well stop talking about the Aris- totelian virtues of pity and terror. When it comes to the P & T catharsis our embattled
disinherited on the picket lines and in the streets could probably give the old Greek kulak lessons anyway.