Part of Our Time Quotes

“By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties

“Each of us lives with a sword over his head.
There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties

“Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties

“When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins & Monuments of the Thirties

“His philosophy may be summarized as indignation at what he conceived to be the common practice in American industry of bottling up seven cents’ worth of mud and chemicals, giving it an exotic name, and selling it for five dollars to ladies in search of a new and infinitely lovelier countenance. He was, in brief, that glory of American radicalism, the man who is cracked on a single subject.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“He appears to have become a Marxist without reading more than the tiniest fragments of Marx, and we may surmise, without injustice, that he did not read Marx until he had become an anti-Marxist, which is a piece of intellectual history common to his period.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“by declaring Of Mice and Men a “mess of sentimentality and insidious innocence” and”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“He feared not defeat or disaster but only that time to come when he must cease to try.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“It only destroyed them as writers, because it caused them to abandon the quarrel with self.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Yeats said once that “Evil comes to us men of the imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues. I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“There were 300 delegates to the first convention of the League of American Writers; of the younger ones, only Richard Wright, James Farrell, and Nelson Algren can be described as engaged any longer in the craft of the novel as against the pursuit of a living down its byways. No segment of a literary generation can be said to equal this one for self-destruction: just one per cent appears to have survived twenty years. It was, for all its noise, a small and narrow world and with an impact remarkably superficial.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“After the Austrian Socialists were destroyed, Alfred Hayes composed a poem about Otto Bauer, their leader, who was even then hiding from the police: “All honor to them, Bauer! For you/ History prepares a shameful grave/ A nameless spot buried under weed and stone/ Where creeping jackals shall come to howl/ Stirred by ancient kinship with those bones!” To read that poem and to think that its author once gave his mother the pangs of birth is to understand why, if the Old Testament God and all his vengeance did not exist, man would have had to invent them.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Josephson told what it meant to create in the Soviet Union: “Writers address a colossal public; cheap editions are circulated by the State Publishing House in amounts of six or more millions, at literally a few pennies a copy; and, as a consequence, writers, being paid on a royalty basis, enjoy a peculiarly favorable position. The security, the prosperity that I noted in Russian writers offered a striking contrast to the condition of writers in my own country, where a very few may succeed in earning somewhat meager livings, establishing them among the lower-paid workers in the community, while the majority starve in garrets still. “It seems,” Josephson ended, “that there is only one way out, that, before we can raise the status of workers in the field of literature, there must be a social revolution.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“The Communist view that the writer was a recruit into the army of history carried with it the traditional Communist faith in empty celebration and rhetorical posture. By its rules, the writer must be a member of a community of the orthodox; he must belong to an organization of writers and it must unfurl banners like those of the army’s other regiments.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Among all the enemies of the plebeian writer’s promise, none lasts longer than self-pity. In 1934, Dashiell Hammett brushed off Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing with the observation that the arts had little to hope for in a man still weeping because he did not have a bicycle when he was twelve years old.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“D. H. Lawrence wrote an introduction to Bottom Dogs that was at once a salute and a warning to the plebeian writer. Dahlberg’s style, said Lawrence, was “the bottom-dog mind expressing itself direct, almost as if it barked .... This is a genuine, if objectionable book.... I don’t want to read any more books like this. But I am glad I read this one, just to know what is the last word in repulsive consciousness.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Its protagonist was a vagabond and its last line was: “Something had to happen; and he knew nothing would ....”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Waldo Frank was in search of a substitute for God. Near the end of his pilgrimage, Markand meets John Byrne, a revolutionary, who tells him: “If I did not have faith in men, I’d be a Christian like my father. You must ... while you live ... have faith in something.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“The subjects of this chapter, the buried ones at least, had a different view; they believed that to be a great writer one needed simply to be on the side of the future and to substitute outer reconciliation for interior quarrel. The lesson of their failure is literary and not moral. For the writer is lonely even in fantasy and, try though he will, it is very often his fate to damage no one but himself.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Yeats said once that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric and out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“It seems to me to have been one of the tragedies of the thirties that so many people substituted an exterior for an interior passion, and nowhere is this process more damaging than to literature.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“most persons who achieve anything of substance bring a certain pride of performance to the worst calling they fall into.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“The West Coast sailors and longshoremen had already erupted in a violent and successful strike.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Any insurgent religion, good or bad, makes its first converts among people capable of large feelings of love or hate. And there were not many sailors, granted the life they lived, who could bring to this particular religion the capacity for universal love. There were more who understood universal hate.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“In hindsight, men have a deplorable tendency to excuse their mistakes by resorting to their enemies’ image of themselves.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Had there come a time, while he was signing the decrees ordering this man’s death and that man’s imprisonment, when he asked himself if the killing would ever stop? At that, Pressman stopped walking; he was near the marquee of the Hotel William Penn, and, in the light, Hardman saw real shock on his hard young face. “Do you mean, J. B.,” he said at last, “that you reject the Terror?” Things were never the same between them.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were very personal instruments. Their creed was the individual; they were victims and not conquerors of institutions.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“As Gardner Jackson entered Old South that night, he was stopped by Harry Canter, secretary of the Communist Party of Boston. “I just wanted you to know,” said Canter, “that tonight I’m going to call you one of the murderers of Sacco and Vanzetti. I hope you understand that inside I don’t really mean it.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“and a governor—himself reluctant.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties

“and because Boston journalism has always been devout in enlarging the routine into the sensational.”
― Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties