When Louis Aragon, one of the founding fathers of dada and surrealism, turned to the proletariat for regeneration, he did so with that splendid violence characteristic of the cults he once championed…. His poem, "The Red Front," brought down the wrath of the authorities upon his head, as their police minds would not put down to poetic license his open advocacy of the shooting of prominent politicians.

In time, however, Aragon's initial intoxication gradually gave way to the more sober tendencies in the literature to which he was now organically bound. And it is a tribute to the integrating powers of the doctrine he embraced that his first novel written under its influence [The Bells of Basel (Les Cloches de Bâle)] should surprise us by its gravity of intention and maturity of performance. This poet of cosmopolitan rhetoric has turned into an eager student of history; and in his aspiration to the role of social analyst, he must needs rehearse the parts he once neglected. Like other contemporary novelists, Aragon returns to the pre-war scene in order to find and correlate the elements that shaped our present destiny. And the world he discovers in his expedition to the past is a world that cannot survive.

But in treating this material he adopts a particular angle of vision. His novel is built around the lives of three women, who become the focus of his insights into the society that produced them. Thus the story gains from the specific nature of its major theme, the theme of woman as a social animal….

But the mists of the happy future into which the novel vanishes cannot altogether conceal its defects. As with some other French writers, the charm and fluency of Aragon's prose is at times more expressive of the current level of French literary achievement, smoothly functioning in all of its works, than it is of the individual accents of an original creation. Catherine is somewhat too exotic to suit the part the author has assigned her within his social scheme; and Victor, intrinsically the same type as Edmond Maillecottin in Jules Romains, is nowhere realized as freshly and vividly as Edmond is in that remarkable seventeenth chapter of "The Earth Trembles." In fact, the whole section bearing Victor's name, which describes the great taxi strike in which he is involved, seldom rises above the plane of reporting. Aragon's problem, already solved in some measure by other revolutionary artists, is to wrestle with and overcome the tendency of his sociological facts to become the limbo of his imagination.

Philip Rahv, "From Surrealism to Socialism," in The Nation (copyright 1936 The Nation magazine, The Nation Associates, Inc.), Vol. 143, No. 13, September 26, 1936, p. 368.