This particular reaction is best portrayed through the creative artists who appear in these novels. Julien Dellatre is one of three ex-Communists who call themselves the Three Ravens Nevermore. A scarred veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he refers to his poems, “Ode to the Cheka,” “Elegy on the Death of a Tractor,” and “The Rape of Surplus Value” as “past asininities.” His renunciation of the Movement is complete, yet his tragedy lies in the fact that he has found nothing to replace it. He has concluded that “Europe is going to the dogs,” that the reason is a turning away from God, a “loss of cosmic consciousness.” Feeling that a new religion is necessary to save twentieth-century man, he lacks a conviction which would permit him to take the final step into faith. The great passion of his life is behind him. In his own comment he has summed himself up: “a burnt-out fanatic is abject.” Another man of letters in the same novel is Leo Leontiev, “Hero of Culture and Joy of the People,” who has come from Russia to France to address an international peace rally. The death of his wife frees him to renounce the regime and find political asylum in France. Psychologically ready to take this step, “he felt as if a whole drugstore of poison were working at [his synapses]--the accumulated toxins of thirty years.” He has become a Hero of Culture by following the Party line in literature rather than his artistic conscience. Free at last, he feels that he must write something truly fine, a vindication of himself that will also be worthy of his wife, whose death he suspects may have been suicide or murder. But he is unable even to write the projected _I Was a Hero of Culture_ for the American publisher who has given him a substantial advance. For him, as for Dellatre, the light had flickered out, and it could not be rekindled. Some artists, like novelist Bernard Carr and poet Lester Owens in _Yet Other Waters_ manage to rebound, to continue to work creatively. But still they bear psychological scar tissue. Even in the process of preparing to leave the Movement, Bernard Carr suggests from the floor that the Writers Congress be concluded with the singing of “The Internationale.” And he is moved as he sings. An allied phenomenon is that of the individual who is inwardly in conflict with the Party but remains with it through a fear of these consequences. When Bernard tells frustrated poet Sam Leventhal that he should leave the Party, Sam turns pale. “Bernie, the Party is my life,” he replies. “It would be spiritual death for me outside the Party.” An even more revealing answer is made by British physicist Lord Edwards. When Leontiev asks him why he stays, Edwards replies: “I told you there is nothing else. You will soon find that out yourself. Besides--once you’ve invested all your capital in a firm, you don’t withdraw it--not at our age, not after thirty years.” =The Role of Woman=