Jews Without Money, Radicals Without Royalties

It was on a trip a few years ago to that mecca of petit bourgeois decadence, Las Vegas, that I devoured Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left.  This book is now widely considered the definitive text on the various trotskisant movements (or "groupuscules") that peppered the Gotham cityscape in the twenties and thirties. Mostly Jewish, with as much a tropism for literature as for politics, these sons and daughters of immigrants started out as revolutionaries and wound up anti-Communists, either of a liberal or conservative stripe. (Wald deftly showed that the was as nerve-racking as it was satisfying, especially for latterday patrons of the establishment who traffick in selective memories about the old days and bygone struggles, who took what position when, who did what to whom.) 

A number of these complicated and dynamic figures are now forgotten: If Herbert Solow can’t earn a place at the table for being the leading American Trotskyist before World War II, then he at least deserves recognition as the man who helped nurture the critical talents of one Lionel Trilling. Others are famous for their continuing influence (Norman Podhoretz is an advisor to Rudy Giuliani) and their semi-permanent positions on the mastheads of great, or once-great, journals of opinion like Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary and Dissent. On the whole, they’re all defined more according to their ex-identities, those idealistic and embarrassing vestiges of a radical past which they’ve spent the second and third acts of their distinctively American lives repudiating. As Irving Kristol once put it, "As long as I can remember, I’ve been a ‘neo’ something. I was a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neocon. Eventually I’ll just be a ‘neo.’"

Wald has since altered his focus to account for some of the lesser — or at least less acknowledged — revolutionaries of yesterday who left us enduring ruins and monuments of their time. Most of these were Stalinists, strict CP men who wrote forgettably because in the eyes of the Party, they were themselves forgettable: mere individuals being ground through the cogs of history.

Installment one began in 2002 with Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Now Wald has published the follow-up volume, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, which is well-reviewed by J. Hoberman in The Nation:

Exiles‘s major tour de force is the chapter "Inventing Mike Gold," a startling rehabilitation of the Communist Party’s leading literary hack (and hatchet man), remembered today largely for his contribution to the mythology of the Lower East Side, Jews Without Money (1930), one of the few proletarian novels to earn a spot in the academic canon. Wald downplays Gold’s greatest hit to present him as a lapsed romantic Modernist, linking him to Walt Whitman and even the Beats. (One of the book’s more fascinating secondary narratives recounts the way Whitman, the American poet most admired by leftists, was transformed into a Popular Front icon. In Gold’s 1935 "Ode to Walt Whitman," Wald notes, the poet "is likened to a reborn Christ, to the spirit of communism, to nature, and to Bolshevism…serv[ing] as the multipurpose icon of Gold’s multiethnic cultural mosaic.")

Wald by no means ignores Gold’s work. Still, cognizant of (if not necessarily endorsing) Kempton’s contempt for talent sacrificed on the altar of social revolution, he is almost always more interested in the drama of lives than those of literature, mapping a "humanscape" populated by writers committed to political commitment. Thus, Exiles‘s cover features Gold in action, addressing a 1930 May Day rally. The denizens of Waldsville are often quite colorful. Exiles featured such rare birds as the forgotten Woody Guthrie analogue Donald Lee West, as well as Communist poet Joy Davidman, who was married to "radical folksinger" William Lindsay Gresham before she decamped to England to change the life of C.S. Lewis. Trinity, which is more concerned with prose than poetry, devotes half a chapter to Lauren Gilfillan, whose precocious (and once-celebrated) nonfiction novel–a firsthand account of the Great Coal Strike of 1931 called I Went to Pit College–although more straightforward (and ironic), prefigures by several years the art reportage of the James Agee-Walker Evans classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

It might interest you to know that Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, wrote her graduate thesis on Gold, further fueling speculation about her intellectual kinship with Paul Wolfowitz and the left-to-right school of U.S. foreign policy.

It might also interest you to know that Gold actually was not so cut-and-dry an apparatchik as he’s made out to be here.

After a notorious Leavisite dust-up with Thornton Wilder — whose ecclesiastic death-wish unsettled plenty of non-Reds, too — about the shaky relationship between art and ideology, Gold wrote a vigorous defense in The New Republic of Jews Without Money, which, admittedly, was a journeyman’s attempt at what James T. Farrell would later accomplish with his brilliant Studs Lonigan trilogy, the Irish-American working class epic of the forties. Gold’s book, in an interesting turn of events, had been attacked from the left by Melvin Levy, in full prolier-than-thou mode for what Levy saw as too minimalist a depiction of alienated factory life in New York. 

Gold responded, “It is difficult to write proletarian literature in this country because all the critics are bourgeois. If a Thornton Wilder writes books in praise of the Catholic theology, or if a Robinson Jeffers preaches universal pessimism and mass-suicide, that is art. But if a revolutionary writer, even by implication, shows the social ideas that are stirring in the heart of the working class, he is called a propagandist. [Let] us not fear to be crude or propagandistic. We are going somewhere. The rest of literature is sinking into the arms of Catholicism, and death.”

George Orwell, surveying the wreckage of T.S. Eliot’s talent twenty or so years after the publication of "The Waste Land," noted that “It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist Party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.”

And no less of a critic than Edmund Wilson commented on the Gold-Levy affair that "it has now become plain that the economic crisis is to be accompanied by a literary one.” What Wilson saw in proletarian literature — John Dos Passos representing the highwater mark — was that it was the only of several utopias hitched to the stream train of the future rather than to the wagons of the past:

Most Americans of the type of Dos Passos and Eliot—that is, sensitive and widely read literary people—have some such agreeable fantasy in which they can allow their minds to take refuge from the perplexities and oppressions about them. In the case of H.L. Mencken, it is a sort of German university town, where people drink a great deal of beer and devour a great many books, and where they respect the local nobility—if only the Germany of the Empire had not been destroyed by war! In the case of certain American writers from the top layer of the old South, it is the old-fashioned Southern plantation, where men are high-spirited and punctilious and women gracious and lovely, where affectionate and loyal Negroes are happy to keep in their place—if only the feudal South had not perished in 1865! With Ezra Pound, it is a medieval Provence, where poor but accomplished troubadours enjoy the favors of noble ladies—if only the troubadours were not deader than Provencal! With Dos Passos, it is an army of workers, disinterested, industrious and sturdy, but full of the good-fellowship and gaiety in which the Webster Hall balls nowadays are usually so dismally lacking—if only the American workers were not preoccupied with buying Ford cars and radios, instead of organizing themselves to overthrow the civilization of the bourgeoisie! And in T.S. Eliot’s case, it is a world of seventeenth-century churchmen, who combine the most scrupulous conscience with the ability to write good prose—if it were only not so difficult nowadays for men who are capable of becoming good writers to accept the Apostolic Succession!