Read an Excerpt
Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics
Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s
By Milton A. Cohen
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1713-3
Chapter One
"Leftward, Ho!" Migrations of Writers, Critics, and Magazines in the 1930s
There is much excitement in this country today about the increasing radicalization of the American intellectual. —V. F. Calverton, 1932
[Writers now show] increasing anxiety ... [and] determination to be on one side or other of the fence, not sitting on it.... To join no party seems, now, a sign of weakmindedness. —Frank Chapman, 1936
LITERARY CONVERTS IN THE EARLY THIRTIES
By all accounts, the 1930s were tumultuous years for writers—angry, hopeful, confused, hard-up, disillusioning years—but most of all social: writers formed groups, signed petitions, attended meetings, made speeches, marched in rallies, started little magazines, responded to surveys and symposia in literary magazines, criticized other writers' responses. And the direction of this socializing—so different from the sense of isolation typically imputed to the 1920s—was political: "The atmosphere of American literature became more political than at any time in its history," write William Phillips and Philip Rahv, who, as editors of Partisan Review in the later 1930s, had much to do with that politicizing. More specifically, writers went left, toward communism, a few joining the Party, many more becoming fellow travelers: sympathizers of the Soviet Union, joiners of the Party's many front groups in America, readers of and contributors to its official literary magazine, New Masses, and a host of evanescent leftist mags. The catalyst of this leftward migration in the early thirties was the Depression. To be sure, a small circle of writers—John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, Mike Gold, Joseph Freeman, and a few others—continued the leftist literary agitation of The Liberator and Masses of the war years into the 1920s with the formation of New Masses in 1926 and in the New Playwrights Theatre the following year. The Sacco and Vanzetti executions of 1927, moreover, were an international cause célèbre and a politicizing event for writers like Edna Millay and Katherine Anne Porter. But not until the Depression had really taken hold in late 1930 and 1931— when, as Edmund Wilson wrote, there was "no sign of any political leadership which will be able to pull us out ... no sign of a [Teddy] Roosevelt or a [Woodrow] Wilson to revive our political vision"— did writers like Wilson, who previously had been tepidly liberal or apolitical, conclude that "what has broken down, in the course of one catastrophic year, is not simply the machinery of representative government but the capitalist system itself"— just as Marx had predicted it would.
Two Exemplars
Wilson's essay containing these passages, "An Appeal to Progressives," is a seminal document in the psychological conversion of writers to radicalism, and it deserves close scrutiny. Its venue, The New Republic, had long been the bastion of progressivist liberalism under its late editor, Herbert Croly. But with Croly's death in 1930 and the Depression's worsening, the remaining editors, including Wilson, were moving the magazine's position far beyond liberalism. In addressing the typical reader of The New Republic, "the contemporary progressive," Wilson's tone is restrained and rational, avoiding militancy and assuming an almost professorial formality in his rhetorical questions: "May we not assume ...," "It may be true that ...," "Doesn't this program today seem rather inadequate?"
His argument unfolds logically, but with increasing force. First, amidst this present crisis, liberalism is no longer a viable political position: "It seems to me impossible today for people of Herbert Croly's general aims and convictions to continue to believe in the salvation of our society by the gradual and natural approximation to socialism which he himself called progressivism, but which has more generally come to be known as liberalism.... [It] has not [brought on socialism or] been able to prevent a national economic disaster of proportions which neither capitalists nor liberals foresaw and which they both now [are] ... unable to explain" (521-22). Wilson then presents his key surmise: that the Depression marks the breakdown of capitalism and "one of the turning-points in our history" (524). "[I]t may be true that with the present breakdown, we have come to the end of something, and that we are ready to start on a different tack" (529-30). This new tack is a planned society on the model of Russia. As will be developed below, Russia in the early thirties—the Russia of the first Five-Year Plan—seemed to most Western intellectuals the rational antithesis of a reckless, materialistic, now shattered capitalism: "It may be that the whole money-making and -spending psychology has definitely played itself out, and that the Americans would be willing, for the first time now, to put their traditional idealism and their genius for organization behind a radical social experiment" (530).
Then Wilson proposes something unexpected: don't just adopt Marxism, Americanize it:
I believe that if the American radicals and progressives who repudiate the Marxist dogma and the strategy of the Communist Party still hope to accomplish anything valuable, they must take Communism away from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities, asserting that their ultimate goal is the ownership by the government of the means of production.... If we want ... to demonstrate that the virtue has not gone out of American democracy, if we want to confute the Marxist cynicism ... predicated only on an assumption of the incurable swinishness and inertia of human nature— ... an American opposition must not be afraid to dynamite the old conceptions and shibboleths and to substitute new ones as shocking as necessary. (532-33)
The "Appeal" concludes on a hopeful note. Observing that in the Republican twenties, liberals felt increasingly discouraged by their failure to be heard, Wilson asks: "Who knows but, if we spoke out now with confidence and boldness, we might find our public at last?" (533).
Wilson's "Appeal" epitomizes the thinking of writers of his generation who went left in the early thirties. It assumes that capitalism is crumbling, that liberalism cannot deal with the crisis any more than have the captains of industry or the government, that Russia presents a model of social planning that the United States can and should adopt, and finally, that liberal intellectuals can find something to counteract their own malaise, something hopeful, if they are not "afraid to dynamite the old conceptions ... and to substitute new ones as shocking as necessary." Bold declarations, and coming from a highly respected scholar, critic, and author, Wilson's views were doubly impressive because this bookish intellectual seemed the least likely candidate for radical political involvement.
The essay's date, January 14, 1931, is also a bellwether. Observer-participants like Malcolm Cowley and Granville Hicks point to the summer of 1930, following the second stock market crash, as the time when it became clear that the Depression was not ephemeral and that "Hoover's optimistic pronouncements ... were little more than incantations." By mid-1930, however, "the revolutionary movement has not yet produced a strong and unified literary group" in Joseph Freeman's assessment. Two years later, however, V. F. Calverton could confidently declare in his leftist magazine, The Modern Quarterly, that "literary radicalism had become 'a mainstream affair'" ("Leftward Ho!" 27). Thus 1931 seems to have been the conversion year for writers and intellectuals in the early thirties, and Wilson's essay stands at the threshold of this migration. In 1931, moreover, with unemployment doubling from six to twelve million and banks failing at an ever- increasing rate, there was nothing on the horizon—certainly nothing from the Hoover administration—to suggest that government could cope with the plummeting economy. Failure and paralysis were the norm, and Wilson's conclusion that it was time for liberals to jettison a failed system and work to replace it with a radically different one seemed reasonable.
If the rhetoric of Wilson's essay was logical and restrained, the editorial statement for the first issue of the radical magazine The Left—also published in early 1931—proudly asserts militancy and brash confidence:
LEFT!
There exists among intellectuals a steadily increasing awareness of the disintegration and bankruptcy of the capitalist system and its accompanying social order and culture. The intellectual tradition which held its political faith in democracy, progressivism, or the evolutionary approach, ... and its artistic credo in the paradox of "art for art's sake" is crumbling—capitalist democracy is in world-wide chaos and bourgeois philosophy and literature are becoming emasculate anachronisms. The more intellectually honest are becoming convinced that the capitalist system must be replaced by a collective state, dictated by the proletariat.... They are not avoiding the realities of the social struggle by following the alternative course of escapism and de featism. They accept the coming of the new order ... and realize that the valid, significant art of today and tomorrow finds its impetus, substance and sincerity in the emergence of the proletariat through the revolutionary movement. The LEFT [quarterly] ... is born of this revolutionary movement and will provide a new medium for its expression in the arts—present the work of proletarian and revolutionary writers—and attempt to win over to the movement those artists who have hitherto found their material and ideology in the bourgeois tradition.... The LEFT calls the intellectual and artist from his blind bourgeois psychology, his pathological introspection, his defeatism and futile liberalism. Only in the world revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalism and build a co-operative, classless society is there new ground for talent, new strength in affirmation, new ideology, new courage. Left!
The message is almost an echo of Wilson's (no coincidence, since it was the typical rhetoric of radical recruitment): capitalism is finished; progressivism won't work; the twenties' attitude of "art for art's sake" is over; the "intellectually honest" are coming over to communism and "the social struggle," trading their defeatist bourgeois mentality for proletarian affirmation. The editorial's perspective, however, is altogether different from that of Wilson's essay: This is a manifesto of the already-converted, calling across the divide to bourgeois intellectuals: "Join us!"
Both styles were common in the early thirties, but the direction was the same: Left! The hopeful migration of writers and intellectuals, however, was not always greeted with open arms. As will be discussed below, Communist Party functionaries distrusted them as unreliable and gave them a chilly welcome. Others, like Lillian Symes, looking back in The Modern Monthly a few years later, depicted their conversion with detached amusement:
Into a political labor movement, which still lacked a substantial foothold among the American masses, ... moved a new army of enthusiastic, confused, politically uneducated but highly articulate individuals ready to serve—and to direct—the revolutionary movement immediately with pen and voice and to take part in political controversies about which they frequently knew nothing.... [F]or every one of these [who had studied the labor movement for years] there were dozens who passed directly through the experience of emotional conversion into the orbit of Communist activity, surrendering their souls in an ecstasy of self-abasement to the high priests of proletarian culture. Party membership was, in most instances, too sacrificial a step to take and the bulk of the leftward-moving liberal army camped in the intellectual outskirts of Party headquarters. Still clinging to the protective coloration of the "liberal" label, many of them functioned as genuine "innocents" or as conscious "stooges" in those numerous Committees, Groups, Leagues against this or that which constitute the Party periphery and which permit the leftward liberal to dabble safely in the class struggle.
Who were these writer-converts? Many came from Wilson's generation, which had come of age during World War I or slightly later, and many spent at least part of the twenties as expatriates and aesthetes: Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Matthew Josephson, Slater Brown, Gorham Munson, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Horace Gregory, Kenneth Fearing, Lola Ridge, Granville Hicks, Genevieve Taggard, Witter Bynner, Isador Schneider, George Dillon, Eda Lou Walton, and Wilson himself. A few had achieved prominence even earlier, for example Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Lincoln Steffens. But only a few had been strongly leftist before the Crash, such as John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, and Mike Gold, all coeditors of New Masses in the late 1920s, as well as Joseph Freeman, Edwin Seaver, and Newton Arvin.
A younger generation, who had come of age in the Depression, did not need to covert: they had learned their economic lessons firsthand in employment agencies, and radicalism was a natural response. As Alfred Kazin, one of their number, recalled,
The "new" writers looked as if they had been born to trouble—as in fact they had been, for they were usually products of city streets, factories and farms. More than the age of the ideologue ... the Thirties in literature were the age of the plebes—of writers from the working class ... the non-literate class.... What was new about the writers of the Thirties was not so much their angry militancy, which many shared, as their background; writers now came from anywhere.... [They] wore a proletarian scowl on their faces as familiar as the cigarette butt pasted in their mouths.... [My friends] were all radicals as a matter of course.
Some of these younger writers achieved literary prominence beyond the thirties: Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, Kenneth Patchen, and Kazin himself. The stars of many others faded when political literature faded—they became scholars, critics, and historians, and patiently waited for doctoral students and literary historians to rediscover them: Meridel Le Sueur, Robert Cantwell, Jack Conroy, Stanley Burnshaw, Edwin Rolfe, H. H. Lewis, Ruth Lechlitner, Sol Funaroff, Joseph Kalar, and Joy Davidman, to name a few. During the early thirties, however, it was primarily the older "converts" who seemed to occupy center stage; moreover, they provided the generational context for the reactions of Stevens, Frost, Cummings, and Williams. In approaching the converts' complex experience, several questions arise: What did they leave behind? What did they gain in becoming political? How did they view Russia? What were the historical way stations along the path of their conversion? What kind of new literature did they create?
Losses and Gains
The first two questions are obviously complementary. What the converts left behind includes both modernist aesthetics and the 1920s literary ethos, both of which received a thorough bashing not only from the younger 1930s writers, as one would expect, but also from the older converts themselves, who had once subscribed enthusiastically to "the revolution of the word" and to what Malcolm Cowley called "the religion of art." Modernist aesthetics that gloried in abstraction and difficulty was now damned for the very elitism its practitioners once proclaimed and for appearing, in Horace Gregory's words, "'arty,' pretentious or distracted."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics by Milton A. Cohen Copyright © 2010 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
