Trinity of Passion is the second of three volumes that track the fortunes of several generations of left-wing writers, carrying forward the chronicle launched in Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (2002). It delves into literary, personal, and political trajectories of cultural workers in the era of “the antifascist crusade.” This social and cultural campaign enthralled the hearts and minds of the mainstream of the literary Left at the time that the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the United States battled in World War II (1941–45). The adjective “crusade,” habitually used then and later, aptly captures the zealotry with which ideals were pursued at the price of blindness to complicating contingencies.
In Exiles from a Future Time, the writers discussed were principally shaped by the interplay of modernist impulses homologous to the 1920s and the feeling of civic emergency induced by the domestic crisis of the early 1930s. In Trinity of Passion, most of the authors initiate careers in the middle and late 1930s; they are drawn to what is by this time a dynamic and bustling movement whose predominant theme was opposition to fascism at home and abroad. The series of three volumes, spanning the years from the early 1930s to the early 1960s, will conclude with The American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.
Each volume of this cultural history stands alone as a self-contained book that investigates and appraises an interrelated assembly of writers, themes, publications, and organizations. The inquiry is designed neither as an encyclopedia of literary activists nor as a survey of “greatest hits,” but as an interpretation of issues that engrossed the rank and file of the literary Left. Writers in the antifascist era, pro-Communist by ideological inclination and sometimes by Party affiliation, faced newly configured questions and challenges. Jewish Americans and African Americans were markedly conspicuous in the cultural field, which decisively affects the eight governing propositions and motifs in Trinity of Passion.
• More than ever, starting with the Spanish Civil War, Jews had to define manhood in terms of learning how to fight.
• African Americans in the same era increasingly had to negotiate their duty to contest racism at home with their obligations to halt fascism internationally.
• Women and homosexuals had to contend with a Left culture increasingly infused with putatively masculine standards of behavior—realpolitik, emotional toughness, direct action, and freewheeling personal mobility.
• The organizations and publications that sought to lead as well as to express the tradition of the Left experienced public defections, mysterious losses, and the arrival of ambitious younger voices.
• The cultural climate of the United States shifted rapidly from a relative apathy about fascism in the 1930s to an irresistible yet somewhat forced and illusory national unity during World War II.
• The immediate post–World War II moment brought a mix of disillusion, uncertainty, anger, and cynicism resonating in the new mass-market venues for radical writers.
• Some erstwhile pro-Communist writers subsequently devoted their fiction to working their way out of what they interpreted as misguided loyalty to Communism, yet most never relinquished pride in their antifascist idealism.
• Above all, writers had to come to terms with the formidable task of realizing their artistic potential amidst the contending claims of economic survival, the needs and responsibilities of personal life, changing audiences, the ideological loyalties that masked political contradictions, and psychological and physiological well-being.
Following the arrangement of Exiles from a Future Time, I treat discrete authors as components of a “humanscape” in relation to the peculiarities of their biographies.1 In order to better re-create attendant conditions and patterns, and to convey the sweep of a literary and personal life, the straitjacket of strict chronology, before, during, and after the critical decade of the “crusade,” is violated at times. This occurs especially in biographical narrative but also in the use of novels published decades later that reflect back on earlier events in which the author participated. Moreover, a range of strategies is deployed to convey personal and political commitments and their complex cultural expressions. Three such strategies are comparative biography in the instance of Spanish Civil War novels by Milton Wolff, Alvah Bessie, and William Herrick; the reconstruction of the African American Left community of the 1940s in the case of Ann Petry’s Harlem writings; and the narrative of the career of activist Communist editor Morris U. Schappes in the investigation of Jewish Americans trapped between internationalism and insularity. Since the portraits of these and other writers overlap the eras and decades surveyed in the three-volume study, readers may feel a degree of arbitrariness in regard to the placement or omission of a particular writer or literary text in this volume. As before, my eventual aim is to present the literary and biographical material in a manner that affords fresh angles and issues in respect to particular figures and writings, while remaining faithful to an overall chronological sequence of events.
Furthermore, Exiles from a Future Time focused principally on the writing and lives of poets. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade is more concerned with prose writers. The title as well as principal leitmotif is drawn from the 1948 poem “Elegia,” by Communist and Spanish Civil War veteran Edwin Rolfe (1909–54). In the poem, the antifascist cause of the 1930s and the 1940s is exemplified by the city of Madrid, capital of the Spanish Republic. Rolfe and other volunteers in the International Brigades had tried to defend Madrid from being overrun by fascists in the three-year armed conflict now considered to be the first major battle of World War II. The seven lines that are quoted as the first of the two epigraphs for this volume stress the complexly blended forms of passion (designated as a “trinity of passion”) that bound Rolfe to the antifascist crusade. The cryptic nature of Rolfe’s choice of “trinity” as a modifier is reflected in its reverberation of John Donne’s sonnet “Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God,” as well as its selection as the code name of J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first atomic bomb test three years earlier.2 In his reference to a human trinity, blending diverse loves that may lead to intensification as well as disharmony, Rolfe echoes passages from Ernest Hemingway’s earlier For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel pitting love against delusion and betrayal.3 Although Rolfe completed the poem nine years after Franco’s triumph over the Spanish Republicans and three years after Allies’ victory over the Axis powers, such passions blazed in his memory more fiercely than ever.
“Elegia” is also an appropriate epigraph because “passion” epitomizes one of the most captivating yet precarious aspects of the heritage of the literary Left, an especially seductive sentiment during the antifascist era of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Passion rouses individuals to action and can spawn fervent idealism and predisposition to sacrifice. It is unimaginable to be able to effectively combat fascism, racism, and class oppression without passion. But passion can also generate oversimplified perceptions, blindness, misdirected rage, and wishful thinking. Passion often leads to the type of zealotry noted by the African American actor Ossie Davis in Trinity of Passion’s second epigraph. Not at all confined to those on the Left, zealotry may influence one’s idealism in unsettling ways, without necessarily annulling either the intentions of the passionately motivated or the righteousness of their cause.
The consequences of political passion for literary creativity can be discomfiting. Passion may fuel the striving to create works of the literary imagination relating to social liberation, but passion by itself offers no guaranty of artistic success or guidance as to appropriate form and content. No matter how ardently and purely passion is felt, the creative act is perforce refracted through the peculiar psychology of the artist. It is only then transformed into literature through the writer’s skills and interactions with editors, publishers, and audiences. Art aroused by passion on occasion burns most brightly in close proximity to political events; other times it flares in the afterglow of the events.
In re-creating and probing the intellectual and emotional panorama associated with the Spanish Civil War and World War II, this study focuses on a select group of writers and their careers. The merits of their various writings are appraised for the skill with which they convey the emotional landscape of antifascist struggles and its legacy, rather than for the particular political convictions held by the authors. Trinity of Passion’s introduction, “The Strange Career of Len Zinberg,” features a forgotten writer of popular fiction; its final, climactic chapter, “Arthur Miller’s Missing Chapter,” concerns a major dramatist; and its conclusion, “The Fates of Antifascism,” discusses diverse authors who fall in between. This is a book about a cross section of literary talent and achievement, as much as it dwells on the legacies of diversely unfulfilled political dreams.
One cannot concentrate exclusively on the presentation of the new without reference to the old. The narrative strategy of Trinity of Passion encompasses pivotal political events and landmark literary achievements while not rehearsing material that is familiar to the general reader or readily available elsewhere. Substantial attention is devoted to well-known authors such as Henry Roth or Arthur Miller when new information on their work and their relation to the Left warrants. Since biographical data and literary analysis are extensive for other prominent writers of the era—such as Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright—they are considered sparingly.
Many of the conceptual approaches utilized in Exiles from a Future Time apply as well to Trinity of Passion. “Elective affinity” continues as the chief determinate for locating writers in an ongoing, evolving, and ardent pro-Communist cultural tradition. The utopian theme in Exiles from a Future Time—romantic idealizations of the USSR and dreams of an interracial partnership among proletarians—is still visible but is now part of a broader mix. The burden of “living in a state of emergency” and the weight of “force fields” of literary networks and institutions are more present than in Exiles.
No political concept is more central to Trinity of Passion than the definition and changing fortunes of the Communist-initiated policy of the Popular Front. The Popular Front became the official Communist orientation in August 1935, at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. The Popular Front was theorized by German Communist Georgi Dmitrov as a “broad” version of the United Front (usually an alliance of working-class organizations around a common objective), and his speech was published in the United States as The United Front (1938). The novel revised policy was, however, anticipated in the United States by several efforts at creating united fronts in 1934, and the matter is complicated by the occasional use of the old term “united front” after 1935, with “People’s Front” and “Democratic Front” employed as well.
The gist of the Popular Front policy was the subordination of the Communist Party’s revolutionary anticapitalist program, which appears in Communist leader William Z. Foster’s Toward Soviet America (1932), to the pursuit of unity with supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The political practice of the People’s Front was less a call to build a coalition for unified action on a specific issue than it was a multiple strategy of preserving the existing socioeconomic-political system against the looming threat of fascism. Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, however, the Communist Party jettisoned the Popular Front policy overnight. This hiatus lasted for eighteen months; the policy was essentially reinstated after the Nazis’ attack on the USSR in 1941. Under the exigencies of wartime, the potential of the Communist Party for using the Popular Front in order to police the domestic U.S. Left was more in evidence than in the 1930s. Declaring World War II a “People’s War,” the Party sought to promote its version of national unity by enforcing the no-strike pledge, assailing African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph and his March on Washington Movement against discrimination in the military (first as pro-war, then as disruptive of wartime unity), collaborating in the prosecution under the Smith Act of the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party, and endorsing the internment of Japanese Americans.
In Europe the Communists’ wartime policy was called the National Front or National Freedom Front and was theorized as an extension of the Popular Front under new conditions. In the United States, the term “National Front” was mainly used in the Party’s theoretical journal, The Communist.4 Most importantly, Communist Party general secretary Earl Browder enforced his own interpretation, relentlessly mechanical in its retrogression to political positions to the right of those of many liberals, even those with pro-Soviet sympathies at the newspaper PM and the journal New Republic.5 After the Teheran conference of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in 1943, Browder went even further, conceptualizing the need for unity between workers and their bosses as a permanent condition. The implications of this evolving concept for writers and literary culture are too multifaceted to be condensed summarily. Fine points about the theory and practice of the Popular Front will be taken up as pertinent in the ensuing chapters.
The writers of the antifascist crusade were associated with the Communist movement in particularized modes. Many passed through membership in the Communist Party. The originality of Trinity of Passion lies more in its research into writers’ lives, writings, and institutional networks than in promoting any novel political theories of my own. The use of the term “Stalinism” to describe the Soviet Union and the ideology of the U.S. Communist Party in this era follows the prevailing Marxist scholarship of the late twentieth century, emphasizing Stalinism’s historical character.6
No matter how commendable they were in other respects, pro-Communists lauded the USSR as a model of socialism and a force for world peace, supported journals and newspapers that hailed Stalin as a genius, and endorsed a succession of policy revisions championed by Moscow. Of course, in contrast to Stalinists in the USSR, they did not personally impose a state dictatorship. The essence of the political lives of most pro-Communist writers in the United States was an honorable one of fighting against the injustices of U.S. society and fascist dictatorships internationally. This perspective frequently outlasted their Communist Party affiliations and in succeeding years was occasionally coupled with protests against injustices in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, there was a specificity to the version of communism they promoted, one that is blurred by euphemisms for tacitly Stalinist political allegiance such as “Progressive,” “Left,” and “radical” or even the unqualified use of the term “Communist.”
Paradoxically, however, one aim of this book is precisely to bring the writers, as individuals and artists, out from under the shadow of the term “Stalinism,” in accordance with an observation of the socialist writer Michael Harrington. Throughout his youth, Harrington had known Communists exclusively as political opponents in the radical movements in which he was an activist. Only after the 1956 revelations of Nikita Khrushchev about Stalin’s brutal regime and the Hungarian revolt against Soviet domination “created turmoil in the Communist world” did Harrington experience his “first truly personal contacts with the Communists.” He was then “surprised to discover . . . complex and often decent people who had served the wrong cause for right reasons while fighting courageously for social change in American society.”7 This sentiment provides an accurate profile of many of the writers portrayed in this study.