Exiles from a Future Time is the inaugural volume in a sequence treating the Literary Left in the United States as an undammed stream running from the time a Communist-led tradition was first forged in the early 1930s, through the tradition’s various permutations and crises, until it was supplanted by a “New Left” cultural upheaval in the 1960s. In this and subsequent books I will reconfigure the themes, chronology, and personnel of our indigenous Marxist cultural movement, progressing in each volume from topics such as the creation of a proletarian avant-garde in poetry to radical regionalism in fiction, and then to the Left presence in mass culture and the cultural criticism produced by blacklisted literature professors in the McCarthy era.
The structure of the order of themes from Exiles to subsequent books in the series will not be stringently chronological, nor will it correspond to decades. Rather, a succession of leitmotifs, originating with romantic-utopian impulses in Exiles and shifting to militant antifascism followed by resistance to domestic repression in successor studies, will distinguish the prevalent trend of the particular books. Some cultural developments very much rooted in the 1930s (the evolution of the Workers Theater movement, the rise of the proletarian novel, the founding of the journal Science & Society, the attraction of Jews to the Left) will only be approached in later volumes, while careers surveyed in this first book will not be broken off precipitously but pursued to encompass episodes as late as the 1960s. In reconstructing careers and trajectories, Exiles and its successors grant unique accentuation to the 1940s–50s “bridge” between the 1930s and the 1960s, which are relatively neglected decades for the study of Left writing.
Moreover, in the various volumes, women authors, writers of color, gay and lesbian cultural workers, along with divers genres, will be contemplated in the general narrative as well as in discrete chapters. The design is to acknowledge the patterns of particular cultural strains associated with collective experiences, while also contesting customary compartmentalization of Left cultural workers (as “Writers of the 1930s,” “Black Radicals,” “Political Poets”) and reassembling the intricate lacework of overlapping and interfacing that constitutes the actuality of the Left community.
While the aim of this project is not to demonstrate any particular pet theory, my contemplation of the material in this first volume has caused me to revisit, and finally to introduce, six conceptual approaches to cultural practice that in assorted, serrated, and overhanging fashions apprehend central (and memorable) aspects of the lives and works of my subjects:
1. The “elective affinity” that
impelled them into a common project.
2. The “revolutionary romanticism” that bedeviled even the most modern of their cultural endeavors.
3. The “force fields” of publications, networks of cultural activists, and writers’ organizations that partly shaped cultural work within the framework of national and international events.
4. The “gender ideology” with which women writers grappled as they sought to negotiate personal experience and political loyalties.
5. The “Afro-cosmopolitanism” championed by Black Marxists in white America.
6. The avant-garde quality of the poetry ensuing from the Left’s equivocal quarrel with High Modernism.
Some chapters give extended stress to one concept over another; for example, Chapters 3 through 5 are apportioned to exploring creative personalities within the force fields of Left institutional infrastructures, while Chapters 2, 6, and the conclusion speak to modernism and the avant-garde. Yet the concepts also accrue particular attention in parts of other chapters; for example, gender ideology and Afro-cosmopolitanism are somewhat addressed in Chapter 3, and then both are investigated more exhaustively in Chapters 7 and 8. In some other areas—sexual orientation, connections with the film industry—some particulars are given in Exiles, but extensive analysis is projected for a later volume. In order to avoid bogging down the narrative with excessive theoretical discourse, these six approaches and other concepts (such as Walter Benjamin’s “living in a state of emergency”) will be elaborated, albeit briefly, in the most appropriate chapter.
Exiles carries forward the exertions of other scholars to speak to cultural commitment in terms of political affiliations, stances, and activities, as well as in respect to the aesthetics and forms of cultural production itself.1 I put my chief accent, however, on individualized research into matters such as the writer’s intimate life, friendships, occupation, and precise political activities, as a prerequisite to reckoning the “value” of artistic work. Thus, in a sharp departure from earlier studies, including several of my own, the focus of literary analysis is not restricted to works of literature intended to explicitly dramatize political ideas, as in the depiction of a strike or an account of a conversion to socialism. Rather, I pose the question: What kinds of texts did writers with radical commitments, ascertained by their having substantial ideological and organizational ties to the Communist Left, actually yield? Readers may be surprised by the answers.
My motivation to produce such a “revisionist” work about the mid-twentieth-century Literary Left stems first of all from my sustained encounters as a reader with the fiction and poetry generated by several hundred imaginative writers who identified with Marxist movements in mid-century. (By this I mean writers who either openly proclaimed their political affiliation or else demonstrated an association with the Communist Party and Left-led organizations over a protracted period of years, thereby indicating that the connection was not merely an accident or the result of a misunderstanding.)2 While probing the range of possible relations between creative practice and radical political commitment, I found that many lesser-known authors were as intriguing and meaningful as the twenty or so “canonical” radical writers who have dominated earlier studies.
Most significant, my method of evaluating cultural and political practice that incorporates subjective dimensions and quotidian activities is rooted in first-hand primary research into personal biography and the circumstances (networks, writers’ organizations, mentor relationships) involved in literary production. Consequently, judgments are not derived by looking at experiences and writings restrictively through the prism of Communist Party positions or theoretical estimates of Stalinism, although, of course, such policies and assessments are significant factors. Where befitting, I have also tried to evaluate individual writers by adhering to a stance suggested by the late Black activist and minister Adam Clayton Powell. Reverend Powell avowed that Harlemites neither demonized Communists nor “fell over backwards in admiration,” but judged them “individually” on the basis of their commitment to Black equality.3 I, too, strive to judge the writers individually on the basis of the merits of their cultural and political practice. When I furthermore identify writers as having been pro-Communist in various fashions, I am not intending to offer that affiliation as a simple explanation for their values or their writing, or to translate psychological and artistic affairs into the language of politics. To the contrary, such a political identification serves to render their lives and work as much more intricately problematic by adding yet another feature—and a vexing one at that—to lives already plentiful in personal and cultural experiences.
Second, my decision to strike out in a new direction was reinforced by more than two decades of teaching mid-twentieth-century radical poetry, fiction, drama, film, and criticism. My students responded to the literature variously. Their contemporary preoccupations led them to preferences for novels and poems that I hardly anticipated. Frequently evidenced by undergraduates was a difficulty in grasping apparent contradictions raised by the professed ideals of the writers and the sometimes sensational charges of their anti-Communist literary and political opponents. As a result, I have also tried to produce a study that will address the concerns of young cultural and political activists today who might profit from knowing more about the attainments and inadequacies of their predecessors.
It is also important to note that a number of my findings, such as those recapitulated in the conclusion to this volume, are intimately tied to the methodology of this study. For example, one of my aims in Exiles is to compensate for the deficiencies of many earlier cultural histories to fully appreciate the subtleties and contradictions of the avant-garde aspects of pro-Communist poets, diversely evident in the “proletarian” as well as post-1935 “People’s Front” eras. My suspicion is that the limitations of such outlooks were bolstered by approaches downgrading the biographically idiosyncratic elements of the artists (sexual orientation, regional background, ethnicity, details about precise political commitments), partly due to the absence of information, which made it more tempting to conceive of pro-Communist authors primarily as bearers of a general “Left” ideological position. To reintroduce the individualized habitus (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense)4 of the writer’s singular being and consciousness is not to become a biographer but to restore the self-activity of Left cultural workers as well as to supply some of the neglected mediations in the creative act—especially the mentality of the artist and the force field of the institutions within which he or she worked.
The final version of this first volume on the forging of a Left tradition is the result of wrenching negotiations among all sorts of contending claims in determining scope and structure, as well as the limitations of my own areas of expertise. These are some of the reasons why, even though I designed this overall project to dramatically advance our knowledge of mid-twentieth-century literary history and, more specifically, the Literary Left, there is no claim to have written a “definitive” study, least of all a work that in any way precludes further exploration of the field. For example, it is crucial to recognize the “linguistic limits” of my project. Beyond the scope of this study are the novels, poetry, drama, and criticism created by U.S. socialists who wrote in languages besides English; in particular, that of the thriving Left-wing movement of Yiddish authors that lasted from the 1890s through the Cold War, including the “Sweatshop Poets,” and the “Proletpen” contributors to Der Hammer, Signal, and Yiddishe Kultur.5 Interrelations between literary practice and painting, cartooning, sculpting, dance, music (including composing, choral singing, and folk singing), acting, and directing are slighted as well, although references to extant scholarship will be cited where pertinent.
Instead, I will count this and subsequent volumes successful to the extent that they open up novel areas of inquiry for students, scholars, and cultural workers; facilitate the rediscovery of long-neglected writers; promote the rethinking of familiar texts and episodes, and the rectification of mistakes that I have made; and expedite the unearthing of original information about the many literary figures who are of necessity mentioned only in passing. My conclusions are meant as hypotheses, although some are obviously far more strongly held than others.
As I conducted the early phases of the research for this multivolume study, my beloved wife of seventeen years, Celia Stodola Wald (1946–1992), suffered from the onset and fatal effects of the pernicious disease scleroderma. Our intense relationship began with the rise of the New Left in the mid-1960s, which imparted a shared purpose to our lives. Exiles from a Future Time is dedicated to our extraordinary daughters, Sarah and Hannah.