As a Communist writer for most of his life, Mike Gold was often miscast by his critics and later historians as a Party spokesman or even a cultural bureaucrat. The Communist Party did, in fact, appoint officials such as Alexander Trachtenberg (1894–1966) and V. J. Jerome (1896–1965) to annunciate policy and guide practical activity. Such men had power, however, only in certain contexts or at particular moments; they were merely elements, albeit influential ones, of a vital and fractious cultural movement. Their authority was due primarily to their connections with the Party apparatus, but they were never the movers and shakers of practical literary activity at the movement’s base.
Far more vivid in the lives of the tens of thousands of readers of the Communist press was the personality aura—partly a myth created of their own desire—of Mike Gold.1 First as editor of the New Masses from 1928 to 1930, and then as a member of its editorial board until 1934, Gold appeared regularly in its pages. He also became a prolific writer for the Daily Worker, beginning in 1933 with his “Change the World” column (originally called “What a World”). Gold was never a member of any leading Party committee, nor was he intimate with or particularly trusted by Party leaders, but he was an enormously popular speaker and debater who frequently toured the country; he authored introductions to books by Langston Hughes and other Left poets and artists; and, despite the resentment of some members of the New York John Reed Club who chafed at his “star” status, he was a nationally known symbol of the fully “committed” writer who had a genuine public following. Simply put, no single individual contributed more to forging the tradition of proletarian literature as a genre in the United States after the 1920s. All who came after Gold would stand on the shoulders of his legacy.
Part of the explanation for Gold’s impact was his colorful semi-autonomy from the Party officials such as Jerome on the Party headquarters’ “Ninth Floor.” The dazzling blend of proletarianism, bohemianism, romanticism, and even a strain of modernism that comprised the early 1930s mix of Left poetry was quite evident in Gold’s own personality and career. “A kind of cheeky Krazy Kat bouncing rocks off the crania of his adversaries” was the way the Marxist playwright and novelist Philip Stevenson (1896–1965) remembered Gold. He was “sentimental about the socialist future, always ready to fight for his beliefs, overcorrecting opportunism with doses of leftism.”2 One of his most renowned polemics indicted the poetry of Archibald MacLeish for expressing a “fascist unconscious.”3
Some of the confusion that exists in scholarship about the policies and practice of the Communist Literary Left flows from a basic tension in the life of Gold, a man riven by strong contradictions that he held together by promoting in his critical statements and imaginative writings the self-image of a fully integrated revolutionary artist whose commitment to the working class was total and dependable.
This toughness convinced the African American writer Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896–1977) that, in her battle against racism, “Mike so perfectly symbolized the fact that I was not struggling alone. . . . [A]s long as there are people to fight for, Mike Gold will burn a light. Mike Gold will be there in the corner for us to gather around and know.”4 A Pennsylvania miner who later lived in the Soviet Union, Ed Falkowski, recalled that Gold’s name became a “household word” among radical workers in the 1920s and 1930s because “He seemed to know—to be certain—of final victory for the working class. There was no wavering in him, no doubts to put to sleep.”5 Such a persona was constructed over many difficult years by a man who regarded himself as “soft” and “almost mad with the overflow of pity and sorrow I feel for this goddamned mess of a world.”6 Gold’s lifelong friend Dorothy Day (1897–1980), founder of the Catholic Worker, regarded him to the end as a “gentle and loving spirit.”7
Gold emerged from an anarchist political background that he never completely transcended; his personal instability before the mid-1930s and his lifelong battle with diabetes, exacerbated in his last three decades, curbed his activities in the Party to contributing columns, usually polemical and humorous, and giving speeches. In his declarations on cultural matters, he promoted values of simplicity and directness which reached an apogee in his 1930 nine-point program of “Proletarian Realism” that advocated writing akin to a clean, swift knock-out punch to the collective chin of the bourgeoisie.8 Gold’s own creative writing, when he exercised discipline, as in his much-revised Jews without Money (1930), or in some of his experimental drama, possessed a refreshing lyricism portending other major achievements that never came. In a response to Genevieve Taggard’s introduction to the poetry anthology May Days, Gold explained his view of reconciling craft with commitment:
[T]here is no doubt that the Russian Revolution has brought a wiser, harder intellect into being; and this intellect cannot accept the muddle of individualism and communism that appeared in the Masses pages....
The new revolutionary artist has no compartments in his mind, one for individualistic art and the other for communist revolution. He is so saturated in the Communist world that he is incapable of creating art that is not communist, any more than Michael Angelo or Dante could have created art that was not medieval.9
This ideal anticipates the single-minded psyche of male protagonists in several Left-wing novels depicting martyrs to the revolutionary or antifascist causes, especially André Malraux’s Kyo and Katov in his Man’s Fate (1934) and Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).10 The famous Whitmanesque mysticism of Gold’s February 1921 manifesto, “Towards Proletarian Art,” appears to have been superseded in the late 1920s and early 1930s by a publicly expressed unity of political and artistic objectives.11
Such a new attitude was formulated in the years of Gold’s greatest creative ferment. In his early thirties, he had just returned from an exhilarating experience in the Soviet Union; he was also seeing his plays produced by the New Playwrights Theatre, which he had helped to found with a $50,000 contribution that he charmed from Otto Kahn, a Jewish businessman.12 But this energetic avowal of Gold’s consummate Communist artist masks a personal story of emotional pain and instability, a nostalgia and guilt for a lost childhood happiness that he sought to reconstitute by transforming himself into the beloved patriarch of Left-wing culture. In the process, Gold would organize his emotional and intellectual life around a predominating military vision of the class struggle that naturally gave rise to a view of “art as a weapon.” This was also the well-known Communist slogan of the John Reed Clubs at the time, indicating that Gold was hardly alone in believing that cultural statements might affect life-and-death struggles.
The cost of Gold’s vision of cultural warfare is hard to reckon. By the time Gold turned forty, his literary career had been remade from creative writer into popular Left journalist, although his prose was never as academic, and rarely so stultified and colorless, as that of functionaries such as V. J. Jerome. But Gold’s lack of time to create a literature to match the Marxist program he devised may not have been his only obstacle. He also made a dramatic turnabout in his personal life through a strong commitment to marriage and raising his children, while additionally suffering from declining health and engaging in a fight for economic survival, his livelihood largely dependent on churning out daily newspaper columns.
Walking through Greenwich Village on a hot summer evening in 1955, the former New Masses editor Joseph Freeman stepped into a bar on Greenwich Avenue to call home. Approaching the only phone booth in the establishment, the fifty-eight-year-old Freeman almost did a double-take as if confronting an apparition. A short, slim man in his early twenties with a mop of thick, dark, shaggy hair and swarthy features was holding open the booth’s door for air while declaiming free verse into the receiver. For a moment Freeman imagined that he had been propelled back in time thirty-five years, and that standing before him was Mike Gold from their Liberator days of the early 1920s. Taking notice of the older man’s interest, the fledging poet quickly introduced himself as Gregory Corso (1930–2001).
Relishing memories of those long-ago times when he and Gold used to “bat poems around,” Freeman listened a bit to Corso’s side of the telephone debate about whether a certain line of poetry should be cut. Soon Corso put Freeman on the phone with his interlocutor, another aspiring writer by the name of Allen Ginsberg (1926–1999). Freeman instantly determined that this was the son of Louis Ginsberg (1895–1976), the socialist poet whose verse used to appear in both the Liberator and New Masses. Ginsberg’s mother had been an active Communist, and the preadolescent Allen had attended Party-sponsored meetings where he learned to sing “The Red Flag” and union songs.13
Freeman and Corso ended up having drinks together, after which Freeman examined some more poems and told Corso that “in the old days” he and Gold would have surely published them (minus Corso’s generous use of four-letter words) in their revolutionary magazine. This led to a series of meetings between Corso and Freeman to discuss literary matters. Corso eventually found work as a seaman and took off on a ship, but Freeman continued to read the poetry of the Beats. After Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems appeared in 1958, Freeman bumped into both Corso and Ginsberg at a 1959 New Year’s Day party at an art gallery. When Ginsberg insisted to Freeman that Corso was the “better poet,” Freeman offered his own view that Corso’s strength was his “imagination” but that Ginsberg’s was “feeling.” He then urged both men to look up Mike Gold on their next trip to San Francisco; they would surely find a kindred spirit. Six days later he mailed off a report of these events to Gold, with whom he had recently resumed communication, after nineteen years of silence.14
Although no evidence exists that a West Coast rendezvous actually occurred, Freeman’s intuition of a resonance between Gold and the early Beats was perceptive. In 1957 Gold had attended a poetry session in San Francisco at The Cellar featuring Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982), whom he had first met in 1923,15 and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1920); both performed their work to the “obligato of a progressive jazz trio.” Gold linked the former to the French surrealist (and French resistance fighter) Paul Eluard (1895–1952) for his “simple statement of indignation and love,” and admired the latter as “an enemy of all that destroys man’s joy of living.” Gold was also familiar with Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” which he characterized as “the most heartbroken lamentation over the epoch that I everread.” What drew Gold to this new movement was its “life,” the sure sign of which was police harassment. He noted that Ginsberg was only following in the steps of Walt Whitman, who also had been subjected to the charge of “obscenity.” While Gold had no sympathy for drugs and homosexuality, or what he believed to be Ginsberg’s “Trotskyism,” he saw the Beats passing through a stage parallel to that of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) in 1914. To his People’s World readers, Gold observed: “Yet he grew, and they will, too.”16
That the trajectory of Mayakovsky should spring to mind as a point of reference had a basis in Gold’s personal history. Both men were born in the same year, passing through a tumultuous youth and early manhood in which they aspired to combine poetry and modern theater. Both, around 1914, developed loyalties to the working-class movement, subsequently moving forward to embrace the Russian Revolution with every fiber of their beings. During the 1920s, as Mayakovsky became the voice of revolutionary art, Gold himself became increasingly drawn to Futurism, capped by a visit to the Soviet Union from late 1924 to early 1925, where he immersed himself in the theater experiments of Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940).
In the fall of 1925, Mayakovsky made a tour of the United States, and during his New York sojourn he was hosted at a party by Freeman and Gold. According to Freeman, “Gold recited ‘A Strange Funeral at Braddock,’ broke into tears and made an eloquent speech about the proletarian revolution.” When Freeman expressed concern about the quantity of alcohol being consumed by these aspiring proletarian revolutionaries, Gold dismissed him by observing that “Mayakovsky drinks three times as much as we do.” Mayakovsky then confessed: “Yes, I am a bohemian.... That is my great problem: to burn out all of my bohemian past, to rise to the heights of the revolution.”17
Mayakovsky’s 1930 suicide, not long after Gold visited him in Moscow, coincided with the final stages of Gold’s own transformation into a celebrated novelist and regular Daily Worker columnist. Although never quite disappearing, Gold’s erratic bohemianism was progressively displaced as he assumed the responsibilities of marriage, a family, and unyielding Party commitment. Gold rationalized Mayakovsky’s sad end as the result of harassment by “little people on the make ... climbers and careerists.”18 He turned to a substantial consideration of the Russian poet only during the early years of World War II.19 This was after he accidentally discovered David Burliuk (1882–1967), the painter and poet who was a founder of Russian Futurism and a mentor of Mayakovsky, living in obscurity in a tenement in the Ukrainian section of New York’s East Side. In a brochure about Burliuk that Gold prepared for the A.C.A. Art Gallery on East 57th Street, he discussed his affinity with both men.
In Mayakovsky Gold saw a young rebel who, to quote the Soviet poet Nikolai Aseev, had been ruled “by street life and thunder,” until Burliuk bullied him into assuming his responsibilities as a poet who understood “the harsh and crude realities of the proletarian struggle.” Significantly, Burliuk himself is presented in the brochure by Gold as having made a personal transition of his own. Gold quotes Burliuk as telling him that he eventually forsook aggressive experimentation aimed at only the destruction of “old forms in art,” to bring “poetry back to the people by stressing the dramatic and epic, by heroic oration, not morbid introspection.” In due time Burliuk’s paintings themselves became what he called “primitive.”20 Thus Gold saw in the lives of both men patterns justifying the narrative of his own struggle to gain control of his emotional and personal life, exemplified by a removal from the literary experiments of his younger self.
Although it is likely that some of the breakdowns and depressions that marked Gold’s youth were the consequences of his protracted combat with diabetes,21 his flamboyant behavior recalls that of several generations of rebellious youth gifted with literary precocity. Gold emerged from painful poverty in New York City as something of an autodidact, becoming in his teens a devotee of the American writers such as Whitman, Twain, and Sandburg, and Russians such as Gorky and Dostoyevski. When he showed up in Boston at age eighteen, he lived in an anarchist commune, embraced vegetarianism, and, like Allen Ginsberg twenty years later, was nicknamed “Professor.” At one point neighbors complained about Gold’s insouciant habit of exercising stark naked before an uncovered window with a big cigar in his mouth.22
During the 1920s, Gold was, on the one hand, an eccentric Communist who preferred a good joke to a political speech;23 but he also privately wrestled with a variety of insecurities as he tried his hand at writing poetry, drama, fiction, and reportage, as well as editing Left magazines and producing plays. Gold was invigorated by his personal contacts with Futurists in mid-decade, and it was the shock of the Great Depression, the inspiration of the Party-led movement of the unemployed, and the triumph of Hitler that enabled him to visualize a new identity as America’s foremost committed writer. It was through the stern tutorial of the Communist movement that Gold had found stability and salvation as “the people’s writer ... fearless and incorruptible, pouring forth what seemed like a torrent of words from the heart.”24 Thus he felt he had a debt to the Communist movement which he would honor for the rest of his life. His early undisciplined experiments in art and life brought with them the dangers of self-centered individualism, a bohemianism that needed to be, like Mayakovsky’s, “burned out.” As he forged this new identity, he shed his own “street life and thunder.” He retained this self-selected personality, never losing control over what he was and represented, to his last day. Yet he retained to the end an incandescent warmth, compassion, and empathy for that rebellious stage of youthful angst and hi-jinks in which he now hypothesized the Beats to be.
Gold’s biography has been recounted several times but is too often confused with that of the persona of his novel Jews without Money, which he claimed was “85% autobiographical.”25 He was born Itzok Granich on 12 April 1893, in New York City’s Lower East Side, the first surviving child of Charles Granich, who emigrated to the United States from Jassy, Rumania, in 1885, and Kate Schwartz, who left for the United States from Budapest, Hungary, one year later. Gold anglicized his first name to Irving at the behest of his schoolteachers, and then to Irwin when he started publishing.
Gold’s father, in contrast to Herman, the working-class house painter of Jews without Money, was self-employed as a suspender maker and salesman who owned his own manufacturing shop with several employees. Although he was incompetent in dealing with commercial matters, Charles Granich was an engaging storyteller with a vast knowledge of the theater, and adored by his first-born son, who sat at his feet for hours, lost in a fantastic tapestry of Old World tales and extemporaneous dramatizations of Yiddish and European plays. Hence young Michael was devastated when his father fell mysteriously ill, became bed-ridden, and died when his son was only eighteen. A year before his death, Charles Granich made several unsuccessful suicide attempts by slashing himself with a knife. His son, who discovered the bleeding body and heard his pleas for death, was horrified to find himself hating his father and wishing for his demise in order that the family might be free of this burden.26 Charles’s economic incompetence and illness required that his wife find work in a restaurant; Gold himself was forced at age twelve to quit school and to start work at a gas mantle factory, followed a year later by a job at the Adams Express Company. The parents quarreled bitterly over their dilemma, and thus was born in Gold the “consciousness of guilt for duty undone.”27
The loss of his father as a powerful source of joyous entertainment haunted Gold for the rest of his life, even as he carried on Charles’s tradition of singing folksongs (often in Yiddish) and public storytelling. Gold’s writing had actually begun at age fifteen while his father lay ill; he wrote tales, entitled “Tenements,” “Nails,” and “Ghost Story,” that were published in a settlement-house newspaper.28 Several of Gold’s early published writings refer to the death of fathers and father figures, events usually associated with political action. In a 1919 poem, “To One Dying,” Gold tells of the passing of an old revolutionary who will be replaced by a young disciple.29 In “A Great Deed was Needed,” a striking coal miner’s son, Buddy, weeps at the loss of his father, then transforms his rage into desire for class war with the cry, “The world needs a great proletarian deed!”30 A few years before his own death, Gold insisted that he still meditated daily on his father’s fate.31 Charles Granich’s death was also decisive in his son’s leftward turn, for Gold formed the belief that the prevailing social system was at fault for never giving his father a chance to reach his full powers: “[H]e had not been given an honest chance to discover his own make-up, and to work toward his own special career. I felt that he had been robbed. It was this sense of injustice to my father that had prepared me so readily for my contact with the revolution.”32 In Jews without Money, originally called “Poverty Is a Trap,”33 Gold created a myth to dramatize this conviction by remaking his father into a working-class house painter who injures himself in a fall from a ladder and then slowly languishes from lead poisoning due to breathing the fumes of his paint.
This brilliantly realized character, who fused Gold’s own personal anguish and his political convictions, retains Charles Granich’s personality and role as a victim of capitalist society who lacked consciousness of the forces destroying him. But the occupation of painter and the illness that killed him were drawn from the life of Gold’s friend, the worker-poet Jim Waters (dates unknown), who lived with Gold at the time he was finishing Jews without Money.34 Gold transferred to the working class the love and idealized childhood adulation he had felt for his father; hence a victory of the working class over capitalism became a legitimate dream for him as a partial compensation for the loss of his father.
The life of Kate Granich is more faithfully portrayed in the novel. Gold intended Katie to be a symbol of socialism, albeit a romanticized one, who is depicted in the chapter “Mushrooms in Bronx Park” as closely linked to nature. Indeed, the social and cultural critic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), who met Gold just before World War I and remained friends with him through the next decade, recalled years later that Gold was “a passionate, brilliant, vehement youth ... a romantic and an anarchist, closer to Rousseau and Stirner than to Marx.”35 Throughout the novel the son, searching for an emotional center to his life, fails to recognize that it is his mother who is the ultimate object of his own desire; unlike his dreamy father, she lives socialist values in her altruism, generosity, and explicit hatred of capitalist exploitation. Only on the final page does young Mike’s quest for a savior shift from the illusions of religion (his fantasy of a Messiah) and of popular culture (the Messiah begins to look like Buffalo Bill) to working-class revolution. Such a revolution will be the instrument that will “destroy the East side” and “build there a garden for the human spirit.”36 Through this indirect reconciliation with the spirit of his mother, animated by a socialism of natural love, an alternative foundation is created for a new kind of family with Gold himself assuming the role of family avenger and protector.
Jews without Money contains a second invention about his family. In the novel a sister, Esther, one year younger than the protagonist, is killed by a delivery wagon. Young Mikey’s relations with Esther are surprisingly sadistic, provoked by the nurturing role she plays in relation to his sick father. With mother Katie working in a restaurant, Esther assumes the part of housekeeper and nurse. Thus she earns a higher place than Mikey in their father’s affections, expressed so effusively to young Esther as to assume sexual overtones.37 The more innocent, kind, cooperative, and generous Esther’s behavior becomes, the more young Mikey torments, ridicules, humiliates, and even beats her. On the evening when she is killed by a blond, German American wagon driver, young Mikey is lost in a book about Richard the Lion-Hearted.
The Granich family consisted only of Mike and his two younger brothers, George, born in 1895, and Emmanuel (“Manny”), born in 1898. Several years before Mike’s birth, a sister had died at the age of four of natural causes. Esther, the invented sister in the novel, has many characteristics borrowed from an aunt, and the wagon accident is based on an incident when Mike’s brother Manny was run over in the street and injured. By practically eliminating his brothers from the narrative and moving the death of his sister from the past to the present, occurring as Mikey approaches adolescence, Gold dramatizes the complex feelings of a surviving child. Possibly he believed that the sister who pre-deceased him had served as the object of an idealization by his father against which he could never measure up, or else the sister is a stand-in for the role Gold wishes he had played in relation to his parents. The invented tale of Esther invokes emotions of self-hate and jealousy on the part of young Mikey that otherwise appear to have no explanation, other than being the manifestations of an exaggerated sibling rivalry. Moreover, the linking of Esther’s death to the family’s poverty—she is killed when she is forced to seek firewood on a cold stormy night because her father is sick and Katie is working—shows once again Gold’s tendency to assuage his personal pain by channeling anger in the direction of an inegalitarian social order.
Readers and scholars have reacted variously to the rapid transmogrification of the protagonist at the climax of Jews without Money from a candidate for suicide to a proletarian revolutionary. This is said to have occurred several years after Mikey turned fifteen, and is portrayed as a cure-all to his various problems. Specifically, in the final chapter, the post-adolescent protagonist declares for proletarian revolution after hearing a man on a soapbox speak at a political rally. Later, Gold claimed that this was based on an incident in 1914, when he was twenty-one, and that the speaker was the “Rebel Girl,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890–1964), at the time a fiery leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later a Communist spokeswoman. One of Gold’s sons believes that the speaker may not have been Flynn but Emma Goldman (1869–1940), the anarchist who was anathema to the Communist Party by the time Jews without Money was published.38
Moreover, it is likely that radical politics were well known to the three Granich brothers from their youth, with each brother influencing the other. The youngest brother, George, became a founding member of the Communist Party in 1919, which suggests a time of radical activity going back to an even earlier date. As with Mike, his commitment was life-long. After a period of hoboing, George married, and he and his wife, Gertrude, then ran a children’s camp in Woodstock, New York. The Graniches subsequently established an after-school center for children in the basement of their home on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Jews without Money is dedicated to George and Gertrude’s son, Michael. When George died of cancer in 1946 at the age of forty-five, Gold devoted three of his Daily Worker columns to expressing his grief.39
The brother between Mike and George, Manny, worked in the shipyards during World War I and then took an interest in engineering. In the early 1920s Manny traveled to California, where he organized agricultural workers for the IWW. Sometime during the 1920s, Manny joined the Communist Party, and in 1932 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he helped build factories in the Ural Mountains. In 1936, Manny (now sometimes called “Max”) and his wife, Grace, were asked by the Comintern to travel to China, where they edited Voice of China, working with Madame Sun Yat-sen to rally the Chinese against the Japanese. After returning to the United States, Manny worked as the chauffeur, secretary, and body guard for the Communist Party general secretary Earl Browder while Grace was employed at Party headquarters, on the famed “Ninth Floor.” When Browder was expelled from the Party in 1946, Manny turned bitterly against him. Manny’s loyalty to the Party lasted until the 1961 Sino-Soviet dispute, after which he became a supporter of Mao and a passionate defender of the Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Whatever the precise stages of Gold’s radicalization were, it seems to be the case that, at the time that he heard Flynn (or Goldman) address the rally in Union Square, he purchased a copy of the Masses and later submitted to the magazine a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, about the death of three anarchists, which appeared in the August 1914 issue.40 He became regularly associated with the Masses and its successors, initially as Irwin Granich and later as Mike Gold. Less evident from his novel is that the young Mike Gold was also ambitious in a conventional way, perhaps seeking to achieve the economic security that had slipped from his father’s grasp. First, he took extra courses in night school to compensate for his failure to finish high school. Although he never disclosed this information himself, documents found by his literary editor (see endnote 25) after Gold’s death reveal that he was hired by the New York Globe from 1913 to 1914, and used the credentials he acquired there to attend New York University to study journalism for a year. He also worked on a number of suburban newspapers in the New York area and managed a printing plant. Based on these accomplishments, he received special permission to attend Harvard University as a provisional student in the fall of 1916—an uncanny parallel to the biography of Gregory Corso, who attained the same status in 1954. While matriculated, Gold penned a chatty column that appeared six days a week in the Boston Journal called “A Freshman at Harvard.”
His efforts to become “Joe College” ended in catastrophe. Only a semester later, Gold suffered a nervous breakdown so severe that he always considered it the lowest point of his life. Setbacks in his romantic life had triggered a delayed reaction to his father’s death, during which repressed feelings powerfully reasserted themselves. Fifty years later he recalled:
[My father’s] memory ... obsessed me more than did that beautiful girl I was in love with. Every day I thought of him ... I think the thing that hurt me most was that I had adored him as one of the most brilliant people I had known.41
Gold fell into a paralyzing depression and sold all his books. He walked around in dirty rags that deteriorated to the point where his genitals could sometimes be seen through the cloth. He began to scrounge money for food, thought endlessly about his dead father, and continued to pursue the hopeless love affair. Still, during the illness and his recovery in these years just prior to World War I, revolutionary politics were never distant. He joined the IWW and frequently resided in an anarchist commune, run by the Boston Left personality Polly Parrot. There he was active in supporting local strikes, editing an anarchist newspaper called The Flame with a millionaire friend,42 and working in the Boston birth control movement. He frequently contributed to the Socialist Call in New York.
Gold’s Boston experiences were the nadir in terms of his effort to establish a sense of self and control over his destiny. While the pain of his first loss in love may well have set the stage for the reappearance of powerful, suppressed feelings about his father, he could also blame his personal crisis on his having held naive illusions in achieving stability through a Harvard education that would lead to a normal professional career. Although he cited his Harvard sojourn in an application to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1936, exaggerating his stay to six months, he omitted it in his 1928 application and otherwise denied that he had ever attended.43 There is evidence that he was neither lying nor joking in this attitude, but trying to express some essential verity that the “facts” of the situation did not communicate.
Leaving Boston, Gold began to live out his father’s legacy by devoting himself to the theater, first demonstrated through his association with the Provincetown Players.44 In 1917 Gold’s Down the Airshaft was performed, followed immediately by Homecoming. Both short plays are noticeably based on events in Gold’s life. The first tells of a Jewish boy longing to leave his mother and take to the road until he hears the artistic muse of his own environment through the sound of a flute coming down the tenement air-shaft. The second depicts a dead Russian father, killed in battle at the front, returning briefly to his family as a ghost until he is exposed by news of the actual events of the war reaching home.45 That same year Gold, now a member of the Socialist Party, escorted Theodore Dreiser, in search of material for a play about tenement life, to view the Chrystie Street apartment he shared with his mother. Furthermore, his own first sketch of an episode from Jews without Money appeared as “Birth: A Prologue to a Tentative East Side Novel” in the November–December 1917 issue of the Masses under the name Irwin Granich.
In late 1918, however, Gold crossed the border into Mexico to escape the draft. There he passed more than a year working—sometimes translating for the press, sometimes doing physical labor—as well as carousing. He was also active on the Left, proclaiming an anarchist politics opposed to all states and political organizations but still sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution. At one point, collecting money in the streets of Mexico City for a Spanish translation of the Soviet Constitution, he encountered the African American boxer Jack Johnson, with whom he was acquainted, and received a $10 contribution.46 His time in Mexico resulted in a full-length play, a short story, an unfinished novel, and a life-long love of Mexican songs, the spirit of the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish language.47 Back in Provincetown in 1920, he saw the Players perform his work Money, a one-act play climaxing in a scene in which Mendel, a factory worker, describes his political transformation when hearing a street corner speaker on the East Side predict a classless society.
In January 1921 he had become a member of the editorial board of the Liberator under the name Michael Gold, which he used for protection during the post–World War I wave of antiradical repression. The pseudonym was borrowed from a friend of his father who was a northern veteran of the Civil War, a war in which Gold did believe. Around this time he joined the Communist movement, although his membership status may not have been consistent until the early 1930s. By January 1922 Gold and Claude McKay were jointly appointed executive editors of the Liberator, but by October Gold, who was temperamentally incompatible with the fastidious and somewhat aristocratic McKay, had gone West.
From 1922 through 1924, Gold lived in Oakland, California, writing for the San Francisco World and other papers. He published a series, “The Life of John Brown,” in the Daily Worker which subsequently appeared as a Halderman-Julius Publishing Company pamphlet under that name. After a period in Chicago, when a collection of his narratives called A Damned Agitator and Other Stories (1924) was published as a pamphlet by the Daily Worker, he traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, and the Soviet Union. There he was profoundly affected by the Constructivist theater of Meyerhold that employed pantomimes, acrobatics, formalized scenery, and other techniques to emphasize his plays’ nonverbal aspects.48 Decades later, Gold enthusiastically recalled how he attended the theater every night of his stay, and also spent long hours in the company of Meyerhold (who spoke English) in the green room of his theater. To Gold, the plays were impressive for their ability to express emotions through the movement of the body, and he saw a unity between words and muscular activity. Observing a Meyerhold performance “had the effect of sculpture that came to life under your eyes.” He was also fascinated by the extraordinary stage, an old barnlike house containing all kinds of structures and several floors, as well as by the “noble” appearance of the German Jewish Meyerhold.49
The impact on Gold, who was also acutely sensitive to the visual and physical, was monumental.50 Returning to New York, “I felt as if something had left my life and must be replaced by something as close to the original as possible.” Gold threw himself back into journalism, helping to launch the New Masses as a Left publication friendly to but independent of the Communist Party. He worked on some short plays and dramatic sketches, including an influential “mass recitation” called “Strike!” that appeared in the New Masses in July 1926. He also completed chapters of a novel-in-progress based on his own youth that he would soon recast as an autobiography. But he remained committed to recreating some version of Constructivist theater in the United States. In 1927, with John Howard Lawson, John Dos Passos, and others, he organized the New Playwrights Theater, which took its name from “The Playwrights Theater,” where the Provincetown Players first performed in New York City. Then a well-to-do supporter of revolutionary arts, Florence Rauh (sister of Max Eastman’s former wife, Ida Rauh), offered Gold her apartment while she went on vacation. Gold went into a “trance” and started to write a full-length play, Hoboken Blues. When finished, he realized that it was in “Futurist style,” something that had not been a conscious choice but happened “automatically.” He sent the manuscript off to the American Caravan, a new annual of avant-garde literature. The editors—Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld—accepted it at once with great eagerness, and it appeared in 1927. This was the same year that Gold was arrested during a demonstration to protest the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
An experimental drama set in Harlem, New York, and Hoboken, New Jersey, Hoboken Blues was intended to have an entirely African American cast with white characters played by Blacks in white masks. The subtitle was The Black Rip Van Winkle: A Modern Negro Fantasia on an Old American Theme, and the protagonist is a Black man, Sam Pickens, who travels from Harlem to Hoboken seeking work as a banjo player in a circus.51 After being attacked by white policemen, Pickens awakens to find himself in a communist utopia. When he decides to return to Harlem to retrieve his wife and daughter, he discovers that he has actually been asleep for twenty-five years.
Gold’s plans received a setback when he went to the flat of African American singer and actor Paul Robeson (1898–1976) to ask him to play the role of Pickens. Robeson had read the play, but felt it was inappropriate for him because it seemed politically “hopeless” in spirit.52 Moreover, Gold was never able to assemble an all-Black cast, and its production by the New Playwrights Theatre in 1928 was a failure, although the Daily Worker published a supportive review by James P. Cannon.53 Fiesta, another full-length play but written in a conventional style, received more favorable reviews when it was produced at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1929. But Gold was bitter about changes made in the production; he felt that the directors had debased the Mexican peons whom he wanted to embody the spirit of the revolution. Gold was further distressed by the abandonment of the New Playwrights Theater at that time by the other writers; he believed this to have been engineered by Lawson, who did not share his confidence about winning a working-class following. Then there was a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his own efforts to dramatize African American and Mexican life in the plays; although he felt knowledgeable and respectful of these cultures, the effects were not at all what he had intended. For the most part Fiesta ended the playwriting phase of Gold’s career. But in 1936 the Federal Theatre Project produced Battle Hymn, a drama rewritten with Michael Blankfort (1907–1982) from a biography of John Brown that Gold had originally published in 1924, and in 1948 he released parts of a play based on the life of Communist Party New York City councilman Pete Cacchione (1891–1947).54
Gold’s clumsy efforts at Black dialect and his depiction of African American stereotypes in Hoboken Blues seem somewhat inexplicable in the context of Gold’s militant antiracism. In the early 1920s, Gold had criticized Upton Sinclair for his creation of an “old-fashioned stage darkey,” so one might have expected Gold to avoid the subject if he were unable to do better.55 What seems likely is that Gold was attempting to recreate Black urban culture with the same humor and earthiness with which he was depicting Jewish ghetto culture in his East Side novel; but the effort failed due to his lack of intimate familiarity with the materials and his primary focus on producing a Futurist spectacle.56 Moreover, Gold, who would occasionally make oddball statements about Black music in his columns in the 1930s, may have been caught in cross-currents of Left thinking at the time. At first there was a celebration of “Negro primitivism” in the Harlem Renaissance; later many radicals, Black and white, denounced the Renaissance jazz culture as the creation of wealthy and decadent white patrons.
Gold had long felt a strong affinity between the African American and Jewish situations. This was not premised on a disparagement of his own culture, nor was it an expression of Negrophilia. Gold, dissimilar from some other Jewish radicals who seemed to be captivated by a bleached-out version of “universalism” —in which their ethnic identity became unmentionable—felt at ease in his culture and community. If he showed signs of any Jewish “nationalism,” it was unquestionably a “proletarian nationalism” premised on class alliances.57 Even before the Communist movement theorized a Black national liberation struggle as the key to transforming capitalism, Gold saw common roots, experiences, and a future between the two targets of extreme bigotry in his day, Blacks and Jews.58 In 1923 he published a powerful story about racism in a hospital, “Death of a Negro,” and soon after proclaimed John Brown his hero.59 Scholar William Maxwell observes aptly that “the notion of the shared fate of Jews and African Americans that led him to Brown also urged him to resist Americanization via black hating.” Gold was the scourge of those second-wave immigrants who were “paying the ticket price of citizenship with professions of whiteness”; instead, he devoted himself to “exposing the bond” between Yiddish culture and Negro spirituals.60
Reminiscing in the 1960s about his relationship with Claude McKay, Gold characterized racism as the “White Problem” (instead of the “Negro Problem”), recollecting that he had regarded the persecution of the Jew as that of a “White Negro.”61 Letters preserved from the time exhibit Gold’s identification and empathy with Blacks, devoid of liberal paternalism. Of course, Gold’s views would be refracted through the changing opinions of the Party to which he gave allegiance; for example, during World War II he wrote several columns denouncing the “Harlem Riots” as an expression of a “perverted Negro nationalism” that may have been inspired by “fascist hoodlums organized by a Negro Hitler.”62 Notwithstanding his vision was somewhat skewered by the priorities of the antifascist struggle, he returned in the Cold War years and afterward to clear-sighted and uncompromising exposés of racism. At the time that William Faulkner presented a public statement against compulsory integrationism, Gold rendered a powerful public riposte in “A Reply to William Faulkner’s ‘Thinking with the Blood.’ ”63
During his discussions with David Burliuk in the early 1940s, Gold was particularly struck by the obscurity into which the painter-poet had fallen: “This artist who discovered Mayakovsky, who exhibited with Picasso and Kandinsky, who knew Gorky, Verhaeren, Repin, who organized one of the intellectual currents that burrowed under the feudal throne of the Czardom, is living in an East Side tenement.”64 To give Burliuk some perspective, Gold reminded him of the example of Van Gogh, offering a description that one might bring to bear on the later career of Gold as well:
The critics completely ignored him, or scorned him. He did not fit into their categories. He was like the sunset. He was full of contradiction, like nature itself at work. He was a man. He suffered deeply for the wrongs done the working class. He adored the violence and tenderness of his Mother Nature. He was a humanist. He was a painter of man and nature.65
Gold, too, had been among the cultural luminaries of his generation; a friend and associate not only of Leftists such as Eastman, Dell, Reed, McKay, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Sinclair, Gold was also championed at different intervals by Eugene O’Neill, Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, and even Ezra Pound. By the time he encountered Burliuk, he, too, was beginning to be scorned and ignored. In Gold’s parting toast to Burliuk, the close identification of the two men was clear: “My children and your children will see a humanist world. And you, the Van Gogh of a darker time, will be famous and loved.”66
When Jews without Money appeared ten years earlier, few would have predicted that its author would end his career in poverty and near obscurity. The book, however, was atypical of Gold’s oeuvre in terms of the amount of time devoted to its production, the deep wellsprings of personal and group life that it expressed, and, of course, the propitious moment in which it appeared—one year after the stock market crash and on the eve of Hitler’s ascendancy to power. As early as 1917, Gold began publishing autobiographically based fiction in the Masses, and throughout the 1920s published more of such writings in journals such as American Mercury, Menorah Journal, and New Masses. These contributions were heavily revised to appear as the book-length Jews without Money in 1930. The book was extremely popular, elicited rave reviews, and acquired a reputation as the founding novel of “Proletarian literature,” despite certain unorthodox features.67 That same year, Gold achieved national attention through his assault on the writings of Thornton Wilder that was published in the New Republic, and from Sinclair Lewis, who praised Gold in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.68
Yet the background to the construction of Jews without Money requires further attention. An examination of Gold’s correspondence with Upton Sinclair, and with his future publisher, Horace Liveright, indicates a significant modification in perspective on the book following his return from the Soviet Union. Prior to that time, Gold had maintained that he was writing a novel based on autobiographical experiences. Yet scholars have observed that the earlier published versions of chapters, and related stories, seem to depict Gold’s life more accurately than the manuscript that was ultimately marketed—at Gold’s insistence—as an autobiography.69 What changed was the creation of a more positive view of both of his parents, as well as a celebratory attitude toward the ghetto culture that was previously depicted mainly as stifling and oppressive. A noteworthy example is that his early writing represents his mother as a symbol of narrowness, a figure to be escaped rather than embraced.70 Once his new orientation was established, Gold became adamant that the book was no longer fiction but mostly truth. Gold’s mother in his finished work would become a sacred “mother-legend,” similar to the mother in Walt Whitman’s fictional persona.71
Gold’s experiences in the Soviet Union appear to have triggered a rebirth, encouraging him to take a fresh approach to the earlier events in his life. In the Nation he described the revolution as tantamount to the apocalypse—“The world was upside down; the money-maker was a pariah and outlaw; the revolutionists became the pillars of society.... It was ... the end of everything—the beginning of everything.”72 To Upton Sinclair he affirmed that “One feels so normal and strong in Russia,” and that everything now seemed “simple and real”; after all, he had witnessed “The earth in the throes of the birth of a new race of giants.”73 The Soviet sojourn, repeated in 1930, was the final stepping stone toward the creation of a Mike Gold whose faith was firm and unyielding. In the same letter to Sinclair in which Gold had lamented his being “soft,” he had added that “I know therefore that I am not the leader and I am willing to follow the Lenins and the like.”74
Several years later, Gold was able to publish a fuller statement of his political creed in the New Masses. “Why I am a Communist” challenges the reader to name a party more successful in organizing the struggle for socialism than the Communist Party; if one cannot, then one should abandon all efforts to build rival parties and help advance the best one extant. Gold lists all the achievements socialism will bring—“It will free the factory slaves, the farm drudges, it will set woman free, and restore the Negro race to its human rights” —and he uses representative romantic imagery to promise a working-class victory in his lifetime: “I know that the world will be beautiful soon in the sunlight of proletarian brotherhood.” He concludes that the struggle requires that “I accept its disciplines and necessities; I become as practical and realistic as possible for me; I want victory.” Complementing the argument for putting the Party first on tactical grounds, however, is Gold’s testament to the centrality of the Communist Party in providing intellectual and emotional stability. He explains how, in the process of making his Communist commitment, “My mind woke up like a suppressed volcano. I can never discharge this personal debt to the revolutionary movement—it gave me a mind.”75
Gold’s credo was thus forged not on orders from Moscow, but developed out of his own life experience. From the emotional turmoil of his youth he gradually assembled a new world outlook that provided an explanation for the fate of his father, his own situation, and the oppression of others with whom he identified. The solution was socialism, and the instrument for realizing the solution was the Communist Party. Art and culture could be weapons to advance that effort, wielded by those who shared a common vision. Such a vision worked pragmatically to improve his own life, as shown by the success of Jews without Money and the national attention garnered by his essay on Wilder in the New Republic; moreover, in the excitement of the early 1930s, the vision seemed to be working for others as well. Unfortunately, what Gold believed to be the opening of a new epoch, leading forward to socialism, was but an anomalous moment in a sequence of unexpected events, a series of limited victories to be followed by many serious defeats. Gold, however, remained more or less frozen in the instant of his glory days. Nearly fifteen years later, on the eve of the worst antiradical repression in modern U.S. political history, and Gold’s departure from his native land for a three-year exile in France, he declared:
Marxism flourished... during the first half of the 1930s.... New writers wrote “proletarian novels,” plays and poems and became a main stream in our national culture, that formed the finest literary epoch our country has known since the Golden Age of Whitman, Emerson and Melville.
It was a fighting art, a Marxist art and frankly a weapon in the class struggle then raging so openly.... We must find our way back to the main highway.... We must rebuild the Marxist cultural front, with its literary magazines, theaters, music and art.76
Unfortunately, that cultural front would never be rebuilt. Instead, the rudimentary Communist cultural tradition would barely survive for another decade or so, although a number of honorable contributions would be made. Gold, however, would be a very minor participant; it was what he had done, what he had stood for, not what he would do that would count for subsequent generations. From the mid-Depression on, his life became something of a holding action. Moreover, circumstances conspired with his own personal weaknesses to prevent the completion of the major books that one expected to follow his first success.
In 1930, with $6,000 in royalties from Jews without Money, Gold purchased land in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for $3,000, which he later sold to the Leftist humorist S. J. Perelman (1904–1979). Gold seems to have had at least three major prose fiction and nonfiction projects in mind at this time. One, dependent on financial backing, was a volume to be called “Jews of the World,” consisting of impressionistic pictures of life in Palestine and the ghettos of Europe. Another was a novel about a Harvard college student, of which three chapters were completed. The narrative concerns the ordeal of Ernest Lowell, a devotee of Thoreau and Whitman who falls under the corrupting influence of an English professor devoted to Proust, Gide, Eliot, and Huxley. The student has a fatal flaw—prejudice against working-class Italians. Oddly, Lowell resembles Gold in having a father who is both economically incompetent and physically ill. The most fully conceptualized of Gold’s future projects was a novel about the struggles of the unemployed. The hero is a young Irish American iron worker who loses his job and finds himself caught between a radical friend wanting him to organize, and a wife who pressures him to make whatever compromises are necessary to find work.
This last manuscript had the most promise since, like Jews without Money, it grew out of the anger of his childhood poverty and oppression. It also had a conspicuous and compelling theme: that unemployment is not an individual problem, and that its solution requires one to think and act socially. Moreover, Gold’s brother George had been a leader in the Unemployed Councils, and Gold himself had participated in demonstrations. Gold even took a leave from his newspaper column to focus on the project. But soon he found the subject “too huge to be confined within the framework of fiction.” He later reminisced that “I could find no form for all this bleeding chaos, this welter of millions of individual tragedies. There were too many stories and not the one inevitable one.” Within a short time he found himself transforming some of his research materials for the novel back into articles for the Communist press.77
By temperament, Gold was simply not suited to sustaining his focus for months or years in isolation on one big project. Jews without Money, of course, had been crafted from dozens of short, discrete vignettes, published over a decade and reworked into a loosely unified volume with much agony. Gold’s companion of the 1920s, Helen Black, told novelist Albert Maltz that Gold was simply incapable of revision. He would ask her if a story needed further work; if she replied that it did, he sent it out anyway, moving on to the next project.78 No doubt Gold’s growing medical condition, his active life, and his constantly changing living conditions contributed to an inability to concentrate on long-term writing projects. By 1936 Gold was writing Sinclair that he was out of funds and back to the days of sleeping on the floor: “I’m afraid that as usual I will have to forget fictioneering and get some work to do—may go back to the Daily Worker column, which pays a small wage but takes every bit of creative feeling out of me.”79 And so he did. Back in 1933, with money in his pocket and still optimistic about future books, he was so incensed by the triumph of Hitler that he had talked to the Daily Worker editor Clarence Hathaway; they arranged to launch his “Change the World” column at $15 a week, and Gold was even reluctant to accept that much. Now he returned to the job for more businesslike reasons.
Another change had occurred as well. In June 1935, en route to Paris to attend the Congress for the Defense of Culture, Gold was seated with other single travelers at the ship captain’s table facing a young French woman, twelve years his junior, named Elizabeth Boussus. Elizabeth was a French teacher at Rutgers University and was returning home for a visit. She was struck at once by Gold’s articulateness, confidence, and athletic build, which was that of a gymnast. Gold squired Elizabeth around Paris during the congress. They were married in April 1936 in a civil ceremony in Brooklyn. Their first son, Nicholas Francois Granich, was born later that year in Los Angeles, where they lived for a while, and a second, Carl André Emmanuel Granich, was born in 1940 in New York.
In the late 1930s, Gold was constantly on the move, frequently shifting residences and doing a great deal of public speaking. In 1938, however, the Gold family began paying installments on a summer cabin in a “Single Tax” colony in Plainfield, New Jersey, called “Free Acres.” Between 1938 and 1941 they mostly lived there. Their plan was to rent it out, but a fire eliminated that possibility and the cabin was eventually sold in 1947. The Gold family spent the rest of the year living in a cold-water flat on New York’s Lower East Side or in uptown Manhattan. Having an undisciplined writing schedule, Gold sometimes received complaints from neighbors for typing late at night; nonetheless his Daily Worker columns arrived on time. Politically he had a special status in the Party due to his national reputation, one that allowed for his rarely attending neighborhood cell meetings.
In 1940, Gold was suddenly hospitalized with severe diabetes. He had long shown episodic signs of the illness, but the stress of the moment probably elevated the disease to a more dangerous state. Not only was Elizabeth in the final stages of her pregnancy, but, stunned by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Gold had ceased writing his column for a month. He then became convinced of the Pact’s justification and embarked on a vigorous speaking campaign in its defense, as well as writing a series of Daily Worker articles castigating literary backsliders for departing from the Communist-led cultural movement in the wake of the Pact. These polemics were collected as The Hollow Men (1940), one of Gold’s weakest tracts; his friend Sender Garlin called it “a hollow book.”80 The night that their son Carl was born, Mike as well as Elizabeth was hospitalized, and their son Nick was left home alone.
After that crisis, Gold’s stamina significantly decreased. Eventually his energy began to flag after only two or three hours at the typewriter. For the next two and a half decades, until be became blind and died, Gold had to take sixty units of insulin a day, and to carefully monitor his hours of work and sleep. Still, he continued his public speaking, even though it usually involved long walks and train rides. He did this not only out of a sense of duty and for the pleasure of receiving the warm response he usually was accorded, but also because the Daily Worker columns paid little and the small speaking stipends were necessary to pay his rent, which was usually $25 a month. The Gold family lived without luxuries, and friends in or around the Communist Party provided them with free medical care, free rides, and free or discounted clothing.
In 1947, with the Cold War closing in, Gold decided that his children should get to know the French side of the family. Gold’s summer house at Free Acres was sold that year for a good price, and additional money was borrowed. In France, Gold related well with Elizabeth’s family; her parents had been adamantly pro-Dreyfus, and Emile Zola’s J’Accuse was prominently displayed in the libraries of both sides of the family. He learned French to the extent that he could read the papers, understand conversation, and speak slowly. During the postwar period in France, everything was rationed and most people used bicycles for transportation. The Golds lived at several different locations, with their sons receiving their education in Paris for two winters before going to a provincial village school. Politically, Gold was somewhat under wraps. He had dropped his Party membership upon leaving the United States, and carried out only a few activities, such as attending a 1949 Peace Congress in Prague with Welsh Left-wing poet Dylan Thomas.
When the Golds returned to New York City in the spring of 1950, the Communist Party was very weak and under constant attack by McCarthyism. For a while Gold resumed his work at the Daily Worker, but fell victim to staff cutbacks possibly connected with internal political struggles. He then worked for a Czechoslovakian news agency and, after that, Polish radio, where he made recordings for “Radio Poland.” Elizabeth, who was not a Party member but was sympathetic to the Party, was working in a garment sweatshop, and Gold, who was nearly sixty, even tried factory work for a while. During one summer their economic situation reduced them to seeking work at the Left-wing Camp Unity; Elizabeth was employed as a waitress, and Gold’s job was to hand out towels to guests. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that Gold became tormented by a serious writer’s block.81
In 1955 their oldest son moved to California, and the Golds, at Elizabeth’s insistence, followed a year later. At the time of the Khrushchev revelations and the subsequent Soviet intervention in Hungary, Gold was settling in San Francisco. There he gave an interview on radio station KPFK defending the invasion, but felt he did poorly. He continued to write columns for the West Coast Communist paper, People’s World, and the Jewish Communist Freiheit. His eyesight deteriorated to the point where he was totally blind in one eye, and everything he wrote was dictated to Elizabeth. On 16 May 1967, he died of a stroke at age seventy-three during a hospitalization at the Kaiser Foundation near San Francisco.
The cacophony of elements that made up Gold’s art is evident in his 1924 poem “The Strange Funeral in Braddock.” The verse suggests a folktale with medieval elements—dragons and ogres invoke industrialism and are romantically juxtaposed to the spring sunlight and the soft April air. Gold inserts a Greek chorus to recite the refrain, “Listen to the mournful drums of a strange funeral. / Listen to the story of a strange American funeral,” while the dead worker, Jan Clepak, is reincarnated as a Christ figure. Macabre and grotesque in imagery, the poem concentrates on the consequences for three survivors of Clepak’s horrific death after he falls into a vat of molten steel. In a proletarian reworking of Shakespeare’s song by Ariel in The Tempest of a “sea-change,” Clepak is literally transformed into molten steel, the will of his observing wife becomes steel, and other material transformations take place as well.82
The poems of Gold, which might on occasion be called working-class grotesque, are replete with memorable phrases, often crudely satiric, with allusions to such writers as T. S. Eliot and Sinclair Lewis. In “Ode to Walt Whitman,” he declares: “Poetry is the cruelest bunk, / A trade union is better than all your dreams—” and “Hear the shriek of the killer babbitts.” In “A Wreath for Our Murdered Comrade Kobayashi,” he writes of “bombastic pansies.” In “Tom Mooney Walks at Midnight,” a satiric reference to Vachel Lindsay’s “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” he declaims: “One race—one class—one dream: Communism!”83
The fragmented, disrupted, and discontinuous images that marked Gold’s career are appropriate to a literary legacy that oscillates between the outrageous and the pedestrian, between brilliant and banal, between warmth and vitriol. It is hard to justify the consistent application of literary terms such as naturalism and romanticism to very many aspects of the improvisational, indeterminate, open, and aleatory features of his writing. Indeed, his nine-point program for proletarian realism, usually read as socialist-realist didacticism, actually has aspects of a satiric incorporation of Ezra Pound’s declarations on Imagism. At times, even a proto “surrealist” Mike Gold can be detected in his Constructivist drama and poetry of the 1920s and very early 1930s, not to mention in his 1930 children’s book, Charlie Chaplin’s Parade, which describes a city with skyscrapers “like giant brooms ... rocking in the wind, and scraping chunks of cloud from the sky, which fell into the street like dust.”84
Gold was an especially unlikely paramour of the bisexual Walt Whitman in light of his tendency to bait middle-class writers as “pansies.”85 But he gave a boost to the Left-wing association with the Good Grey Poet through his 1935 “Ode to Walt Whitman,” which includes passionately romantic stanzas such as this one:
O Walt Whitman, they buried you in the filth
The clatter speedup of a department store basement
But you rose from the grave to march with us
On the picket line of democracy—
Sing sing O new pioneers with Father Walt
Of a strong and beautiful America
Of the thrushes and oceans we shall win
Of sun, of moon, of Communism and joy in the wind
Of the free mountain boys and girls—
It will come! it will come! The strikes foretell it!
The Lenin dreams of the kelleys and greenbaums
Deep in the gangrened basements
Where Walt Whitman’s America
Aches, to be born—86
Whitman is likened to a reborn Christ, to the spirit of communism, to nature, and to Bolshevism; that is, he serves as the multipurpose icon of Gold’s multiethnic cultural mosaic. According to Walter Lowenfels, “Mike was an early pioneer in claiming Whitman for the working class. He campaigned year in and year out for Whitman observances among workers, for a Whitman monument in Brooklyn, etc.”87
Stanley Burnshaw, the poet and critic who served with Gold at the New Masses in the early 1930s, and who remained in touch with him for many years afterward, believed that Gold “suffered from being a bundle of selves.”88 This seems confirmed by the recollection of others who were his contemporaries. For example, to the young New York Communist writer Nathan Adler, the older and more established Gold “was a self-involved guy, with no openness, no response.” Gold stood in sharp contrast to the well-dressed, charming Joseph Freeman, a marvelous dancer in his Russian boots, who spoke to young men passionately of life, love, and revolution “in Proustian sentences with subjunctive clauses.”89
At the Daily Worker office in the mid-1930s, sports columnist Lester Rodney heard Gold referred to as “a sort of prima donna,” mainly from Joe North, who still bore a grudge against Gold from conflicts during the John Reed Club days. But Rodney was primarily impressed by the fact that Gold “met his deadlines on the Worker, and we all, to my recollection, found him a bluntly honest guy with an unmistakable passionate sincerity about life, art, people and the sins of capitalism.”90 Rodney was also “fascinated” by Gold’s face: “Except when he was smiling, it seemed to reflect the pain he felt for all the tragedy, poverty and injustice he had witnessed.”91
The FBI was also fascinated by Gold’s face. In the files released under the Freedom of Information Act, FBI agents refer to one Irwin Granich, “alias Isaac Granich, Isadore Granich, Mike Gold, Michael Gold, 5' 7½ inches, 153 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, dark complexion, scar on right cheek” and “Jewish-appearing features.”92 Yet Gold’s son insists that he had no scar on his cheek, and, while Gold did become dark and swarthy when tanned, he was mainly taken for a Native American Indian.93
The “real” Mike Gold, however, is hard to disentangle from the contrasting auras he inspired among FBI informants as well as his many admirers among the 1930s and 1940s Left. One informer regarded Gold as especially dangerous because he had “better than average intelligence” and was a “forceful public speaker.”94 The critic, editor, and film producer Bernard Smith, who worked with Gold on the New Masses in the late 1920s, found Gold friendly and open to discussion, but always “remote”: “I simply could not get to the core of the man.”95 When John Dos Passos contrived a literary portrait of Gold in the New Playwrights Theater days in his novel Most Likely to Succeed (1954), he seems to have created two characters embodying alternative aspects of Gold’s life and personality—Eli Soltair, an anarchist who is full of fun, and Lew Golten, the dour fanatic. The general perception of Gold by rank-and-file Leftists is uniquely captured in the 1991 recollections of the poet Aaron Kramer, who was a teenager in the 1930s and whose idolatrous response to Gold’s mystique may well have been shared by thousands of others:
Gold [is] a figure so complex in my psyche that I’ve held back from saying a word [until now].... Even as a pre-teener I turned to Gold’s Daily [Worker] column before reading the most sensational page one news item, and mastered it thoroughly.... What stays with me is the keenness of his intellect and the vigor of his style—whether slashing or exuberant.
He had my brain in his grip for many years. I used to wonder when writing a poem: How would this piece fare under Mike’s penetrating stare? I held back from certain subject matter, such as love or nature, fearing that Mike would deem it slight or soft.96
Women felt a special attraction to Gold, most of whom regarded him as handsome. Edward Dahlberg recalled that the “first time [I] set eyes on Mike Gold,” he “had a cigar in his mouth and his arms around the bodices of two young women.”97 The Australian-born novelist Christina Stead was quite infatuated when she met Gold shortly before his marriage. She added yet another fictional version of Gold to the small body of literature about him.98 He became the model for Jean Frere in her novel House of All Nations (1938), described as follows:
He had a dark broad face ... a dark, rosy skin, shining dark eyes and a rather large, but well-formed mouth, with the lower lip pouting often.... He had extremely thick long curly coarse brown hair, growing low and irregularly on the broad forehead. When he smiled his eyes went into slits the shape of snowshoes and his mouth elongated like a longbow over his regular white teeth. He was thickset with a short thick neck, a large widespread nose, with a faintly Negroid air.99
Yet Josephine Herbst, reminiscing in a letter to Genevieve Taggard about Gold’s affair with life-long Communist Helen Black, describes him as “the good, Newfoundland type.... Around every night, just to sit or go to supper. Very domestic. Affectionate. He would be nice and simple with a woman. Like a child. Only children never make great lovers.”100 Gold’s relationship with Black extended through the late 1920s and early 1930s, and it was Black, as much as Gold, who renounced marriage as “bourgeois.”101
Gold was excoriated as a “lowbrow” by anti-Stalinist critics Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in the 1950s. Yet this self-representation was often contrived for purposes of humor.102 Norman MacLeod recalled a debate sponsored by the John Reed Club at which Gold, preparing to do battle with journalist Heywood Broun (1888–1939), arose before the crowd with a cigar jammed in his teeth, “spitting out of the tough guy side of his mouth.”103 Gold could sound vicious in his columns—Dahlberg described him as “the barking Cerberus of pleb fiction”104 —but he also mocked his own ostentatious proletarianism, as when he signed letters to his millionaire patron, Otto Kahn, “your class enemy.”105 Gold mostly held a reverent attitude toward the standard literary classics of Western culture, especially those written by the leaders of the American Renaissance.
True, there were certain writers of the modern period that he detested beyond all reason—Henry James (“an insufferable bore”) is a prime example.106 And he didn’t hesitate to call political-literary enemies “rats” in his column, nor to offer crude denunciations of Hollywood culture that his editors sometimes tried to change.107 But he would give one’s due as a craftsman even to a reactionary such as Ezra Pound. A more telling weakness was the paramount importance he assigned a writer’s “position” in relation to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. A writer who was moving toward Gold’s own political stance was warmly encouraged; a writer departing the fold was treated brutally. The redirection of their trajectory determined the weight he might give to denunciations of writers for elitism, obscurantism, symbolism, and other nonrealist literary crimes. Gold became self-critical of this tendency on his part in the final years of his life. While never relenting in his hatred of “Trotskyites,” he acknowledged a flaw in what he called his “outlaw personality,” which he suspected to have developed from the insecurities of his youth. Convinced in the early days of his career that he had no real friends, he attempted to defend himself by ruthless criticism of all whom he believed to support capitalism. Later he recognized that there were fine and sensitive people who were not radical at all, and he wished he could write something to make amends.108
While Gold is given credit for championing and developing the concept of “proletarian literature” in the 1920s and the early 1930s, there appears to have been an evolution in the term’s meaning.109 At first, Gold presented proletarian writing more as a unique contribution to literature, rather than an opposition to the dominant literature. When socialist writers of the time denounced “capitalist” literature, Joseph Freeman recalled, they were referring to “the tripe of the popular magazines which were full of lies not only about the system but about life in general.”110 By the early 1930s, Freeman began to feel that Gold represented a trend in the Communist cultural movement that attacked select writers, with whom they politically disagreed, on the grounds that the writers had gone to college. This approach evolved after the 1930 Kharkov conference. At that time the sectarianism toward leftward-moving big-name writers was repudiated, but, in Freeman’s view, Leopold Auerbach (the leading critic in the Soviet Union) also sanctioned the advocacy of “proletarian literature” as a political weapon to police the Left: “Stalin and his mob had not the slightest interest in literature; they were using an alleged literary criticism as a weapon for destroying intellectuals suspected of being in favor of Trotsky, against Stalin or simply neutral.”111 Gold, unconsciously, and in his own erratic manner, adapted this stance, which fit well with his longstanding “outlaw personality.”
An example of the manner in which Gold’s political views tended to override all else is his literary assessment of the fiction of John Dos Passos, with whom he had collaborated in founding the New Playwrights Theater. At the time Dos Passos published Manhattan Transfer (1925), Gold issued a review in the New Masses that was as competent as any that appeared in the popular press, including one by Sinclair Lewis, and superior in critical nuance and sensibility to those of the novelist D. H. Lawrence and the humanist scholar Paul Elmer More.112 During these years, Dos Passos was moving toward the Left, and in 1933, when Dos Passos was probably closest to the Communist Party, Gold published a fine study of his fiction in The English Journal, which contained superbly adept characterizations of Dos Passos’s literary strategy:
There are really a dozen novels in these two books [The 42nd Parallel and 1919], fitted together in a continuity and context that makes each narrative a comment on the other. Dos Passos ranges through all the strata of the social order. He is the geologist and historian of American society....
To add historic poignancy to these individual lives, and to relate them to their background, there is a Greek chorus of newspaper headlines and Americana. This adds to the strangeness of the novels, yet, after careful reading one finds them an organic part of the massive effect at which Dos Passos was aiming.
So, too, are the score or more of cameo biographies of significant Americans which Dos Passos has interpolated on his narrative ... these terse bitter passionate portraits add an extraordinary flavor of historic truth to the novels, and contain, besides, germs of the future revolutionary growth of Dos Passos.
It is chaos again, but Nietzsche said “one must have chaos to give birth to a dancing star.” In the complexity and confusion of these novels the drive is felt toward a new communist world; and, if the aesthetes and gin-soaked Harvard futilitarians are present, it is that they may serve as a contrast to the obscure, almost unmarked hero of this epic canvas—the rising Proletaire.113
By 1938, however, Dos Passos had openly renounced Soviet policy and the Communist Party. Gold published a column in which he reevaluated Dos Passos’s work as a mere reflection of bourgeois decadence, full of merde.114 This last characterization, unfortunately, is the exclusive comment by Gold on Dos Passos quoted by Gold’s hostile critics.115
Whatever Gold’s genre, the visions he transmitted of the Soviet Union were dead wrong. On occasion Gold did speak out against official Communist Party policy—his criticism of the dissolution of the Communist Party into the Communist Political Association during World War II caused Party leader Robert Minor to publicly reply116 —but Gold never dissented on the more crucial matter of the Party’s uncritical support of Stalin’s dictatorship. Gold was emotional, and he had a tendency to glibly and confidently make predictions based on wishful thinking long before his “Change the World” days. In 1926 he professed in a letter to Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944) and Sarah Bard Field that
It is foolish to air the whole Trotsky thing in the capitalist press ... I was pro-Trotsky, too, but I think Max [Eastman] is making a mistake to get so heated over it. In two years the controversy will be forgotten, Trotsky will be back on some big job, and Russia will still be marching on.117
There existed a pattern in which Gold would react honestly and emotionally to new events at first, but within a short time accommodate himself to the Party’s new and previously unacceptable position. Joseph Freeman recalled that he had run into Gold soon after receiving the news that the Communist International had denounced his 1936 An American Testament. Gold was dumbfounded and announced that he would immediately go to Party general secretary Earl Browder and arrange a meeting to straighten out the matter. Shortly after, he returned to Freeman and explained that Browder was too busy to see him, but that everything would work out all right in the end if Freeman continued to act loyally. That was the last contact Freeman had with Gold until they began corresponding in 1958.118
Gold’s Daily Worker and New Masses columns also caused genuine mental anguish to fellow revolutionists, whom he frequently challenged if he sensed a deviation from his understanding of the Communist Party’s orientation. In a draft of his unfinished autobiography, “A Calendar of Commitment,” John Howard Lawson wrote that his first reaction to Mike Gold’s attack on him, which appeared as “A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time,” in New Masses on 10 April 1934, just a week after Lawson’s play Gentlewoman closed, was “blind rage.” He had trusted Gold as a friend, and felt betrayed that, when he was down and out, Gold ignored even the good will that had gone into his dramatic effort:
It was the method of Gold’s criticism to link the attack on an author with personal judgments of the author’s life and motives.... There was one passage written by Mike that made me feel I had lost my reason, struck me like a blow [this sentence was lightly crossed out on one version of the manuscript]. Mike wrote: “The declassed bourgeoisie of America are not feeling futile.... They are beginning to organize, in one form or another.... The fact that Lawson cannot see this is another of the penalties he pays for his delayed adolescence.”
I rubbed my eyes and asked myself, where had I been during the past year? And where had Mike been? I had organized the first trade union of professional people in a big industry controlled by finance capital. I was spokesman for the writers against the film monopolies, and my statements had been carried by all the New York newspapers.119
Albert Maltz, on the eve of his blacklisting and imprisonment, felt the same anguish when he read in the Daily Worker Gold’s claim that Maltz was opposed to the “Art as a Weapon” slogan because he had sold out to the blandishments of Hollywood.120 Although Gold apologized to Maltz in the late 1950s, he repeated the insult by attacking in his column former Left writers living in Mexico for allegedly complaining about the cost of maid service. Maltz considered this a slander and, while he donated money to assist with Gold’s medical expenses, he refused to give the eulogy for Gold at the Los Angeles memorial meeting.121
After a “Change the World” column in which Gold trounced as a renegade a man who was a loyal supporter of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, novelist Nelson Algren commented wryly in a letter to Richard Wright: “It’s wonderful the way a mutt like Mike will, out of a clear sky, start slugging a passing stranger who, it turns out, should remain definitely unslugged. I always thought that the proper Marxian approach toward the middle class was to win them first and slug them later. Mike has the cart before the horse.”122
On occasion Gold would review books and plays, or respond to newspaper reports of opinions by writers, without having read the material first. Sometimes, as with Lillian Smith’s controversial Strange Fruit, he was obliged in a later column to modify or even retract his opinions.123 His review of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh begins: “I haven’t been to see the Theater Guild’s... The Iceman Cometh, yet from the reviews I can almost tell what the play is like.”124 Still, in 1940, when African American Communist Party leader Benjamin Davis unfairly attacked Richard Wright’s novel Native Son for political deviations in Wright’s depiction of events as well as the character of Bigger Thomas, Gold stood firm in his praise of the novel.125
The literary achievement of Mike Gold is comprised of a haunting novel, some provocative plays, stories, and poems, and, as Walter Lowenfels put it in a letter to Joe North, a “ganze gestalt [that] was something more than any individual excellence.... He had perspective and vision and anger as well as love.”126 But this affection didn’t stop Lowenfels from writing a more critical letter to Phillip Bonosky, the Communist novelist who published a highly laudatory 1962 tribute to Gold in Mainstream:
In my book, Mike has been an ambivalent influence in left cultural life in the USA the past 25 years. I feel he has done our cultural movement more harm than good by his continual carry over of a past cultural approach that dates back to the 20s and early 30s.
Lowenfels, for one, saw “The Gold Standard” as a problematical foundational component of the tradition that animated the literary Left in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.
Yet Gold’s critical pronouncements, weak as some obviously are, constitute a body of work that cannot simply be vulgarized as intellectual hackwork dictated by Stalinism. He was a writer first, then a political activist; over the years, however, an increasing amount of his criticism evolved into journalism that grew out of the process by which he organized his emotional life around the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Considering the background from which he came, and the time in which he wrote, Gold probably gained more than he lost by placing a faith in institutions of the Left analogous to the manner in which many people place their hopes in a pope, the Republican Party, “Science,” or the president of a union. His literary influence and reputation before the Cold War have yet to be fully assessed; especially neglected are transnational dimensions, as in the case of Gold’s mentor relationship to Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado (1912–2001). Once he made the very human decision to invest his confidence in the Communist Party, he suffered many crises and episodes of frustration, but stood by his Party to the end; thus his career appropriately mirrored the decline of his Party’s fortunes. To his credit, however, his life’s literary activities as a whole bear out Joseph Freeman’s later judgment that Gold was distinguished from many other writers on the Left because he “really cared about socialism more than he cared about his personal career.”127