In the title essay of the 1945 collection The Yogi and the Commissar, Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), a former Communist Party member turned novelist, posits two extremes betwixt which the conscious intellectual must negotiate a course. At one end the Yogi represents self-absorption to the point of passivity; at the other the Commissar stands for ruthless immersion in the world of action to the stage of losing moral autonomy. Koestler by no means promotes the latter over the former, nor suggests that intellectuals can or should be free of either impulse. Rather, his aim is to render the reader cognizant of one’s own drift. If the cultural historian could simply divide mid-century U.S. Left cultural workers into the pristine polarities of uncontaminated artists seduced by power-hungry political automatons, matters would indubitably be simplified. Yet the record, for those who seem to have been victimized by the Communist Party as well as those alleged to have done the victimizing, rarely lends itself to such unalloyed archetypes.
The Communist Party official most visibly guiding cultural policy from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s appears in many memoirs and studies to be a stone’s throw from the “Commissar” end of the spectrum, a rigid, bureaucratic personality maladroitly superimposed on the temperament of a man ultrasensitive to art and poetry.1 V. J. Jerome (Jerome Isaac Romain [1896–1965]), was born in a Russian-Polish shtetl in Lodz, and at the age of nine joined his parents in England, where he went to high school.2 In 1915 he disembarked in New York City at nineteen and worked his way through several years at the City College of New York doing odd jobs. Already radicalized, he was equally enthralled by modern art and drawn to the Imagist poets of England and the United States, with H.D. and Richard Aldington as his favorites.3 He dropped out of college when he married Frances Winwar in 1919. She, too, was Left-wing, having contributed poetry to the Masses. Their son was named “Germinal,” after Zola’s novel.4 At the time of his marriage, Jerome used the last name “Roman”; he later changed it to Romain, and other relatives used the name Roram (including his younger brother, Nathan) or Rourman. In the early 1920s Jerome worked as a bookkeeper for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In 1924 he joined the Communist Party. That year he was divorced from Winwar; she left him for an aspiring concert pianist, Bernard Grebanier (1903–1977), who would also join the Communist Party in the next decade. Winwar herself was a distinguished figure on the Left in the 1920s and 1930s.
Born in Sicily in 1900, she had come to the United States in 1907. Her father was a singer, Domenico Vinciguerra, brought to New York by the family of the wealthy State Department luminary, Christian Herter. Vinciguerra thought he had been transported to the United States to pursue his singing career, but soon learned that he was to serve as a handyman on Herter’s Long Island estate.5 His daughter, Frances, who had raven hair and dark eyes, and delicately classical features, weighed one hundred and ten pounds and was precisely five feet tall. In the 1920s, she published articles on culture under the name Frances Vinci Roman.6 Adoring music and painting, she became co-founder of the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in New York. While pulling close to the Communist movement at times, she stayed an independent Marxist throughout the 1930s. After marrying Grebanier, she initiated an exceptional career writing in many genres, beginning with historical romances. The Ardent Flame (1927) and The Golden Round (1928) are novels set in the thirteenth century; others are set in Massachusetts, Sicily, and France. She was even better known for her popular biographies, usually sentimentalized, of famous artists. Many of these featured collective protagonists: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne in Poor Splendid Wings (1933); Byron, Shelley, and Keats in The Romantic Rebels (1935); and William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Farewell the Banner (1938). Other of her fictionalized biographies were of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, George Sand, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
During the Depression, Winwar was engrossed in the League of American Writers from 1936 to 1939, serving on its Executive Committee, National Council, and other bodies. In 1936 Winwar published a commentary on the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony in the Popular Front publication Woman Today.7 She resigned from the league in 1939, along with Grebanier, who had served as the chair of the New York chapter and taught at the New York Writers School. After divorcing Grebanier in the 1940s, she married twice more. Continuing to publish through the 1960s without evidencing any more radical political sympathies, Winwar developed senile dementia in the 1970s and vanished from the public eye until news of her death was reported in July 1985.
Grebanier, whose only marriage was to Winwar, was born in New York City and in 1926 began teaching as an instructor at Brooklyn College; he lasted there until his retirement in 1964. Grebanier persevered in playing the piano and also became a collector of paintings, sculptures, tanagras, intaglios, and vases, which he acquired during many trips to Europe, especially to Italy. Renowned for his wit, as well as his obesity, both of which recalled Samuel Johnson, he wrote numberless scholarly books on English literature and theater, directing several off-Broadway plays as well. Grebanier’s scholarly reputation rested primarily in the field of Shakespeare, where he produced decidedly anti-Freudian studies.
During the Depression, Grebanier became an activist in the Teachers Union and joined the Communist Party in 1935, leaving in 1939. The gay poet Harold Norse (b. 1916 as Harold Albaum), a literature student and Communist activist at the time, recalled Grebanier as “a leviathan of a man whose resonant bass voice and flamboyant manner kept the students enthralled” even as he “heaped scorn on those who rejected the Communist faith.” Yet,
a less unlikely Stalinist... would be hard to find. In mustard corduroy suits with silk foulards beneath many chins, and three or four massive rings on each pudgy hand, which he flourished in sweeping gestures as he bellowed his epigrams.... He minced about in quick little steps that gave his gargantuan frame the aspect of a gaudy hippopotamus.8
In 1940 Grebanier reluctantly became an informer during the Rapp-Coudert investigation of Communists at Brooklyn College. While he later contended that the hostile reaction on the campus to his “naming names” destroyed “seventeen years of happy marriage,” there is evidence that it was already unraveling due to personal conflicts.9
In December 1925, the twenty-nine-year-old V. J. Jerome was single again and began a relationship with the forty-six-year-old Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933), at one time a leading socialist and now an important Communist recently divorced from the millionaire reformer Graham Stokes.10 Rose Pastor Stokes found Jerome “so rare and fine a spirit that it would take more than human will to resist his appeal.”11 They were secretly married in February 1927. Stokes obtained nothing from her divorce settlement, and for three years she and Jerome had custody of his son while both took temporary jobs at minimal wages. Jerome usually worked in sales, variously selling insurance, advertising space, and printing. After 1930, Stokes became stricken with cancer and Jerome’s son was returned to his mother. When Stokes’s fatal illness was diagnosed, Jerome immersed himself in raising funds for her treatment, which included the removal of a breast and a trip alone to Germany in 1932. This was hazardous for a Jewish Communist at the time, but indispensable to receive radiation treatment. Just before her departure she begged Jerome to help her commit suicide because of her unbearable pain, and on board the ship she wrote a letter reproaching Jerome for his refusal to cooperate.12
Stokes’s death in Germany elicited an outpouring of anguish that Jerome communicated to his and Rose’s intimate friend, the poet and novelist Olive Tilford Dargan (1869–1968, who after 1932 used the pen name Fielding Burke). He graphically described Rose’s transformation from a beauty filled with vitality and nobility into “a broken, cancerous body with a shaven head anguishing upon a hospital cot—and then gray ashes in an urn.”13 In June 1933 these ashes were returned to the United States and displayed on the platform of a massive Party-sponsored memorial meeting. They were then placed in the safe of the Communist attorney Joseph Brodsky until a decision could be made as to how the Party might make use of them; but at some point during the 1930s Jerome privately retrieved her ashes and their fate remained a mystery to Stokes’s biographers.14 From Stokes’s death until his own, Jerome unsuccessfully tried to find a writer who might complete and publish Stokes’s autobiography-in-progress. It was finally brought out in unfinished form in 1992.15
Jerome had earned a B.A. at New York University in 1930, but he had yet to find a focus for his writing. In her terminal days, Rose Stokes successfully tried to temper his style. She urged him to write always as if he were addressing workers, simply and directly: “After you’ve written long and involved sentences, cut them up mercilessly. Try to see a concrete image of what you have set down in writing. Revise, revise until it is simple and clear.”16 Jerome had been thrilled by Stokes’s poem “Paterson,”17 which he described in a letter as “a symphony of sullenness, of fist-clenchings, of crouching for the pounce. It is the victor of tomorrow speaking to the victor of today.”18 His initial objective was to write poetry, fiction, and drama carrying forward the spirit he detected in Stokes’s verse.
Jerome’s chance to rise to national visibility, however, came not through writing imaginative literature but through his onslaught against the work of the fellow-traveling New York University philosophy professor Sidney Hook (1902–89). Communist journalist Sender Garlin, who knew both Hook and Jerome personally, was confident that it was Jerome alone who instigated the attack, and that Party leader Earl Browder was in the early stages anxious to find a means to allow Hook a way out. In an undated letter, Jerome told Stokes of his plan to write a reply to an article by Hook, “Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx,” that had originally appeared in the Symposium, an academic journal sponsored by New York University.19 Hook had told Jerome, who was auditing Hook’s class on Marxism, that the appearance of the essay was an example of “boring from within,” but Jerome wasn’t convinced: “it’s to decide this question that I’m dipping my pen in vitriol.” His use of “vitriol” suggests a priori antagonism toward Hook, but Jerome assured Stokes that his object was to clarify theory, not to attack personalities, and that he was writing without any particular publication in mind, although he assumed that his essay would be submitted to a Communist journal in the United States, Germany, or the Soviet Union. He also saw the essay charging Hook with “revisionism” as part of a larger project that would go beyond Hook to include V. F. Calverton and Edmund Wilson. “At last I feel that I’m finding myself in the movement in writing, even more than teaching. For I have always wanted to plunge into Marxian philosophy, but the impetus for polemics was lacking.”20 To Dargan he in like fashion wrote of his Hook essay:
Please remember that there is nothing “ad hominem” about the attack. The matter is purely a question of ideological struggle. It is only because this struggle is so vital to us — for it represents zealous guardianship on our part of the basic principles of the revolutionary movement against adulteration and weakening—that the ideological disputes are for us no mere abstract, scholastic disputations, but a life and death conflict.21
There would endure a brutality in Jerome’s prose polemics; they rank among the strongest pieces of evidence in the cultural Left in the United States for the existence of a kind of thinking parallel to that of Stalinist cultural thugs such as Andrei Zhdanov.22
Following publication of Jerome’s censure of Hook in the January 1933 issue of the Communist, which played a crucial role in fostering Hook’s disaffection from the Party, Jerome was asked to collaborate with Sam Don, editor of the Communist, with the consequence that he would be associated with the Communist for the next two decades.23 This assignment prompted a comprehensive switch in his focus away from the creative writing that he had already inaugurated toward polemical scholarship.
Jerome, like Rose Pastor Stokes, who had been the spokesperson for the Negro Commission of the U.S. Communist movement in 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, was much inspired by historical and contemporary instances of African American resistance to racism. He had published several poems on the subject in the early Depression and he was working on a play about the rebel slave Nat Turner (1800–1831). One poem, “Newsboy,” features an African American worker speaking in Jerome’s rendition of “Black dialect”; the African American urges a newspaper boy, who is yelling sensational and misleading headlines, to voice the truth about the urgency for Black and white workers to fight fascism. The piece evolved into a popular play performed by the Communist-led American League Against War and Fascism.24
An example also showing Jerome’s use of “Black dialect” is the sentimental, idealized “A Negro Mother to Her Child,” which appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of The Rebel Poet along with a powerful lithograph of a lynching under the stars and stripes:
Quit yo’ wailin’ honey bo’
’Taint no use to cry
Rubber nipple, mammy’s breast
Both am gone bone dry.
Daddy is a bolshevik
Locked up in de pen
Didn’t rob nor didn’t steal
Led de workin’ men.
What’s de use mah tellin’ you
Silly li’l lamb
Gon’ter git it straight some day
When you is a man.
Wisht ah had a sea o’ milk
Mek you strong an’ soun’
Daddy’s waitin’ til you come
Brek dat prison down.25
Two years later, however, Jerome wrote to Dargan that the months of labor he had spent on the anti-Hook piece had meant shelving the drama about Turner. Twenty years afterward, in prison, Jerome would still be haunted by a desire to finish the play.26 Moreover, Jerome’s view of workers in struggle, especially African Americans and women, never evolved from the highly idealized and romanticized imagery of his early work. When Party member Howard Fast’s Spartacus came out in 1951, Jerome waxed enthusiastic in a letter to the author:
How glad I am to see women presented not alone as comforters to their men, but ready and able to fight actively side by side with them, expecting no special consideration. Wasn’t it always so among the enslaved men and working classes, and haven’t we today the Rosalie McGees, the Amy Mallards, and the Elizabeth Gurley Flynns?27
Franklin Folsom recalled Jerome as a small, short, round-shouldered man with a circular face, thick glasses, and a troubled but kindly face. He seemed to be always thinking of higher things, “a wonderful, sweet guy who could be an awful pill” because he could be so “overly zealous about the fine points.” At times he performed like a martinet on behalf of the Party’s Central Committee, and he could act pompous. Yet he could also be generous, and humorous anecdotes abounded about his forgetfulness. A popular story, told with a few variations, is about the time Jerome noticed his suitcase sitting in Party headquarters. Consequently he picked it up and went to Grand Central Station. Only after he got there did he realize that he had no idea where he was going, so he called the Party headquarters to get the information.
Jerome was apparently not cognizant that some Party members laughed at him behind his back. In response, others felt they had to be protective of him; they didn’t want to wound his feelings. Among his traits that were mocked was the formal manner in which he frequently started a conversation: “May I intrude with an anecdote?” Jerome had acquired a British accent while he lived in London’s East End, and used language that sounded archaic. Another of his characteristic expressions sometimes imitated was, “paradoxical as it may seem.” He regarded himself as a scholar of English literature, and references to Dryden, Milton, and other English writers appeared throughout his rather tedious polemics such as Culture in a Changing World: A Marxist Approach (1947) and Grasp the Weapon of Culture! (1951).28 Although it may well have cloaked a more complex individual residing within, Jerome’s prose, public and personal, gave voice to the narrowest and simplest versions of Marxism, and his scholarship, even if genuine, seemed leaden. More troubling, Jerome seemed to become more mechanical rather than subtler over time.
His 1933 essay “Toward a Proletarian Novel” offered intriguing perspectives, even if Jerome ultimately sought to force literary practice into categories designating how near or far an author allegedly was from the working class.29 Characteristic of his literary criticism by the end of the decade was “Edmund Wilson: To the Munich Station,” which indicts Wilson for providing “literary service to fascism.” Wilson’s crime, in addition to writing positively of Trotsky in the New Republic, is that he quotes Marx “to deny the truth that Marxism is the scientifically formulated theory and practice of the working class, made operative through the leadership of the Communist Party” (emphasis in original).30 In The Negro in Hollywood Films (1950), Jerome addressed a crucial and neglected issue at length with a righteous anger appropriate to the issue of racism. Yet he is relentlessly negative in his bashing of recent films that might at least be the incipient stages of a new direction. Further, in a like manner he attacks Party writers who were more sanguine than himself about the capacity of Hollywood film to use artistry to play an increased positive role. In a 1953 letter to Howard Fast, Jerome angrily reprimanded Fast’s draft novel about Sacco and Vanzetti for its complimentary literary portrait of then Professor of Criminal Law Felix Frankfurter in the 1920s: “Is this the same being who today, as Justice of the Supreme Court, has condemned to death the Sacco and Vanzetti of 1953—Ethel and Julius Rosenberg?” Jerome compared Fast to Joseph Freeman, who, in An American Testament, had tried to write of Max Eastman in the 1920s without retrospectively judging the earlier Eastman by his relation to the Communist Party in the late 1930s.31
Franklin Folsom wrote that Jerome often acted “rather like a Jesuit or Talmudist” in regard to Marxist icons. He reminisced that Jerome “could always point to a classical text that supported his point of view—a method of citing authority that was not always helpful to writers finding their way in a complex world different from the world in which classical authors had lived.”32 In 1981, puzzling over a reference to Jerome’s Grasp the Weapon of Culture! as the U.S. government’s only example of an “overt act” cited at Jerome’s Smith Act trial, Nation editor Victor Navasky quipped: “today it seems less calculated to inspire action than somnolence.”33 Jerome’s short autobiographical novel of his childhood, however, A Lantern for Jeremy (1952), displayed an unexpected capacity for simple, lyrical writing.34
Sender Garlin felt that Jerome was an inappropriate choice to be a cultural leader. He was simply “not supple enough for that kind of post.” Jerome seemed to think that dealing with the problems of artists was similar to intervening in a longshoremen’s strike. Jerome would talk of the “purity and integrity of Marxism” so that one could “almost see the Virgin Mary.” He was unquestionably esteemed and needed by many in the Party, but not personally liked, except by a few writers such as John Howard Lawson. Garlin recalls that when Jerome first emerged on the scene as a Party writer he called himself “V. I. Jerome,” but underwent so much ribbing for the obviously vain reference to V. I. Lenin that he switched the V. I. to V. J.35
Among the reasons that Jerome rose so quickly in the Communist literary movement, as in his ascendancy to editorship of the Communist and assignment as head of the cultural commission, were his association with Rose Pastor Stokes and also the Party leadership’s assessment that other writers, such as Gold and Freeman, could not be deemed organizationally reliable. Thus an intellectual such as Jerome, although he lacked the formal academic credentials of several members with Ph.D.’s and the national popularity of a Mike Gold, could compensate by providing stability and invoking self-discipline. In 1936 Jerome further proved his mettle as an organizer when he was sent to Hollywood to consolidate a Party branch there. In the Left film community he acquired additional respect as a fund-raiser.
From 1935 until 1955 Jerome edited the Party’s theoretical journal, first called the Communist and later Political Affairs. His personal life improved as his political fortunes grew. For a while he lived with the Party activist Ann Rivington, and in Hollywood he had an affair with the Communist writer Viola Brothers Shore (1891–1970).36 In 1937 he married Alice Hamburger, a much younger woman, who as “Alice Evans” was executive secretary of the Left-wing New Theater League. They had two sons, their first names Carl and Frederick in honor of Marx and Engels. Eventually Alice became director of the Park Nursery School, having a special interest in autistic children. During the McCarthy era she was fired and blacklisted after taking the Fifth Amendment before an investigating committee. In the same year as his marriage to Alice, Jerome was appointed head of the Communist Party’s cultural commission.
For a small number of intellectuals, Jerome inspired great admiration. Historian Herbert Aptheker regarded Jerome as his “teacher,” and was thrilled by praise from Jerome.37 James Aronson, the talented journalist and editor of the National Guardian, gave a personal tribute to Jerome after he died:
The man with the eternal briefcase and the thoughtful face ... when he approached you, with his furrowed brow and purposeful look—if you did not know him you would be sure he was inviting you to join a conspiracy of gargantuan proportions. In actual fact, he wanted to tell you of a most touching poem he had just read in an obscure quarterly which sang truth to the people. He was a most gentle revolutionary. He had such a deep respect for learning. ...He had the strength born of conviction that steeled his soul and mind for six decades. And he carried his lantern with the never-ending curiosity of the youth he ever was.38
The painter Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) and the poet Alfred Kreymborg (1883–1966) were enthusiastic about Jerome’s polemic against intellectuals who balked at the Hitler-Stalin pact, even though it now reads as a crude and self-righteous piece of writing that defamed many former Party allies, who were still Left liberals, as lackeys of Western imperialism and warmongers.39 Another admirer was the poet Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), who at the time of the Moscow Trials wrote to Jerome, “I wish you were here to answer with your clarifying skill the questions about the new Moscow trial that plague me.”40 Although Mike Gold had engaged in bitter polemics with MacLeish in 1933, Jerome published a sympathetic appreciation of MacLeish’s play Panic in 1935.41 As late as the spring of 1939, MacLeish was still praising Jerome’s broadsides against his old enemy Edmund Wilson and others in the New Masses, insisting that “my admiration for his [Jerome’s] scholarship increases from day to day.”42 Then MacLeish pulled back from his fellow-traveling stance at the word of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and Jerome singled him out for extended attacks by name in Intellectuals and the War (1940).
Samuel Putnam (1892–1950) was an outstanding translator and former expatriate who authored the memoir Paris was Our Mistress (1947). Joining the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, he contributed to the New Masses and then became a regular reviewer for the Daily Worker with his own column in the 1940s. Putnam also adored the “intellectual companionship” of Jerome, and remarked that he, like others, “loved to watch your mind at work.” He reported to Jerome in early 1944 that his young son, Hilary, later a leading philosopher at Harvard University, “fairly lives on the sustenance that he gets from his talks with you.” However, only a year later Putnam underwent a disillusionment and came to the conclusion that “out of misguided humility [he] had forced himself to live in the stifling atmosphere of the party line with all its ruthless intolerance for the process of the mind.”43
The Left-wing journalist I. F. Stone (1903–1989), however, made no secret of his opinion that he found Jerome’s cultural leadership “offensive.” In an early 1950s letter declining to sponsor a rally on behalf of Jerome during his Smith Act trial, Stone confessed, “I’d feel like a stultified ass to speak at a meeting for Jerome without making clear my own sharp differences with the dogmatic, Talmudic, and dictatorial mentality he represents. I intend to go on defending him as a Smith Act victim but I can’t pretend he’s a libertarian.”44
A characteristic piece by Jerome was his 1937 essay in The Communist, “Marxism-Leninism for Society and Science,” reviewing the first year of the journal Science & Society.45 It constitutes a tedious checklist of pros and cons of the different articles held up against Jerome’s model of orthodoxy. This type of work steadily encroached on his literary scholarship. After a few book reviews published in the 1930s, there was a hiatus in his writing on literature until he projected a full-scale survey of the novel in the United States in the mid-1940s, but this never got beyond the outline stage.46
Some evidence of political disquiet on Jerome’s part surfaced during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1949 Jerome expressed some criticisms of William Z. Foster’s article, “The Fascist Phase of Imperialism,” scheduled to be published in Political Affairs, and he requested permission from Foster to publish some comments along with it. Foster replied that such a move would only confuse the Party: “Either the article, with necessary amendments, is correct and should be published; or it is wrong and should not be published.” Jerome then made an unsuccessful proposal to the National Committee of the Party to halt publication of the article.47 Between November 1953 and January 1954, Jerome complained to the Administrative Committee of the Party that decisions involving Political Affairs were being made without him, and he finally resigned as editor, requesting that his name be removed from the masthead.48
In 1951, shortly after taking the Fifth Amendment in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Jerome was arrested together with twelve other Communist Party leaders and charged with violating the Smith Act (allegedly advocating the overthrow of the government). In the summer of 1951, Jerome and the pro-Communist novelist Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), who had refused to name names in an earlier investigation, were imprisoned together at the Federal House of Detention in New York.49 Soon Jerome was put on trial as one of the twenty-one so-called secondary Communist Party leaders indicted under the Smith Act. After a nine-month litigation, he was convicted of conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, and in 1955 he began his jail sentence. He was released in 1957.
Jerome and Frances Winwar had remained cordial after their 1924 divorce and followed each other’s literary work, exchanging inscribed copies of books and pamphlets. When a Department of Justice representative approached Winwar for a five-hour interview about Jerome, she acknowledged that he was a Communist but insisted that he was a fine person with whom she had shared an “interest in victims of police brutality.” In a subsequent interview with the FBI, she declared that Jerome was essentially a scholar and “the St. Augustine of Communism.”50 While Jerome was in prison, Winwar sent money to Alice Jerome.
Jerome had written poetry while he was in court, and in prison he became more preoccupied with ideas for creative literature, criticism, and historical analysis than with immediate political issues.51 His first son recalled that “my father always regarded himself as a creative writer,” but his biggest problem “was relinquishing a manuscript that had room in the margin for further revision. I have never known such a painstaking lapidarian of prose, far closer in spirit to Flaubert and Lafcadio Hearn than to the insatiable agitprop machine.” Over the years Jerome had abandoned many works in progress and often dreamed of new ones but never acted on his dreams. In prison he recalled an artist friend in London
who worked simultaneously, that is, intermittently on half a dozen canvases with pencil and brush, turning from one to the other as the mood gripped him. That is how I have been feeling in the recent period with the tugs of the mind alternating from the essay on historiography, to the project on humanism, and thence to the Nat Turner play (still a dream), and beyond to the theme of the origin of Christianity.
He began to dread the thought of dying without completing his projects.52
Part of his inspiration for this new creative upsurge came from pouring over old classics from the prison library such as Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Jude the Obscure, Jane Eyre, and Tom Brown’s School Days, and from conversing with other inmates while working in the prison plumbing shop and mopping: “What deep, buried mines of humanity are here.”53 His wife reported to Albert Maltz that even though Jerome enjoyed such work, as well as helping to prepare prison Passover services and playing on the prison chess team, his health seemed to be deteriorating.54
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Jerome was tediously unstoppable in finding political deviations in the writing and literary views of others; however, he was an equally severe critic of his own writing. For him, the central question was the possible political implications of a cultural argument or artistic image, which can clearly put a brake on creativity and risk taking. Oddly enough, Jerome’s private tastes ran toward modern art, a collection of which he maintained in his home, but his public posture on cultural matters was hardly distinguishable from the advocacy of two-dimensional Soviet Socialist Realism. This led Annette Rubinstein to conclude that he was an elitist; simply put, he felt that ordinary Party members and workers were not capable of appreciating advanced art in the manner that he was.55
Such a public stance hardly worked to his own advantage as a frustrated writer. In the early 1950s he drafted a poem, “Caliban,” and circulated it to friends and associates for comment. His poem presents the view, not uncommon today, that The Tempest, particularly in its portrayal of the enslaved Caliban, is in part Shakespeare’s apology for colonial expansion. Jerome’s poem, however, is complicated by its reference to the African American Canada Lee’s stage performance as Caliban, and the implications of producing the play during the Cold War atmosphere in which, for the first time, a Black actor portrayed this character. It was additionally significant for Jerome that the performer was Lee, because he brought to the role a Left-wing political consciousness.
In the literary discussion that ensued, Jerome received a taste of his own medicine. The African American Communist writer Lloyd Brown (b. 1913) declared the poem “politically wrong” for a combination of reasons. Brown held that efforts to make seventeenth-century plays responsible for contemporary racism, or in the case of The Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism, were a misdirection of energy. He also reasoned that both the Soviet Union, which claimed to be the foremost “Shakespeare country” in terms of the number of readings and performances held there, and the international peace movement, based their moral claims on the humanist heritage of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and other “cultural giants,” which validated the progressive fruits of the Shakespeare legacy.56
The Jewish Communist critic Sidney Finkelstein (1909–1974), who had an M.A. from Columbia University but spent the Depression working in the Brooklyn Post Office, was more generous to Jerome. He tried to make specific textual changes in Jerome’s poem that would show Shakespeare in a more positive light, yet also reveal “that there were limits to his wisdom, things that even Caliban could teach him, that Caliban knew and Shakespeare didn’t.”57 This was succeeded by an even more elaborate literary discussion of The Tempest and Jerome’s poem, in which James Allen (Sol Auerbach, 1906–1990), a Communist Party specialist on African American history, launched a full-scale offensive against the draft poem, and Finkelstein intervened on Jerome’s behalf.58
Clearly then, Jerome did not have a double standard when using a political yardstick to validate art; the cultural commissar applied standards to himself at least as rigorously as he did to others when scrutinizing the political implications of poetry, and it is hardly surprising that his productivity was so meager. Nevertheless, Jerome’s Party post brought him perks; even while he defended Jerome’s poem against what he saw as exaggerated and unfair criticisms, Finkelstein felt compelled to complain to Jerome that his own recent book, How Music Expresses Ideas (1952), had not yet been reviewed in Political Affairs (successor to The Communist), whereas “every time you write a pamphlet, you make sure it gets the most immediate and widespread attention.”59 In a letter to the Communist playwright and Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson (1894–1977), to whom he also had sent his draft poem for comment, Jerome acknowledged that the discussion had caused him great “pain,” in part because the criticisms made of the poem reflected “extrinsic” tensions; but he nevertheless felt that he had benefited from the criticism and finally published the poem in a special “Negro History Week” issue of Masses & Mainstream.
The final version is a marvelous meditation on the ambiguities of cultural production on multiple levels. The long poem is structured as a three-way colloquy among an observer of Lee’s stage performance; words quoted from The Tempest and other plays by Shakespeare; and an italicized representation of thoughts attributed to Lee. The first stanzas show a harmony between the viewer’s perception of Lee as a representative of colonially oppressed people, emerging from his “rock-bound ghetto,” and Shakespeare’s perhaps inadvertent representation of Prospero as “the white conqueror” demanding service. Then, while the viewer begins to identify Caliban as the “towering fore-shadow / of Red Cloud, / Toussaint, / Jaurez, / Nat Turner,” Shakespeare begins to stack the deck by allowing Prospero to depict Caliban as a lying would-be rapist, and giving Caliban replies that appear to confirm the accusations. By the middle of the poem the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of the actor, Lee, dominate the page, the observer’s perspective having dissolved completely into those of the Black protagonist. With quotes from Shakespeare now put at the service of the actor, to demonstrate hypocrisy and contradiction, a heroic effort is made to instruct the playwright of the implications of his creation:
Undo your assent to Prospero,
lest it be a comfort to the private civilizers
who come with conquering tread on freemen’s coasts—
who come with trinkets, rum, and Bibles—and guns:
for the Glory of God
and the power of Spain
and the vaults of the Virginia Company.
Theirs are the roads to the silver mines of Potosí
covered with Indian dead.
Theirs the pledges broken, the treaties torn—
by land-grabber, claim shark, empire builder,
to the civilizers’ war cry, “The savage must go!”
Theirs the infamy:
Africa raped—
torn from birthland, herded in slave-ship, sold
forced into the canefield and rice swamp,
branded, cropped, castrated,
hunted in the forests and the marsh.60
Jerome’s poem emerged from the familiar tradition of Left-wing (often Jewish) writers using Black protagonists to fight liberation battles with universal implications. Yet the poem actually leaps forward several decades in cultural debate through Jerome’s particular approach to the pivotal location, and intricacies, of subaltern representation.
Not only does Jerome address the ur-text of Shakespeare; he also conveys the context of theatrical depiction in an advanced capitalist society from the perspective of a politically conscious reader responding to the real or imagined signals emanating from an actor with an individualized identity beyond the stage. In the explicit merging of the poet-observer’s vista with the one attributed to the Black actor, Jerome implicitly concedes the possibility of projection, and therefore opens the door to himself being interrogated and challenged in the manner that he cross-examines Shakespeare. At the same time, the riddle to be addressed is less focused on Jerome, Shakespeare, and Lee than on the production itself—on the power of art in new contexts to generate diverse meanings to which diverse audiences can relate even as they transcend the author’s intent. Whatever his defects in orchestrating Communist policy, the Party’s cultural commissar crafted a work of art in which the felicitous relation of form and content smoothly reveals a consciousness of its own production and its function as both a mediated and mediating cultural creation.
From the time Jerome assumed cultural leadership in the Communist Party and all the way through his prison experience, he asserted the view, which he averred to be “Leninist,” that the Party must provide leadership in cultural policy, and that its special contribution should be political evaluations of the implications of a work and the views of its author. Naturally, it was hoped that Party cadre members who were artists might be able to make such judgments on their own or in consultation with other experienced members, rather than wait to be reprimanded in the Party press. For instance, in 1936 Jerome had written a poem “To Carl Sandburg,” chastising what he saw as a lapse in the old radical poet’s social consciousness; but when The People, Yes appeared that year, he withdrew his verse.61 John Howard Lawson, like Jerome, dreamed of producing a “play on Negro life” called “Thunder Morning,” the work he saw “closest to my heart.” Yet in the face of critical comments he received from Jerome and others, Lawson felt that he had to continuously withdraw and rewrite it. At the time Lawson died, it was still unfinished.62
When Jerome emerged from prison in 1957, however, there was a change in his outlook. The dispute in the Party over the Khrushchev revelations was under way, and many Party members assumed that Jerome would ally with the more orthodox Foster faction. Instead, A. B. Magil was astounded to discover that Jerome identified at that point with the Eugene Dennis faction, which appeared at that moment to be headed toward a major democratization and “Americanization” of the Party without dissolving it altogether. On the street, Jerome told Magil that he no longer believed in a Party “line” for literature.63 In a letter to Albert Maltz that same year, Jerome repudiated the Communist cultural policy of the past as employing the method of “fiat,” which of course contradicted the Party’s alleged goal of clarification by discussion.64
Jerome, however, departed for Poland in 1958 and did not participate in the internal Party fight that was reaching a climax, nor did his later public writing acknowledge any change of view.65 From 1959 to 1961 he lived in Moscow and worked as an editor of Lenin’s Collected Works. In 1962, back in New York, he began a novel based on the life of Spinoza. In 1963 creative work continued to obsess him, and he confessed to Walter Lowenfels that he had been too long “occupied with political and theoretical writing” which “drove the muse, like Hagar, into the wilderness.”66 He wrote to exiled American literary agent Maxim Lieber in Poland in 1963 that he was desperately looking for some part-time work that would allow him to write, and that his newest project was a historical novel.67
In 1965 Jerome underwent surgery for the removal of a brain tumor. The cancer had caused disorientation and the loss of sensation, vision, and motor power in his limbs. He also suffered depression, impairment in judgment, difficulty in concentrating, and a poor attention span, to the extent that he could no longer care for himself.68 His domestic situation was complicated because three years earlier, his wife, Alice, and their two sons had broken from the Communist Party and joined the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, although the marriage itself was not disrupted. Jerome died later that year at the age of sixty-eight. His widow moved to Chicago, complaining to John Howard Lawson that the Communist Party was ignoring her proposals to circulate Jerome’s sequel to A Lantern for Jeremy, entitled The Paper Bridge (1966).69
If Jerome gravitated toward the role of Koestler’s “Commissar” for most of his life, Joseph Freeman was something of an unhappy “Yogi” who, in his years of Party activism, and especially afterward, frequently pined for an increasingly idealized youth of untrammeled poetic expression and sensuality. His purge from the Communist movement in the late 1930s also gives him something of the glow of martyrdom, although none of his poetry and fiction addressing the emotional terrain of the committed writer have survived their time. Freeman is more commonly remembered as the person most associated with the New Masses, as editor and critic, during its rise as a potent cultural force in the United States. His own recollections, in letters and conversation, deeply shaped Daniel Aaron’s discussion of the New Masses in Writers on the Left, as well as the work of other scholars after Aaron who independently examined Freeman’s papers.
Yet, despite Freeman’s obvious literary sophistication, his popularity among the circle of young Dynamo poets, and his assertion that he always stood for a more professional publication, he was mistrusted by many of his contemporaries in or around the Party and the broader Communist cultural movement. Freeman’s narrative of events is the fullest and most compelling available, in part because no pivotal editor ever sat down to tell the entire history of the New Masses, providing supporting documentation. Freeman’s version, however, like any other story, must be reexamined in the context of the storyteller’s personality and perceptions.
Some who loved Freeman at the outset came reluctantly to regard him more critically as they witnessed him in action. Such was the case with one of Freeman’s early protégés on the Left, A. B. Magil (b. 1905). Magil came from a lower-middle-class family in Philadelphia, where his father, Joseph Magil, was a self-employed Hebrew scholar. The senior Magil was the translator of the Pentateuch (five books of Moses) in English and Yiddish, and the editor of a prayer book that was used all over the world. His children became political activists; one of Magil’s three older sisters, Rose, was among the few influential women in the Zionist movement in the United States. Magil also had a socialist brother-in-law who worked for a while as city editor of the Call.
Magil initially planned to become a writer, hoping to support himself as a high school teacher. While he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he took some education courses that disabused him of the latter notion. Meanwhile, he became increasingly drawn to the work of the Irish authors W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. He also met Harry Alan Potamkin (1900–1933), the future Marxist film critic, who was five years his senior and was involved in modernist cultural circles.70 On one occasion, Potamkin invited the nineteen-year-old Magil to a reception for radical Jewish mystic and novelist Waldo Frank (1889–1967), where they sat on the floor with other admirers listening to him.
In 1924, while working as a camp counselor, Magil met Sender Garlin (1902–1999), a radical journalist from Glen Falls, New York, and the brother of one of the camp’s owners. Both he and Magil adored the satiric wit of H. L. Mencken. Garlin, politically unaffiliated but already friends with Joseph Freeman, urged Magil to move to New York. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English at the age of twenty, Magil did just that. He found a job as a copyeditor at Women’s Wear magazine, and was soon following the disputes between socialists and Communists in the garment industry. Attracted to the Communists, he read the Yiddish Communist newspaper Freiheit (Magil was fluent as a writer and speaker of Yiddish). When the Daily Worker moved from Chicago to New York in 1927, Magil and Garlin began visiting its office, located in a dingy warehouse. Magil’s only literary publications to date were a poem, “Johnny Madeiros Is Dead,” about the six-year-old son of a textile striker drowned in a river after the boy was chased by a mounted policeman,71 and a Yiddish translation in Menorah Journal. He soon metamorphosed into a revolutionary activist.
For several years he and Garlin considered themselves to be disciples of Freeman. But the more serious Magil became politically, the more troubled he became about Freeman’s tenuous relation to the Communist Party. Freeman’s notorious “Don Juanism” was only part of the dilemma. Freeman basically liked to do whatever he wanted to do and resisted political discipline. By the mid-1930s he also had a reputation for defending Party policies in discussions with Party supporters, while equivocating with people hostile to the Party, including those around the right-wing socialist New Leader such as Eugene Lyons, a militant anti-Communist whom Freeman had known when they had both worked for the Soviet news agency TASS in the late 1920s.
Magil’s negative assessment of Freeman must be qualified because of the hyperorthodox loyalty to the Party leadership that he maintained until 1956. Even Magil’s friends, including Garlin, a notorious mimic, joked about Magil as “the Rabbi” and “Straight-line Magil,” nicknames prompted by his earnest appearance—he wore very heavy glasses, unusual at that time. Magil was always on call to undertake Party political assignments when needed—in Detroit in the 1930s, in the Middle East in the late 1940s, and in Mexico where he organized a Communist underground apparatus in the early 1950s. Whenever he visited the New Masses office, he had the aura of being “the Party Whip”; frequently he would hint that the opinions he held had evolved from discussions with Alexander Trachtenberg and V. J. Jerome.
Many others, from a variety of perspectives, also expressed reservations about Freeman’s character and motives; such long-term doubts about Freeman’s personal qualities assisted in making his outrageous purge in 1939 all the more palatable. In his voluminous correspondence of later years, Freeman depicted himself as utterly self-sacrificing to the “cause,” not only in terms of his time but financially as well, and exploited and ultimately victimized because of his integrity. Various recollections and some documents suggest that Freeman was perpetually in difficulty because of his reckless and undependable behavior. Mike Gold recalled in an obituary for Freeman that, as an editor of the New Masses, “Joe had a wonderful way of sliding out of a situation and going to another city to write you a ten-page wonderful letter” in which he provided “all the theoretical ways of solving the particular hell-hole in which you and the magazine had suddenly been thrown by the dropping of some particular floor.”72 A note Freeman received from Bill Browder, the shrewd business manager of New Masses and younger brother of Earl Browder, sums up a common attitude toward him, held not just by Party functionaries: “You have a charming personality and that has probably saved your life many times.”73
While Freeman would always maintain that he quit TASS in 1931 to go to Hollywood and then to join the New Masses, there is evidence that he did not leave TASS voluntarily. Freeman’s first wife, the artist Ione Robinson, wrote her mother at the time conveying her great distress that Freeman had been “fired” by TASS director Kenneth Durant, whom Freeman had hitherto idolized.74 The reasons were kept secret from Robinson, but it seems unlikely that they involved any doctrinal political disagreements with Soviet policy, since three Party leaders soon there after asked Freeman to join the New Masses editorial board. Freeman’s own papers suggest that the unpleasantness at TASS may have been due to conflicts with his brother Harry.
Freeman also had antagonists in the John Reed Clubs, such as Conrad Komorowski (sometimes called “Comrade Conrad”), who accused Freeman of not doing as much as he could for the New Masses because he was too concerned with writing books and hanging out with big shots outside the Communist movement.75 Walter Snow was another John Reed Club activist who had a lifelong dislike of Freeman.
Snow, whose Party name was “Robert Clark,” was six feet tall and stick thin, with a round face and horn-rimmed glasses. In the 1920s he was a hobo and later a stage hand, but he drifted into journalism and then wrote pulp fiction, specializing in contributing to magazines like Gang World. He joined the Communist Party in the late 1920s, but dropped out in the early 1930s while remaining a Party loyalist in the John Reed Clubs. He rejoined the Party in the years leading up to World War II. Decades later, after reading Aaron’s Writers on the Left, Snow complained caustically to his step-son, the future historian Maurice Isserman, that Freeman “was a careerist and opportunist, a snobbish revolutionary bureaucrat.” Much of Snow’s rancor is aimed at Freeman’s alleged privileged living conditions: “Freeman... always lived in swanky apartments—a huge skylighted studio in the Village and later Park Avenue swank.... Some argued that it was necessary to maintain Joe ... in swank to entertain Corliss Lamont ([Lamont’s] father then head of [the] House of Morgan) and other wealthy angels [a term for financial donors]. The Freemans offered a ‘proper’ New York home for Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinoff.”76
If Snow’s account is accurate, it goes directly against Freeman’s own self-portrait in which he presents himself as a self-sacrificing movement activist. In reflecting on the New Masses crisis that had occurred in 1931, a few years after he and Snow had first met, Freeman avowed that he worked almost alone at the New Masses from 1931 to 1933. During those years, “I lived on nothing, worked day and night, broke my health and finally by the end of 1933 was ordered by the doctor to lay off.”77 It seems probable that there is exaggeration here on both sides.
Tiba Willner (1906–1999), the younger sister of Sender Garlin, who worked as promotion manager for the New Masses throughout much of the 1930s, adored Freeman as a person. She did not regard him as handsome in a conventional sense, as he had an unusual “Mongolian cast” to his eyes which some people liked and others didn’t. Edward Dahlberg recalled that Freeman was “a good-looking youth, quite swarthy and soundly built, but later had a flaccid oleaginous face.”78 When novelist Albert Halper met Freeman in the early 1930s, he thought he had “an oily baboon face.”79 But Willner thought that when Freeman opened his mouth, “he was the most attractive man in the world.”
He loved to gather young poets and writers around himself, and was a genius at talking to youthful audiences, displaying a wealth of information and making each person think that Freeman was addressing him or her personally.80 In private, Freeman was a tremendous charmer; sweet, warm, kind, and able to talk about anything. He was also a woman chaser of the first order. He insisted to Sender Garlin, though, that he was not promiscuous, only “a variationist.”81 To Tiba he bragged that he had seduced a thousand women, and, although she was happily married, he pursued her from the time she was eighteen until she was fifty, after both had left the Party.
Freeman’s first wife, Ione Robinson, wrote her mother, when she first met Freeman in Mexico in 1929, that “you would think he was a brother of Rudolph Valentino by the shape of his head, and his eyes.”82 Almost from the outset of their brief marriage, however, Freeman’s former and new girlfriends were omnipresent, sometimes living in the apartment, or else Freeman was away, communicating with his wife by telegram. There were also stories that Freeman had slept with a mistress of Joseph Stalin and that Ivy Litvinov (1890?–1977), the British-born writer married to the Soviet ambassador to the United States, was his inamorata as well. A number of literary figures in or around the Communist movement, including Genevieve Taggard and Ella Winter, had been his lovers. Winter reportedly broke off with him when she walked in on Freeman with another woman.83
Freeman married Charmion Von Wiegand (1898–1983) in 1934. She was the daughter of the conservative Hearst journalist Karl Von Wiegand, and a student of the artist Piet Mondrian. In the 1930s she became a painter, an art critic, and a representative of artists. The marriage lasted until Freeman’s death, but neither partner adhered to conventional fidelity and they continually fought.84 Garlin remembered that Charmion tended to “belittle” Freeman in public, and her letters to her husband complain of being “emotionally starved.” She protested Freeman’s surrounding the couple with other women—some of whom were old girlfriends—with whom he was emotionally, and not infrequently sexually, involved; about his “explosions”; and about his pressuring her to obtain money from her father under false pretenses.85 Such a tumultuous personal life unquestionably had political ramifications. Freeman himself attributed his bad relations with Max Eastman to sexual competition between the two,86 and Sender Garlin believed that some of the ill will directed toward Freeman in high Kremlin circles that produced the attack on An American Testament had similar origins.87
Despite her affection for Freeman, Tiba Willner was well aware of Freeman’s unreliability. He was a man incapable of being on time foran appointment with any one. She believed that he even came late to his own father’s funeral, an act that further incensed his brother Harry, a Communist Party patriot already antagonistic to Joseph, whom he called “mushmouth.”88 Franklin Folsom, executive secretary of the League of American Writers, considered Freeman a hard drinker, although not a drunk, who easily consumed a quart of whiskey a day. Sender Garlin, himself decried as a “kibbitzer” by Alexander Trachtenberg, came to realize that Freeman couldn’t be trusted by the Party hierarchy. Freeman would never be a foot soldier rising at 5:00 A.M., and “he certainly wasn’t tough enough to cut a friend’s throat.” Although Garlin thought that Freeman was too intelligent to be a bohemian himself, he unabashedly enjoyed the company of bohemians.89
For those outside the Party, Freeman could, on occasion, appear to be something of an apparatchik. Halper recalled that during the visit of Soviet novelist Boris Pilnyak to the United States, “Freeman was the interpreter, agent, and Party watchdog for the unwary, doomed Soviet writer, staying at the talented Pilnyak’s hotels, accompanying him to Hollywood, guiding and subtly directing his every move.”90 In May 1939, Freeman asked fellow traveler Maurice Hindus (1891–1969) on behalf of Soviet Russia Today to drop a paragraph from an article that sounded “needlessly pessimistic.” Hindus went into a rage over this effort to tamper with his political analysis, telling Freeman, “It is entirely beneath your intelligence.” Freeman, however, replied defensively that Hindus was needlessly expressing “so much indignation over so small a matter.” Freeman would have been correct if his suggestion was minor and stylistic; but it was, in fact, a request for Hindus to conform politically.91
Freeman’s popularity was indeed selective. Matthew Josephson, the historian and a fellow traveler of the Party until 1939, had been a Columbia University classmate of Freeman’s, and confided privately to Sender Garlin that he had a longstanding dislike of Freeman.92 Even the relatively mild mannered Granville Hicks had a stormy relationship with Freeman. In the fall of 1936, when the two were assigned to work together on the New Masses, Hicks reminded Freeman of a personal insult that Freeman had avowed in June of that year: Freeman, in defending his public criticisms of Hicks’s John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (1936), had kept Hicks’s rebuttals out of the New Masses and accused Hicks of lacking “the revolutionary’s subordination of personal vanity in the face of truth.” As a result, while Hicks would work together with Freeman to carry out common projects, he told Freeman that “the less I have to do with you personally, the better I shall like it.”93
James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism, appearing in 1936, was an especially problematic book for the New Masses editors to review. It was clearly based on Marxist principles with which the editors agreed, yet relentless in its satirical attack on their practice. When Granville Hicks was fair minded enough to take precisely such a position acknowledging agreement on many fundamentals in his review of the book, Freeman sent a letter to Isidor Schneider complaining that Hicks should have argued that Farrell’s “viewpoint is not that of a Marxist, though every specific idea he advances may be accepted by Marxists.” The reason for this accusation was that Farrell had emphasized the “social” basis of literature more than its “class” basis. To Freeman, it was acceptable to use such a debater’s trick to claim that Farrell’s Marxist position was merely a liberal one, thereby evading the challenge of Farrell’s book.94
What is telling about Freeman’s response, in addition to his inaccurate characterization of Farrell’s perspective, is that Freeman himself was frequently under political suspicion for being a “liberal.” Just before he hurled the epithet at Farrell, Freeman had received an angry letter from a leading Communist, Israel Amter, accusing him of “the rottenest kind of liberalism with which our Party is struggling against.”95 Free man had atendency to shield himself from Left criticism by throwing the same kinds of charges at others, a practice that would come back to haunt him in 1939.
Stanley Burnshaw had a deep skepticism about Freeman that he retained for decades. When Burnshaw left the New Masses, he protested to business manager Bill Browder that “by bringing in four acolytes he was changing the staff of the New Masses to a kind of claque.”96 To Granville Hicks, Burnshaw further complained that Freeman had unnecessarily initiated a “personal feud” with him.97 To novelist Christina Stead, he expressed the view that Freeman had his own faction and sought personal power.98 Stead had been friends with Freeman, but had concluded that “he is an insatiable sensualist and such a man is absolutely disloyal, and neither men nor women really trust him in their hearts, although they may see with complaisance the agreeable parts of his personality.”99
By the late 1930s, Freeman was certainly feeling uncomfortable, and he was perceived by friends and associates as trying to live a divided life. He had broad literary sensibilities, aspired to write philosophical poetry, desired a wide circle of friends and lovers, yet at the same time craved to be respected as the Communist Party’s preeminent cultural spokesman. Later Freeman would conclude that he could never have achieved this goal because a transformation had occurred in the 1930s of which he had not been fully aware. The traditional Marxist view, which he attributed to Lenin, was that “the artist, the writer, the scientist must be won to communism in his own way, through the portals of his art or science.” But by 1934, he believed, the view had been supplanted in leading Party circles by a much more manipulative approach. Freeman was haunted by an all-night meeting of the Party’s cultural fraction, where Alexander Trachtenberg, once his strong advocate, allegedly rebuffed him by declaring, “Don’t tell us how to handle the intellectuals. You’re a rotten liberal.” Although the remarks seem consistent with Trachtenberg’s role as the specialist in exploiting cultural opportunities, Freeman was so devastated by the personal assault that he fell ill with a mysterious throat ailment and lost the use of his voice—his most potent feature—for several months.100
Still, Freeman never acceded to any interpretation that the Communist Party or the Soviet leadership dictated the New Masses literary policy, and to the end he insisted that he had never been forced to lie on behalf of the Party. He held to the formulation that the Communist Party played the role of “guiding” the New Masses in the 1930s.101 He was also adamant against “the narrow notion that Left literature in the Thirties was solely the product of the Kharkov Conference or the John Reed Clubs or the New Masses. ...We ought to see the picture in larger historic perspective.”102 What he meant was that world events pushed writers leftward in complex ways, all of which “led to the dominance on the ‘cultural front’ of radical writers, artists, directors, teachers, etc.”103 While the Communist Party certainly intervened in the affairs of and presented the prevailing strategy for the New Masses, Freeman nonetheless maintained that “the Left did not have to do very much to attract the intellectuals in the Thirties; reeling from the overwhelming shock of the Depression, most of them stormed the offices of the Left magazines and literary groups and begged, pleaded, wheedled and even demanded to be taken in!”104
Given Freeman’s later conclusions about the deleterious effect of Stalinism on the Cultural Left in the United States, one might wonder if he retrospectively came to accept the argument of Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform (1934), which he and Joshua Kunitz had bitterly attacked when it was published.105 However, in correspondence late in life Freeman defended his assault on Eastman’s book because Eastman had claimed that the Soviet Union had clamped down on free cultural expression in the 1920s, whereas Freeman believed this had not happened until the early 1930s. Moreover, Freeman made the unconvincing claim that he had to attack Eastman’s book because “it gave aid and comfort to the sectarians on the literary Left.” That is, by exposing the vulgar trends in Soviet literary practice, Eastman’s book allegedly showed the sectarians how they should act if they wanted to be “good Communists.”106
While Freeman was able in his epistolary reminiscences to conjure up a convincing portrait of his idealism and authentic love of literature and the socialist dream, other materials surviving from the 1930s episodically document ugly personal references to individuals, especially if they were Leftists politically critical of the Communist Party. This dramatically contradicts Freeman’s later boast that he, almost alone among the Communist writers, kept his debates and disagreements “impersonal”: “I have a temperamental dislike of the ad hominem argument.”107
Throughout the 1930s, V. F. Calverton (born George Goetz, 1900–1940), Freeman’s major contender and rival spokesperson for Marxist culture, was called a “charlatan” and “our greatest danger” on the cultural front.108 To Malcolm Cowley, he characterized Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) as one of “Trotsky’s stooges in America.”109 This came immediately after his return from Mexicowhen Freeman himself had been subjected to what he believed was personal slander imputing to him pro-Trotskyist sympathies. In the 1950s when novelist Howard Fast engaged in public breast-beating over his mistake of trusting the Communist Party, Freeman declared Fast an opportunist who stayed on the fringes of the Party until the Moscow Trials were long over, and then remained in the Party just long enough to win the Stalin Peace prize.110
In 1937 Edwin Rolfe complained that he had heard that Freeman had blocked the publication of an essay by Alan Calmer as a “Critics Group” pamphlet because it was allegedly critical of the recent American Writers’ Congress. Freeman was outraged by what he characterized as a slander. What really happened, he explained, was that he had told Angel Flores (1900–1992), the Puerto Rican–born English professor who led the pro-Communist Critics Group, to publish the piece, “despite my opinion that it was not a real criticism but a distortion of history.”111
In his letter to Rolfe, Freeman further divulged that even before he had taken this action, he had heard rumors about Calmer’s ideas and had informed on Calmer to Communist Party leader Earl Browder. When Calmer later ran into Freeman and expressed bitterness about Freeman inducing Browder to “suppress” the essay, Freeman accused Calmer of suffering from an “illusion.”112 The accusation seems more appropriate to Freeman; how could he have imagined that his actions could have had an effect other than discouraging publication of Calmer’s essay? Freeman clearly desired to prevent Calmer’s pamphlet from getting a hearing but did not want to take the blame for blocking its publication.
Freeman later contended that his decision not to make a public statement denouncing Stalinism, as he had been requested to do by various liberal editors, was consistent with his refusals to make public declarations at the behest of others while he was still in the Communist movement. “I have written many things in my life and many that were wrong. But I wrote them of my own free will and the errors I made were made in good faith. I have never written anything under compulsion.”113 Thus Freeman’s version of his final days in the Communist movement emphasizes his independent strength of character. He claimed that when he was under pressure to issue strong public statements supporting the second of the Moscow Trials, he was reluctant to do so and consequently stayed away from New York as long as he could.114
Tiba Willner’s recollection of Freeman’s final days in the Communist movement, when she and her husband were working for the New Masses, combines a censure of Freeman for personal irresponsibility along with one for political indiscretion. She agrees that the precipitating episode came when Freeman, who had been sent to Mexico for the New Masses, failed to return to New York on schedule. Yet Willner, who resumed her friendship with Freeman after the Khrushchev revelations in 1956, is certain that he was “shacked up” with a woman, and didn’t plan to return until he was good and ready. It is impossible to determine, at this late date, which rendition of the reason for his delay is accurate, but the known features of Freeman’s career suggest that both could be true. Since Freeman had recently been criticized at a special meeting held at the Kremlin for his insufficiently harsh portrait of Trotsky in his autobiographical An American Testament (1937), the issues of political irresponsibility in Mexico and personal indiscretion upon his return to New York City were combined. Freeman was called before a special meeting of the Party’s Central Committee and brutally condemned. George Willner, Tiba’s husband, was present in his capacity as the recently appointed New Masses business manager and was shaken by Freeman’s desperate and emotional efforts to defend himself. Some of the arguments that he used to bolster his credibility appear in a letter that he sent to Browder at the time.115
In this correspondence, Freeman surprisingly makes no reference at all to the content of An American Testament, or to the fact that Party members had read and approved it before publication. Instead, he invokes his record of service to the New Masses as proof of his unquestionable devotion to the Party. He reminds Browder that he readily took up the task of working on the magazine in the crisis of 1931–33, and once again in 1936–37, when he believed that a similar crisis was in progress. However, in the second instance, Freeman said he had been suspicious that his assignment of holding down the fort might be a set-up for him to take the blame for the decline of the magazine that had set in earlier. Still, “as a disciplined Communist, I considered it my duty to accept the assignment and to do the best I could to keep the magazine going.”116
Now, in 1937, due to his disgrace following the Mexican episode, Freeman found that he was about to be “disconnected” from the magazine, and he was in great distress about the situation. He begged Browder to work out an arrangement so that he could continue to submit articles and to help edit the magazine when he was available. He suggested that he simply be described as taking a “leave of absence,” and that the rest of the editorial staff be informed by the Party leadership “that I have neither been canned nor have I quit my post.” Appealing to Browder to remember that, as a writer, his work was deeply affected by his relations with his comrades, he quoted approvingly a remark that Floyd Dell once made to him: “the Party is my father and my mother, and misunderstanding there is very painful; it paralyzes work.”117 The letter gained Freeman a bit more time before a public denunciation, but his Party career was now over.
Two years later, the Communist International, a monthly organ of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (the Comintern), published a statement by a Soviet leader, P. Dengal, damning the British and American Communist parties for having printed favorable reviews of Freeman’s autobiography, An American Testament. Dengal’s attack on Freeman argued that Freeman’s was not a case of a confused writer but of one who cleverly uses the mask of objectivity to get across to workers “an anti-working class outlook and arouse sympathy for the enemies of the labor movement.”118 Freeman was charged with not breaking fully with his middle-class bohemianism; and An American Testament was scored as having “slight literary value” and being “hackwork,” due to Freeman’s arrested development. In Dengal’s criticisms there is an echo of Freeman’s own earlier attacks on writers who failed to break with their bourgeois past, not to mention his criticism of V. F. Calverton’s “charlatanism.” Although Freeman was never so crude as Dengal, their styles of debate could occasionally be similar.
Freeman, however, never reconsidered nor repented his attacks on rivals, most of which he appeared to forget. Even his later recollections of his “literary line” in the 1930s were organized around the avowal that he had never supported “proletarian literature,” and that his disbelief in the genre was always emphasized in what he wrote. Yet his essays in the early 1930s are only a softer and more sophisticated version of the Kharkov Conference orientation. His introduction to the 1935 volume Proletarian Literature in the United States appears to be consistent with the predominant New Masses position that any writer can produce proletarian literature so long as he or she adheres to a working-class (Marxist) perspective, identifies with the proletarian struggle and cause, treats experience from a proletarian perspective, and reshapes his or her life within the working-class movement.119 Retrospectively Freeman was able to selectively emphasize certain aspects of his writings, including poems, to make them more compatible with his post–Communist Party anti-proletarian literature stance.
Freeman’s final communications with the Communist Party make pathetic reading. In July 1939 he wrote V. J. Jerome about his difficulty in completing an article due to illness, debts, poverty, and a desperate search for employment. He concludes: “What enables me to bear this suffering and degradation at all is the hope that in the end I shall emerge a better Bolshevik, more useful to the Party.”120 After his excommunication, Freeman went into a deep depression; his body seemed to double in size and he later told Tiba Willner that he had attempted suicide.121 He had for years received psychoanalytic treatment, but now his therapy became crucial to his survival. The theme of his psychoanalysis was his alleged neglect and exploitation by others, who were motivated by a lust for greed and power. He, on the other hand, subordinated his own career to helping other individuals.
Even though there is no evidence that Freeman became an informer during the two occasions that he was called before governmental investigating bodies,122 unpleasant gossip circulated about him in Party milieux. A characteristic story was that as a well-paid employee of the E. L. Bernays public relations firm in the 1940s, he wrote the speeches for the National Association of Newspaper Publishers.123 Franklin Folsom worked for TASS under Freeman’s brother Harry in the 1940s, and was surprised that Harry had no contact with Joseph.124 Yet Freeman’s emotional crisis was not permanently crippling. He wrote two novels, Never Call Retreat (1943) and The Long Pursuit (1947), which allegorically addressed his revolutionary experiences, as well as short fiction and a constant stream of unpublished poetry for the same purpose. He also meditated on the whole course of his life in unpublished writings and dreamed of picking up where he had left off—as a poet, “pure and undefiled”125 —before his experiences in the Communist Party.
In letters to Floyd Dell and Josephine Herbst in the 1950s and 1960s, Freeman worked his way through to a very simple analysis of the role of poetry and socialism in his intellectual development. As a child he had received intense religious training in Judaism, and until he was twenty he prayed every day. Thereafter the poetry he had been writing became transformed into a substitute for his religion, and “In this way poetry became a preoccupation with the eternal problem of good and evil, the mystery of human nature and conduct in a universe whose riddle remains to be solved.”126 From his boyhood until his old age, with the exception of the 1930s, poetry poured from Freeman independent of the prospects of it ever being published, although as many as a hundred poems found their way into print in the 1920s and early 1930s. Similarly he had drawn every day until he was over thirty, and both his wives were painters. Like his friend Floyd Dell, the poets who nurtured him were the classic romantics, Byron, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. These seem logical choices in light of his early childhood, for, until he was seven, he lived in a small Ukrainian village full of woods, hills, and streams, without sidewalks and lights. Fifty years later he vividly remembered “the horses, the cows, the servant girl who took care of me, the church across the road whose bells have haunted me around the world.”127
Freeman further linked his move from poetry as religion to socialism as religion, acknowledging that his verse was often grim as well as “chiliastic.” He offered one of the clearest personal confessions on record of the Jewish-American messianic appropriation of Communism:
The belief of Chiliasm that Christ will return in the flesh to rule a just world for a thousand years derives from Jewish apocalyptic literature older than the Book of Revelations. It is the Christian, revolutionary version of a persistent Jewish dream—the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. As a child I lived in a landscape rendered grim by pogroms, beautiful by the vision of the Messiah, whom I saw in daydreams riding his traditional white horse as he came to redeem us from exile and suffering. Eventually the Messiah did come for me; he came with hammer and sickle in hand to redeem the whole of mankind. But this savior, like all his predecessors, failed to leave behind him the promised land of universal justice and love. Nevertheless my verse continues to be chiliastic. . . . I cannot surrender my belief... that in the end man will free himself of evil and develop his godlike potentials to the full.128
As the 1950s evolved into the 1960s, Freeman detached his religio-artistic-socialist vision from the specifics of his Communist Party experience, transforming it into a transhistoric faith in the power of human redemption. His mentor relationship to Daniel Aaron at the time of the latter’s study of the cultural Left was a high point of his late middle age; this was dramatized by a moving visit to Smith College in 1958, where he delivered in a public forum a spirited defense of his passionate belief in poetry and the future that he called “The Vision of the Thirties.” One year younger than his antagonist, the cultural commissar V. J. Jerome, the Yogi manqué Freeman likewise succumbed to cancer in 1965.