In the first years of the Depression, a young Vassar College student, tall and heavy-set, and ardently committed to the creative and intellectual life, felt increasingly distraught as she became mindful of the suffering of ordinary people. The disparity with the sheltered childhood she had enjoyed in her comfortable Manhattan West Side apartment in a Jewish middle-class neighborhood was unendurable. After completing two years, eighteen year-old Muriel Rukeyser left Vassar College in 1932, relocating to New York to write poetry while she resided at home. Already radicalized and attracted to the Young Communist League at Vassar, she attended a meeting of the Communist-led National Students League later that year where she encountered the Student Review editor Harry Magdoff and inquired of him whether she might write for the publication. Soon after, she borrowed her father’s car and drove to Alabama with friends to attend the March–April 1933 trial of the Scottsboro defendants.
Arrested for fraternizing with African Americans, Rukeyser was jailed, during which time she contracted typhoid fever. Following her release, she and her friends were harassed by a racist posse as they made their way north. When they ran out of money, Rukeyser contacted her distressed parents, who paid her bills and transported her back home. The incident continued the escalation of Muriel’s estrangement from her parents, which eventually led to frequent banishment from the family and continual threats of disinheritance.1
Once back in New York, Muriel found that the article on the Scottsboro trial that she had submitted to the Student Review had been well received by the editors and would be published.2 Consequently, she joined the editorial board of the Student Review as literary editor, although the Communist student activists who ran the publication were too busy with exams and political work to hold editorial board meetings. Rukeyser asked Harry Magdoff if she might also submit her poetry to the Student Review. Despite a lack of confidence in his ability as a judge of poetry, Magdoff agreed and ran “Scottsboro” in April 1933 and “The Trial” in January 1934.3 Shortly afterward, Joseph Freeman of the New Masses contacted Magdoff and proposed that the two of them lunch together. The main topic of their discussion was Rukeyser’s poetry; Freeman told Magdoff that her verse was outstanding. Freeman was unaware that Magdoff had been publishing her poems only because of his general respect for Rukeyser, not because of any literary expertise. Soon Rukeyser’s poetry commenced to appear in the New Masses.4 Thus one of the leading poets in the United States close to the canonical modernist tradition—a woman who was Jewish American and bisexual, as well as pro-Communist for nearly two decades—made her debut in the Left cultural milieu, which would provide her with a vision of sufficient vitality to sustain her artistic endeavor for the rest of her life.5
Rukeyser had been born in New York City in 1913. She attended the Ethical Culture and Riverdale Country Day Schools, where she was skipped ahead several grades so that she was always several years younger than most of her classmates. She also entered a childhood friendship with Robert and Frank Oppenheimer, the physicists who would endure victimization during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Her father’s family was descended from German-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe and had settled in Milwaukee in the nineteenth century. Starting in the gravel business in New York, Lawrence Rukeyser worked as a cement salesman in association in the 1920s with Generoso Pope, the publisher of Il Progresso, an Italian-language daily newspaper that defended Mussolini. Together they became the major purveyors of sand, mortar, and brick in New York City and eventually the leading developers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and the builders of most of the large apartment buildings on West End Avenue. Eventually Pope, who had Mafia connections, forced his partner Rukeyser to sell his portion of the business.
Muriel had a favorite routine with Robert Oppenheimer, who was a few years ahead of her in school; they would sneak up to the roofs of her father’s nearly completed buildings on cold winter days. Lying on top of the water towers to feel the ambient heat from the water stored below, young Robert delivered minilectures on physics to her.
Muriel also roamed the neighborhood with packs of friends, carrying out pranks such as dropping bags of water from rooftops. But her relations with her parents became adversarial, and there were other childhood unhappinesses. Part of the difficulty was her father’s demand for automatic obedience to parental and male authority. But her parents also mocked her weight by calling her “little elephant,” and they disparaged her cultural interests. From the time her younger sister, Frances, appeared without warning, there was intense sibling rivalry. In later years Muriel’s parents would torment her by comparing her unfavorably to her “good” sister, who settled down to a husband and children.
The family belonged to a reform synagogue and only superficially followed Jewish traditions. They appeared more engrossed in their summer home on Long Island, their country club, and their chauffeured limousine. Muriel was convinced that their allegiance to the upper classes made them insensitive to the plight of impoverished Jews and others; she even suspected that they might have been able to tolerate Hitler, had he not been so aggressive in his anti-Semitism. As a result she elected a positive stance of affirming her Jewish identity along with her radicalism, expressed in lines from her 1944 collection, Beast in View: “To be a Jew in the twentieth century / is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, / Wishing to be invisible, you choose / Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.”6 When she became a mother in the late 1940s, she decided to set up a Christmas tree, and even underwent a brief flirtation with Episcopalianism; but she also volunteered to teach Jewish Sunday school classes and remained in communication with her own rabbi from childhood. After the founding of Israel she emerged as a strong partisan, especially during the 1967 and 1973 wars when she feared the Jewish population would be decimated. During the 1970s, suffering from diabetes and other ailments, she finally realized her dream of visiting the Jewish state.
In her literary development, Rukeyser first read Shakespeare and the Bible at home. Then her parents bought for her sets of Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac, The Encyclopedia Britannica, and The Book of Knowledge. After her adventures in Scottsboro, Rukeyser attended Roosevelt aviation school from 1933 to 1934. She ran out of money before obtaining her pilot’s license and in later years would episodically launch other ventures to earn it, without success. Next she worked at Left-wing theater jobs (especially Theater Union) and for theater magazines; her fascination with drama had been kindled during her Vassar sojourn, during which time she met Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969), with whom she continued to be in touch. In the early summer of 1934 she was in residence at the Yaddo writers colony, and her Theory of Flight was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1935.
In 1936 she traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to witness the devastating effects of silicosis on the workers there. Then she went to England to meet T. S. Eliot and other writers, followed by a trip to Spain to report on the antifascist Olympics held during the summer of 1936 in Barcelona. Her sojourn in Spain coincided with the onset of the Spanish Civil War, and she formed a strong attachment to a German antifascist athlete, Otto Boch, who was later killed in the war and whom she would address in her poems decades afterward. Rukeyser next took jobs involving statistics, films, and photographs, publishing U.S. 1 in 1938 and A Turning Wind in 1939. Throughout the Great Depression she indulged her large appetites for food, sex with a variety of male and female partners, and adventure. Even in her last decade, she took trips to North Vietnam (1972) and South Korea (1975) to protest the U.S. aggression against the former and state repression in the latter.
Rukeyser’s relation to the Communist Party bore some similarity to that of Ella Winter (1898–1980), an intimate friend and occasional lover. Winter was first married to the muckraker Lincoln Steffens (1886–1935), assisting him toward pro-Communist views, and then to Donald Ogden Stewart (1894–1980), a comic playwright, novelist, and scenarist who also became pro-Communist and served as president of the League of American Writers from 1937 to 1940. Some Communist Party members, as well as various anti-Stalinists and anticommunists, believed Rukeyser and Winter to be “secret” Party members, and their activities and public positions tended to reinforce this belief. Robert Gorham Davis was convinced that Rukeyser held such a status because he claims to have seen her being bawled out by a Party functionary, Jack Stachel, for publishing a poem in a magazine thought to be anti-Party.7 Rukeyser, however, who was far less active and prominent than Winter, was not especially interested in political factionalism; unlike Winter, she consorted with writers of diverse political persuasions, including the Trotskyists John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan. Most likely she was a member of the Young Communist League in the early 1930s, but after 1940 she became increasingly independent.
In a 1980 interview, Rukeyser insisted that she had desired to be part of the Communist movement, but its political zig-zags made any stable relationship impossible. In particular, she was inspired by a pre–Popular Front vision of militant antifascist and anticapitalist collaboration by a range of radical tendencies she witnessed at the outset of the Spanish Civil War.8 In the political biography she later imparted to her son, she said that she had come close to joining in the mid-1930s—to the point of taking out an application—but had pulled back at the last minute from a desire to protect her creative autonomy.9 By 1940, however, she was adamant about her independence from the Communist Party in her correspondence, although there is no public record of her dissociating herself from the Party’s slavish pro-Soviet policies during the next decade. In a June 1940 letter to Louis Untermeyer, she articulated the validity of a visionary, semimystical politics:
I believe in poetry. I believe that the life of people and the life of poetry must ultimately mean the same thing, in the different terms involved. I believe in the life of the spirit generally walking the earth, against war, against slavery, for the giving of all the processes and inventions and art and technique of living.
She insisted that her political views were consistent, namely that she was always personally ready and willing to fight fascism—whether in Spain or in France—but she opposed conscription and forcing others to fight. She concluded that “I do not belong to any party or organization, and that is why I say I am vulnerable from both sides.”10
During the late 1930s Rukeyser moved to California where Robert Oppenheimer assisted her in finding work. There she met Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), and was active in causes supported by the Communist Party. As part of the Left-wing scientific community in Berkeley, including not only the Oppenheimer brothers but also the crystallographer Melba Phillips, Rukeyser pursued her literary and personal concerns without feeling much pressure to conform. She lived from hand to mouth, frequently borrowing apartments and small houses. During the war she resided in Oakland and afterward in San Francisco. In 1943 she took a job on the East Coast in the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information, but she w red-baiting campaign in the press which coincided with a disgraceful unsigned political and personal attack on her that appeared in the Partisan Review.11 Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1945, she taught a writing class at the Communist-led California Labor School. She also passed through a brief marriage in 1945 to the painter Glyn Collins (it was annulled), and in 1947 gave birth to a son by another man. She told the son, William, that his father had died, and to her parents she explained that the boy’s father was Jewish and was killed fighting in Palestine. In the late 1950s, however, she acknowledged to William that his father was not Jewish and that he was still alive, although they had had no communication since the pregnancy. Among her affairs with women, two of the most intense were with Rebecca Pitts (1905–1983), a one-time Communist intellectual also close to novelist Josephine Herbst, and the writer May Sarton (1912–1995). Her last decades were spent in the companionship of her literary agent, Monica McCall.
When Rukeyser returned to the East Coast, she found a relatively safe haven at Sarah Lawrence College, during the presidency of Harold Taylor. She took a half-time position there in 1954, so that she could devote herself to raising her son as well as writing. Her works in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s included not only more volumes of poetry, but a biography of mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs, several volumes of criticism, some plays, a novel, and four children’s books. Her teaching salary was a pittance, but the medical benefits were crucial. Occasionally she was red-baited by the local chapter of the American Legion, which demanded that the trustees get rid of her. Her situation was precarious—during the McCarthy era she lost a commission to write the script for the radio show “Omnibus” and a contract with Little, Brown publishing company. Nonetheless she maintained the job until her first stroke debilitated her in 1964. Among the students to whom she remained closest was the poet, and, later, novelist, Alice Walker.
In 1950, Ella Winter fled the McCarthyite witch-hunt by going to England with Donald Ogden Stewart. She and Rukeyser followed a similar political evolution: disillusionment with Stalin and his legacy, especially after the Khrushchev revelations of 1956, but also an attitude of refusing to explicitly renounce the Soviet Union in public because its policies provided a counterweight to the imperialist actions of the United States. Nevertheless, Rukeyser supported the Hungarians in their 1956 rebellion against Soviet domination and the Czechs in the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Rukeyser’s later politics were also significantly influenced by Left-wing scientists she knew or had studied, such as the British Marxist J. D. Bernal (1901–71), famous for his view that science closely reflects economic development and should be used as a guide in formulating social policy. In particular, Rukeyser’s optimism about revolutions in society was linked to the hopes and expectations arising from “revolutions” in physics and biology.
During her last years Rukeyser was embraced by feminist writers and activists, and her identification with the movement was wholehearted. Lines from her poems became the titles of two of the most influential volumes of women’s verse, No More Masks (1973) and The World Split Open (1974). Yet Adrienne Rich described Rukeyser as “our Neruda,” and there were ways in which Rukeyser probably felt more intellectually comfortable in the company of Frank Oppenheimer, who had by then become director of the San Francisco Exploratorium.12 Increasingly she described her politics simply as “Left”; this was not due to an abandonment of socialism, but because, if she could not give a full and complicated answer, she preferred a term that did not lead to simple stereotyping. All her life she read voluminously, and she regarded herself as well versed in Marxism from her own point of view.
Throughout her literary career, Rukeyser rose to the challenge of developing techniques for communicating strong feelings about the lives of ordinary people. Oddly enough, while she regarded poetry as a gift with which people were born to enhance communication, she was scathing in her judgments about poets she considered lazy, and, as a teacher, she would make withering criticisms of her students’ work. Like her friends Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, she also scorned the politics of the literary establishment.
In a sense, her early association with Dynamo, where she was the only female contributor, placed her in appropriate company. As Herman Spector pointed out, in a plea to recruit financial support for the magazine, “Within the space limitations of a 38-page quarterly, we intend to show how the unity of revolutionary significance can illumine a multiplicity of techniques, temperaments, experiences.”13 Of all the Left poets of the interwar generation, Rukeyser was perhaps the most creative in carrying out her belief that a new age demanded new styles and subject matters if art were to be an effective agent of change. In her personal behavior, she was drawn to a romantic image of herself as living fast and dying young, and the health problems that started plaguing her after the age of fifty were a possible consequence.
Her own contributions to Dynamo were among her most direct statements of political commitment, including her stirring autobiographical testament, “Poem of Childhood.”14 In “Theory of Flight,” which appeared in her book of the same title, she depicts the modern revolutionary leader as a pilot who must become the expression of “the people’s” desire.15 By the time she assembled “The Book of the Dead” section of her collection U.S. 1, comprising the first seventy-two pages, Rukeyser had blended her visionary approach with the documentary and reportage motifs of Depression culture to create a variant of the technique that Walter Benjamin theorized as “profane illumination.”16 The term refers to art capable of vivifying the common experiences of humankind with a religious glow, through the use of images from the nonsacred material world.
“The Book of the Dead,” although structurally and thematically alluding to an Egyptian religious text treating life after death, is the rubric for a sequence of poems individually titled “The Road,” “West Virginia,” and variously by the names of American working men and women. The documentary raw material of this work is the court testimony, interviews with doctors, and speeches of dying men and their families in the context of an industrial catastrophe. The historical background on which she drew was the situation in the early 1930s when thousands of workers had been lured from throughout the United States by Union Carbide to dig a tunnel at a breakneck speed to maximize profits to divert a West Virginia river for a power station. As a result, hundreds breathed silica (a glass-like compound) into their lungs, which caused death.
Rukeyser’s poetic sequence grounded in the circumstances proceeds on a complex journey during which the reader travels to West Virginia not only geographically, but historically; at the outset there are references to indentured servants from the colonial period (ancestors of the modern wage slaves) as well as to John Brown (prefiguring the rise of new abolitionists to destroy capitalism). This initiation is followed by the voices of members of the protest committee, led by the African American George Robinson; descriptions of the silicosis; interviews with doctors; and a tour of the power plant. The last poem in the collection offers an intimation of utopia in its depiction of a “fertilizing image” of “a tall woman.”17
The progress of Rukeyser as a social poet was expertly traced by John Malcolm Brinnin (1916–1998) in his 1943 essay, “The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication.” Brinnin argued that Rukeyser’s three volumes of poetry published during the Depression were in miniature the literary-political record of the reshaping and transformation of a generation, instructive for others drawn to similar issues. Brinnin was well qualified to formulate this proposition, for he worked in the same tradition with many analogous concerns. Born in Nova Scotia, Brinnin was the son of a theater scenic artist from Boston. His family moved to Detroit when he was four. After an early education in Catholic schools, he entered Wayne University (later Wayne State University) already enthusiastic about Marcel Proust. He soon dropped out of school to begin a career of self-education in the public library as well as engage in the activities of the Detroit arts and Left-wing communities.
Supporting himself by working in bookstores, he quickly began to engage in publishing projects. In 1934 he established a magazine called Prelude, a miscellany of poetry and prose by Detroit writers. This publication merged with the Detroit John Reed Club’s New Force to create New Writers in 1936, which published the work of radical as well as avant-garde poets and fiction authors. Later that year he launched Signatures, a larger and more impressive quarterly that featured sections of “work in progress” by a range of well-known contributors, mostly Left-wing, from the United States and England. Rukeyser was among the poets, along with Kenneth Patchen, Louis Mac-Neice, and Horace Gregory. Brinnin’s own work in Signatures appeared under the name Isaac Gerneth.
The death of his father in 1936 prompted Brinnin to enroll at the University of Michigan to finish his education, where he supported himself by running a campus book shop, called “The Book Room,” and winning Hopwood prizes. A veteran of the Detroit John Reed Club and a member of the Young Communist League, Brinnin was active politically and culturally with other young writers and activists, some of whom were, like himself, gay. One of these was Kimon Friar (1911–1993), later a prominent translator of modern Greek literature.18 In 1940 Brinnin moved to New York City. He then spent 1941 doing graduate work at Harvard, succeeded by five years of teaching at Vassar as an instructor. Following a period of travel and short-term jobs, Brinnin became director of the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA in New York City, where he launched a sensational program of reading appearances by such major poets as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edith Sitwell, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, and William Carlos Williams. While his first published works were volumes of poetry, including The Garden Is Political (1942), The Lincoln Lyrics (1942) and No Arch, No Triumph (1945), he eventually turned to scholarship, co-authoring with Friar the influential Modern Poetry: American and British (1951) and a series of studies of poets, the most well known being Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal (1956).
Several years into the Popular Front, Brinnin first began submitting verse to national Communist publications, and his work appeared on several occasions after 1937 in the New Masses under his pseudonym Isaac Gerneth. At the time, the poet, playwright, and, later, novelist, Norman Rosten (1914–1996) was helping to select poetry for publication in the New Masses and strongly encouraged Brinnin; from New York he communicated the enthusiasm about Brinnin’s verse expressed by other young people working in the New Masses office such as Samuel Sillen and Joy Davidman.19 Rosten also kept Brinnin informed of the economic constraints that threatened the regularity of the New Masses Literary Supplement, which encouraged an editorial policy of keeping poems to a maximum length of one page. Moreover, Rosten felt compelled to impress upon Brinnin that the magazine’s priority for selecting verse was that the poems should “deal with acute ‘social’ material as much as possible.” More specifically, Rosten told Brinnin that while his “lightning like diction and imagery” made him “a poet’s poet,” the New Masses editors, although “quick to recognize your ability,” were still “a little wary of your lines.” In particular, “The question of ‘popular’ understanding is very important for a revolutionary magazine.” Thus the dilemma of a New Masses editor was to find poetry with “reading clarity” in an immediate sense. “You, being a fastidious worker of images and rhythms, are not too easy to grasp. A compliment, really. But the revolution must go on—even with lousy poetry.”20 Rosten’s and Brinnin’s verse appeared together in the Communist Party pamphlet Saludl Poems, Stories, and Sketches of Spain by American Writers (1938), where they were identified as members of a “single literary group—the younger, social minded, ‘proletarian’ authors.”21 Brinnin’s contribution, “For a Young Poet Dead in Spain,” was well crafted and written from the heart—a good friend, Robert Campbell, had been killed in action in Spain—but was nonetheless a conventional tribute as well as a prediction of future promise.
A year later, the clash between immediate clarity and technique necessary for more complex creativity hit home when Brinnin’s submission to a second Communist Party pamphlet, Get Organized: Stories and Poems about Trade Union People (1939), was rejected. The series editor, Alan Calmer, explained to Brinnin that his task in producing the volume paralleled that of a revolutionary poet’s efforts in verse. It meant “catering a little to the demand for ‘popular’ poems and stories, while trying to feed it with good writing, even though to start with it has to be on a rather simple level.” The Party’s literary pamphlet series “must be on a central theme and of a direct character to reach a lay audience.” If Brinnin could write a poem on the Flint sit-down strikes it would be usable. The work he had submitted, however, “Cadillac Square,” “is fine but out of scope for the new collection.”22
Thus in his 1943 essay on Muriel Rukeyser, Brinnin spoke from his own experiences as he explained her struggle to remain one of those poets who have their eyes on “the immediate issues of their time” while avoiding two temptations. The first of these was to succumb “so close to the partisanship of radical journalism that their verse is merely a kind of poetic commentary upon movements of the Party line”; the second was, in the face of “political stress and disillusion,” to “retreat toward obscurantism, the withdrawal from the objective arena into the subjective room.” Rukeyser, Brinnin argued, represents those who “have undergone the disappointments and tortured doubts of the last decade and yet succeeded in enlarging both their strength of purpose and the scope of their poetry.”
Brinnin substantiates his contention by demonstrating Rukeyser’s move from an emphasis on straightforward declarations, often in urban speech, toward the increasing use of images of a psychological and surrealist character, as well as a change in the use of symbols from those that were public and universal to those more “privately conceived and privately endowed.” In her work one sees the classic—and insoluble in a formulaic sense—posing of the problem of “how” a poet should “sing” in the face of mass suffering. Brinnin puts it as follows: “Since the social poet is the one to whom communication is the first and necessary virtue, his attempts to be strong and clear without seeming banal, and his attempts to use the complex resources of the English language, are twin problems.” He proposes considering Rukeyser’s early career as a field in which to examine a variety of strategies: the equation of personal rebellion (against “father”) with social rebellion (against the rulers of society); the “intellectual objectification” of her political views (her use of an airplane’s flight to represent human aspiration); the Popular Front effort to appropriate popular heroes such as Lincoln; and the use of popular ballads for Marxist insights. While her focus tended to be on “the thing said” and “not the manner of expression,” Brinnin locates a second movement under way in the later poems of U.S. 1, where he finds a “use of language so complex, and a compression of ideas so intense, that it is unquestionably removed from the grasp of the lay reader, not even to mention the proletarian.”
Rukeyser, in fact, has come face to face with a familiar dilemma for the social poet:
whether to insist upon first premises, even though that means a static repetition of familiar ideology, or to exercise full imagination and the resources of language in an endeavor to contribute a new dimension to poetry, though that attempt, in its inevitable intellectual concentration, must deny a social audience.
The genius of Rukeyser is that she refuses to fashion a definite choice, declining to break entirely with one aim or advance completely to another. Still, the trend in her work toward the latter choice is increasingly evident in A Turning Wind (1939); as Brinnin observes, in this work, “The problems of a generation, for instance, are no longer centered exclusively in the terms of the striker or the organizer, but in the larger concept of Death, who appears in many disguises.”23 Whereas Rukeyser’s earlier books had been promoted by the New Masses, A Turning Wind was never reviewed in the magazine.
In reference to the achievement of poets such as Rukeyser, how, then, should the term modernism be used in illuminating the poetic practice of the pro-Communist literary Left? If it is to retain any meaningful coherence as a category typified by the Eliot-Pound revolution in poetic sensibility, the term must be employed with considerable specificity and caution. Most Left poets (Hughes, Hayes, etc.) have a relationship to modernism and might now and then produce a particular passage or poem that would be usefully treated under that rubric. But only a few (Rukeyser, Patchen) might convincingly be dubbed “modernist” in terms of the preponderance of their writing. This is partly because, as this book has documented, the weight of authoritative opinion within the Communist cultural leadership that cohered in the late 1920s was hostile to high modernism, and such opinion carried weight due to the nature of the time. Among the handful of exceptions was in regard to the adaptation of certain popular experimental techniques, especially cinematic and documentary, as evidenced in the work of Dos Passos, so long as the result did not appear to be too difficult or obscure. Of course, some voices of opinion did cry out that Left writers could learn from the moderns, but these tended to be of dissident and less official spokespersons.24 Yet, in practice, while clearly opposed to the worldview of the “reactionary modernism” of Eliot and Pound, the modern Left writers certainly shared with many modernists a fondness for certain themes such as the city and technology. Moreover, there were assuredly calls for a fresh language, attention to craft, and technical innovations appropriate to a new kind of literature that were widespread on the Left and that provide solid evidence that much of the Left literary tradition has a crucial place in modern literature.
What is perhaps decisive is that, from the origins of the tradition of literary criticism produced by the mid-twentieth-century Communist cultural Left, while a few divergence can certainly be found, there is a steady steam of stern pronouncements against the “difficulty” that forms a prime feature of modernism. One can see this in statements such as the conclusion of a report issued by the Pen and Hammer research group (comprised of Communist academics in the early 1930s) that argued that “the revolutionary poet should, in general, so simplify his writing that it can be grasped by a mass audience.”25 Such a view was usually claimed as a political requirement, as stated in 1932 by the Midwest Worker’s Cultural Federation demand of its members “to reject and deny all bourgeois culture as the culture of a dying class, and to build a revolutionary cultural tradition.”26 Another example is afforded by the leading Marxist critic Granville Hicks:
Whereas the revolutionary novelist may, at least to a certain point, learn from the more critical of his bourgeois predecessors, the revolutionary poet has no earlier stage of revolt to which he can look for guidance. The result is that several of the younger poets who are in sympathy with Communism have tried to adapt to their purpose the forms and idioms of the experimental reactionary poets. Both Horace Gregory and S. Funaroff, for example, have been much influenced by T. S. Eliot.... Eliot and kindred reactionaries have evolved forms that express their own restlessness and futility. The attempt to use their technical devices for the expression of the revolutionary spirit inevitably involves a fundamental contradiction, and the resulting poems are confused and ineffective.
Hicks’s conclusion is the familiar claim that poets like Gregory and Funaroff would “find much healthier nourishment” in the songs of such militant working-class poets as Joe Hill and Ella May Wiggins, rather “than in the elaborate elegies of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.”27
While many of these early 1930s formulations can be attributed to the “workerism” of the pre-Popular Front era, pressure on Left poets to simplify and write directly did not diminish in the late 1930s, although exceptions were sometimes made and latitude allowed for writers whom various Communist Party editors wished to court, especially in the New Masses. Exertion from certain editors as well as vocal readers to prioritize social immediacy and communicative lucidity is unmistakable in most publications associated with the Communist Party, such as Sing Democracy published by its Labor Poets of America and Young Labor Poets. Such concerns also shape the dominant character of submissions to poetry sessions of the conferences of the broader League of American Writers.
Instances of rebellion against the excesses of this pressure was, as one might expect, constant. A clear example of a dispute over issues related to modernism occurred when Joseph Freeman wrote a Daily Worker column in 1933 defending the work of poets whose poetry “is honestly describing the emotional world of those who have developed in bourgeois literature and are moving toward Communism.” He emphatically concluded:
I have asked our poets not to falsify this aspect of their development. It is only too common to find people who are Communists in thought and action and bourgeois in their feelings. Our emotions develop more slowly and painfully than our ideas. Some poets attempt to conceal or overcome this disparity by writing verse that represents only their ideas. In most cases the result is flat, stale and unprofitable.
It is better to achieve genuine growth by following the evolution of our feelings naturally and honestly.28
Yet this was not the end of the matter. Private correspondence, as is often the case, enriches and complicates the published record.
In this instance, A. B. Magil responded to Freeman two days later in a personal communication saying that such remarks “repudiated almost all the literary criticism you have written during the past few years.” Magil regarded such calls for “self-development” and “honesty to oneself” as a “laissez-faire” attitude in literature invoking nothing less than “venerable ghosts of the bourgeois twilight.” Carried to its “logical conclusion,” Magil continued, “this can only mean the substitution of bourgeois subjectivism and eclecticism in literature for Marxism.” The task was not to judge literature by “honesty,” but, rather, Marxist critics should guide poets toward Communism and “not allow them to shift for themselves, making a virtue of their stumblings and hesitations.” He insisted that
Proletarian literature is not achieved “naturally” (through spontaneous development) in a capitalist society any more than the proletarian dictatorship is achieved “naturally.” [It] requires the conscious activity of those who have transcended the limitations of the bourgeois world-view, of the Marxist-Leninists.29
Magil wrote to Freeman as a comrade offering a sharp opinion, not as a higher official delivering a ukase. Over time Magil’s cultural influence would increase while Freeman would be excommunicated.
One important variation is that the relative autonomy of the African American Literary Left allowed poets to develop in a manner that was free of accusations of crypto-modernist adaptations. The pro-Communist work of Robert Hayden and Sterling Brown clearly defended the autonomy and integrity of African-American culture while using a variety of linguistic and verse strategies, typified by Brown’s “Scotty Has His Say.” In this poem, Scotty, a poor southern Black proletarian, is disturbed about white employers overworking his lover. He makes threats of retaliation with African American “witchcraft” in a manner that mocks the whites’ fear and ignorance of Black folk culture:
ef yuh treats huh mean
I gonna sprinkle goofy dus’
In yo’ soup tureen ...
I got me a Blackcat’s wishbone,
Got some Blackcat’s ankle dus,’
An’ yuh crackers better watch out
Ef I see yo’ carcass fus’—30
Scotty’s spirit of rebellion, which blended with Black-specific dialect, folk culture, and power relations of men and women to the dominant culture, falls within the realm of the Communists’ view of class-based national oppression. Yet the poem also provides powerful confirmation of the need for a critical methodology such as Houston Baker’s argument for a “racial poetics.”31
Robert Hayden, in “Gabriel: Hanged for Leading a Slave Revolt,” uses the rhythms and question-and-answer format of a nursery rhyme or ballad to inscribe the voice of a rebel-hero who even on his deathbed refuses to retreat one inch from his commitment to rebellion:
Black Gabriel, riding
To the gallows tree,
In this last hour
What do you see?
I see a thousand,
Thousand slaves
Rising up
From forgotten graves,
And their wounds drip flame
On slavery’s ground,
And their chains shake Dixie
With a thunder sound.32
The use of such a mild and familiar form as the structure on which to hang a vision of horror and revenge is at once hypnotically spell-binding yet jarring to one’s complacency.
These examples, while experimental, nevertheless remain rooted in a desire for comprehensibility, based in either a realist-naturalist recreation of a scene, or the familiar gothic features of Gabriel’s apocalyptic vision. Not with standing, in additional verse by Brown, Hayden, and other radical Black writers, one can also discern more modernist tropes in the poetic treatment of Black culture, dialect, history, and worksongs. Fragmentation, a corrosive skepticism, and modern difficulty are evidenced in Brown’s “Southern Road,” in which it is almost impossible to understand the nature of the crime for which the African American speaker must serve a life sentence on a chain gang:
Burner tore his—hunh—
Black heart away;
Burner tore his—hunh—
Black heart away;
Get me life, bebby,
An’ a day.33
There is intentional ambiguity here so that the reader, who struggles to make sense of the obscure references to Burner and the tearing away of his “Black heart,” will eventually realize that the specific “crime” is not important; under the Jim Crow system a “crime” will eventually happen to a Black person. It is also difficult to pronounce the sound, “hunh,” which seems to fuse the noise of the hammer striking stone with an exclamation of exertion made by the narrator (or the chain gang as a whole) with each swing.
The reader may grasp the necessity of enduring a chain gang in order to duplicate the authentic sound, once again reminding us of the distance between the poem’s readers and subjects. In another example, Robert Hayden’s “We Are the Hunted” is a poem that appears initially to simply recreate the fears of Black slaves escaping into the woods. Yet no one has satisfactorily explained the ambiguous metaphors of his closing lines:
We shall find shelter from the black pursuit
And doors against the tangled, multi-dark.34
This sort of writing, employing abstract although powerfully suggestive color-reversals, wrapped around an insubstantial center, was well-nigh atypical among the Black Marxist Left; too sparse in aggregate to be the basis of theorizing about forms. On the contrary, the consummate poet of the Left, for African Americans as well as Euro-Americans, was Langston Hughes, who made a virtue of his “simplicity” to the point that it becomes an aesthetic issue to be addressed.35
Indeed, Hughes’s verse was an experiment in the complex simplicity Richard Wright advocated in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”36 Hughes’s “Letter to the Academy,” composed in formal diction and appearing in International Literature in 1933, observes belligerently that literature of the past, reflective of class peace, is incapable of responding to the new world situation. Moreover, a feature of the new era is the restoration of a sensuality where the “flesh,” previously defeated by the “spirit,” returns as an equal partner.37 “Good Morning, Revolution,” surfacing around the same time in New Masses, displays casual slang, colloquialisms, and irregular stanzaic patterns; Hughes whimsically domesticates “a guy named Revolution” into a superheroic proletarian buddy.38 Ironically, Hughes pioneers a “familiarization” strategy, an odd parallel to the “defamiliarization” techniques of modernism.
“White Man,” published in New Masses in 1936, is one of Hughes’s most effective experiments in dereification. He starts on a personal note, speaking as a Black worker to a white man who takes “all the best jobs,” lives in the finest housing, hobnobs with fascist powers, and reaps the profits from Black cultural production. Hitherto powerless in this situation, the Black worker has discovered, from reading Marx’s writings (“something... that rich people don’t like to read”), that this “White man” really spells his name “C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T” and may not even always be white.39 The argument is expressed is a forthright manner, but its full absorption would turn the world on its head. Thus in a “simple” way the voice of Hughes’s oral poem begins to tear down the current forms of language and thought so that new forms can emerge.
“Our Spring,” from the same period, dramatizes the results of joining with the “buddy” Revolution and demystifying racism so as to disclose its true function as a legitimator of class power. With the speaker merged with Revolution as an international force, whose martyrs from Boston to Germany are replaced like “those rivers / That fill with the melted snow in spring,” the standpoint has shifted from “I” to “we.” Thus the seasons themselves will be returned to the people in a pastoral-utopian image where “the land will be fresh and clean again, / Denuded of the past—.”40
Hughes’s “Song of Revolution,” from The Negro Worker in 1933, seems to fulfill the optimism so frequently demanded by readers and some editors of the Communist movement. It also posits a role for revolutionary verse, becoming “a song . . . Marching like fire over the world.” The power of this song lies in its ability to work up its components from the material world, to become an instrument “drowning” the past, eliciting “youth and laughter,” and banishing “doubt.” Thus emboldened, the revolutionary force can surgically remove “fear” from the world, thereby allowing “the children of all creation” to emerge from a deep sleep into a new reality of “joy.”41 In contrast, “Revolution,” appearing a year later in New Masses, surprisingly adulates the powers of “the Great Mob” for its numbers and singlemindedness that “knows no fear.” A nameless leader directs this force against the exploiter made of “iron and steel and gold” whose “golden throat” must be split from “ear to ear.”42
In 1928, Hughes asked the same question as did Alfred Kreymborg a few years later in “American Jeremiad.” In three short couplets called “Johannesburg Mines,” he described the situation of 240,000 natives working, and asked: “What kind of poem / Would you make out of that?”43 The problem is repeated at the end, in order to engage the reader in the process of formulating a response, suggesting that an appropriate answer to this material fact requires a unity of poet and masses. Poems such as “Black Workers,” printed five years later, are meant to represent Hughes’s own answer to the question. In five lines he describes how the work of bees “is taken from them,” then affirms that “We,” the black workers, are “like the bees— / But it won’t last / Forever.”44 Although he uses a condensed version of the traditional form of the fable (specifically alluding to Bernard Mandeville’s eighteenth-century attack on idealism in “Fable of the Bees”), he shocks common sense by affirming that Black workers have such a status. This overstatement should cause the reader to seek out discrepancies, which of course lie principally in the area of human consciousness—the black worker’s capacity to understand, theorize, and act to change circumstances. The decision to separate out the last word of the poem, “Forever,” is a warning against an apocalyptic view of immediate gratification with the suggestion that the struggle may be long and hard.
In addition to such divisions on the cultural Left as that between Freeman and Magil over what constituted “laissez-faire” in literary policy, the obtainable documentation also implies that stock allegations, which often involved charges and of counter-charges about cultural opportunism on one side and vulgarity on the other, were habitually mixed up with jealousy, envy, and personality conflicts. While writers associated with the Rebel Poet and Anvil tended to see the New Masses after Walt Carmon’s departure as increasingly elitist and unsympathetic to authentic worker culture, those drawn to establish Dynamo felt that the New Masses was too functionalist and unsympathetic to publishing a range of poetic sensibilities.
Edwin Rolfe, in particular, believed that he was under compulsion from older Party members, such as V. J. Jerome and Joseph North, to invoke criteria with which he felt uncomfortable. In letters to James T. Farrell between 1933 and 1936, he apologized for crudities in his own reviews, and for his inability to publish a story by Farrell in the “Features” section he was editing for the Daily Worker because one of the characters in the story makes a disparaging remark about “foreigners,” which readers might construe as reflecting the author’s own sentiments. One of Edwin Rolfe’s poems, “Definition,” while conceivably inspired by a conflict at the Daily Worker, embodied an indirect attack on the mentality of Communist Party leaders such as V. J. Jerome, whom he felt were manipulative in their dealings with young writers.45
Yet Dynamo poets detested not only Walt Carmon, seen as a publisher of “trash,” but also his New Masses replacement, Stanley Burnshaw, regarded as a middle-class intellectual temporarily slumming at the time when proletarian literature appeared to be in a Bull Market.46 It is conspicuous that various positionings on literary disputes do not fall into simple categories; they evolve within a force field of elements that are sometimes unique to little magazine production and other times peculiar to the political and cultural output of the U.S. Left. One can see in Dynamo, and even more aggressively in Partisan Review, a less dogmatic rejection of “difficulty.” Yet the issue of “difficulty” in isolation hardly sums up the totality of the disputations that drove forward the Literary Left, debates addressing issues that render it still relevant to the contemporary transactions of those who continue to counterpoise their artistic visions and cultural critique to a world in which the haves methodically exploit the have-nots.
Prior to anxieties about “difficulty” were sentiments underpinning the choice to become a revolutionary artist in the first place, such as those exuded by the young Mike Gold, in his letters to Louis Untermeyer. Gold wrote during the World War I era where he dreamed of devoting literary publications to the goals of “vigor and recklessness.” He expressed his pride in the magazine Flame for such qualities, dedicating it to be “the champion of all the lost causes—anarchism, vegetarianism, dynamite, obscenity, etc.” Gold announced that he liked “fun, hellishness, beauty” and hated “righteousness and joylessness anywhere.” Yet he wondered, “Why can’t a lot of this stuff be made the starry hitching team for the wages of justice?” He was repelled by his discovery that so many writers ended up performing for the elite and failed “to stay with the masses.” Hence he surrendered to the temptation to call “poets who only poeticize ‘criminals,’ ” which he realized was “raw,” but “I cannot help getting peeved at their eternal arrogances.” His closing question is as applicable today as it was eighty years ago: “what sort of instincts can anyone have who is not seared and wounded by the sight of poverty, even when it does not hamper him personally? It is such an offense to the sense of beauty and love which the poet is supposed to have a monopoly on.”47
What eventuated as such sentiments became allied to a specific political organization, its ideology, and its cultural institutions? It is seductive but ingenuous to assess the itinerary as merely the loss of innocence in which the writer forfeited self-reliant emotional response to ritualized political demands. Communist Party institutions were brimming with people who were as much affected by their unique cultural and personal backgrounds as by their miscalculations of all the contrarieties implicated in the Great Promise of the USSR. Writers were energized by their idealized view of this bold regime, and the U.S. Party’s declaration of pro-Soviet ardor, as much as they may have been cowed or blinded by it. More personal factors such as one’s self-assurance or the condition of one’s intimate life might have much to do with his or her response to what the Party, its organization and ideology, had to offer. To understand a pro-Communist poet’s relation to literary trends requires an investigation of formative aesthetic experiences, early literary models, networks of friends, and traumatic life experiences. As a generalization, one can only conclude that the Party had a moral authority that should be neither minimized nor exaggerated.
For most poets, their acquisition of an early aesthetic sensibility did not operate in terms of perceiving art in terms of “Left” and “Right” so much as simply responding to the literary texts available to them in light of their psychological state when encountering them. Very often a writer begins to produce verse under the inspiration of a favorite poet or two. In some cases there may be a political attraction, as in the instance of Walt Whitman’s democratic views (although Whitman loathed political affiliations and ideology); other times the association was serendipitous. Edwin Rolfe, for example, encountered Hart Crane’s work at a formative moment because his intimate friend, Leo Hurwitz, was the brother-in-law of a Crane enthusiast, Gorham Munson (1896–1969).48 A poet’s absorption of a Marxist viewpoint was frequently the result of strong emotions, observations, and experiences that caused a prior discontent with or opposition to the status quo; assimilated in this fashion, Marxism might clarify, but rarely created, one’s radicalism.
There is empirical evidence, in cases such as Jerome, Trachtenberg, Gold, and Magil, that longevity as a Communist Party cultural leader or full-time editor seemed to require highly politicized approaches to culture. Yet one cannot fully understand the cultural unease that permeated the far more numerous rank-and-file of the cultural movement through simplistic binaries—such as positing modernist libertarians contra socialist-realist literary commissars. Some poets closest to modernist styles in their own work nevertheless made explicit non-literary “demands” on other writers, such as insisting that one could only improve one’s poetry by becoming immersed in the working-class movement—too often a euphemism for carrying out Communist Party policies. Those who refrained from making such demands tended to be at arm’s length from any organizational commitment to the Party, such as Kenneth Fearing (who may have been briefly a Party member) and Horace Gregory (who was mainly an ideological supporter), and to have had limited careers as committed revolutionaries engaged in organized Communist political practice. Thus their contribution to understanding the dilemma of the “committed” writer must be qualified.
Moreover, as the 1930s unfolded and the Popular Front policy was avowed, there was an comprehensible exertion on the part of broad layers of cultural workers, not just Communist Party cadre, to reach “the masses” in order to enlarge their political consciousness about the menace of fascism. There had always been pressure to be comprehensible but this was an unexpected new turn toward popularization. Oddly, it came in the same years when the more studied works of the British Left poets led by Auden were accruing celebrity. Thus the counter-orientation to move from being “proletarian” and “revolutionary” poets to becoming forthrightly popular “people’s poets” cannot simply be construed as writers accepting orders from above to follow the line of the Popular Front; Left poets and their audiences were amenable to the Popular Front orientation because they personally felt a growing political urgency to fight against fascism. The Republican loss in the Spanish Civil War and the staggering advance of fascism in Germany impelled many to sound the alarm to the broader public. If literary history was merely a matter of a linear development of Left poetry from simple to more complex, it would seem that the kind of direct writing promoted in the late 1930s by the Labor Poets of America and Young Labor Poets should precede rather than follow the much more memorable achievement of the Dynamo poets of the early 1930s.
Perhaps the most imposing reason for applying the category of modernism to pro-Communist poets only with explicit qualifications, cognizant of the danger of obtruding a “theme” on the complexity of a writer’s entire life, is that the basic framework for Left writers was the historical materialism of Marxism, which they assimilated in sundry ways and to variable degrees. Not only did such a philosophic perspective place poets in a special relation to all literary schools whose defining features were of a contrary weltanschauung; identification as a Marxist first, whatever its liabilities in terms of real or imagined political obligations, could liberate Left poets to utilize a variety of strategies to actualize their literary goals. A Marxist novelist might move among or blend the literary traditions of realism, naturalism, surrealism, hard-boiled fiction, and regionalism, to produce a Judgment Day, a Yonnondio, a Day of the Locust, or a Native Son. Many Left-wing poets had markedly hybrid styles, used varied strategies within or among poems, or employed a particular technique in order to comment satirically on it.
John Malcolm Brinnin was certainly astute in holding up Muriel Rukeyser’s work as a model that brings the strains of the Communist literary tradition into bold relief: As a poet, she was promoted by a small group of Communist Party enthusiasts mainly for her more accessible writings; her more unequivocally modernist attributes were not broached or were implicitly criticized. Yet her growth as an artistic activist was largely self-determined by her choices and unusual freedom of movement; after the late 1930s she did not evolve as a participant in the collective projects of Communist Party–led publications and organizations. What she gained from the Communist tradition was, however, more than just a vision; the burden it placed on her to “popularize,” to relate to common experience, drew her to new challenges and unique efforts. Fortunately, she rarely succumbed to the temptations of self-falsification or banality.
Her inner resources, and the autonomy of her personal life, kept Rukeyser at a distance from the one-dimensional anti-intellectualism and self-righteous “workerism” promulgated by Leftist militants who prided themselves on their real or alleged proletarian credentials, as well as by certain political activists who did not hesitate to proclaim knee-jerk edicts on cultural matters. The existence of such pressures sometimes motivated Left poets to disown or mute their real literary preferences, and in some instances undoubtedly caused them to modify their styles.
Notwithstanding, there was an acute “newness” of the emerging cultural vanguard around the Communist movement in the 1930s. The project of a culture consciously based on a newly rising class, especially one dispossessed of cultural heritage or a self-consciousness of its own worth, was a fresh if somewhat voluntaristic enterprise. But this voluntarism itself flows from an admixture of millenarianism of an uncommon kind; it was the customary belief in a distinctive destiny for the United States blended with the Marxist creed of a special destiny for the working class, and the Leninist view that the Russian Revolution had shattered the chain of capitalism at its weakest link, launching us into the unfamiliar. Incorporated into Left literature were older themes in U.S. culture, such as the mobility suggested in the “lighting out for the territory” of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, with the utilitarianism of Whitman. While there was a disapproval of self-emancipation through one’s own imagination to create “a world elsewhere,” the verity of a potential utopia in the United States also seemed distant from the concrete state of affairs of the 1930s. Such a disjuncture between craving for utopia and bleak immediate prospects may have induced a deeper dependence on imaginative resources than normally anticipated. In particular, there appeared a partial resuscitation on the part of certain U.S. Left writers, such as those promoted by Horace Gregory, of a reliance on symbolism and the use of the fable.
Still, the public character of most U.S. Left poetry, its goal of literary democratization, was a natural brake on the modernist tendencies to believe that one’s unique sensibility can only be expressed through a private language, and to proclaim the self, as poet, an autonomous power in the world. If modernism is interpreted as a distinctive experimental tradition in post-romantic art, characterized by the preeminence of cryptic speech and literary self-government, many Left poets assuredly had an ambivalent relationship to it. On the one hand, techniques such as Eliot’s “objective correlative,” using a set of objects to generate a feeling, or even Pound’s “persona,” the postulation of masks, were amiably employed by writers such as Spector and Fearing. Moreover, the imagist designs of classic hardness and exactitude, objectivity, parsimony of language, and autarchy of form were pervasive in learned writers such as Norman MacLeod, but also among the most “proletarian” of autodidacts such as Joseph Kalar. On the other hand, there was little fellow feeling for that aspect of modernism that looked back to the displaced aristocratic culture as incarnating the truly humanistic values.
Unquestionably there were those among the Left who felt it imperative to break aggressively with traditional art. Mike Gold’s 1930 declaration of the tenets of proletarian realism and Richard Wright’s 1937 “Blueprint for Negro Writing” are in the genre of revolutionary literary manifestos.49 Further, to the extent that Enlightenment values might be seen as promoting “realistic” cultural forms and generating a presumed scientific rationality to legitimate the fortified powers of the status quo, there was certainly evident skepticism on the part of some on the Left. For example, Charles Humboldt’s statement in the New Masses, supporting the “reworking” of reality through art, opposed the idea of practical cognition as a function of the instantaneous replication of appearance; rather, the emphasis was placed on the generative dynamism involved in reformation and elucidation.
Rukeyser, Spector, and others wished to articulate a vitality of spirit not rendered within any mode of representation given over to appearance. Yet Rukeyser was nearer to romanticism in perceiving a oneness of humanity and nature, something of a contrast to the recurrent modernist perspective of a fecund mind travailing in isolation in the face of a passive nature. Spector and Fearing surely tilted toward modernism in applying ironic strategies to cancel expectations evoked by representational art. Instead of imitating the external world, some of their verse, along with Rukeyser’s, could be apprehended as executing an image, thereby becoming its own exceptional configuration of reality.
This is perhaps the design behind the collage technique employed by Rukeyser, Funaroff, and others—a means of heightening that sense of generative proximity. Collage signifies a poetic reasoning unimpeded by discursive coherence, and the movement of their work aspires to establish an ethos with the capacity to ameliorate society. However, for the pro-Communists, this strategy led beyond, not in the direction of, modernism; in fact, to them, modernism’s demand for cultivated compact intelligence appears more suitable for curbing the catalytic potential of poetic reasoning than for making verse the bridge to mass action. Leftists like Rukeyser and Funaroff, in contrast, wished to affiliate the collage effect with the struggles of the working class and collective resistance to fascism.
Thus it seems plausible to theorize the pro-Communist proletarian and even some of the “people’s culture” tendency as part of an avant-garde that grows out of modernism but holds distinct features. In this sense it evokes the revolutionary school of surrealism, frequently fathomed as a mode of interpreting modernism.50 Until recent books by Cary Nelson, Walter Kalaidjian, Michael Denning, and others, the Left avant-garde was perceived as pre-modernist, if not near-subliterary. This misunderstanding was a result of Left poetry’s frequent tempering of experimental features to address class issues and achieve greater accessibility, and linking of individual voices to a collective protagonist; the appearance and content of pro-Communist poetry, fiction, and drama seemed to more aptly resemble realism and naturalism.
In sum, the narrative of the forging of a proletarian avant-garde is rooted in the life history of individuals brought into relationships with networks and institutions, expressed by clubs, magazines, political parties and organized cultural movements led by the Party directly or indirectly. From a ground-up examination one discovers that a semi-autonomy was fostered among Black writers, a proto-feminist consciousness arose naturally in the work of women writers, and other forms of ethnic consciousness varied more considerably depending on topic and period (Jewish consciousness becoming strong in the World War II era). While the rapprochement between the artist and Party institutions was never complete, the tendency was for institutions to try to progressively “tame” the writers in the name of the “state of emergency” mentality, thus rooting out certain kinds of ambiguity and difficulty that might lead to pessimism or hesitation. At the same time, there is a marked melancholy aura in the Left writing of Spector, Funaroff, Rolfe, Hayes, Rukeyser, and others; the same revolutionary romanticism that engendered utopian longings was also a personal refuge, a realm of privacy that unleashed doubts about the eventual realization of desire.
A precedent for investigating Left writers as an avant-garde was articulated by Charles Russell in his argument for the detachment of the “historically parallel” traditions of the avant-garde and modernism in Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries (1985). Russell reasons that archetypal modernists such as Proust and Pound cannot detect explanations in the “flow of modern history,” so they fasten on a perception of “meaningless chaos” or “evident cultural decline.” In contrast, the avant-garde, from Rimbaud and Apollinaire through the surrealists, futurists, and Brecht, yearn “to sustain a belief in the progressive union of writer and society acting within history.” Such a view can be tracked to romanticism, but, unlike much romantic thought, the cause for optimism must be located in an entity beyond bourgeois society.
What stays is the “romantic belief in the prophetic and activist role of the writer,” undertaken with “full awareness of the gulf that exists between them and the audience to whom they would speak.” Thus modernists and the avant-garde have “a common awareness of the most problematic aspects of cultural modernity” but cleave to counter premises about the motives and rejoinders.51 In the case of the Communist avant-garde, there are particular outgrowths such as the urge to blend the poet-seer with the class-conscious proletariat as agent of change, and assorted pressures to conjure up a pantheon of cultural heroes (Whitman, John Brown, Frederick Douglass). Moreover, like the rest of the avant-garde, the Left was always delimited in relation to modernism—not only because it shared many of the same interests but because modernism conquered as the paramount heritage in U.S. literary culture in the 1940s and after.
Russell claims that modernists “appeal to a presumed reality beyond mere society and its history,” often premising aesthetics in racial fictions, mystical doctrines, or the realm of psychology, with aesthetic fealty surmounting social interests.52 In contrast, the avant-garde, clasping the same social and aesthetic responsibilities, has battled to postulate the singularity “of activist aesthetic behavior against the threatening social realm.”53 Modernist and avant-garde writers partake of the hypothesis that they have to invent new forms and defenses for their art, which is why some theorists coalesce the two streams. Nevertheless, the avant-garde’s turn to Left-wing activism customarily ends in a judgment of modernism as nihilism, and thus its inventiveness in form is perceived as nothing less than dissipated yet boisterous experimentalism.
From this perspective, there are ways in which Kenneth Fearing is a more emblematic example of an avant-garde political revolutionary than either Rukeyser, who is singularly experimental in form, or Gold, whose dramatic aesthetic posturing recalls the behavior of European cultural iconoclasts. What bonded the Left with the avant-garde was estrangement from the dominant culture and the social system it bolstered, a belief in joining with more powerful social forces to effect action, and a confidence that novelty in their art, in form as well as content, was an emissary in the revolutionary process. Yet Fearing’s self-conscious experiments were solidly tempered by social necessity, such as a belief, like Brecht’s,54 that he should refrain from depicting characters whose political consciousness was in advance of the mass of the citizenry. Thus, like many avant-gardists, including the Futurists, Fearing’s discernment of the imminent was constricted, a kind of obstructed utopianism. Equivalent to the dadists, Fearing guided his blows against society’s vainglorious and shortsighted attachments. He recognized the pettiness and artlessness of his poetic characters’ lives, and could be acrid and vindictive in his mockery.
Fearing and the other Left avant-gardists of the Depression era faded posthaste from public awareness during the Cold War years, albeit their names and writings were kept alive in the underground streams of the remnants of the Left tradition and Bohemia. This led to a speedy judgment in 1950s academe as to the fleeting quality of their attainments, and the careful reconstruction of the Great Depression as an aberrant time of misguided hopes. The moments of uncommon emotional power and creatively crafted political insights in poetry that I have tried to emphasize in this volume were lost to literary history; the traditional Communist vision of the artist exalted by commitment became transmogrified into a myth of poetry debased by politics.
Yet the dreams and commitments of the Communist avant-garde would quickly revive just a few years later in forms that were unanticipated, but recognizable nonetheless—as the latest and most novel installment of the ever-present longing to remake the world. Those who would live through the experience of the 1960s radicalization would see the bonds concealed within the incongruities, just as Joseph Freeman in 1955 thought he had discovered the young Mike Gold when he encountered Gregory Corso declaiming free verse into a telephone in a bar.
Signs of latent cross-generational linkage were even more apparent to Freeman in early mid-May 1959, when he and Charmion Von Weigand went to the McMillan Theater at Columbia University. The occasion was a symposium on the 1930s sponsored by Partisan Review, the one-time organ of the John Reed Clubs that Freeman had helped to launch, but which was now a voice of liberal anti-Communism. In the audience he noticed several former revolutionaries—Earl Browder, Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen (who founded Commentary). But he wrote to Daniel Aaron that he was principally enraptured by the youthfulness of the vast majority of the throng: “All over the USA young people have been reading about the Thirties and their curiosity about that decade is immense.”55
The symposium itself was disheartening. Speaker after speaker dispensed what Freeman saw as self-serving remarks, muddling the factual history of the cultural Left in the 1930s, while he, who had been at the very core, sat mute and anonymous in the assemblage. “It was all dull and trivial except for two moments,” due mainly to the novelist Norman Mailer. The first was when historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to Freeman’s astonishment, denied that the Communist movement had strongly affected New Deal legislation; he was sharply disputed by Mailer. The second was when, in retort to a provocation by Mailer, the novelist Mary McCarthy denied that liberals had tacitly aided Joe McCarthy. Neither point, however, was pursued in the discussion that followed.
What Freeman felt, above all, was that the symposium’s speakers wanted to “close the past.” And yet he knew that at the heart of that paradoxical Great Depression decade was “the basic dream with the changing name” which is “like the phoenix” that “perished in the flames only to rise again out of its own ashes.” Meditating on the young audience, rather than the speakers, Freeman observed:
What the meeting ... made clear was that there is a new generation ... who have picked up the old dream and will soon find new ways of carrying it forward.
Here’s to them!56