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Marc wrote and was written about.
(portrait by Hugo Gellert) |
“Literature,
oh literature, you are a most useless thing. Only those without power
talk about you; no one with real strength bothers to talk, they just
murder people.” Lu Xun (revolutionary Chinese writer). (link)
The
1930s economy was in Depression, the middle- and working-classes
ravaged, and talk of revolution commonplace on American streets. This
tumult is reflected in the period's literature when now mostly
forgotten names challenged the genteel traditions of the book-reading
and theater-going worlds.
In
her comprehensive analysis of American literature, “Root and Flower” (1988), Annette Rubinstein posits that, “A cultural
period is seldom as precisely delimited as was the 'Red Decade' in
the literary history of the United States.”
Disillusionment
with American capitalism was widespread and young literati turned to
address the vital economic concerns of the time.
“This
disillusionment was so widespread,” Rubinstein writes, “that in
1934 the American Labor Party (ALP) representative, Vito Marcantonio,
could declare unrebuked on the floor of Congress that it would be
impossible for the nation to solve its problems until it had begun
production for use and not for profit.”
Rubinstein worked
on Marcantonio's staff and ran for office on the ALP ticket. She was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1953.
Influenced by
Marxist literary theorist Georg Lukacs, Rubinstein held writers to a
standard of engagement with their times. She valued literature that
reflected a writer's concern, "with the vital current which moves steadily beneath the innumerable eddies and confusing crosscurrents of life's surface."
Murray Kempton
was a contemporary of Rubinstein's. A columnist for the “New York
Post,” his writings suggest an impassioned observer unburdened by
any commitment other than to what he called, “the writer's quarrel
with himself.”
Kempton was not a
member of the Communist Party and never dragged before committees
engaged in the red witch hunt of the 1940s and '50s. Instead, he
wrote about those who were.
Rubinstein
was one such writer and it landed her in the same purgatory of the forgotten
to which Marcantonio had been banished. She labored earnestly at the
margins into her nineties. Kempton's columns were bound into
mainstream book releases and yielded a Pulitzer Prize.
Kempton
and Rubinstein evaluated the experimental and leftist currents that
washed over literary culture during those years in significantly
different ways.
 |
| Annette Rubinstein |
Red Letters
“Root
and Flower” highlights the Communist Party's fundamental role in
developing the revolutionary literature. Hard times heightened the
Party's appeal to beleaguered American workers. The resulting jump in
resources financed the creation of a cultural infrastructure that
both groomed writers and promised a potentially ample audience.
For
example, Rubinstein writes: “[T]he John Reed Clubs, initiated in
the fall of 1929 to develop radical young writers of working class
background, had established branches in 30 cities before they were
dissolved in 1934.”
In
“American Hunger,” Richard Wright recalls that, “With the
exception of the church with its myths and legends, there was no
agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the
people upon it as the Communist Party.”
“Many
intellectuals,” Rubinstein says, “were attracted to Marxism
primarily because of historical materialism. With its concepts of
class exploitation, surplus value and the real nature of the state,
“it offered the only coherent rational explanation of the economic
crisis.”
For
Kempton, “They believed that to be a great writer one needed simply
to be on the side of the future and substitute outer reconciliation
for interior quarrel.”
Rubinstein
saw merit in the social and political activity of the new proletarian
writers. For her counterpart at “The Post,” this turning away
from writer-like isolation represented the fatal flaw.
Plebes
Kempton
writes that the Party's literary recruits were, “plebeians; their
Mermaid Tavern was a cafeteria on Fourteenth Street in New York or
the John Reed Club in a loft in the Loop in Chicago or the office of
the 'New Masses'. All other doors seemed closed to them...”
He
says proponents of this “plebeian realism” believed the genre
would, “come to dominate American literature and that the
proletarian poem and the proletarian novel would outlive James and
Joyce and Yeats and Eliot, because history was on its side.”
Lacking
in prestige, Kempton writes, “they were young and could believe
that they were the future. They did not feel lost or tired or
bankrupt. Some of them felt that they were the precursors to a new
kind of American realism that would open up subjects and explore a
side of life neglected in the literature of their country. They would
find their poetry in the world of urban poverty from which so many of
them had come and which only the sociologists and the census takers
had penetrated before them.
“The
most important thing after all was to feel that you were not alone
and hunched over your feeble candle in the night. No one owed Richard
Wright a living, but somebody owed him a home.”
Only
the Communists had an offer, according to Kempton, and the response
to that offer was revolutionary.
“Except
for [Nelson] Algren and James T. Farrell,” he says, “all were
able at one stage in their lives to believe that art is a weapon or
it is nothing and that its first test is whether it is on the side of
history.”
 |
| Murray Kempton |
Rubinstein
covers the early purveyors of what she labels “proletarian
fiction,” defined as any creative writing in which the author
identified with the working class and championed its cause.
The
proletarian novels, for Rubinstein, “centered about a
then-important development – the almost spontaneous
self-organization of hard-pressed workers in an individual mill or
factory, their confrontation with the employers, and a consequent
strike or lockout.”
In
Michael Gold's, “Jews Without Money” (1930), and Agnes Smedley's
“Daughter of the Earth” (1929), Rubinstein sees, “books of
enduring human and literary value.” James T. Farrell's “Studs
Lonegan Trilogy,” she deems “savagely effective” in its
indictment of the “destructive culture capitalism creates.”
But
the marriage of revolutionary writers and revolutionary party,
Kempton suggests, was not a natural fit, their common goal
notwithstanding.
The Party Novel
Waldo
Frank's “The Death and Birth of David Markand” (1934), is another
example of the form. Kempton says it was, “a tract for the
wandering cerebral man; it had nothing to say to the anchored, action
proletarian whose search was not for reconciliation with himself, but
comfort for his kind.”
Under
Communist guidance, says Kempton, the proletarian novel became the
Party novel, “which is something very different.”
“The
story line,” he says, “was basic and always reiterated.” Its
necessary elements were a community of workers without class
consciousness undergoing an economic education that concluded, “there
are no halfway houses, the Party is their only ally, the owning class
their enemy, and that they have a world to win.”
“They say
literature can be used to publicize, promote, incite, and advance the
revolutionary cause, and thus bring about revolution,” says Lu Xun.
“Still it seems to me that this sort of literature has no strength
because good literature has never been about following orders and has
no regards for its effects. It is something that flows naturally from
the heart.”
Richard
Wright would not bend his literature to the guidelines required by
party discipline.
“It
was not courage that made me oppose the Party,” he explains. “I
simply did not know better. It was inconceivable to me, though bred
in the lap of southern hate, that a man could not have his say.” |
| Lu Xun |
One
of the more bitter pills Wright swallowed was the closing of the
aforementioned John Reed Clubs where he had gotten his chops.
Rubinstein
explains how, “The anti-fascist united front policy in the literary
world made it important to enlist as many prestigious authors as
possible, and the emphasis on developing unknown young worker-writers
to create a proletarian literature was therefore somewhat abruptly
abandoned.”
Kempton
observes that,“A major talent like Richard Wright's could continue
to grow, but the truncated careers of many promising young novelists
was largely caused by the radical orientation.”
Says
Lu Xun, “Only when revolutionaries start writing will there
be revolutionary literature.”
The
writers who came after were largely of middle-class background and
education. Rubinstein's highest praise is saved for Josephine Herbst
whose “Rope of Gold” trilogy, she said, earned its author a
place among those great writers who can, “feel the future in an
instant.”
The
Communist Party never delivered on making the proletarian artist a
popular success, says Kempton. The first-wave plebeians, “did not
search; they only sat and waited, those of them who did not go to
Hollywood, reciting their litanies; and whether in Hollywood or New
York, the sap went out of them.”
Bending Towards the Lightards Light
For
Rubinstein, although the output of these writers was, “far better
than average American fiction, they were all buried in the
reactionary Cold War period of politics.” A shared experience with
the progressive writers of her time colors Rubinstein's analysis in a
way Kempton's dialectic with himself can produce neither empathy or
understanding.
“But
the most evident impact of the depression on American literature was
made, surprisingly, not on the printed page but in the playhouse,”
according to Rubinstein. “The rapid formation of unemployed
councils, the sudden spurt of radical activity on all sides, greatly
increased the pressure from below for a people's theater.”
Rubinstein
quotes Hallie Flannagan, who would eventually lead the influential
Federal Theater Project: “Unlike any art form existing in America today, the workers' theaters intend to shape the life of the country,
socially, politically, and industrially.”
Rubinstein
sketches the lives and productions of various workers stage groups,
starting with the Theater Guild, which offered John Howard Lawson's
“Processional.” The playwright himself called it a “jazz
symphony,” and said he was trying to “build something of a
definitely American character and rhythm.”
Harold
Clurman, one of the founders of the Group Theater said, “...our
interest in the life of our times must lead us to the discovery of
those methods that would most truly convey this life through the
theater.”
Lawson
joined The Group Theater along with Clurman, Paul Green and others.
Despite some modest successes and long lines waiting to purchase the
cheaper balcony seats, the orchestra sections were empty and the
company went belly-up.
Personal versus Public
Rubinstein saw
Lawson as a leading cultural spokesman for the Communist Party as
well as an important film critic and a distinguished script writer.
He stood fast as one of the Hollywood Ten and Marcantonio stood with him.
Kempton
found these facts closer to flaws than virtues. Lawson, for Kempton,
is a writer who took the wrong path, became more of a politician than
scribe, and lost his way, winding up as neither thing.
Before
it dissolved, Rubinstein insists, the Theater Group made theater
history “in a number of ways,” including the development of an
important young playwright by the name of Clifford Odets.
His
“Waiting for Lefty,” she notes, generated an extraordinary
response beyond the cultural left.
Kempton's
assessment of Odets, and other Communist writers is, as in the case
of Lawson, personal.
This
new theatrical bent is, for Rubinstein, an imperative from the
streets. Kempton sees writers aping a “fashion” or “social
myth” of the time, rather than responding to its prompts.
“They were all
angry young apprentices,” he writes of the new school playwrights.
“They began, most of them, during the Hoover administration, close
to Union Square with the Workers Laboratory Theater, whose offerings
carried spare, didactic labels like 'The Klein-Ohrbach Strike.' By
1934, many of them were with the Theater Union, still downtown but
apparently more substantial, and their productions conveyed an
impression of foundation.”
An
examination of their lives, their habits, leads Kempton to conclude
that, “They were really rather conventional young men.”
The celebrated
Odets, he says, “wanted comfort and safety of a sort foreign to the
plays he wrote. And he does not appear to have been alone among the
revolutionary dramatists in withheld commitment.”
Hollywood
For some years,
Odets toggled between lucrative Hollywood stints and work with The
Group, until the latter dissolved and the writer settled on the West
Coast.
 |
| Clifford Odets |
Kempton says
that, “When Odets returned to Hollywood in 1937, he found that The
Workers Laboratory Theater appeared to have moved, spiritually if not
physically, over to the Warner Brothers lot. And to a degree Odet's
old friends set the tone for the community, which was pro-Roosevelt
and anti-fascist.”
This concession
aside, he contends that being inside the Hollywood Golden Circle was
more important to the Party's writer/members than any revolution.
After
the witch hunt, which had cast writers as a vanguard that, Kempton
suggests, had an infinitesimal impact on film output, “Their
banners still carried the old wild cries. But inside they were
different men; they did not feel for each other as they had; they
lived according to Hollywood habit, and it was not unusual for them
to step upon one another's faces.”
The
Communist Party habitually generalized from the particular, says
Kempton, but it is he whom extends the writers' personal foibles to a
decade's-worth of theatrical literature. Although Rubinstein agrees
with his flogging of Odets as a Hollywood sell-out, she finds much
that was worthy of note and analysis in theater's Red Decade.
And
that analysis entertains the question of why the 1930s were the only
time since Elizabethan England that the English-speaking stage
occupied the center of a national culture.
She
posits that, “Unlike the twenties, when the essential choices
seemed to be individual ones and the conflicts largely generational,
when politics seemed irrelevant to daily life, every hotly contested
government decision in the thirties was fateful. Struggles on the
floor of Congress about money to be appropriated for home relief or
WPA jobs, about a moratorium in foreclosing family farms, about the
legality of strikes and picket lines, affected one's daily life.”
Economic
circumstances, says Rubinstein, forced collective action, and those
that participated were encouraged to see it could prompt change. This
sense of possibility, she says, coupled with the need for collective
struggle informed an exciting literature in a depressing age.
Drama,
which requires struggle to be drama, “had a naturally important
part to play in that literature,” says Rubinstein.
A
labor action could represent “vital contemporary forces” or
“signal a momentous shift in power,” although the example chosen,
Rubinstein asserts, “must be rooted in the significant conflicts of
its own time, even though the action may take place in another place,
or the past, or future.”
The
art form's popularity in the 1930s, she said, might also be
attributed to the “necessarily collective nature of theater, the
collective nature not only of its creation but also of its reception.
A play is and must be a shared experience, appealing to a common
emotional denominator in its audience.”
Antonio Gramsci might have told us,the surviving ideology from the
20th century battles dictates the kind of writer and
writing western societies sustain and consume. Rubinstein notes that
the end of the Federal Theater Project, “marked the end of the
first period of a people's theater in the United States. There has,
as yet, been no second.”
Lu Xun, a
contemporary of both Rubinstein and Kempton says, “When there is
revolution, the contours of literature itself change. However, only
real revolution can change literature; a small revolution won't
because it doesn't revolutionize anything, so neither can it change
literature.”
