Literature in the Red Decade: Kempton and Rubinstein Reflect

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.

He too, wrote about the Red Decade in “Part of Our Time, Some Ruins and Monuments of the 1930s” (1955).

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 20^th 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.”

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