The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Slesinger soon left New York for Hollywood where she wrote screenplays for movies such as The Good Earth (released in 1937) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (released in 1945). In the mid-1930s she published a collection of short stories, Time: The Present (1935). She married Hollywood producer Frank Davis and became a supporter of the Communist Party during the Popular Front period. Her name would appear on the famous letter denouncing the John Dewey Commission’s investigation of the Moscow trials, which her former husband, Solow, would be so instrumental in initiating. She also endorsed the call to the Communist-initiated Third American Writers’ Congress (1939).61 Although she never stopped being pro-Soviet Union, she became significantly disillusioned with the Soviets at the news of the Hitler-Stalin Pact later that year. She may even have enjoyed a partial reconciliation with several of her old New York friends before her death from cancer in 1945 at the age of thirty-nine.62

  When The Unpossessed appeared, it was instantly reviewed by the New Masses. Philip Rahv, a young Communist poet, gleefully seized on the character “Comrade Fisher,” who was supposed to be a member of a band of pro-Trotskyist agents attempting to “bore from within” by manipulating a group of Communist fellow travelers. Fisher, Rahv wrote, is “kneaded out of the same mud-pile as those insufferably clever young men, veterans of the Zionist Salvation Army, who are now writing articles for liberal weeklies on the strategy and tactics of the world revolution and the villainy of Stalin.” Still, Rahv concluded, Slesinger’s book was not without faults, for it did not present a “disciplined orientation” for radicalized intellectuals. In other words, the absence of an explicit call in the novel for intellectuals to join the Communist Party suggested that the author was not totally unsympathetic to the characters she was condemning.63

  In the fall of 1934 Edwin Seaver, another pro-Communist writer, reviewed the novel in the Menorah Journal, which had changed from a monthly to a quarterly and had been appearing irregularly after Cohen left it at the beginning of 1932. Seaver pulled no punches in identifying Slesinger’s frustrated intellectuals as the dissidents of the open-letter controversy. Arguing that the novel was, in fact, already somewhat dated, Seaver dissected the character strongly suggestive of Elliot Cohen:

  If he were strictly contemporary, Miss Slesinger, your Bruno Leonard would not be concerned with the immortal mission of the intellect; nowadays he would be taking fits because Stalin is not radical enough for his sudden conversion, because the Comintern is too petit-bourgeois for his Kosher tastes. Each Bruno Leonard in search of the aesthetic and philosophical grail has become a little Trotsky in search of a fourth international.

  The situation has changed, Seaver explained, and the Bruno Leonards deserve even harsher treatment because the only real choice facing humanity is life with the revolutionary movement (namely, the Communist Party), or death at the hands of the fascists. The Bruno Leonard type, Seaver concluded, is still “crazy as a bedbug,” but the Freudian-oriented bedbugs of the past have become the Trotskyist intellectuals of today.64

  The Unpossessed is a highly original novel. Slesinger adapts some of the modernist techniques of Joyce, Proust, and the early Hemingway to her purposes, but the book is also shaped by her close reading of Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Parker, and Virginia Woolf. The Unpossessed anticipates both Saul Bellow’s novels about frustrated Jewish intellectuals such as Herzog (1964) and Mary McCarthy’s political satires such as The Oasis (1949). At the same time, it is reminiscent of earlier American works by and about radical intellectuals, especially Max Eastman’s Venture (1927) and Edmund Wilson’s I Thought of Daisy (1929). As in those two novels, personal (more precisely, sexual) and political themes run together in The Unpossessed, overlapping, intertwined, and often infused with intentional ambiguity. For example, in The Unpossessed the conception and ultimate abortion of Margaret Flinder’s baby and the evolution of Bruno Leonard’s magazine run parallel. The contemporary reader will undoubtedly focus on the embryonic feminism implicit in the novel, while Slesinger’s dominant, although not entirely separable, intention was to depict the “problem” of the radicalized intellectual disaffected from capitalist society and in search of a bond with common people and a more natural existence. This “problem” constitutes another close thematic tie to Venture and I Thought of Daisy. The disalienation that Eastman’s Jo Hancock finds in the woods with his Russian proletarian beauty and that Edmund Wilson’s narrator seeks in the chorus girl of I Thought of Daisy Margaret Flinders hopes to locate through motherhood, and her male characters aspire to achieve through their association with the working-class movement.

  In each of the three novels the unifying character is derived largely from the author’s own personality and experiences, although The Unpossessed may be somewhat differentiated in that a secondary character, Elizabeth Leonard, appears to embody certain important aspects of the author as well. A recent essay by Janet Sharistanian has convincingly demonstrated that Margaret suggests certain aspects of Slesinger’s life in the early 1930s while Elizabeth embodies her “flapper” experiences in the 1920s.65 This splitting of a single consciousness into characters embodying its contradictory elements might be extended into other areas as well. The depiction of Elizabeth as Jewish and Margaret as non-Jewish may be indicative of Slesinger’s partial assimilation, which stands in contrast to Bruno’s affirmation of his Jewishness even as he seeks to identify with the international working class.

  These novels are also admirable in that they demonstrate the unabashed and frankly honest self-scrutiny particularly characteristic of the bohemian-radical intellectuals whose basic intellectual formation occurred prior to the domination of the movement by the Communist-led writers. In Slesinger’s case, her literary sensibilities were strong enough to resist the oversimplified good-versus-evil treatment of intellectuals typified by Mike Gold’s The Hollow Men (1941) and Isidor Schneider’s The Judas Time (1946), both of which were also directed against those New York intellectuals who comprised the anti-Stalinist left.

  Like its predecessors, Slesinger’s novel is rooted in the actuality of the historic moment: Venture is thematically situated in the Golden Age of pre-World War I radicalism; I Thought of Daisy reflects the discomfort of the 1920s; and The Unpossessed exudes the disorientation of the early depression. Slesinger’s work communicates the pain and contradictions of the intellectuals trained and informed by the environment of the 1920s as they struggled to relate to the new realities and demands of the 1930s. Venture, I Thought of Daisy, and The Unpossessed are all romans à clef; but Slesinger’s novel is closer to Wilson’s as a study of a specific milieu that produced distinct character types. Both novels illustrate how radical intellectuals have employed the novel as a tool in the search for truth and the moral meaning of the lives and actions of their associates.

  At least one attempt has been made to connect each major character in The Unpossessed with its “real life” counterpart from the Menorah Journal group. In Part of Our Time (1955), Murray Kempton accurately identifies Bruno Leonard with Elliot Cohen and Miles Flinders with Herbert Solow but incorrectly equates Jeffrey Blake with Lionel Trilling. Actually, Blake very clearly suggests Max Eastman, with whom Slesinger had an affair at the time.66 Yet The Unpossessed cannot be fully understood in terms of such analogues. Unlike Edmund Wilson’s Hugo Bamman, for example, who obviously resembles John Dos Passos, the characters in The Unpossessed are essentially composites designed to express a variety of themes emanating from the milieu engaged in the NCDPP and the League of Professionals.

  Solow was scarcely the Irish Catholic with the New England Calvinist temperament that Miles is, yet that particular aspect of the fictionalized persona serves as an effective vehicle for capturing the gloomy disposition and intense, almost monomaniacal, quest for lofty principles that has been associated with Solow in memoirs by his contemporaries. Jeffrey Blake suggests several other writers besides Eastman: Blake’s superficial notion of himself as a fellow-traveling Marxist intellectual recalls Clifton
Fadiman; when Blake is criticized for including a “racy demonstration chapter” in one of his novels, Albert Halper, the author of Union Square (1933), comes to mind; and Blake’s preoccupation with sexual mystique suggests V. F. Calverton, for whom Slesinger did some secretarial work.

  The most important characteristic assigned to the intellectuals in The Unpossessed as a group is that they are sterile. They are sterile because of the social patterns, values, and life-styles that they have established for themselves. The major manifestation of their sterility is portended in Slesinger’s title: Dostoyevski’s The Possessed is reversed to The Unpossessed, suggesting “uncommitted.” Slesinger portrays a group whose convictions are more rhetorical than real. Bruno Leonard’s concluding monologue about the uselessness of diseased intellectuals to the revolutionary movement reflects Slesinger’s basic view: “My friends and I are sick men—if we are not already dead.”67

  Bruno Leonard, the Jewish professor of English, endlessly brooding over his Jewishness and its impact on his intellect, ceaselessly tormented by a writer’s block, is the high priest of The Unpossessed. He is the mentor of a campus-based group of militant, self-righteous young Communists known as the Black Sheep. But Bruno’s coterie of friends are also his students and he is their teacher in the arts of life, wit, sex, and politics. Bruno’s most important male intimates are Miles and Jeffrey, who had been radical pacifists with Bruno on the same campus, suggestive of Columbia, twelve years earlier. Bruno, the valedictorian, remained there to teach, while Miles took a low-paying office job and Jeffrey penned a series of light-weight novels. They are reunited in a scheme to publish a revolutionary magazine.

  In addition to Miles and Jeffrey and their wives, Margaret Flinders and Norah Blake, Bruno acts as a teacher to two other characters. One is his cousin, Elizabeth Leonard, an artist living in Paris when the novel opens. Bruno had used his influence to liberate her from a boring conventional life and put her on what she calls a “fast express” of bohemian living and “chain loving.” The other is Emmett Merle, the sheltered and miserable son of a wealthy family. Emmett’s relation to Bruno allows Slesinger to probe the homosexual aspects of Bruno’s personality and his role as a teacher. But perhaps more significant is Bruno’s function as a surrogate parent. Although Emmett is in rebellion, he still needs a role model. Bruno’s problem, or perhaps his virtue, is that he is aware of his inability to serve Emmett in that capacity.

  The Unpossessed, with its narrative structured around aspects of marriage, friendship, and adultery, is above all a study of group dynamics. Woven in and around the story of Bruno, his magazine, his friends and his students, is a subplot of the failing marriage of Margaret and Miles. One facet of their problem is bound up in Miles’s deteriorating sense of self-esteem because he earns less money than his wife. But Slesinger also employs the relationship to evoke an eternal, almost mystical dialectic of male and female relations, one that turns on the notion that a man and woman, as ideal lovers, create a third entity. Yet Miles cannot give himself wholly to this synthesis in a way that Margaret can. He fears drowning if he relinquishes himself totally, believing that he must retain a part of himself, his restlessness, as private and secretive. Women, Margaret concludes, are perceived by men as rivals to the world of action. Whether Slesinger was parodying this romanticized stereotype or endorsing it is not altogether clear.

  Miles resents Margaret’s desire for complacent happiness, her belief that lovers can achieve sufficiency through “each other.” He associates her talk of happiness with his stern Uncle Daniel’s remark that “pigs are happy.” Miles is opposed to Margaret’s having a baby, a fairly common attitude among radical intellectuals of the time.68 He sees childbirth as a capitulation to bourgeois society, an acceptance of it and a sellout of his own principles. Deeply pessimistic, Miles resents Margaret’s hopefulness about the future, characterizing it as “balmy.”

  Margaret, in contrast, embodies a variety of feminine themes. She is oppressed in her subservience to Miles, as well as by her own guilt, because she cannot satisfy him. All she can offer is comfort, which only irritates him. She and Norah Blake also seem to embody mystical female qualities; they are more natural and less self-contrived than the male characters, or even Elizabeth Leonard who lives “like a man.”

  Desiring to realize herself in a less artificial world, especially through the act of childbirth, Margaret especially resents the ersatz culture of the group. She is particularly contemptuous of the way they surround themselves with German newspapers and Russian movies when, in fact, she herself has rarely ventured from New York City. Margaret aspires to be one of the ordinary people, whose simplicity is represented in minor characters such as Mr. Papenmeyer, with his children and his Verstand, and Arturo Tresca, a musician also full of love for his wife and children. Norah epitomizes the Lawrentian ideal of a woman: raised in the country, she has maintained the simplicity of childhood, which Margaret with her urban upbringing has lost; she has become the open, comfortable port to which the womanizer Blake returns safely after each of his frequent voyages.

  The molding of character by social environment was a common theme in the literature of the 1930s. In The Unpossessed the atmosphere of the 1920s and the closed character of the small intellectual clique conditioned Leonard’s group so that its members could not effectively relate to concerns of ordinary people or even fulfill their own aspirations. The members of the group were political only in drawing rooms and at parties and as such had only a parasitic relation to the class struggle.

  The formative years of several of the characters—Miles, Margaret, Bruno, Elizabeth, and Norah—are analyzed as well. Miles, who is most intensely scrutinized, was reared in the austere, morose environment of a New England farm, one that might have been created by Eugene O’Neill. There, rocks abounded in the fields, and punishment and suffering were accepted as ineluctable features of life. Miles, now in his thirties, remains suspicious of his wife’s “rose colored” expectations and aspirations, and he perceives any sign of political compromise as inviting gangrenous corruption. To Margaret, Miles seems a tortured saint; his Marxism, which she regards as merely crude economics, is perceived by her as a product of his fatalistic religious temperament. She calls it his “new God.”69

  Spurred on by his Calvinistic compulsions Miles is driven to seek complete purity, condemning the petit-bourgeois deviations of his associates. He is repelled by the proposal that the revolutionary magazine be funded with money raised through a dance sponsored by a decadent businessman. He is also punctilious about describing his views as “communist” rather than “socialist,” although he himself is not a member of the party. Miles’s high and ascetic personal standards are measured against an incident in his youth when his Uncle Daniel—his parental surrogate for a weak father and a beautiful (therefore evil) mother—unflinchingly shoots the family dog because it killed a neighbor’s chickens. It was not necessary to shoot the dog, yet it seemed a natural act because it corresponded to the harsh world outlook of his culture. When he carried out the execution, Uncle Daniel became deified in the eyes of Miles: “Miles knew well that day that there was something bigger in men than themselves, that could drive them to do what alone they never would have dared.”70 Later Daniel falls ill, and Miles begins to wish for his death. When his wish comes true, Miles’s encompassing sense of guilt is fully formed.

  Thus in The Unpossessed we have an attempt to portray the Menorah group during the years 1932 and 1933, with its cliquish and cultist and insular features, its combination of witty rhetoric (provided by Bruno) and bottled-up fanaticism (embodied in Miles), both of which lead nowhere. Yet, as Lionel Trilling emphasized in his criticism of Murray Kempton’s too literal interpretation of the book, the essentially apolitical nature of Slesinger’s fictional group divests the portrait of its verisimilitude. The attraction of Bruno’s coterie to a vague abstraction of the Communist Party and the manipulation of Jeffrey Blake by Ruth Fisher scarcely convey the actual evolution of
the Menorah group. Trilling emphasized that “any member of the group would have been able to explain his disillusionment [with Stalinism] by a precise enumeration of the errors and failures of the Party, both at home and abroad.”71

  In this respect, then, the novel contains more invention than fact and Kempton erred in presenting it, as he did in Part of Our Time, as bitter reality. Slesinger, like any satirist, relied upon an exaggeration of certain tendencies in her satiric objects, which was done at the expense of achieving a truly rounded portrait of the Menorah group. Slesinger did, however, provide some penetrating insights into the social relations of the group, especially their attitudes toward marriage, children, sex, and how the various personalities coped with the radical movement during the depression. But the resulting novel was predominantly psychological. Its realism is mixed: the atmosphere of the depression, the conformist rebellion of the Black Sheep, the contradictions and pretensions of Bruno’s group, are all captured through little incidents, scenes, and scenarios. Yet the novel provides no sense at all of the Menorah circle as a highly politicized, dynamic group whose members would eventually go anywhere or accomplish anything. One would not know from reading The Unpossessed that this was a group that would carry the stamp of its unique politicization for decades and ultimately leave its imprint upon the cultural establishment of New York. If anything, Slesinger’s novel predicts that it is the Black Sheep who, breaking with Bruno at the end, will become the vital force in society.