by Alan M Wald
The failure of The Unpossessed to portray the political essence of the group cannot be divorced from the fact that Tess Slesinger herself chose to follow a very different political course from that of her earlier associates. It is not clear, however, whether at the time that she wrote The Unpossessed Slesinger had become a partisan of the Communists, and, accordingly, offered the book to them as a club to use against their intellectual opponents. Possibly her real attitude was expressed in a letter that Michael Blankfort, who in the early 1930s had been associated with V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly, wrote to Commentary thirty-two years later:
. . . Tess Slesinger was profoundly dismayed and sickened by the political storms breaking across the days of our lives. It is difficult today, as Trilling remarks about similar events, to understand how bloody and cruel were the internecine wars of the 30s among the Stalinists, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites, et al. . . . the wars were catastrophic enough to cause sensitive artists like Tess Slesinger to run away from them, from New York, and even from writing itself, in order to avoid the deadly accusations of treachery and the awful turning away of one friend from another because of something said about the latest theses from the Comintern.72
This attitude, if indeed it was Slesinger’s, may account for certain ambiguities in the book, especially the incident where Bruno, in arguing with the weak Jeffrey who wishes to placate the Communist Party at all costs, declares that he “won’t print lies.”73 The implication seems to be that there is a higher integrity combined with Bruno’s hyperintellectualism than one finds in the mentality of those who were more subordinate to the party. Inspired by a vision of the first truly human culture described by Leon Trotsky at the end of Literature and Revolution, Bruno is also subject to a disease of skepticism that undermines his confidence in this vision even as he considers it. The ability to honestly confront his own weaknesses and to understand that his psychological maladies corrupt his political aspirations renders Bruno far more attractive than any of the other leading characters.
Still, all the central characters in The Unpossessed suffer from an affliction that prevents them from acting out their convictions. The source of Bruno’s affliction is a compulsion to travel endlessly and narcissistically into the recesses of his own mind which has “a hundred impulses balanced evenly.”74 Jeffrey’s stems from personal opportunism, and Miles’s results from the transference of the personal guilt he feels to political engagements. In Slesinger’s portrait they are all victims of emotional disorders associated with their intellects, rather than diabolical counterrevolutionaries.
To the extent that individuals play a decisive role in creating movements, the evolution of the Menorah group began with Elliot Cohen’s search for the role of the Jew in the modern world and the broad human, cultural, and social sympathies Cohen fostered. Heightened by the fierce political acuity and activism of Herbert Solow, the group moved, with the onset of the depression, toward the Communist vortex of the radical movement. From there most were impelled toward Trotskyism.
It is not surprising that Trotsky, who incarnated internationalism and cosmopolitanism, the Jew who had shattered the manacles of religious identity and who strove to merge himself with the forces of the world revolution in every country and culture, should for a period become their rallying point. Although these same intellectuals would later come to see, and fixate upon, an authoritarian side to Trotsky, at the moment they were strongly attracted by the moral appeal in the writer and activist who transcended intellectual and physical strictures, led a revolution, directed the Red Army, suffered exile and persecution, and simultaneously fought against the corruption of his life’s work. For the later members of the Partisan Review group, literary conflicts and a refusal to relinquish modernism exacerbated their increasing distrust of the Communists prior to their public break with the party. But for the Menorah group, the Stalinized Marxism of the Communist Party—its dogmatism and dread of criticism, its sectarianism in practice, its authoritarianism—was from the very beginning of their collaboration incompatible with their burning intellectual vivacity. Their initial rejection of Stalinism was not by any means a repudiation of communism, and for a number of years afterward they had hopes of revivifying an authentic revolutionary Marxism.
To call The Unpossessed a “document” of this group in the early 1930s, as Murray Kempton did, is far from accurate. Although an important stream of literature in the 1930s was, in fact, documentary, and many novels used documentary techniques, The Unpossessed is not a documentary in any sense. Like the radical-bohemian novels of Max Eastman and Edmund Wilson, it is not even a political tract. Rather it is a satire of the moment and an inquiry of sorts into the dialectic of human emotions and thought, an examination of the nature of a specific group of intellectuals and their relationship to the conflicts and issues of their time.
Chapter 3. Radical Modernists
What distinguished Partisan Review from the New Masses was our struggle to free revolutionary literature from domination by the immediate strategy of a political party.
—William Phillips and Philip Rahv, Letter to the New Masses, 19371
IN DEFENSE OF LITERATURE
In the fourth decade of this century, a generation of young American writers and literary critics began to turn from immersion in the experimental forms and esoteric sensibilities of the years following World War I to the politico-literary activism of the early 1930s. Yet this move from what we now call literary modernism was a far less sweeping and unqualified process than might appear from our vista in the 1980s; simply put, the achievements of the 1920s were considerable and could not be ignored. The disillusioned exiles and aesthetes of the postwar decades had technically revolutionized and deepened the thematic internationalization of American literature. The disciples of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, despite the apolitical and sometimes reactionary social views of some of their modernist masters, established themselves against twentieth-century materialism and commercialism as an avant-garde in literary protest. To most writers galvanized into political activity by the 1929 stock-market crash and subsequent depression, the legacy of Eliot and others appeared insufficient. Yet to certain of the newly radicalized literary intellectuals, the 1920s were viewed as an important component of a cultural tradition that required assimilation.
It was in part their preoccupation with the literary productions of the previous decade—its innovations in technique and sensi bility, its Europeanization of American culture, its absorption with the estrangement of the intelligentsia—that distinguished William Phillips and Philip Rahv from most of the young writers attracted to the Communist Party’s literary wing and its John Reed Clubs. This preoccupation would later account significantly for the development of Partisan Review, when the two editors broke with the Communist Party after assessing historical events in the Soviet Union, Spain, and Germany, and after witnessing the failure of the proletarian cultural movement. At the end of 1937 Phillips and Rahv emerged as the leading editors of an independent Marxist, but anti-Stalinist literary journal, whose mark on American intellectual and cultural development remains evident today.
Rahv was born Ivan Greenberg at Kupin in the Russian Ukraine, the second of three sons.2 His mother was an ardent Zionist and the family ran a struggling dry-goods store in a Jewish ghetto surrounded by peasants. When Greenberg was eight his father moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he worked as a house-to-house peddler to raise money to bring his wife and children to the United States. At the time of the October Revolution, the family shop was expropriated, and the Greenbergs fled to Austria, remaining there for two years before reuniting in Providence. But several years later most of the family moved to Palestine where Greenberg’s father opened a small cement factory. After that venture failed, the fourteen-year-old Ivan returned to the United States by himself. There he finally mastered English, which he added to the Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French he had already acquired. For the rest of his life, however, he spoke with
a noticeable east European accent and was regarded as “less assimilated” into American culture than those Jewish-American writers of his circle who had been born in the United States.
An autodidact who never graduated from high school, Greenberg found his first work writing advertising copy for a firm in Oregon, while giving Hebrew lessons on the side. His spare hours were passed in the public library where he pored over the classics of literature, history, and philosophy. When the depression came he lost his job and moved eastward, spending six months penniless in Chicago in 1930 before arriving in New York where he stood in breadlines and slept on park benches. In 1932, living in dirt and poverty and eking out a few pennies as a melamed, teaching elementary Hebrew by rote, he was taken to a John Reed Club meeting by Nathan Adler, an aspiring writer. Soon after, he joined the Communist Party and took the party name “Rahv,” meaning “rabbi” in Hebrew.
In the party, Rahv became secretary of the monthly magazine Prolit Folio, sponsored by the Revolutionary Writers Federation that was affiliated with the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. He published reviews in the Daily Worker and New Masses, joined the Rebel Poets group, and wrote and translated left-wing poetry. The wholeheartedness with which he gave himself to the revolutionary excesses of the party in the early 1930s is illuminated by his 1932 “Open Letter to Young Writers” in the Rebel Poet. In an apocalyptic style characteristic of the time, Rahv heralded the brilliance of Marxian analysis while excoriating the decadence of bourgeois culture. Observing that for writers there are no “neutral subjects,” he drew the conclusion that the writer’s only choice is between prostitution and revolution.3
William Phillips was also the son of Jewish emigrants from Russia. His father, who had changed his name from Litvinsky, was trained as a lawyer but was unable to sustain a practice.4 The son, born 14 November 1907, grew up in poverty and attended the City College of New York during the late 1920s. Inspired by the ironic skepticism of his teacher Morris Raphael Cohen and the literary experiments of T. S. Eliot, he pursued graduate studies at New York University and Columbia University, teaching part-time to support himself.
At the beginning of the Great Depression, Phillips’s circle of bohemian-literary friends gravitated toward the Communist Party. By 1932 he was a convinced Communist, submitting an article called “Class-ical Culture” to the party’s theoretical review. No less fervent in tone and style than Rahv’s “Open Letter,” Phillips’s contribution was more party-oriented, replete with denunciations of the “social fascism” of the Socialists and declarations of fidelity to the “real leaders” of the working class, “the Communist parties in every country.”5 Phillips, who chose the party name “Wallace Phelps,” differed from Rahv in that he tried for a brief time to pursue a traditional academic career concurrent with his Marxist commitment. Hence, in the same month in which he made his debut in the Communist, an essay in the Symposium appeared under his own name entitled “Categories for Criticism,” in which he tentatively presented the case for Marxist aesthetics in conventional critical vocabulary.6
Phillips and Rahv first met in the New York chapter of the John Reed Club, and, in 1933, together with other members, they conceived a plan for their own magazine. With the support and assistance of established Communist cultural leaders like Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold, the new journal was launched with $800 raised through a lecture by the British Marxist John Strachey.7 Recollections conflict as to who did what in initiating the magazine, but early editorials indicate an agreement that the Partisan Review would concentrate primarily on literary and cultural questions, leaving the New Masses free to turn increasingly to political matters.
From the journal’s inception, the articles written by Phillips and Rahv showed greater subtlety and sophistication than had been evident in their earlier Communist writings. They generally pursued three objectives: a desire that proletarian fiction and criticism should incorporate certain aspects of the literary achievements of the 1920s; an opposition to schematic, sectarian, and reductive applications of Marxism; and a concern with developing a full Marxist aesthetic that acknowledged the special needs of radical intellectuals. In articles such as “Criticism” by Phillips and Rahv and in “A Season in Heaven” by Rahv, the editors positively assessed T. S. Eliot’s writings. The Partisan Review critics maintained that despite evidence of Eliot’s royalist sympathies, his writing expressed criticisms of contemporary life that transcended his political views, an approach that recalls Marx and Engels’s treatment of Balzac, and Lenin’s of Tolstoy.8
Phillips’s “Three Generations,” which discussed trends in American literary tradition and their impact on the new generation of left-wing writers, lauded Eliot for his technical proficiency. Searching for a “usable past,” Phillips noted that the only successful school of American writers had been the movement analogous to that of Zola in French literature: the realist-naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, Robinson, and Sandburg. The “Lost Generation” writers who rejected this heritage were in turn rejected by the older, radical writers, Joseph Freeman, Mike Gold, and Joshua Kunitz. “Nevertheless,” Phillips concluded, “the spirit of the twenties is part of our heritage, and many of the younger revolutionary generation are acutely conscious of this.”9
The campaign by Rahv and Phillips against mechanically applied Marxism, to which they assigned Lenin’s epithet of “leftism,” was a hallmark of their criticism. Of course, both gave allegiance to the Communist International’s call for a consciously proletarian literature and art. They also believed in building an organized movement of anticapitalist and pro-Soviet intellectuals. “The profile of the Bolshevik is emerging in America,” they said, “heroic battles are developing new human types and relations are budding in and around the Communist Party.”10 As revolutionaries they asserted that the writer’s assimilation of this new material could not occur by passive observation but only through active participation in the working-class struggle. The task was to guard the revolutionary aims and direction of the budding revolutionary cultural movement: “The critic is the ideologist of the literary movement, and any ideologist, as Lenin pointed out, ‘is worthy of that name only when he marches ahead of the spontaneous movement, points out the real road, and when he is able, ahead of all others, to solve all the theoretical, political and tactical questions which the “material elements” of the movement spontaneously encounter. It is necessary to be critical of it [the movement], to point out its dangers and defects and to aspire to elevate spontaneity to consciousness’“11
These early articles constitute a valuable catalog of the dangers of a mechanical and sectarian application of Marxist theory to writing and criticism. In 1934 Phillips and Rahv asserted that the most widespread error in leftism occurs when “zeal to steep literature overnight in the program of Communism results in . . . sloganized and inorganic writing.” To view the writer’s goal as merely “discovering” the class struggle for the reader was to renege on one’s creative responsibility, which is to assimilate the political context imaginatively. Literature, they affirmed, was not so much a medium of abstract conceptualization as one “steeped in sensory experience” requiring the transformation of the class struggle into “images of physical life.”12
One year later Phillips and Rahv echoed the same points in a jointly written discussion article on the eve of the 1935 American Writers’ Congress, a major national gathering initiated by the Communist Party. In the article they took issue with a long list of Communist literary shibboleths. Ironically, the Congress would mark the beginning of the party’s new “respectable” political turn to the right, which would result in the jettisoning of the proletarian cultural orientation altogether. Among other criticisms, Phillips and Rahv questioned the slogan “Art as a Weapon,” because the weapon’s range was limited to those susceptible to art. Using Faulkner and Proust as examples, they challenged the equation of a nonproletarian attitude on the part of individual writers with the ideological perspective of th
e bourgeoisie. They concluded that “revolutionary literature is not the literature of a sect, like surrealism or objectivism; it is the product of an emerging civilization, and will contain the wealth and diversity which any cultural range offers.”13
The search for a truly Marxist aesthetic concerned Phillips and Rahv throughout the 1930s; they never accepted the slogans of the Communist International as sufficient guides for revolutionary writers and critics. Early in 1935, attempting to apply Marxist dialectics to critical theory, Phillips discussed the relationship of literary form and content. Examining the views of Plato, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Croce, and Dewey, Phillips argued that any separation of form and content was simply false. Hamlet’s soliloquy, he noted, is banal in its content but achieves aesthetic cogency through its integration in a literary form. Phillips cited the writings of Sidney Hook and Robert Cantwell as representative of contemporary misunderstandings of this dialectical unity.14 Likewise, in a review of Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper, Rahv related historical materialism to the theory of tragedy, concluding that the modern recrudescence of tragedy had a material basis in the heroic struggle of the industrial working class.15
Despite their evolving critique of the Communist Party’s exploitation of the proletarian literary movement, Phillips and Rahv remained an integral part of that movement until the demise of the original Partisan Review in the fall of 1936. Their criticisms of leftism were balanced with warnings against the “right danger,” that is, writers who “seek to assimilate the Joyce-Eliot sensibility without a clear revolutionary purpose.”16 The Partisan Review also contained denunciations of renegades, as well as subtle accolades for Communist leaders. Rahv and Phillips wrote as if they anticipated an imminent renaissance of proletarian writers and literature: “This last year has seen a quickening in the growth of revolutionary literature in America. The maturing of labor struggles and the increase of Communist influence have given the impetus and created a receptive atmosphere for this literature. As was to be expected, the novel—which is the major literary form of today— has taken the lead. Cantwell, Rollins, Conroy and Armstrong have steered fiction into proletarian patterns of struggle.”17
