The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  By the beginning of 1935 a switch in Communist Party policy was becoming apparent. Not only had the expected proletarian cultural renaissance failed to materialize, but the Communist International was at the point of a historic political jettisoning of its ultrarevolutionary Third Period policies of 1928–33. After the disastrous consolidation of Hitlerism, facilitated by the Communists’ refusal to seek unity in action with the German Social Democrats against the Brown Shirts, the party began to seek a defensive rapprochement with liberal and “progressive” capitalist forces. The John Reed Clubs, founded as organizations of workers and proletarianized intellectuals who were openly anticapitalist and partisans of the Soviet Union, were peremptorily liquidated by the party in favor of formations like the American Writers’ Congress and the League of American Writers that had a wider appeal to the liberals among the academics, commercial authors, and literati. As Malcolm Cowley has recounted, the Comintern’s literary and political turnabout went hand in hand: “Dimitrov called for the People’s Front on August 2, 1935, which was some months after the [American Writers’] Congress. But the premonitory rumblings of the People’s Front were already spreading over the world.”18

  Even before the American Writers’ Congress was held, most of the John Reed Clubs had been dissolved, which effectually eliminated much of the material support for Partisan Review and its copublications. With the demise of the John Reed Clubs, the Partisan Review became organizationally independent, although it still remained under the guidance of its three main editors: Phillips and Rahv, who then worked for the Federal Writers Project, and Alan Calmer, who was employed by International Publishers. The journal drifted in the direction of the new League of American Writers, which from the 1935 congress until late 1936 considered making its organ Partisan Review. Failing to get organizational support, Rahv and Phillips faced financial difficulties and in early 1936 decided to merge Partisan Review with Jack Conroy’s publication, Anvil.19 When the Partisan Review and Anvil were forced to close down altogether at the end of 1936, Rahv and Phillips continued their search for the reason why the proletarian cultural movement had failed. They were particularly concerned with the Communist Party’s authoritarian interventions in the movement.

  The two-year interlude between the first and second American Writers’ congresses (1935 and 1937) proved to be the turning point for Phillips and Rahv. By the time of the second congress, the Communist Party policy had undergone such a complete transformation that not only had the proletarian literary movement been abandoned but, in accordance with the new Popular Front strategy of alliances with “progressive” capitalism, the party’s cultural leaders even hailed literary patriotism, the new nationalism of Van Wyck Brooks, and the culture industry of Hollywood. On both literary and political grounds, Rahv and Phillips were appalled. The outrageous Moscow trials (1936-38) were commencing, and, simultaneously, reports emanated from Spain that the Communists had crushed the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a dissident Marxist organization, and other left-wing forces.20

  Thus Phillips and Rahv arrived at a new assessment of the relationship between revolutionary politics and radical literature. Above all, they concluded that writers and critics must be free of all partisan political and organizational pressure. Yet they also felt that they had been duped by the appealing simplicity of the notion that writers must ally themselves with the revolutionary working class. As a substitute for a genuine aesthetic, this abstract call for an alliance tended to merge politics and literature; it equated the personal views of a writer formed amidst specific circumstances with historical class objectives, and it led to the evaluation of a writer’s merit and achievements and relation to the working class on the basis of his or her support for the policies of a particular Marxist party. In an analysis offered by Rahv in 1940, he concluded that “within the brief space of a few years the term ‘proletarian literature’ was transformed into a euphemism for a Communist Party literature which tenaciously upheld a factional faith identifying the party with the working class, Stalinism with Marxism and the Soviet Union with socialism.”21 But if Rahv and Phillips were the most articulate in their criticisms of party policy and defenses of the legacy of the 1920s, they were hardly alone. Their disaffection with the party and their project of reconstituting the Partisan Review as an independent communist organ coincided with the political evolution of several other writers and critics.

  OTHER DISSIDENT WRITERS AND CRITICS ON THE LEFT: JAMES T. FARRELL, F. W. DUPEE, EDMUND WILSON

  James T. Farrell was born into a working-class Irish-American family in Chicago on 27 February 1904. His father was a teamster and his mother worked as a domestic servant. The Farrells were so poor that when James was three, he had to be turned over to the care of middle-class relatives. He financed several years in the University of Chicago by working as a gas-station attendant and in other assorted jobs but quit before graduating in order to become a writer. In 1931 he eloped to Paris with Dorothy Butler, writing industriously while they lived in poverty. The next year he settled permanently in New York City, experiencing a change in fortune when his first novel, Young Lonigan (1932), was published by the Vanguard Press. This was followed by Gas-House McGinty in 1933, and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Calico Shoes and Other Stories in 1934. In 1935 the appearance of Judgment Day completed the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which left Farrell firmly established as a major figure in American letters.22

  Although Farrell had read socialist classics and was attracted to radicalism during the late 1920s in Chicago and in 1931 when he was in Paris, he did not become actively involved with the organized left until he moved to New York City. As a supporter of the Communist Party from 1932 to 1935, Farrell wrote for various party publications and collaborated in a number of party activities until he became affected by many of the same political and literary questions that had caused the Menorah group and the Partisan Review editors to reaffirm communism as an antidote to Stalinism. Although personal considerations required that he proceed with caution—his companion at the time, Hortense Alden, feared that her acting career would be damaged if they openly opposed the party— he finally issued A Note on Literary Criticism in the spring of 1936.23 A Marxist polemic against the political manipulation of literary judgments as practiced by the Communist Party, the theoretical underpinnings of the book are consistent with Trotsky’s views expressed in Literature and Revolution (1923). Farrell had discussed a draft of the work with George Novack, by then a committed Trotskyist, when they were together at Yaddo, a retreat for writers and artists in Saratoga Springs, New York.

  In his own work Farrell did not attempt to write “Marxist novels,” although he was greatly influenced by Marx and his books have many political implications. Still, although Farrell did not draw inspiration for his fiction from reading Das Kapital, he was an authentic artist whose vision of the world was enriched and enhanced by his assimilation of socialist theory. No accurate assessment of Farrell can ignore the fact that a major source of his desire to write was his rebellion against what he called the “biological tragedy” of humanity—the corrosiveness of time and the inevitability of death. On the other hand, complementing this concern was his rebellion against what he called the “social tragedy” created by class society, which can be overcome through education and political action.24

  The Studs Lonigan trilogy itself is consecrated to revealing how American culture prevents humanity from achieving its fullest expression which will be most clearly realized through the abolition of class society. The spiritual godfathers of the trilogy were members of the English faculty at the University of Chicago who strongly encouraged Farrell: James Weber Linn and Robert Morss Lovett. They saw the vast literary potential in a character called “Studs,” whom Farrell had first created in a short story by the same name. However, as Farrell developed the story into three novels over the next several years, against the setting of the Great Depression, he began to see Studs as not just a character but also as a soc
ial manifestation.

  The broader historical significance of the trilogy may not be immediately apparent because it is written in the cliché-ridden idiom of the protagonist who has roots in a specific Chicago South Side neighborhood. However, the tragic destiny that overwhelms Studs is bound up in the course of America’s social and economic development from the Woodrow Wilson years to the Great Depression. Studs’s fall in the third volume, Judgment Day, provides an opportunity for Farrell to pass judgment not merely on Lonigan but on American capitalist society. The book as a whole dramatizes the failure of cultural myth as a program of action.

  For example, as the characters live through the boom years of the 1920s, Studs and his family and friends remain true believers in the myths of American society propagated by the schools, businesses, churches, and other institutions. These myths cohere in what is commonly referred to as the American dream: a belief that the democratic capitalism of the United States permits all those who have sufficient ambition and ability to become whatever they wish. Consequently, when the Great Depression hits, not only the economic but also the spiritual foundations of Farrell’s characters’ lives are demolished. Feelings of profound dislocation are displayed at the end of Judgment Day in the ruminations of Studs’s father, Paddy Lonigan: “It was neither right nor fair. He could not see why all these troubles must come to him. What had he done? He wanted to know. Here he was, a man who had always done his duties. Hadn’t he earned his place in the world by hard work? Hadn’t he always provided for his family to the best of his abilities, tried to be a good husband and a good father, a true Catholic, and a real American?”25

  As a foil to Studs and the Lonigan family, Farrell offers glimpses of the growing consciousness of the rebel Danny O’Neill, who decides to work his way through the university while employed as a gas-station attendant. O’Neill begins to break with the false consciousness perpetrated by his society, especially with the myth of Christianity: “He conceived of the world, the environment he had known all his life, as lies. He realized that all his education in Catholic schools, all he had heard and absorbed, had been lies. . . . An exultant feeling swept him. God was a lie. God was dead. God was a mouldering corpse within his mind. And God had been the center of everything in his mind. All his past was now like so many maggots on the mouldering corpse of God within his mind.”26

  Studs Lonigan dies of heart failure at the end of Judgment Day, but in part his illness has a social basis—for his health was damaged during the Prohibition era by the consumption of large quantities of cheap bootleg liquor, which he used to anesthetize himself against the pain of the disappointments in his life. The final passages of Judgment Day are rich with symbolically evocative episodes. As Studs lies in his sickroom near the end, he experiences a deathbed fantasy. Before him appear many figures who, like the characters in a medieval pageant, represent not only various aspects of his life but also objectify the false religious and cultural codes and attitudes he has adopted. Immediately thereafter occur two more episodes. While his mother listens without comprehension to the Latin incantations of the priest giving extreme unction to Studs, Paddy Lonigan witnesses a Communist-led demonstration against unemployment in which banners bearing slogans calling for revolutionary political action are visible. Even though Farrell never lectures his readers on political doctrine, the significance of the juxtaposition is obvious.

  Farrell’s eagerness for knowledge, a personality trait matched only by his irascibility, was forged in rebellion against the cultural poverty of his boyhood on the South Side of Chicago. His reading began with and remained rooted in the social thought of the American pragmatists, the novels of the realists and naturalists, and the historical and class outlook of the European Marxists. Consequently, his critical thought, expressed in a plethora of reviews and essays, largely probes the social basis of human experience—of morality, psychology, aesthetics, and of the concepts of time and the historical process. His political convictions informed all his literary projects; ever since the 1920s he viewed the re-creation of the world of his experiences through art as an act of social redemption. In this endeavor he sought to include no propaganda in his work; he simply ascribed to his role as an artist the task of preserving the memory and dignifying the lives of common people by revealing the nature of their experiences in American society.

  If Farrell’s boyhood struggles predisposed him to radicalism, there was nothing particular in the background of Frederick Wilcox Dupee that led to his leftward development during the 1930s. Born 25 June 1904, also on the South Side of Chicago, he grew up in small towns in Illinois. His father had to move about in search of better business connections as the family fortune declined.27 His Huguenot descent meant much to him as a youth; it was a way of differentiating his family from other small-town families that he thought were boring. In fact, with his jaunty demeanor, wry face, and flashing blue eyes, quite a few of his friends thought that he looked French.

  He attended first the University of Illinois, then the University of Chicago, and finally Yale, from which his father had graduated. At Yale he joined the Elizabethan Club, and, with his friends Dwight Macdonald and Wilder Hobson, immersed himself in Spengler, Proust, Joyce, James, Sherwood Anderson, and Irving Babbitt. After graduation he spent two years teaching at Bowdoin College before deciding to become a writer and begin traveling around the United States. In late 1929 he and Macdonald initiated a bimonthly literary magazine published in New York, the Miscellany, which ran from March 1930 until March 1931. Dupee contributed stories to the magazine before it folded. At the same time he wrote a number of reviews for the Symposium that suggested that he had an antiradical bias: at one point he denounced John Dos Passos’s left-wing writings as “bogus modernism,” and at another he suggested that Edmund Wilson’s blend of Communist politics with his modernist sensibilities brought ill consequences.28

  Dupee next went to Mexico, living in small towns and on the beaches, surviving on a small income of $87 a month augmented by payments for occasional travel articles that he wrote and sold. Unable to finish a novel, he fell into a deep depression during which he contemplated suicide. When he emerged from his despair, he had formed a new identity as a literary critic and a new political consciousness based upon what he had learned about the Mexican Revolution.29

  Returning to the United States in the mid-1930s, he went immediately to New York City where he discovered that all his former literary friends—including Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham, and Robert Cantwell—had become radicals. Cantwell directed him to the Communist Party with a warning that writers should probably refrain from joining the party. Despite such admonitions, Dupee joined at once and accepted an assignment working on the waterfront with longshoremen. Whereas most writers in the party lived in Greenwich Village and did little more than arrange cultural events and pass out leaflets, Dupee was anxious to be more active, to be more than just an armchair revolutionary. His major effort involved assisting an attempt to build a rank-and-file caucus in the International Longshoreman’s Association. After a month he was made educational director of the party unit in the union, which gave him a chance to study Marxism, but he continued to distribute Shape Up, the rank-and-file paper, on the docks in the early morning cold. He also participated in a militant anti-Nazi protest aboard the SS Bremen, a German luxury liner.

  Soon a friend took Dupee to the New Masses offices, and, when Isidor Schneider was called to Europe, Dupee was asked to replace him as literary editor. He started work in February 1936. That summer both the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow trials began. As his disillusionment increased, various people began efforts to influence him: James Burnham, an acquaintance from the Miscellany and Symposium days, began phoning him at the office to call his attention to the criminal absurdity of the trials. Newton Arvin and Horace Gregory, on the other hand, pressured him to stay on.30 Philip Rahv walked into the office one day and shortly thereafter introduced him to William Phillips.

  When Rahv and Phillip
s first broached the idea of Dupee’s joining them in relaunching the Partisan Review on an independent basis, Dupee still felt bound to the party. After a while, however, he remained at the New Masses only because Rahv and Phillips thought that it was a good tactical move to have him stay there until publication of the new magazine was announced, thereby making his resignation more dramatic. However, conflicts at the New Masses continued to increase so that Dupee felt he could not stay any longer. Shortly after the start of the Moscow trials, Theodore Draper, called “The Commissar” behind his back by the staff, marched into the office and began reciting the names of people the New Masses had to “get,” beginning with Herbert Solow. Dupee was soon assigned a list of members of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky to contact in order to persuade them to resign from the committee. His first call was to a young writer named Mary McCarthy, who howled with laughter, convincing him to abandon his efforts. He also requested permission from the party to criticize the design of a new Soviet monument in memory of the October Revolution, but permission was refused. Finally, at the urging of Burnham, Dupee read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932-33) and found that Trotsky’s implicit criticism of Stalin’s usurpation of the promise of the revolution provided a political focus for his various misgivings about the party. One day at the office he turned to his young assistant, Samuel Sillen, and said, “You know, I really can’t take any more of this.” He said good-bye to Joseph Freeman, the editor, and walked out with a folder of letters documenting some of the conflicts he had endured. One pertained to a campaign in opposition to his publication of Rahv’s harsh review of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) on the grounds that Steinbeck was moving toward the left. Shortly after, Dupee received a formal expulsion notice from the party, based upon the charge that he had tried to make the New Masses “a forum for attacks on the Soviet Union.”