The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  It was not only young and upcoming writers such as Farrell and Dupee who became convinced that authentic Marxism had to be defended against vulgarization. Edmund Wilson, born in 1895, had inherited a deeply rooted antagonism toward capitalism’s business ethic and commercial mentality from his family, whose ties to the professional stratum of the middle class reached back over a century to preindustrial days. Wilson was also acutely conscious of the thwarted idealism of his father, a brilliant but maladjusted lawyer.31 The son initially expressed his alienation from bourgeois society when, after graduating from Princeton, he joined the army in the hope of forcing a change in his life. Returning from service in France in 1919, he wrote on cultural matters for Vanity Fair, Liberator, Dial, and Bookman. Eventually he became literary editor of the New Republic and remained associated with the magazine until 1940 when he resigned over the publisher’s prowar stance. The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which he wrote about in “The Men from Rumpelmayer’s,” provided the first specific focus to his personal disquiet.32 In 1929, the Gastonia, North Carolina, textile strike finally jarred Wilson from his perch as a spectator.

  During the post-World War I years, Wilson forged a historico-literary method that sharply differentiates him from other critics of his generation. From Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature (1864), which Wilson had read at the age of fifteen, he derived a view of literary schools as forces in a larger social drama. He employed a synoptic style, summarizing plots and biographies, and his forthright approach delved directly to the social core of a literary problem. If he occasionally forsook critical subtlety, it was to focus on a writer or gain perspective on a literary trend. Never awed by the oblique, obscure, or elitist literary schools, Wilson became known in some respects as a popularizer who rendered recondite modernist writers—such as Joyce, Proust, and Eliot—more accessible to the uninformed reader.33

  The bulk of Wilson’s writing in the 1920s appeared as short review articles. He also wrote several volumes of mediocre plays, poems, and dialogues, and one important novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929), perhaps the most definitive portrait of Greenwich Village bohemia at that time. Wilson’s first mature book-length critical work, Axel’s Castle (1931), explicitly revealed the social orientation for which he would be hailed as a “conscience” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Kazin, and others. Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925), Wilson argued that the modern symbolist movement in literature—represented by writers such as Yeats, Valery, Proust, Joyce, and Stein—was essentially a second wave of reaction against the advance of science and industry in the wake of the nineteenth-century romanticists.

  Begun in 1926, Axel’s Castle is a sympathetic but critical exposition of the isolation from an unsympathetic society that underlay writings of the symbolist mode. Modern symbolism, Wilson maintained, expressed the retreat of artists from an encroaching reality into endless psychological explorations and mythical worlds. Axel’s Castle reflected the crosscurrents of social and personal change during the years in which it was written; consequently it embodied an uncertainty of viewpoint that would be found again in To the Finland Station (1940). Wilson so convincingly communicated the acute sensibilities of the symbolist writers that his ultimate criticisms were largely undermined. Yet there is no doubt that Wilson meant to reject symbolism in favor of a more serviceable life of reason and humanizing art.

  Wilson’s radicalization in the 1930s was profound, although his active involvement in Communist and other left-wing activities was brief and without depth. In 1931 he rejected liberal progressivism for communism. Then, after an episodic collaboration with the Communist Party, he endorsed A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party. By 1933, however, he had abjured association with organized movements and for the remainder of the decade he devoted himself to a study of the ideas of communism.

  Wilson’s public declaration of the bankruptcy of reformism that appeared in the New Republic in 1931 was an important event. In “An Appeal to Progressives,” he criticized the recently deceased founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly. In The Promise of American Life (1909), Croly had ascribed the evils of American society to the default of the postrevolutionary Jeffersonians who had appropriated the Hamiltonian program of conservatism under a guise of false rhetoric. Lumping Croly with a whole panopoly of liberal-progressive ideologues—John Dewey, Charles Beard, Walter Lippmann, and Stuart Chase—Wilson declared that all were sincere but were hopelessly tied to capitalism. Reformism was an inadequate response to the present economic and moral crisis, Wilson asserted, and he argued that American radicals “must take Communism away from the Communists.” This slogan meant that, because Progressives disagreed with the tactics of the official Communist Party, they were obligated to unanimously announce that their own goal was likewise “the ownership by the government of the means of production.”34 Wilson followed his appeal with a cross-country pilgrimage to ascertain the state of the nation in 1931. He contributed a series of articles to the New Republic that ultimately became the depression chronicle, The American Jitters (1931). These articles disclosed an intensification of Wilson’s animus against American capitalism and a growing sympathy for the American Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

  Wilson’s personal observations in the penultimate chapter of The American Jitters, however, revealed an unmistakably moralistic and psychological interpretation of socialism. While he believed that Marx’s predictions were being empirically verified, he disparaged the scientific claims of Marxism. Marx, “like the other great Jewish prophets,” had the ability to look “searchingly into one’s heart.” Wilson explained that the real laws of capitalist production “are merely the instinctive workings of human acquisitiveness, selfishness, and self-deception.”35 Wilson also espoused an ideological identification with the Enlightenment of preindustrial capitalism: “I believe in progress as the eighteenth-century people did. . . . I do not, however, believe in progress in the sense in which the nineteenth-century capitalists used the word . . . a conception entirely different from the visions of the earlier philosophers, who had not foreseen that the rising middle class would be able to seize upon machinery as a powerful instrument for human exploitation.”36

  In February 1932 Wilson, who was not by temperament a person of action, joined the NCDPP delegation to investigate the miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky. In October his name appeared as a supporter of the League of Professionals for Foster and Ford. However, Wilson never felt comfortable with the kind of literary criticism that he read in the New Masses. He mulled over the vast gulf between the quality of Lenin’s ideas—”the mind of Lenin was one of the sharpest lenses through which human thought has ever looked”—and those of the American Communists and soon came to the opinion that he was being misused by the party.37 He began a brief liaison with V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly and A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party before turning exclusively to theoretical inquiry for the remainder of the decade.38 Among Wilson’s various heresies at the time was an unbounded admiration for Leon Trotsky’s literary achievements and his preservation of Marxist principles that Wilson celebrated in a two-part essay in the New Republic.39

  THE APPEAL OF TROTSKYISM

  With the literary and political rebellion of the Partisan Review editors and their growing association with Farrell, Dupee, and Wilson, the influence of Trotskyism began to extend beyond the small circle of dissident communists in the NCDPP and League of Professionals. Among other themes, Trotsky was now writing about the Moscow trials, exposing their fraudulent content with the greatest force and authority, thereby himself becoming an indispensable component of the burgeoning movement of anti-Stalinist left-wing intellectuals. In addition, Trotsky had a special appeal to radicalized literati that stemmed from his literary, historical, and polemical achievements which had earned him authentic credentials as a first-rate writer and theorist. One biographer, Baruch Knei-Paz, observed that, as an integral facet of Trotsky’s personality, �
�there emerged, almost from the outset, a seemingly compulsive inclination toward the world of ideas, and of intellectual preoccupations in general.” In a powerful study of Trotsky’s literary method, Norman Geras observes that, even in Trotsky’s early writings, “the techniques and inspirations of creative literature inform . . . his activities as historian and journalist, revolutionary theoretician and polemicist.”40

  Even more, his intellectual and literary predilections blended harmoniously with his extraordinary career of revolutionary activism, which included his service as the president of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905, as the director of the military committee that organized the October uprising, as the Soviet Union’s first commissar of foreign affairs, and as the commander of the Red Army. Throughout these many years of dangerous and vigorous activity, Trotsky’s imagination, independence of thought, rebellious spirit, and literary productivity never declined. “With full, almost naive conviction Trotsky believed in the creative possibilities of the word,” wrote Irving Howe many decades later,

  but he believed not as most Western intellectuals have: not in some ironic or contemplative or symbolic way. The common distinction between word and deed Trotsky scorned as a sign of philistinism, worthy—he might have added—of liberal professors and literary dilettantes. He regarded his outpouring of brilliant composition as the natural privilege of a thinking man, but more urgently, as the necessary work of a Marxist leader who has pledged his life to socialism. The heritage of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century is stamped upon his books, for he took from them the assumption that to write is to engage in a serious political act, a gesture toward the redemption or recreation of man.41

  Throughout his life Trotsky developed a set of distinctive ideas about literature and culture. Like many leading revolutionaries, he approached cultural matters with the same passionate intensity that characterized his study of politics. As late as 1935 he wrote that “politics and literature constitute in essence the contents of my personal life.”42 His essays collected in Problems of Everyday Life (1924) present theoretical arguments explaining why the mastery and critical assimilation of all existing culture is the central task of the proletarian revolution. In his literary criticism, Trotsky, who was much inspired by the Russian radical critic Vissarion Belinsky, focused on the social aspects of literature, but he rigorously differentiated between his assessments of the political views of an author and his judgments of the artistic quality of a work. Literature and Revolution (1923) and many subsequent essays demonstrate that Trotsky had no patience with critics who claimed that a certain political ideology might automatically enhance an aesthetic work or guarantee a more profound and sensitive exploration of life through the imagination.43 Just as Marx admired the monarchist Balzac more than many socialist writers of his day, so Trotsky lauded the art of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy, whose political outlooks might be characterized as mystical and even reactionary. Above all, Trotsky had always been aware of a consanguinity of temperament between the rebel artist and the social radical. Cultural and political heretics were potentially bonded by their refusal to accommodate to the status quo. In 1938 Trotsky wrote that “generally speaking, art is the expression of man’s need for a harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative work.”44

  Trotsky devoted extensive correspondence during the 1930s to the question of the significance of American intellectuals for a small revolutionary workers’ party. The main tendency of intellectuals, once radicalized, was to gravitate toward the Communist parties that were the official representatives of the Soviet regime because, among other attractions, they offered a strong material alternative to capitalist literary institutions, including numerous left-wing magazines, the possibility of being published in the Soviet Union or participating in international lecture tours, and an audience of respectable size. Trotsky was brutally harsh in his assessment of pro-Communist intellectuals:

  A whole generation of “leftist” intelligentsia has turned its eyes for the last ten or fifteen years to the East and bound its lot in varying degrees, to a victorious revolution, if not to a victorious proletariat. Now, this is by no means one and the same thing. In the victorious revolution there is not only the revolution, but there is also the new privileged stratum which raises itself on the shoulders of the revolution. In reality, the “leftist” intelligentsia has tried to change masters.45

  Trotsky therefore urged that his followers exercise special precautionary measures when assimilating former Communist intellectuals: “if it is a matter of a young intellectual who has been in our movement, that’s another thing; a worker is also another thing; but an intellectual with an education gained in a Stalinist party, that’s a dangerous element for us.”46

  From the onset, Trotsky pressed American radical intellectuals and writers who had become disillusioned with Stalinist communism to strive for theoretical and political clarity. He believed that a recurring problem among these intellectuals was their tendency to mistake the opinions of bureaucratized Communist parties for authentic Leninist practice. The once-burned intellectuals frequently concluded that collaboration with any Marxist party would result in a repetition of their being manipulated and suppressed as they were by the Communists. Consequently, they tended to stay aloof from identification with parties, sustaining, as best they could, a general anti-Stalinist radicalism. As early as 1932, Trotsky criticized the limitations of this standpoint in a letter to V. F. Calverton, who was beginning to open the pages of the Modern Monthly to a discussion of Trotskyist ideas:

  A Marxist who, for one secondary consideration or another, does not draw his conclusions to the end betrays Marxism. To pretend to ignore the different Communist factions, so as not to become involved and compromise oneself, signifies ignoring that activity which, through all the contradictions, consolidates the vanguard of the class; it signifies covering oneself with the abstraction of the revolution, as with a shield, from the blows and bruises of the real revolutionary process.

  Still, Trotsky held that a uniquely promising situation existed among American intellectuals, although, paradoxically, he believed that it was partly determined by what he called “the political backwardness of the United States, technologically the most advanced country in the world.” The basis for this contention of backwardness was that the United States “lagged behind in the domain of socialist theory.” It also lacked the potent socialist traditions and mass radical organizations that existed in Europe. But Trotsky’s analysis was, ultimately, overoptimistic about the prospects of a revolutionary movement. He held that the very same factors that caused political retardation prepared the way for a great leap forward: “The great transoceanic ‘porridge’ is unquestioningly beginning to boil,” wrote Trotsky to Calverton, “the breaking point in the development of American capitalism will unavoidably provoke a blossoming of critical and generalizing thought, and it may be that we are not very far from the time when the theoretical center of the international revolution is transferred to New York. . . . Before the American Marxist open truly colossal, breathtaking perspectives.”47

  The relative weakness of working-class political traditions and organizations in the United States helped account for the fact that so many of the most advanced and independent-minded intellectuals gave serious consideration to the miniscule and isolated Trotskyist organization. The political weight of the Communist and Socialist parties in the United States was not insignificant, but it was not so overwhelming as in many European countries. However, after the success of the Popular Front and the exponential growth of the American Communist Party in numbers and influence, which was capped only by the onset of World War II, the stream of intellectuals toward Trotskyism virtually ceased.

  What helped to distinguish the Trotskyist-influenced critics, especia
lly those who would rally around the reorganized Partisan Review, and what exacerbated their relations with the Communists, was their willingness to openly blend Marxism with an aggressive sympathy for the modernist themes and techniques of the 1920s, exemplified by T. S. Eliot. In contrast, the official Communist attitude was expressed by Mike Gold: “[In] the Twenties the young poets followed T. S. Eliot. Eliot was to the poetry of the boom period what Mencken had been to its prose; both were anti-people, and fascist-minded, and both were washed away like rotten piers in the flood of new insights and new demands that the depression brought to American writers.”48

  Gold’s reductive viewpoint epitomized the vulgarization of Marxism in the sphere of literary criticism that so exercised the Partisan Review editors. Rahv and Phillips held that new forms and stages of class society can produce new forms of art, most famously demonstrated by the rise of the novel, that became a generalized literary form only with the rise of bourgeois society. But they also agreed with Marx and Engels that art has substantial residual value, that it did not necessarily have to change its forms dramatically or render its earlier achievements obsolete with every new conjuncture in class relations. The poetry of Eliot, in fact, owed an important debt to artistic achievements that had been realized prior to the boom period, namely, the revolt against gentility as well as the Imagist experiments. Eliot’s writings were certainly not “washed away” by the 1930s.