by Alan M Wald
In many ways Schapiro’s political evolution paralleled that of Felix Morrow, except that Schapiro kept organized politics at arm’s length and never joined a party or made a full-time commitment to the movement. What may have differentiated Schapiro from others who also remained aloof and may have allowed his revolutionary Marxist convictions to persist much longer was not a lack of seriousness or conviction. Schapiro was primarily devoted to something he thought more substantial than the transient realm of politics. From an early age he became committed to a concept of culture based on art, as if art were an eternal realm continuously being added to but which remained constant despite the vicissitudes of politics. Schapiro’s vision was permanently fixed on this realm of art. As a kind of extension of that vision, he was a socialist in the sense that he wished well for humankind and believed that the preservation and extension of the artistic realm might best be achieved through socialism.
Through his college friendship with Lionel Trilling he was marginally connected to the Menorah group, and, in the early 1930s, he felt torn between a desire to commit himself wholeheartedly by joining the Communist Party and a desire to do his own work. He felt incapable of adding party responsibilities to his scholarship and teaching. He chose the latter course but retained a respect for those who chose the former. Although he was out of the city when the Culture and Crisis manifesto was prepared, he circulated a similar statement among architects. He also became active in the John Reed Clubs through which he published a pamphlet on public housing and was an active member of the League of Professionals.62 During the late 1920s Schapiro, as a friend of Chambers, followed the factional struggle in the Communist Party and, like Chambers, felt sympathy for the Lovestone group that was expelled in 1929. But also like Chambers, who went back to the Communists, Schapiro, too, felt that he could not trust the Lovestone group and that the Communist Party was the center of the movement. Although he had signed the open letter of protest in 1934, he retained strong ties to the party. In 1935 he assisted the party in gathering various kinds of information, and in 1936 he addressed the First American Artists Congress, established as part of the Popular Front. In his paper, “The Social Bases of Art,” he rejected pure individualism and argued that artists should ally with the revolutionary working class.63 Still, when the November elections came, he followed the Trotskyists’ advice and voted for the Socialist Party’s candidates.
From then on he worked diversely in the anti-Stalinist left. He spent a year in a key editorial role on the Marxist Quarterly, remaining even after the Trotskyists left. He endorsed the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, wrote for the new Partisan Review, and joined the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism. He remained a member of the American Artists Congress until the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact when he led a split that established the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.64 Amidst all of these activities he retained and developed his heterodox cultural beliefs: he found artistic freedom within the traditionalist restrictions of Romanesque art, and he argued that abstract expressionist art reflected the antibourgeois rebellion of the artist while simultaneously eliciting a sense of freedom from the responsive observer.65 During the 1939–40 fight in the SWP, he followed the discussion closely, sensing that Cannon and Trotsky were more correct.
Schapiro’s rebuttal to Hook, “The Nerve of Sidney Hook,” however, was sui generis. It was written according to the dictates of his own perspective. Conceding no ground, he began by challenging Hook’s interpretation of the term “failure of nerve,” first used by Gilbert Murray to argue that the decline of rationalism in the Hellenistic age “was connected with a loss of interest in civil responsibilities and political life.” On the one hand, Schapiro argued, the term made no sense when applied to Trotskyists, who were simply carrying out, in modulated form, their prewar analysis in spite of enormous pressures to change their views. On the other, when railing against unambiguously irrationalist trends, Hook had brought together too many disparate phenomena, forgetting that “the irrationalist content of contemporary arts, their motifs of anxiety and exasperation, the sympathy with the tormented, suffering, psychotic, primitive, infantile and magical, and the violent hostility to social life, and even to science, include a valid criticism of existing institutions and make us more deeply aware of the inner world of the self.” Schapiro suggested that Hook was merely using the term as “a convenient label with which to discredit opponents,” primarily the Trotskyists. “He taxes with failure of nerve individuals who have courageously maintained, at the risk of persecution, the same unpopular views about the war that they held before it began. At the same time he is silent about those who have abandoned the camp of socialism for a shallow and palpably false doctrine of a new managerial society.” An important point of Schapiro’s argument was that Hook himself had undergone a tremendous change of perspective without admitting or explaining it, and he cited a series of statements made by Hook between the fall of 1939 and 1943 to demonstrate Hook’s turnabout.
Schapiro was a genuine independent, but a classical Marxist nonetheless, struggling to keep a Leninist view alive under difficult conditions. Of course, his advocacy of a working-class war against Hitler was the advocacy of a war that did not exist, even in embryo; yet the social activist must always advocate policies not yet extant for the purpose of trying to bring them into being. The conundrum of Leninism in World War II is whether such a class war was possible or would have been effective under any plausible set of circumstances. In any event, Schapiro and the other Leninists accurately predicted that the victorious allies would reestablish the same type of social formations that had originally caused the rise of fascism. They also pointed out that the “critical supporters” of the war were incapable of making significant criticisms (other than anti-Soviet ones) because serious support to a war effort by one’s own nation paralyzes criticism.
Schapiro continued his allegiance to revolutionary Marxism throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s, when he quietly shifted to left-wing social democracy. A supporter of the Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League in those years, he followed their publications and participated in a sharp debate with James T. Farrell over the political nature of the film Open City in the New International.66 He maintained friendships with party members as well as with some lapsed Trotskyists—such as Louis and Sarah Jacobs—no longer in organizations. When James Kutcher, a member of the Socialist Workers Party who had lost both legs fighting in World War II, was fired in 1948 from his Veterans Administration position, Schapiro joined the political defense committee and participated in raising funds.67 On 27 February 1949 Schapiro addressed a public meeting sponsored by the Independent Socialist League on “Art and the State,” at which he defended the liberating impact of the Russian Revolution on the arts and also the Bolshevik cultural policies of the Lenin period.68 As late as 1956, Schapiro addressed an Independent Socialist League forum on the Hungarian revolt.
At the time Dissent was founded he joined the board of sponsors and adhered to its independent radicalism until the 1960s, although he rarely contributed articles to the magazine.69 Then, like some of the other Dissent sponsors, he responded negatively to the excesses of the New Left by which time he had also developed a strong attachment to Israel. Still, he never railed against the non-Stalinist left, nor did he explicitly repudiate Marxism, as did Dissent editor Howe. By the time his fame as an art historian had come to national attention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, his political past was so vague and obscured that the most complete biographical study of Schapiro erroneously depicted him as having moved from Communism in 1932 to the Socialist Party in 1936. This interpretation was based on Schapiro’s vote for Norman Thomas that year, but support for Thomas was also the official Trotskyist policy in connection with its temporary entry into the Socialist Party. The biography omitted entirely the fact that Schapiro considered himself a revolutionary Leninist in opposition to social democracy at least until the late 1940s.70
Many of the New York intellectuals came to dismiss the reality of American imperialism during the late 1940s and the 1950s. This was due to the abandonment of their anti-imperialist position during World War II, coupled with the beginning of the Cold War and the failure of the postwar upsurge of the working class to sustain itself. Their new view was explicitly articulated in 1948 by Philip Rahv who contended that “American ‘imperialism’ is the bogey of people who have not yet succeeded in getting rid of their Stalinist hangover.”71
In various forms most of the other New York intellectuals also came to embrace the very supraclass theories they had once rejected. They did so by reorganizing their thought around a cluster of key terms that began to appear increasingly in their writing: “modulation,” “variousness,” “skeptical realism,” “moral realism,” “the imagination of disaster,” “the end of ideology,” and, in the arena of political polemic, “liberal anticommunism” and “anti-anticommunism.” All of these coinages were utilized to convince the intellectuals as well as their audiences that they had moved forward rather than backward. Yet most of their “new” views about the sociological character of the Soviet Union and the “straight-line thesis” that Leninism automaticaly leads to Stalinism had been stated decades earlier by the Mensheviks and other opponents of the October Revolution. Moreover, the particular political programs they espoused for the reform of capitalism scarcely went beyond the reforms of the New Deal that they had long been accustomed to criticize from the left.
It is clear that the intellectuals’ new views had not evolved in isolation from changes in their social status. In the absence of a viable and militant working-class pole, the intellectuals had gravitated toward the seats of power in bourgeois society. Equally important, the unprecedented economic prosperity of postwar America had provided enormous opportunities for them to pursue careers in the universities and in publishing, especially with the impeccable anticommunist credentials that they had earned through their activities in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Even their cultural interests became more American-centered as Rahv, Trilling, and Dupee devoted themselves to promoting Henry James as a home-grown modernist, while Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg secured their positions as the foremost defenders of the New York school of abstract expressionism.
Still, the scars of alienation from American culture in the 1920s and 1930s ran deep among those of the New York intellectuals with profound literary sensibilities. Not all felt themselves at ease in the new social setting. Several carried on personal rebellions through their literary criticism. In some instances the political pressures of the time brought peculiar results, as in the case of Philip Rahv, who abandoned his efforts to advance a Marxist aesthetic for a dubious attachment to high modernism as the salvation of the radical intellectual.
Rahv’s whole approach to cultural modernism had always had an ambiguous relation to Marxism, as can be seen through a comparison of his work with that of Georg Lukács, perhaps the most systematic of the Marxist critics of modernism. According to Lukács, literature of the capitalist epoch had reached its zenith in the age of “classical realism” (represented by the novels of Balzac and Sir Walter Scott) because writing during that period was animated by a historical consciousness linked to the French Revolution. After 1848, however, literature had declined into “naturalism” (represented by Zola and Flaubert) in which a static, ahistorical, superficial apprehension of reality comes to mar artistic perception. Lukács’s view is that modernism is a further development of naturalism, wherein an ahistorical perception of reality becomes fetishized, the distorted and subjective vision of the artist replaces objective reality, and an exaggerated preoccupation with form and technique becomes the prevailing principle of creativity.72
Like Lukács, Rahv prized historical insight into the nature of an epoch. Yet instead of discussing the relevance of historical materialism as a guide to understanding the social matrix in which a work of art is conceived, Rahv chose to discuss historical consciousness in the way that Nietzsche did—as “virtually a new faculty of the mind, a sixth sense.”73 Consequently there is no systematic methodology, Marxist or otherwise, present in Rahv’s writings. His critical preoccupation with the ironies and tensions in modernist literature makes him a strange cousin to the school of New Criticism that began to dominate American literary criticism in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Rahv’s treatment of modernism in his essay “Twilight of the Thirties,” written in 1939, provides a good example of the peculiar political and philosophical direction in which one can go when one’s “Marxist” interpretation of social process is more dependent on a “sixth sense” than on historical materialism. Rahv accurately argues against a mechanical attribution of the labels “bourgeois” and “proletarian” to particular schools and works of literature because they do not take into account all the factors that mediate the class origins of an artist and a work of art itself. Trotsky, he points out, analyzed the symbolist schools that flourished in Russia before the October Revolution by situating them amidst the “special role and changing status of the intellectuals” that obtained at that time.
Departing from Trotsky’s analysis, Rahv then presents his own view that a central feature of modernist culture was its perception that art does not derive its value from its relation to society but that it has value “in itself.” Rahv believed that even though this perception was inaccurate, it tended, under certain conditions, to encourage “the creation of moral and aesthetic values running counter to and often violently critical of the bourgeois spirit.” Therefore, radicals should have an interest in supporting modernist culture because it encourages and requires the detachment of intellectuals from bourgeois society: “From René [by Chateaubriand] to The Waste Land, what is modern literature if not a vindictive, neurotic, and continually renewed dispute with the modern world?”
Further, Rahv argued that modernist literature, despite its weaknesses, was clearly superior to literature that either adapted itself to the capitalist marketplace or to the left-wing literary movement during the 1930s, which, Rahv believed, had placed itself abjectly at the service of the Communist Party. Writing at the very outset of World War II, Rahv announced that he had decided to take his stand with modernism mainly out of pessimism: “If a sufficiently organic, active, and broad revolutionary movement existed, it might assimilate the artist by opening to him its own avenue of experience; but in the absence of such a movement all he can do is utilize the possibilities of individual and group secession from, and protest against, the dominant values of our time.”74
Thus Rahv’s approach to modernism begins with a legitimate criticism of vulgar Marxist aesthetics but ends up by defining the role of the vanguard intellectual in supraclass terms, as a self-exiled “outsider,” alienated and angst-ridden. If he and his fellow intellectuals had actually remained faithful to the program of “secession from, and protest against, the dominant values of our time,” they would have ended up very differently. But the actual result was that Rahv’s modernism became a mechanism for negation, for abstention and withdrawal, in regard to left-wing movements. Ultimately this version of modernism may even have provided justification for a form of cultural elitism that served as a barrier to those intellectuals who once wished to participate in the struggles of the oppressed classes.
Whatever enthusiasm the American Trotskyist movement may have had for the Partisan Review, it was not derived from any special attachment to modernism. In Literature and Revolution and elsewhere Trotsky had articulated a position, generally accepted by his political disciples, that it was dangerous to endorse any particular school or style above others and that all literary movements had dualistic tendencies. Even though Trotsky was renowned for his polemics against the “proletarian culture” movement that sought official sanction in the Soviet Union, he always had a special interest in and sensitivity to literature by workers or about working-class life.
In the United States the most important creative artist significantly influenced by Trotskyism was James T. Farrell. Although his critical writings of the 1930s and 1940s defended modernist writers against narrow-minded “philistines” of both the right and the left, he was also very concerned with fostering nonelitist literature that communicated the life experiences of the plebeian classes. This did not mean, however, that Farrell exaggerated the merit of a literary work because of the virtue of its political line or the class origin of the author. Farrell, in fact, held that the “Lost Generation” decade of the 1920s had produced a greater number of extraordinary works of literature than had the radical writers of the 1930s. On the other hand, he believed that the writers of the Great Depression decade, despite certain deformities due to the influence of Stalinism, had made unparalleled advances in terms of bringing characters, perceptions, and experiences of men and women from the working classes into the pages of American literature.75
In his well-known essay, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” written in 1940, Rahv barely acknowledged this achievement. By the 1940s he had essentially transformed the Partisan Review into an organ of modernist high culture at the expense of other literary schools, most notably realism and naturalism.76 Twenty years later, Rahv still adhered to this view despite the fact that modernism had lost much of its capacity as a vehicle of intellectual rebellion, especially in light of its close association with the conservative New Criticism, largely based on modernist texts. Delmore Schwartz noted the phenomenon of the incorporation of modernism in a 1958 address at the Library of Congress:
