by Alan M Wald
Lionel Trilling originally conceived of The Middle of the Journey as a nouvelle, a very short novel with a high degree of thematic explicitness. His subject was to be the way death is perceived by middle-class intellectuals of the time. When the character Maxim, based upon Whittaker Chambers, came unbidden into the story, the book took on unexpected direction and eventually turned into a novel.31 It seems significant that Trilling, who wrote virtually nothing about his revolutionary years in his essays, could not escape the subject in his major work of fiction. Once Trilling’s imagination began to flow, an important relationship was established between the response of middle-class intellectuals to the reality of death, which they chose to either ignore or romanticize, and their response to the failure of utopian movements for social change. In both cases, ideology was shown to falsify experience.
Trilling’s narrative occurs in the mid-1930s, just after the Moscow trials. The fellow-traveling Communist intellectuals at the center of his book are characterized by “an impassioned longing to believe.”32 They specifically wished to believe that the construction of a just and virtuous society was feasible, hence they were determined to credit the Soviet Union with having made a decisive step toward the establishment of such a society. To sustain this belief the fellow travelers only tolerated comments about the Soviet Union of a positive nature. Once a commitment to the belief had been made, it became almost impossible for any evidence to shake it. Those who offered such evidence were condemned as deficient in goodwill. If reality ever attempted to breach the believer’s defenses, the contradictions between belief and reality were rationalized through the use of “dialectical logic.”
The essential point was that Communist-oriented intellectuals of the time did not really have a political life. They refrained from political discourse and debate, thereby doing away with the defining elements of politics (opinion, contingency, conflicts of interests, clashes of will), regarding these as somehow repugnant to the vision of reason and virtue that would be the communist future. Trilling’s polemical purpose in The Middle of the Journey was to bring to light this “clandestine negation” of the political life that Stalinism had fostered among intellectuals in the West.33 To Trilling this negation was even more significant in its imperiously bitter refusal to consent to the conditioned nature of human experience. The novel is designed to engage a confrontation of ideology and reality; Maxim was intended to be a “reality principle” because he knew from personal experience the horror that lay beyond the glowing words of the Great Promise.
Trilling’s protagonist, John Laskell, undergoes an enormous change in attitude during the course of the novel—similar to that experienced by Howe, Elwin, Wilson’s nameless narrator, and Katy Preston—primarily in connection with a shift in his feelings toward Maxim. At the beginning, Laskell is convinced that Maxim is deluded in his believing that the party was trying to kill him; he refers to Maxim as absurd, even treacherous. Yet from the moment that Maxim leaves him at the country train station to meet his friends, the Crooms, Laskell begins to feel terrified, like Maxim, that “something untoward might happen.”34
Laskell begins to subsconsciously reconsider his feelings about Maxim as he observes his friends, the Crooms, trying to make excuses for the irresponsible behavior of Duck, their handyman. They always blame external factors rather than Duck himself. For example, when Duck gets drunk they insist that the cause is a constitutional weakness, not self-indulgence. They insist on viewing him as a tragic figure, unhappy in his present condition but capable of becoming something far better. Laskell, in contrast, wishes that the Crooms would become angry with Duck when he acts irresponsibly. Laskell’s refusal to make excuses for Duck represents an important stage in his changing consciousness, for Duck is a symbol of undirected rebellion against society—in effect, an expression of modernist sensibility. Although the Crooms imagine Duck to be a worker, his biography resembles a character from a Faulkner novel: his grandfather was the richest senator from the state; his father lost money because of his weakness for speculating; Duck is unable to control his drinking. He directly recalls Faulkner’s Popeye from Sanctuary—not only because of his cartoon name, but because, while the local women regard Duck as virile, he is sexually impotent.
The Crooms’ blindness toward Duck is associated with their refusal to discuss Laskell’s own brush with death during a recent illness. Although Laskell is anxious to discuss the episode with them, they seem to regard death as unnatural and continually evade the topic. This attitude is dramatized when Mickey, a child unspoiled by the falsification of reality, attempts to give Laskell a dead, moldy leaf as a gift. The nursemaid grabs the leaf and scrubs his hand while Nancy Croom attempts to substitute a fresh, green leaf, which Mickey rejects.
Soon after, Laskell’s consciousness has completed its change: he realizes that Maxim is telling the truth. But recognizing that the new, fanatically religious and right-wing Maxim represents an ideology as false as that of the Crooms and his former self, he articulates a new outlook, one that is ostensibly beyond ideology: “An absolute freedom from responsibility—that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility—that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is.”35 His friends respond with hostility to such ideas and are characterized as expressing “the anger of the masked will at the appearance of an idea in modulation.”36 Ideology not only falsifies the perception of reality, but it provides a mask of altruism occluding from sight the will to power.
Of all the novels and stories of the 1940s that express an ostensible rebellion against ideology in the name of experience, only The Middle of the Journey presents a hero and final perspective suggesting that its author might play a leading role in directing intellectuals of subsequent decades. This contrasts with Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944), Isaac Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home (1946), and Eleanor Clark’s The Bitter Box (1946), each written by an individual formerly associated with the anti-Stalinist left. All depict a kind of disillusionment with either radicalism or modernist/bohemian rebellion as the result of an immersion in experience; their protagonists, however, tend to be either younger or older than those of Wilson, McCarthy, and Trilling, and these novels are set in an urban locale.
Bellow, born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, and Rosenfeld, born in 1918 in Chicago, were part of a group of students won to Trotskyism at Chicago’s Tuley High School during the early 1930s by Nathan Gould, a Trotskyist youth leader of legendary oratorical powers. Some had previously been members of the Young Communist League.37 Along with Oscar Tarcov, who later published the novel Bravo My Monster (1950), Bellow and Rosenfeld formed a circle of young, precocious literary-minded Trotskyists, who were active in the Spartacus Youth League when it was the Trotskyist youth organization, the Young Peoples Socialist League during their sojourn in the Socialist Party, and the Young Peoples Socialist League (Fourth International) after the Trotskyists founded the Socialist Workers Party.
Bellow and Rosenfeld enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1933 where they participated in the Trotskyist-run Socialist Club, which published a sixteen-page printed magazine called Soapbox. On the masthead was a quotation from William Randolph Hearst: “Red Radicalism has planted a soapbox on every campus of America.” At the university they organized “Cell Number Five” of the Trotskyist youth group. Never regarded as political leaders, Bellow and Rosenfeld were seen more as kibitzers and wits. At Trotskyist social affairs, for example, they would take turns reciting Swinburne’s poetry in various accents: Swedish, Polish, Jewish, Italian. In 1935 Bellow transferred to Northwestern University where he published his first short story. Called “The Hell It Can’t,” the story won third prize in the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in February 1936. In the story, of which the title is drawn from Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935), Bellow graphically describes a beating administered by fascist thugs. In 1937, Bellow married Anita Goshkin, also a Trotskyist.
During the 1939–40 schism, Bellow
and Rosenfeld were sympathetic to Shachtman, but they had begun to lose interest in radical politics. Both moved to New York City in the early 1940s to launch their literary careers, but Bellow soon severed all ties with the Workers Party, maintaining only a few personal friendships; Rosenfeld would occasionally speak at public forums on cultural subjects sponsored by the party. Their thorough disaffection with radical politics was distressing to their friend, David Bazelon, an aspiring midwestern writer who was then moving close to Trotskyism and contributing to Politics.
Although Bellow was considerably influenced intellectually by the anti-Stalinist left, surprisingly little of his Trotskyist experience worked its way into his fiction or memoirs. As noted, some of his college writing had political themes, and his second contribution to the Partisan Review, “The Mexican General,” depicts the assassination of Trotsky from the point of view of Mexican police officials involved in the aftermath.38 There are passing references to Trotskyism in other short stories as well as in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), which may derive its main character in part from Abraham Liebick, a gifted young Trotskyist from Chicago’s Marshall High School who was killed while serving in the Navy’s Medical Corps in the Pacific.39 Dangling Man (1944) is about a restless young intellectual who joined the Communist Party in 1932 but broke away at the start of World War II, which approximates Bellow’s relationship with the Trotskyists. While waiting to be drafted, the young man’s disillusionment extends from radicalism to his circle of bohemian friends. At the end of the novel he has become skeptical of all the former values that he had acquired during his political and cultural rebellion. With bitter irony he submits to the experience of the majority of his generation by celebrating his last day as a civilian: “I am no longer to be held accountable for myself; I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self-determination, freedom cancelled. Hurray for regular hours! And for the supervision of the spirit! Long live regimentation!”40
Rosenfeld wrote only one story, “The Party,” reflective of his experiences in the Trotskyist movement. It is told through the eyes of someone different from himself, a full-time functionary who works in the party’s printshop and draws cartoons for the party paper. The story presumably depicts the decline of the Workers Party during the mid-1940s, when he was no longer a member. In it Rosenfeld describes the peculiar mentality of a devout but self-abnegating member loyal to the forms of the movement—the rituals of party interventions and social affairs, the veneration of “old guard” leaders and the dynamics of faction struggle—even as its political content is lost. In this sense the story is simply a variation on the “end-of-ideology” motif. Rosenfeld’s ideologues are brutally satirized because they remain impervious to experience.41 Passage from Home has a more complex development, because, unlike “The Party,” a change occurs in the outlook of the main character. Here Rosenfeld traces the awakening consciousness of fifteen-year-old Bernard Miller who leaves his father to live with his nonconformist aunt. Returning to his father at the end, Bernard’s immersion in experience has taught him that the bohemian alternative to the alienation of conventional life is illusory, and he becomes resigned to his outsider status. Thus experience teaches that alienation is the permanent condition of humanity.
Eleanor Clark was born in 1913 in Los Angeles and raised in Roxbury, Connecticut.42 Attending Vassar as a contemporary of Mary McCarthy, she met Herbert Solow in 1934 at the advent of her writing career in New York. She began to associate with the Partisan Review circle a year or so before the magazine was relaunched. In 1937, immediately after the Dewey Commission of Inquiry hearings in Mexico, Clark visited the Trotsky household and undertook the translations of some documents. Subsequently she married Jan Frankel, one of Trotsky’s most important secretaries; her relationships with both Solow and Frankel, with some degree of invention, are blended together in Hannah Paltz’s narrative of the Trotskyist “Ginko” in Chapter 4 of Clark’s novel Gloria Mundi (1979). Returning to New York, Clark collaborated with the American Trotskyists and wrote Trotsky that she had applied for membership.43 Frankel, who had joined her in the United States, began to drift away from Trotskyism at the time of the Cannon-Shachtman split, and their marriage dissolved. By 1943 Clark, no longer a radical, was employed by the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C.
Clark’s The Bitter Box (1946) traces the disillusionment with the Communist Party of a rather unimpressive bank clerk, John Temple, who in personal frustration one day quits his cloistered job to immerse himself in the experience of political activism. Although he achieves moral, social, and even spiritual comfort by devoting himself to party affairs, the underlying horror of his experience is revealed when he learns the fate of his friend Brand, who was “liquidated” because he knew too much about the party’s underground activities. In this connection, Herbert Solow’s relationship to Whittaker Chambers provided important background for Clark’s novel, just as it did for The Middle of the Journey. Strangely, the novel is not directly political, even though it reflects in many other ways the anti-Stalinist experiences of the 1930s: the factional struggle between Brand’s party and the opposition group (People’s Will), whose leader is assassinated, suggests the Stalinist-Trotskyist conflict; the political turns and sudden changes in Brand’s party’s line suggest the “Third Period,” Popular Front, and Hitler-Stalin Pact convolutions of the Communist Party; the party’s newspaper, the Word, echoes the Worker (albeit with a religious twist), and the literary magazine Everybody’s suggests the New Masses. But, as in Rosenfeld’s “The Party,” Clark creates as a center of consciousness a rather narrow mind subjected primarily to pressures and motivations other than those stemming from political theory.
A REVOLUTIONARY NOVELIST IN CRISIS
Until 1945 James T. Farrell was a dependable ally of the Socialist Workers Party. Except for Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald, he was virtually alone among the anti-Stalinist intellectuals in adhering to a revolutionary internationalist point of view during World War II. From 1941 to 1945 he served as chairman of the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which had been formed to defend the Trotskyist trade union militants in Minneapolis Teamster Local 544 and leaders of the SWP. These union militants and party leaders had been prosecuted as the first victims of the Smith “Gag” Act, which made it unlawful to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government or to belong to any group advocating such an overthrow.
Farrell wrote and published fiction steadily during these years, arguing that there is an interdependency between the advancement of culture and the struggle for human liberation, although Farrell’s fiction differed from that of John Dos Passos, who wrote explicitly political novels. Some of Farrell’s work, such as his antifascist novelette Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade (1939), dramatized important political issues, but his Studs Lonigan trilogy demonstrated that he was primarily a novelist of human character. Farrell was acutely sensitive to the psychological costs of living in a class society, and his conceptions of individual consciousness and social destiny were infused with a materialist outlook. This is most evident not only in the Studs Lonigan trilogy, but also in Farrell’s second series, the O’Neill-O’Flaherty pentalogy: A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940), My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face of Time (1953). Although the pentalogy centers around the life of Danny O’Neill, Farrell preferred that the five books be called the “O’Neill-O’Flaherty series” because the main characters are derived from both families. Both the Studs Lonigan trilogy and also the O’Neill-O’Flaherty series, conceived about the same time and thematically interconnected, provide an exposé of the false consciousness created by the institutions of capitalist society. A third series, the Bernard Carr trilogy—consisting of Bernard Clare (1946), The Road Between (1949), and Yet Other Waters (1952)—evolved somewhat later but was still linked to the revolutionary Marxist period in Farrell’s literary development.
The O’Neill-O’Flaherty series, comprising a sp
rawling 2,500 pages, suffers by comparison with the Studs Lonigan trilogy because its five units, read separately, lack cogency. Yet their cumulative effect is more potent and complex, and Danny O’Neill is a wholly unique creation. Studs Lonigan’s humanity is only dimly perceived behind the warped values absorbed from his environment; his notions of evil, engendered by Father Gilhooley’s sermons, are haunting and amorphous, and his daydreams of a better life, associated with his would-be childhood sweetheart, Lucy Scanlan, are vague and romantic. In contrast, Danny O’Neill, an autobiographical persona, is much more intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive than Studs, and he moves, despite setbacks, unrelentingly toward victory over his environment. As Danny escapes the predestined roles prepared for him by his family and subculture, the skillful precision with which Farrell probes the processes of human consciousness demonstrates a literary debt to Joyce and Proust.
Using stream of consciousness and associational techniques, Farrell roots the emotional development of Danny in a childhood trauma when his parents, Jim and Liz O’Neill, turn him over to the care of his widowed grandmother, Mary O’Flaherty. Danny’s mind and personality are thereafter subtly shaped by his interaction with the two families, one middle class and the other working class. The respective class differences in attitude and outlook are acutely dramatized by two of the central male characters: Danny’s uncle, Al O’Flaherty, a shoe salesman, and Danny’s father, Jim, a teamster. Al O’Flaherty worships conventionalized notions of education and culture, while Jim fears that Al will turn Danny into a soft “dude.”
