The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  53. Isidor Schneider, “The Splitting Tactic,” ibid., p. 24.

  54. Menorah Journal 19, no. 4 (June 1931): 472.

  55. Modern Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Summer 1932): 109.

  56. Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time (New York: Delta, 1955), p. 122.

  57. See the following reviews: J. Donald Adams, New York Times, 20 May 1934, p. 6; Robert Cantwell, New Outlook, no. 163 (June 1934): 53; Joseph Freeman, Daily Worker, 2 June 1934, p. 7; Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune, 10 May 1934, p. io; Horace Gregory, New York Tribune Books, 13 May 1934, p. 2; T. S. Matthews, New Republic, 23 May 1934, p. 52; Ferner Nuhn, Nation 138, no. 3594 (23 May 1934): 597–98; George Stevens, Saturday Review of Literature 10 (19 May 1934): 701.

  58. Biographical information about Slesinger has been summarized from the following: Lionel Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger (New York: Avon, 1966), pp. 311–33; Janet Sharistanian, Afterword to The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1984), pp. 359–86; Shirley Biagi, “Forgive Me for Dying,” Antioch Review 35, nos. 2–3 (Spring-Summer 1977): 224–36; Menorah Journal, passim 1928–31; author’s interview with Dorothy Eisner McDonald, June 1978, New York City.

  59. “Mother to Dinner,” Menorah Journal 18, no. 3 (March 1930): 221–34; “The Friedman’s Annie,” ibid. 19, no. 3 (March 1931): 242–60. Both were reprinted in her collection, Time: The Present: A Book of Short Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), which was reissued as On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories (New York: Quadrangle, 1974).

  60. Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed, p. 313.

  61. Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), pp. 254, 289, 291, 321.

  62. Peter Davis to AW, 22 June 1977; Louis Berg to AW, 24 March 1976.

  63. New Masses n, no. 9 (September 1934): 26–27.

  64. Menorah Journal 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1934): 189.

  65. Sharistanian, Afterword to The Unpossessed (Feminist Press ed.), p. 377. See also Tess Slesinger’s “Memoirs of an Ex-Flapper,” Vanity Fair 43 (December 1934): 26–27, 74, 76.

  66. Biagi, “Forgive Me for Dying,” pp. 226–27.

  67. The Unpossessed, p. 330.

  68. Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed, p. 314.

  69. The Unpossessed, p. 175.

  70. Ibid., p. 53.

  71. Trilling, Afterword to The Unpossessed, p. 328.

  72. Commentary 42, no. 1 (July 1966): 16–17.

  73. The Unpossessed, p. 122.

  74. Ibid., p. 33.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. New Masses 25, no. 4 (19 October 1937): 21.

  2. Biographical information on Philip Rahv has been assembled from the following: Andrew J. Dvosin, “Literature in a Political World: The Career and Writings of Philip Rahv” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1977); James B. Gilbert, Writers and Partisans (New York: Wiley, 1968); and Mary McCarthy, “Philip Rahv, 1908–1973,” New York Times Book Review, 17 February 1974, sec. 7, pp. 1–2.

  3. Philip Rahv, “An Open Letter to Young Writers,” Rebel Poet 6 (September 1932): 4.

  4. Biographical information on William Phillips is based primarily on William Phillips, A Partisan View (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), and author’s interview with William Phillips, November 1973, New York City.

  5. W. Phelps [pseud, of William Phillips], “Class-ical Culture,” Communist 12, no. 1 (January 1933): 94. William Phillips was so close to the party in the early 1930s that many radical intellectuals believed he was a member. See James Burnham to Leon Trotsky, 30 April 1937, Trotsky Papers, HL.

  6. William Phillips, “Categories for Criticism,” Symposium 4, no. 1 (January 1933): 31–47.

  7. “We propose to concentrate on creative and critical literature,” states the first editorial in Partisan Review 1, no. 1 (February–March 1934): 2. See also William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “In Retrospect: Ten Years of Partisan Review,” The Partisan Reader (New York: Dial, 1946), p. 679.

  8. Wallace Phelps and Philip Rahv, “Criticism,” Partisan Review 2, no. 7 (April–May 1935); Philip Rahv, “A Season in Heaven,” Partisan Review and Anvil 3, no. 5 (June 1936): 11–14.

  9. Wallace Phelps, “Three Generations,” Partisan Review 1, no. 4 (September–October 1934): 51.

  10. Wallace Phelps and Philip Rahv, “Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary Literature,” Partisan Review 1, no. 3 (June-July 1934): 4.

  11. Ibid., p. 5.

  12. Ibid., pp. 5, 6.

  13. Phelps and Rahv, “Criticism,” p. 3.

  14. Wallace Phelps, “Form and Content,” Partisan Review 2, no. 6 (January–February 1935): 31–39. The theme of the relationship between form and content was a major preoccupation of Phillips. A provocative development of this issue appears in “Sensibility and Modern Poetry,” Dynamo 1 (Summer 1934): 20–25.

  15. Philip Rahv, “How the Wasteland Became a Flower Garden,” Partisan Review 1, no. 4 (September–October 1934): 37–41.

  16. Phelps, “Three Generations,” p. 51.

  17. Phelps and Rahv, “Problems and Perspectives,” p. 3. In “How the Waste Land Became a Flower Garden,” p. 38, Rahv describes Max Eastman as “politically degenerate and full of venom”; on p. 39, he cites Stalin, Dimitrov, and Thaelmann as heroes of the workers.

  18. Malcolm Cowley, “Thirty Years Later: Memories of the First American Writers’ Congress,” American Scholar 35, no. 3 (Summer 1966): 497.

  19. The merger is discussed in Mike Gold’s article “Papa Anvil and Mother Partisan,” New Masses 13, no. 6 (18 February 1936): 22–23.

  20. Philip Rahv, “Two Years of Progress,” Partisan Review 4, no. 3 (February 1938): 22–30.

  21. Philip Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” Southern Review 4 (1940): 617.

  22. More detailed biographical information about Farrell can be found in Edgar M. Branch, James T. Farrell (New York: Twayne, 1971), and Alan M. Wald, James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

  23. James T. Farrell to AW, 5 November 1978. Between his arrival in New York City in 1932 and 1935, Farrell was frequently out of the city and too preoccupied with his writing career to pay much attention to the struggle between the Communist Party and the dissident intellectuals. When the League of Professionals for Foster and Ford was formed in 1932, he was so little known that no one thought to ask him to sign.

  24. Ibid.

  25. James T. Farrell, Judgment Day (New York: Avon, 1973), p. 424.

  26. Ibid., p. 310. Some useful studies of the Studs Lonigan trilogy include Ann Douglas, “Studs Lonigan and the Failure of History in Mass Society,” American Quarterly 29 (Fall 1977): 487–505; Henry Hopper Dyer, “James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neill Novels” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1965); Blanche H. Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), pp. 175–227; Josephine Herbst, “James T. Farrell’s Judgment Day,” New Masses 15 (25 May 1935): 25–26; Richard Mitchell, “Studs Lonigan: Research in Morality,” Centennial Review 6 (Spring 1962): 202–14; Charles C. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 240–57.

  27. Biographical information has been assembled from an author’s interview with F. W. Dupee, August 1973, Carmel, Calif., and from Mary McCarthy, “On F. W. Dupee (1904-1979),” New York Review of Books, 27 October 1983, pp. 19–20, 22.

  28. Frederick Dupee, excerpt from letter, Symposium 3, no. 3 (July 1932): 386–87; review of Axel’s Castle, ibid. 2, no. 2 (April 1931): 264–67.

  29. James Burnham to Leon Trotsky, 30 April 1938, Trotsky Papers, HL.

  30. Newton Arvin to F. W. Dupee, 8 June 1937, Dupee Papers, BL.

  31. The essential biographical material was recorded by Wilson in “What I Believe,” Nation 134, no. 3473 (27 January 1932): 95–98. It was reprinted in The American Jitters (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), pp. 304–13, but it
was unfortunately omitted when these articles were reissued in The American Earthquake (New York: Doubleday, 1958).

  32. Wilson, The American Earthquake, pp. 152–60.

  33. Helpful estimates of Wilson’s critical achievement include Frederick Crews, “Lesson of the Master,” New York Review of Books, 25 November 1965, pp. 4–5; F. W. Dupee, “Wilson without Reputation,” New York Review of Books, 7 November 1966, pp. 3–5; Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision (New York: Knopf, 1948), pp. 19–48; Leonard Kriegel, Edmund Wilson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).

  34. Edmund Wilson, “An Appeal to Progressives,” The Shores of Light (New York: Vintage, 1952), p. 532.

  35. Wilson, “What I Believe,” pp. 96–97.

  36. Ibid., p. 98.

  37. Edmund Wilson, “The Literary Class War: II,” New Republic 70, no. 910 (11 May 1932): 349. This second part of a longer article was deleted when Wilson reprinted the first part in The Shores of Light, pp. 534–39. Philip Rahv wrote a response to Wilson, also called “The Literary Class War,” New Masses 8, no. 2 (August 1932): 7–10.

  38. Useful information about Wilson’s association with Modern Monthly and the American Workers Party can be found in Haim Genizi, “Edmund Wilson and the Modern Monthly, 1934–5: A Phase in Wilson’s Radicalism,” Journal of American Studies 7, no. 3 (December 1973): 301–19. Some additional details about Wilson’s political activities in the early 1930s can be found in Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), and Edmund Wilson, The Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). A fuller account is contained in Daniel Aaron, “Edmund Wilson’s Political Decade,” in Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s, ed. Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson, pp. 175–86 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1982).

  39. Edmund Wilson, “Trotsky,” New Republic 73 (4 January 1933): 207–9, and “Trotsky II,” ibid. (11 January 1933): 235–38.

  40. Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Oxford, 1978), p. 10; Norman Geras, “Literature of Revolution,” New Left Review, nos. 113–14 (January-April 1979): 4.

  41. Irving Howe, Steady Work (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 119. Howe’s striking characterization of Trotsky’s attitude toward writing appears in the essay, “Trotsky: The Costs of History,” written as the introduction to The Basic Writings of Trotsky (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 3–39. When Howe revised and expanded this essay as part of Leon Trotsky (New York: Viking, 1978), this section was dropped.

  42. Quoted in Paul N. Siegel, Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 9.

  43. The most useful collection of Trotsky’s literary criticism is in Siegel’s Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art. Most books about Trotsky refer to his collaboration with the surrealist André Breton, but, as Jean van Heijenoort records in With Trotsky in Exile (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), Trotsky’s knowledge of and interest in surrealism were fairly limited, despite his openness to experimental art. Above all, he preferred to read French realistic novels.

  44. Siegel, Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, p. 104.

  45. Ibid., p. 106.

  46. Naomi Allen and George Breitman, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky (New York: Pathfinder, 1937–38), pp. 114–15.

  47. George Breitman and Sarah Lovell, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932–33] (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), p. 299.

  48. Mike Gold, The Hollow Men (New York: International, 1941), p. 21.

  49. Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Hayden, 1971), p. 257.

  50. A useful survey of European Marxist critiques of modernism is Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

  51. Branch, James T. Farrell, pp. 118–21, 163.

  52. See the following: “Ripostes,” Partisan Review 4, no. 1 (December 1937): 74; unsigned editorial, New Masses 24, no. 2 (14 September 1937): 9–10; Michael Gold, “A Literary Snake Sheds His Skin for Trotsky,” Daily Worker, 12 October 1937, p. 7; unsigned article, “Trotskyist Schemers Exposed,” ibid., 19 October 1937, p. 2; V. J. Jerome, “No Quarter to Trotskyists—Literary or Otherwise,” ibid., p. 6. The “Trotzskyist Schemers Exposed” article announces that Rahv and Dupee have been expelled from the party and accuses them of providing “services to the fascists” by trying to depict Marxism as foreign. In V. J. Jerome’s article, he also identifies James T. Farrell and Lionel Abel as Trotskyists.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. “Avant trente ans revolutionnaire, après canaille.” Quoted by Trotsky in George Breitman and Sarah Lovell, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932–33] (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), p. 331.

  2. Author’s interview with George Novack, June 1976, New York City.

  3. Additional details about the relations between the CLA and AWP can be found in James P. Cannon, History of American Trotskyism (New York: Pioneer, 1944), pp. 169–88.

  4. Militant, 10 March 1934, p. 4.

  5. Ibid., 17 March 1934, p. 3.

  6. Ibid., 24 March 1934, p. 3.

  7. Herbert Solow to Norman Thomas, 16 May 1934; Norman Thomas to Herbert Solow, 26 May 1934; Herbert Solow to Roger Baldwin, 13 December 1935; memorandum on discussion of labor defense, 25 September 1934; all in Solow Papers, HIL.

  8. Articles and leaflets on the Belussi case are preserved in the Solow Papers, HIL.

  9. The Solow Papers, HIL, contain the following: an undated NPLD leaflet announcing that Carlo Tresca, James Rorty, Bertram D. Wolfe, Arne Swabeck, and others will speak against the use of the National Guard against strikers in Minnesota and Toledo; an undated leaflet by NPLD protesting the deportation of four German refugees from Holland, and a Militant article on the protest; an article dated 19 May 1935 (publication not named) concerning an NPLD demonstration against a pro-Hitler rally at Madison Square Garden, plus a letter from Solow protesting the arrests made and an article from the New York Post, 21 June 1934, about Solow’s protest of the treatment of the demonstrators at night court. See also the NPLD program in the Militant, 28 December 1935, p. 4, and “Summary of One Year of Non-Partisan Labor Defense,” ibid., 30 November 1935, p. 3.

  10. Herbert Solow, “German Writers Say ‘Yes,’” Nation 138, no. 3576 (17 January 1934): 64–65.

  11. Herbert Solow, “The New York Hotel Strike,” Nation 138, no. 3582 (28 February 1934): 239–30.

  12. Author’s interview with Farrell Dobbs, December 1977, Berkeley, Calif. See also Cannon, History of American Trotskyism, pp. 154–55; Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Monad, 1972), pp. 105–6; William Brown to Herbert Solow, 14 September 1934, designating Solow an honorary member of Teamster Local 544 and praising him for services during the strike, Solow Papers, HIL.

  13. See the following by Herbert Solow in the Nation: “War in Minneapolis,” 139, no. 3605 (8 August 1934): 160–61; “Unionism at Stake,” 139, no. 3608 (29 August 1934): 241; “Father Haas,” 139, no. 3612 (26 September 1934): 52; “Once Again: Western Unionism,” 139, no. 3621 (28 November 1934): 622–23; “Class War in Minnesota,” 139, no. 3625 (26 December 1934): 743–44.

  14. See L. D., “Split Looms in Workers Party,” Workers Age 4, no. 28 (13 July 1935): 5, and undated letter from James Rorty to A. J. Muste, Rorty Papers, OL.

  15. See Political Committee to Barney [sic] Strang, 8 January 1935, and Harry Strang to Political Committee, 11 January 1935, in possession of the author.

  16. See the discussion of Muste’s attitude in Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson’s Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1981), pp. 58–60. See also Harold Isaacs to Leon Trotsky, 6 February 1936, Trotsky Papers, HL, and George Novack, “A. J. Muste and American Trotskyism,” Liberation 12, nos. 9–10 (September–October 1967): 21–23.

  17. John McDonald to AW, 18 November 1974. See the interpretations of the f
action fight presented by Sidney Lens, Unrepentant Radical: An American Activist’s Account of Five Turbulent Decades (Boston: Beacon, 1980), pp. 42–44; Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928–41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977), pp. 115–22; and Cannon, History of American Trotskyism, pp. 189–215.

  18. Information on B. J. Field comes from the following sources: Cannon, History of American Trotskyism, pp. 126–33, 146, 191; Myers, The Prophet’s Army, pp. 63–65; Paul Jacobs, Is Curly Jewish?: A Political Self-Portrait Illuminating Three Turbulent Decades of Social Revolt, 1935–1965 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 79, 93, 96, 103; George Breitman, ed., Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement [1929–33] (New York: Pathfinder, 1979), pp. 149, 150–61, 167; author’s telephone interview with Jesse Simons, 8 June 1985, New York City; author’s telephone interview with Leona Finestone, 10 June 1985, New York City; William Krehm to AW, undated; author’s telephone interview with Edward Sard, 24 September 1983, New York City; untitled article by B. J. Field in New International Bulletin 1, no. 3 (January 1936): 34–38

  19. See obituary, “Aristodimos Kaldis, 79, Is Dead; Artist Noted for His Landscapes,” New York Times, 3 May 1979, p. 25, and William Khrem to AW, undated.

  20. James P. Cannon, Speeches to the Party: The Revolutionary Perspective and the Revolutionary Party (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), pp. 84–86.

  21. This is the thesis of the influential article by M. S. Venkataramani, “Leon Trotsky’s Adventure in American Radical Politics, 1935–37,” International Review of Social History 9, pt. 1 (1964): 2–46.

  22. Information on Harold Isaacs comes from author’s interview with C. Frank Glass, 5 April 1983, Los Angeles, Calif., and Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series (Detroit: Gale, 1982), p. 347.

  23. Harold Isaacs, “I Break with the Chinese Stalinists,” New International 5, no. 4 (September–October 1934): 76–78.

  24. Harold Isaacs to Leon Trotsky, 6 February 1936 and 4 March 1936, Trotsky Papers, HL.

  25. John McDonald to AW, 18 November 1974.