by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Others find different strategies. Erwin, Caesar’s father, who had emigrated to Palestine as a pioneer, concludes that there is “always a gap between the world of values and that of action, and that actually everything [is therefore] permitted”—a lesson Caesar takes to heart as he races from woman to woman. Moishe Tzellermaer remakes himself through a religion “which contained neither a belief in God nor reflections on the nature of God,” but consists of mere dry rituals dryly observed. Goldman, who has never known the idealistic raptures of the older generation, also turns to religion, dabbling briefly in cabala, “but his religion had nothing to sustain it and died.” After this he turns to Taoism and Jungian psychology, which also “die.”
The handful of Shabtai’s characters who find their way do so by remaining still, accepting the thin margin onto which history has thrust them and trying nonetheless to survive decently. Uncle Lazar, though still acknowledging a “redemptive instinct” in man, concludes “that there [is] no single act in public or private life, however right or revolutionary, which [is] redemptive in the sense that from a certain point onward a new era would commence in which everything would be perfectly good.” The thought itself is familiar enough, but the dignity it allows Uncle Lazar is impressive. He forms an alliance with Yehudit Tanfuss, a modest, unassuming woman, and “in the early hours of the evening, they would sit on the balcony talking or reading . . . or [go] for walks arm in arm, which [is] the way they always liked to walk together.” And Aunt Zipporah (who made me think of Dilsey) keeps washing clothes and ironing and cooking and helping her sisters and friends through sickness and old age, for she believes in “the dignity of labor” and that “it was forbidden to lose the will to live,” and that the difficulties of life “were not accidental but the very stuff of life.”
Only the Goldmans, father and son, cannot make their peace with limitation. Pure, sterile, Ephraim resists the trickeries of history until “all of a sudden he turned into an old man . . . and all that was left of him was obduracy and bitter but helpless rage.” The aggressions of the father become the self-torments of the son, who before ending his futile life gains a moment of illumination that may be no more—but it is enough—than ordinary sympathy: “Love and hate, together with the force of habit and family ties [reflects Goldman], chained people to each other in a way over which logic and will had no control, and . . . even death could not sever these bonds, except through the stubborn strength of time, which wore everything away, and even then something of the other person remained behind as part of your being forever. . . .” All—rectitude and opportunism, hedonistic frenzy and calm acquiescence—melt into a life that was once to be transfigured but now, simply continuing, must be endured.
About the older generation Shabtai writes with great assurance. About the younger generation, Shabtai’s own—Goldman, Israel, Caesar, and the women they pursue and abandon—he is neither judgmental nor very sympathetic, but wary and bemused, as if a writer can understand the chaos of those who came before him but not of his contemporaries. Shabtai describes Caesar’s “deepest feeling about life . . . that it was fluid and formless and aimless, and everything was possible in it to an infinite degree, and it could be played backward and forward like a roll of film, just as he wished”—a feeling that’s the very opposite of the one held by Goldman’s father or Uncle Lazar and Aunt Zipporah.
In certain respects Past Continuous seems closer to a chronicle, in which the past is granted a stamp of certainty and contrivances of plot are not allowed to interfere with the passage of events, than to a traditional or even modernist novel, in which events, whether or not ordered by plot, may still be represented as being in flux. But the book’s density of texture is closer to the novel than to the chronicle.
Here is a close look at one of the book’s most attractive figures, Uncle Lazar, who was caught up in the political struggles of Europe but is now quietly aging in Tel Aviv:
Although the truth is that Uncle Lazar was not a taciturn man by nature, and if he hardly ever spoke it was only because he knew the limitations of human knowledge, the invalidity of human reason, and the restrictions of human possibilities, and everything was so contradictory and ambiguous that doubt seemed the only thing which possessed any reality, and the ability to believe was possessed by only a few, and there was no use hoping for much, and he also knew just how far a person had to deceive himself in order to live through a single day, and how fate could play tricks on people, as it had on him, and that all the words in the world were incapable of moving the world a single centimeter from its course, or bringing back one single day that had passed, or filling in the gaps, or consoling a man whose eyes had been opened, and Uncle Lazar’s eyes had been opened, and they remained open, although he was not at all despairing or embittered, but simply very realistic and sober, with all the calm detachment of a man who had experienced much and who saw clearly and for whom life, to which he continued to relate seriously and positively, held no more surprises, because he had already died and risen again.
The Hebrew title, far more evocative than the English one, is Zikhron Devarim, signifying a protocol or memorandum, and indeed, the pace and tone of the book are rather like that of a protocol or memorandum: precise, measured, detached. Shabtai’s technique is in radical opposition to the prescriptions for the modern novel of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: dramatize, dramatize, show rather than tell. There are few large scenes in the book; it consists mostly of compressed biographies, life histories in miniature. The voice of Past Continuous tells more than it shows, on the valid premise that, with enough pressure of thought and feeling, the act of telling can become a way of showing.
Chronicling the rise and fall of a generation, almost never stopping for psychological detail or nuance, steadily widening its reach so as to gain the illusion of totality, the voice of Past Continuous achieves an authority quite beyond that of the omniscient narrator in the traditional novel. And while its use of associations bears a similarity to “stream of consciousness,” especially as practiced by Faulkner, Shabtai’s method is finally quite different, since in his book we do not enter the inner life of the characters. Brooking no pretense of relativism, the narrative voice does not hesitate to say with assurance about Ephraim or Lazar or Caesar, “The truth is. . . .” If only as a premise of reading, we come to suppose we are listening to a communal recorder, a choral observer who may just possibly be the consciousness of a city.
The narrator speaks:
From one day to the next, over the space of a few years, the city was rapidly and relentlessly changing its face, and right in front of [Goldman’s] eyes it was engulfing the sand lots and the virgin fields, the vineyards and citrus groves and little woods and Arab villages, and afterward the changes began invading the streets of the older parts of the town, which were dotted here and there with simple one-storied houses surrounded by gardens with a few shrubs and flower beds, and sometimes vegetables and strawberries, and also cypress trees and lemon and orange and mandarin trees, or buildings which attempted to imitate the architectural beauties and splendors of Europe, in the style of Paris or Vienna or Berlin, or even of castles and palaces, but all these buildings no longer had any future because they were old and ill adapted to modern tastes and lifestyles, and especially because the skyrocketing prices of land and apartments had turned their existence into a terrible waste and enabled their owners to come into fortunes by selling them, and Goldman, who was attached to these streets and houses because they, together with the sand dunes and virgin fields, were the landscape in which he had been born and grown up, knew that this process of destruction was inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, as inevitable as the change in the population of the town, which in the course of a few years had been filled with tens of thousands of new people, who in Goldman’s eyes were invading outsiders who had turned him into a stranger in his own city.
The culminating effect, for this reader at least, is overwhelming. Dispassionate in grief, this narrativ
e voice seldom drops to judgment, though once or twice there is a sentence that can be taken as a judgment of sorts. At the funeral of Goldman’s father, a mourner says, “In spite of everything he deserved to be loved.” (“Why do you hate the South? . . . I dont. I dont. I dont hate it. I dont hate it.”)
Kafka once said, “We must have those books that come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-ax to break the sea frozen within us.” Before he died Yaakov Shabtai wrote such a book.
Why Has Socialism Failed in America?
{1985}
AMERICA NEVER STOOD STILL for Marx and Engels. They did not attempt a systematic analysis of the possibilities for socialism in the New World, but if you look into their Letters to Americans you will find many interesting aperçus, especially from Engels. Almost all the numerous theories later developed about the fate of American socialism are anticipated in these letters.
As early as 1851, when the socialist Joseph Weydemeyer migrated to the United States, Engels wrote him:
Your greatest handicap will be that the useful Germans who are worth anything are easily Americanized and abandon all hope of returning home; and then there are the special American conditions: the ease with which the surplus population is drained off to the farms, the necessarily rapid and rapidly growing prosperity of the country, which makes bourgeois conditions look like a beau ideal to them. . . .1*
It isn’t farfetched to see here a germ of what would later be called American exceptionalism, the idea that historical conditions in the United States differ crucially from those set down in the Marxist model for the development of capitalism, or differ crucially from the way capitalism actually developed in Europe. Consider those remarks of Engels: a recognition of, perhaps irritation with, the sheer attractiveness of America; a casual anticipation of the Turner thesis in the claim that “surplus population is drained off to the farms”; a wry observation about American eagerness to accept the bourgeois style, though this might better have been phrased in the language of American individualism.
At about the same time, Marx was taking a somewhat different approach. “Bourgeois society in the United States,” he was writing, “has not yet developed far enough to make the class struggle obvious”2*; but he also expected that American industry would grow at so enormous a rate that the United States would be transformed into a major force in the world market, delivering heavy blows against English imperial domination.
Now, if one cares to, it is possible to reconcile Engels’s approach with that of Marx. Engels was thinking tactically, about the problems of building a movement, while Marx was thinking historically, about events anticipated but not yet encountered. Marx was asking why the social consequences of the rise of capitalism, such as an intensified class struggle, had not yet appeared in the United States—even though, according to his theory, these consequences were inevitable. He was “testing” a particular historical sequence against his theoretical scheme, and this led him to believe that capitalism would emerge in the United States in its purest and strongest form—purest, because unencumbered by the debris of the precapitalist past, and strongest, because able, both technologically and financially, to leap past the older capitalism of England. Thereby, he concluded, the United States would—or was it, should?—become “the world of the worker, par excellence,”3† so that socialist victory might even occur first in the New World. Here Marx was verging on a materialist or “economist” reductionism, and he would repeat this line of reasoning some thirty years later, in 1881, when he wrote that, capitalism in the United States having developed “more rapidly and more shamelessly than in any other country,”4‡ the upsurge of its working class could be expected to be all the more spectacular.
Engels’s observations, because more “local,” tend to be more useful. He writes in his 1891 preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France: “There is no country in which ‘politicians’ form a more powerful and distinct section of the nation than in North America. There each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself controlled by people who make a business of politics. . . .”5*
Had the later American Marxists picked up Engels’s tip here, they might have avoided some of their cruder interpretations of the role of the state in this country. More interesting still is Engels’s introduction to the 1887 reprint of his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he acknowledges “the peculiar difficulties for a steady development of a workers party”6† in the United States. Engels first makes a bow toward the overarching Marxist model: “. . . there cannot be any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe. . . . [Emphasis added.]” Engels would elsewhere stress the “exceptionalist” aspect, largely tactical, of the American problem. In order to play a role in politics, he says, the American socialists “will have to doff every remnant of foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the [German] immigrants [in the Socialist Labor Party] must go to the Americans. . . . And to do that, they must above all else learn English.”7‡
What may we conclude from all this? That, like other thinkers, Marx and Engels cherished their basic models; that the more closely they examined a particular situation, the more they had to acknowledge “deviations” from their models; that they anticipated, quite intelligently, a good many of the major themes in the discussions about socialist failure in the United States; and that in their efforts to suggest adaptations of the nascent socialist movement, mostly immigrant in composition, to the American setting, they were not very successful. You might suppose, however, that Engels’s proposal that the Germans learn English would be regarded, in leftist terminology, as “a minimum demand.”
If I have overstressed the differences in approach between Marx and Engels, it is for a reason: to show that both the orthodox view of later socialists, clinging to the authority of the Marxist model, and the heterodox emphasis upon American distinctiveness can legitimately be attributed to the founding fathers of Marxism. An interesting comment on this comes from Theodore Draper in a personal communication: “Whenever the two old boys considered real conditions in real countries, they gave way to the temptation of ‘exceptionalism’ (I seem to remember that it crops up in their writings on India, Italy, Ireland as well). Reality always breaks in as ‘exceptions’ to the rule.”8*
2
Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? first appeared in 1906, and though its thesis has been rendered more sophisticated in numerous later writings, it remains a basic text. I propose here somewhat to minimize—though not to dismiss—Sombart’s reasons, which tend mainly to stress objective historical factors standing in the way of socialism in America. But since he saw that some of these factors, like the supply of free land in nineteenth-century America, would not be operative much longer, he concluded—like the Marxists, though not one himself—that in a few decades socialism would thrive in America. In this prediction he was mistaken, and it is important to know why. Here, in schematic form, are some of the Sombartian “objective” factors that account for the failure, or at least difficulties, of American socialism:
1. Since this country had no feudal past, Americans could feel that as free citizens of a “new nation” they were able to express their needs and complaints within the democratic system; in consequence, the sense of class distinctions was much less acute here than in Europe.
2. Material prosperity in the United States, the result of a tremendous economic expansion, undercut the possibilities of socialist growth, since it enabled segments of the working class to gain a measure of satisfaction and imbued others with the hope that America would be their “golden land.”
3. The greater opportunities America offered for upward social mobility led
most Americans to think in terms of individual improvement rather than collective action—they hoped to rise out of, rather than with, their class.
4. The open frontier, with its possibility of free or cheap land, served as a safety valve for discontent.
5. The American two-party system made it hard for a third party to establish itself and enabled the major parties to appropriate, at their convenience, parts of the programs advanced by reform-oriented third parties.
6. [This comes not from Sombart but from labor historian Selig Perlman:] The massive waves of immigration led to deep ethnic cleavages within the working class, so that earlier, “native” workers rose on the social scale while newer groups of immigrants took the least desirable jobs. It therefore became extremely hard to achieve a unified class consciousness within the American working class.
Neatly bundled together, such “factors” can seem more than sufficient for explaining the distinctive political course of America. But when examined somewhat closely, these factors tend—not, of course, to disappear—but to seem less conclusive: they are present, some of them all the time and all of them some of the time, but their bearing upon American socialism remains, I would say, problematic.
A methodological criticism of the Sombartian approach has been made by Aileen Kraditor: that Sombart, like the Marxists, takes for granted a necessary historical course against which American experience is to be found, if not wanting, then deviant, and therefore requiring “special explanation.” But it’s quite likely, argues Kraditor, that no such over-all historical direction can be located and that what really needs explaining is not why socialism failed in America, but why anyone thought it might succeed. Well, I am prepared to grant the dubiousness of the European model/American deviation approach, but would argue that there is some value in pursuing it tentatively, if only to see where else it might lead.
