Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
Return to Contents»
Shadowy Aesthetics: The Cultural Front, Literary Judgments and Perceptions of Mass Entertainment / Graham Barnfield
<1> Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century was published in late 1996. There are numerous ways of reading its contribution to American cultural studies. Simply put, the book pursued a reading of US cultural history using the "Birmingham School" cultural studies approach developed in Britain in the 1970s to which Denning himself was a contributor. Simultaneously, it sought to recover a home-grown analytical and radical tradition, by looking at the early contributions of loosely analogous intellectual tendencies situated in the US labor movement in the quarter century or so after the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Each task derives its moral and persuasive force from its close relationship with the social movement that Denning studies in magisterial and comprehensive detail. Lastly, as Denning indicates here (as in other works), the study could also assist those seeking to reconstitute some form of social democratic, class-based movement for equality and justice in the present day.
<2> Responses to The Cultural Front are widespread and ongoing, including this issue of Reconstruction, conceived in part to mark a full decade of existence for Denning's volume. One of the most representative responses to The Cultural Front, on account of the breadth of opinion therein, was a specially convened symposium which filled close to three quarters of the journal Intellectual History Newsletter. [1] Here, in response to his critics, Denning addressed "the two recurring issues, one of which I expected - the meaning and significance of Stalinism - and one of which surprised me - the quality and consequences of my literary judgments". [2] Taking this description as a starting point, the following attempts a short appreciation of The Cultural Front, organized around a consideration of the circumstances in which these recurring issues became closely connected.
<3> Mass culture often plays a contradictory role in discussions of the aesthetic standards - or literary judgments - determined throughout the course of the 1930s. As a general descriptions go, it would be largely uncontroversial to note that numerous historical accounts point to the consolidation of the culture industries during the Depression, despite or even perhaps because of widespread economic hardship. They register the emergence of Hollywood's film studios as manufacturers of both a vocabulary and a gallery of images that the popular imagination could draw upon. Public notions of style and beauty were often filtered through the lens of the movies.
<4> For would-be public intellectuals, these changing circumstances created certain dilemmas. "The public" devoted a substantial slice of its time to mass entertainment, despite opposition from those who believed that said time and emotional attachment could be better used on other pursuits. Hostile opinions formed, not least those which matured into the theories of mass culture that crystallized around the Partisan Review and the Frankfurt School. As Denning demonstrates exhaustively, to those employed and/or entertained by these emerging industries, they could also provide a source of consolation, a subculture shared across the labor movement and even a point of political engagement. In the interstices of these two diverging perceptions of mass entertainment can be found a dialogue in which the more ambiguous, indeterminate aspects of creating a new aesthetic were played out. Put another way, the cultural front movement which Denning accounts for also interlinked the same beliefs, in Stalinism and in literary judgment, which informed critical responses to his book.
<5> In discussions of 1930s cultural life, a prominent strand of literary criticism has focused upon the preponderance of political aesthetics throughout the period, not least as part of a wider "Red Decade" discourse. [3] Specifically, much older scholarship has concerned itself with the extent to which adherence to the correct political line became a measure of artistic value. Interpretive arguments commencing in the 1940s drew upon allegations of totalitarianism and Communist Party membership. This contrasts with more recent contributions emphasizing the relative autonomy of those writers and artists involved in radical politics from their organizational "line". Empirically, this argument is often verified by pointing to the actual variety in the narratives and cultural work on offer to readers and audiences from politically committed artists, regardless of what particular manifestos said at the time.
<6> Simultaneously, both types of explanation suggest that the sheer volume of politicized experiments in realistic representation taking place after 1929 was, broadly speaking, linked to the economic slump. These conditions also presented struggling cultural practitioners with opportunities to establish their reputations, often with work that responded to a vacuum within extant culture industries (hence, for example, a reputation for investigative reportage of a sort largely absent from the mainstream press). Taken together, observations of this cultural "moment" were reconfigured as a trope around which subsequent literary histories could be organized. For instance, in the year the present author commenced undergraduate study, a student textbook appeared that unleashed Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs (1930) on "the glossy middle class Vanity Fair [which] was more interested in Prohibition than unemployment". [4] Even with the issue of the Communist Party ignored, a dichotomy between realist, political art and escapist mass entertainment seems like a useful pedagogic device.
<7> Such accounts assert that depression decade rebellious writing broke with commercial publishing; they neglect to consider the interaction between the two. What is seldom acknowledged is that hostility toward popular culture's escapist elements was often compatible with an aesthetic project that overlapped with elements of mass culture itself. One rewarding aspect of The Cultural Front is that, time and again, it demonstrates the extent to which the two divergent perceptions were made concentric by employment patterns in the culture industries. Like other astute observers, Denning recognizes that the much-maligned movement for "proletarian literature" (and art) in the USA produced cultural artifacts that could appear similar to some of those churned out by the culture industries.
<8> Similarities in form and content can be found when comparing proletarian novels to 'hard-boiled' detective fiction. [5] Likewise, writing by John Dos Passos - such as the 'newsreels' of the USA trilogy (1938) - and Kenneth Fearing, who faked newspaper headlines in his poetry, invites obvious parallels with the output of the publishing industry. On this basis, Fearing's work has been reassessed as an insightful precursor of the Frankfurt School's analysis of mass culture, albeit one distinguished from Marcuse and colleagues by an enthusiasm for movies and magazines. [6]
<9> Fearing's writing as a book and film reviewer is instructive: it shows how cultural critics on the US left tended to evaluate particular products of the culture industries on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes intimating they would prefer alternatives to commercial entertainment, they were still obliged to engage with it. In the process, a working vocabulary of aesthetic criteria became a routine feature of left-wing periodicals. For instance, Fearing was unappreciative of Hollywood period dramas. In a small-scale film review, he slated Captain Blood and A Tale of Two Cities, which he felt took pleasure from its stereotypical presentation of the proletariat. [7] This sits uneasily with recent presentations of Fearing as a prototype postmodern critic, continually celebrating popular culture.
<10> Note also that Fearing's reviews were published at a time when movies were subject to phased distribution, with prints for projection moving westwards across different cities' theaters. [8] Whether part of the Cultural Front or not, critics using the print media enjoyed considerable influence. Furthermore, as Cary Nelson shows us in two major works on poetry, the written word's ephemeral media acquired greater longevity in the material culture of everyday life: once popular habits in print culture, such as compiling scrapbooks and enclosing cuttings in correspondence, could extend the reach of all manner of writers, including those intending to act as cultural arbiters. Necessarily, the reviewer's role included disseminating aesthetic opinions, in ways that complicated the wider relationship between the cultural left and the culture industries. Moreover, if we extrapolate from the conduct of the western intelligentsia today, where one or more book or film reviews can inform opinion while serving as a substitute for actually reading or watching the items in question, it doesn't take a vast imaginative leap to consider the influential role reviews could play.
<11> In 2007, it is apparent that many of the well-rehearsed academic arguments about a "Party line in literature", where the left-wing writers and critics subordinated poetry and fiction to politics, have gone the way of popular scrapbook compiling habits. Some of this is down to the research endeavors of Michael Denning and Alan Wald; more broadly, the socio-political changes brought about by the end of the Cold War have robbed the anticommunist cultural narrative of much of its allure, increasing the emphasis placed by conservative writers on espionage. Old assertions about ideological conviction leading to inferior art do not fit well with the untidy realties of empirical evidence. Suffice it to say that "communist social-realist art was for all practical purposes indistinguishable from images by non-communist artists ... similar themes, stylistic diversity, and the occasional use of past political art as a model [meant that] a viewer could not always identify an artist's specific political affiliation from either the style or the subject of his anti-fascist paintings". [9]
<12> In short, the formal similarities and occupational connections noted above illuminate the way that a historically specific discourse concerning the "Red Decade" encouraged sharply drawn dividing lines between Cultural Front art and literature on the one hand, and mainstream popular entertainment on the other. [10] This is not the place to rehearse these familiar arguments, except to say that literary polemics in such publications as the Daily Worker and New Masses have long been used as evidence in the unending search for evidence of "Moscow Gold" as a determinant in the debates over aesthetics found in left-wing periodicals and cultural organizations. When debating "what happened in the Thirties", the formal and thematic proximity of proletarian literature to the cultural industries is often neglected. One of the many virtues of Denning's work, reinforced through the biographical detail found in works such as Wald (2007), is that it avoids this binary by situating left-wing cultural workers within the industries that employed them.
<13> Michael Denning treats the cultural left of the Depression era and war years - or the "Age of the CIO"-- as a social movement with its own distinctive cultural formations. [11] Building on the methodological approaches associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, part of Birmingham University (UK), Denning applies Antonio Gramsci in a U.S. context. He also provides the broad canvas upon which to explore these issues by revisiting Raymond Williams, an intellectual predecessor of the "Birmingham school" whose writing first emerged as attempt to make sense of 1950s Britain.
<14> At times, Denning tackles the Cultural Front formation through an emphasis on its distinctive "structures of feeling". Williams developed this category in order to argue that the definitive character of a social formation could be grasped through an examination of routine, everyday practices. Such occurrences were not isolated, but part of an organized and complex whole, shaping belief within an overall framework of class relations. [12] This analysis was later modified, reassessing structures of feeling to encompass "lived experience" and past and future aspirations. [13]
<15> Is it appropriate to see members of the "Cultural Front" as hammering out an aesthetic vision in the everyday practices? Can the struggle to develop an aesthetic consensus be examined at the routine level of the book review and the brief critical note? Some would argue it is not, and that the appropriate focus for such an investigation would be the scores of declarations and prescriptions that appeared in the political press. Indeed, official publications such as the Daily Worker define "good" art through withering reviews of what was perceived as politically reactionary, hence subsequent controversies that hinge on the claim that some reviews were often little more than appraisals of ideological content. This trend is most discernible from the accentuation of populist discourse - in the form of a "workerist" aesthetic - over more highbrow sources of cultural authority. For instance, an anthology prepared by the major left-wing writers' organization declared that a "day in the life of a man who spends nine hours in front of a punch press on a ship has more beauty and more harmony than you will find in all of Park Avenue with its boredom, its waste of time and its quest of joy that doesn't exist". [14] With this level of rhetoric, little wonder the encounter between politics and literature was at times presented as an essentially sterile environment. Only at the end of the McCarthy era was Proletarian Literature deemed suitable for impartial academic investigation, albeit merely to be represented as a worthy but minor chapter in literary history.
<16> Over time, certain radical novels have been opened up to reassessment, as part of publishing mainstream overviews of 1930s writing. Prior to Denning, with a few exceptions (notably Bloom, 1992), the same cannot be said of the way the reputation of radical criticism has fared. [15] Typical here is Richard Pells' influential Radical Visions and American Dreams (1973), which argues that Marxist critics generally "assumed the value of a given book depended chiefly on its ability to elicit a militant response from the reader". [16] A parallel process affected assessments of the visual arts, hence suggestions that abstract expressionism developed in opposition to "what happened in the thirties" (an argument associated with a series of critical essays by Clement Greenberg). [17] More recent and revisionist authors have taken issue with the predominant approach; a favored method of argumentation consists of contrasting Cold War assumptions to more empirically-based accounts. One by-product of this by now well-rehearsed argument is the neglect of the shadowy ambiguities falling in the spaces between the various manifestos declaring "proletarian culture" and the ever-present culture industries alongside which they were written, defining their goals in opposition to mass entertainment and "bourgeois culture" alike. Dramatic changes in the organizational orientation towards young, class conscious writers and artists - dropped in favor of a Popular Front-influenced courtship of more established figures - should not obscure the more long-term sedimentation of a body of critical and aesthetic judgments which encompassed commercial cultural production.
<17> Notions of shadow provide a punning metaphor for an investigation of mass culture and the cultural left. This is most applicable to the concrete relationship between shadowy film noir and the cultural left, itself perhaps one of the main successful outcomes of the intertwining of political and aesthetic sensibilities that germinated in the "Age of the CIO". [18]The Shadow was also one of the most familiar pulp characters of the age, enjoying a wide readership for its outlandish storylines and hard-boiled dialogue. [19] In turn, the character was adapted for radio by Orson Welles, "the American Brecht, the single most important Popular Front artist in theater, radio, and film, both politically and aesthetically". [20] Yet pulp writing and U.S. Proletarian Literature were often cast as bitter antagonists, especially by proponents of the latter. In the Daily Worker, Michael Gold admonished those proletarian writers who paid too little attention to technique, stating they might learn "to write cheap detective and cowboy stories for the pulp magazines, but ... will never become the real thing". [21] Likewise, in a somewhat generic New Masses review, an anonymous contributor praised Carl Van Doren for taking the time to nurture high culture and its authors, "the masses having been left to Hearst, Macfadden, and Hollywood". [22] When Proletarian Literature was advocated in U.S magazine journalism, the culture industries were likely to be presented as a quicksand in which young talent could be swiftly engulfed. Yet this attitude seems all the more incongruous given the similarities in form and content between hard-boiled popular fiction and the prose style advocated in the New Masses.
<18> Michael Gold's public attacks on popular narratives sat uneasily with the left-wing intelligentsia's "lived experience" of reading ephemeral criticism of cultural texts. The routine habits and practices of what Denning characterizes as the Cultural Front "structure of feeling" engendered and popularized a corpus of ambivalent aesthetic criteria. When shifting the focus of the analysis away from the broad aesthetic positions announced in the most influential publications, a richer, more subtle picture emerges. Denning provides a rationale for so doing, by correctly outlining the extent to which participation in a common project, whether expressed in theater and gallery attendance or on picket lines and demonstrations, was a key factor in forging the "Cultural Front" into a common bloc. (That it would be mistaken to underestimate the influence of developments within the political outlook that underpinned this bloc goes without saying.) In recasting the 1930s left as a social movement, Denning has helped to move the analysis away from the rather limiting preoccupation with membership lists and "Moscow Gold". He sets the stage for an excavation of the approaches to aesthetics and popular culture (and their interrelationship) that characterized this movement.
<19> Aside from the more obvious archival reasons, why rely on correspondence and short book reviews in order to interrogate the character of long-forgotten literary judgments? Two main methodological motives are apparent. First of all, despite their episodic and ephemeral nature, the letters exchanged between radical intellectuals helped to structure their overall understanding of debates within their chosen social movement, albeit in a more personal fashion than the comparable journey based on formal political commitments such as Party or campaign membership. Secondly, writers assumed such communications required less tactical management of how issues were presented than those published in the Communist and liberal press for wider consumption. From the semi-private domain of the letters sent back and forth throughout this milieu - both the preferred and more humdrum, routine means of communication - a plurality of attitudes towards popular culture emerges.
<20> It was asserted previously that book reviews played an important role in setting the aesthetic agenda. Low sales figures for many 1930s political novels suggest that, for many in the Cultural Front social movement it was these brief notices, rather than reading the actual books in their entirety, that served to familiarize them with the intellectual trends with which they competed for influence. A second consideration is that New York-based book-reviewing radicals were accustomed to a freelance working environment where, paid by the word, they often faced a broad range of subject matter to comment on, often dealing in matters for which there was no clear party "line" as such. Reviewing necessarily cut across the different "disciplines" of economists, dramatists, art critics, and so forth, in a manner appropriate for those involved to see themselves as generalist, if not universalist, in their orientation. [23]
<21> Unlike contemporary cultural critics, few figures in the 1930s argued that "the binary which excludes popular culture as an outside while conserving as an inside a canon of specifically literary texts simply cannot be sustained as a serious intellectual argument". [24] Instead the personal communication between supporters of the Cultural Front reveals an insecurity about how to organize the very system of standards with which beauty and creative success could be measured. Taken together, these private absences of any consensus about aesthetics can be read as a challenge to the "Party line in culture" thesis. Few of the exchanges conducted within the left's "structure of feeling" confirm Robert Warshow's assertion that "for the first time popular culture was able to draw its ideological support from the most advanced sections of society". [25] Indeed, there was much that underlines Raymond Williams's emphasis on the importance of unexpected discontinuities to make sense of this milieu as an ensemble, in contradistinction to those who see it as an undiscriminating, middlebrow morass. If we are serious, pace Denning, about subjecting the inter-war US left to the methodology pioneered by Raymond Williams, then we must reconstitute the relationship between aesthetics and politics as one mediated through the lived experience of critics both as readers and as epistolary practitioners.
<22> Contradicting the subsequent presentation of such debates by such journals as Partisan Review, sections of the literary left used "high culture" as a benchmark against which progress could be measured. This positive appraisal of the benefits of the products of cultural hierarchy nestled - as one would expect from this milieu - with misguided praise for Stalin's Russia and its perceived economic prowess. This attitude was well expressed by the liberal journalist Matthew Josephson, who excitedly informed Soviet affairs analyst Joshua Kunitz that John Dos Passos and William Shakespeare were the foreign authors most frequently discussed in Russia. [26] In welcoming this development, he also complained that "literature and culture etc." lagged behind social progress there, which he considered to be "in the bag". This exchange is instructive, in that it suggests that Josephson - with Kunitz's agreement-- hoped that his movement could scale the heights established by Shakespeare, rather than bypass them entirely. (This observation suggests a somewhat skewed analysis of Dos Passos, whose celebrated 'newsreel' technique suggested a bridge between high and popular culture, integrating cinematic and literary forms. It could also be suggested that the growing emphasis on a "people's culture" in the build-up to war elided this distinction on a practical level, particularly by critics such as Warshow who were hostile to the "legacy of the thirties".)
<23> Correspondence between Kunitz and Josephson refers to high culture as an aesthetic standard to aim for. The established arguments about how politics and aesthetics were linked in the 1930s become hard to sustain when confronted with the evidence. Aesthetic inconsistency and dispute were the norm. As many have noted, this was often expressed in the continual quest for definitions of "proletarian culture" in the party press. It is alleged that when the desired clarity was not forthcoming, organizational discipline was imposed. Yet correspondence indicates a widespread and more subtle tactic, which relied upon the authority of a canonical text to settle the matter, hence Walt Carmon contacting Kunitz to emphasize the need for a translation of Plekhanov's early cultural writings, "as a sort guiding line for our own work". [27] Whereas the frustrated Carmon sought an appropriate textual exegesis as a solution to his difficulties, Kunitz himself tried, once again, to advocate a clear aesthetic position by aligning it to Soviet "progress": witness his fierce polemic against Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform. In a more relaxed atmosphere, he expressed his hopes that the decor of a single Russian pavilion could be generalized into an art form worthy of emulation, making it apparent that, in Kunitz's eyes at least, the routine architecture of public spaces could itself become a 'high' cultural form. [28] Once again, a common pattern is emerging: debates within the Communist Party's cultural milieu suggest that, in striving for common standards as to what constituted "good" art and literature, critics like Kunitz arrived by default on an approach that effaced the distinction between high and popular culture.
<24> Political intellectuals' relationships to aesthetic thinking, as expressed through their interpretations of the culture industries, were further complicated by the troubled relationship with popular culture that arose as a consequence of the same intellectuals' democratic suspicions of certain forms of cultural analysis. Concepts that resembled European elite theory proved especially problematic. Hence, a young Lionel Trilling advanced a position - one which he would later repudiate - by caricaturing the pompous claims of established literary critics, according to whom "the machine has impressed the individual into a mob. And with the mob art has never dealt and cannot deal." [29] Like many on the literary left, he intuited that elitism, traditionalists and a fussy preciousness about art were all inherently linked (an approach which now appears far removed from that of the New York Intellectuals, with whom Trilling was closely associated.) Indeed, their subsequent trajectory concerning the entertainment industries is well expressed by Leslie Fiedler's claim that in "democratic nations, mass culture is entrusted with the job assigned elsewhere to the secret police". [30] On a more intermediate level, the difficulties of remaining suspicious of identifying mass culture as social decline [31] while reacting to some of its apparent consequences became difficult to sustain. Thus, to return briefly to Orson Welles, it would appear that the infamous panic caused by his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds led many on the left to imagine a problematic relationship between broadcasting and the gullible masses. [32] Again, this suggests that the shadows cast by mass culture on the Cultural Front "structure of feeling" encouraged incoherence and instability, with no common response forthcoming across official and sympathetic publications alike.
<25> The eventual departures of Trilling and Fiedler from this milieu were politically motivated. Nevertheless, their changing attitudes to the culture industries over a 40-year period reveal that a coded discussion of the masses replaced the initial hesitation over how to evaluate beauty and aesthetic success in an age of mass-produced entertainment. Elitist tendencies were less pronounced in the realm of employment, where left cultural practitioners found that the financial incentives of the film industry could ameliorate periods spent as struggling writers. Aesthetic debate was less of a priority in these circumstances. (In a surprising illustration of this shift, and a rare moment of sympathy for what he terms "communist front groups", the embittered journalist Eugene Lyons appeared saddened that the Left Theater movements were "bled of talent by Hollywood raiders". [33])
<26> Taken together, all of these examples suggest that using categories like "elite" and "mass" culture gave the Cultural Front's adherents little in the way of an aesthetic argument of any conviction. The blanket allegations of economic determinism we still read today suggest a far more coherent aesthetic than existed across key publications. Left critics have been frequently caricatured as evaluating works of art according to how much they mirror the material situation: occasionally, it was the reputedly sophisticated aestheticians who praised the capacity of an aesthetic work to approximate class realities. Thus Lewis Corey, political economist and erstwhile dance critic, commended Clifford Odets on the grounds that "rarely is the sociology of a play as sound as in [Odets'] Paradise Lost". [34] In casual correspondence Corey revealed a methodology he staunchly avoided in public: in private he was assessing the sociological accuracy of a work of drama, whereas in public he demonstrated a more discerning form of discrimination. More broadly, debates over whether or not 1930s literary critics were deterministic have raged for many years, making this a somewhat unproductive avenue to explore: the point remains that economic and sociological analogies did provide a temporary aesthetic standard to fall back on amid the informal communications that sutured the left intelligentsia into a network or social milieu.
<27> In summary, when using Denning's The Cultural Front to unlock the aesthetic criteria shared on the U.S. left cultural movement, four main approaches to aesthetic questions emerge in relation to the culture industries. One was largely dismissive, hence Michael Gold's advice to young writers. Another searched for sources of external legitimation, whether in canonical texts by leading Marxists or from deference towards Stalin's Russia. A third approach involved an individual positioning his or herself within the continuum of the traditional high culture/mass culture debate, either from the standpoint of debunking this binary as essentially a power relationship or by asserting that mass culture presented a serious social problem. Finally, they could fall back - in the manner of Corey - on the familiar grounds of art's capacity to emulate material reality. Any of these could be a public or private response to cultural production.
<28> As Denning's groundbreaking study shows, in the "Age of the CIO" the social movement at its broadest spent much of its time and money on the culture industries. In turn, this meant that organizations oriented toward these constituencies - and cultural practitioners - felt compelled to develop aesthetic norms that could embrace the new mass art forms so as to avoid alienating potential support. In turn, such considerations were often swamped by the primacy placed on political over cultural concerns in the same period, further driving the need to make "history a central category of aesthetic criticism". [35] In terms of a relationship to mass culture, this means understanding the way that an historically specific social movement, itself partly predicated on the Depression and its aftermath, was the site of a sprawling aesthetic discourse. As the impact of the burgeoning culture industries was experienced by leftists attempting to change society, it posed sharply the question of how to judge aesthetic value.
<29> Should "Cultural Front culture" be assessed in opposition to the regnant commercial popular culture, or does this opposition reflect a failure to try and emulate it, at least integrating key techniques? To the contemporary researcher, the lack of a clear aesthetic standard across the board should be striking. Archival evidence suggests that few were adopting the fixed dogma complained of as characterizing the proletarian literature debates of the 1930s. In practice, compromise was key: cultural practitioners combined attempting to produce high art on a craft basis, often while developing parallel careers in Hollywood or in mainstream publishing. Audiences often broadened their horizons in several arenas, thus avoiding these rigid distinctions. When it came to the culture industries, the left press sounded bullish, dismissing some enterprises whilst praising others and promising clear analysis based on offering general statements of principle. If we are serious about treating the Cultural Front as a social movement with a distinctive "structure of feeling", in keeping with Michael Denning's analysis, then the real aesthetic uncertainties of the individuals who comprised this movement, unsettled and fragmented by the rise of the culture industries, requires analysis. Here we find a shadowy place where the movement's connecting links are themselves overshadowed by - when not defined against - an industrialized popular culture.
Notes
[1] Intellectual History Newsletter Vol. 19, 1997, pp.1-58.; http://www.bu.edu/mih/issues/vol19.html. [^]
[2] Ibid., p.53. [^]
[3] See Graham Barnfield, "A Reversal of Fortune: Culture and the Crisis, Yesterday and Today", Working Papers on the Web, http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/thirties/thirties%20barnfinal.html. [^]
[4] Ralph Willett and John White, "The Thirties", in Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Temperley, Introduction to American Studies (New York: Longman, 1989), p.263. [^]
[5] See also Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London: Serpent's Tail, 1996). In Haut's journalism, Daniel Fuchs is frequently treated as a key connection between proletarian and hard-boiled writers. Almost 30 years earlier, two David Madden edited anthologies appeared, Proletarian Writers of the Thirties and Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (both Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1968), again suggesting this link. [^]
[6] Rita Barnard, The Culture of Abundance: Nathanael West, Kenneth Fearing and the Great Depression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). [^]
[7] Kenneth Fearing, 'Nevertheless It Moves', Partisan Review and Anvil, February 1936, p.30. Cary Nelson has drawn attention to the way that poetry circulated through material culture; see the running commentary throughout his Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-45 (The Wisconsin project on American writers) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (London: Routledge, 2001). [^]
[8] The trend for staging simultaneous nationwide openings for Hollywood blockbusters began in 1975 with the release of Jaws. In a recent interview, Colin McCabe claimed this struck a decisive blow against the influence of critics in making or breaking a movie. See John Crace, "Is criticism dying, or is that just your view?", Education Guardian Tuesday December 18, 2007. http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2228811,00.html [^]
[9] Cecile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp.141-142. [^]
[10] In parallel, "visual culture" and popular literature - sometimes including that associated with the US left - could also house varying degrees of eugenic representation, apparently independent of an artist's political allegiance. See e.g. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (eds.), Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). [^]
[11] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996). [^]
[12] See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), esp. pp. 64-88. [^]
[13] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.132. Readers may wish to take issue with any suggestion that this mode of analysis is universally applicable, and history is littered with examples of routine practices that move from being 'taken for granted' to assuming central importance. [^]
[14] Henry Hart (ed.), American Writers Congress (New York: International Publishers, 1935), p.15. [^]
[15] In passing, one reason for not using the term "aesthetic realism" for this appreciation's object of study is that, although the term originated in 1920s editions of The Modern Quarterly, coined by poet Eli Siegel, over time it was applied to a quasi-religious lifestyle philosophy. The Modern Quarterly/Beginnings of Aesthetic Realism, 1922-1923: The Equality of Man, the Scientific Criticism, and Other Essays by Eli Siegel; 2nd edition, ed. Ellen Reiss (New York: Definition Press, 1997) is an indicative document linking the phrase's two phases. [^]
[16] Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p.179.[^]
[17] Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock present 1950s anti-communism as magnifying the importance of Greenberg and the Partisan Review, to which he was a contributor. See their 'Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed', reprinted in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London: Paul Chapman, 1985), p.175. [^]
[18] Paul Buhle, 'The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics', New Left Review 212, July-August 1995. [^]
[19] On language, ethnicity and The Shadow, see Graham Barnfield, 'Hard-Boiled Cities: Dashiell Hammett's Democratic Moment and Beyond', Diatribe Vol.1, No.6 (Winter-Spring 1996). [^]
[20] Denning, The Cultural Front, p.362. [^]
[21] Cited in James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p.123. [^]
[22] 'Without Malice' [r. Carl Van Doren's Three Worlds], New Masses, November 3, 1936, p.24. [^]
[23] This is not to understate the particularist influence of Stalinism, expressed in the myopic dogma of "socialism in one country". [^]
[24] Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 5-6. Seemingly iconoclastic claims of this nature have fuelled attacks on those critics who, in the 1930s, sought to maintain this binary (even while anticipating the canon's eventual downfall at the hands of working class culture). For instance, a biography of Granville Hicks prompted the following charges: "what lies behind intellectual conservatism is a failure to recognize itself as an entrenched tradition that is exclusive in its humanist inclusiveness. Art, man, and reason are seen to be eternal verities outside cultural influence or mediation, and to hold on to this naïve transcendentalism seems both quaint and dangerous". See Paul Hansom, review of Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society, in American Literature, Vol.67, No.1, March 1995, p.167. I would contend that this attack tells us more about a contemporary agenda than about the academic New Masses contributor. For a more nuanced insertion of the 1930s into the "Battle of the Books' that raged in the 1990s, see James Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). [^]
[25] Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1974 ed.), p.34. [^]
[26] Matthew Josephson to Joshua Kunitz, December 30, 1933; Joshua Kunitz papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Columbia University (hereafter Kunitz Papers). To further illustrate Kunitz's deference to high culture, it should be noted that he condemned Michael Gold's notorious populist critique of Thornton Wilder, albeit under a pseudonym. [^]
[27] Walt Carmon to Joshua Kunitz, November 5, 1930; Kunitz Papers. [^]
[28] 'Max Eastman's Hot Unnecessary Tears', New Masses, September 1933, pp.12-15; 'Creating a People's Art', Soviet Russia Today, June 1939, pp.38, 43. The pavilion art cited includes Andreyev's gigantic stainless steel figure. [^]
[29] Lionel Trilling, 'Is Literature Possible?', The Nation, October 15, 1930. [^]
[30] Leslie A. Fiedler, Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p.29. [^]
[31] This trend has been termed "negative classicism", characterized as continual predictions of a "decline and fall" scenario at the expense of a previous golden age. See Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). [^]
[32] Unsigned editorial, 'Panic from Mars', The Nation, November 12, 1938, p.498. Needless to say, Denning's appraisal of the broadcast, and its place in Welles' worldview, is more nuanced. [^]
[33] Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1941), p.138. [^]
[34] Lewis Corey to Clifford Odets, December 24, 1935. Box 15: Correspondence File 1935-38; Lewis Corey Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, University of Columbia. See also Lee Baxendall, "The Marxist Aesthetic Theory of Louis C. Fraina" in Madden (ed.), Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, pp.194-218. [^]
[35] See the editor's introduction to Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Reconstructing American Literary History, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. ix. [^]
Return to Top»