Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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Reconstructing the "Humanscape" of Left Culture and Commitment: an Interview with Alan Wald / Joseph Ramsey

 

Introduction

Alan Waldis H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor in the Department of English and the Program in American Culture and the University of Michigan. (Note: H. Chandler Davis was a University of Michigan faculty member fired in 1954 and subsequently imprisoned for refusing to co-operate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.) Renowned among established and emerging scholars of the U.S. literary left for his "encyclopedic" grasp of the field - not just as it stands embodied in published works, but as it lies hidden in private papers, personal correspondence, oral histories, and other subaltern sources scattered throughout the archives - Alan is equally well-known for his great personal generosity with his time, energy, and knowledge. His recently released book, Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade is the second volume in a three-part study of the U.S. literary left that has received considerable praise, including recently in The Nation. Wald's previous books include, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987), James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (1987), The Revolutionary Imagination (1983), as well as two collections of essays, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1992), and Writing From the Left (1994), and Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (2002), the inaugural volume in his current triptych.

The interview below was conducted by Joseph Ramsey, editor for reconstruction 8.1, via email between September and December of 2007. Ramsey is a recent graduate of the Ph.D. program in English at Tufts University, where his dissertation, for which Wald served as an advisor, was entitled "Red Pulp: Radical and repression in mid-20th century U.S. 'genre' fiction." He now is an Assistant Professor of English at Fisher College in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

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Current Work

<1> Ramsey: Could you briefly summarize your current research project for those who may be unacquainted with it? What have you set out to do in Exiles from a Future Time, Trinity of Passion, and the projected third Volume, "American Night"?

<2> Wald: In the late 1990s I committed myself to producing a massive one-volume work introducing an extensive amount of fresh research and conceptualization about the cultural Left. It would principally detail the activities of those involved with the pro-Soviet Communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s. I saw this as a contribution to the larger, shared project of canon revision and the rethinking of the inner dynamics of U.S. culture in the mid-20th century.

<3> The new focus was something of a departure from my earlier scholarship, which had concentrated on documenting the anti-Stalinist Left, and which tended to ground the 1930s as the moment of truth for a generation of literary intellectuals. Yet the new project was a logical next step inasmuch as it continued to track the troubled history of the political commitment of writers, especially those who see themselves as variously allied with radical social movements.

<4> The origins of this preoccupation with writers and politics go back to the time I was a high school and college student in the early 1960s. I was attracted to the Civil Rights movement at the same time that I was fascinated by the Camus/Sartre debate. That debate still haunts me, and I strongly recommend the latest book on the topic - Ronald Aronson's brilliant Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (2003).

<5> For the fresh project, however, I was not primarily concerned with formulating any precise specific political intervention. That had been an aim in the mid-1980s when I wanted to clarify the original goals of Marxist "anti-Stalinism" in U.S. culture. Twenty years later, I have no need to repeat myself, so I am free to approach this project with a very open agenda.

<6> In other words, the trilogy-in-progress is not about a search for anything specific. True enough, I am trying to reconstruct writers' political affiliations; but, while I am politically candid, I have never had in mind the revelation of "shocking" new biographical material about writers and Communism. I simply prefer to deal with the complexity and ambiguity of life and art as it comes, which is usually in unpredictable ways. Any political identification that I may establish - such as Communist Party membership, or a pseudonym used in a pro-Communist publication - is just part of a larger picture.

<7> I am also reading a good deal of unpublished material in archives, and forgotten works of criticism, fiction, and poetry. But I am not seeking any alleged masterpieces that have been overlooked. My special research interest is in middle-range writers; of course, I have personal likes and dislikes, but the hierarchical ranking of texts has never been of interest. I just want to see what is out there, so that the story of cultural commitment can have a more empirically-grounded foundation. What has happened is that the "big book" has been "writing me" as much as I am writing it.

<8> Yet the project keeps growing larger due to my fascination with the primary research, which stimulates my creative juices. In archives and oral histories, and by studying Left-wing periodicals, I continue to encounter diverse middle-range writers, many now forgotten. Most of them demonstrated significant connections with the Left that produced what I believe is new knowledge about particular experiences. And occasionally there are also some surprising details about better-known writers. As for the literary quality of the writing that emerged from the Communist-led cultural movement, there are a few cases where I am intellectually and emotionally "transported" by a novel, story, play, or a poem, many of which had received little or no attention in previous scholarship about the Left. Yet most of the imaginative writing and criticism is of attraction to me for mainly historical reasons.

<9> Since my method is to follow my research, constantly revising my hypotheses, I soon discovered that I had far too much material for a single volume, and that it might be possible to break the work into three thematic groupings (with some overlap). Thus emerged the idea of a trilogy.

<10> JR: It's interesting that you mention the Camus/Sartre debates. I was struck by the way the recent Nation review of your work began by positioning your efforts with and against Sartre's 1948 What is Literature? What about the Camus-Sartre debates still "haunt" you? Can you elaborate? What do you see as the continuing relevance of these debates today?

<11> AW: The issue in the Camus-Sartre debate did not centrally involve imaginative literature, as least for me. It was a debate about intellectuals positioning themselves in relation to imperialism, colonial revolution, and Stalinism. How does one support colonial liberation from a consistently democratic position? How does one support as well as criticize foreign governments and social movements that are under attack by one's own government, without being an apologist for oppression in these other societies and without fueling the anti-democratic elements in one's own society? Sartre was very strongly in support of self-determination for Algeria yet went through a period as an apologist for the USSR; Camus was admirably clear about Stalinism, yet weak about Algerian independence. The controversy may stand as a prototype for many subsequent dilemmas.

<12> JR: How does your overarching narrative of the mid-twentieth century American literary Left differ from other influential "meta-narratives" of the period? Can you outline how the "red decade" of the 1930s sits differently in your account, and then how your account has built upon other predominant versions?

<13> AW: I didn't conceive of this project as a rival to other narratives and scholarship, although the resulting research certainly stands as a counterpoint to those who would demonize the pro-Communist Left, or who would reduce the Left experience merely to the Great Depression moment, some clichés, and a few famous authors. Actually, the founding studies in the field, by Daniel Aaron and Walter Rideout, depict the 1930s, "The Red Decade," as I do: a pivotal element in a larger experience. Moreover, both scholars held an admirably balanced view of the Communist aspect.

<14> But there are vital distinctions in our narratives: I am writing some fifty years later, so I give greater attention to Left writers perhaps formed by some memory of the 1930s but who came into their own in the 1940s and 1950s; I include some writers from Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and identify gay and lesbian writers; I search for connections (and disconnections) with the experiences of the New Left; and I also have more information about the ultimate fate of writers still alive and writing at the time that these earlier narratives of Aaron and Rideout were produced.

<15> It's also distinctive that the post-WWII "moment" is becoming more central to my perspective on the mid-20th century cultural life than the original upswing of the 1930s; it was in the early Cold War that a "committed writer" of this generation faced truly hard choices in regard to the disintegration of illusions produced by the Popular Front in relation to both the USSR and the U.S.A. This fits into the larger conceptual point that I am developing in regard to the unfinished character of the 20th century. This may also differentiate my narrative from that of Aaron and Rideout.

<16> My own viewpoint is that the social and political challenges raised to a high pitch in the 1930s, expressed most movingly in the interracial anti-racist campaigns of the Communists, were deflected by World War II and debilitated by the Cold War. The new radicalism of the 1960s was in many ways crippled by that complicated post-war history even though it was also propelled forward by fresh opportunities. In the new millenium we are faced with even more vexing issues that in some ways require a return to and completion of that earlier, mid-20th century agenda. You can probably see here the influence on my historical thinking of Tony Judt's magnificent Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005); I am trying to reflect on the U.S. in parallel terms. Closer to home is also the scholarship on "The Long Civil Rights Movement" that Jacquelyn Dowd Hall summarized compellingly in her March 2005 essay in the Journal of American History. Implicated as well are issues raised in writings from decades ago, by U.S. Marxists like Gilbert Green and George Breitman, that compared the 1960s and 1930s radicalizations.

<17> So, returning to literary radicalism, my orientation resembles that of Aaron in seeing the issue not in terms of a how a particular novel or poem ratifies some Marxist theory, but in trying to make sense of a writer's life experience within the constraints of history, livelihood, friendships, family, and accident. Of course, I am a product of my own generation, so I pay a more attention to the personal (so far as it can be understood), and give special emphasis to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and lesser-known authors as well as mass culture writers. Aaron said very little about imaginative writing itself in Writers on the Left, and Rideout's The Radical Novel in the U.S. was fixated on novels that explicitly showcased radical politics (although he fortuitously managed to place Henry Roth among the "bottom dog" authors). I generally move among fiction, poetry, drama, literary criticism, and some editing and journalism, and I am open to any text that I can connect with the author's radical experience - even if it is pulp fiction, science fiction, a love poem, or if it emerged in pre- or post-radical years.

<18> JR: Indeed as you pointed out way back in Writing on the Left (1994), the radical presence in pulp fiction, science fiction, and other "genre" fiction was to that point a major blind-spot in scholarship and thinking about American Left literature and culture of the mid 20th century. Now a decade or so after publishing that "Agenda for Research," what do you see as the scope and significance of the "Left presence" (as you say) in these genre subfields? And what does this presence tell us about the way and extent to which left culture-workers were "silenced" after the "Red Decade"?

<19> AW: This is a gigantic topic and we are really just standing on the precipice of the serious research that needs to be done. For the 1998 second edition of Encyclopedia of the American Left, I prepared an entry on "Popular Fiction" that gave biographical sketches of over thirty detective and pulp writers connected with the Communist Left, and, under "Science Fiction," another dozen science fiction writers. Except for the famous few, preliminary archival work has yet to be done on these, and many more names can be added. Only then can the "Left presence" be assessed.

<20> JR: How would you conceptualize the relationship of the Communist Party to the cultural movement you describe and narrate?

<21> AW: In the era on which I focus, basically 1929 to 1956, Communist cadres and activists provided real leadership to the Left cultural movement. This movement was comprised of publications, organizations, and the group advocacy of political causes. As a result, those drawn to it share a distinctive stamp, despite diverse degrees of commitment and personal eccentricity. Of course, one can't reduce the whole experience of radicalism in culture to Communism; there were other varieties of radicalism, and even membership in a Communist group doesn't explain that much about an author's imaginative writing. But one can't divest the movement of its Communist content, either. Generalizations are certainly possible, but they have to be preceded by a careful investigation of the individual experiences of a wide range of diverse participants, and that's where I hope to make a major mark. Much of the earlier thinking was based on a smaller and narrower group of allegedly representative figures, or else by dipping into select texts by and controversies about a number of writers without really knowing much about their personal lives or political activities, or even the fuller breadth of their cultural work. One also has to be cautious about claims based on "insider knowledge" of the Left due to one's personal or family connections; such knowledge may well be accurate about oneself or one's circle, but there is a real danger of projecting from the few to the many.

<22> JR: How important do you see Marxism, communism, (and Communism) as having been to 20th century African-American literature? How does recent research - including your own - complicate the predominant views of this issue?

<23> AW: All the evidence accumulated by scholars such as James Smethurst, Bill Maxwell, Bill Mullen, Mary Helen Washington, James Miller, and others suggests that pro-Soviet Communism was the most attractive political force in various ways for an extraordinary range of the most talented and influential Black fiction writers, poets, and playwrights from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. They were not manipulated or "duped"; the pro-Communist cultural institutions offered a venue for publication and the possibility of an interracial community while still honoring what they saw as the "national culture" of African Americans. Some writers produced major work while still pro-Communist - Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, William Attaway, and Theodore Ward. Others came into their own as they were leaving the movement – John Oliver Killens, Lorraine Hansberry, Julian Mayfield, Douglas Turner Ward. Still others produced fabulous works expressing disillusionment with pro-Soviet Communism - Invisible Man, The Lonely Crusade, and The Outsider are among my favorites. So, Communism is a crucial issue in mid-20th century African American culture, even though the diverse and sometimes complicated passages of many Black writers through pro-Communist Marxism have not yet been substantially addressed. On the other hand, so far as I know, very few African-American writers followed the path of Black Trotskyism, represented by C. L. R. James. The novelists William Gardner Smith and Willard Motley did collaborate with Trotskyists, as well as with as with Communists, but this did not translate into a primary identification.

<24> JR: A major theme of Trinity appears to be the Popular Front's relationship to masculinity. How and why did the PF-UF anti-fascist "crusade" impact perceptions and representations of masculinity in your view?

<25> AW: This is part of the larger matter of the Left and ideologies of masculinity. Since the Left was based on a notion of class warfare, putatively masculine behavior was always promoted: toughness and not softness; military discipline and not bohemian individualism; the ability to break one's ties, take off, and live in a free-wheeling, rough-and-tumble way; the willingness to go down fighting; etc. During the Popular Front, class war against capitalist rulers became subordinated to the international "crusade" against fascism - the need to bear arms and kill a ruthless armed enemy. This brought about complications for cultural work. One that I discuss in Trinity of Passion is that Jewish-American male writers were faced with a "feminine" image of Jewishness in the dominant culture of capitalism, even as Jews were a special target of fascism and a moral obligation clearly fell upon us to be in the forefront of the struggle against the Nazis. As a consequence certain works of literature of the anti-fascist era symbolically dramatized internal warfare between "tough" Jews and imaginary characters who are seen as weaker or more cowardly (and possibly surrogates for less "masculine" Jews). For African Americans, of course, there was the dilemma of a claiming a "manhood" that involved the paradox of serving with honor in a racist military for a Jim Crow country. Finally, for all participants in the "crusade," the "masculinist" military struggle intensified the element of zealotry which was already a problem on the Left. Zealotry, or passion, is necessary to fight to the death, but it also oversimplifies one's perceptions.

<26> JR: What were the biggest empirical surprises for you in researching and writing Trinity? Exiles? The upcoming third volume?

<27> AW: The empirical surprises in literature were mainly in the discovery, or sometimes rediscovery, of works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism that come to life in new ways when seen more fully in historical, political, and biographical context. Books that I had read earlier, such as Jo Sinclair's The Changelings, took on a far richer significance for me when read in the context of the author's long journey through the Left. This complex and multifaceted process of "decoding" is what keeps me going, in spite of the fact that I have never been very enthusiastic about many Great Depression texts identified as "Proletarian literature" or "strike novels."

<28> But there were non-literary surprises, too. In Trinity of Passion, one surprise was the realization of how problematic the Communist response was to the 1943 rebellions of people of color in Harlem, Detroit, and Los Angeles. I had not encountered any appreciation of this in previous scholarship. Some scholars on the Left seem to be so caught up in the "unity" of the Popular Front (which I see as a selective and calculated unity) that they can fail to apprehend its downside - in this case, the Communist belief that these rebellions occurred on orders from Hitler. Much of the scholarship on Communism from the more conservative perspective mainly carries out original research in regard to espionage, so the 1943 situation, from the viewpoint of people on the socio-economic bottom, has not been of interest to them, either.

<29> Another surprise was the cultural complexity of the immediate post-Browder moment in Party circles, which came into view as I traced the relationship of Isidor Schneider and Arthur Miller, who appeared as "Matt Wayne" in the New Masses. One might have imagined that Communist cultural policy under Browder would be more open than what came immediately after; to the contrary, cultural "Browderism" produced its own kind of straight-jacket effect that exploded upon his departure and produced the hope of a new direction. However, in a pattern familiar to the Communist-led Cultural movement, this brief openness was followed by a crushing move toward even greater conformity.

<30> JR: What is the current state of the 3rd volume? What can we expect from it? What emphases? What figures will receive significant attention?

<31> AW: For me, writing is like creating a painting or sculpture. I have completed much research for volume 3, "American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War," and I have drafts of various narratives that will go into it. So I have a vision of it. But the final form - what it will include and highlight - will not be known until it has gone through many revisions. For that to happen, I will need to find a major block of unbroken time during which I can focus on the work. Among the chief issues I hope to treat are the crisis of the post-WWII moment, the resistance to repression during the High Cold War, and the bridges built to the New Left in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the writers on whom I have been doing particular research are Charles Humboldt, Jose Yglesias, Helen Yglesias, Warren Miller, Tom McGrath, Douglas Turner Ward, Lorraine Hansberry, Carlos Bulosan, Audre Lorde, Bert and Katya Gilden, Martha Dodd, Kenneth Fearing, and Abraham Polonsky. I also plan to revisit Ann Petry and Jo Sinclair in regard to their novels The Narrows and Anna Teller.

Methodology

<32> JR: Both Exiles and Trinity start with what you call the "strange" Communist careers of Guy Endore and Len Zinberg. Why begin with these two little-known figures as you do?

<33> AW: That wasn't planned, especially in the instance of Zinberg. Originally, I was going to commence with a "literature review" in the first volume, summarizing the history of scholarship on the Cultural Left and then explaining what would be my own contribution. But Paula Rabinowitz told me that that idea was "boring" (among her favorite words), and I ended up publishing that material separately. At some point the figure of Guy Endore walked into the opening section as the embodiment of the "noncanonical Communist writer" and he just stayed there. I liked the fact that he was a devoted Communist but defied so many stereotypes, and also that he was a damn good "middle-range" writer. In the case of Zinberg, I had most of the material about him formulated in the early 1990s and presented his strange story as a talk at several universities in 1995-96. I probably thought that the Zinberg narrative would eventually go in the third volume, in order to show the long-term influence of the Left experience on mass culture. But in writing Trinity of Passion, I started to feel that Zinberg was more notably a writer who grew out of the anti-fascist era, and I was intrigued by the fact that the plot of his In Black and Whitey was linked back to the Communist view of the 1943 Harlem Rebellion as a creation of Hitler. So Zinberg just forced his way into the beginning of the book.

<34> JR: In both Exiles and Trinity you emphasize the need to craft a "humanscape" in order to narrate the US Literary Left movement. What does this mean and why is it so important to your project? What does collective literary biography have with literary interpretation in your view? (In Trinity especially one notices your deployment of biography alongside prose fiction as a kind of base narrative by which to interpret literary works. Sometimes biography seems to be even more determinant; you read major literary works as translations and/or revisions of "the author's life." What assumptions about prose literary production underlie your bio-lit readings here?) What are the main kinds of sources that you most rely upon in constructing the "life of the author"? Which sources do you approach with most caution?

<35> AW: As I have adapted the neologism "humanscape," the basic idea is that literature, radical or not, is created by people who are the expressions of particular family upbringings, religious training, regional cultures, personal relationships, artistic skills, loves, emotional crises, and other influences. I meant it to counter politically reductive approaches. Of course, it is plausible to assume that an attraction to Communism in the 1930s-50s era would be a rather compelling factor of magnitude and therefore convey itself in some form in one's creative activity, but the devil is in the details. So I strive to recreate the relevant aspects of the lives of the radicals, emphasizing the most pertinent features, and treating politics and literature in that framework. Of course, one can't reproduce every facet of a life, and one is limited by the amount of information one can unearth. So one makes choices and tries to foreground case studies that bring new dimensions to the front. That's why I move back and forth between individual and group narratives, which suggests a "collective biography" approach even though it is both more and less than that.

<36> I would describe the method as my effort to develop a complicated colloquy among a range of sources: first of all, the various texts (published, unpublished, major and minor); then, the other available sources (interviews, oral histories, letters); and, finally, the context (historical situation, political ties, network of friends, information about books/film/music/plays that may have been influential on the writer). From this kind of material one develops a hypothesis about a writer, and then modulates it in light of additional sources.

<37> But all sources are potentially dangerous if there are no checks and balances: Oral histories are a problem because of the kind of tricks that can be played by memory, frequently in the form of a genuine amnesia or revision of a memory that is not the same as lying. Even letters can depict a momentary passion or a self-construction to impress someone. And an entire archive can be erected by the author or the literary executor or by the archivist with crucial elements absent. (The pattern I've found is for the absences to involve primarily sexual and political material.) Another problem is subjective: One doesn't "see" things for which one isn't looking, and strong preconceptions can shape the emphasis given to select components, or to the particular leads that one chooses to follow. So experience helps, as well as a tendency to be conservative about jumping to conclusions.

<38> JR: How did you come to this methodology as your primary means to unpack this history of literary production? And how do you locate this within current thinking about literary criticism and theory? Is this a resistant practice, directed against a particular generational or institutional form of literary criticism or literary history?

<39> AW: The methodology grew out of my personal experiences in the 1960s. First, I wanted and needed to write creatively, but I was not willing or able to focus primarily on myself, which is what a novelist or poet must do. So I sought an external narrative framework about which I felt strongly but from which I was at some distance. Second, I was a devoted New Leftist and then a socialist political activist, and I could see all around me that the issue of "commitment" was not a simple ideological matter but that its understanding required a multi-sided approach that included emotions and personal life. So I sought to incorporate such multiple factors in historical context by going back to previous generations of cultural workers, even as I kept in mind concerns that grew out of my own 1960s activism. It was a perfect solution. I cared so deeply about these issues that I was motivated to be as honest and accurate as possible, regardless of what I found.

<40> JR: Reading Trinity I was struck by the lack of explicit engagement or argument with influential studies such as Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, probably the most widely read recent study of the period of the US Popular Front culture. What do you see as the major connections, divergences, similarities, or differences in your project versus Dennings? Foley's? Politically? Methodologically?

<41> AW: I wrote at length about Denning for a special issue of The Intellectual History Newsletter (Vol. 19, 1997), and I reviewed both Denning's and Foley's books in journals when they came out (Labour/Le Travail 1998; American Literature 1994). Where possible, I try not to repeat in my books the material that is available in print elsewhere, although sometimes this is unavoidable. Moreover, the trilogy is not intended as an argument or oppositional engagement with either of them, although it is certainly true that Foley and I have incompatible assessments of the Stalin era of the USSR and the Mao era in China. Still, Foley is primarily a specialist in the politics of literary representation; her Radical Representations effectively gets readers (and scholars) beyond simplistic disparagements of politically committed literature, and she presents fresh primary research. So in that respect we are on the same wavelength, even though it is unlikely that we will ever agree on definitions of "Communism" and "anti-Communism," or on "the national question," or on the causes of the problems of the Popular Front. Of course, I look forward very much to her forthcoming work on Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison.

<42> In regard to Denning, I am not aware of substantial difference on political matters, but my work gives greater attention to individual agency in relation to political activism and cultural production (with the result that I am weaker than he is on "the big picture" of U.S. culture). Also, my view of the Popular Front is that it was produced by national and international contradictions of a profound magnitude, and that cultural workers in this era are most fascinating and relevant when seen in light of these contradictions. I'm not certain that Denning would disagree with any of this, but I don't see The Cultural Front communicating the downside of the Popular Front. Of course, no book on this complex subject is perfect, including any of my own.

Recovering the Literary Left

<43> JR: What do you see as the relationship between your historical research and our contemporary "moment of crisis" (to quote Walter Benjamin)? What particular relevance or interest do you see the texts, authors, and collective biographies that you explore and reconstruct as having for contemporary readers, scholars, political activists today?

<44> AW: Well, if I am correct that the mission of the socialist Left today is to complete a project inaugurated in the 1930s, deflected and defeated in the 1940s and 50s, and only partly revived in the 1960s, then we need to know what existed before in order to rebuild the movement and its vision. It is one thing to abstractly proclaim the need for internationalism, anti-racism, socialist democracy, and so forth, and another thing to apprehend what that means in practice and how such a vision might be corrupted by zealotry, dogmatism, and so forth. I'm trying to narrate and analyze numerous lives of cultural workers on the Left in order to show what this meant in practice. As a result I hope that young people today will see that they are not alone in their hopes and dreams for a better world, that their aspirations were prefigured decades ago. At the same time, however, there are many dangers along the way that one would be foolish to ignore or to imagine were only specific to earlier generations. Obviously the biographies that are most relevant are those of individuals who recognized and repudiated authoritarian versions of "socialism" (such as those who left the Communist movement in 1956, if not earlier) yet continued onward to forge a new radical vision.

<45> JR: What do you see as the prospects, opportunities, likelihood of returning the works of Zinberg, Endore, Benjamin Appel and others whom you examine to print and to readership? What current developments are you aware of in this vein? For instance, what have you learned from experience with Radical Novel Reconsidered series? [Note: The Radical Novel Reconsidered, a series issued by the University of Illinois Press from 1995 to 2000, and edited by Alan Wald, issued left-wing literary works including: To Make My Bread, Moscow Yankee, The People From Heaven, Salome of the Tenements, The Great Midland, Tucker's People, Pity is Not Enough, Burning Valley, The Big Boxcar, The World Above, A World To Win, Lamps at High Noon). ] What texts were next to be brought out by the series when it was discontinued? What U.S. left-writers do you think could have wide appeal today if they could be returned to print? What advice would you give to other scholars interested in recovering works in this way? Frankly, what do you think that it will take for the radical writers upon whom you concentrate to "bust in on the canon" of American literature?

<46> AW: My advice would be not to start with the assumption that there will be a significant revival with "wide appeal" of any of the figures on whom one is working; what seems more likely is that there will appear opportunities for the reprinting of a novel (especially by a university press with a regional interest, a radical or feminist press, or small or vanity press), and possibly some modest sales. Works by Kenneth Fearing, Ben Appel, and James Norman recently came back into print, and so have books by William Attaway and Edwin Lanham - but this has been due more to the genre of the writing than the Old Left connection. In regard to Left poetry, Cary Nelson has done a brilliant job with the "American Poetry Recovery" series at Illinois. Yet I don't think that this has translated into substantial sales, book reviews (except in the case of Edwin Rolfe), and classroom adoptions. I remain baffled by the absence of any collections of plays by Theodore Ward, John Howard Lawson, and Mike Gold. I wouldn't want to discourage any efforts, but the whole issue of sales and "wide appeal" is unpredictable.

<47> The first several volumes of "The Radical Novel Reconsidered" series received some prominent reviews, and two of them sold satisfactorily. But then things slowed down. It sometimes seemed as if the better quality novels had the weaker sales. (Why would a slight and mediocre novel such as Salome of the Tenements do so well, and a rich and original novel such as The World Above do so poorly?) Although I didn't like many of the newly-produced covers, the University of Illinois Press was first-rate in many areas: The design and logo for books were good, the material inside included excellent bibliographies and photographs, the authors of the introductions did outstanding jobs, and attractive publicity was carried out. After a dozen volumes, the press concluded that a series on this topic was not viable. The view at University of Illinois Press was that few people actually taught a course exclusively on "The Radical Novel," and, if a novel of this type is to be included in a broader course, the professor would most likely choose a famous novel in a cheap edition. I had been happy to volunteer my labor on this project, but it did hurt to see the end of a dream. I had imagined that many more semi-forgotten books would come back in print - Trumbull Park (although Northeastern University Press subsequently brought out an edition), Morning Noon and Night, Let Me Breathe Thunder, We Fished All night, Walk Hard Talk Loud, The Searching Light, The Hanging on Union Square, The Dark Stain, The Hospital, and so forth. It's not that I thought that these were masterpieces or would have fabulous sales; I just wanted to introduce them as part of the discussion of "what really happened" in the making of mid-20th century U.S. literature.

<48> To some extent a revival of interest in various literary texts will be connected with changes in society. No doubt the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for the relative popularity of Tillie Olsen and Meridel LeSueur - talented but not major writers. A number of African American authors were retrospectively returned to literary history following the Black Power and Black Arts movement. Carlos Bulosan has been revived as a result of the combined efforts of the Asian-Asian American political movement of the 1970s and a capable Marxist scholar, E. San Juan, Jr. So the national political climate is certainly a factor in creating the potential for a larger audience, and, if we Marxists are accurate, anti-capitalist movements will appear as long as capitalism perpetuates exploitation and inequality. But it is impossible to predict the forms that these movements will take, and the degree of interest they will take in particular literary ancestors.

Personal and Political

<49> JR: Your book on James Farrell seems a logical start to your career as a literary historian of the US radical literary left. Did it seem that way then? Could you see the present trajectory of your work back then?

<50> AW: As I recall, I wrote many of the drafts of the opening sections of what became The New York Intellectuals when I was a graduate student; in particular, the material on Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, the Menorah Journal, and the journey of Partisan Review up until 1939. Then I wrote a big chunk on Farrell, and it was suggested by my dissertation director at that time, Fredrick Crews, that this might suffice for the dissertation as a whole. My original aim, at least when I wrote my dissertation prospectus, had been to focus mainly on the question of Trotsky's influence on the Literary Left in the 1930s. But after I published the book on Farrell rather quickly in a New York University Press series, and then the book on John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan (The Revolutionary Imagination, which is substantially about Marxism and Modernism in poetry), I realized that I had to step back and think on a larger scale if I was going to make a significant contribution to understanding the Literary Left. The New York Intellectuals was the result of this switch from focusing on literary Trotskyism to seeing literary Trotskyism as a dynamic center of something larger and less easily classifiable. Still, my work through the 1987 was anticipated in embryo by my thinking in graduate school; what kept expanding was my research base and the range of figures who attracted my interest that kept expanding.

<51> JR: To what degree do we still today need to deal with unpacking the Trotskyist/Stalinist conflict(s) common to this period? How formative were these to your own upbringing as a scholar and political thinker?

<52> AW: To me, the issue is not really "the Trotskyist/Stalinist conflict." It is the predicament in which Stalinism represents the experience of revolutionary defeat; in this case, the degeneration of the once-promising Russian Revolution into a murderous totalitarian dictatorship. This catastrophe generated illusions tragically compromising the socialist movement (and a tiny number of scholars still hold to those illusions about Stalin). Trotskyism is noteworthy as one critique of Stalinism, albeit especially compelling because it is powerful and Marxist; but "Trotskyism" is variously interpreted and hardly the only ball-game in town. In my case, the centerpiece of my political contribution to Left history has been trying to assert the legitimacy and necessity of a Far Left or Marxist anti-Stalinism; that is, a form of revolutionary socialism in which anti-Stalinism is a crucial part of the picture yet not the main point - which of course needs to be a positive one. I don't expect other scholars to say exactly the same thing, but I feel that it is necessary to at least integrate an estimation of Stalinism into one's perspective. Of course, one should realize that many critics on the Right, journalists and academics, will still label an anti-Stalinist Marxist as somehow sympathetic to Stalinism; for them, the primary issue is that one is on the Left, and linking such a person to Stalinism is the principal way they have of discrediting one. That's sad, but it should not prevent our presenting a candid estimate of the past.

<53> In terms of my personal background, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a liberal but conventionally patriotic family that was neither attracted to nor unduly obsessed with denouncing the USSR, so I did not have any emotional baggage in regard to this issue. As a student activist in the New Left, I was primarily motivated by concerns about racism, poverty, and the war, and skeptical of all states and governments. Later, after I was moved more decisively Left during my activity with SDS and Cleveland ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project of SDS), and some time abroad, I encountered a version of Trotskyism through New Left Review, Ernest Mandel, Michael Löwy, and others, that was sophisticated and helped to guide me through an understanding of revolutionary history that has been useful to the present. I was also influenced by a period of membership in the Socialist Workers Party where I was exposed to the writings of James P. Cannon and C. L. R. James. Cannon still appeals to me as the one veteran leader of early communism in the U.S. who retained his youthful socialist idealism, and I hope that the extraordinary new biography by Bryan Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928, will help him to be better known. James, of course, subsequently morphed into a major figure in cultural studies.

<54> JR: How has your understanding of the U.S. 20th century Literary Left developed and changed over time from your early work on The New York Intellectuals, to Writing from the Left, to Exiles and Trinity?

<55> AW: First came the switch, after The Revolutionary Imagination, away from a "Trotskyocentric focus." The next development came in the very process of writing The New York Intellectuals. No one else had fully traced out the connections between early Marxist anti-Stalinism and the pseudo anti-Stalinism that emerged from the Cold War. Inspired by the record of the former in the late 1930s, and enthusiastic about the literary achievements of James T. Farrell and John Wheelwright in that era, I had expected to see a substantial even if "minority" tradition of Marxist anti-Stalinist cultural work continue in the 1940s and 1950s. I had even imagined that there might be a significant line of cultural continuity to the 1960s, thereby establishing Marxist anti-Stalinism as a kind of "red thread" through generations. I did see something like this in politics, so I was anticipating that it was there in culture. But what I actually found wasn't that substantial in quality or quantity - although it was of some interest to me, personally. Moreover, while doing the bulk of the writing in 1983-84, I was forced to confront the dramatic right-wing devolution of one wing of this tradition that had been a component of 1960s "neo-conservatism." True enough, the element of "Trotskyism" in the background of some of these initial neo-conservative intellectuals has been much exaggerated, but some connection of Hook, Glazer, Kristol, etc., to the anti-Stalinist Left tradition cannot be denied. So I had to rethink my assessment of the weight and outcome of various radical cultural legacies. I carried this out in the process of doing the essays that were published as Writing From the Left (1994). My conclusion was that, numerically and in terms of quality and relevance to cultural concerns of the 1960s, there were actually a vast number of writers variously connected with the Communist tradition who had never been considered; figures such as John Sanford and Guy Endore, who were capable of skillful writing. It seemed as if most theoretical generalizations about the cultural Old Left had occurred in the absence of full empirical data. So that's when I decided that one must go through that vast, untapped legacy, to try to make sense of it, and launch a discussion, as a prerequisite to offering a compelling judgment about the significance of the Left in relation to mid-century U.S. culture.

<56> JR: What do you see as the role of radical public intellectuals today? What models for left-wing activism do you find within our contemporary "moment of crisis"?

<57> My expertise about intellectuals is limited to the earlier, "Old Left" generation; in the new millennium, the political and cultural situation is vastly different. But there are certainly a number of impressive left-wing "public intellectuals" out there at present - Mike Davis, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Manning Marable, and Stephanie Coontz, for starters. The general idea of the radical public intellectual is to use one's unique skills and opportunities as an intellectual to speak on contemporary political issues from a Left perspective. It is a challenging task because it requires a wide range of proficiency, beyond one's research area, especially when one takes on foreign policy issues as does Noam Chomsky; and then there is a need to avoid specialized terminology and a heavy scholarly apparatus without oversimplifying. I myself made a foray in that direction in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I traveled to Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and to the location of an armed land takeover in the Southwest U.S., and I published about those political issues as well as about matters such as racism in the U.S., the legacy of McCarthyism in the universities, the national elections, multi-culturalism, and affirmative action. I wrote enough to fill a book but these pieces appeared mostly in local or tiny radical publications, and the impact was minimal. In the end, I found that it was impossible for me to keep "up to speed" on these kinds of issues while simultaneously carrying out the kind of meticulous research that I felt was required to complete my trilogy. I had to rein myself in and keep to topics that I knew really well, as I was hypersensitive about the possibility of making a mistake or being superficial. I humbly doff my hat to those who are able to sustain the role of public intellectual and reach a sizable audience; but those of us who are more limited can make contributions as well.

<58> JR: What are the most important lessons for contemporary cultural left theory and practice that you find embedded in the prior historical moments to which your research is devoted?

<59> AW: While it is attractive to affiliate one's cultural work to an admirable political and social movement, and this will no doubt continue to happen, it has worked out badly when one applies political (and "moral") criteria to judging and promoting culture. Culture is certainly political in many respects, but the translation of texts into political ideology or the predetermination of alleged "effects" upon readers is problematic. The worst excesses come when particular styles and themes are judged to be more or less revolutionary, or when spokespersons for political movements start making pronouncements about culture, or when denunciations of "racism" and "sexism" (which are certainly present and important to notice) become the shrill axis of critique. To be sure, everyone has a right to express his or her likes and dislikes, but one should be wary of those who cloak these personal preferences in the name of a certain class, or Marxism, or the revolution, or some other self-righteous and self-aggrandizing stance. Declaring oneself for the working class, or in possession of the true Leninist program, etc., gives one no special authority, knowledge or expertise. When applying political criteria to interpreting and evaluating art, there is a substantial risk of imposing an interpretation from the outside or one that elevates a "short-term" reading over long-term effects. James T. Farrell wrote very well about this for the 1930s in A Note on Literary Criticism (1936).

<60> JR: I was thinking back to your comments about C.L.R. James and James P. Cannon. They differ on among other things the role of Leninist vanguard organization - James breaking from this "orthodox" Marxist position, and Cannon not. How do you relate to this "organizational" question today politically, culturally, and as a radical intellectual yourself? Where do you stand on the question of 'What is to be Done?"

<61> AW: I can't imagine how one puts forward a revolutionary socialist agenda without organization. How else do people co-ordinate their talents, compensate for each other's weaknesses, and focus their limited forces on top priorities? On the other hand, such an organization can't be created ex nihilo, because a couple of students or intellectuals announce that they are the embodiment of working-class interests. I consider myself part of a layer of 1960s activists who are variously attempting to keep alive socialist thought and action in the hope that a new generation will come along and rebuild a revolutionary socialist movement worthy of the name. The divergent ideas and experiences of Cannon and James are central to that effort.

<62> JR: Personally, what are your favorite left-wing literary texts? Do you have a short-list of "unknown radical masterpieces" that you consider "must-reads"? What radical texts have you found to be most successful in your classrooms and how so?

<63> AW: There is really no convincing way to account for literary taste. Why is it that I am bored silly by a canonical work such as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, but intrigued by his In Dubious Battle? Why do I find Grace Lumpkin's relatively popular strike novel, To Make My Bread, almost unreadable, but her little-known work about a family crisis, The Wedding, to be near-spell-binding? Why do I look forward to re-reading the works of the early Saul Bellow but dread the idea of going back to Bellow's major novels? Why did it take me decades to finally appreciate Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore? Why do I find Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman to be tedious, but The Crucible to be gripping?

<64> There are many books growing out of the radical tradition that are valuable to me at the present moment; my list would start with The Narrows by Ann Petry, Between the Hills and the Sea by K.B. Gilden, A Walk in the Fire by John Sanford, and The Great Midland by Alexander Saxton.

<65> For classroom use, books need to be chosen according to the type of class and the context. Generally, my aim as a classroom teacher is to encourage students to think for themselves and gain a perspective on analyzing culture in relation to society - this means any perspective (including conservative, religious, and "aesthetic" ones), so long as it leads to convincing and original interpretations. Once a student has a basic framework as a starting point, it can evolve through life experience. The notion of using books or the classroom to "radicalize" students has always struck me as bizarre; I was "radicalized" by life itself, and literature, conservative as well as liberal and revolutionary, helped me find my way.

<66> For most courses I prefer writers such as Melville who present a vast panorama of life and lend themselves to contradictory interpretations. For courses on "radical" literature specifically, I tend to use books that have some real stature, such as Native Son, so that the students know that the book is important beyond the personal preferences of myself. Of course, now and then I assign something by a favorite "middle range" writer such as Harvey Swados, just to open the door to that kind of writing. But a real problem is that undergraduates are not that interested in reading long books these days; while they might just skim through a lengthy classic such as Call It Sleep, there is a greater chance that they might carefully read a short (but still high-quality) volume such as Arthur Miller's Focus.

<67> JR: What texts or writers (critical or "literary") do you find to have most influenced your development either as a scholar or political thinker and why?

<68> AW: Like many people drawn to literary studies, I was permanently stamped by the very first texts that excited me about the relationship of the imagination to social and historical understanding. When I was in elementary school, my father read me a chapter from Moby Dick each night. Starting in high school, I came to see the larger world overwhelmingly via writings of the High Modernists and Existentialists, at least through college. I read everything I could find by Dostoevsky and Kafka, and also Sartre and Camus. Blake was very important, and I read many of "The Beats" and San Francisco Renaissance poets. The only radical writer I read from an early age was Richard Wright (a high school teacher urged me to look into Black Boy) and Wright has remained a life-long fascination.

<69> In terms of literary criticism , it was at Antioch College that I read Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left, which not only drew me toward Old Left writers but also in the direction of undertaking original biographical and primary research. The first "theorist" I read was probably Leslie Fiedler; I came across Waiting for the End, and then went on to other essays and books. Despite fiedler's failings as a reliable scholar, penchant for showmanship, and very poor treatment of many Left writers, Fiedler brought to life the psychoanalytical dimensions of culture in a way that has lasted . I also was quite taken with Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Armed Vision. And I met Dwight McDonald, who came to an undergraduate seminar to discuss his work. I should also mention that my college advisor, Milton Goldberg, taught a literature class in which he counterpoised The Communist Manifesto to Civilization and Its Discontents. At Antioch I took student-organized courses on Capital and other Marxist classics, and I studied with SDS President Carl Oglesby, present as an Activist-Scholar in Residence.

<70> Toward the end of the 1960s I started reading Lukacs (Goldberg encouraged this), and by the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I was reading what was then available of Benjamin, Gramsci, and so forth. A formative moment was when I took a small seminar by Richard Lichtman, who had been just fired by the UC Berkeley Philosophy Department, where we went carefully through all the writings of the "Young Marx." From there I went on to read tons of Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and historians such as Isaac Deutscher and Perry Anderson. By the time I became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in 1975, I was able to read widely in feminist criticism, African American Criticism, Chicano criticism, etc. All this was absent from UC Berkeley curriculum at the time I was there.

<71> JR: Beyond the question of (not) "radicalizing" students in the classroom, how do you understand the relationship between - on the one hand - the classroom, and the college or university more generally and - on the other -  progressive social movements? What is or can be, or ought to be in your view, the role played by left teachers and intellectuals in struggling for positive social change?

<72> AW: When I first began teaching literature in 1975, I had no doubt about my priorities. There was a gigantic disparity between what was taught in the classroom and world cultural reality. As a professor, I was part of that vanguard who brought multicultural texts and interdisciplinary methodology into the classroom. In my own department, my behavior was probably pretty awful; I had some skill in public speaking from the floor due to my UC Berkeley activist days, and I hammered away at issues of curriculum and hiring at every opportunity. I can remember a period in which I used to read over the minutes of every Department Executive Committee meeting in search of any news of hiring in underrepresented fields. When there wasn't any, which was almost always the case, I would send off a complaint to the Department chair with carbon copies - this was before e-mail - to various faculty allies. (In my own defense, however, I will say that the University of Michigan English Department in those days was about 90% white male, and classroom offerings reflected that. The situation today is qualitatively improved, even if far from perfect.)

<73> I also had clear priorities as a campus political activist, although I regarded this as very separate from my role as a "teacher." Mostly, I participated in activities against dictatorial rule in Chile, against South African Apartheid, in support of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, against political repression in El Salvador and Haiti, and much more. Sometimes I taught classes to socialist student study groups. On occasion I functioned in all-faculty groups, trying to mobilize support for affirmative action, supporting anti-racist activities and unions, and so forth. I would express my opinions in university publications, but saw these activities apart from teaching, service, and scholarship. I participated in on-campus sit-ins to create the Women's Studies Program and for divestment from South Africa, and was arrested for sitting in at a congressman's office to protest U.S. government aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. My view of the university was that it could and should have an intimate connection with society, and that it could not ignore war, racism, poverty, etc. On the other hand, I understood that the university had to protect the expression of diverse viewpoints, Left and Right, if knowledge were to be advanced and problems solved.

<74> The climate on my campus is utterly transformed today and such collective projects seem to have vanished. Most of us with socialist commitments have had to find more individualized ways to continue, often with off-campus activities. The main effect that this has had on my teaching is that my topics are more mainstream; I am more likely to teach "The 20th Century U.S. Novel" than "Marxism and Cultural Studies." The change in climate has also made classroom discussion among undergraduates less passionate and creative. It will clearly take some new kind of radicalization, with fresh leadership, to bring things back to life for students and faculty.

 

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