Notwithstanding its presentation and publication by a leading academic press, this is a work of neither literary history nor criticism. Rather, it is a triumphalist manifesto of a tenured ideology—a peculiar variant of radical leftism somewhere between neo-Stalinism and something probably best described as post-Trotskyism.
Wald, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, has assembled biographical sketches of a group of writers nearly all of whom remained loyal to the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), through its worst period: that of the Great Purges, the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the purges and murders following the Second World War. That is, they were unredeemable Stalinists.
Most of them were also untalented hacks, although some, depressingly, began with talent and suffocated it in the service of Stalin’s secret police, for which, after all, the CPUSA was a thin mask. They were swept off the horizon of American literary life more by their creative failure or self-immolation on the altar of the Party than by the general catastrophe of the Communist intellect worldwide, or by the familiar bugaboo of “McCarthyism.” The few legitimate exceptions to this carnival of failure, discussed here without originality, were the black writers Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, none of whom remained faithful to Communism. In addition, we find included a few women writers grossly overpromoted by latter-day feminists, such as the mediocre Meridel LeSueur and the dull Tillie Olsen.
And finally, the book addresses a tiny number, such as the poets Horace Gregory and Stanley Burnshaw, who came to their senses and fled the Stalinist milieu. Muriel Rukeyser, a poet and translator more or less forgotten today, is probably the only example of one who remained basically faithful to the radical left while producing occasional works of value. In an oversight typical of the sloppy Wald, however, her fascinating work on early American history, The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971), is never mentioned, nor is Richard Wright’s invention of the term “black power.” Wald clearly prefers reading about writers than reading their work.
It is impossible to imagine most of the names discussed here being recognized by the wider reading public today: Mike Gold, whose image, unknown to all but the most initiated, adorns the cover. Joseph Freeman, Don West, Genevieve Taggard, H. H. Lewis, Walt Carmon, Samuel Sillen, Norman MacLeod, Herman Spector, Sol Funaroff, Alfred Hayes, V. J. Jerome, A. B. Magil, and Sidney Finkelstein: their careers are known today only on campuses, or, more specifically, in academic departments where ideological functionaries like Wald, mainly known as the author of a prior dishonest volume, The New York Intellectuals, have established a set of principles. For them, affiliation with the Russian party-police and its “Popular Front” intrusion into American intellectual life rather than creative achievement makes a writer important. In this context, “experts” like Wald flourish.
The essential deception of this book is betrayed by its subtitle’s reference to “the mid-twentieth-century literary left.” According to Wald, this category includes V. J. Jerome or Sidney Finkelstein more than Mailer or Bellow or even Nelson Algren. In a passage that combines mendacity with silliness, Wald asserts that Alexander Trachtenberg, head of the CPUSA (and Moscow-subsidized) International Publishers, “discharged outstanding services to literature in the United States by publishing books … such as Myra Page’s Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932), Mike Pell’s S. S. Utah (1933), James Steele’s (pseud. for Robert Cruden) Conveyer [sic] (1935), Ben Field’s (pseud. for Moe Bragin) The Cock’s Funeral (1937), Albert Maltz’s The Way Things Are and Other Stories (1938), Richard Wright’s Bright and Morning Star (1938), Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring (1940), Beth McHenry and Frederick Meyers’s [sic] Home is the Sailor (1948), and Lars Lawrence’s (pseud. Philip Stevenson) Old Father Antic (1961).”
Can anybody really believe that the absence of these titles from the American literary canon—except for Wright’s, which was a single short story issued as a pamphlet, not a book—reflects anything other than their nullity? Here again, one has the sense that Wald reads about writers rather than writing. Mike Pell’s S. S. Utah is not a literary work at all; rather, it is a fictionalized account of a naval mutiny pro- duced as a manual for agitational work by the clandestine maritime apparatus of the Communist International. Similarly, Home is the Sailor is a lightly-pseudonymized autobiography of Frederick N. “Blackie” Myers, an infamous Stalinist waterfront thug implicated in the murder of the Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca. The misspellings noted above are characteristic of this book, which shows numerous marks of sloppiness, including presenting Alexander Woollcott as “Wolcott” and the film-maker Joris Ivens as “Jorge Ivens.” But describing the volumes issued by International Publishers as major works of American culture is something other than sloppiness; it is a deliberate deceit that makes one wish professors could be charged with malpractice.
Wald’s infelicities abound. Naturally, he is addicted to the standard academic cant when discussing such favorite politically-correct topics as women writers. Here is his commentary on Tillie Olsen and others like her:
The fragmented consciousness evidenced in Olsen’s Yonnondio … certainly yokes the novel to modernist and postmodernist language experiments that contemporary French feminist theorists valorize as crucial to liberation from phallocentric master narratives… . The ambivalences of this literary trend can be observed in the literary persona that has become the site for the most contested interpretations retrospectively inscribed, of the relation of female Marxist cultural workers to the organized Left during the mid-twentieth century; this persona was produced by the writing of Meridel Le Sueur.
Such gibberish appears almost satirical; that it is emitted by a professor of English is dismaying, to say the least.
Wald is clearly possessed of a tin ear. He cites the early “proletarian” work of Burnshaw, concluding with the leaden lines,
Tell our numberless scattered millions
In mill and farm and sweatshop
Straining with arms for rebellion,
Tie up our forces together
To salvage our earth from despair
And make it fit for the living.
About these pedestrian lines, Wald enthuses, “Rarely has the moral and political case for Communist solidarity been expressed so cleanly and eloquently.” This ridiculous comment reflects not only critical incompetence, but also simple ignorance. The ex-Communist Kenneth Rexroth and the anti-Stalinist Kenneth Patchen, both of whom receive short shrift from Wald, wrote much finer verse on Communist and revolutionary themes. So did numerous writers in other languages, such as the Peruvian César Vallejo or the Hungarian József Attila, of whom Wald, dazzled by the “Popular Front” of Earl Browder, seems to know nothing.
Above all, Wald’s most obnoxious failings are moral. Although he still seems to imagine that his rehabilitation of Stalinism and its prostitutes is consistent with his discreet romance with Trotskyism (mentioned here only in the acknowledgments), he endeavors to forget, and to make his students and readers forget, the meaning of totalitarianism. He quotes with apparent approval the “folk” music impersonator Lee Hays, who said that Horace Gregory should “sell the Daily Worker on the subway for a year;” Hays was not worth a single hair of Gregory’s eyebrow, as a creative personality or as a man. Further, Hays declared, “I sometimes wish Uncle Mike Gold would rise and slay these demons.” When these bombastic threats were issued, “Uncle” Joe Stalin was literally slaying the “demons” in Russian literature, including such geniuses as Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and Osip Mandelshtam. No normal observer could overlook the very great probability that Hays’s brutal idiom was intended to be followed by even more brutal results, once Hays and his comrades attained power in America.
Wald, however, finds it easy to overlook these issues, hypnotized as he is by commissars such as V. J. Jerome, the author of party-line manuals with titles like Grasp the Weapon of Culture! He mournfully notes, “Jerome seemed to become more mechanical rather than subtler over time.” Considering that Jerome earned his living as a flunky of the international Stalinist apparatus, can this be surprising? Wald passes over without comment an anecdote entirely characteristic of those circles. Sidney Finkelstein, the author of equally artificial works of “criticism,” such as How Music Expresses Ideas, complained to Jerome that while his own work was ignored by the CPUSA’s official “theoretical organ,” Political Affairs, “every time you [Jerome] write a pamphlet, you make sure it gets the most immediate and widespread attention.” Of course, the power granted by the Russian police to its servants worldwide had its perquisites, which, in Moscow, included the power of life and death over one’s rivals. Again, Wald ignores the echoes of Stalinist savagery in the degenerate discourse of the American Communists.
Finally, however, Wald’s intent is transparent. His title, Exiles from a Future Time, is borrowed from the interesting but short-lived poet Funaroff. Unfortunately for Wald, the reality anticipated in the title is the present, in which he has gained great influence. He closes this book with a citation from the forgotten essayist Joseph Freeman, who in a 1959 letter hailed the youthful audience at a Columbia University symposium on the 1930s. Freeman wrote, “there is a new generation … who [has] picked up the old dream and will soon find new ways to carry it forward.”
Lost in the narcissism of his academic position, Wald cannot admit that the “dream” revived in the 1960s has ended in an ignominy no less profound than that in which the Communist hacks found themselves a generation before. Alan Wald refuses to awake from history’s nightmare and seeks to use it to draw others into a state of intellectual sleepwalking. But we who are alive and awake must be glad to realize that we will never suffer the future dictatorship to which the original doubtless referred, and for which tenured totalitarians like Wald are so nostalgic.
