Sara on left literary politics of the 1930s

>Reply-To: sara_marcus@world.oberlin.edu
>From: "sara marcus" 
>To: whseminar@dept.english.upenn.edu
>Subject: 30s report, 2nd try!
>Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2001 19:11:53 -0000
>
>Literature, politics, the literary left, and proletarian literature in the
>1930s.
>
>Between 1929 and the late 1930s, many American liberals, intellectuals, and
>writers saw Communism as the country's best hope. The stock market crash of
>1929 seemed to signal an imminent fulfillment of Marxist predictions about
>the collapse of capitalism.  The poorest classes of America increased
>dramatically; their suffering was by turns invisible (as with the rural
>poor), at times impossible to ignore (as with the unemployed who swelled
>over the sidewalks and breadlines of American cities).
>
>Meanwhile, half a world away, the Soviet Union was implementing its
>Five-Year Plans with reported great success.  American leftists returned
>from visits there telling of a socialist utopia where poverty and inequality
>were being steadily eradicated.  The forces of Fascism were rearing up for
>the fight in Germany, Spain, and Italy.  It really seemed like the whole
>organization of society worldwide might be ready for a fundamental shift.
>In this context, the Communist Party in the US was the main organization
>force for American Leftists, claiming energy and respect even from
>non-members.
>
>The CPUSA was serious about attracting and educating its own homegrown
>proletarians, and it did so through its local branches. But the Party also
>attracted middle-class intellectuals, artists and writers to the cause. Many
>leftists saw the CP as the only organization with the ability to get things
>done and to effect a complete transformation of society.  At a public
>meeting in the early 30s, when writer Sherwood Anderson posed himself the
>question of the difference between the Communists and the Socialists, he
>answered his own question by quipping, "I guess the Communists mean it."
>
>With so many writers and intellectuals joining or at least
>"fellow-traveling" with the Party and with Communist principles, it was
>inevitable that these commitments would begin to be reflected in their work.
>  Far-left-wing American literature did not begin with 1929; the beginning
>of the 20th century was marked by writers including Theodore Dreiser and
>Jack London who built works of fiction around tales of the exploited
>working-class and class struggle.  But in the 1930s this tendency coalesced
>into a movement: the proletarian literature movement.
>
>The proletarian literature movement was given shape and a forum by its
>central magazine, the New Masses. Its writers produced several dozen
>now-forgotten novels about poor folks and their struggles.  Typical titles
>include Strike!, by Mary Heaton Vorse, and To Make my Bread, by Grace
>Lumkin. Josephine Herbst's Trexler trilogy started off with a novel entitled
>Pity Is Not Enough.  These novels were usually written in a realist or
>naturalist style, straightforward narrative and a prose style later critics
>have called flat.  They usually started out describing the horrible lives of
>poor workers and built to a final strike or conflict scene that spoke to the
>possibility of a greater day ahead.
>
>"'Reading the Proletarians' - Or is it more accurate to say 'Reading about
>workers who ought to recognize they are proletarians, written by sympathetic
>artists to be read by unconverted bourgeoisie?'" - David G. Pugh, in a 1967
>essay, "Reading the Proletarians 30 Years Later"
>
>Some writers wrote about specific fights, like Langston Hughes' play about
>the Scottsboro trial and Clifford Odets' play, Waiting for Lefty, about a
>taxi-drivers' strike.  Writers not only wrote about the struggle; they also
>participated.  In 1931, the National Committee for Defense of Political
>Prisoners was founded with Dreiser as the chair, Lincoln Steffens as
>treasurer, and John Dos Passos on the membership list.  In 1932, 52 writers,
>artists and intellectuals signed an open letter backing the CP president
>ticket. The list included Langston Hughes, Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood
>Anderson, and Steffens, all famed writers in their time.
>
>I have to write a quick thing about reportage, which, although it barely
>figures into most discussions of the proletarian literature movement, is my
>favorite part of it - because reportage's descriptions of strikes, marches,
>and working-class people's struggles are so much more vivid and real and
>believable and stirring than their fictional counterparts.  Reportage is, if
>you ask me, where the push to aestheticize mass action and the push to
>motivate readers came together the most effectively.  Ask me if you want to
>read some reportage or read my thesis on it or hear me blather about it for
>a couple hours.
>
>During the 30s, the movement was not marginal to the US literary scene.
>Proletarian novels were reviewed favorably in the liberal Nation and New
>Republic, and received mixed reviews in the mainstream Saturday Review and
>Herald-Tribune Sunday book section.  The 1935 Year Book Review Digest also
>writes about the proletarian movement.  Steinbeck, who is of course the most
>remembered of the political writers from the 30s, held himself a bit more
>aloof from the movement, but his 1935 novel In Dubious Battle, about a
>fruit-pickers' strike and its Communist organizers, is considered the best
>strike novel of the period.
>
>The proletarian movement fared less well in subsequent decades. It was
>ignored or maligned through the McCarthy period.  Many of the writers were
>persecuted and blacklisted. In 1963, an anthology claiming to offer "a
>faithful sampling of the writing of the Thirties" (20-21) did not include
>reprints from the New Masses, writing by Communist authors, or any of the
>writing from the decade that elaborated calls for Marxist or Communist
>values in literature.
>
>The literary argument throughout the 70s and 80s was that this writing
>wasn't "real" literature, was marred by dogmatism and adherence to party
>line, was clumsy propaganda and utterly uninteresting to read.  Some
>scholars argued that the writers of the 30s were marching lockstep to the
>directive of the CPUSA, or maybe straight from Moscow.  They neglect to see
>that there is no smoking gun there, that the CP didn't issue lengthy
>guidelines for American writers as in Stalinist Russia, that many of the
>proletarian writers were not even members of the CP.  These scholars can't
>seem to accept that writers might honestly have wanted, without being forced
>or coerced, to try to create literature that could have a positive effect on
>a world they saw as deeply flawed and troubled.
>
>Only since the end of the Cold War have some scholars - including Constance
>Coiner, Paula Rabinowitz, Barbara Foley, Robert Shulman, and ME! in my
>senior thesis a couple years ago - tried to rehabilitate this literature.
>Trends in scholarship about marginalized subjectivities telling their own
>stories, resistant ways of reading and writing, the recent privileging of
>the "subversive" in literature, and relationships between politics and art,
>are opening up a space to talk about this literature and about what lessons
>it has for us regarding relationships between literature and politics.
>
>Were the proletarian novels and short stories really "bad" fiction (while
>well-mannered comedies of errors about the leisure classes can be "good"
>fiction)?  If so, what does that tell us about what we seek to get out of
>literature, about our standards for judging it?  Can literature serve a
>political end and still be interesting and enjoyable to read?  The
>proletarian movement doesn't give us answers to these questions, but it, and
>reactions to it, provide us with one of the most extensive conversations on
>the topic.