Social Chronicle of Literary Communism

...Aaron concentrates on organizations and journals close to or controlled by the Communist party: the John Reed Clubs, the League of American Writers, the New Masses and the early Partisan Review...

...It is well to be reminded of these facts by Aaron's book, even though it is in part a record of mistakes and of some fairly shabby dealings...

...Among the forces creating social consciousness in any historic period is, of course, its imaginative literature...

...There were the Harlan County investigations, the election pamphlet of 1932 in support of William Z. Poster and James W. Ford (which an amazing number of first-rate writers signed), Hitler's coming to power, the Communist disruption of a 1934 Socialist meeting in Madison Square Garden, the Works Projects Administration's theater and writing projects, the Moscow purge trials, the Spanish Civil War, Father Coughlin, and Munich...

...This was a generous, self-transcending vision, humanistic, internationalist, realistic in its analysis of the forces of history, yet giving primacy to human consciousness as the immediate cause of social change...

...The effect of all these challenges was not merely political...

...These have often done a good job, but their work needs to be complemented by the special sensitivity and imagination of poets and novelists...

...In 1927, Katherine Anne Porter, Edna St...

...But the '30s were also a period in which the best of men had already realized that there would have to be world unity or world destruction, and in which writers were legitimately excited by newly perceived relationships between history and imagination, action and ideas...

...Most of the important American writers took part in the socio-political debates of the '30s...

...This is also true of historic events...

...By comparison, the 16 years since 1945 seem featureless and blank...

...Similarly, Aaron makes no attempt to say, in the light of the experience of the '30s, what the relation of the writer to society and social action should be...

...This was the period of T. S. Eliot's After Strange Gods and The Idea of a Christian Society, Ezra Pound's A. B. C. of Economics, the Southern Agrarians' I'll Take My Stand, Robert Frost's "Build Soil," and Wallace Stevens' "Mr...

...Burnshaw and the Statue...

...Such varied reflections of the times as Dos Passos' U.S.A., John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan series, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Wilson's To the Finland Station, e. e. cummings' Eimi, Archibald MacLeish's Panic and Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes are mentioned only incidentally or not at all...

...In leading up to the '30s, Aaron gives us a vivid history of the early, preparatory period of Van Wyck Brooks, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman and John Reed, dating back to 1912...

...His record will be invaluable for the future, though in some respects the author's self-imposed limitations keep him from doing full justice to the tone and depth of the period...

...We are given a literary epoch without the literature, Hamlet without the prince...

...The New Leader, for example, is mentioned but not discussed...

...We sometimes forget that Dryden and Swift put their literary imaginations at the service of political activism quite as readily and wholeheartedly as Byron and Shelley...

...Vincent Millay, John Howard Lawson, John Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker picketed the Boston State House in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti...

...The more the artist resists and transforms instead of merely mirroring these new impulses, the more power he has over history...

...Finally, though superbly equipped to do so, Aaron does not try, except in a brief concluding paragraph, to evoke the imaginative vision which Marxism at its best could offer the writer...

...New epochs in history first make themselves known through the sensibilities of artists...

...Literary movements are the creation of pimps who live off writers...

...In the course of a witty piece in the current Noble Savage, John McCormick says flatly, "There are no literary movements, there are only writers doing their work...

...The book is built around the individual experiences of these and many other figures— how they became involved in the movement, the dialectics of their uneasy relationship with it, the reasons for their eventual break...

...Reviewed by ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Professor of English, Columbia University If the richness of a literary period were to be judged by the clarity with which a historian could draw a political map of it—as Daniel Aaron has so lucidly done in this book—the 12 years before World War II would be the most significant period in American letters...

...In the preface, Aaron emphasizes the limitations he has set himself...

...As a chronicler of the '30s themselves, he is as interested in radicals whose influence did not survive the war (Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, V. F. Calverton, Joshua Kunitz) as he is in those writers who are still well known and widely read (Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Dos Passos and Granville Hicks...

...Neither are controversial personalities, like Freda Kirchwey, on the staffs of the influential liberal weeklies...

...Activism and direct social criticism have been left largely to the theologians, historians and, especially, the sociologists...

...This is completely inconsistent with the historic record, with what we know of the association of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller, Flaubert and Maupassant, Pound and Eliot, and many others...

...In fact, it is essential to be reminded of this as we enter a period so dangerous, so terrible in its potentialities, that we need every possible help from the poets and novelists if we are to imagine what it means...

...Since Professor Aaron's book was commissioned by the Fund for the Republic, which is preoccupied by the question of Communist influence in America, "the most confused and controversial problem of the age," he has been forced to confine himself pretty much to what went on among proSoviet leftists, and to see liberal and anti-Communist—even antiStalinist—tendencies largely from this particular perspective, though he does not, of course, share its values...

...They sharpened the discussion of the writer's relation to society which had been going on since the Romantic movement or even the Cromwellian revolution...

...They have recognized that important changes within art come mostly from influences outside art...

...Unless we can imagine it, we cannot adequately respond to it...

...Aaron refers to the Spanish Civil War, for instance, many times in connection with individual writers, but makes no direct attempt to describe the tremendous effect which it had emotionally and politically on leftists and liberals of the period...

...After innumerable interviews and vast research, Aaron recreates these experiences with patience, intelligence and sympathy...

...There were many mistakes in the '30s, much doctrinaire critical writing that showed little respect for what literature really is, and, of course, often shocking duplicity with regard to Stalinism and the Soviet Union...

...From that time until the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, something happened every year to challenge writers' political imaginations and their readiness to commit themselves...

...His book, subtitled "Episodes in American Literary Communism," is strictly a "social chronicle of the Left Wing writer," and not literary criticism of the imaginative writing which came out of the movement...

...The major creators in all the arts have always communicated with their fellows, discussed ideas as well as techniques, put forth manifestoes, founded organizations, schools, periodicals, publishing houses...

...But just because mistakes were made in the past, one cannot simply step out of history, as so many writers in this country supposed themselves to be doing in the '50s...