PARADOX

...In the same period, his parents died, his hearing worsened, and he experienced continued failure in his work as a poet and novelist...

...Besides earning much-needed money, says Shi, Josephson also acquired a new social awareness on Wall Street that played a crucial role in his transformation from aes-thete to activist...

...Shi is par-ticularly good on Josephson's working methods, his efforts to use history to speak to contemporary situations, and his unusual ability to personalize and dramatize the past...

...No one even vaguely acquainted with the life of Matthew Jo-sephson (1899-1978) can fail to have wondered at the sheer variety of his endeavors...

...Drawing on the writer's Journals and letters, Shi vividly recreates these forma-tive years (including the beginnings of Josephson's friendships with Burke, Cowley, and Hart Crane) and suggests they marked the Start of a long quest for "his own style of both life and poetry...

...In Shi's view, he simply lacked the imaginative spark for fiction writing, and may have found the literary adulation he sought in a number of lovers, including the young Katherine Anne Porter...

...If only for her extraordinary understanding— considering her husband's loud, abrasive manner and many love affairs—she de-served more attention here...

...Joseph Barbato (Joseph Barbato, a free-lance writer and critic, has contributed to The Village Voice, Smithsonian, and other publications...

...Opposed to class distinctions, they "insisted upon maintaining their own distinctions as individual artists and cultural spokesmen...

...And yet one is Struck by how rep-resentative Josephson's career was of these dilemmas...

...One can only hope that other finished copies of his book are bound better than mine, which split in half as I read it...

...In 1921, the search brought Josephson and his young wife, Hannah, to Paris, where the "insolent, combative" young p?et sought out Louis Aragon and other Dadaists, and became prominent among them...

...In 1930, while he described hunger strikes and relief efforts in The New Republic, he bought his country home in Sherman...

...Moments later, the re-maining pickets were arrested by the police...

...Despite the success of his books, however, Josephson by his own sights remained a failed novelist, guilt-ridden over his "pot-boiling" writing for the mass magazines...

...Determined to address public issues, the once self-isolated aesthete became a fellow traveler and admirer of Soviet collectivization...

...Each underwent a process of "alienation, return, and partial reintegration into conventional bourgeois American society," writes Shi...

...Soon, he decided to seek "social acceptance, economic security, and professional recognition...

...Eliot, and pos-tured flamboyantly ("I am bored with the world," he declared at twenty...

...Bourgeois by up-bringing, taste, and profession, such leftist writers pledged public allegiance to the lower classes...

...By night, he worked on a novel and wrote reviews...

...As Shi observes, such paradoxes have probably typified the lives of American literary radicals throughout the Twentieth Century...

...Then, for two years, he was a successful Wall Street broker...

...At his death in 1978, he was working on a book in which he hoped to exonerate Alger Hiss...

...Again and again, Josephson expressed re-grets over his failure to write a novel...

...Committed to the solitary ar-tistic life, they were dedicated to Marxist collectivism...

...For the latter, Shi chides Josephson sharply...

...There were to be other books, including a life of Thomas Edison that remained definitive until recently, and two volumes of unrevealing memoirs...

...In the 1950s, Josephson devoted much energy to attacking the excesses of the Red Scare and the efforts of revisionist writers to enshrine his "robber barons" as innocent nation-builders...

...In this penetrating biography, David E. Shi, a historian at Davidson College, argues convincingly that something more was at work not only in Josephson's career but in those of his friends Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, and other writers during the era between the world wars...

...Finally, be-ginning in the 1930s, he became an outspo-ken radical intellectual, the author of The Robber Barons and other muckraking studies, and a self-described "hack" for The New Yorker, Colliers, and other magazines...

...From childhood, Josephson had lived in comfort...

...The result, and most emphatically so for Josephson, was a way of life that embodied many contradictions...

...In 1924, back in the United States, he plunged into the heart of American reality—Wall Street—and made a splendid stock broker...

...In the 1920s, he was an expatriate poet, an editor of influential little magazines, and a leader of the Dadaist movement...

...Matthew's father, a successful printer turned banker, hoped his son would take over the family business...

...From their country retreats they criticized the capitalist System whose literary rewards they reaped...

...Finally established as "the writer turned public man," Josephson became the best-selling author of several highly interpretive histories in the 1930s and early 1940s, no-tably The Robber Barons, The Politicos, and The President Makers, which have significantly shaped subsequent writing on American business and politics...

...Then thirty-five and already ac-claimed for The Robber Barons, published earlier that year, Josephson spent some forty minutes on the line, then took a taxi to a meeting uptown...

...Amid the artistic and literary ferment of New York on the eve of World War I, Josephson began a period of rebellious ex-perimentation marked by a distinct con-tempt for bourgeois Convention...

...Shi's absorbing, well-written study teils us surprisingly little about the talented Hannah, herseif a writer, whom Josephson once called "the making of me...

...The train was taking the young fellow traveler back to his country home in Sherman, Connecticut...

...Sr)urred by moral outrage over condi-tions in Depression America, Josephson became more radical even as he became more middle-class...

...That aside, Shi's book is a first-rate account of a biographer and historian, his close contempo-raries, and the dilemma of the writer in American society...

...Unlike many other East European Jewish families in Brooklyn's Brownsville section, the Josephsons had a maid and spent their summers at the Long Island shore...

...But the bright and bookish Josephson rejected his family and religious background, enrolled at Columbia University, and immersed himself in what he later called "bad poetry and gloomy Russian novels...

...My curse has been extreme versatility," Josephson once wrote...

...Ambitious, naive, and arrogant, the fledg-ling poet championed Amy Lowell and the Imagists, fired off critical letters to Theodore Dreiser and T.S...

...In the summer of 1934, he joined other writers on a picket line in front of a New York Publishing house, where an ac-countant had just been fired for union or-ganizing...

...Still in his early twenties, Josephson, as an editor of the little magazines Secession and Broom, was soon a well-known American expatri-ate...

...I was just then sitting in the train's club car enjoying a very bourgeois cocktail—and I laughed out loud," he recalled...

...Later that day, Josephson was amused, while reading an afternoon paper, to find his own name listed among those arrested...

...Unlike members of the "lost" generation, however, he accepted and even cele-brated the possibility of integrating America's machine-age business values into art...