Bohemian Josie
Langer, Elinor
Bohemian Josie JOSEPHINE HERBST: THE STORY SHE COULD NEVER TELL by Elinor Langer Atlantic-Little, Brown. 374 pp. $19.95. ElinorLanger's JosephineHerbst: The Story She Could Never Tell has aroused...
...She traveled through Depression America, Nazi Germany, Batista's Cuba, and Franco's Spain...
...She is too close to her subject to view it in its proper historical and literary context, just as Herbst was too caught up in her own experience to transmute it effectively into fiction...
...The chief impulse behind Herbst's writing was autobiographical, but that doesn't let us get very far into her trilogy, which was distinguished not by its technique, as was Dos Passos's U.S.A., but by its picture of economic relations and their impact on three generations of an American family, of which Herbst's own life was a part...
...We have too little contact with real struggling people...
...A graduate of Berkeley, where her interest in writing was encouraged, she moved to New York City in 1919 and flirted with the radicals and bohemians in The Liberator crowd, including Genevieve Taggard, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman...
...None of us live enough," she told Katherine Anne Porter of her visit, "and I never felt it so much as in Russia...
...Unfortunately, Langer is far too sympathetic to Josephine Herbst to write a judicious biography of her, as moving, in parts, as it is...
...She had the knack, as Harvey Swados said, "of being in the significant place at the crucial moment"—at least during the 1930s...
...By then she was married to John Herrmann, and in the fall of 1930 she went with him to Russia, where her interest in radical politics blossomed...
...She explains Porter's story as "purely and simply a malignant reinterpretation of everything she knew about Josie's history almost from the day they had met...
...By resorting to histrionics, Langer not only makes light of her subject, she undermines her own authority...
...Elinor Langer has provided some of those facts, but a large part of Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell could just as well have been told by Herbst herself...
...She was sympathetic to, if not always in agreement with, Party causes...
...The reasons are not simply political, as Langer would like us to believe...
...When Elinor Langer visited Herbst's grave four years after her death in 1969, it was still unmarked...
...Much of that interest has centered on the evidence Langer presents to support two claims: that Alger Hiss lied about his relationship with Whittaker Chambers, who accused him of being a communist spy...
...Ironically, Langer is hampered, as a biographer, by the same problem that limited Herbst as a novelist: lack of perspective...
...Herbst's heyday was in the 1930s...
...The portrait of Josie that emerges—fiercely independent but emotionally insecure, and deceitful—is far from flattering...
...As a result, she is blind to the more sensitive and telling aspects and leaves some critical questions unanswered...
...She was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1892 to an impoverished family...
...A year later, Herrmann was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, and soon a courier of stolen Federal documents...
...What exactly was Herbst's achievement...
...It has been suggested that she never lived to complete it because she could never face certain facts about her own past—about John Herrmann, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, for instance...
...John A. Glusman (John A. Glusman is a free-lance writer based in New York City...
...ElinorLanger's JosephineHerbst: The Story She Could Never Tell has aroused a good deal of interest for a biography of a writer who remains relatively unknown...
...Having already put a good deal of her life into her art, Herbst labored, during her later years, over a memoir...
...How does she compare with other writers of the period (like Clifford Odets and James Far-rell) who also wrote about the decline of the middle class...
...The times and places simply do not add up...
...All of this makes for good reading and better publicity, but detracts from who Josephine Herbst really was: a radical and a writer...
...and she expressed her outrage at the plight of the oppressed in The New Republic, The New Masses, Scribner's, The New York Post, and The Nation...
...Why, for a writer who has been ranked with John Dos Passos, has her work not survived...
...Thirty years later she was virtually forgotten, living alone, and poor...
...Written in 1942, it accuses Herbst not only of being a Soviet courier, but of having "a revolutionist attitude," and causing "trouble wherever the opportunity presented itself...
...Langer has also given us an inadequate assessment of Herbst as a writer...
...Neither of these claims, ultimately, can be proven by the evidence Langer brings to light...
...Hemingway and Ring Lardner provided jacket quotes, and it was praised by Ford Madox Ford and Katherine Anne Porter, among others...
...Only by the concerted efforts of Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren did she win a citation from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1966...
...Josie never joined the Party, but engaged in Party activities, such as Theodore Dreiser's National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners...
...The trouble with us and our kind," she wrote during an Iowa farm strike in 1932, "is that under this system we are such isolated bastards...
...a true Stalinist...
...Herbst's first two short stories were published in H. L. Mencken's Smart Set, but it wasn't until 1928 that her first novel, Nothing Is Sacred, appeared...
...How could she defend the Moscow show trials, the Great Terror, the Nazi-Soviet pact, which has led her literary executor, Hilton Kramer, to brand her "for the most part...
...and that novelist {Catherine Anne Porter, a former friend and neighbor of Herbst's, informed on her to the FBI and accused Herbst of having been a Soviet courier in 1935...
...What she doesn't satisfactorily explain is why Porter would rat on Herbst in the first place...
...Langer asserts, "There is absolutely no way Herbst could have been traveling as a courier to and from Moscow...
...Of the seven points listed in the appendix to the transcript, Langer notes, "six have reference as sources only to Katherine Anne...
...Between 1933 and 1939, her fictional trilogy, Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939), for which she is still best known, was published...
...The evidence Langer marshals against Katherine Anne Porter is more persuasive but still not wholly convincing: a four-page confidential memorandum from the FBI, reprinted verbatim...
...How, for example, could Herbst accept Stalin's collectivization campaign, which resulted in the loss of six million peasant lives...
...Indeed, Langer has absorbed so much of Herbst's life that she seems absorbed by it...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
