Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

Introduction: Literary Lineages

This volume collects recent scholarship on intellectual, literary, and cultural movements and figures associated with left-wing politics beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into our own time, largely in the United States but elsewhere in the world as well. These essays honor the contribution of Alan M. Wald’s pathbreaking research, which for almost half a century has demonstrated that attention to the complex lived experiences of writers on the Left provides a new context for viewing major achievements as well as instructive minor ones in US fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. His many books and articles, which are listed in the accompanying bibliography, have illuminated the creative lives of figures such as James T. Farrell, Willard Motley, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Rahv, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Kenneth Fearing, and Arthur Miller. Wald has delved into a consideration of Sidney Hook and pragmatism, developed a theory of Popular Front culture, and dissected the complexities of the anti-Stalinist Left. His investigations have opened the archives of Irving Howe, Sol Funaroff, Alfred Hayes, Paule Marshall, Sherry Mangan, Samuel Sillen, Rebecca Pitts, and other unduly neglected writers such as Jo Sinclair, Carlos Bulosan, John O. Killens, and Joy Davidman, among the many more across the Left who people Wald’s magisterial studies in modern American culture. Collectively, the thinkers and actors intimately linked with social struggle who are analyzed in these diverse essays can be understood to form intertwined lineages of the Literary Left. Moreover, the critics and historians comprising this tribute attest to the varied lineages threading together myriad scholarly traditions as well. Throughout we stress the concluding “s,” indicating the plural and multiple tendencies, fields, and methods expanding the Literary Left.

Linage, precursor spelling of lineage according to the University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary, has a contradictory cast, collating an escalating series of descendants, at once expansive and particular:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of lineage, spelled “linage,” predates Chaucer (from circa 1330) and has continued in usage to the present day. As is clear from the ascending list, its varied meanings create a complex system of linkages among and between people. Beyond the family ancestry and lines of descent and kinship implied are larger connections that ally tribes, nations, ethnicities, and people—the entirety of humanity. And more than that, this matrix includes the territory inhabited by them—that is, we of the world. So, in one configuration of the term, we are all together now, but if we look more closely, because one definition particularizes a tribe of Israel and the land it inhabited, one begins to see why Lineages of the Literary Left makes sense as a title. It is not because we are the descendants of this particular tribe—unnamed—and thus perhaps mythical and singular. Rather, our concerns as activist scholars seek to incorporate everyone—the human race—through diverse ideas and practices aimed at inclusion and social justice; yet invariably, as happens with small and fragmented sects identifying spatially and temporally, these lineages threaten to collapse in on themselves even as they continuously proliferate and disagree. Lineages disperse.

Surely the lineages of the Literary Left traced in this volume incorporate aspects for all the myriad definitions of linage found in the Middle English Dictionary—of descent, and thus of forebears, of sects and their fractious posterity, of alliances and schisms, of times and places and beyond these of human history itself. The contributors to this volume are linked through an intellectual project to recast the literary and cultural histories of the twentieth century through attention to biography, theoretical readings of obscure and canonical works of fiction or poetry, anti-imperialism and antiracism, and theorizing the varied collective cultural and political projects associated with something like a revolutionary leftist agenda—within the Communist Party or among its critics on the Left. Moreover, we are connected as colleagues, friends, or students through the legacy of Alan Wald’s work as scholar and teacher over the course of a half century: we are among those constituting various lineages of the Literary Left.

A modern American current of imaginative literature fashioned with radical (left-wing) political intent or associated with social protest can be recognized, at its start, in the work of such writers as Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. Something more in the nature of a movement linking the political Left and radical artistic work emerged in the 1910s with the appearance of the magazine The Masses (1911–17) and continued through the 1920s and 1930s with its successor, the New Masses (1926–48), and with other radical journals, such as the Partisan Review (1934–2003). Associated with the Socialist Party and the Communist Party as well as their varied political offshoots, left-wing literary movements seemed to subside during the first decade of the Cold War, yet leftist literary lineages persisted and assumed new forms in the second half of the twentieth century, including the magazine Masses & Mainstream (1948–63), successor to the New Masses, as well as less obviously leftist publications, including pulp fiction, children’s literature, and work in other popular media.

The earliest studies of these lineages appeared in the late 1950s, culminating in the first thorough account, Walter Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1950 (1956), followed by Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961) by Daniel Aaron, the Harvard University emeritus English professor whose work inspired Wald’s and helped shape that of many others. Part of the postwar scholarly assessment of American Communism after the movement had declined (due both to internal flaws and official repression), Writers on the Left appeared just as a rejuvenated New Left was emerging in the United States.

While Wald’s work and most of the essays collected here focus on elements of the Literary Left in the United States, comparable movements have appeared throughout diverse traditions of modern world literature: in France, from Victor Hugo and Émile Zola to the surrealists, existential Marxists, and poststructuralist critics; in Britain, from William Morris to W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and beyond; in China, from Lu Xun, the May Fourth movement, and the League of Left-Wing Writers; in Japan, in the work of Takiji Kobayashi, Yuriko Miyamoto, and the Proletarian Arts Foundation to the postwar writer Kenzaburō Ōe; and in Latin America, represented by Pablo Neruda, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and many others. By including essays on Japanese, European, and Middle Eastern writers and activists, we hope this volume will spark comparable reassessments of the international dimensions of these literary practices, spawning even more lineages in the process. Furthermore, by dissecting the political biographies of activists and scholars whose work falls beyond the ambit of literature, we foreground how the Literary Left informed and learned from broader leftist movements within academia and various communities.

 
There are many different ways to group the twenty essays comprising Lineages of the Literary Left. We have grouped them thematically—poems, lives, novels, histories—but the interconnections among them crisscross these categories. Roughly, they all consider twentieth-century literary and cultural productions, including poems, novels, pageantry, dance, painting, sculpture, performance, and journalism, created in and for varied milieu from New York’s Union Square to Moscow’s Red Square associated with radical social movements. In addition, some essays reassess the scope and assumptions behind America’s literary history and its periodization and focus attention on the long process, begun in the 1960s, of rethinking the boundaries of intellectual history and cultural studies. These efforts dramatically altered the scholarly definition of canonical literary works deserving historical and textual attention and redrew the boundaries of national culture. Some essays address methodological issues raised when biographies and archives are probed for traces of forgotten histories (emphasizing the salience of this mode of writing the literary biography of ghosts developed in Wald’s work). As such, they often acknowledge the complicated status of activist writers and scholars in the United States and other parts of the world and thus point to new directions in social and cultural criticism that politically engaged intellectuals may pursue in the coming years. Many of the essays also consider theoretical debates about history, social movements, and political praxis, especially as they are expressed through text, gesture, or image. To do so, they delve into popular cultural forms (parades and pageants, manga and pulp) in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Asia to reconsider seemingly nonpolitical forms, such as the lyric or a woodcut. Many essays examine the affinities and tensions across classes, nations, races, and genders among left-wing intellectuals’ lives and within their cultural and scholarly expressions. Often these raise the vexed question of Stalinism within various leftists’ lives, activities, and organizations and as such offer further recoveries of lost biographies, traditions, and works. Various essays probe the complex political investments of scholars and activists in strategies to confront war and promote peace, challenge imperialism and analyze decolonization, or model revolutionary acts. Each of these occasionally disputatious approaches can be said to have grown directly from the scholarship of Alan M. Wald.

As the most important scholar of the twentieth-century American cultural Left in the world, Wald has made immeasurable contributions to rethinking American literary history and Marxist critical practices. As this volume attests, his work is the touchstone, the point of departure, for what is virtually a boom in studies of the Literary Left of the 1930s—and now of the entire twentieth century. Standing at the crossroads of literary criticism and historiography, Wald’s scholarship develops from his unique approach to biography, often gleaned from deep archival research and wide-ranging interviews. This method is significant not only for literary critics and theorists; he has also taught many of us how to be historians of the American Left. Wald’s recently completed three-volume history of Communist Party affiliations among disparate groups of writers—Exiles from a Future Time, Trinity of Passion, and American Night (University of North Carolina Press)—joins his earlier volumes on the anti-Stalinist Left to provide a major rethinking of the relationships among politics, modernism, periodization, popular culture, and social movements. The three-volume study continues his superb crafting of biographical critique or critical biography: the deep respect he pays to the details of private lives and lived experiences as a lens for gleaning a sense and sensation of literary expression. Wald’s is a method aimed at unpacking literary form within and through literary history. In short, his work does more than outline diverse alternative tracks within history; the generative aspect of his work, on view in these essays, posits how lineages of the Literary Left probe the myriad vicissitudes of twentieth-century American literature.

Wald has written on almost every left-wing writer in the United States and done so in a range of styles and venues. He is a careful, erudite, and subtle scholar, versed in critical theoretical nuances and dedicated to the most painstaking archival, ethnographic, and oral historical research, but he is also concerned with broadening the audience for his work to include general readers and, most important, political activists by speaking and publishing widely. For instance, as editor of the University of Illinois Press series “The Radical Novel Reconsidered,” Wald brought back into print works long ignored, helping us understand the complex countertradition of radical cultural practices suppressed during the virulent Red Scare of the 1950s. In addition, he regularly reviews new scholarship within the broad field of literary radicalism for a number of journals and as such brings these studies to wider attention within the public sphere as well as academia. As Wald’s scope has expanded, he has developed a new model for periodizing the twentieth century, one that accounts for the peculiar and varied forms of what he calls “Communist literary modernism” operating across classes and within their fractured ethnic, racial, sexual, and gendered communities.

Wald’s scholarly work can be divided into two parts: the earlier emphasis of his career retrieved and reexamined the American anti-Stalinist Literary Left, culminating in his definitive study The New York Intellectuals. His method focused on excavation, digging up the names, life stories, and works of literary radicals critical of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The three books from this period are compendiums of this cohort of writers, but they also develop a style of reading that views a literary work as a complex, even theoretical, gloss on political affiliations and biographical details. Wald’s method of searching lives and movements has influenced many of the contributors to this volume—T. V. Reed, Chris Vials, Dayo F. Gore, Julia Mickenberg, Robbie Lieberman, and Bill Mullen—even when those being considered (Robert Cantwell, Dorothy McConnell, Beulah Richardson, Pauline Koner, Charlotta Bass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, respectively) were far from the Trotskyist Left. Attention to genre—for instance, poetry and poetics, as in the essays by Harvey Teres on Elizabeth Bishop, Sarah Ehlers on Genevieve Taggard, Rachel Rubin on Langston Hughes and Don West, and Tariq Ali on the poetry of defeat and resistance—has been essential to Wald’s methodology since the appearance of his double biography of poets Sherry Mangan and John Wheelwright, The Revolutionary Imagination. That book adapted ideas developed in Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious by connecting genre, form, and history to relatively unknown modernists, whose anti-Stalinist politics, Wald argued, were keys to their formal innovations.

While retaining the biographical thoroughness of his early work, in his more recent studies Wald has dissected complex narrative structures—focused primarily through the lenses of racial and ethnic identities and Utopian desires for collectivity and alternative sexualities—to demonstrate how literary movements come into being and express themselves symbolically. Incorporating and recasting a series of standard literary and political tropes in order to find a voice within an oppressive structure (be it Cold War America, racism, heterosexism, imperialism, or political ostracism), these authors often then found themselves and their ideas transformed through both internal psychological dynamics and external political forces. Exiles from a Future Time is the first volume of Wald’s impressive trilogy on the post-1930s Communist cultural scene. It begins with a playful yet powerful discussion of “strange Communists” to explore a weird history based in the idiosyncratic stories of individual writers but suggesting a larger field, unnoticed by scholars of either the CPUSA or twentieth-century American literature. The second volume, Trinity of Passion, provides a significant new approach to the critical understanding of the place of the Spanish Civil War in deepening antifascist sentiments among black, Jewish, and gay writers during and after World War II. The final volume, American Night, completes the saga by addressing the impact of the Cold War on various writers and brings Wald’s multifaceted story of Communist literary modernism’s legacies into the 1960s.

The trilogy on communist-oriented writers has led Wald to expand his object of study to include popular fiction, B movies, children’s books, and cover art for pulp fiction as he followed the varied trajectories of their lives. It turns out that anticommunist paranoids who saw mid-twentieth-century American popular culture as saturated by left-wing ideology were right, and it is because of Wald’s research that we know how thoroughly ingenious were those on the margins of mainstream American apparatuses of culture—working through publishing houses, book clubs, reading groups—in fashioning an oppositional stance within an industrial setting. Often at one and the same time, these “strange communists” bent in accommodation to political repression but also pried open various media, forms, and genres for personal expression in surprising and counterintuitive ways. One can see the influence of Wald’s capaciousness, his open approach to the full range of an author’s works, in Joseph G. Ramsey’s reading of Ed Lacy/Len Zinberg’s boxing pulp or in E. J. San Juan, Jr.’s consideration of Benjamin Appel’s political bildungsroman about the Philippines. The impact of Wald’s challenge to arbitrary cultural divisions—for example, insisting that one needs to read pulp fiction together with political theory in order to fully grasp the writing career of many left-wing authors—is apparent in Konstantina M. Karageorgos’s and Nathaniel Mills’s revisionist approaches to canonical authors Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, respectively, whose writings were deeply imbued with both philosophy and popular culture. Wald’s sense that the impact of proletarian literature extends beyond its limited period of the Great Depression can be seen in Heather Bowen-Struyk’s ethnographic exploration of the contemporary youth culture appeal in Japan of a 1929 proletarian novel, The Crab Cannery Ship.

Ultimately, Wald’s three recent books stand with his earlier works as visionary and revisionary histories of midcentury American literature. Rendering a sense of how movements shape thought through collective biography and political history, and are in turn shaped by the variety of individuals’ experiences and sensibilities, has been a hallmark of Wald’s archival and ethnographic scholarship. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, Wald’s ecumenical approach, which draws on the sensibilities of the New Left to frame his readings of the Old Left and beyond—detailed in his own contribution to this volume, where he turns his method on himself—has changed the narrative that literary historians construct about modernism and postmodernism and thus expanded current American Studies thinking about culture, nationalism, citizenship, and race. Opening movements to scrutiny—and doing so through attention to individuals—influenced the composition of the collective-biographical focus of Michael Löwy’s genealogy and typology of Jewish radicals; the attention Howard Brick gives to the rise of the distinct “world systems” approaches of Eric Wolf and Immanuel Wallerstein; Cary Nelson’s reconsideration of poststructuralism, Marxist scholarship, and Joseph Stalin’s legacy; and the challenges to traditional and racist historiography of slavery that James Smethurst discerns in the work of African American writers and artists.

 
In all, Lineages of the Literary Left incorporates a wide range of studies by scholars concerned with the modern literary and cultural Left in the United States and throughout the world. Bringing together distinguished and emerging scholars of the cultural Left from around the country and abroad—some of whom were students with Wald, some students of Wald, and others students of his students—the volume maps approaches to modern literary language and image, reconsiders the methods that have been refined and invented in that work, and charts new directions in left-wing cultural studies. This volume makes clear that the Literary Left is an expansive category: its lineages extend beyond the written word to include actors and dancers, painters and sculptors, philosophers and street performers, and scholars and activists. And its history is neither limited by national borders nor traditional periodization.

Inspired by the political activism of the 1960s, Alan Wald’s work has continued to graph the lineages first recorded by Rideout and Aaron and has traced new threads within its territories and tribes. Charting a capacious field, Wald has inspired the editors and contributors to this volume and scores of others around the world to follow suit. He is a consummate teacher, at once generous and rigorous. Many of us also speak of Wald’s enthusiasm, erudition, and attention to detail in critiquing our work in stories that are similar to the one recounted by Mary Helen Washington in the foreword. Wald’s energy and seriousness are infectious. Like him, we often ignored advice to play it safe and instead followed our passions, political and aesthetic, by ferreting out the hidden stories and histories of a fascinating cohort of cultural workers committed to doing more than interpreting the world.