Chapter 4 of Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 129-169.

The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, "We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion." Commentators hostile to 1930s literary radicalism might concede that there was open debate over defining proletarian literature but still insist that proletarian writers felt pressured by what Fraser Ottanelli calls the "heavy ideological limitations imposed by the third-period analysis on artistic and aesthetic considerations." Howe and Coser charge that proletarian authors wrote in accordance with "formulas" and that the "conversion ending" was "the tithe the writer paid the party." Alfred Kazin characterizes proletarian novels as "'conversion' epics which always ended with the hero raising his fist amidst a sea of red flags." Murray Kempton asserts that the "formula" of the proletarian novel was: "[B]oy sees vision of exploitation, boy goes on strike, boy finds vision of freedom.... The proletarian novel's hero was an Alger boy who had learned that the road upward is blocked and that the future is with him who looks to his own class." Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, these critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause. 1

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When it was a matter of exposing the formalist and elitist premises of contemporaneous bourgeois critics, the Marxists had no trouble subscribing to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class war. Gold, in his famous 1929 polemic against Thornton Wilder, threw down the gauntlet, declaring that Wilder's "air of good breeding.... decorum, priestliness, glossy high finish .... conspicuous inutility, caste feeling, [and] love of the archaic" provided the "parvenu class" with a humanistic fantasy that "disguises the barbaric sources of their income, the billions wrung from American workers and foreign peasants and coolies." Oakley Johnson declared the superiority of Communist literature over bourgeois literature on the grounds that it is simply better propaganda: "Novels containing propaganda which derives from intense personal conviction, or even sacrifice, are likely to have far more power ... than those in which the propaganda springs from a decayed patriotism or from conformity to a fashionable prejudice." Freeman asserted that the experience upon which bourgeois art is based is "the experience of personal sensation, emotion, and conduct, the experience of the parasitic classes." The liberal "Man in White" considers proletarian literature 'propaganda' because it seems that only a decree from Moscow could force people to write about factories, strikes, political discussions. He knows that only force would compel him to write about such things; he would never do it of his own free will, since the themes of proletarian literature are outside his life. But the worker writes about the very experiences which the bourgeois labels "propaganda," those experiences which reveal the exploitation upon which the prevailing society is based. / 132 / There was no such thing as apolitical art or literature, the Marxist critics argued, Proletariat and bourgeoisie had opposing systems of value that were of necessity reflected in the discourses by which the different social classes articulated their views of the world. 3

While Marxist critics felt at ease in using the term "propaganda" to describe any text's class affiliation, they had more difficulty reconciling themselves to the view that the term might denote literature characterized by specific types of didactic maneuvers. On this issue, it becomes difficult to distinguish the statements of the Marxists from those of many of the liberals and fellow travelers who gravitated toward the left but remained uncomfortable with the idea that art or literature should be hortatory. For example, in the first issue of Hub-a magazine whose stated editorial policy was to welcome "all sincere work"-the painter Thomas Hart Benton proclaimed the positive impact that he saw Communism having upon artistic production. "International Communism," he declared, is a "revolt against the emptiness which is characteristic of the art coming out of this [bourgeois] background ... a recognition of the fact that art cannot live healthily upon itself alone." For all its rebelliousness, "International Communism" preserved art's high social function, for it entailed a "return to the classic attitude which saw the form of art as the servant of meaning." William Carlos Williams, in a 1933 issue of Contact, expressed a comparably fervent appreciation of the compatibility of left-wing ideas with artistic truth. "I cannot swallow the half-alive poetry which knows nothing of totality," he stated. "It is one of the reasons to welcome communism. Never, may it be said, has there ever been great Poetry that was not born out of a com- / 133 /munist intelligence." indeed, he asserted, Dante and Shakespeare could be cited as instances of "communist intelligence." For Benton and Williams, Communism took on broadly humanistic meaning, becoming essentially coterminous with artistic propositionality and even artistic genius. 4

Although Benton and Williams welcomed Communism, their enthusiasm in no way supplanted their prior commitment to a view of art as being divorced from propaganda. For they insisted that pro-Communist art and literature perform their roles in an entirely implicit manner. Benton stipulated that "Art does not teach its meanings, it reveals them.... Art reveals itself like the human personality through acquaintance, not through overt declaration.... Propaganda subsequently may accompany [art] but it cannot accord it substantial meaning or lead to the establishment of those new relations which mark vital form." Williams even more emphatically rejected any association between literature and didactic purpose. "Writing . . . has nothing to do with truth but is true," he declared. ",A writer has no use for theories or propaganda, he has use for but one thing, the word that is possessing him at the moment he writes." For Benton and Williams, sympathy with Communism clearly did not entail acceptance of an instrumentalist view of art or literature, which they saw as by their nature antithetical to political programs or doctrines. 5

Benton's and Williams's grafting of left-wing partisanship onto inherited notions of aesthetic autonomy was a prevalent stance among most of the progressive artists and writers who were associated with the cultural left in the early 1930s. Articles and reviews in various left-leaning little magazines routinely interlaced positive responses to the political propositions embedded in individual works of proletarian literature with cautionary remarks about the danger of politicizing art. Frederick W. Maxham, in Kosmos, noted that in The Disinherited Conroy "has written propaganda, but he has developed his narrative with such astuteness that the 'point' is almost entirely implicit." Conroy's novel illustrates "the limit to which propaganda can be carried; it gives the reader an accurate emotional (and to a lesser extent) intellectual realization of his faith in the proletariat, with- / 134 /out in any wise detracting from the work as a novel." Editorials in Kosmos took a similar tack, expressing "aversion" to stories which were "nothing but desire projections" and declaring that propaganda had to be "skilfully enmeshed" in a story. Kosmos published a "literature of sincerity," the editors announced. "Praiseworthy is the fact that writers feel no Messianic call to preachment; their writings are solid enough not to need moral direction." A contributor to Blast chided Dynamo for rejecting a story by Williams because the point of view of its doctor-narrator was not adequately "proletarian": "The mirror to industrialism must be kept clear of paint, and this magazine exclusively of proletarian 'stories' is continuing the work of Flaubert and the Goncourts. It does a work vastly more solid than the organs of propagandist ergoteurs." Most non-Communist critics and readers drawn toward the literary left were skeptical of literature that too openly declared its propagandistic intentions, even if they were not averse to leftist writers making their views known by implication. 6

One might anticipate that writers and critics in or close to the Communist party would express a more unabashed sympathy with texts overtly expressing revolutionary attitudes and ideas. To a degree this was true. Some Third-Period literary radicals argued that revolutionary optimism was a vital ingredient in proletarian fiction and urged writers to designate, or at least suggest, the revolutionary "way out" from the miseries produced by capitalism. The editors of the John Reed Club publication Partisan informed potential participants in a proletarian fiction contest that the submissions "will be judged by their ability to picture the incidents

in the class struggle, and in making them into a powerful appeal for the revolutionary movement. Stories confined to depicting the misery under capitalism will not be acceptable, they must, above all, be an inspiration to building the revolutionary movement." Hicks, in his generally laudatory review of The Land of Plenty, chided Cantwell for leaving young Johnny Hagen in the rain, mourning his murdered father and uncertain about the outcome of the strike. "Cantwell relies too much on obliqueness, and the heroism of the embattled workers is a little obscured," Hicks remarked. / 135 / "As a result The Land of Plenty fails to sweep the reader along, as William Rollins' The Shadow Before does, to high resolve and a sense of ultimate triumph." New Masses critic Emjo Basshe praised Marching! Marching! for portraying a "singing army" that "can never be conquered," a "chorus which has kept the air filled with its challenge through strike and lockout, in the face of vigilantes, police and militia guns, against starvation, tar and feathers." To represent reality truly, these critics urged, the writer should depict the growing insurgence of the proletariat and leave readers with increased determination to involve themselves in the class struggle 7

Moreover, occasionally Marxist commentators voiced the view that proletarian literature should be forthrightly propagandistic. Cantwell averred that his The Land of Plenty had been written as a work of "propaganda" and chided Marxist critics for giving him a political critique that was "distinguished by its vagueness." E. A. Schachner faulted Conroy's The Disinherited for the very quality that Maxham admired, complaining of the novel's "studied carelessness and primitivism" and declaring that it 1, eschews interpretation as if it were a bourgeois plague.... [It is] more averse to direct statement than any Philadelphia lawyer." Moishe Nadir, we will recall, admired the Marxist lessons implicit in To Make My Bread but criticized Grace Lumpkin for telling the story from the vantage point of "backward workers" rather than from that of her own vanguard consciousness. Eugene Gordon, in his New Masses review of Guy Endore's Babouk, praised the novelist for his frequent excursions into the history of colonialism, noting that the narrative "loses nothing by the author's frequent stepping out of character to chat amiably or satirically with the reader." While faulting the novel for black nationalism, Gordon commended its hortatory narrative voice, which several mainstream reviewers had found jarring. Explicit in such critical judgments, both negative and positive, was the notion that proletarian fiction, to be politically effective, should wear its politics upon its sleeve. 8 / 136 /

But critical expressions of approval for revolutionary didacticism were relatively few and far between. Marxist critics were frequently uneasy with texts that displayed their partisanship through the direct articulation of revolutionary doctrine. Obed Brooks wrote in the New Masses that Herbst's The Executioner Waits was praiseworthy for its "complete freedom from lumpy ideology." Conversely, he disliked Isidor Schneider's reliance upon authorial editorializing in From the Kingdom of Necessity and considered the novel successful only where it relied upon narrative alone to convey its political analysis. Leon Dermen, while criticizing Langston Hughes for not having portrayed the black proletariat as sufficiently class-conscious in The Ways of White Folks, castigated left-wing writers who "indulg[e] in ‘revolutionary' hysterics." Hicks asserted that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was "so thoroughly revolutionary in all its implications that slogans are unnecessary." By contrast, Hicks argued, Upton Sinclair interferes with his "imaginative recreation" in The Jungle by introducing "long passages of straight exposition." Hicks concluded, "[E]very such interruption is destructive." In his largely negative assessment of the majority of the submissions to the New Masses novel contest, Calmer concluded that "the worst scourge of proletarian literature" was "the tendency to sloganize, editorialize, rather than let the propositions emerge from the narrative." Moissaye Olgin, praising the contributions to Proletarian Literature in the United States, observed that "[t]here is a happy avoidance of sermonizing in the volume, and wherever there appears a revolutionary action, it seems to grow out of the very soil of the workers' lives." The Communist poet EDWin Rolfe remarked in his review of CalDWell's American Earth that " [i]n [CalDWell's] hands propaganda is so expertly woven into the texture of his stories that they by far outdo in effectiveness the slogans of his more conscious but less gifted fellow-writers." A. B. Magil, also invoking / 137 / the loom metaphor that frequently appears in discussions of fiction and propaganda, faulted Lumpkin for relying too heavily on speech-making in the final portion of To Make My Bread. Revolutionary ideas should be conveyed not in "formal declarations," he remarked, but "as part of the creative process," woven "in the warp and woof of a story." 9

Most 1930s critics and reviewers were, moreover, hesitant to prescribe optimistic closure as a necessary ingredient of the proletarian novel; they disliked novels that represented the "way out" in a forced or obligatory fashion. In the New Masses Alice Withrow Field faulted Myra Page for ending Moscow Yankee with a "pink sunset." Calmer directed his ire against the "subjective tendentiousness of the conversion ending" in proletarian fiction, which he saw as the "revolutionary equivalent of the Cinderella formula." EDWard Newhouse, himself the author of two pro-Communist novels (You Can't Sleep Here and This Is Your Day), praised Tom Kromer's bleak Waiting for Nothing for its gritty realism, concluding, "I hope no one starts beefing about the fact that this novel doesn't show 'the way out.'" 10

Even critics who believed that the proletarian novel should leave its reader in an optimistic frame of mind treated the issue of narrative closure as a problem, not a prescription. Gold remarked, "Anybody can write the first two acts of a revolutionary play. It is the last act, the act that resolves the conflicts, that has baffled almost every revolutionary playwright and novelist in the country. For you can't truthfully say in your last act or last chapter that there has been a victorious Communist revolution in this country." Conroy was vulnerable to the charge of projecting / 138 / "wish-fulfillment," for both The Disinherited and A World to Win could be said to end with the protagonists' "conversion" to revolutionary activism. Yet when he spoke about problems in proletarian fiction before the 1935 Writers Congress, he elaborated on Gold's metaphor:

In the [final] act, the action must be resolved into some sort of climax-the strike is lost but the workers, undaunted, pledge themselves to continue the struggle; the central character awakens to social consciousness; or the strike is won and gives the workers fresh courage for the ultimate battle. And how is the proletarian novelist or dramatist to accomplish this naturally, imparting to the reader or audience a sense of reality and inevitability? That is one of his major concerns.

Hicks, defending himself against the accusations of the recently alienated Partisan Review group in 1936, argued that "the essential hopefulness of Communism is a fact, not mere theory. The understanding of events that Communism gives does inspire a confidence that is capable of changing human lives." There is, he maintained, "a dramatic reality in conversion and a powerful story in a strike." But he took care to disclaim any responsibility for encouraging writers to produce rote texts, noting, "I have hoped that some day the formulas would be transcended." Thus even the critic who is often singled out for fostering a crudely propagandistic and instrumentalist view of literature disavowed any intention to promote a specifically didactic program. If novelists produced works with formulaic plots, Hicks protested, this was in spite of, rather than because of, his urging. 11

There was in fact widespread agreement among 1930s Marxists that explicit didacticism was undesirable. Gold wrote in 1929 that "the function of a revolutionary writer is not to suggest political platforms and theses, but to portray the life of the workers and to inspire them with solidarity and revolt." Hicks, in his response to the IURW criticisms of the New Masses work in 1931, noted that "schematism and abstractness" constituted "one of the principal dangers of proletarian writing, and must be guarded against." V. J. Jerome criticized the "beatific expounding of social / 139 / ultimates" in the "implausible oratory" of the Northern organizer who, in Fielding Burke's Gastonia novel Call Home the Heart, gives a lengthy speech about Communism from the back of a train to striking mill workers. Freeman, in his introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United States, argued that '[a]rt at its best does not deal with abstract anger. When it does it becomes abstract and didactic. The best art deals with specific experience which arouses specific emotion in specific people at a specific moment in a specific locale, in such a way that other people who have had similar experiences in other places and times recognize it as their own." Accordingly, "[the artist] does not repeat party theses; he communicates the experience out of which the theses arose." The most influential Marxist critics were committed to the view that literary texts should make their politics felt through implicit, concrete, and nondidactic means.12

Commentators unfavorable to 1930S literary radicalism have routinely posited that the campaign against "leftism" waged by the "dissident" group clustered around Partisan Review should be credited with defeating the crudely didactic aesthetic put forward by the New Masses group. As Rahv and Phelps themselves claimed after their 1937 split with the Stalinists, they and other "younger critics" had "stigmatized as 'leftism' the passion for uniformity, the pious utilitarianism, and the contempt for tradition that, despite all protestations to the contrary, determined the mentality of the sectarian Marxists." Beginning with the publication of their 1934 essay, "Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary Literature," Rahv and Phelps did condemn "sloganized and inorganic writing" that "drains literature of its specific qualities" and "distorts and vulgarizes the complexity of human nature, the motives of action and their expression in thought and feeling." This criticism resonated through practically everything Rahv and Phelps wrote during their tenure in the proletarian movement. They also stipulated the superiority of a cognitive to an instrumentalist conception of literature. "Success cannot be gauged by immediate, agitational significance," they declared, "but by [the writer's] recreation of social forces in their entirety.... Literature is a medium steeped in sensory experience, and does not lend itself to the conceptual forms that the socio-political / 140 / content of the class struggle takes most easily. Hence the translation of this content into images of physical life determines-in the esthetic sense -- the extent of the writer's achievement." 13

It was, moreover, Rahv and Phelps who coined the term "leftism" to denote the critical tendency to deny the bourgeois heritage, promote a propagandist conception of literature, and encourage overt didacticism. As James Murphy has noted, Rahv and Phelps adapted "leftism" to their own polemical ends: where RAPP theorists used the term mainly to denote a "Proletkult" contempt for the classics and a sectarian attitude toward fellow travelers, Rahv and Phelps expanded the term's meaning to include "disregard for aesthetic values, the limitation of literary criticism to sociological analysis, and the demand that proletarian literature be narrowly agitational in character." Soviet critics often used the term "tendentious" in a value-free or even a positive way. Lunacharski signified by "tendentious" the process by which the writer "seeks to organize his material toward a definite end." Zhdanov claimed that "Soviet literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, allegedly non-political." Rahv and Phelps, however, equated "tendentiousness" with "leftism," which they took to mean "the stereotyped portrayal of workers and capitalists as heroes and villains, the insertion of abstract propaganda into fiction, poetry, and drama, and the general distortion or coloring of reality for political ends." 14

Rahv and Phelps may have spearheaded the attack on overt didacticism and given currency to the term "leftism" to denote a multitude of didactic sins. But the Partisan Review group did not wage a solitary campaign against Stalinist propagandism. When Rahv and Phelps launched their assault against "leftism" in 1934, they were in fact repeating arguments that / 141 / had been made previously in the pages of the New Masses by party stalwarts such as Gold, Freeman, Olgin, and Hicks, who had already been taking writers to task for didacticism, abstraction, and schematism. In fact, the key figures whom Calmer cited approvingly in his -1934 obituary on "leftism," "All Quiet on the Literary Front," included not just Rahv and Phelps but also Hicks, Freeman, and Seaver. Even Gold, who has been stigmatized as "leftist" more than any other 1930s literary radical, himself noted in 1935 that "for years the health of our proletarian literary movement was enfeebled by the injection of a whole mass of wrong, leftist theory." Rahv's and Phelps's only original contribution to the attack on "leftism," Murphy argues, was to focus the meaning of the term primarily on questions of didacticism and literary form. 15

Through 1936 the New Masses group and the Partisan Review group were in fact far less easy to distinguish from one another than subsequent commentary on the 1930s literary left would have us believe. Calmer and Brooks, who considered themselves philosophically aligned with Rahv and Phelps on aesthetic issues, were skeptical of the politics of the Partisan Review core group and decided to publish most of their own critiques of "leftism" in the pages of the New Masses. Moreover, the relations between the New Masses and the Partisan Review were mostly affable. It was in the New Masses that Rahv published his negative assessment of Faulkner's modernist style as late as 1936. In the same year Alexander Trachtenberg, the head of International Publishers, congratulated the Partisan Review for having "from the very beginning ... fought against all attempts to reduce literature to sloganized, lifeless writing." The Partisan Review was asked to be the official organ of the League of American Writers (LAW). 16 / 142 /

The attack on "leftism" did not come out of nowhere. The U, S. literary radicals' antipathy to overt didacticism had its roots in a number of sources, both non-Marxist and Marxist. Soviet critics of U.S. literary radicalism frequently made the point that the Americans manifested a distinctly pragmatic and antitheoretical streak. The IURW critic Anne Elistratova, we will recall, chastised the Americans for insufficient "politicalization." The Americans' cult of authenticity, she argued, was based on the assumption that working-class authorship would in itself guarantee truthful representation. This doctrine, she urged, was in turn based on the empiricist notion that truth is signaled through immediacy and verisimilitude, rather than through a genuinely dialectical grasp of concreteness. The anonymous International Literature reviewer of the John Reed Club publication Left asserted that the lack of dialectical thinking among American Marxists was traceable largely to their intellectual roots. "The relative youth of [the movement in the United States] ... [and] ... the disdainful attitude towards theory that is characteristic of American bourgeois culture as a whole-having evolved its 'creeping empiricism' into a system in the shape of pragmatism, with William James at the head-an attitude which was bound to prove contagious to some extent also for our revolutionary movement in its early stages-all this has conditioned a quantitative shortage of theoretical cadres for the revolutionary cultural movement, as well as a generally inadequate theoretical level of preparation." 18

Various U.S. critics have also argued that there is something distinctly American in the U.S. radicals' pragmatist and empiricist bent. Rahv, in a 1940 polemic against what he called the "cult of experience" in American writing, argued that the literary proletarians' preoccupation with authenticity was an extreme version of the anti-intellectualism endemic to almost all American literature. The American pragmatism that constituted the philosophical basis of literary proletarianism, he charged, "exhibits a singular pattern consisting, on the one hand, of a disinclination to thought and, on the other, of an intense predilection for the real; and the real appears in it as a vast phenomenology swept by waves of sensation and feeling." Subsequent critics have also concluded that American literary proletarianism was empiricist and antitheoretical, though they generally view these qualities as virtues, not defects. Frederick Hoffman, we will recall, argues that the American proletarians were largely resistant to "imported ideology." Marcus Klein applauds the literary proletarians for being less committed to articulating Communist doctrine than to portraying an authentic new-and American-subject matter. 19 / 144 /

The U.S. literary radicals' comments on the goals of proletarian literature do frequently reveal a distinct pragmatism and distrust of theory. Gold argued that the literary artist has no need to "present theses" because "facts are the new poetry. The proletarian writer will work with facts. Facts are his strength. Facts are his passion." He declared to the 1935 Congress, "A great body of proletarian literature will show the concrete facts ... [and] will be the greatest argument we can present to those people who struggle with the theories of Communism and fascism.... We must use this [picture of real life] as ... the final answer to ... the intellectual abstractions of the bourgeoisie." Hicks, too, asserted that there was no need for the proletarian writer to engage in open declarations about the need for revolutionary change because reality would reveal its own meanings: "If [the writer] is wise he will find in facts his all-sufficient bulwark." Freeman accepted a fundamental dualism between theory and experience as the basis of his aesthetic program. His chastisement of texts that are "abstract and didactic" was based on the premise that the province of literary discourse is the immediate and the concrete: we will recall his proclamation that literature "deals with specific experience which arouses specific emotion in specific people at a specific moment, in a specific locale." Even Rahv and Phelps, who sought to distance themselves from the epistemology of the "leftists," were, as Klein notes, also absorbed in the cult of authenticity. Their recommendation that writers represent "'images of physical life' . . . in effect was ... advice to writers to experience ever more profoundly the discrete actualities of lower-class life." For the major American Marxist critics, a largely positivist conception of "fact" and "experience" constituted the epistemological basis of literary representation. Theory was abstract, an intrusion into the realm of the real; any literary work that aspired to represent the real had to stress at all points the primacy of the concrete. 20

Moreover, the American literary radicals never engaged in a critical / 145 / encounter with bourgeois aesthetic theory and, as a consequence, relied upon an eclectic theoretical model drawn from non-Marxist as well as Marxist sources. A name that is cited approvingly with surprising frequency in the writings of American left-wing critics is that of 1. A. Richards. Richards, perhaps the most influential Anglo-American critic of the 1920S and 193os-and an important influence upon the New Critics-was an unabashed empiricist and formalist. He developed a theory of literature that stressed physical sensation as the basis of aesthetic response; he collapsed ideas and doctrines into attitudes and emotions. Moreover, he espoused a militantly antipropositional conception of literary discourse and sharply distinguished between language's "scientific" use, which aims at questions of truth and falsity, and its "emotive" use, which is presumably nonreferential. "The bulk of the beliefs involved in the arts are ... provisional acceptances," he declared, "holding only in special circumstances (in the state of mind which is the poem or work of art) acceptances made for the sake of the 'imaginative experience' which they make possible." Creators of artistic works, Richards maintained, are concerned above all with aesthetic effect: "[T]he artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting or whatever it is, 'right', apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy. 21

One might think that Marxist critics concerned with making art into a weapon would have repudiated Richards's doctrine. Curiously, however, Richards was frequently invoked by literary radicals attempting to devise theories of proletarian literature. Freeman somewhat anomalously coupled Richards with Voronski, a prominent Soviet theorist of the pre-RAPP period, in the pantheon of socially conscious critics: "[T]he best literary minds of all times have agreed on some kind of social sanction for art, from Plato and Aristotle to Wordsworth and Shelley, to Voronsky and 1. A. Richards." Hicks chastised Richards for ignoring the "limits of class morality" in literary evaluation. But he applauded Richards's "account of the psychological effect of art" as "the soundest yet proposed." Moreover, in drafting their projected (though never published) pamphlet on proletarian literature, Hicks and Brooks referred to Richards in their correspon- /146 /dence and drew heavily upon his sensationalist model of the imagination. In an eight-point outline describing "the writer's creative process," for example, they inserted "the role of ideas in creation; relation to didacticism" as point six, preceded by a series of Richardsian categories describing various features of literary form and the imaginative process. Hicks and Brooks clearly cared about a text's political content. But they seem not to have achieved much theoretical synthesis of "content" and "form." "Ideas" and "didacticism" were for them, as for Richards, categories largely marginal to the "creative process" itself. 22

Clearly U.S. Marxist critics were influenced by Anglo-American empiricism; their antipathy to the presence of "abstract" ideas in literature reflected a characteristically American tendency to privilege fact and experience over theory. But it would be incorrect to exaggerate the Americanness of the U.S. literary radicals' cult of authenticity. Even though, as I argued in chapter 2, the Americans were under no mandate to imitate the Soviet example, it strongly influenced U.S. literary radicalism in all its phases. The Americans' interest in a literature based on factuality and verisimilitude reflected in large part their continuing loyalty to the Proletkult concept -- the "fact, facts, facts" of which Serge Tretiakov had written with such enthusiasm. The promotion of worker-correspondents in the Daily Worker and the New Masses, the encouragement given to middle-class writers to acquaint themselves with the intimate details of work-processes, even the carryover of the Soviet term "sketch" to describe brief worker-authored factual accounts-these and related features of U.S. literary proletarianism were directly borrowed from the Soviet experience. The Americans' lively interest in the "real thing" was not, as Hoffman suggests, a sign of / 147 / "resistance to an imported ideology," but part of the documentary legacy of Proletkult.

Furthermore, the U.S. critics' antipathy to overt didacticism was not simply a manifestation of a characteristically American resistance to theory. For from 1928 onward the dominant tendency in Soviet and European Marxist aesthetics stressed the incommensurability of literature with overt expressions of political doctrine. Georgi Plekhanov, the key Marxist philosopher invoked in RAPP-era discussions of aesthetics, held that science and journalism deployed wholly different methods of analysis and representation than did art and literature. The former, he argued, described reality through abstractions, the latter through concrete images. "[W]hen the writer operates with logical arguments instead of with images or when the images are invented in order to prove a certain thesis," Plekhanov warned, "he is not an artist but a journalist." The principles of dialectical materialism and the "living man" that undergirded the RAPP program were drawn primarily from Plekhanov's anti-instrumentalist view of literature, which was itself, R6gine Robin argues, derived from nineteenth century Russian theories of realism. As the U.S. literary radicals had increasing commerce with literary theorists in the international Communist movement through the medium of International Literature, the doctrines that they encountered called not for more didacticism, but less. Contrary to the widespread view that the Soviets continually pushed the Americans toward a more propagandistic conception of proletarian literature, the Soviets in fact routinely criticized the Americans for "abstraction" and "schematism." 23

The writings of Plekhanov-and to a lesser degree of Franz Mehring furnished Soviet Marxists with arguments in support of the doctrine of literary concreteness. But it was the writings of Marx and Engels that provided the epistemological foundation upon which full-fledged criticisms of / 148 / "leftism" would be built. In particular, the 1933 translations into both Russian and English of letters written by Marx and Engels to left-wing writers of their time-Marx's and Engels's to Ferdinand Lassalle and Engels's to Margaret Harkness and Minna Kautsky-came to be frequently cited in discussions of "tendentiousness" and "propaganda" in proletarian literature.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx issued a call for a literature that would "draw its poetry ... from the future." Both he and Engels applauded and encouraged writers-Heine, Freiligrath, Herwegh, as well as Lassalle, Harkness, and Kautsky-who, articulated and supported the workers' cause. But both Marx and Engels unequivocally advocated a cognitive as opposed to an instrumentalist conception of literature, and they continually counseled left-wing writers against wearing their politics on their sleeve. Thus Marx chided Lassalle for writing "ŕ la Schiller"-that is, "transform [ing] individuals into mere mouthpieces of the spirit of the time." Engels, also addressing Lassalle, remarked that effective dramatic characters conveyed the essential forces of history not through dialogue but through action: they must be "alive, active, so to speak rooted in nature." Moreover, Engels warned the prosocialist writers Kautsky and Harkness of the dangers of tendenz. He praised the realism of Kautsky's characters: "[E]ach one is a type, but at the same time a definite individual person, a 'Dieser,' as old Hegel expressed it." But he criticized the novelist's tendency to point a moral. "I think that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out," he remarked. "[T]he author does not have to serve on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts he describes." Engels criticized Harkness for her representation of the working class in her novel City Girl on the grounds that "the working class figures as a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at striving to help itself. All attempts to drag it out of its torpid misery come from without, from above." Yet, Engels went on to say, "I am far from finding fault with your not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a Tendenzroman, as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the authors. That is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art." 24

In advocating that procedures of literary evaluation take into account a text's adequacy in depicting as "typical" the emergent revolutionary forces of any era, Marx and Engels were departing from the mainstream of the German classical philosophy in which they had been trained. But, as Peter Demetz has pointed out, the greater part of Marx's and Engels's aesthetic was drawn directly from Hegel and shared the epistemological premises guiding the mimetic theories of contemporaneous bourgeois disciples of Hegel such as Taine. Marx's and Engels's criticisms of Lassalle were based on the notion that the dramatist had failed to view his characters as the embodiment of the "concrete universal," a central concept of Hegel's philosophy. Marx's and Engels's antipathy to the direct expression of ideas in literature reflected their agreement with Hegel's tenet that the fundamental unit of representation in literature was the "image," which distilled in its complex particularities the dialectical relations among larger general meanings. The invocation of Schiller as the epitome of undialectical polemicism was also drawn directly from Hegel, who declared that Schiller had "given way to a stormy violence that expanded outward without a real core." Moreover, Engels's postulation of the centrality of the "type" to realistic representation paralleled the formulation of Taine, who, Demetz notes, "demands of the writer that he create representative figures (caractčres) who unfold their spiritual essence to the reader in sensory form." By the 186os, Demetz notes, this conception of the "type" had become a "literary clich6," blending the scientifically defined type (the "representative example of what is already existent") with the literarily defined type (the "character") and with the theological type (the "prophetic or normative," bearing within itself "what the future world order ought to be"). In the advice they offered authors about strategies of representation appropriate to realistic texts, Marx and Engels were recapitulating key tenets of bourgeois aesthetic theory of the day. 25

To point out that Marx and Engels based their aesthetic theory-or, more properly, their prolegomenon toward such a theory-on bourgeois / 150 / sources, particularly Hegel, is not in itself an especially damning observation. Without Hegel's dialectical idealism, as Marx and Engels were themselves the first to point out, there would have been no historical materialism. But where Marx and Engels stood Hegel's dialectic "on its head" in their writings on history and political economy, they undertook no such critical exercise when they wrote about aesthetic matters. Indeed, they seem to have accepted without question Hegel's premises that literature is cognitive rather than hortatory and that its basic unit of cognition is the concrete universal. Marx had declared elsewhere that "[t]he Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." But apparently Communists who were writing novels were to adopt a different rhetorical strategy. Moreover, despite their support of writers who sought to aid the working-class cause, Marx and Engels especially Marx-remained classicist in their literary preferences and considered much aesthetic experience to be beyond politics. In short, in their ideas about art and literature, the founders of scientific socialism were mainstream nineteenth-century philosophers rather than "Marxists." As James Scully has remarked, Engels's objections to didacticism are "based on narrow formalist concerns" and proceed from "a metaphysical rather than a materialist distinction between form and content." Raymond Williams, putting the point more bluntly, observes that in his letters to Kautsky and Harkness the later Engels moved "towards a slightly grumpy bourgeois position rather than necessarily a Marxist one." 26

If Marx and Engels were uncritical in their absorption of Hegel, the 1930s Communist critics who interpreted Marx's and Engels's writings on aesthetics to the left literary community were more uncritical still. The letters to Lassalle, Harkness, and Kautsky, which had never before been translated or widely disseminated, rapidly assumed the status of holy texts. Mikhail Lifschitz welcomed Marx's attack on Friedrich Schiller as an attack on "the Idealist method of converting the living character into an automaton to prove the abstract concept of the author." Marx, he argued, advocated not didacticism but partisanship in art, conveyed through the / 150 / self- development of a sensually-concrete reality." In commentaries accompanying the texts of the letters to Kautsky and Harkness, the critic Franc Schiller (not to be confused with Friedrich Schiller) noted that the recently translated texts had "present meaning for our times." The letter to Harkness, he opined, demonstrated Engels's antipathy to abstract ideology and revealed the necessity for literature to represent reality implicitly, through concrete characters and incidents. The letter to Kautsky, he commented, had even more relevance to the present day:

The clear statements of Engels in his letter to Kautsky on the individual and the type, on purpose and its expression in literature, show once again the error of the creative slogans of the theoreticians of the proletcult, left and literary front groups on contrasting abstract personality with the group, the dissolving of individuality with a drop drowning in the current (the group), of a schematic depiction of good and bad.... [L]ikewise the statements of Engels in this and other letters are incompatible with the "left" idea of "throwing the classics overboard from the modern ship" or a one-sided attitude to the great realists (Tolstoy) or a publicist sharpening of views.

The literary-critical writings of Marx and Engels were greeted with enthusiasm not just because, as Franc Schiller put it, they "fil[l] a considerable gap in the hitherto little explored subject of the attitude of Marx and Engels to questions of literature and criticism," but because they furnished artillery in the battle against "tendentiousness" and "leftism." 27

Schiller and Lifschitz provided influential commentaries on Marx's and Engels's writings on literature. It was up to Georg Lukács, however, to develop the aesthetic embedded in these writings into a full-blown theory of literary mimesis. Lukács, Schiller, and Lifschitz collaborated in the USSR on a project of publishing and interpreting an anthology of Marx's and Engels's writings on literature and art. Lukács's theories of realism and typicality drew upon this collective project and articulated what was becoming the dominant position in Soviet debates. In 1931, in fact, Lukács traveled from the Soviet Union to Germany at the behest of the IURW in order to help guide the debates over politics and form that were being waged in the German literary movement. For a period of two / 151 / years Lukács polemicized against tendentiousness and "leftism," aligning himself with Linkskurve editor Otto Biha, a strong opponent of "Proletkult delusionlism." In a series of articles on proletarian literature, Lukács criticized propagandistic tendencies in proletarian fiction and argued for a realism based on concreteness and typicality, which he viewed as the correct literary embodiment of dialectical materialism. Lukács was in fact one of the leading figures-and consciously so-in the assault on "leftism." 28

Lukács's essay "Propaganda or Partisanship?" which was published in the Partisan Review, played a significant role in the battle against "leftism" that was being waged in the United States in 1934. Lukács invoked Engels as he sharply criticized the rhetorical strategy of including overtly hortatory statements in proletarian fiction. Such a practice, he warned, implicates the text in "subjective idealism" because the writer's revolutionary stance becomes "a demand, a summons, an ideal, which the writer contrasts with reality." Instead, Lukács maintained, "[t]here is no room for an 'ideal,' either moral or esthetic," for the revolutionary work must be "a portrayal of objective reality, its actual motive forces and its actual trends of development." To portray this reality truthfully did not entail assuming a pseudo-neutral stance, Lukács argued. "Correct dialectical portrayal and literary re-creation of reality presuppose partisanship on the writer's part." A successful demonstration of the relationship between "is" and "ought" thus requires the writer not to impose his/her own desires upon reality, but to reveal how the dialectic of reality embodies insurgent and oppositional forces. Too often, however, the proletarian writer's legitimate motivation to "re-create ... the subjective factor in revolutionary development ... is replaced by a merely subjective (because uncreated) 'wish' on the author's part: 'propaganda.' And when the author portrays this wish as objective and fulfilled, instead of truly (i.e., dialectically) recreating the subjective factor with its desires and its behavior, the portrayal becomes ‘propagandistic’. 29

Both the recently translated writings of Marx and Engels and the work of Lukács were cited by the prominent U.S. literary Marxists. Although it is sometimes asserted that the U.S. Marxists operated in virtual ignorance of Marx's and Engels's statements about literature and art, this is not the case. In 1932 the New Masses reprinted Engels's comments on Goethe. Calmer praised Schiller's pieces in International Literature, as did Hicks, who wrote of the journal that "[p]erhaps the most interesting and valuable critical material ... may be found in the various letters on literary questions by Marx and Engels with comments by F. Schiller." Rahv thanked International Literature for "present[ing] the long-awaited Marx and Engels correspondence with La Salle [sic..... The concrete and profound insights of Marx and Engels into the problems of tragedy and the revolutionary viewpoint in literature will undoubtedly illumine many dark corners in our young proletarian criticism." Lukács’s essay also influenced the U.S. literary radicals' critique of "leftism." In a clear echo of the Hungarian critic, Calmer castigated the writer of the proletarian short story for "forcing [his] desires down the throats of his characters (or, to express the same thing in esthetic terminology.... subjective tendentiousness)." Rahv praised Luk6cs as a "foremost European critic" whose "critical operations" had delivered a "blow both to 'pure' art and to the 'leftists' in the proletarian camp." In sum, the opponents of "leftism" in the United States were aware of the relevance of Marx's and Engels's writings to their cause and were conversant with the terms of the debate in the USSR. 30

Critics committed to fostering the growth of proletarian literature could find useful guidelines sketched in the works of Marx and Engels and developed in those of Schiller, Lifschitz, and especially Lukács. The dialectical conception of the type as a concrete embodiment of general historical processes and contradictions; the stipulation that in proletarian texts the category of the typical should encompass an emergent class-conscious proletariat; the notion that revolutionary theory should not be imposed from without, but portrayed as flowing from reality-these and other tenets of the Hegelian-Marxist-Lukácsian theory of realism provide useful tools for analyzing both strengths and deficiencies in proletarian fiction. Yet this theory of realism also displays some severe shortcomings, not only as a standard for evaluation but also as a guide for practice. For the attack on "leftism," which was premised upon this theory of realism, sent out ambiguous signals to left-wing writers, not only about the techniques by which revolutionary ideas might be communicated but also about the desirability of expressing these ideas at all.

The antipathy to overt didacticism shared by most 1930s Marxists -- Soviet, German, and American alike-was based upon the doctrine that lit- / 155 /erature is an essentially cognitive rather than agitational type of discourse. Although proletarian texts were supposed to influence their readers' beliefs and attitudes-art was, after all, a weapon-audience response was, as a theoretical category, virtually irrelevant. A text's partisanship was manifested not through appeals or arguments addressed to the reader, but through its dialectical grasp of the text's historical referent. Truth to the object, rather than arousal of the reader, constituted the principal determinant of value in a proletarian text-although it was assumed that arousal might well result from the reader's encounter with truth.

The insistence upon reflection as the basis of mimesis had the undoubted merit of cautioning writers that revolutionary ideas should not be tacked onto the story, thereby fashioning, as Lukács warned, "a demand, a summons, an ideal, which the writer contrasts with reality." But the doctrine that art entailed exclusively cognitive activity was in some ways problematic. First, it meant that writers of proletarian novels were not to look upon their enterprise as entailing any distinctive rhetorical procedures. As Hicks put it, proletarian literature is "not propaganda in any sense that bourgeois literature is not. The aim of the proletarian author is the aim of any author: he wants to write about representative persons and significant events in such a way as to bring out what he believes to be the truth about them." In effect, then, Marxist critics had no specific advice to offer writers about how most effectively to bring revolutionary ideas to the attention of their readers. "Content" might differ, but the fictional strategies adopted in proletarian fiction were for all practical purposes identical to those found in all fiction. In answer to Cantwell's complaint that Marxist critics had failed to treat his novel as a "work of propaganda" and had offered only "vagu[e]" comments about its politics, Hicks replied, "I do not know what he means and I doubt he does." 31

Second, the stipulation that literature is qualitatively distinct from science and journalism-and that this distinctiveness consists in literature's use of implicit and concrete modes of representation-perpetuated a formalist conception of the aesthetic sphere. The opponents of "leftism" maintained, of course, that their view of the aesthetic was dialectical materialist / 156 / and that a text written in accordance with its specifications was peculiarly privileged to render cognition of social reality. But their premise that ideas should not be directly expressed in literature, and that fiction in particular should present a seamless and transparent analogy to real life, a sensuous concreteness, meant that texts which violated this stipulation were not merely not politically effective, but not literary. Raymond Williams, specifically contesting this intrusion of formalist theory into the critical consideration of left-wing fiction, has written, "The author, or a decisive character, offers a socialist interpretation of what is happening, what happened, what might have happened, what could yet happen. Heavily warned off by the dominant culture. No preaching in novels. No ideas in novels. To hell. Do it." 32 To the extent that the 1930s Marxists engaged in precisely such "heav[y] warn[ing] off," they were ruled by the "dominant culture."

Third, the wholesale dismissal of overt didacticism meant that Marxist critics tended to lump together all the literary sins that they considered "leftist" without considering how different types of rhetorical effects produce different didactic strategies. The admixture of journalism into fiction, the construction of "conversion" plots conveying "wish-fulfillment," the inclusion of long political speeches by fictional characters, the interventions of intrusive narrators-these and other techniques for highlighting political ideas were generally treated as virtually identical. In fact, as we shall see in Part II, such devices position-and "teach"-a text's audience in quite different ways. Some of them presuppose a high level of readerly agreement and in effect instruct through co-optation. Others presuppose a relatively low level of political education on the part of readers and take them by the hand. Had Marxist critics of the 1930s developed an audience-centered approach to questions of literary representation, they might have been able to help writers distinguish among different types of rhetorical approaches to different audiences. Obed Brooks, recognizing this inadequacy in left-wing criticism, proposed to Hicks that their proposed pamphlet on proletarian literature was weakened by its privileging of the "reflective aspects of literature" over the "functional." He and Hicks should focus more, / 157 / Brooks suggested, on "what [literature does for a class or for individuals, rather than the way in which it is influenced by, or characteristic of, class or individual traits." 33 This proposal was never pursued by Brooks and Hicks themselves or any other 1930s radical critic, with the exception of Kenneth Burke.

Burke was perhaps the quirkiest of the CP's literary allies in the 1930s. His relationship with the party is generally thought to be epitomized in the dispute that broke out at the 1935 Writers Congress over Burke's suggestion that the party use the term "the people" in place of "the workers" in its "propaganda." Of more real substance, however, is the dispute between Burke and Hicks over the issue of "propaganda" itself. In his New Masses review of Burke's Counter-Statement, Hicks criticized Burke as one of a few "sympathizers.... fortunately in a minority, [who] argue somewhat in this fashion: if the class struggle is the central fact in life, and if the proletariat not only ought to win but is, historically speaking, certain to win, that literature is best which so affects its readers that they struggle better in behalf of the proletariat." Burke was "simplistic"; his "underlying error," Hicks charged, was "the conception of literary effect.... It implies that the effect of reading a book is such that the reader goes out and does some specific thing." 34

Burke never published a reply to Hicks's review, but he privately sent to the New Masses literary editor an infuriated response in the form of a news release: "Extree! Extree! NEW MASSES GOES REVISIONIST." Burke lashed out in a statement that is worth quoting at length:

How can a magazine, devoted to propaganda, as the New Masses presumably is, attack a 'theory of effect' which makes provision for aiming at specific effects? For what is propaganda literature, by very definition, but literature aimed at specific effects?

It so happens that Hicks has completely misstated my theory ... [which], it so happens, makes no selection between propaganda literature and 'pure' / 158 / literature. It says that some books may aim at very specific effects, and some may aim at much broader effects. The New Masses might reasonably have attacked it for admitting the 'broader' aspect- but to print an attack upon the , narrower' aspect (upon its recognition of the fact that there is a usable literary machinery for aiming at specific effects) is simply to involve the editors in an implied attack upon the very raison d’ętre of the New Masses itself. (italics added)

Burke ended with a swipe at the New Masses editors in general and at Hicks in particular:

My respect for the editors of the New Masses is not such as to cause surprise in me at this failure to understand the implications of their own contributions.

But what the devil! What can one expect, if the Communists are to get their Communist theory from an ex-divinity student, a former Unitarian, a seeker after "revealed values," and at present a teacher in one of those typical survivals from feudalistic stratification, a 'better' New England college? 35

Burke signed his letter "yours for muddle-headed liberalism." It was true that Burke was nowhere near as committed to revolutionary politics as were fellow travelers such as his good friend Malcolm Cowley. "Marxism does provide some necessary admonition as to our faulty institutions," he wrote to Matthew Josephson, "but as I understand it is exactly 18o degrees short of being a completely rounded philosophy of human motivation." Throughout his writings during the 1930s, however, Burke evinced considerable sympathy with the project of proletarian literature. In particular, he outlined various elements of a rhetorical approach to literature-a description of the "usable literary machinery for aiming at specific effects "-potentially of great value to the literary left. The view of literature as the "dancing of an attitude"; the unabashed advocacy that writers adopt a "propagandistic attitude"; the attachment of legitimacy to the "hortatory" and "forensic" features of literature; the distinction between a symbolism that integrates readers into dominant values and one that promotes questioning of dominant ideology; the persistent attention to literary texts as constituted by contractual bonds between authors and readers-these and other tenets of Burke's rhetorical program could have clarified and ad- / 158 /vanced the project of 1930s literary radicalism. That Hicks chose to dismiss Counter- Statement as "simplistic" testifies not to his own petty-bourgeois pedigree (a low cut on Burke's part) but to a fundamental contradiction underlying the entire critical project of the 1930s literary left. Even though they called for a literature that would arouse the working class to action, the Marxist critics chastised literature outrightly attempting to do this. The leading figures of the literary left were indeed, as Burke sardonically put it, "involve[d] ... in an implied attack upon the very raison d’ętre of the New Masses itself." 36

The strongly antididactic aesthetic theory espoused by the 1930s Marxists gave a contradictory message to proletarian writers: their texts were to be used as weaponry in the class struggle but should not too closely resemble weapons. As the frankly revolutionary-indeed, "leftist "-novelist Myra Page complained in 1934, "Many of our critics ... have freed themselves only in part from the old bourgeois method and approach in which they've been schooled. 'Art is a weapon', they repeat, but in prac- / 159 /tice, forget. That they're not in the classroom or salon, but speaking for and to a class fighting to destroy and rebuild the world. A class for whom books are necessarily a weapon." 37 The ambiguity of the Marxist critics' message was compounded by the term used to describe what was undesirable in left-wing literature-namely, "leftism." For the invariably pejorative use of this term carried an uNMistakable political implication: if "leftist" literature was bad, then good writing must be "centrist" or even (within the context of left politics) "rightist." Particularly since the "leftist" errors with which writers were most frequently charged-that is, "editorializing" in narration, "sloganeering" in dialogue, and "wish-fulfillment" in plot usually involved moments in texts when explicitly revolutionary politics were being raised, the message the critics were sending was politically troubling: to write a good novel one could not try to teach too much, one could not be too "left."

"Leftism," Murphy reminds us, meant different things in the contexts of the USSR and the United States. In the former, it signified sectarian attitudes toward nonparty writers and contempt for inherited literary tradition. In the latter, the term incorporated this meaning but came to encompass those issues of form and politics that were for the Soviets grouped under "tendentiousness." Even if the U.S. Marxists were largely on their own in the way they defined and deployed the term, however, their use of it inevitably carried over a cluster of meanings gathered in the Soviet context. It is necessary to understand why the USSR critics dubbed their opponents "leftists" if we wish to grasp the full political import of the term, even in its etiolated American form.

"Leftism" was not, in the Soviet context, exclusively a literary term. It was directed against forces in the cultural revolution Of 1928-31 that were on the "left," and it was deployed by forces that were of the "center" and the "right." During the RAPP period, the charge of "leftism" was directed against LEF and its successor Litfront, which took issue with the RAPP leadership's stress upon psychological portraiture of the "living man." The "leftists" abjured the heroization of single protagonists, called for multiple-authored texts to counter the individualism of the bourgeois concept of authorship, and crammed their narratives full of facts and statistics about technological achievements. "The theory of the 'harmonious man' and the emphasis upon 'psychologism' were condemned as idealis- / 160 /tic soul-searching, diverting writers from social themes and the depiction of the working class," observes Herman Ermolaev. "The slogan 'Study the classics' was brushed aside as a manifestation of formalism which hindered the social education of proletarian writers." Indeed, fictionalization itself was seen as politically suspect, since "[i]n works of fiction the materials of life were subordinate to, and 'neutralized' by, the laws of plot construction. Hence fiction was incapable of an exact portrayal of realities. The true 'living man' could be presented only in documentary genres, where he was allowed to live his natural life." 38

LEF and Litfront were stigmatized as "empiricist" and "naturalist" by the "dialectical materialists" in the leadership Of RAPP, who adhered to the cognitive approach to literature laid out by Plekhanov. As Katerina Clark has observed, LEF's and Litfront's strong documentarist tendency did "reflec[t] the cultural values of what was a starkly 'proletarian' and positivist age." But this positivism was also associated, she points out, with the cultural revolution's impetus to use the machine to eradicate distinctions between mental and manual labor: documentarism was inextricably bound up with "utopian enthusiasm" for "socialist egalitarianism." In keeping with the first Five-Year Plan's "militant antielitism," the Soviet literature of fact posited "a democratic, undifferentiated way of knowing: no fact was manifestly superior to any other, the only ground of value being verifiability." Positivism was thus linked with the representation of the "new Soviet man." But the LEF/Litfront program was not exclusively documentarist. As EDWard Brown points out, the "leftist" opposition to the RAPP leadership also laid stress on the "subjective element" in representation. The cognitive aesthetic of psychological realism was beset by "objectivist errors," claimed the Litfrontists. Writers needed to register their emotional reactions to socialist construction. Somewhat paradoxically, the "leftist" opposition conjoined documentarism and romanticism in advocating that literature be simultaneously instrumentalist and agitational. 39

During the RAPP period, all literary controversy occurred toward the left wing of the political spectrum. The defenders of "dialectical materi- / 161 /alism" and the "living man" envisioned their cognitive aesthetic as the basis of a proletarian literature that would "tear off the masks." The First Congress of Proletarian Writers urged representing the "complex human psyche, with all its contradictions, elements of the past and seeds of the future, both conscious and unconscious" not because they wanted to promote bourgeois individualism, but because they felt that this aesthetic program would best embody dialectical materialist principles and advance the cause of the proletariat. Although Leopold Auerbach and other elements in the RAPP leadership resisted the documentarism of the "leftists," they also strongly advocated that middle-class writers go to the factories; moreover, they recruited shock workers into the field of literature. Brown concludes that RAPP for the most part adopted a "compromise position between the 'extreme right,' which tended to regard art as pure cognition of life, and the ,extreme left,' which minimized its cognitive function in favor of a view of art as a class instrument." 40

As calls for socialist realism increasingly supplanted the advocacy of proletarian literature, however, the tenor of the debate shifted. For socialist realism took as its premise the notion that class struggle in the USSR had ceased and that the nation was now seamlessly united in the project of socialist construction. The formulation of socialist realism, which took place over the two-year period between 1932 and 1934, coincided, Clark notes, with a new "policy of 'encouragement and concern' toward the old intelligentsia," which was itself premised on a rejection of what Stalin called "'vulgar egalitarianism.'" "Proletarian" literature-with its implication that the "proletariat" still existed, as an identifiable class with distinct class interests to articulate and defend-was to be superseded by a literary project that aimed to reflect a classless reality presumed already in existence. This new reality was, the theorists of socialist realism urged, still riddled with contradictions; it was the task of the writer to grasp these contradictions from a dialectical standpoint. As Karl Radek put it in his address to the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress, "Realism does not mean the embellishment or arbitrary selection of revolutionary phenomena; it means reflecting reality as it is, in all its complexity, in all its contrariety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new reality-the reality of socialism." 41

/ 162 /

The shift toward socialist realism had three consequences of particular significance to our inquiry here. First, there was no necessity for the authors of socialist realist texts to come from the ranks of the proletariat. Professional middle-class writers who were sympathetic fellow travelers were as well equipped-indeed, in technical terms, usually better equipped-to represent the emergent national reality. Second, texts need not abjure psychological portraiture or, for that matter, heroization of great individuals. just as Stakhanovism would hold up for public acclaim-and reward with material incentives-those "shock workers" who epitomized the spirit of dedication to the nation's industrial development, socialist realist texts-which should be full-fledged fictions, not documentaries-would feature, as Maxim Gorki proposed, "individuals in [whom] the miraculous energy of the masses is concentrated." Finally, the task of writers was now unequivocally to be seen as mimetic rather than hortatory: the creation of concrete "images" embodying and distilling the complex but nonantagonistic contradictions of socialist construction. Writers should not engage in agitational polemics that would disrupt realism's illusion of seamless transparency: the objective portrayal of existing realities was adequate testimony to socialist partisanship. 42

The establishment of cognitive aesthetics as the principal position in twentieth-century Marxist theories of literature was not the result of a preordained logic, but itself the product of class struggle. In their call for a documentary literature defined and conceived in agitational and instru- / 163 /mentalist terms, the figures associated with L E F and Litfront were espousing a radical egalitarianism and, moreover, calling for a continuation of the class struggle in the realm of culture. The cognitivists who enlisted Marx and Engels in support of their arguments, by contrast, were participants in a larger ideological assault upon "leftism," as both a literary and a more broadly political program. Franc Schiller, we will recall, referred to "the theoreticians of the proletcult, left, and literary front groups" that wanted to "throw the classics overboard from the modern ship" as the forces that ought to be dislodged by Engels's letter to Kautsky. Ermolaev, pointing out that the criticisms of the left within RAPP were eventually directed against RAPP in its entirety, remarks that Engels's letter to Harkness "became one of the main weapons used in attacking RAPP for having overplayed the importance of ideological influences on the aesthetic aspects of literature." After 1932, advocates of cognitivist positions who had been sharply attacked as rightists during the previous four years-Lunacharski, Bukharin, even Lenin's great favorite Gorki-became prominent advocates of the distinct socialist realist blend of "dialectical materialism" and "revolutionary romanticism." By the time of the 1934 All-Union Soviet Writers Congress, there appears to have developed virtual unanimity on the proposition that literature should render "objectively partisan" portraits of socialist construction and that, in these portraits, the fundamental unit of literary representation was the "image." 43 / 164 /

We should bear in mind that, in the USSR during the late 192os and early 1930s, the terms "left" and "right" denoted complex political realities. LEF had its roots in futurism, which, branching in another direction, became implicated in the culture of fascism: there was nothing intrinsically "proletarian" about it. Moreover, the "leftists" in the USSR, who embraced the machine as the harbinger of socialist equality, were in their way as committed to productive-forces determinism as were their opponents who announced that rapid industrialization was precluding the necessity for continuing class struggle. It would therefore be simplistic to equate the documentarism urged by the "leftists" with an intrinsically "left" politics or the concrete and imagistic fictionality urged by their opponents with an intrinsically "right" politics. It would also be erroneous to dub the cognitivist aesthetic "Stalinist"-since Stalin played no significant role in its formulation-or to associate the "leftists" with Trotsky, since Trotsky, a confirmed Plekhanovite, was a conservative on literary questions. In the "cacophony" of the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress, Robin observes, "where [Zhdanov's] discourse.... however prescriptive, is not fundamentally different from Gor'kii's or Radek's," positions on literary matters bore no self-evident relation to other political issues. 44

The Americans' grasp of the issues involved in the POst-1931 Soviet attack on "leftism" was partial at best, since International Literature was / 165 / largely in the hands of the RAPP-era "dialectical materialists" and then the socialist realists. Even though they partook of the "Proletkult" enthusiasm for worker-authored texts, the U.S. literary radicals were for the most part not exposed to the prodocumentarist political arguments advanced by the Soviet "leftists"; the Americans' enthusiasm reflected an economistic workerism as much as an impulse toward revolutionary egalitarianism. 45 The debate over "leftism" in the United States gravitated toward questions of literary form without a clear context in class struggle. To endorse a cognitive aesthetics in the US. setting was not a hard-fought political position, but a gesture of common sense, confirmed by the apparent compatibility between the literary theories advanced by I. A. Richards on the one hand and by Marx and Engels on the other. The stakes in the struggle against "leftism" in the United States were not nearly as high as they were in the USSR.

Nonetheless, the equation of tendentiousness with "leftism," along with the stigmatization of both terms by their mutual association, was hardly a maneuver devoid of political consequences. By the mid-1930s, the prominent New Masses Marxists were evincing uneasiness with certain aspects of the attack on "leftism." At the 1935 Writers Congress, Hicks warned that "the attempt to write criticism in terms of experience and sensibility, rather than ideas and attitudes, may, though certainly sound in itself, lead to vagueness, aestheticism, and a kind of ivory tower," In the same year Freeman wrote to Hicks of the antirevolutionary tendencies embedded in what he designated as the "definite trend toward revisionism" in the literary movement. "Under the guise of attacking 'vulgar' Marxism," he remarked, "these people are pushing the cult of 'form' in the direction of art for arts [sic] sake." A year later he reiterated his concern, remarking that "our literary movement is much too full of the most shameless logrolling accompanied by attacks on so-called 'leftism.'" 46

/ 167 /

Hicks and Freeman were justifiably alarmed at the formalism and antiCommunism they saw cropping up in the literary left. But they themselves did not stand on firm ground. Hicks's critical writings had never theorized the role of "ideas" and "attitudes" in literary creation. Freeman's valorization of "experience" as the basis of literature had left him scant grounds from which to combat the "cult of 'form."' In many of its essentials, the aesthetic doctrine that he and Hicks had been promoting was identical to that urged by Rahv, Phelps, and Calmer-most probably the "these people" to whom he made disparaging reference. When Freeman objected in 1936 to the political "logrolling" being carried out in the name of upholding the integrity of literary form, he was too late. For the New Masses group had been complicit in devising and elaborating the aesthetic that would be used as a club with which the self-proclaimed "anti-Stalinist left" would bludgeon the entire project of proletarian literature.

Indeed, by a further irony, the U.S. literary Marxists can be seen as complicit in defining-or at least as wholly inadequate in combating-the aesthetic that would facilitate their eventual banishment from the annals of American literary history. As we will recall from chapter 1, it was the conjunction of the New York Intellectuals with the New Critics that resulted in the promulgation of the formalist critical doctrines that would be used to brand as "propaganda" the entire left-wing literary legacy of the 193os. The "heresy of the didactic," the New Critics' oft-repeated slogan, would rationalize on apparently formal grounds what was in essence a political witch hunt in the realm of literary and cultural history. But let us review the litany that the literary Marxists themselves devised to describe proletarian literature's sins against itself: "hysterical revolutionism," "lumpy ideology," "schematism," "abstraction "I "abstract ideology," "wish-fulfillment," "sloganeering." The anti-Communists did not need to invent a new pejorative vocabulary to label and dismiss-as "propaganda" -the legacy of 1930s literary radicalism. The literary radicals had provided this vocabulary themselves.

*

I have been demonstrating that the standard account of the Third-Period Communist critics as ultraleft and dogmatically prescriptive is not borne out by a careful analysis of the historical record. Rather than prescribing an aesthetic rigidly in line with Soviet developments, the American Marxists / 167 / followed their own inclinations and, within the context of general agreement over basic principles of revolutionary literature, entertained quite a broad range of conceptions of what proletarian literature might be and do. Moreover, rather than insisting that radical writers subordinate their work to the immediate agitational demands of the Communist movement, the critics were if anything militant in their rejection of openly "propagandistic" texts. In framing their attack on "leftism," which they largely equated with hortatory and didactic writing, the Americans in part were making use of contemporaneous bourgeois aesthetic theory, against which they never mounted a serious political attack. To a considerable extent, the U.S. radicals took their cue from the USSR, where a cognitive, anti-instrumentalist view of art and literature was developing in conjunction with a recoil from the egalitarian "leftism" of the cultural revolution years. Above all, their theorizing about the relation of art to propaganda was shaped by existing Marxist theory, which assumed an opposition between image and idea, cognition and agitation. Rather than working out a rhetorical theory that would describe-and thereby legitimate-the didactic strategies peculiar to works written with "propagandistic" intent, the 1930s U.S. Marxists subscribed to the bourgeois binary opposition of art to propaganda that invariably denigrated the latter term.

Having criticized the aesthetic theory of U.S. literary radicalism "from the left," as it were, I now hasten to put these comments in perspective. It is currently fashionable-not only among conservatives and establishment liberals but also among various voices on the postmodernist left-to see only disaster in the major twentieth-century attempts to build revolutionary movements, construct egalitarian workers' societies, and develop revolutionary cultures. Whether the left movement is faulted for ignoring the greed embedded in human nature, for failing to appreciate democratic pluralism, for ignoring the linguistic construction of the subject, for clinging to a "scientistic" paradigm based on "class reductionism," or for succumbing to Stalinism, commentators are largely in accord that there is little that we have to learn-except lessons of a negative and cautionary variety-from the experience of past Communist-led movements. A revisionary look at the 1930s literary left requires us to reconsider this ready dismissal. Much of the recent work on the politics of textuality enables present-day academic Marxists to discern signal shortcomings in the assumptions about language, ideology, and representation espoused by the / 169 / 1930s literary radicals. Yet most of the commentary on the politics of language currently issuing from the pens of academic leftists shares little of the impassioned commitment to revolutionary social change that motivated the 1930S Marxists. When the Depression-era literary radicals called for a proletarian literature that would be a weapon in the struggle to advance and liberate the working class, they were espousing a conception of the politics of discourse quite different from that endorsed by the great majority of post- or neo-Marxists. The 1930s Marxists were constrained in their efforts to work out a revolutionary aesthetic not by some inherent incompatibility between Communist politics and art, or by the constrictions imposed by an authoritarian party, but by the political and epistemological limits of the broader cultural movement of which these commentators were part. Present-day students and practitioners of revolutionary culture have much to learn from the efforts and achievements of the 1930s literary leftists, even as we strive to move beyond their limits.

1. Robert Thompson, "An Interview with Jack Conroy," Missouri Review 7 (Fall -1983): 159; Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1991), pp., 63-64; Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957) [Boston: Beacon, 1957), P. 304; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), P. 38o; Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), P. 136. According to Paul Buhle, the party leadership, aided by the "megalomaniac sectarianism of literary czar Gold," drove "the more inventive and heterodox contributors (i.e., the more true to life) from the Party ranks or into subject matter and treatment where they could not succeed" (Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left [London: Verso, 19871, P. 177).

2. Mike Gold, "A Letter to the Author of a First Book," NM in January 1934): 26; Ruth McKinley to Insider Schneider, N.D., Schneider Papers, Butler Library, Columbia U.

3. Gold, "Thornton Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ," rpt. in Michael Folsom, ed., Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (New York: International, -1972), P. 202; Oakley Johnson, "Pure Propaganda and Impure Art," Left 1 (Summer-Fall 1934): 33; Joseph Freeman, "Introduction" to Proletarian Literature in the United States (New York: International, 1935), PP. -12-13. Gold's polemic against Wilder prompted many excited responses, positive and negative. See New Republic 65 (December 17, 1930): 141; and Freeman, "On the Literary Front," NM 6 (January 1931): 4-6. See also Edmund Wilson's discussion of the uproar following the appearance of Gold's piece in "The Literary Class War," rpt. in The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), PP. 534-39. Wilson remarked in some delight, "It has now become plain that the economic crisis is to be accompanied by a literary one", p. 539.

4. Editorial, Hub 1, no. 1 (19341: 2; Thomas Hart Benton, "American Art," Hub 1, no. 1 (1934): 31; William Carlos Williams, "Comment," Contact 1, no. 3 (February 1934): 131,132.

5. Benton, 32-33; Williams, "Comment," Contact 1, no. i (February 1932): 8.

6. Frederick W. Maxham, review of The Disinherited, Kosmos 2 January-February 1934): 31; Editorial, "In Defense of Preciousness," Kosmos 3 (August-September 1934): 23; Jay Harrison, "Editorial," Kosmos 2 (February-March 1935): 16; letter from the New English Weekly, Blast 1 (October-November 1934): 1.

7. "Stories of Struggle," Partisan 1 (April 1934): 1; Hicks, review of The Land of Plenty, NM 11 (May 8,1934): 25-26; Erajo Basshe, "Singing Workers," NM 18 (January 7, 1936): 23.

8. Robert Cantwell, "Author's Field Day," NM 12 (July 3,1934): 27; E. A. Schachner, "Revolutionary Literature in the U. S. Today," Windsor Quarterly 2 (Spring -1934): 61; Moishe Nadir, "To Make My Bread," NM 8 (February 1933): 19, 20; Eugene Gordon, "Black and White, Unite and Fight," NM 13 (October 23, 1934): 24-25. Cantwell did not remain so eager to receive criticism of his work from Marxist critics. in -1936 he wrote to Farrell, "I simply cannot read Hicks, Gold or Kunitz. They have only influenced me in a negative fashion." But Cantwell still endorsed Marxism as a theoretical ground for criticism: "The Marxian point of view, even if imperfectly grasped and crudely applied supplies a superior method of criticism than any that our reactionary colleagues can possible achieve. Bad as Granny is now, he would be a thousand times worse if he did not have the rudimentary understanding of Marx that he has picked up" (Cantwell to Farrell, February 3, 1936, Cantwell Papers, U of Oregon).

9. Obed Brooks, "In the Great Tradition," NM '13 (November 27, 1934): 23; Brooks, "In the Mold of Poverty," Partisan Review and Anvil 3 (February -1936): 28, 29; Leon Dermen, "Negroes and Whites," PR i (November-December 1934): 50; Hicks, "Proletarian Mastery," NM 16 (July 16, 1935): 23; Hicks, "Revolution and the Novel," in Jack A. Robbins, ed., Granville Hicks in the New Masses (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974), P. 57; Calmer, "Reader's Report," NM 16 (September 10, 1935): 23; Moissaye Olgin, "First Choice of New Book Union is a Comprehensive Anthology of Proletarian Literature of High Order," DW (October 10, 1935), 5, quoted in James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991), P. 126; EDWin Rolfe, review of Erskine CalDWell, ed., American Earth, Left 1 (Summer-Autumn 193-1): 84; A. B. Magil, cited in Murphy, p. 127.

10. Alice Withrow Field, "Soviet Tempo in an American Novel," NM 15 (June ii, 1934): 26; [Alan Calmer, "The Proletarian Short Story," NM 16 (July 7, -1935): 17;1 EDWard Newhouse, "Why Wait?," NM 14 (March 12,1935): 25,

11. Gold, "Change the World!" DW (February 9, 1934), 5; Conroy, "The Worker as Writer," American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International, 1935), hereinafter AWC, p. 84; Hicks, review of Horace Gregory, New Letters in America, rpt. in Robbins, PP. 382, 383.

12. Gold, "Notes of the Month," NM 15 (December 1929): 23; Hicks to Conrad Komorowski, New Masses folder, August 11, 1932, Box 44, Hicks Papers; V. J. Jerome, "Toward a Proletarian Novel," NM 8 (August 1932):14; Freeman, "Introduction," pp. 13, 1'.

13. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, "Literature in a Political Decade," in New Letters in America, ed. Horace Gregory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), P. 172; Rahv and Phelps, "Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary Literature," Partisan Review 1 (Jun-July 1934): 5, 9.

14. Murphy, p. 1; Anatoli Lunacharski, "Marxism and Art," trans. Joseph Freeman, NM 8 (November 1932): 12; A. Zhdanov, "Soviet Literature-The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature," in Zhdanov, et al., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches of the First Soviet Writers' Congress, ed. H. G. Scott (.1935; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), P. 21. The term "tendentious" was usually spelled "tendencious" in 1930s English translations from German and Russian.

15. Calmer, "All Quiet on the Literary Front," PR & A 3 (March 1936): 13; Gold, DW (May 6, 193 5), 5; Murphy, p. .1.

16. Rahv, review of William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, NM 21 (November 24, 1936): 20-21; Alexander Trachtenberg, "Revolutionary Literature," DW (July 1, 1935), 5, quoted in Murphy, p. -176. Calmer was never a party member, and his criticisms of Hicks, Gold, and Freeman were scathing. He wrote to Hicks sometime in 1937, "[Y]ou could have changed the prevailing literary codes set up by Mike and company. instead of ending his stupid reign, you succumbed to his general point of view.... I could have forgiven many of your errors ordinarily but, considering the commanding position you had and the power you had to change things, I was and am very angry at the road you took which, as long as it is maintained in the movement, can serve only to drive away the most gifted literary writers who are interested primarily in literature; and to keep only cripples like [Henry] Hart and [Harry] Slochower who, because they have no literary ability, do not object to sacrificing what they haven't got to suit the immediate political aims of Joe Freeman and Mike too (who, I hardly need to tell you, always manage somehow to drive away practically every talented writer that comes anywhere near the movement, leaving them with the uncontested leadership)." Interestingly, however, Calmer noted that when he had been invited to join the "new Partisan Review crowd Of course I wouldn't because of their anti-party position." For another expression of Calmer's growing negativism toward proletarian literature, see his "Portrait of the Artist as a Proletarian," SRL 16 (July 31,1937): 3-4,14. Brooks remarked retrospectively that "very early [I was] associated with the people who edited Partisan Review.... Between 1934 and 1937 1 had some very strong criticisms of the Party, being influenced by Trotskyists and other ideas, but in 1937, with my eyes fairly open, I decided that the moment had come and you have to commit yourself" (cited in Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities [New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986J, P. 33).

17. Calmer, "A New Phase in American Proletarian Literature," IL 7 (.1935): 73-75. Orrick Johns's account of the 1934 John Reed Clubs convention differs in emphasis from Calmer's. Johns notes in passing the conference's condemnation of "narrowness" and "leftism" but stresses the clubs' successful cultivation of working-class writers and their commitment to "win[ning] writers and artists to the revolution" ("The John Reed Clubs Meet," NM 13 [October 30,19341: 25, 26).

18. Anne Elistratova, "New Masses," IL 1 (1932):107-14; Anonymous, "Left No. 2,"IL 2-3 (1932):147.

19. Rahv, "The Cult of Experience in American Writing," rpt. in Essays on Literature and Politics 1932-1972, ed. Anabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Drosin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, -1978), p. 1-i; Frederick]. Hoffman, "Aesthetics of the Proletarian Novel," in David Madden, ed., Proletarian Writers of the Thirties (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1968), pp. 185-186; Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature 1900-1940 (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1981), PI). 134-54.

20. Gold, "Notes of the Month," NM 5 (January '1930): 7; Hicks, The Great Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1935), P. 305; Freeman, "Introduction," p. 13; Klein, Foreigners, P. 136,

21. 1. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 4th ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), pp. 278, 26.

22. Freeman, "Introduction," p. '14; Hicks, "Revolution and the Novel," in Robbins, pp. 6o-6i; Brooks to Hicks, March 8, 1934, Box 16, Hicks papers; "Outline" for Proletarian Literature pamphlet, Box 105, Hicks Papers. Hicks also grouped Richards with a prominent Soviet commentator on aesthetics. Responding to Eastman's diatribe in Artists in Uniform, Hicks observed that Eastman disliked Richards's account of literary response "partly, it appears, because it bears some resemblance to Bukharin's." Hicks noted that Bukharin and Richards "naturally differ on what is desirable" with regards to the changes that literary texts work in their readers. But he praised the American and the Soviet for their common commitment to an emotion- and sensation-based theory of poetry. See Hicks, "The Vigorous Abandon of Max Eastman's Mind," NM 13 (November 6, 1934): 22.

23. Plekhanov, quoted in Murphy, pp. 28-29; Regine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992), pp. 91110, 151-54. See Deming Brown, Soviet Attitudes toward American Writing (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962), 131). 56-82, for an overview of the criticism of "schematism" and "empiricism" in American proletarian literature. For more on Plekhanov's changing fortunes with the Soviet literary left, see Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories: The Genesis of Socialist Realism, U of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 69 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1963), PP. 79-88.

24. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Selected Writings of Marx and Engels (New York: International; 1968), p. 99; Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, -1976), p. 100; Engels to Lassalle, ibid., P. 103; Engels to Minna Kautsky, ibid., pp. 87, 88; Engels to Margaret Harkness, ibid., pp. go, 91.

25. Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1967), PP. 107-38. The quoted passages are from pp. 111,134,135,136.

26. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Selected Writings, p. 63; James Scully, Line-Break: Poetry as Social Practice (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 68, 69; Raymond Williams, "The Writer: Commitment and Alignment," Marxism Today (June 198o), 23.

27. Mikhail Lifschitz, "Marx on Esthetics," trans. G. D. Kogan, IL 2 (1933): 84; F. Schiller, "Marx and Engels on Balzac," trans. Jessie Lloyd, IL 3 (1933): 113, 119; F. Schiller, "Friedrich Engels on Literature," trans. Jessie Lloyd, IL 2 (1933): 122, 128.

28. Murphy, PP. 45-49. Otto Biha's "On the Question of Proletarian Revolutionary Literature in Germany" (IL 1, no. 4 119311: 88-105) provides a classic statement of the anti-" leftist" position, revealing that the arguments developed in -1934 in the United States were anticipated by a good three years in Germany.

29. Georg Lukács "Propaganda or Partisanship?" trans. Leonard F. Mins, PR 1 (April-May 1934): 40, 43, 44, 46. The title of this essay was translated in a somewhat misleading fashion, since the term "propaganda" is never used in the essay, only the term "tendency." David Fernbach's 1980 translation is entitled "'Tendency' or Partisanship?" (Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1980] pp. 33-44). it is tempting to speculate about the reasons for the altered title in the Partisan Review version. Rahv expressed great admiration for the piece but admitted to having some reservations about Lukács's "definition of the term [propaganda]," insofar as "people do not always mean his meaning when they use the word" (Rahv, "Valedictory on the Propaganda Issue," Little Magazine [September-October 19341 2). This statement is somewhat confusing, since Lukács did not use the term "propaganda" at all. The conflation of "tendency" with "propaganda" in fact coincided neatly with Rahv's campaign to convert the struggle against "leftism" into one against didacticism.

30. "Engels on Goethe," NM 8 (September 1932): 13-14; Calmer, IL (July 1934):159; Hicks, "Of the World Revolution," NM 10 (January 9, 1934): 26; and Rahv, "'International Literature' Grows in Popularity among American Workers," DW (January 22,19341, 5 (all cited in Murphy, pp. 109-10); Calmer, "The Proletarian Short Story," NM 16(July 2,1935): '17; Rahv, "Valedictory," 2. For the argument that the American Marxists were ignorant of Marx's and Engels's writings on art and literature, see Mary E. Papke, "An Analysis of Selected American Marxist Criticism, 1920-1941: From Dogma to Dynamic Strategies," minnesoto review 13 (Fall 1979): 41-69. Commentators on 1930S literary proletarianism who see in the Partisan Review/New Mosses split an American playing out of the Brecht/ Lukács debate should note that the presumed "Brechtians" (i.e., the anti- Stalinists) drew upon Lukács for their conceptual artillery. It is noteworthy that the LEF/Litfront group never had a defender among the few American critics who knew Russian and acted as interpreters of the Soviet debates. Kunitz, for example, harshly put down Tretiakov and his colleagues:

They were characteristic expressions of the N E P, of the bourgeois elements in the N E P. The groveled before American business, American efficiency, American technology. They attempted to transfer these concepts to art. Unable to fully orient themselves in the complex and everchanging Soviet reality, they attempted to simplify that reality for themselves by reducing to mechanics, technology, craft, mass production, in the arts. To these scions of the bourgeoisie, psychology was worse than poison; for psychological writing would reveal their utter hollowness and lack of inner comprehension of the proletarian world about them. Both the Lefs and the Constructivists, though loudly proclaiming their revolutionism, had not a Communist among them, not a worker among them. ("Max Eastman's Unnecessary Tears," NM 9 [September 19331: 13)

31. Hicks, quoted in John Scott Bowman, "The Proletarian Novel in America," Ph.D. Thesis, Pennsylvania State College, 1939, P. iii; Hicks, "Author's Field Day," NM 12 (July 3,1934):32.

32. Raymond Williams, "Working-Class, Proletarian, Socialist: Problems in Some Welsh Novels," in H. Gustav Klaus, ed., The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (New York: St. Martin's Press, -1982), P. 120.

33. Brooks to Hicks, September 13,1933, Box -16, Hicks Papers. For more on the Marxist critics' shortcomings in developing a rhetorically based aesthetic theory, see Robert William Glenn, "Rhetoric and Poetics: The Case of Leftist Fiction and Criticism During the Thirties," Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern U, 1971.

34. "Proceedings," in AWC, pp. 165-7-1; Hicks, review of Burke, Counter-Statement, cited in Burke to Hicks, "Copy," n.d., Box 10 Hicks Papers. Hicks reiterated his criticism of Counter-Statement in "The Crisis in American Criticism," in Robbins, pp. 9-10.

35. Burke to Hicks, "Copy," n.d., Box l0, Hicks Papers.

36. Burke, cited in David E. Shi, Matthew Josephson: Bourgeois Bohemian (New Haven and London: Yale UP, -1981), P. 174. Burke noted to Isidor Schneider that too many Marxist critics weakened their own case by conflating Marxist with sociological criticism. There is an opposition between sociological and aesthetic criticism, Burke argued, but not between aesthetic and Marxist criticism, which has no need to "handle 'form' and 'content' by different coordinates." Burke concluded, "A genuine political approach to art can never exist so long as critics, as they sometimes do in the New Masses itself, are forced to say that a book is 'wrong' but 'well done'" (Burke to Schneider, October 3, 1932, Schneider Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University). For Burke's elaboration on his rhetorical theory in relation to proletarian literature, see, in addition to Counter-Statement (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1941), PP. 1-137; "Symbolic War," Southern Review 2 (Summer 1936): 134-47; Attitudes toward History, Vol. 2 (New York: New Republic, -1937), pp. 6-9, 50; "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," AWC, pp. 87-94; and "The Relation Between Literature and Science," The Writer in a Changing World, ed. Henry Hart (New York: Equinox, 1937), PP. 158-7-1. In relation to his specific views on Communism and capitalism, Burke once observed that his principal objection to capitalism was that its "great instability interferes with the firm establishment of the moral-esthetic superstructure which the artist draws upon" ("My Approach to Communism," NM 10 [March20, 19341: 20). Burke occasionally participated in activist politics: Josephson describes Burke's getting arrested on a CP-led picket line in support of a writers' union (Infidel in the Temple: A Memoir of the Nineteen-Thirties [New York: Knopf, 19671, pp. 356-57).

37. Page, "Authors' Field Day," 32.

38. Ermolaev, PP. 78, 74. For the futuristic LEF manifesto, see William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), PP. 408-9.

39. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1981), PP. 34, 95; Edward Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928-1932 (1953; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), PP. 154-56.

40. Quoted in Edward Brown, P. 78; Edward Brown, P. 59.

41. Clark, "Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), P. 203; Karl Radek, "Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art," in Zhdanov, et al., pp.156-57. The Post-1932 attitude of the CPSU toward "equalitarianism" is summarized in Stalin's comment: "The roots of equalitarianism lie in the mentality of the peasant, in the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant 'communism'" ("Interview with Emil Ludwig," IL 2-3 1-1933): -107). Lest this attack on egalitarianism seem to be exclusive to Stalin, we should note that the notion of "socialist inequality" is a staple of Marxist doctrine first articulated by Marx himself in "The Critique of the Gotha Program," where he argued against the applicability of the slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" to the period of socialism, as opposed to Communism. See Selected Writings, PP. 315-35.

42.Maxim Gorki, Culture and the People (New York: International, 1939), P. 197. For more on the difference between agitational propaganda, which seeks to overturn an old regime, and integrative propaganda, which seeks to secure allegiance for an established regime, see A. P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda (New York and London: Methuen, 1983).

43. Ermolaev, PP. 115-16. The Hegelian notion that the "image" constitutes the key unit of literary representation was highly influential in Soviet aesthetic theory from Plekhanov forward. The pre-RAPP cognitive theorist Bogdanov theorized the "image" as the principal mode of literary communication. Victor Stanislavski (who, while a nonMarxist, was cited more frequently by Soviet aestheticians in International Literature than was his antagonist Brecht) noted that "the theatre should not act as a 'tutor,' but should draw the spectator by means of images, leading him on through the images to the idea of the play" ("Two Letters," IL 1 [-19331,125). Radek, in his address to the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress, praised the Japanese writer Kobayashi Takiji for showing that "Japan is approaching a democratic revolution, which will evolve into a socialist revolution ... by means of images-not asserting it, not proving it by arguments" (Zhdanov et al., p. i6q). Bukharin was perhaps the foremost champion of the view that the "image" is the fundamental unit for articulating a dialectical materialist standpoint ("Poetry, Politics, and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR," in Zhdanov et al., pp. 183-258). Robin, who details how the polarization of aesthetic from scientific language was attacked from various quarters at the 1934 Congress, remarks that the legacy of this concept was a continuing "difficulty in conceptualizing the relation between ideas and artistic qualities" (P. 151).

44. Robin, pp. 10, 202-3.

45. Howard Lee Hertz argues that after 1932 International Literature was run by pronationalist revisionists who favored substituting "socialist construction," and later "socialist realism," for the more left-wing slogan "proletarian realism" to denote the goal of Soviet writing. See "Writer and Revolutionary: The Life and Works of Michael Gold, Father of Proletarian Literature in the United States," 2 Vols., Ph.D. Thesis, U of Texas at Austin, -1974, vol 2, pp. 495-539.