As far as contested terms go, ‘modernism’, famously, has something of a history, and in what follows I use the word to denote a practice rather than a set of names. Above all, I use it to signify a form of resistance . A generation of writers of the immediate post-World War I period used cultural production as a bulwark against industrialisation, in what essentially amounted to a continuation of the romantic idealism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The figures at the heart of my study saw the potential of using that same practice for precisely the opposite purpose: to hurry on rather than postpone the roll-out of proletarianisation. During the Depression decade, this revolutionary moment fell into unlikely compliance with government policy. The paradoxes, just as much as the promises, of this contradictory project form the subject of my study. My basic contention is that modernism is misunderstood when viewed as an ‘aristocratic’ practice. On the contrary, even if it wanted to, modernist practice makes it impossible to maintain existing hierarchies, particularly those surrounding ideas of what may and may not be taken seriously. The principal feature of the various modernisms I pay attention to is that their proponents challenged the status of the aesthetic, and were concerned, therefore, with the significance of pleasure. Neither of these characteristics is usually attributed to either creative writing or criticism claiming an overtly political purpose. However, proletarian literature, despite its frequently grim subject matter, was at its best joyous. To miss this point is to view the writing itself through the lens—in this context—of a hopelessly bourgeois critical perspective, masking disdain for the subordinate with a purported objectivity.
In his introduction to the 1935 anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States, poet and critic Joseph Freeman attacked what he regarded as a dishonesty concealed behind the smoke and mirrors of the contemporary literary scene. At a time of national crisis, ‘an era of bitter class war such as ours’, the liberal intelligentsia—panicked—has chosen not to enter the fray, masking vacillation behind a pose of impersonality.1 This general assumption of disinterest is caricatured by Freeman in the person of ‘the Man in White’, who ‘Wrapping himself in linen, donning rubber gloves, and lifting his surgical instruments – all stage props – […] proceeds to lecture the assembled boys and girls on the anatomy of art’.2 The ideological function of this position as an effective block to the socially revolutionary perspective put forward in the anthology, for Freeman, is self-evident, and the Man in White ‘has barely finished his first sentence, when it becomes clear that his lofty “scientific” spirit drips with the bitter gall of partisan hatred’.3 The affectation of objectivity, in other words, either through cowardice or duplicity, serves as a form of anaesthesia. The lost consciousness of art, etherised upon the table, as it were, is figured in Freeman’s metaphor as a severed vital connection between cultural production and the wider, more diffuse circuits and currents of meaning, power and practice at work in the social sphere.
In contrast, in his own poetry Freeman sought a voice with which to rally others to political insurrection, and this was more often than not realised through the confessional mode. ‘Rise to the surface, O my hidden strength!’ he wrote, promising to ‘Forget the cruel nightmare of my youth | And dedicate my new found power to truth’.4 A socially revolutionary perspective is explicitly represented as a struggle with the self, and for those who have suffered most the struggle is greatest:
The past dies, save for those whom it has broken;
They will remember whom the world has maimed,
Let them be silent! Things must not be spoken
Or, if their lips are bitter and inflamed,
Let them speak all by symbol and token.
These lines were first published in 1925; in the same year Ezra Pound published his Draft of XVI Cantos. Where Pound contained the historical within a confusion of styles—in itself the very paradigm of the modern—somehow the formal elegance of Freeman’s pentameters sits a little uneasily with his rejection of the past for the imperatives of the present moment: not so easy to prise apart the ‘cruel nightmare’ of the poetic I’s youth from the Shelleyean, distinctively nineteenth century at least, overtones of the writing. Moreover, Freeman’s exhortations to silence and to symbol urge poetic mediation above political action. If the Man in White, then, wields impartiality as a disguise for partisanship, in Freeman’s revolutionary aesthetic distance and analogy are key to his ecstatic vision of the ‘power to truth’. To take Freeman seriously is to see how we have misread as passion what is in actuality the intellect, and to have misunderstood as the latter what amounts to class hatred.
‘The Modernists’, writes Louis Menand, ‘engaged in a good deal of shouting against the nineteenth-century and […] at the same time did their best in their own ways to live up to the nineteenth century’s cultural standards’.6 Freeman in this respect could be seen as paradigmatic. However, it was the development in the criticism of Pound and Eliot and other towards claims for the professionalisation of literary practice that led to the ‘pose of depersonalisation’ he attacked. As Menand points out, institutional rather than aesthetic justifications for literary careers contained an ideological content, a set of ideas and practices according to which ‘professional standards of conduct’ replaced the ‘vocational values of independence, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship’.7 Not that any of this changed the ways that writers thought about themselves: rather the critical vocabulary used to distinguish literature as such from other kinds of writing was adapted to suit a new set of standards.8 As Terry Eagleton has noted, if criticism, under these circumstances, is to appear as anything other than an amateurish pursuit, it must create a distance between itself, its methods and ways of being, and the experience of the ‘common reader’.9 Inasmuch as the aim outlined by Freeman in the anthology was the rubbishing of this emergent institutionalised criticism and its elevation of itself above the hoi polloi, the intentions of proletarian literature were classically avant-gardist.10
At the other end of the political spectrum from Freeman, Allen Tate began the decade proselytising for the value-free ‘technical expertise’ claimed by Eliot. By the mid-1930s, however, things had changed. Joseph Harrington traces the development of Tate’s thinking towards an increasingly authoritarian stance, destabilised by the contradictory valorisation of individual autonomy alongside a backward-looking desire for cultural consensus.11 High modernism itself thus became defined by the conviction that ‘a private subject and sphere came to seem increasingly beleaguered, fragile, and in need of protection from a public realm that had spilled over its original boundaries’.12 The consequences of economic crisis led in some unforeseen directions, and the establishment during the Depression decade of job creation programmes such as the Federal Writers’ Project assimilated culture into bureaucracy. This threat to the conditions of possibility of an autonomous art was mirrored on the radical left by a zeal for ‘centralized planning’, as evidenced in publications such as New Masses. In 1934, for instance, following a notoriously prescriptive series of articles on ‘Revolution and the Novel’ by Marxist critic Granville Hicks, the magazine announced a prize contest for ‘the best novel on an American proletarian theme’.13 The competition was co-sponsored by publishers John Day Company. Such a confluence of interests, public and private, extended out across the range of mainstream publishing led, for some, to the feeling that popular taste itself was governed by political pressure. So for a figure such as Tate, writes Harrington, ‘[w]hat the public wants is equated with what Mr Ford or Mr Roosevelt wants, and both are destructive to liberty’.14 Resistance both to the perceived banalities of mainstream culture and also to government intervention, however, had been precisely the positions held by key figures in the literary left during the first half of the 1930s. These complex, sometimes elegant shifts in position, whereby modernist strategies are by the end of World War II somehow transformed into an institutional criticism jealously guarding its autonomy, whilst on the outside those excluded by academic criticism take their chances in a marketplace itself radically transformed by technology, make up the narrative backbone of Modernism and the Practice of Proletarian Literature.
The Great Depression highlighted and intensified social division, yet the effects of economic breakdown affected everyone insofar as they represented a crisis on a national scale. For expatriates in body or soul inhabiting a demi-monde already detached from the shining surfaces of the 1920s nothing much, perhaps, had changed. ‘I used to tell people I had been just as broke before the stockmarket crash as after it’, John Dos Passos recalled. ‘My books could hardly have sold less anyway’.15 But once even the most professionally déclassé turned their attention to the meaning of the crash for American identity it became clear that the wounds first inflicted on Wall Street ran deep. ‘Scenes of privation and misery on a scale which sicken[ed] the imagination’ forced Edmund Wilson to re-evaluate his ongoing work on the Symbolist movement.16 For Wilson, symbolism had exposed the mystifications of conventional discourse, but in so doing undermined its own potential for meaningful critique.
Wilson and Dos Passos inhabited the rarefied strata of social and literary elites, yet the concerns they articulated registered the depth to which writing found itself enmeshed in the wider discursive contours of a breach in the social fabric. In History, Memory, and the Literary Left (2006), John Lowney notes that whilst disruptions in cultural continuity had preoccupied writers since the French Revolution, the Depression ‘represented a more specific crisis of representation’.17 So opaque were the causes of the crash that writers—understandably drawn to the enormity of the situation—were all the same faced with the resistance of the crisis to narrative explanation. The damage inflicted by socioeconomic factors, in other words, was inflicted on coherent discourse as much as on physical existence. If it was all but impossible to understand the origins of the crisis, moreover, it was equally impossible to imagine a convincing end to it. As ...