Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left

A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction

T. V. Reed

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805047
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left is the first full critical study of novelist and critic Robert Cantwell, a Northwest-born writer with a strong sense of social justice who found himself at the center of the radical literary and cultural politics of 1930s New York. Regarded by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as one of the finest young fiction writers to emerge from this era, Cantwell is best known for his superb novel, The Land of Plenty, set in western Washington. His literary legacy, however, was largely lost during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, when he retreated to conservatism. Through meticulous research, an engaging writing style, and a deep commitment to the history of American social movements, T. V. Reed uncovers the story of a writer who brought his Pacific Northwest brand of justice to bear on the project of "reworking" American literature to include ordinary working people in its narratives. In tracing the flourishing of the American literary Left as it unfolded in New York, Reed reveals a rich progressive culture that can inform our own time.

1

REWRITING THE LEFT

Critical Contexts

To fully understand the stakes involved in rethinking the career of a writer such as Robert Cantwell, it is crucial to know something of the critical context in which radical writers of the 1930s have been evaluated. A caricature of the left-leaning writers of the mid-twentieth century as Communist dupes and party hacks came to dominate the American imagination during the height of Cold War hysteria in the 1940s and 1950s, and unfortunately continues to obscure perceptions of many writers of that era, despite more than five decades of brilliant revisionist scholarship.¹ Because few periods in American literary history have been as subject to vilification and distortion as the 1930s, it has taken an inordinately long time for scholars to bring us closer to the variegated truths about the body of writing produced by literary leftists during the Depression era and its wake. These distortions matter both for understanding this period and because they continue to taint any notion of “political literature” in the United States, suggesting that political commitment and literary quality are mutually exclusive.

Attacks on the dogmatic excesses of some of the writers and critics in and around the Communist Party USA began within the thirties left itself, a fact that belies reductive notions that all literary leftists were “artists in uniform” marching to the same Stalinist beat. I am alluding to the title of Max Eastman's deeply disillusioned portrait of Soviet culture, Artists in Uniform (1934), which later provided a label used by less careful critics to discredit US literary radicalism in toto. Eastman's foray was among the first sustained volleys in an intense set of literary left debates driven especially by anti-Stalinist Marxists close to Leon Trotsky. Two years after Eastman, James T. Farrell, a close friend to Cantwell, published A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), a work that richly critiqued some dimensions of the Communist literary left while remaining very much within a left tradition, signaling a more intense period of intraleft literary debate that was soon extended by a group of anti-Stalinist Marxist writers and critics clustered around the journal Partisan Review.

One atypically blunt essay, Review cofounder Philip Rahv's “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” has been cited incessantly as the true story of the Communist-led literary movement. The essay's most oft-quoted line, that revolutionary or “proletarian” writing in the thirties was “the literature of a party disguised as the literature of a class,” is effectively wrong on both counts.² When radical writers in the thirties were forced into “disguise,” it was most often to hide their Communist Party attachments from hostile anti-Marxists, and, while their productions were in no simple sense “the literature of a class,” authors identified with the proletarian literary movement, working class or otherwise, did a great deal to bring the neglected experiences of the working-class majority in US society into our literature for the first time.

Rahv's essay notwithstanding, the intraleft debates about literature and politics in the late thirties were carried out on a relatively high plane compared to what would occur in subsequent years. In later decades attacks on the Stalinist literary left were put forward on a number of different levels, from the sophisticated plane of the “New York intellectuals” around Partisan Review to the rabid right-wing writings of sensationalist popular accounts such as Eugene Lyons's The Red Decade (1940). But even the best of these seldom reached much beyond stereotype, with reductive attacks proliferating, and growing shriller during the intellectual cold warfare of the McCarthy era of the late forties and fifties.³

One of the key things that the anticommunist witch hunts did was obscure the fact that only a small minority of the membership of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) had any idea of the dictatorial and criminal nature of Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union. To the vast majority of members and fellow travelers (sympathetic nonmembers), the CPUSA was the organization doing most to challenge economic, racial, and gender inequality in America. At a time when capitalism's flaws were deeply visible, in a nation where more than one in three people were unemployed, thousands of people with a progressive vision saw the Party as the best hope for the country. The profound disillusionment that came with the revelations, beginning with the Soviet's pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, that Communism under Stalin had become a hideous, repressive distortion of Marxist ideals, led many to utterly dismiss what the Party actually meant in the US context. But in fact, many of the subsequent developments in the US labor movement, civil rights and ethnic rights movements, and women's liberation and gay liberation were driven by former Communists who were able to separate their progressive values from betrayal by Party leadership. Other former members, however, reacted to disclosure of Stalinist horrors by joining right-wing attacks on their former friends and on all who had been part of or close to the CPUSA.

Much of the shape of historical accounts of thirties radicalism was given initially by these participants on the left who later swung to the right (sometimes the far right) and thus sought fully to repudiate their “youthful follies” (Cantwell is among that group.) While this former involvement lent authority to these accounts, one may surely ask whether, having declared themselves to have been so thoroughly wrong in their youth, these recanting authors can be believed to have been so thoroughly right (correct) in their later years. Indeed, it is these writers who might best be described as revisionists, since they radically revised their own histories and those of their colleagues in memoirs deeply colored by Cold War hindsight. Even the best of these writings were too deeply colored by guilt over revelations of Stalinist atrocities and fear of McCarthy era reprisals to be capable of balanced discussions of their own cultural productions or those of other writers once close to the Communist Party USA. As we will see, Cantwell too went to considerable lengths to move away from his political positioning from the 1930s, and to disguise or repudiate much of his work from that era.

The process of undoing deeply distorted views of the Great Depression US cultural left began in earnest with two painstaking, still useful books, Walter Rideout's The Radical Novel in America (1956) and Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left (1961).⁴ The carefully crafted, calmly presented arguments in these books were the first major attempts to look dispassionately at particular writers and particular works, rather than generalize about the whole corpus of writing from the thirties left. Both authors acknowledged a range of more and less successful literary efforts, and noted a range of political positions that never simply echoed the views of the CPUSA or any other organization. This “liberal paradigm” of revision inaugurated by Rideout and Aaron, while immensely valuable, also had its limits in terms of openness to the radical ideas it chronicled; it remained anchored in certain Cold War assumptions about the United States, but these works opened the way for a rich array of equally thoughtful reassessments.

Revisionary works on the thirties continued apace through the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, until the growing momentum in the nineties, the first post–Cold War decade, ushered in still more sweeping changes in perspective on the literary old left. The telling of the story of thirties radicalism passed from the generation of the thirties itself to younger generations of scholars who were free of the need to excoriate or justify their own past actions, and generally less ensnared in particular, narrowly partisan positions.

With regard to the alleged control or manipulation of writers by the Communist Party USA, as revisionist critic Paula Rabinowitz was among the first to point out, one of the ironies of the literary history of the 1930s has been the way in which anti-Marxist critics of the allegedly mechanical materialism of much thirties literary theory have in fact subscribed to an actually mechanistically determinist model by portraying all thirties literary production as if it unproblematically reflected the ideas of Communist Party functionaries.⁵ While some of those figures certainly did at times proffer dogmatic prescriptions for how to write, what to write, and for whom to write, subsequent critics themselves have been in many respects more slavish servants of these reductions than were the writers of the thirties. Especially by attending to the more complex, variegated, even contradictory, practices of thirties writers and critics, as opposed to relying simply on their most programmatic statements, a rather different picture of the decade's writing emerges.

The ongoing work of revolutionary revision is multifaceted and complex. Let me sketch some of the main aspects of this new body of work that have shaped my efforts to rethink Cantwell's contribution to the tradition of left letters. My division of the work into the following categories is somewhat artificial. In practice, the various elements outlined often work together in mutually reinforcing or cross-complicating ways. But I think it clarifying to treat each element distinctly, while along the way suggesting some of the many ways in which revisionist scholars have been recombining these elements.

GENDER

Much writing during the thirties, and much subsequent criticism, focused far too much on the worker and the worker-writer as white, male, and presumptively heterosexual. All three of these assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality have been challenged by recent work. Work on gender has proceeded on three main planes. First, there has been work of rediscovery and reassessment. Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz's edited collection, Writing Red: An Anthology of Women Writers, 1930–1940, did much to set in motion this recovery of a wider range of women writers on the left. Certain of these women, including Muriel Rukeyser, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, and Tillie Lerner Olsen (against whose trumped-up arrest in 1934 Cantwell worked), have been the subjects of extended study. But only a handful of the many other interesting female authors have received attention, and there is much further analysis to be done of both recovered and still undiscovered women writers on the left.⁶

A second, more controversial arena concerns the policy toward women and women writers adopted by the central organization of the old left, the Communist Party USA. Barbara Foley is no doubt the critic who has made the most positive case for the enlightened, feminist nature of CPUSA policy. Foley finds little fault with the Party's policies and sees them as a major step toward women's liberation. Paula Rabinowitz offers what is to me a more balanced and convincing portrait of the limitations of CPUSA gender policies and practices. And here the split between policy and practice seems important. Foley correctly cites a number of positive positions regarding “male chauvinism” taken by the Party. But Rabinowitz more forcefully shows how the assumptions and practices of many critics, particularly as reflected in the experiences of women writers themselves, were often far more riddled with sexism. Thus, while the Party was more progressive on gender issues than most political organizations of the era, it was still sexist in certain respects.⁷

Third, and finally, Rabinowitz's important book Labor and Desire incorporates and goes beyond both of these other levels by raising additional questions about the gendered nature of all left literary practice. That is, she moves beyond the ghettoizing of gender to mean women and looks instead at the various ways in which a male-centered, “phallocentric” discourse characterized much radical literary discourse during the thirties and beyond. She sees in both male and female writing from the thirties much celebration of the worker in terms that privilege the male body and maleness as the measure of radicalism. Rabinowitz's key insights remain too little considered by many later feminist critics who continue to limit themselves to the mode of rediscovery and revaluation. In addition to exploring this vein, the rich body of recent work conceptualizing and historicizing various modes and styles of masculinity might be more fruitfully brought to bear on the literary left as well such that monolithic images of the heroic white male worker are replaced by more nuanced analysis. As we will see, Cantwell, for example, had a fairly nuanced understanding of gender, particularly as entwined with questions of class.

RACE, ETHNICITY, AND ETHNO-RACIALIZATION

If all literary leftists have been portrayed as dupes, then radical writers of color, especially African American Communists, have often been portrayed as doubly duped. Work on race and ethnicity that challenges this stereotype is proceeding, like that on gender, primarily on three levels: rediscovery and reassessment of writers and texts, new analyses of Communist race policies, and new perspectives from cultural theory. Rediscovery and reassessment has meant both recovering “disappeared” writers of color and rethinking the effect of the radical affiliations of many well-known writers of color, including Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Carlos Bulosan, and many other African American, Latino/a, Asian-Pacific American, and American Indian writers.

Rediscovery and reassessment have been very deeply tied to reevaluations of Communist Party race policies. Important overview essays and book chapters by Alan Wald and Barbara Foley, and book-length studies by James Smethurst, William Maxwell, and Bill Mullen have greatly enriched our understanding of Communist Party policies on race and culture, and have added depth to our understanding of the roles played by black politicos, critics, and writers in shaping and reshaping those policies.⁸

In New Negro, Old Left, for example, Maxwell has carefully documented the limits of claims to Communist manipulation of black cultural workers, offering a much more nuanced and convincing portrait of both CPUSA policy and practice. Maxwell seeks in particular to restore a sense of agency to African American Marxists who have often been treated condescendingly as political naïfs and dupes. Most importantly, Maxwell shows how black Marxist intellectuals of the twenties did much to shape the positions adopted by the Party in the thirties. He makes clear that African Americans were makers, not just victims of, Communist racial and literary policy over the course of several decades. While their experiences with the racism of the “white” left were certainly significant ones, there was also quite positive, nurturing involvement in the literary left by virtually all of the major African American writers of the era.

Comparable work on Latino/a, American Indian, and Asian-Pacific American writers is far less developed, and much needed, but a new paradigm is in play to view the relationship between the left and racial subalterns in a more dialectical light. Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan has received renewed consideration in relation to the literary left from E. San Juan, Jr. And Michael Denning has drawn attention to a cluster of Cultural Front representations of Mexican Americans, partly inspired by the Sleepy Lagoon case, a trial that was in many respects the Latino version of the famous Scottsboro rape case. Important work by San Juan on Filipino/a writing, by Lisa Lowe on Asian American writing, by Ramón Saldívar and José David Saldívar on Chicano/a writing, and by Robert Warrior on American Indian writing has greatly expanded the base from which to look at various racialized representations in fiction and criticism.⁹

Ethnicity and race have a long history as complicated and interwoven but distinct concepts. Recently the terms “race” and “ethnicity” have been given a greater nuance and complexity that are reopening a number of key questions about the literary left. Much of this work grows from a rethinking of the concept of “whiteness.” This has worked in two directions. First, by racializing whiteness, critics have moved the discussion of race beyond an implicit assumption that talking race means talking of nonwhites. Racializing whiteness has also redounded back on questions of ethnicity. In particular, theorists have shown how groups such as the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Jews had to “become white” through a complicated historical process still very much in play in the 1930s and beyond. That is, various Euro-American ethnicities were not immediately assimilated into the category “white,” as many critics looking backward have assumed. These complications have led to renewed considerations of what were once labeled “white ethnics,” as well as raising new questions about ethnic, racial and ethnoracial characterizations produced by “white” writers, “ethnic” and otherwise. In Cantwell's world, for example, the term “American” really meant white and Anglo, excluding other European ethnic groups only later assimilated to whiteness. Suzanne Sowinska models a complex race-gender analysis of this kind in “Writing Across the Color Line: White Women Writers and the ‘Negro Question’ in the Gastonia Novels.”¹⁰ Wald has likewise examined the process of “racial cross-dressing” in thirties writing, as found, for example, in the writing of Guy Endore.¹¹ It has also meant renewed consideration of Anglo writers such as Carey McWilliams of California, who exhibited a deep interest in the conjuncture of class and race in the context of the cultural left.¹²

SEXUALITY

Discussion and analysis of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other “queer” forms of sexuality had become increasingly important to left literary studies by the turn of the twenty-first century. As he has in the areas of gender and race, Alan Wald has done a good deal of the recovery work entailed by this project, making it clear that a very significant number of radical writers were far from straight. Work on this terrain will entail both further rediscoveries of gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers, motifs, and subtexts, as well as a broader examination of sexuality as a structuring force in writing from the left.¹³

What role did their sexuality play in the politics of various left writers and critics? In their aesthetics? In their lives? Did experience in the gay closet make the move into a closeted Communist stance easier, or more difficult? In the case of one prominent left critic, F. O. Matthiessen, we have speculation on connections between his sexuality and his politics in both critical and fictional form.¹⁴ Cantwell's story would certainly seem to confirm a significant gay left presenc...