AMERICAN NIGHT: THE LITERARY LEFT IN THE ERA OF THE COLD WAR

Abstract

AMERICAN NIGHT: THE LITERARY LEFT IN THE ERA OF THE COLD WAR. By Alan M. Wald. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2012. viii + 412 pp. $45.In his autobiography, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Boston: Houghton, 1973), Al Richmond warned the reader that interspersed within the personal narrative were three essays that deal with American radicalism in a wider, historical context. Richmond argued that he needed the essays "to make the American Communist experience comprehensible and credible to those not directly involved in it" and "to penetrate the inordinate obsession and mystification that shroud communism in the United States" (vii). What Richmond did on the individual level, Alan M. Wald has done for several generations of writers who were pulled to the left. And no one has taken a longer view of American letters from the left, scholarly or otherwise, than Wald. American Night is the last volume of a trilogy that began with Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002) and continued with Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007). Wald resembles Richmond in how he constructs his story. He alternates wider discussion of the historical context with biographical information, including oral history, to create what he calls a "humanscape" (Exiles 6), with the aim of his project being "to present the literary and biographical material in a manner that affords fresh angles and issues in particular figures and writings, while remaining faithful to an overall chronological sequence of events" (Trinity xv). In constructing this humanscape, and by focusing on the careers and works of less well-known writers, Wald, like Richmond, wants to look at the larger issues through "the tangible form in men and women who continue the quest and struggle" (Long View viii). In Wald, these tangible men and women appear in all their complexity and variations.Wald was probably not thinking consciously of Al Richmond when he set out to write an account of the American literary left, but he certainly intended to engage with Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961). As Wald himself wrote in 2002, "In the forty years since the publication of Writers on the Left, no other scholarly book on the Communist cultural movement has brought as many writers to life" (Exiles 4). Aaron concentrated on a core of what he saw as major players (e.g., Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Joseph Freeman, and Mike Gold), so his account does not do justice to the cultural work of women, African Americans, or gay and lesbian authors. Wald has offered an incredible kaleidoscope of characters, and in American Night he offers, in addition to an insightful chapter on women and African American writers, one of the best discussions of gay leftists, the "homintern," that I have seen. Aaron centered his story on New York and the changing of party policy. Wald's account rejects a geographical focus and even a thematic focus. But what makes Wald's trilogy the new standard history of the left in American letters is that he has absorbed all of the scholarship in the forty years since Writers on the Left appeared, which includes a great deal of recent and good studies of individual authors or groups. Wald's long view of the left includes, as incredible as it sounds, reading everything by his authors, talking to as many of them as he could find, and then analyzing everything that was written about them. As someone who works in this field, I must admit that it is a daunting task to ponder having to follow Wald.American Night picks up the story as World War II and the fight against fascism ends. The antifascist cultural front had brought together groups and writers in a common cause evolving from the rise of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War, but the coalitions were challenged when the Cold War made the Soviet Union not an ally but a foe. …