Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

Abstract

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven G. Kellman. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert K. Landers. Encounter Books, 2004. The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Ruth Price. Oxford University Press, 2005. Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad. Knopf, 2007. In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is “compulsive.”1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.