The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s by Milton A. Cohen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s by Milton A. Cohen Kevin R. West The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. U of Missouri P, 2018, 382 pp. Hardcover $44.00. In this well-researched study, Milton Cohen documents the shifting political attitudes of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway throughout the 1930s and early 1940s with an eye toward mapping the factors that led each author to move toward and then away from an identifiably leftist praxis. Cohen combines biographical and epistolary evidence with a reading of each author’s major novel of the period—The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, respectively—to investigate how the authors found invigorating paradigms in collectivist commitments for literary production and social critique as well as irreconcilable contradictions. According to Cohen, each author’s attraction to leftist ideology was a product primarily of self-interest and concern for topical issues as opposed to a more general commitment to socialist or communist values—although Wright was a member of the Communist Party for several years and all three authors contributed to left-leaning publications (Hemingway’s 1935 article “Who Murdered the Vets?” in The New Masses likely being the key publication for Hemingway Review [End Page 111] readers, with the keynote address at the 1937 League of American Writers Congress as an important follow-up performance). Despite clear sympathies with the disenfranchised members of various societies, all three novelists qua novelists necessarily found their strong individualism in conflict with collectivist demands, an internal tension that Cohen sees mirrored in the protagonists of each of the three novels. In the case of Wright, the failure of the Communist Party of America to explicitly oppose racism—or its insistence that race was a subset of class and not the proper focus of revolutionary energies—led to his dramatic and explicit ouster from the Party. Native Son’s protagonist Bigger Thomas may be decidedly unsympathetic, Cohen avers, but the racism he experiences at least partially causes his criminality, and Wright as an African-American writer eventually came to see that the struggle for racial equality could no longer remain subordinate to some supposedly larger struggle for economic revolution. Or, rather, as Cohen determines from his close reading of the novel’s final pages, the communist vision (as expressed by Bigger’s lawyer Max) is not in fact sufficiently large for Wright: in his crucial essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright reports how he came to see that the human right to self-determination exceeded politics and race. Cohen, along with Keneth Kinnamon, sees the tension between Max and Bigger at the novel’s end as reflective of Wright’s vacillation between the misaligned (though not mutually exclusive) goals of communism and civil rights. Likewise, Cohen finds the “central contradiction” of The Grapes of Wrath to be the lack of coherence between the “rugged individualism of the pioneering farmers” and the collective action required to challenge the powers arrayed against them (181). Cohen incisively notes the Joads’ blindness to their ancestors’ appropriation of Native American lands even as they experience the appropriation of their own lands and labor; surely they ought to see that group solidarity must supersede clan solidarity, but the novel’s early, strident, “collective ‘we’ . . . seems to shrivel to the familial ‘we’ of the Joads in the final chapters” (207). The novel’s mixed messages as to what constitutes ownership and what drove the Joads from “their” land—the weather, the capitalists, or the tractors—serve to index Steinbeck’s inability to synthesize his interest in “people not classes” and his conviction that “the principle of private ownership as a means of production is not long with us” (205). Even if Steinbeck did not consider himself a communist, Cohen rightly observes that his anti-capitalism certainly sounds communist, even as he lacked clear ideas about what would [End Page 112] replace private ownership. “Just as the novel’s contradictions reflect an author blinded by his passionate partisanship,” Cohen concludes, “its failure to show the ‘we’ coalescing politically hints...