Reviewed by: Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman Bill Brown Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. James D. Bloom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Pp. 156. $46.50. Once we decide that literature has a political unconscious—once we believe that modernism and mass culture have “as much content, in the loose sense of the word, as the older social realism” 1 —then what are we to do with consciously political literature? One answer lies in revealing that it possesses an “aesthetic unconscious,” that it has as much “form,” in the loose sense of the word, as modernism; another lies in revealing that it also possesses a political unconscious capable of expressing what its manifest content cannot. Implicitly, Left Letters pursues both answers as it surveys the careers of Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold, America’s most famous literary Communists—editors of the New Masses, contributing editors to Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935), authoritative and authoritarian critics who energized America’s radical renaissance, autobiographers who compellingly recorded Jewish immigrant life in New York. James Bloom wishes to show, not least, that the “literary left Kulturkampf” they waged “rests on as much as it resists” the so-called “bohemian modernism” of the twenties (117). Explicitly, Bloom frames his account by demonizing today’s “mandarin academic ‘Marxism’” as a form of “intellectual McCarthyism” that, ever eager to avoid besmirching itself with vulgarity, has suppressed the literary and political merits of America’s radical left (4, 94). From one point of view, such charges seem to reenact, rather than examine, Gold’s notorious rhetoric of denunciation, wherein Thorton Wilder became the new “Emily Post of Culture” and Gertrude Stein a “literary idiot” (Proletarian Literature, cited in Bloom, 114). But from another point of view, the longing for literary criticism to be other than it is, the hope of “coordinating rhetorical profession and political practice,” along with the belief that the “culture wars” of the 1930s can help us rethink the wars of today—these more poignantly express not just the absence of a vital public sphere in which to stage the politics of culture, but more simply the absence of what Joseph Freeman found in the Communist movement: “something more simple, more normal, more meaningful” than the complex abnormalities of bourgeois life-as-usual (10, 91). [End Page 166] The heaviness of Bloom’s frame casts something of a shadow on the concise and compassionate literary portraiture, his “exhumation” (5) that works within Cary Nelson’s “repression and recovery” paradigm for remaking modern literary history (which is not the history of modernism), while it recognizes that Gold, for one, has not exactly suffered the fate of erasure. (See Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945.) Not only is Gold’s chilling account of adolescent life in the Lower East Side, Jews Without Money (1930), recognized as a classic of “proletarian realism” (his own addition to the generic lexicon); but also, far from being forgotten by the dominant cultural memory, he has been remembered with such anathema that “Mike Gold” serves the literary-historical function of marking all that went wrong with the radical left (in contrast to what went right with the liberal left, with the Partisan Review, say). One of Bloom’s signal achievements is to orchestrate, throughout this book, the voices of Gold’s contemporaries (Wilson, Cowley, Mumford, Burke) and more recent voices (Lentricchia, Said, Kramer) to show how potent a presence Gold was and how potent an emblem he remains. It hardly seems fair to ask, then, “What is so threatening about Gold?” when his own doctrinaire cultural policing (the romance of American Communism turned gothic) is named (as “egregious lapses of rigor and even honesty”) but never discussed (14, 11). Of course, acts of recovery entail repressions of their own. It is the “subtle sophisticated politics” of Gold’s novel, after all, not of his literary polemics, that belie his image as “a Communist party mouthpiece,” a “crude anti-intellectual hack” (21). And thus, while it was a critical commonplace of the sixties that the unflinching realism of...
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Jan 1, 1995
