Mike Gold Research Articles

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert

Editor's Foreword

This issue first declared itself as other recent issues have done: as a neural blip of anxiety about access to collections for the Lost &amp; Found feature, publication of overdue books for the reviews, and receipt of high-quality essays from scholars and theater-makers muddling through uncooperative professional environments. And how to manage the Practitioners' Colloquium when so few people are … practicing?That sort of blip grows. This blip grew. To a beep, a bark, and a bellow. And beyond.Then, silence. Why? Let's start with Lost &amp; Found. The partial shutdown of Princeton's libraries had prevented final work on “The Silver Bullet,” O'Neill's early sketch of The Emperor Jones. Fortunately, a Google search for “incisive commentary,” “O'Neill,” “eminence grise” (no itals in Google!), “Abbey Theatre,” and “very, very helpful” led me to Christopher Murray. He responded with a rigorous contextualization of a 1934 letter from O'Neill to the Irish American politician Patrick McCartan, in which the playwright regrets his inability to attend the Abbey's production of Days Without End. Murray elucidates the success in Ireland of a play that has never caught on Stateside. Is this essentially an Irish play? Murray seems to suggest as much.More good luck: three veteran members of the Eugene O'Neill Society published books late in 2020 or early in 2021. Sheila Hickey Garvey's account of the Circle in the Square Theatre earns a predictably thoughtful review by Anne Fletcher; Chris Morash, commissioned ad hoc by yours truly, overcame Brexit-related postal problems adroitly to handle Zander Brietzke's book on O'Neill's Cycle plays. The third book? A positive review of Patrick Chura's book on Mike Gold is in hand but was nudged aside to ensure adherence to our contracted page count. It's queued up for 43.2.Two newcomers weighed in with trenchant essays when I most needed them. Dan Venning evaluates O'Neill's position among Pulitzer Prize winners of his own day and ours. Informative in its own terms, the essay gains from its “Lost &amp; Found” approach to documentary evidence. For example, an unpleasant and previously unpublished telegram from O'Neill about casting (or not casting) Black actors in his plays meaningfully wrinkles the ongoing discussion of O'Neill and race. Kaitlyn Farrell Rodriguez, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, makes her debut with a sturdy interdisciplinary assessment of “infantilization” in canonical plays by O'Neill, Williams, and Miller.Patrick Midgley provided a first-rate Practitioners' Colloquium by gathering friends and others who had participated in Brandon Fox's prepandemic Long Day's Journey Into Night, previously discussed by Fox himself, and glowingly reviewed by Jo Morello, in EOR 41.2 (2020). Midgley's interviews are equally long on bonhomie and insight.Two features that occasioned no anxiety are the performance reviews and Used Books. Performance review editor Bess Rowen's workload has soared during the pandemic, as, not coincidentally, has the Metropolitan Virtual Playhouse's commitment to Zoom productions of plays by O'Neill and others. The fact that three of this issue's five performance reviewers are making their first appearances in the EOR advertises Rowen's leadership in diversi-fying the journal. We also honor our past in this issue. As we roll through the centennials of O'Neill's plays, we have also reached what we might call the semicentennial of modern O'Neill criticism. In an expanded Used Books entry, Brenda Murphy, Jackson R. Bryer, and David Clare reappraise Travis Bogard's foundational Contour in Time (1972). Personal reflections from Bogard's friend and collaborator, Bryer, add a warmth that is never out of season.As always, I offer sincere thanks to our contributors and readers. Unanxiously.

“Eternal symbols of a dream”: Upton Sinclair, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Meaning of Anarchism

“Eternal symbols of a dream”Upton Sinclair, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Meaning of Anarchism Dan Colson (bio) Not long after Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in August 1927, Edna St. Vincent Millay published “Fear,” an attack on those in the United States who allowed them to die: “you do not at all know what an Anarchist is. . . . An anarchist, you insist, is a man who makes bombs and puts them under the State House” (5). Chastising the conservative and complacent masses, Millay defended Sacco and Vanzetti by stripping them of the capacity for violence— they simply “believ[ed] that human beings are naturally good” (5). “Fear” appeared in The Outlook and in a pamphlet printed by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee (SVDC). In her open letter, Millay repeated the theme seen in numerous SVDC publications designed to encourage public opinion to affect the ongoing legal wranglings: these anarchists were not violent; they were naïfs, unjustly subjected to flawed, yet salvageable government. Millay’s interest, however, was not to save Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s lives. Her text appeared after the men’s execution: they were dead, so now the goal is to consider what lessons we learn from their ordeal. And, consequently, her posthumous lamentation of injustice shaped the resonance of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s martyrdom. Arrested in 1920 for a robbery/murder they likely didn’t commit, Sacco and Vanzetti spent more than seven years in prison as their lengthy legal proceedings unfolded: after several failed appeals— that eventually reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court— the two Italian anarchists became globally famous. The state’s case relied on questionable evidence, bias against Italians, and, of course, the men’s politics. From jury selection, through the trial’s testimony and eventual verdict, until the numerous failed appeals, the forces of US justice treated the result as a foregone conclusion: two radical immigrants had little hope of receiving [End Page 183] fair treatment in the 1920s. The public— led by left-leaning intellectuals and radical organizations— recognized the flaws in the state’s legal case and interpreted the men’s treatment as a punishment for their political identity, rather than for any crime. This perceived miscarriage of justice sparked protests on six continents and an outpouring of support that led Governor Alvan T. Fuller to appoint a commission to investigate the trial. All was in vain, however: the two were executed in August 1927. In that year and the years following their execution, writing about Sacco and Vanzetti was a veritable cottage industry: many works directly addressed the trial, and even more touched on the affair obliquely. The outpouring of support prompted “poems from writers as diverse as Millay, Malcolm Cowley, Louis Ginsberg, Mike Gold, Lola Ridge, and Clement Wood” (Colson 965n4).1 The Sacco-Vanzetti Anthology of Verse was published in 1927, with America Arraigned, another small poetry collection, appearing the following year; Maxwell Anderson’s Gods of the Lightning also debuted in 1928; and H. G. Wells’s Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (which contains a brief section on Sacco and Vanzetti), was published in 1928, “signaling the highwater mark for post-execution literature” (Colson 965n5). Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s memory persisted, however, well into the 1930s, inspiring Nathan Asch’s Pay Day (1930), Bernard de Voto’s We Accept with Pleasure (1934), Anderson’s Winterset (1935), and, most famously, John Dos Passos’s The Big Money (1936). No writer, though, undertook such a thorough examination of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair as Upton Sinclair. Boston, his two-volume, 700+ page novel, appeared in 1928, with serialization beginning only about six months after the men’s execution. Though little remembered today, Boston was a major novel by arguably the most prolific leftist writer of the period. It sold well, received generally positive reviews, and kept the fire of unrest surrounding Sacco and Vanzetti alive after their funeral. At the same time, it shaped their legacy, signaling the repurposing of the men into a political symbol that has little to do with their anarchist politics. In this essay, I read Boston as a text emerging in the interstices of Sinclair’s naturalistic literary form and...

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor For the first time in the history of the association, the ASA annual meeting, in November 2019, took place in Honolulu. For American Quarterly, it was fortuitous that the Honolulu meeting coincided with the midpoint of the Hawai‘i-based team’s ten-year tenure as the journal’s editorial home. In close collaboration with the program committee, ASA president Scott Kurashige conceived the meeting under the theme “Build as We Fight,” calling for resistance to the interlocked systems of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberal dispossession, and for the creation of alliances and communities from the ground up. The history of Hawaiian Renaissance and Indigenous resurgence, especially in the midst of the movement for protection of Mauna Kea, has offered humbling and inspiring lessons for ASA members and scholars, activists, and artists committed to Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, queer love and care, and alliance building across boundaries. Through over five hundred panels, workshops, and tours, the groundbreaking conference realized Kurashige’s and the association’s vision and commitment that we hope to practice in the pages of the journal. Kurashige’s presidential address published in this issue, “‘Unruly Subjects’: American Studies from Antidiscipline to Revolutionary Praxis,” traces the emergence of the ASA as home for those from outside the institutional history of the field, points to the crisis of liberal capitalism and ruptures it has created, and illustrates examples of scholar–activist work seeking to build the revolution toward a new social order, such as the work of Detroit-based Grace Lee Boggs. We have asked two such scholar–activists to respond to Kurashige’s address. Taking up Kurashige’s alternative genealogy of American Studies, Curtis Marez reflects on the recent history of Chicana/o studies and American studies. He discusses its significance for contemporary border fascism and the hope offered by student activism against deportation as an act of “building as we fight.” Noura Erakat takes Kurashige’s message and the inspiration of the Hawaiian liberation movement on and off Mauna Kea to Palestine, where conditions of surveillance, militarism, exclusion, and national supremacy portend an uncertain future that also overflow with promises of life and resurgence, partly through transnational solidarity, which she examines in an essay also included in this journal. This issue features six essays that coalesce and speak well with one another around a few themes: species, environment, and settler colonialism; racialization and othering in nation and empire building; race, solidarity, and anti-imperialism. [End Page v] In his ambitious and fascinating “Grizzly Country: Settler Worlding and the Politics of Species on the California Frontier,” Daniel Rivers traces the history of Native people and grizzlies that coexisted for fourteen thousand years until the genocide and eradication by settler colonial violence. Through interdisciplinary analysis of this history, Rivers examines how the slippages between the human and nonhuman in settler projects formed the underside of the violent remaking of California. In “The Bison and the Cow: Food, Empire, Extinction,” John Levi Barnard turns our attention to the interrelated symbolic and material values of two species within American exceptionalist historiography and neoliberal environmentalism. By demonstrating that the bison has symbolized the tragic but inevitable “vanishing” of Indigenous societies and ecosystems, whereas the cow has figured as a veneer of “sustainability” in the globalized economy, Barnard points to the dangers of conservation without decolonization. Jacob Crane tracks the long history of varied deployments of Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which declares that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” and argues that the article’s lasting influence lies in how Christian nationalists and emergent secularists alike used the text to articulate a national character in opposition to the perceived otherness of the Muslim world. Focusing on the life of Stephen Glori, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s first Filipino student who later joined an Indian show and identified as a Pueblo, Alyssa A. Hunziker situates the school in US colonial projects both at home and abroad, and also argues that schools like Carlisle inadvertently fostered alternative transnational kinship networks among Filipino and Native students. Through a reading of Mike Gold...

When All Seemed Lost

When All Seemed Lost Adam McKible “ Little Magazines and Modernism: An Introduction,” with Suzanne Churchill, American Periodicals15, no. 1(2005): 1–5. “ ‘Life is Real and Life is Earnest’: Mike Gold, Claude McKay, and the Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven,” American Periodicals15, no. 1(2005): 56–73. In January 2000, just a few months after meeting Suzanne Churchill at the inaugural Modernist Studies Association conference, I sent her an email wondering if anyone had recently published a collection of essays on little magazines and modernism. Thus began my long, intellectually-fulfilling collaboration with Suzanne, whose work at the intersection of periodical studies and modernist studies continues to shape this exciting field. And I have American Periodicalsto thank for helping to sustain our collaboration at a critical juncture. After some initial hemming and hawing, Suzanne and I set to work collecting essays for the book. We had no idea what we were in for. After four years of usually thankless toil involving myriad emails, dozens of potential contributors, two university presses, a handful of (too often) grumpy outside readers, plus a whole lot of nail biting and heartache, it seemed as though our book was dead in the water. We could not find a publisher. With excellent and often field-shaping contributions from some of the most notable scholars of little magazines, Suzanne and I knew we had a significant publication on our hands, but we could not find a home for our apparently unwanted collection. It was at this moment of despair, over what seemed like years of wasted work, that American Periodicalssaved our skins—not to mention my own chance at tenure. Following a suggestion from a sympathetic acquisitions editor, we contacted Susan Williams, Steven Fink, and Jared Gardner, then the co-editors at [End Page 68] American Periodicals, about the possibility of producing a special issue of the journal devoted to modernist little magazines. They agreed to look at a selection of essays from the larger collection, and, within a few months (lightning speed for academic publishing!), we were all working together to produce volume 15, no. 1 of American Periodicals, a special issue devoted to little magazines and modernism. Having the opportunity to publish essays from the larger project was instrumental in a number of ways. Because we had to tailor our introduction and our contributors’ essays to the word count limits and the more specific, American focus of the journal, a number of us had a chance to polish further our work and construct tighter, more careful arguments. I know that my own essay, “‘Life is Real and Life is Earnest’: Mike Gold, Claude McKay, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” benefited greatly from further scrutiny and refinement. Not only were many of the individual selections strengthened, but the special issue also gave us some leverage with other presses. Because we could demonstrate scholarly interest in our project, we were able to go into contract with Ashgate and—finally—see the whole book in print as Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches(2007). Thus, American Periodicalsgave us hope at a moment when all seemed to be lost. Susan, Steven, and Jared took a chance on us at a time when, speaking personally, I was becoming rather nervous about my career—and was also wondering which pizza delivery sign would look best on the roof of my car. I suspect that a number of fellow contributors to this twenty-fifth anniversary issue have similar tales to tell about how American Periodicalshas encouraged emergent scholars and scholarly practices to flourish in its pages, and I am happy to add my voice to this grateful chorus. [End Page 69] Adam McKible John Jay College Copyright © 2015 The Ohio State University

"Violent and Sentimental by Turns": The Gendered Discourses of Mike Gold

Proletarian writer Michael Gold famously adopts a pose of exaggerated virility in his theoretical writing as a defense against charges of the effeminacy that was associated with intellectuals, with mass culture, and with Jewish men. But the portraits Gold draws in his autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money , suggest a more complex gendered and ethnic rhetoric through which he idealizes feminized, sentimental domesticity as a counterpoint to gangsterism, the myth of the wild west, and the drive for an authentic, manly American identity. By yoking together the registers of the sentimental and the violent in his writing, Gold seeks not only to move his readers emotionally, but also to goad them toward revolutionary action. This motivational mission justifies Gold's writing as valuable labor rather than the intellectual parasitism and aesthetic prostitution he consistently condemns.

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

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. …

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

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 Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Boston: Houghton, 1973), Al Richmond warned reader that interspersed within personal narrative were three essays that deal with American radicalism in a wider, historical context. Richmond argued that he needed essays make American Communist experience comprehensible and credible to those not directly involved in and penetrate inordinate obsession and mystification that shroud communism in United States (vii). What Richmond did on individual level, Alan M. Wald has done for several generations of writers who were pulled to left. And no one has taken a longer view of American letters from left, scholarly or otherwise, than Wald. American Night is last volume of a trilogy that began with Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002) and continued with Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007). Wald resembles Richmond in how he constructs his story. He alternates wider discussion of historical context with biographical information, including oral history, to create what he calls a humanscape (Exiles 6), with aim of his project being present 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). constructing this humanscape, and by focusing on careers and works of less well-known writers, Wald, like Richmond, wants to look at larger issues through the tangible form in men and women who continue quest and struggle (Long View viii). 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 American literary left, but he certainly intended to engage with Daniel Aaron's Writers on Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961). As Wald himself wrote in 2002, In forty years since publication of Writers on Left, no other scholarly book on 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 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 best discussions of gay leftists, homintern, that I have seen. Aaron centered his story on New York and changing of party policy. Wald's account rejects a geographical focus and even a thematic focus. But what makes Wald's trilogy new standard history of left in American letters is that he has absorbed all of scholarship in forty years since Writers on Left appeared, which includes a great deal of recent and good studies of individual authors or groups. Wald's long view of 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 story as World War II and fight against fascism ends. The antifascist cultural front had brought together groups and writers in a common cause evolving from rise of Hitler and Spanish Civil War, but coalitions were challenged when Cold War made Soviet Union not an ally but a foe. …

The “Albert Maltz Affair” and the Debate over Para-Marxist Formalism in New Masses, 1945–1946

This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials.

Gendering the Great Depression: rethinking the male body in 1930s American culture and literature

This article explores the cultural and literary representation of male bodies during the Great Depression in the United States. While the mainstream model of American masculinity has traditionally linked men's identity to their breadwinning role, this essay shows how the Great Depression caused millions of American males to feel emasculated by their incapacity to provide for their families. It is argued, therefore, that the Roosevelt administration aimed, at least in part, to ‘remasculinize’ America by promoting numerous images of ‘hard’ bodies at work, as may be seen in several New Deal public murals of the time. This remasculinizing effort was complemented by Marxist authors and critics, perhaps most notably Michael Gold, who established a correlation between gender and class by suggesting a dichotomy between hard/masculine/working-class authors, on the one hand, and soft/effete/upper-class writers, on the other. Nevertheless, this study concludes by calling this very binary into question, underlining several counter-images and contradictions that inevitably inform it. If documentary literature questioned Mike Gold's hypermasculine view of the proletariat by providing images of vulnerable yet dignified male bodies, writers such as John Steinbeck and painters such as Paul Cadmus also problematized, as we shall see, Gold's masculinist and homophobic rhetoric from particularly interesting and subversive perspectives.

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s by Milton A. Cohen (review)

Reviewed by: Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s by Milton A. Cohen Marilyn Walker Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2010. In Milton A. Cohen’s Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s, he convincingly argues that literary critics marshaled political and intellectual activism to persuade middle-class poets to write on behalf of the American worker. Before the Great Depression, Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), Robert Frost (1874–1963), and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) were praised by literary audiences. They had autonomy to write about a myriad of topics ranging from nature to observations about daily life. However, with the advent of a national economic crisis, the previously mentioned poets were bestowed with new responsibilities such as contemplating the politics of the Great Depression and representing socially and economically disenfranchised people. According to Cohen’s scholarship, critics such as Mike Gold, Malcolm Cowley, and Eda Lou Walton, encouraged Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams to write about the working class and the challenges they encountered in modern society. Interestingly, predating Cohen’s cadre of poets, working-class life infused poetry, fiction, and drama. For example, in the Victorian period (1832–1901), writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1901), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) composed sympathetic portrayals of laborers during the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850). Likewise, during the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940), writers such as Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Claude McKay [End Page 72] (1889–1948), and Langston Hughes (1902–1967) also expressed working-class concerns through setting, dialect, and attire. Furthermore, the scholarship of William J. Maxwell and Arnold Rampersad has chronicled McKay and Hughes’s association with the political left and communism. However, Cohen’s niche is mapping the artistic advocacy of literary critics and poets and illuminating the influence of leftist critics upon American modernist poetry. Consequently, accompanied by histories on literary magazines such as The Liberator and New Masses, personal letters, and explications of verse, Cohen’s Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics examines the responses of Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams to economic disaster and working-class suffering. Thus, Cohen close reads the structure, style, and content of each writer’s poetry from the 1930s and their resistance or conformity to the political environment. Whereas Cummings crafted poetic homage to the working class, Frost emphasized individualism for the proletariat. Simultaneously, as Cohen identifies the distinctive qualities of each poet, he also demonstrates their efforts to craft socially conscious verse. Although Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics comprehensively analyzes a dimension of being a modernist poet in the 1930s, Cohen could have also emphasized the perils of literary critics influencing poetic production. Instead of inspiration guiding the poet, leftist critics were insisting upon a criterion for literature and attempting to manipulate the creative process. Ironically, the leftist critics were also imposing a supply-and-demand dynamic for a specialized literary sub-genre and jeopardizing the authenticity of artistically progressive verse. Despite the aforementioned reservations, Cohen’s book revels in the poetry and politics of the 1930s. Marilyn Walker National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute for Technology Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

"When the Sun Goes Down": The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Jean Toomer's Cane

Darwin Turner once wrote of Jean Toomer's literary masterpiece, Cane, that inspires critical rhapsodies rather than (In Minor Chord 207). Turner's observation is suggestive of the critical challenges that Cane poses. While there is no consensus regarding Cane's formal structure, critics have often described it in thematic terms as pastoral work. Bernard Bell's reading of Cane as a pastoral work, contrasting the values of uninhibited, unlettered Black rustics with those of the educated, class consciousness Black bourgeoisie, privileges the lyrical elements of the novel and its indebtedness to Afro American tradition of music as major structural device (Portrait of an Artist 13). Yet his analysis here only extends to the poetic pieces that intersperse Cane without comparing them to the prose narratives that provide thematic and structural counter-point to them. Lucinda MacKethan also offers reading of the novel as pastoral narrative, arguing that Toomer mold[ed] [Cane] into version of Southern pastoral perceived with the black man's double of deep belonging and forced alienation (A Pastoral Problem 425). MacKethan's description of Toomer's ironic pastoral vision in Cane does not adequately attend to the rural and urban conflict that frames the novel's portrayal of culturally displaced blacks in the North. In this essay, I will argue that Cane is best understood as what Michael Denning has described as ghetto variant of the complex pastoral form that emphasizes the unique racial and ethnic conflicts associated with stories of deracinated (im)migrant peoples. Thus, my reading of the novel as ghetto pastoral examines the racial and cultural tensions that necessarily shape Toomer's aesthetic in the novel. In The Cultural Front, Denning calls the ghetto pastoral as yoking of naturalism and the pastoral, stories that dialectically represent urban experience as an allegorical cityscape composed in pidgin of American slang and ghetto dialect, with traces of old country tongues (231). According to Denning, these stories sought to provide more accurate portrayal of ethnic class experience. In contrast to traditional pastoral narratives, which privileged transcendent pastoral ideal in response to the alienating aspects of modern society, the ghetto pastoral narrative revealed the ways in which ethnic and racial categories the experience of class immigrants in the city. These are stories about how displaced immigrants in the city attempt to reimagine themselves in relation to pastoral landscape back home, but they are also stories about how race and ethnicity complicate that transformative ideal. As Denning writes, Ethnicity and race had become the modality through which class peoples experienced their lives and mapped their communities (239). Denning offers as examples of the ghetto pastoral mode the work of authors such as Mike Gold, Claude McKay and Anzia Yezierska, novelists whose works arose out of the proletarian moment of the 1920s and 1930s. As Denning points out, ghetto pastoral novels such as McKay's Home to Harlem and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money revealed the ways in which race and ethnicity challenged the transcendent ideal of green landscape that was at the core of conventional pastoral narratives. Instead, these ghetto pastoral narratives portrayed contested urban landscape composed of the old and the new, past and present--at once bringing together the symbolic elements of ethnic folk culture and the harsh material realities of urban life. Rather than the boundless potential expressed in traditional pastoral narratives, ghetto pastorals were stories that revealed how racial and ethnic boundaries delimited the lives of displaced (im)migrants. At the same time, these stories expressed the ways in which migrants pushed on these boundaries to create liminal spaces of existence, spaces formed at the interstices between the pastoral dream of transcendence and the urban realities of working class tenements, sweatshop and factory labor, and cheap mass entertainments (239). …

La revue transition (1927–1938): Le modernisme historique en devenir.

<i>La revue transition (1927–1938): Le modernisme historique en devenir.</i>

Review

Review

Three Early Stories by Mike Gold in the &lt;I&gt;New York Call&lt;/I&gt;

Three Early Stories by Mike Gold in the &lt;I&gt;New York Call&lt;/I&gt;

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (review)

Reviewed by: American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 Carol Loranger (bio) American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945, by Gavin Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xvi + 228 pp. Cloth, $38.50, Paper, $24.95. Class has, in some fashion, been a concern (for some) among all the branches of literary studies for as long as this reviewer can remember, and rightly so. But whether approached as a social by-product of racial or gender or colonial or sexual or national politics, or whether approached straightforwardly as the primary outcome of the base relations of production within a ruling economic order, class has usually been conceived in terms of economic or other power relationships among groups possessed of different levels of power. You have your upper, middle, and lower classes—the latter group figured more commonly these days as the "working class" of so much studious interest to the composition and rhetoric cadre. You have your rentiers and haute-bourgeoisie, your petit-bourgeois tradesmen, bureaucrats and teachers, your struggling proletariat in fiction as in life. What you do not have, says Gavin Jones in this fascinating study, is much attention given to poverty, a "distinct form of socioeconomic suffering," or to the impoverished as such who form a distinct and abject class marked by dispossession—the "materiality of need"—rather than by any [End Page 180] differential of power in their relations to other classes. Not that poverty is not represented in American literature; Jones offers nuanced readings of whole works or portions of works depicting destitution by Henry David Thoreau, Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Richard Wright, and James Agee as well as giving more than glancing attention to a welter of period writings about and from poverty by the likes of—to name a few—Charles Burroughs, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Loring Brace in the nineteenth century; and Hamlin Garland, Meridel LeSueur, and Mike Gold in the twentieth century. Rather, literary representations of and authorial discourses on poverty are frequently "warped in the United States by ideological forces that work to internalize indigence as shame or blame." At the same time, critical discourse on class in America and American literature—and here Jones has likewise assembled and thoroughly digested an impressive menu of recent and contemporary theorizers on class, among them (to name a very few) Lawrence Buell, Wai-Chi Dimock, Michael Denning, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Barbara Foley, Walter Benn Michaels, John Guillory, Rita Felski, and Peter Hitchcock—has tended either to lump the absolute poverty of the impoverished in with the comparative poverty of the worker, letting the working class stand for both; or to focus primarily on relations of production and consumption, omitting to examine individuals and groups excluded from those relations; or, if tied to an affirmative praxis of identification and recovery as in "working class studies," to limit the extent of the study to examples of competing or alternative cultural production that can be celebrated as complex, active and oppositional. Poverty is, to be sure, always partly a relative condition: there are different stages of lack which exist in a complex historical and social web of relations to different stages of possession. But the farthest reach of poverty must always include absolute deprivation of goods and services combined with a struggle for mere subsistence and a level of situationally fostered ignorance and passivity that goes a long way toward preventing the production of an alternative culture—at least one that anyone has yet figured out how to affirm as complex, oppositional, and arguably valuable. Perhaps if sufficient members of the impoverished class somehow obtain Ph.D.s and begin to consider how they fit into the academic class or if sufficient Ph.D.s find themselves unemployed and haunting breadlines in the new economy like so many Hurstwoods and begin to consider how they fit into the destitute class, that culture will finally be found, described, and celebrated. But I doubt it. I joke, but as Jones makes clear, discourse about poverty in the United [End Page 181] States has suffered from the absence of the truly poor...

“A breast for all … and milk for all”: Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl and the 1930s CPUSA

The context in which fragments of Meridel Le Sueur's novel The Girl first appeared in the New Masses helped to deflect and diffuse her feminist message. The articles, poems, and illustrations surrounding her work in this publication promoted Popular Front goals such as defeating fascism through alliances with other progressive groups, and endorsed conservative roles for women as part of this program. An analysis of these materials in conjunction with contemporary Communist party responses to Le Sueur's work reveals critical differences between her political agenda and that of the 1930s CPUSA. At a time when the Party was courting middle-class members and promoting traditional notions of virtue and motherhood, Le Sueur wrote about prostitutes and sterilization policies. Instead of adhering to New Masses editor Mike Gold's proletarian aesthetic, she offered solidarity between women as a solution to social and economic injustice.

Modernism in Black &amp; White

Modernism in Black & White Suzanne W. Churchill (bio) Can innovative practices in the classroom transcend old divisions in the field? The New Modernist Studies has toppled the hierarchies of high modernism, challenging the traditional canon’s exclusion of women, minorities, political activists, popular writers, and other marginalized figures. But the vital attention paid to the work of what Cary Nelson calls “Repression and Recovery” hasn’t fully overcome the neglect of the Harlem Renaissance, if Lawrence Rainey’s Modernism: An Anthology (2005) is any index to the state of the field.1 This hefty, 1181-page textbook claims to be “the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published,” yet it does not include a single African American writer (Nancy Cunard is the closest it sails to Harlem). This is not the only sign of the scarcity of African American representation in modernist studies. Modernism/Modernity, although certainly more inclusive than the Blackwell anthology, devotes more attention to T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis than to Zora Neale Hurston or Wallace Thurman, and the attendance at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference—including those of us participating in this forum—is conspicuously white, despite concerted efforts to diversify the program. I teach at a small liberal arts college in the South, where diversity is also a challenge and goal, in our curriculum as well as our community. The teaching innovation I’ll discuss here was motivated by a desire to bridge the divide between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. It was thus driven not by any deficiency in student preparation or engagement, but by a problem more deeply embedded in the structures of modernist scholarship and pedagogy. We are products of our educations. I [End Page 489] had little exposure to the Harlem Renaissance either as an undergraduate or graduate student, and my course offerings tended to privilege what I knew best: white, Anglo-American modernism. Yet my research in periodical studies taught me that modernism was not always divided along the color line: Fenton Johnson published poems in the largely white avant-garde magazine Others, Claude McKay and Mike Gold co-edited the Liberator, and William Stanley Braithwaite’s 1918 Anthology of Magazine Verse included war poems by Jesse Fauset and William Rose Benét. Such instances of border crossing and collaboration made me wonder what other intersections might be uncovered in modernist periodicals. I decided to conduct an experiment in collaborative research with undergraduates, based on a model developed by my colleague in the history department, John Wertheimer.2 I designed an upper-level seminar, “Modernism in Black & White,” with a dual focus: 1) crossing the color line between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and 2) doing collaborative research in modernist periodicals. Throughout the semester, as students read major modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf, they would work in teams to research and write papers on modernist magazines. Together, we would use the new methodologies of periodical studies to transcend an old divide in modernist studies. In the process, we would reactivate the collaborative energies that generated so much modernist artistic and literary production. The seminar’s combination of great books and periodical studies reflected my ambivalence about periodical pedagogy. I’d had good results with previous, smaller-scale efforts to teach modernism through little magazines. When students encountered “difficult” modernist poems in their original magazine contexts—jostled among book reviews, artwork, and ads for cigarettes and soap—the poems seemed less baffling and remote: they became part of a media format students already knew how to read. Modernist magazines work like the contemporary analogues Michael Sayeau describes in his essay: within their sundry pages, arcane literary forms “come to appear familiar, already a part of . . . students’ everyday experiences of media and entertainment, yet something they suddenly feel empowered to understand and describe.” Like Marsha Bryant, I’ve also noticed that when students break out of the traditional framework for literary analysis (say, a three- to five-page close-reading of a poem or novel), they “often write livelier and more creative arguments.” Encouraged by such results, I was eager to incorporate periodical studies on...

Ethnic Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnic Modernism Henry Veggian Ethnic Modernism. By Werner Sollors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2008. Werner Sollors has cultivated a distinctive habit of sculpting new arguments from rutted and well-traveled key words. "Descent," "consent," ethnicity," and "thematic criticism" are certainly not his creations but Sollors has often reconfigured them like an urban planner who makes a familiar place appear as a newly invented city. Indeed, his explanation of the term "invention" in the 1989 essay "The Invention of Ethnicity" is exemplary of this habit, which results from the pedestrian finesse of Sollors's prose: its arrangements are direct yet fluid, its vocabulary repetitious yet heterodox, and its arguments explore tangents of familiar themes that were forgotten or dismissed. Ethnic Modernism attempts to do for "modernism" what Sollors has done for those previously cited keywords. What is most interesting about this particular example is that Sollors's must consider the term in relation to his own prior writings on it. The words "modern," modernity," and "modernism" recur often in Sollors's early works, where they rarely synonymous. For example, the subtitle of his first monograph, published in 1978 with the title Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," invoked the Symbolist tradition of using the poor, the ethnic, the racial underclass as its subject. In that work Sollors represented Jones/Baraka as a "black Baudelaire" using modernist literary technique to engage matters of racial identity. The book oriented Sollors's career towards what he then rightly considered to be an undervalued relationship between modernist aesthetics and sociological categories of ethnicity and race. Over several decades of writing, the former came to trouble the latter. While explaining the term "ethnicity" in a later essay, Sollors distinguished between a medieval "ethnic" past and modernist dissociation from it. More recently, Sollors stressed in an introduction to Dumas' novel Georges that unlike Dumas' contemporary readers, "modern" readers would require footnotes to explain certain 19th century allusions. Time, subjectivity, irony, society, interpretation, reception: each seems to inflect "modernism" in a different way. They also conflict with one another, leaving many questions unresolved. Was modernism an [End Page 118] anti-ethnic and anti-racial force? Had modernism disrupted the recovery of ethnic history or made it possible? Ethnic Modernism engages the opportunity to follow these matters which had come to resemble traffic jams. There is a powerful dynamic at work in the title Ethnic Modernism insofar as the first term represents the principal avenue of his career and the second resembles an unpaved and neglected side street. Beginning with the book's introductory essay, Sollors stresses the simple but important distinction between the standard definition of modernity as "sociological and technological developments" and the "aesthetic movements" of modernism. (10) This distinction does not aim to merely invert cause (modernity) and effect (modernism); rather, Sollors uses examples of mass transit to connect the chapters, forming a grid, as it were, of recurring and interlocking points. The book's narrative will often turn on these points and move the work in a new direction. The setting is a large city. It is any and every city. Stein's Lena rides hopelessly on a streetcar, Saroyan's narrator observes morbid subway faces. In a short sketch by Mary Antin a streetcar conductor scolds two littering Italian children. Faulkner's narration in The Sound and the Fury becomes a "stream of consciousness trolley" (122) and "transport" becomes a trope for the neo-mystical modernism of Jean Toomer's prose. The examples are pervasive. Henry Roth, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, and Leo Szilard are also invoked, to name only a few of the ethnic modernists who turned the "streetcar settings" of modernity into aesthetic boundary-crossing. But where the aesthetics of an early ethnic modernism hoped that modernity could be turned against itself, the technologies of modernity eventually prevail by reinforcing segregation, internment, and imprisonment. It is truly a binary relationship, in the literal sense of the word, which means a pair of railway tracks, on which pre-WWI modernism and modernity travel towards an eventual Cold War collision. The book's second chapter concludes with Sollors's assessment that Gertrude Stein "had set up a model...