Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade.

Frank, David

Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press 2007)

THE BOOK BEGINS with two epigraphs, one from the poet Edwin Rolfe: "I speak to you, Madrid, as lover, husband, son/ Accept this human trinity of passion," and another from the actor Ossie Davis: "I slammed the door of the tabernacle in His face and went in search of another God." (vii) The words suggest the intensity of passion among the small legion of cultural activists who participated in a world of political and cultural commitments in the middle decades of the 20th century. This volume is the second in an overlapping trilogy that started with Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (2002). In this equally impressive though somewhat more specialized second volume, Alan Wald explores the period between the late 1930s and the aftermath of the Second World War. Still to come is a sequel on the era of the Cold War and the transition to a New Left. Although the volumes are not strictly limited by chronological period, in this middle volume the animating ideals of anti-fascism provide a meaningful unifying theme for assessing the literary left. Passions are never simple, however, and Wald shows too that within the larger consensus there were unresolved tensions and contradictions that found expression in the life and work of his subjects.

Like its predecessor, this study succeeds as a series of interwoven accounts of individual writers, usually three or four in each chapter, grouped around the variety of poles of attraction within and around the American Communist movement. Always alert to the particularity of experience and conditions of cultural production, Wald sheds new light on the work of well-known writers while also introducing dozens of less familiar names.

Consider, for instance, the case of Leonard Zinberg, who also published long afterwards as Ed Lacy--"a secular Jew, a former Communist, and a proletarian writer turned pulp writer extraordinaire," (4) or Aaron Kramer, who started a lifetime of writing poetry when he was in public school in the Bronx, inspired by his African American teacher Pearl Bynoe for whom he later established a student prize. There is also considerable new research on the fate of authors who disappeared from literary history with painful rapidity, such as Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was acclaimed as an instant classic in the 1930s and Lauren Gilfillan, whose I Went to Pit College was a bestseller throughout the decade. Wald's discussion of fictional heroes of the Spanish Civil War takes place within the shadow of Ernest Hemingway's Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), but here we meet a number of more problematic protagonists created by novelists Alvah Bessie, William Herrick, and Milton Wolff.

Meanwhile, when anti-fascist writers confronted the German "burden of guilt" arising from the Second World War, some authors were tempted to produce revenge fantasies rooted in their own racialized assumptions while "others continued to articulate an ideal of class solidarity even under extreme circumstances.

For novelists of the Popular Front era, one of the most glaring contradictions was the push to suspend the left's well-established anti-racist politics in favour of maintaining a wartime consensus of national unity. Wald notes that this default was powerfully challenged by Black novelists such as William Attaway and John Oliver Killens and especially Chester Himes, author of If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947). Himes was convinced that a "Double V" victory over world fascism must include the defeat of its domestic variation within American society: "How can we participate in this greater war without giving the same effort to our home fight against our native enemies?" (66) The tensions were especially visible in literary treatments of the 1943 urban uprisings in Harlem, Detroit, and Los Angeles, which were set off by incidents of domestic racism; for the mainstream left, however, the more palatable reading was provided in Benjamin Appel's The Dark Stain (1943), which attributed the riots to the subversive activities of fascist fifth columnists. Nonetheless, the African-American novelists were not entirely isolated, for Jewish-American writers readily assailed anti-black racism as a surrogate for antisemitism, which itself became a growing concern at the end of the war. Howard Fast, for instance, had the inspiration for writing his hugely popular novel about Black Reconstruction, Freedom Road (1944), while reading reports on the extermination of European Jews and working in the Office of Wartime Information on a plan for desegregation of the armed services.

The most general issue for the literary left was one of aesthetic and political strategy, a theme reflected in the experience of Ann Petry, whose novel, The Street (1946), dramatized the contemporary struggles of a single mother in Harlem. Petry had worked for the People's Voice, an African American newspaper founded in Harlem in 1942 by Adam Clayton Powell, who worked closely with a local, often Communist, left that shared similar class-based anti-racist and anti-fascist politics. Petry wrote the novel out of her experience as a reporter and activist, and it was praised on the left as a work of social criticism; but for some critics the fact that the novel had a tragic outcome rather than a message of interracial class solidarity was a shortcoming. Petry stood her ground, arguing that the novelist should not be a "pamphleteer" or a "romanticist." In doing so, Wald writes, she posed the classic dilemma for writers on the left who wish to avoid "the pitfalls of reductive characterizations and the interpolation of idealized solutions." (127) Petry did not stop writing, though much of her later work was in the form of popular fiction for young adults. But Wald also notes that a subsequent novel, The Narrows (1953), "would be a monumental work that reconfigured the issues of race, gender, and Cold War repression on a new and striking plane." (135)

The confused reception of Petry was not unique, for it occurred at a time when the left was actively debating the relationship of art and politics in essays such as Albert Maltz's "What Shall We Ask of Writers?" and Mike Gold's rejoinder, "The Road to Retreat." Another writer who at this time was also confronting the dilemma of how to produce meaningful content in a satisfying form was the struggling Marxist playwright Arthur Miller, whose experience merits a separate chapter. Wald questions the lately fashionable view that Miller was neither a Communist nor a socialist and situates him close to the centre of Communist-led cultural life at the end of the war. He does this in part by identifying Miller, under the name Matt Wayne, as the drama editor of New Masses for something more than a year in 1945-46. Miller's own memoirs are imprecise on such matters (and his biographers have not been equipped to pursue the question), but Wald presents strong circumstantial evidence and the oral testimony of other editors to support his conclusion. His striking observation is that the Arthur Miller of the soon-to-be written All My Sons and Death of a Salesman emerged from a year when he wrestled weekly in the pages of New Masses with the problems of political and aesthetic authenticity in writing for the stage.

Readers of this volume will come away with lists of new titles to read or older ones to revisit, and Wald makes it possible for us to understand this work as part of a larger tradition rather than a series of literary anomalies. Wald keeps the writers front and centre and reminds us that they wrote out of a vigorous response to existing social conditions and a compelling belief that a different world was possible. They shared, like the subjects of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1999), in a broad consensus in which anti-fascism was for a time the most visible and urgent instrument of their passion for social justice, Wald also forces us to set aside the notion that writers on the left were naive or unsophisticated in their political views and argues that the most uncompromising writers on the literary left exposed a "pattern of evasions" that characterized the era of the Popular Front and perhaps even ill-prepared many of them for what was to come at the end of the war. One way or another, the very intensity of their craft forced writers to come to grips with the human implications of social change and political engagement. As Wald also shows, the literary left shared more than a fractious frailty but participated in what one of the writers discussed in the previous volume, Meridel Le Sueur, called a "communal sensibility"--an irreducible common ethic which in turn influenced their art in the same direction. They did not always succeed, but one comes away from this latest installment in Wald's exploration of the literary left with an enlarged sense of the context and relevance of their ambition.

DAVID FRANK

University of New Brunswick