American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.

Whitfield, Stephen J.

American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, by Alan M. Wald. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 2012, xx, 412 pp. $45.00 US (cloth).

The completion of Alan M. Wald's trilogy on American Communist and pro-Communist writers, spanning the onset of the Great Depression to the cusp of the radical revival of the 1960s, is destined to stir a mixed reaction. No scholar of far-left novelists and poets has ever been more assiduous in tracking down how they addressed the crisis of capitalism; the threat of Fascism and Nazism; the imposition of a second Red Scare; and the persistent inequalities of class, race and gender. Wald teaches in a department of English. But so sure is his grasp of the politics of these three decades (1929-59) that he could easily be mistaken for a historian rather than a literary scholar. Following in the wake of Exiles from a Future Time (Chapel Hill, 2001) and of Trinity of Passion (Chapel Hill, 2007), American Night displays so masterly a command of its subject that virtually all previous explorations of radical exotica, especially in its Stalinist or Stalinoid versions, may come to look superficial (except for the almost half-dozen books that Wald himself has produced before tackling the trilogy).

Any other scholar might alarm his readers, so tenacious is Wald's pursuit of obscure writings. Not only does he confirm their provenance (along with Party names, pseudonyms and noms deplume); he also records the marriages and liaisons that might illumine characterizations in the kind of fiction that is otherwise consigned to oblivion. So obsessive a researcher risks coming across as unhinged. But Wald has a knack for making these "pro-Communists" engaged in an honorable struggle, as they grapple with the social pressures and moral challenges of the era of totalitarianism. He invests with Marxist sympathy the successes and failures he profiles, as well as the books he limns for political meaning and aesthetic advances. He is fully in control of his material. American Night also happens to demonstrate an admirable capacity for critical detachment and subtlety, which were not consistently evident in Wald's previous work.

It may therefore seem churlish to wonder about the ultimate scholarly achievement of this study of the period that Wald labels "late antifascism." The very meticulousness of his approach in a subfield he dominates, the definitiveness of a volume that makes pointless further studies of many figures treated in American Night, cannot stifle doubts about its value, however. One worrisome feature is a tendency to overstate the importance of the writers he discusses. Given the research invested in this project, Wald's commitment to resurrecting their reputations is understandable. But too often, a sense of proportion deserts him. If Charles Humboldt is "a latent genius" (p. 83), if his criticism and poetry make him downright "charismatic" (p. 76), where should a cultural historian place a contemporary like, say, James Agee? Sarah Wright's This Child's Gonna Live was "acclaimed," Wald reports (p. 277). But it was published the same year as Portnoy's Complaint (1969), so where does that leave Philip Roth? Inflation risks getting easily punctured. Wald seems aware of this problem, resulting in inconsistency. On page 289, for example, Don Gordon is praised as "accomplished"--but on the previous page he is conceded to be, after all, only "a minor California poet." Nor is the reputation of novelist Willard Motley likely to be salvaged. As the author of We Fished All Night (1951), he picked an even worse title than Trimalchio in West Egg, which Scott Fitzgerald reluctantly rejected in favour of The Great Gatsby.

The ethos that guides American Night is indulgent: it is "far better to err by generosity toward the many neglected than by circling wagons around the iconic few" (p. 282). But what if serious literary taste requires recognition that such neglect is deserved? What if, furthermore, these novelists, poets and critics exercised appalling political judgment? They did, after all, deny the murderous character of the geopolitical enemy of their own country, sometimes long after such alibis had any credibility. It was typical of the American comrades to believe that "the leadership of the Soviet Union should be trusted to do whatever was necessary for its survival" (p. 152), Wald writes; the interests of the Kremlin were thus presumed to be identical with the masses over whom it so ruthlessly ruled.

Though writers of the stature of Richard Wright are included, few others would be worthy of the attention that American Night bestows upon them were it not for their Support of Communism. Quite a few did admittedly become ex-Communists, though ardent anti-Communism was rare. Enough did drift outside the orbit of Stalinism, however, to weaken Wald's claim that "the postwar Communist presence is central to mid-twentieth century letters" (p. xiv). On the contrary, it was quite ancillary. If that presence were central, then the politics of American letters would trend much further left than scholarly retrospective ordinarily allows for; and the night would look less dark. The radical influence that Wald highlights was often quite fleeting. American Night fails to make a convincing case that "pro-Communism" enhanced the artistic stature of any of the writers included in this book--and certainly none who remain widely known or read. He mentions early work that James Baldwin published in the New Leader, for example. But in 1947, former Mensheviks were running that magazine, which was fervently anti-Communist, a stance that collides with Wald's argument for the inescapable influence of the CPUSA and its sympathizers.

When he sets his mind to it, Wald is superb in analyzing serious fiction; check out his comparison of Wright's Native Son to Albert Camus' The Stranger (pp. 161-62). But only rarely does American Night rate the literary left against canonical figures, as though its author were aware of the threat that such comparisons might pose to the rationale of his book. One consequence is eccentricity of judgment, as when he calls the poetry of Thomas McGrath and the fiction of Carlos Bulosan (the author of the unfinished The Cry and the Dedication) the "artistic equal" of Invisible Man (1952). Unlike Ralph Ellison, Wald argues, such progressives merit praise for having dissented from the "commodity culture and world economic expansionism" of the United States (p. 304). But because American Night stops its account early in the Cold War, Wald misses a historical irony. Experiencing the chronic shortages and glum austerity of Communist rule, the masses for which Marxism professed to speak would soon make clear their preference for a significantly higher standard of living that the "consumers' republic" delivered.

Stephen J. Whitfield

Brandeis University