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

5. Lonely Crusaders, Part I

Chapter Five Lonely Crusaders, Part I THE GREAT OUTSIDER Life on the postwar Left for African American writers was overflowing with exiles among exiles.Willard Motley (1909–65), after publishing We Fished All Night (1951), his novel of Progressives,Communists, and the labor movement in late 1940s Chicago, withdrew to Mexico for the remainder of his life. James Baldwin, whose casual associations with Communism were evidenced in 1937 and 1946, took off for Paris and London in 1948, from where he published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). William Gardner Smith (1927– 74), a student of Communist philosopher Barrows Dunham (1905–95) and friend of Trotskyist C. L. R. James (1901–89), permanently quit the United States for Paris in 1951 after publishing his second radical novel, Angerat Innocence (1949). Richard Wright (1908–60) had moved there in 1947, and Chester Himes (1909–84) would arrive in 1953, as would Richard Gibson (b. 1931) in 1954. Ann Petry, veteran of a decade of Harlem activism in association with the Communist movement, withdrew to her hometown of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1947 to nurse her masterpiece of the underside of a Consumers ’ Republic, The Narrows. Paule Marshall (born Valena Pauline Burke, 1929) was the daughter of recent emigrants from Barbados and grew up in a close-knit West Indian community in New York that distinctively marked her literary imagination. Three African American writers of the Depression generation—Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison (1914–94), and Chester Himes—were particularly seared by their itinerary of gravitation toward and their revulsion against the Communist movement.1 Their initial esteem for the commitment of Communist militants to racial equality was spectacularly eroded by the Communist Party’s accommodation to the shifting needs of the Soviet regime. By the 151 Lonely Crusaders, Part I postwar years, the trio revisited the anguish of their Communist autobiographies in a weirdly symbolic triptych—The Lonely Crusade (1947), Invisible Man (1952), and The Outsider (1953). Fusing metonymic action with personal and political fixations, these three novels, depicting Black men repudiating the Party as an organization and defying the boundaries of Communist propriety in emotional and sexual candor, made an indelible contribution to the postwar renovation of the Black protest tradition. Ellison, more specifically, produced a work that proved serviceable to the post hoc construction of the Cold War liberal narrative in the novel. None, however, were intended to be anti-Communist, let alone anti-Marxist, novels at their inceptions. On the contrary, the documented record suggests that the three authors’ conspicuous postwardisenchantment with Communist Party policies and political leaders was focused on the United States. All three were relatively slow in expressing politics hostile to Stalin’s rule or repudiating the Soviet Union as a tyrannical state. Wright was well disposed to a variety of Marxism until the end of his life. As scholar Barbara Foley argues in her unique study of the drafts of Invisible Man, Ellison’s novel ought to be treated “from the standpoint of the many decisions that went into its making rather than as the product that resulted from those decisions, seemingly inevitable once enclosed between covers.” She rejects the “circular practice” of reading such texts (and lives) through “the palimpsest supplied by Ellison’s writings after 1952 and, more generally, by the cold war narrative that abridgingly shapes most discussions of American writers”; in contrast, one should “read forward to Invisible Man” from multiple drafts, outlines, and notes.2 This is a method that ought to be applied to the entire generation of writers who separated from Communism in these years. To parse the political evolution of Wright, Ellison, and Himes, one must note the uncomfortable truth that the zealous (and disgraceful) 1939–41 Communist Party policy in support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact was in theireyes a step forward.This break with Popular Front antifascism caused a reshuffling of political priorities that promised an aggressive campaign placing Black rights on center stage. All three were politically energized as never before and perhaps never again. Wright and Ellison sneered at alleged backsliders like Granville Hicks, who resigned from the Party at news of the pact, and cheered what they judged to be a Nazi onslaught to break the back of the British Empire.3 Then all was altered by the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war and its growing demand for an alliance with the United States. By 1942, Wright and the others had arrived at a dissident...