Joseph A. Kalar: Poet of Protest (review)

Reviews 245 and its machinations at the center of every administration since 1945 have shown us that the most dangerous inteUettuals neva rebeUed at aU, never seriously doubted the equation of proUferating weapons with the boom economy and perpttuation of the American Way. More Starbuck or Stubb than Ishmael, they are opportunists, cynics or moral cowards, wülfuUy blind to events around them. Like Ahab's officas, they have monitored the steady and pahaps irreversible momentum toward annihUation. Their great inteUectual crime, apart from compUrity , has been their skiUful attack on any otha alternatives as Soviet-inspired or dominated. "Totalitarianism," from that day to this, has been their deus ex machina. Bitta irony of ironies, the prognoses tossed around by Reagan's aides often began in the naher regions of James's own Trotskyist movement, where the inteUectual discoverers of totalitarianism first began to discova the joys of U.S. weaponry. James knew the defectors and condemned them categorically , as has Irving Howe, another Trotskyist refugee and unwitting mentor to the Right, ever since. But James and Howe seem to have been thrown off thdr guard. At least, they faUed to trace in their Uterary studies a threat more ominous than Communism in America, and certainly the Third World, has managed to wield. Wasn't it thae to find? For that matter, our own most ominously evil figures today tum out not to be Ahabs at aU. Ahab had genius, Reagan has press agents. He would remain personally mediocre even if he pressed the button. Mariner, Renegades and Castaways must also be interrogated today on its confidence in the saUors' rdation to their natural environment. James himsdf is on the side of the angds. "Nature," he says plainly, "is not a background to men's activity or something to be conquered and used," but part of him and he part of it. But what about the whale's point of view? Go to New Bedford today and look at the paintings of sea-trade disastas. They seem a terrible price paid, and by the wrong people, for a spedes of exterminsim just beginning to take off in MdvUle's time. Do we still want the Pequod to survive and rtturn to whaling? Or do we breathe a pained sigh of reüef at the removal of one more energetic kiUer? In all fairness, James was working on the bigger picture, a whole book about nineteenthcentury American Utaature, but the Feds were on his taU and he finished the closing section on Ellis Island, awaiting deportation. Thae's a funny story here and pahaps it sums everything up. James was fasdnated with America. He Uved on the bordas of Harlem, saw Richard Wright regularly, hung out at the New School with Theodor Adomo, took in stage shows at the ApoUo, and occasionaUly lectured at Columbia. He reaUy didn't want to leave. So when the government pressed him about the six-month visa he had never renewed, he wrote to Sir Anthony Eden to get a supporting later for a potential reprieve from expulsion. No, Eden wrote back poütely, he could under no circumstances treat a forced rtturn to Ha Majesty's charge as a form of deprivation. James, the keen observer of the U.S., thus remained West Indian, and British. He Uves in London today. His deprivation is that he saw closely, but not for long enough. PAUL BUHLE Joseph A. Kalar: Poet ofProtest edited by Richard G. Kalar. Blaine, Minnesota: RGK PubUcations , 1985. pp. 340. $16.95 (paper). By any measure Joseph Kalar's uterary produaion was meager. In his Ufetime (1906-1972) he pubUshed only thirty-odd poems, twenty sketches, two short stories, some book reviews, and a few pieces of Uterary critidsm. But the amazing fact is not that he wrote so Uttle but that he wrote at aU. For Kalar was an authentic American proletarian pott, a Depression-aa lumber worker whose aeative energies were sapped by twelve-hour shifts, sût days a week. StiU, Kalar managed to read books, keep up several correspondences, and, most impressively, write some of the best working class poetry of the American 1930s. Edited and pubUshed privately...