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  • Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art
  • Alan Wald (bio)

In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is “compulsive.”1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.

In 1988, the University of California at Berkeley Press published a copiously researched 400-page biography, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. This was the first endeavor to detail the intimate experiences and literary-political career of journalist and novelist Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) in North America, Europe, and Asia. The co-authors were the husband and wife team of Stephen R. MacKinnon, a well-published academic specialist in Late Imperial and twentieth-century China, and Janice R. MacKinnon, an importer of antique Chinese furniture. The MacKinnons described their labor as “basic detective work” on several continents over a period of 14 years. Such industriousness was required to reconstruct Smedley’s dispersed archive of publications in multiple venues as well as to “collect her letters, track down and interview her old friends and enemies, and scour intelligence files.” Uncommon thoroughness [End Page 368] was demanded because the subject’s life was fraught with political controversy; the authors pledged to “view Smedley from every possible perspective” (MacKinnon and MacKinnon ix).

Literary scholars are familiar with Smedley because in 1973 the Feminist Press launched a popular new edition of her 1929 proletarian feminist literary classic, Daughter of Earth. From the Afterword to this volume, as well as from reviews and academic essays, they learned that Smedley’s publishing and activist career had in point of fact commenced in the era of World War I, when she was a determined proponent of birth control and the independence of India from Great Britain. After 1920, Smedley lived in Europe and Asia until World War II, becoming famous as a sympathetic frontline journalist with Mao Zedong’s Red Army during the dramatic events preceding the Chinese Revolution. These were reported most notably in her popular work about the Sino-Japanese war, Battle Hymn of China (1943), issued by the Knopf publishing house when Smedley returned to the US. Then the Cold War erupted and Smedley faced accusations of one-time membership in the “Sorge Spy Ring” in China on behalf of the Communist International. She was soon living as a near-pariah in Oxford, England, where she died at age 58 following surgery for a duodenal ulcer.

The MacKinnons’ narrative opens with Smedley’s birth into a childhood of “miserable poverty” as the daughter of a tenant farmer in Missouri (1). They subsequently trace her travels among Western states and then her transit to California. Early in 1918, Smedley, by then a resident of New York City’s Greenwich Village, experienced two traumatic events. While engaged as a partisan in the movement of expatriate radical nationalists from India, Smedley found herself pressured into sexual intercourse by a veteran Bengali activist named Herambalal Gupta. Smedley already suffered acutely from conflicted feelings about sexuality, and the incident precipitated an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The episode became one of the most shocking and powerful scenes of her autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, where Gupta is called “Juan Diaz.”

Afterwards, Smedley made headlines when she was imprisoned under the Espionage Act. The allegation was that she accepted funds from the German government to assist her agitational work against British rule of India. But the MacKinnons treat the charges as a frame-up similar to the federal prosecution of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who received a ten-year sentence for allegedly interfering with military recruitment. Released on bail...

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