Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left: A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction by T.V. Reed (review)

A concise literary biography of “proletarian” novelist Robert Cantwell adds significantly to the revisionist studies of early and mid–twentieth-century cultural radicalism. Rather than a detailed life story, Reed’s book examines Cantwell’s literary efforts through careful analysis of his non-fiction criticism and journalism, his short stories and major novels, his later unpublished works, and subsequent lapses into apolitical and even anti-communist posturing.

Notably, Reed details Cantwell’s aesthetic theory, providing a counter-narrative to the traditional notion of the radical 1930s cultural field as a raft of simplistic formulas manufactured by Communist Party theoreticians. Despite, apparently, never joining the Communist Party, Cantwell’s brief literary career is steeped in the political and cultural debates within and around the organizational orbit of Communist Party activists, such as the editorial board of New Masses. He stalwartly aligned himself, Reed argues, with a radical, Marxist analysis of capitalism and the Communist Party’s theory and program for its overthrow.

With this affiliation in mind (and not despite it), Cantwell fashioned keen insights on the production of proletarian literature in the early 1930s. Influenced to a significant degree by the aesthetics of modernists like Henry James, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, Cantwell elevated aesthetic concerns, but within a framework of social consciousness and collective action for progressive social change on the part of working-class people. Indeed, local workplace issues find “social causation,” as Cantwell sought to describe the aesthetic effect in larger structural or global forces predicated in the logic of harmful, decaying capitalism.

Reed argues that Cantwell considered literary production as an imaginative structure comprised of often contradictory perspectives and ideologies, in which a dominant political outlook was but a single element. While Cantwell favored a distinction between art—specifically the practice and craft of artistic production—and politics, his own work, Reed shows, reflected his deliberate focus on the lives of working-class people that transformed them from passive, isolated individuals into class-conscious agents of social change.

Apart from details about Cantwell’s troubled health and relationship to the informant Whitaker Chambers, one of Reed’s most important discoveries in his study of Cantwell is the latter’s identification of a “translation of process [that] occurs in moving any conceptual system or ideological position into literary form” (163). In other words, Reed has recovered a discarded radical writer who internalized Marxian concepts into his worldview (at least at the height of his literary powers), embedded in his own personal experience as a worker and with social reality, and developed a craft that allowed him to translate that internal world onto a page in an aesthetically pleasing way. Instead of applying a universal class concept couched in Marxian theory to all workers everywhere, Reed shows how Cantwell’s fiction sought to leave “room for working class agency and for the specificity of local struggles” (78). This consideration of place adds a nuance to Cantwell’s Marxism that emerges without the theoretical architecture of thinkers like Gramsci or David Harvey, and suggests more solid, sophisticated thinking in U.S. originated Marxism than is often considered. This element deserves its own scholarly agenda for those who would follow in Reed’s footsteps.

Some dimensions of Reed’s concluding chapter, in which he makes some broad claims about how the Communist Party, its leaders, and its supporters operated ideologically and organizationally, suggests a second new line of research that needs more detailed evidence than can be provided in this case study of Cantwell. Commentary here on the Communist Party’s relationship to the Comintern and its changing and developing positions on politics in the U.S. is important, but seems intended to position the monograph’s author politically rather than adding much in a scholarly way to a literary biography of a single non–Communist Party writer.

Considering the range of Communist Party official and unofficial involvement across geography, economic sectors, social and...