Notes
Notes Introd uction 1. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1956), pp. 283-84. 2. Lionel Trilling, "A Novel of the Thirties," in The Last Decade Essays and Reviews, by Lionel Trilling, ed. Diana Trilling (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 15-16. 3. Kazin, On Native Grounds, pp. 286-87. 4. Leslie Fiedler, Waitingfor the End (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), p. 33. 5. Modernism and realism are more closely linked than some modernist critics might like to admit. These modes and sensibilities had for some time existed side by side, mingling and mixing in curious ways that occasionally resulted in fruitful and important cross-pollination. Can one imagine, for instance, the invention of cubist collage or Duchamp's readymades without the triumph of the nineteenth-century realist aesthetics that legitimized the appropriation of gritty facts from the world in order to convert them almost unmediated into works of art? 6. James T. Farrell to editors, dated 6 July 1978. 7. Henry Roth's debt to Joyce in Call It Sleep is discussed intelligently in Bonnie Lyons, Henry Roth: The Man and His Work (New York, 1976). 8. Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956). Between 1900 and 1910, twenty-four were written; between 1911 and 1919, twenty-one; between 1920 and 1929, ten (not including Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer); between 1930 and 1939, seventy (including all of Farrell's work and Roth's Call It Sleep, but not Dos Passos's works); between 1940 and 1949, twenty-seven (including Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead). 9. Stephen Spender, The 30's and After (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 13. 10. Ibid., p. 14. 11. See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), chapters 8-11, for a full discussion of the (mostly) public debates. 212 Notes 12. See James Gilbert, "Literature and Revolution in the United States: The Partisan Beoieu:" Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1967), reprinted in Literature and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Walter Lacqueur and George L. Mosse (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 154-55. This actually seemed to be taking place in Russia. Witness the brilliant work of the constructivist artists and architects as well as the new experiments in theater by Meyerhold and others: and most visibly, perhaps, to Americans, the inventive filmmaking of Eisenstein, Vertov , and Dovzhenko. 13. See Edmund Wilson, "The Literary Consequences of the Crash," originally published in the 23 March 1932 issue of the New Republic. Of the crash, Wilson says, "to the writers and artists of my generation who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding-out of everything they cared about, these years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating" (reprinted in The Shores of Light [New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952], pp. 498-99). 14. Wilson, "The Literary Class War," Shores of Light, p. 539. 15. Ibid., p. 534. 16. Ibid., p. 538. 17. The attempt to attract bourgeois intellectuals by capitalizing on their modernist alienation has already been mentioned. Subsequently, there was a switch to support for and promotion of proletarian writing. Finally, in 1935, there was the concerted effort to shift to the Popular Front view. Even during the period of ultraleftism of the intellectuals between 1929 and 1934 (according to Gilbert, "Literature and Revolution," p. 157), Communists were suspicious of the intellectuals because they were not working class. Gold thought their bourgeois consciousness could be controlled, but he was wrong. 18. See Gilbert, "Literature and Revolution. H See also Christopher Lasch, "Modernism, Politics, and Philip Rahv," Partisan Review 47 (1980): 183-94, for a penetrating, often brilliant treatment of Rahv's attempt to reconcile modernism and Marxism. 19. Walter Lacqueur, "Literature and the Historian," in Literature and Politics, ed. Lacqueur and Mosse, p. 10. The same is true for visual artists. See Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). 20. See Arnold Hauser, SocialHistory ofArt, 2 vols. (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1951...
OR
