Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s

1. “Leftward Ho!”: Migrations of Writers, Critics, and Magazines in the 1930s

1 “Leftward, Ho!” Migrations of Writers, Critics, and Magazines in the 1930s There is much excitement in this country today about the increasing radicalization of the American intellectual. V. F. Calverton, 1932 — [Writers now show] increasing anxiety . . . [and] determination to be on one side or other of the fence, not sitting on it. . . . To join no party seems, now, a sign of weakmindedness. Frank Chapman, 1936 — LITERARY CONVERTS IN THE EARLY THIRTIES By all accounts, the 1930s were tumultuous years for writers—angry, hopeful ,confused,hard-up,disillusioning years—but most of all social:writers formed groups,signed petitions,attended meetings,made speeches, marched in rallies,started little magazines,responded to surveys and symposia in literary magazines, criticized other writers’ responses. And the direction of this socializing—so different from the sense of isolation typically imputed to the 1920s1 —was political:“The atmosphere of American literature became more political than at any time in its history,” write William Phillips and Philip Rahv, who, as editors of Partisan Review in the later 1930s, had much to do with that politicizing.2 More specifically, writers went left, toward communism, a few joining the Party, many more becoming fellow travelers: sympathizers of the Soviet Union, joiners of the Party’s many front groups in America, readers of and contributors to its official literary magazine, New Masses, and a host of evanescent leftist mags. The catalyst of this leftward migration in the early thirties was the Depression. To be sure,a small circle of writers—John Dos Passos,John Howard Law- 10 Chapter 1 son, Mike Gold, Joseph Freeman, and a few others—continued the leftist literary agitation of The Liberator and Masses of the war years into the 1920s with the formation of New Masses in 1926 and in the New Playwrights Theatre the following year. The Sacco and Vanzetti executions of 1927, moreover, were an international cause célèbre and a politicizing event for writers like Edna Millay and Katherine Anne Porter. But not until the Depression had really taken hold in late 1930 and 1931—when, as Edmund Wilson wrote, there was “no sign of any political leadership which will be able to pull us out . . . no sign of a [Teddy] Roosevelt or a [Woodrow] Wilson to revive our political vision”—did writers like Wilson , who previously had been tepidly liberal or apolitical, conclude that “what has broken down, in the course of one catastrophic year, is not simply the machinery of representative government but the capitalist system itself”—just as Marx had predicted it would.3 Two Exemplars Wilson’s essay containing these passages, “An Appeal to Progressives,” is a seminal document in the psychological conversion of writers to radicalism, and it deserves close scrutiny. Its venue, The New Republic, had long been the bastion of progressivist liberalism under its late editor, Herbert Croly. But with Croly’s death in 1930 and the Depression’s worsening, the remaining editors, including Wilson, were moving the magazine’s position far beyond liberalism.4 In addressing the typical reader of The New Republic , “the contemporary progressive,”Wilson’s tone is restrained and rational , avoiding militancy and assuming an almost professorial formality in his rhetorical questions: “May we not assume . . . ,” “It may be true that . . . ,” “Doesn’t this program today seem rather inadequate?” His argument unfolds logically, but with increasing force. First, amidst this present crisis, liberalism is no longer a viable political position:“It seems to me impossible today for people of Herbert Croly’s general aims and convictions to continue to believe in the salvation of our society by the gradual and natural approximation to socialism which he himself called progressivism , but which has more generally come to be known as liberalism. . . . [It] has not [brought on socialism or] been able to prevent a national economic disaster of proportions which neither capitalists nor liberals foresaw and which they both now [are] . . . unable to explain” (521–22). Wilson then presents his key surmise: that the Depression marks the breakdown of capitalism and “one of the turning-points in our history” (524). “[I]t may be true that with the present breakdown, we have come to the end “Leftward,Ho!” 11 of something, and that we are ready to start on a different tack” (529–30). This new tack is a planned society on the model of Russia.As will be developed below, Russia in the early thirties—the...