In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion The Sense of an Ending THE AFTERLIFE OF LITERARY COMMUNISM It would be simpler if the end of the Communist literary tradition happened quickly, if the demise of the authority of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party over culture suddenly gave rise to liberating impulses producing a massive prison break, a cultural Prague Spring. Yet the afterlife of Literary Communism began much earlier than 1956 and goes on and on; one still does not have the sense of an ending.The 1930s set the stage for intersections of social realism and the avant-garde, while the postwar years produced the new contingency and then Communist literary modernism. The calamity of 1956 was as much a corroboration as an eye-opener, and its cultural ramifications were repeated in miniature in 1960–61 for the small circle of cultural workers still close to the Party. For any remaining political adherents among writers, the last straws were in 1968 and 1989. But the political fortunes of the Soviet Union and similar systems had a lessening significance for writers in the United States long before then; the cultural workers were moved by something that went deeper than Stalinism. Most attempts to revisit Left literature in the years after the high Cold War have tended to wax nostalgic chiefly about the 1930s achievement; there was a comparatively superficial treatment of the evolution of the Communist cultural presence in the 1940s, and even scholars sympathetic to Marxism saw the 1950s as mainly “The Time of the Toad,” focusing on aspects of blacklisting and persecution.1 The rise of the 1960s New Left escalated historical and biographical interest in radical intellectuals, but these, once again, were associated mainly with the Great Depression. The method of recoupment was to view cultural workers through presentist glasses: Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur as feminist icons, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes as precursors of the Black Arts movement, and the Popular Front as the champion of 293 Conclusion multiculturalism and the political resistance found in popular and even mass culture. The decline of the New Left social movements in the 1970s spawned a spectacular increase in Marxist cultural theory, but the outstanding new scholars (none more brilliant than Fredric Jameson) had onlya minor interest in the U.S. Communist legacy, and almost none addressed the literary criticism produced by the immediate postwar Left. This treatment of the 1940s–1950s Communist presence was poor preparation for what occurred next. In literary history, as in personal life, the repressed tends to return. Even as the Communist movement died, an outpouring of novels, poems, plays, films, and autobiographies emerged in the second half of the twentieth century with reference to the postwar Communist past; they have provided a continual flow within the larger culture to this day that is likely to persist.This body of writing began as the slender but powerful and expanding trend that expressed manyof thevirtues pioneered in the 1930s and revitalized through the newcontingencyand Communist literary modernism. At first there was a sequence of unusual works of literature starting in the late 1950s by onetime members of the Communist Party: Warren Miller’s The Cool World (1959), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Clancy Sigal’s Going Away (1961), Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle (1961), John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), Jose Yglesias’s A Wake in Ybor City (1963), Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Lillian Hellman’s An Unfinished Woman (1969), and Helen Yglesias’s How She Died (1973), along with the works of Bert and Katya Gilden and John Sanford. A somewhat younger generation, personally familiar with Communists, would diversely carry on this tradition through novels such as Leo Litwack’s Waiting for the News (1969), Lawrence Bush’s Bessie (1983), Meredith Tax’s Union Square (1988), Brian Morton’s The Dylanist (1991), and Paul Levitt’s Dark Matters (2004). Then the quality of the tradition escalated with the publication of several books coming from other nations but widely discussed in the United States, such as the very early novels of the still-Leninist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Joke (1964) by Milan Kundera, followed by other Kundera books. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook drew upon the 1956 political crisis over “deStalinization ” of the British Communist Party as the setting for the emotional finale of the female protagonist’s love affair with an expatriate U.S. radical, modeled on former Communist Clarence (“Clancy”) Sigal (b...

Share