American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

A Note on Methodology

A Note on Methodology This book was written with the conviction that postwar U.S. literature, while the focus of several acute studies, remains an era in search of a critic. The method of American Night follows an observation of Walter Benjamin’s: “To write history is to give the dates a physiognomy.”1 Aiming to craft a “humanscape ” of several generations of Left writers, I have also tried to respond to an intellectual challenge posed by Theodor Adorno: “Even the biographical individual is a social category. It can only be defined in a living context together with others; it is this context that shapes its social character and only in this context does an individual acquire meaning within given social conditions .”2 The Marxist poet Thomas McGrath, from whose long poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend this book derives its title, put it this way: “All of us live twice at the same time—once uniquely and once representatively. I am interested in those moments when my unique personal life intersects with something bigger.”3 In fiction even more than in poetry, the street runs both ways. One cannot help but look for clues to illuminate the lives that dreamed the sometimes fantastic narratives of Kenneth Fearing, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Abraham Polonsky, Jo Sinclair,Carlos Bulosan, and others.Theory remains indispensable in grasping the workings of artistic form, yet there is a power in the most affecting components of the literary legacy of the Left that begs to be considered against a flesh-and-bone dimension of human existence and historical chronology. Moreover, events of the postwar era make up a trauma that ought to be returned to critical discussion; a critic must sometimes employ a variety of talk therapy, one exploring the writer’s emotional architecture. A particular effort has been devoted to tracing the networks of association—friends, lovers, comrades—that ran through the pro-Communist literary milieu. Details about intimate affairs (alcoholism, infidelity) are incorporated not to censure or scandalize but to gain insight 320 A Note on Methodology into the actual culture of the day. A particular point about private life as a matrix of the literary imagination must be made even as one is mindful of a major pitfall of biography—the reduction of an author’s ideas to his or her idiosyncratic psychology, an outgrowth of some peculiaraspect of thewriter’s personal development. There were hundreds of cultural workers who lived and worked in this complex postwar era. Some dwelled in the literary past, and others wrote in an experimental and explorational spirit that nonetheless linked back to a preceding tradition forged in the Depression by pro-Communists in dialogue with modernism, such as John Dos Passos, Henry Roth, Muriel Rukeyser, Nathanael West, and the Dynamo poets. Given that American Night aspires to rethink from innovative slants the obfuscations of 1940s–1950s converso culture, there has been little room to simultaneously reiterate some of the customary iconic figures and episodes of the Cold War cultural Left. Nor could the book touch on every sphere of cultural practice ordispute. Students of the era should already be familiar with, or can readily access information about, emblematical events that include the 1946 testimony of the Hollywood Ten, Norman Mailer breaking ranks with the pro-Communist Left at the 1949 Waldorf World Peace Conference, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman defying the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Langston Hughes’s 1953 arrangement with the same committee to cooperate but not to inform on any individuals, the controversy over the 1954 film The Salt of the Earth, and Arthur Miller’s refusal to name names in 1956 and 1957.4 American Night is designed to offera map to help us see, locate, and analyze a much larger number of radical writers than these celebrity ones. A glance at the list of photo illustrations for American Night will provide quick orientation to the breadth of the study, consistent with the first two volumes. There is a special exertion to understand cultural workers who make up a substratum or even a rank and file, without denying that there were well-known Left authors or superiorartistic achievements. Among postwar writings of the Left selected for close readings, I say less about those already in the limelight— The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Crucible (1953), The Dollmaker (1954), A Raisin in the Sun (1959)—than about those works that are neglected...