Notes
Notes PREFACE 1. Terms such as “memory crisis,” “memory loss,” and “enforced forgetting” are adapted from the study of cultural memory. For a sustained overview and influential interpretation of these concepts, see Anne Whitehead’s Memory (London: Routledge, 2008) and Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). Of course, a central place in any consideration of memory must go to Paul Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 2. My general viewof the aims of twentieth-century socialism follows the argument of Geoff Eley in Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford, 2002), in the sense that its ideal was of “making democracy social” (13). 3. For a compelling analysis of the impact of the Khrushchev Revelations on the Communist Party, see Maurice Isserman, “The Collapse of the Communist Party,” If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 1–34. 4. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 229. 5. The expression “A Consumers’ Republic” is from Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2003). Cohen’s book is about neither imaginative literature nor the Left, but her investigation is important to accentuate that the postwar crisis came to a head within a context of greatly intensified consumerism. 6. The term “Cultural Cold War” usually refers specifically to the collaboration between the CIA and Cold War liberals to combat fellow travelers and European “neutralists .” The literature about this is endless, and I have addressed some of the issues in The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 7. In a recent book, Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of 326 Notes to Pages xvii–8 the Early Cold War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), Arthur Redding proposes the expression “fugitive culture” to address analogous artistic concerns. He characterizes fugitive culture as follows: “in part complicit but largely and in complex ways resistant, emerg[ing] as various ‘popular front’ writers and activists fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new order” (4). To capture another facet of multilayered literary representation, Lillian Hellman makes thought-provoking use of the artistic term “pentimento,” the alteration of a painting, in her 1973 autobiography, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). I prefer the phrase “converso culture” as more accurately conveying the ambiguities of the enforced forgetting and memory crisis central to American Night, but no term will be entirely satisfactory. 8. Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004). 9. See, for example, Jack B. Tenney, Red Fascism: Boring from Within by the Subversive Forces of Communism (Los Angeles: Federal Printing, 1947). Many of the writers discussed in American Night are cited in this volume. INTRODUCTION 1. Howard Fast, “An Epitaph for Sidney,” Departure and Other Stories (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1949), 76. 2. Morris U. Schappes, “Commentary on ‘An Epitaph for Sidney,’” Jewish Life, February 1949, 25–27. Schappes is critical of the story mainly because of its thin treatment of Jewish identity; Sidney sees himself as Jewish only in relation to anti-Semitism. Schappes’s reader’s report for the magazine urged that the story not be published and pointed to the undistinguished prose style and absence of Sidney’s distinctive personal traits as well. See Jewish Life Manuscript Report for “An Epitaph for Sidney,” box 25, folder 19, Papers of Morris U. Schappes, Tamiment Library, New York University. 3. Fast, “An Epitaph for Sidney,” 60. 4. Ibid., 61. Current estimates for deaths occurring in World War II are now double this number. 5. Ibid., 62. 6. Ibid., 59. 7. Ibid., 71. 8. Ibid., 57. 9. Ibid., 70. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 73. 12. Ibid., 74. 13. In 1932, William Z. Foster, in the post of Party chairman, published the book Toward Soviet America (New York: International Publishers, 1932), the title of which invokes the Communist aspiration of the time. In April 1935, the Communist-led League of American Writers was formed to counteract the sectarianism of the Party- [3.15.221.136] Project...
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