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“Smashing Cantatas” and “Looking Glass Pitchers” The Impossible Location of Proletarian Literature lawrence hanley Perhaps one of the most infamous slogans to ring out in the “literary class wars” of the early 1930s was the one pronounced by Jack Conroy at the 1935 American Writers’ Congress: “We prefer crude vigor to polished banality ” (146). It would be easy to write off Conroy’s motto as a prime example of the “cultural Know-Nothingism” (Howe 277) of proletarian writers, especially in light of the visceral populism of their chief promoter and cultural broker, Mike Gold. Yet even “Know-Nothingism” is a rhetorical strategy, and Conroy’s targets included not just “decadent” bourgeois writers of the kind vilified by Gold in his notorious 1930 review, “Wilder—Prophet of the Genteel Christ,” but also politically sympathetic, fellow-traveling writers in attendance at the Writers’ Congress. In other words, Conroy’s slogan belongs less to a history of American literary innocence, and ignorance, than to a particular conflict on the cultural Left in the early 1930s between two different kinds of cultural capital: one, represented by Conroy and young working-class writers like those he published in The Anvil, his magazine of proletarian fiction, that depended on the conversion of subaltern experience into cultural authority; and another cultural capital, represented by defectors from the middle class like John Dos Passos, Granville Hicks, and Kenneth Burke, that secured its cultural authority in the familiar, traditional currencies of education, social networks, and credentialed expertise. The decade of the ’30s is unique in American literary history because it witnessed a momentary, but broad and decisive shift in the reigning economies of literary value and cultural capital formation. Proletarian writers in the early ’30s, with limited or low-status schooling (at the City College of New York or midwestern state colleges, for instance) and zero social capital, could gain access to the dominant literary system on the basis of authentic working-class experience             and its representation. Lacking such credentials of “authenticity,” established writers, on the other hand, introduced “commitment” and “ideology” to the critical lexicon as a way to mediate the discrepancies between class position and involvement in left-wing cultural politics.1 “Today the bourgeois writer and the vanguard of the proletariat,” a fellowtraveling Edmund Wilson wrote of the controversies surrounding proletarian literature in 1933, “can meet on the basis of the classless Marxist culture—which is accessible to both” (44). Indeed, for a brief historical moment, a shared commitment to radical politics joined working-class and established writers together in a “great alliance,” as advertisements for the 1935 American Writers’ Congress called it. If “proletarian literature” names anything, then, it signifies not so much a stable body of texts, motifs, or writers, but this awkward cultural space, underwritten institutionally and ideologically by the Communist Party, but most fundamentally structured by conflicts about and around the relations between class position, literary production, and cultural capital. Revisionist critics have recently begun to assemble a mass of sophisticated readings of proletarian fiction and poetry, much of it inspired by feminism (Rabinowitz, Coiner), cultural studies (Nelson), and reappraisals of the Communist Party (Foley), but these revisionists have largely avoided the contradictions that plagued “proletarian literature” as a cultural formation. At one level, these contradictory dispositions of cultural capital revolved around the circulation of proletarian writing: what did it mean, as Louis Adamic, for instance, asked in an infamous 1935 Scribner’s article, “What the Proletarian Reads,” that texts written by and for the working class were read and valued by a middle-class literary establishment ? Alternatively, as Douglas Wixson’s recent biography of Jack Conroy exhaustively documents, these contradictions involved the social and cultural positions of working-class writers themselves: what was the relationship between the terms “working-class” and “writer” in a system of authorship and value constructed by and for the middle class? Proletarian novels, for example, narrated strikes, political conversions, and bottom dog realities, but they just as insistently and consistently narrated their own ambiguous cultural situations. In my argument , these allegories of class and culture belied the optimism, or “revolutionary romance,” often attributed to proletarian fiction; more usually, even when embedded in “revolutionary romances,” these allegories narrated the impossible location of working-class literature within the contemporary, bourgeois cultural field. William Saroyan’s short story, “Prelude to an American Symphony,” published in the New Masses in October 1934, shortly after the release of his critically acclaimed The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, provides a...

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