Searching for Lefty

Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. By Alan Wald. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

In his important book American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920–1950 (2003), the cultural critic Bram Dijkstra tells the story of a 1937 painting by William Gropper entitled "The Hunt." In 1965, the painting had been used by the editors of Country Beautiful to illustrate the pleasures of hunting in a celebratory book, The Beauty of America in Great American Art. Attached to it were lines by an American poet, Richard Burton: "The way ran under boughs of checkered green/Where live things stirred." Looked at closely, however, the painting—which shows four dominating, armed, and frightening men and two dogs in a foreground filled with barren trees and a background of threatening black hills—can be seen to represent a slave hunt. The slave, a woman carrying a child, appears distantly toward the edge of a white field, where she is about to be trapped. Dijkstra's point is that by the mid-1960s, viewers, including most critics, editors, and the painting's then owner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had lost the ability to "read" the visual text—ironic and brutal—it presented. Not that the subject was a big secret: when the Met bought the painting, the New York Herald-Tribune quoted Gropper's comment that he "felt the irony of the hunt—the sportsman's equal pleasure in hunting game and hunting Negroes—and I decided to commit it to paint" (qtd. in Dijkstra,140–42).

This episode in cultural amnesia may be taken to represent the fundamental problem that Alan Wald addresses in Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. How is it possible to recover the cultural world in which writers of the Left in the 1930s and beyond had their being and created their work? Indeed, is it possible to overcome a cultural distance that cannot be measured merely by the 60 some years that separate us from the time of Depression, Fascism, and the Communist-led social movements of the period? How does one move past—or through—the Cold War critical mentality that continues to present "Communist poetry" as an oxymoron, that leads our students to disbelieve that anyone could voluntarily affiliate with the party, that conditions most anthologies and courses to fill the literary "void" between T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1925) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) with, at best, a few random pieces by John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and Allen Tate?

Wald is not, of course, the first to enter these lists. Certainly since the 1960s there have been somewhat fragmentary efforts to revive the artistic work of the Left in the visual arts, fiction, and even occasionally in poetry. The most notable previous efforts in regard to the last are those of Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (1989) and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001). It is instructive to compare Wald's approach with Nelson's in Repression and Recovery. The plates in both books, in fact, tell a significant story: the 37 in Exiles are vivid portraits almost all in the traditional head and upper body mode. The 59 in Repression and Recovery include eight striking color images of book and magazine covers; most of the remaining 51 black and white plates are also covers, but they include illustrations as well as full pages containing poems from the New Masses, the Daily Worker, and elsewhere. Wald's plates, that is, represent a gallery of individual writers active in the Communist movement of the 1930s; Nelson's represent the connections between two aesthetic modes—that of modernist design and typography and forms of Left literary creation. Nelson is more concerned to problematize the critical discourse, the aesthetic decisions that have helped marginalize the rich diversity of work...