Professor Alan Wald tells Graham Barnfield about the writers rediscovered after years of forensic detective work
Part of your last book Writing from the Left reads as a pledge to rediscover the lost authors of the 1940s and 1950s. How did you become interested in these writers?
My preoccupation with 'lost' leftwing authors of the 1940s and 1950s is a logical extension of my research on the 'committed' radical writers of the 1930s. Many of the best-known 'left' authors of the Depression era were, in fact, formed as writers and intellectuals in the 1920s - for example, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and Langston Hughes. Even Michael Gold and Jack Conroy served literary apprenticeships in the 1920s. This explains why I was particularly concerned in my first three books with the relationship of Marxism to Modernism, since 'High Modernism' was in full swing in the 1920s. But it wasn't very long before I was asking myself: what was the trajectory of those who were very young in the 1930s, who perhaps did not reach their stride until after World War Two? I was also struck by the fact that so many of the 'canonised' texts of 1930s, such as The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, U.S.A., Native Son, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, Waiting for Lefty, were by writers who later repudiated the particular kind of radicalism to which they adhered at the time when they produced their masterpieces. So I also began to ask myself about the cultural production - and the lives - of those who stayed true to their early convictions through the years of McCarthyite persecution. As a result of further research I began to wonder if it might be an inaccurate representation of US cultural history to focus so much on a '1930s' or 'Great Depression' radical tradition organised around a paradigm of strike novels, conversions-to-Communism novels, and so on. Would it not be more appropriate to think about a radical tradition of larger scope that perhaps expressed itself in distinct forms - and achieved its greatest notoriety - during the 1930s? What if the left tradition were more central to US culture, rather than episodic to 'protest decades' like the 1930s and 1960s? And what if 'writers on the left' were redefined to mean 'writings by leftists', regardless of genre? So I began looking at the names that I did NOT recognise in the book review sections of left publications, or from the membership lists of left cultural organisations. In particular, when I could not locate any references to them in standard literary histories and reference books, I became even more intrigued. I used 'detective' methods of trying to find out the fate of these people - rummaging through phone books in various cities, going to the physical locations of some of their books, writing personal letters to their last known addresses, and looking in the 'miscellaneous' files of the archives of the more important writers and political figures (where materials from unidentified people tends to get lumped and then overlooked). As it turned out, a surprising number of such writers were - or soon became - involved in crime/thriller/pulp/mystery writing, often marked in some fashion by the encounter with Marxism.
From what you are saying, it would appear that dozens of authors disappeared, in that their careers were cut short in the McCarthy era. How did this happen?
Certainly the McCarthy era was a factor in creating many difficulties for the survival of leftwing writers, although it is misleading to think about a substantial number of careers being 'cut short'. Publishing became harder and people switched to different genres, but there was still productivity. One important blow to the left was that the outstanding leftwing editor Angus Cameron, vice-president of Little, Brown, Inc., was forced out of his job, but Cameron then set up an independent publishing house that issued novels and other radical texts. Although books by convicted 'Hollywood Ten' member Albert Maltz were rejected by the mainstream publishers who had previously solicited his work, he kept on writing and brought them out by other means. Then there is the case of bestseller Howard Fast. Upon release from prison, for refusing to give up names, Fast established his own company, Blue Heron, which made his novel Spartacus (which he began in prison) into a bestseller. Thus I believe that literary historians who have premised their arguments on the virtual demise of the left tradition in the Cold War, or else have looked in very narrow places for what they imagine to be 'radical' texts and found very few, have been complicit in the official 'disappearance' of leftwing resistance literature in the Cold War years. Actually, I have discussed this phenomenon with many specific examples, in my introduction to the 1997 reprint of Philip Bonosky's Burning Valley. An important point to keep in mind is that the political repression in mainstream publishing was accompanied by other developments, especially mass-market action/thriller paperbacks and the rise of science fiction. Then there was the phenomenon of children's and young adult books in the areas of narratives, science, history, and so forth. Knopf, a mainstream publisher with left sympathies, created space for leftists in its children's book list, and many other publishers simply didn't ask questions about the politics of the authors when it came to young adult texts. So radicals poured into such new genres and found creative ways to express their ideas.
What was the role of the Hollywood Blacklist in all this? Conventional wisdom says that leftwing writers went to Hollywood and got writer's block, from Nathanael West to Barton Fink. Is it more accurate to say they were driven out in the 50s, at which point many tried to return to commercial writing?
Of course, some survived the blacklist by changing their politics - like Clifford Odets, Roy Huggins, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan. Others, who had already been playwrights and novelists before their Hollywood period, returned to, or continued to pursue, their craft - George Sklar, Guy Endore, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Vera Caspary, Abraham Polonsky. Some tried fiction for the first time - Eddie Huebsch, Ben Barzman, Ring Lardner Jr. Still others managed to make films independently or under pseudonyms, or abroad. John Howard Lawson, the playwright and screenwriter, published some scholarly Marxist books. Although superficial generalisations can be made, one has to look at specific lives to talk accurately about the impact on anyone's work. John Sanford, for example, had given up screenwriting to return to novels years before the blacklist. Yet he did, in fact, develop a major writer's block in the 1950s. The cause was that he felt guilty for having dragged his wife, screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, into the Communist Party, which resulted in her being blacklisted. There are probably some cases where Hollywood culture itself destroyed talent, and others where it provided an opportunity for creative expression that would never have found fulfilment elsewhere. (For example, today Ben Maddow is highly regarded for his film scripts, such as the co-authored noir film The Asphalt Jungle, but no-one seems to care about his noir novel, Forty-Four Gravel Street, or his poetry, short stories or photography criticism.) There may even be some cases where the blacklist actually 'liberated' people to undertake important projects that might otherwise have been missed. (For example, after being blacklisted, screenwriter Philip Stevenson wrote four novels about the 1934 Gallup, New Mexico miners' strike; this fills in a crucial gap in left history, and I'm not certain that Stevenson would have achieved as much had he stayed active in film.) Of course, writers should have the option of making up their own minds about where and in what form they wish to produce. But a simple narrative of 'lost masterpieces' due to repression is both romanticised in terms of the various abilities of figures in the field of film and not very fair in terms of recognising that left writers did not allow themselves to be shut up all that easily.
Many went on to work sometimes under pseudonyms in mainstream publishing and genre writing. Was there a lot of subterfuge involved?
Once again, the cases vary. Meridel LeSueur wrote her children's books for a mainstream publisher under her own name. Howard Fast experimented with another name in the McCarthy era but almost always used his own. (Later on, though, Fast used two pseudonyms to develop several mystery series, probably for market reasons.) Vera Caspary kept her name and lied about her CP past. Jim Thompson kept his name too, but never mentioned his earlier CP membership. Philip Stevenson published two novels as Lars Lawrence, and wrote for the CP press under other names, but his friends Endore, Sklar, Sanford, Maltz and others never changed names for their novel-writing. A person like Zinberg, who had an interracial marriage and wanted to adopt a child, may have had a variety of reasons for masking his identity as Ed Lacy and Steve April. And then there were writers who used 'fronts', usually for film and TV writing. They were often in the difficult situation of having other people sign legal documents and even accept awards; thus, to reveal the names of fronts, even decades later, could bring lawsuits. However, it is now known that black radical novelist John O. Killens 'fronted' for blacklisted Abraham Polonsky in the important anti-racist film noir Odds Against Tomorrow. One former Communist who wrote Classics Comics in the 1950s made me promise never to reveal his identity; yet another one - Dr Annette Rubinstein, a literary scholar - has no hesitation in acknowledging that she did the same thing. Keep in mind that even earlier, long before the blacklist, a number of leftists wrote under pseudonyms for what they regarded as the 'pulp fiction factory' because they were embarrassed by the genre or simply wanted separate identifies for different kinds of writing. Thus Kenneth Fearing was also Kirk Wolfe, and Paul William Ryan was Robert Finnegan in his pulp writing and Mike Quin in his CP writing.
What you're saying will sound counterintuitive to many. After all, inter-war crime fiction has the reputation for being radical given Hammett's alleged CPUSA membership, whereas in the 1950s it seemed far more reactionary, as personified by Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.
Well, the chronological paradigm has a few flaws. For example, Hammett completed the majority of his influential private eye fiction before he had any connection with Communism or even an attraction to radicalism in the Marxian sense. So he is present on the left scene in the 1930s as a personality, and he also did quite a bit of teaching at Party-led schools. Probably, though, in a quantitative sense, crime/pulp/thriller fiction was not overwhelmingly leftwing during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s or 1950s. What we actually see would be more accurately characterised as a fairly strong presence. Starting in the 1920s, Walter Snow, already a Communist, wrote prolifically for gangster pulps, as did future radicals John Spivak and William Rollins Jr. (There was also a major Communist science fiction writer of that decade, Francis Flagg, the pseudonym of George Henry Weiss). In the case of Spivak, he no doubt employed many pulp techniques in his 1930s radical fiction and reportage; and Rollins kept alternating between the left and pulp/mystery genres until his death in the late 1940s. Also in the 1930s, committed leftists were making contributions to crime/gangster fiction in a variety of ways. Sometimes it was explicit, as in the case of Ben Appel's Brain Guy trilogy and William Cunningham's Pretty Boy. But it was also indirect in gangster/crime episodes that occur in radical novels like Gold's Jews Without Money, Daniel Fuchs' Low Company (a novel that was later filmed as The Gangster), Richard Wright's Native Son, and Meridel LeSueur's The Girl.
So would your research support the idea that the investigations conducted in crime fiction are also investigations of the society in which the authors lived, as with Ernest Mandel's Delightful Murder? Is this true for the McCarthy years, when government hostility to such critical voices was at it height?
Hope Davis and Jean Karsavina occasionally tried to interpolate left themes into their pulp fiction. The point is that there was a strong and variegated presence, but I would be hesitant to say that one particular site - for example, crime fiction - was 'radical' in a Marxist or Communist way. Moreover, there are lots of reasons why this presence increased in the 1940s and 1950s. For one thing, the revolution in publishing opened many more doors for people to get books and stories into print and even to make money, if they intervened in the popular forms. Thus the young radical science fiction writers who did their apprentice work in the late 1930s really took off - Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Robert Lowndes, Donald Wollheim, Judith Merril, Cyril Kornbluth.
On balance, just how big a contribution did these writers make to the crime/mystery/detective genre?
Certainly if we include film noir screenplays as crime fiction, the left contribution is almost monumental. Albert Maltz was co-author of The Naked City, Abraham Polonsky was author of Force of Evil (based on the novel by Marxist Ira Wolfert), Ben Maddow was author of The Asphalt Jungle, Kenneth Fearing wrote the mystery on which the film The Big Clock was based, and so on. Even Edwin Rolfe, the marvellous Communist poet, turned to mystery and science fiction writing in the late 1940s. Robert Finnegan had three successes before his premature death. Jim Thompson moves from several proletarian novels to crime fiction, but retains a kind of left populism. Len Zinberg remakes his career as a mystery writer after returning from World War Two. Still, despite a dynamic and influential presence on the part of the left, it would be misleading to theorise any aspect of crime/pulp writing of the 1950s, including film noir, as a left creation, either going back to the popular front politics or as an expression of Cold War resistance. To do that means to shut out too many examples of rightwing film noir and crime fiction, as well as to ignore the fact that many key features of these genres appear decades earlier. Although I have not thought about it too much, we would probably have the same problem in making big generalisations about 'investigations' in left crime fiction. Of course, any thesis can be made to appear powerful by being highly selective in one's examples and by cutting corners in relation to biographical matters (such as the kind of political commitments an author might hold, and the importance of such commitments at various times in artistic production). What I am prepared to say is that there is certainly a heavy left presence in noir production (film as well as fiction) because leftists were often very talented and participated in a wide range of cultural activities. Beyond this, we can point to some specific cases where an interest in urban culture began in left fiction and continued in film (Maddow, Maltz). But we should not forget that there are also instances of left writers such as Guy Endore, who was brought to Hollywood on the strength of his knowledge of the supernatural and occult, evidenced in his classic novel The Werewolf of Paris. For me, the precise meaning of a literary motif such as an 'investigation', while it seems to lend itself to a critique of the social formation, cannot be abstracted from the psychology of an author, Marxist or not. Again, in the instance of Endore, I feel that psychoanalytical and linguistic theories often motivated the 'investigations' in his crime novels such as Methinks the Lady and Detour at Midnight.
Is fair to say that the most fondly remembered of these narratives, like Fearing's The Big Clock, have earned their place in the canon on the back of their literary strengths alone, whereas the more pulpy writers deservedly fell by the wayside? Or is there more to it than this? After all, some of the authors, such as Ed Lacy and Paul Ryan, won prizes for their works, yet few people read them today.
It's hard to say why certain works are remembered and others forgotten. The Big Clock has a following, but it has also been out of print at times. Recently William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, which I regard as also very complex and a powerful Marxist/Freudian statement, appeared in a canon-making volume of American noir; but it had been nearly lost for decades, and there is still no real sign of its revival. Likewise, all sorts of forgotten Jim Thompson books are now in print, to go along with two biographies, but only a few, such as The Killer Inside Me, have real stature. In France I understand that Robert Finnegan has a following, but there is no interest here. In the case of Ed Lacy, I'm pretty certain that if I could use In Black and White or Room to Swing in the classroom, students would be quite excited and we might even see dissertations about Lacy. What I think we can determine, through research, is that certain books have been successful in sales, or received good reviews, or have been taken up by critics and scholars at certain points. But I'm not sure how to assess 'literary strengths' because a book with a strong narrative might have some pretty thin characters, and one with compelling characters might have a poorly-conceived and executed plot. A book might seem to be dreary and depressing when read under one set of circumstances, but to harbour important truths and a prophetic vision under another. One way to resolve this issue is to set up certain models of accepted literary strengths and to compare various texts to these. But the problem with models is that it is hard to find those which respond to all the different kinds of work that a text might carry out. In any event, since no discussion is taking place that includes most of these texts, I think it would be hard to reach strong conclusions.
Given the radicalism of these writers, did working in the crime genre divert them from their political/cultural goals? For instance, William Rollins Jr was widely praised for his strike novel The Shadow Before, yet he seems to disappear off the scene afterwards. Likewise, Howard Fast's E. V Cunningham stories may have helped him to make a living when he was blacklisted, yet he continued to write them into the 1980s, with quantity appearing to overtake quality in his work. I guess what I'm asking is whether these writers are politically significant, significant crime writers, or both?
Again, the question of deflection of a career due to a genre switch can only be answered individually, on the basis of biographical research. Determining the 'goals' of various writers and measuring their achievements against various constraints (individual talent, economic problems, health, opportunities to get into print) is a very difficult task. Clearly the biggest problem for many writers was making money to survive. For some, this factor originally drew them into pulp/crime fiction because one got paid. Yet some regarded this as hack work to support their real interests, in this manner paralleling those Hollywood writers who imagined that they would alternate between money-making screenplays and serious drama. Others took the genre more seriously, and, in fact, Fearing did not see The Big Clock as a mystery thriller. Moreover, when it comes to expressing politics, I think we have to realise that, given the nature of US capitalist society, almost all writers have to pull their political punches in order to have books published, even in times more radical than the 1950s. We have, for example, someone as important and powerful as Ernest Hemingway changing Robert Jordan, the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls, from a Communist to a liberal at the behest of his publishers, for reasons of sales potential. Then there is the question of exactly how political consciousness-raising is accomplished through literature. Speaking as a person who managed to be radicalised by reading such conservative texts as The Wasteland and The God That Failed, I'm sceptical of a model that seems to require a readership with a blank consciousness reading a 'truly revolutionary narrative', and then becoming revolutionised. Books certainly influence individuals, but the circumstances under which the reading occurs and the reader's prior experience play key roles in the outcome. Thus the matter of political significance in relation to artistic significance is tricky as well. Sure, if Jim Thompson actually longed to write strike novels with workers raising the red flag, that didn't happen, and I suppose that we can say that the genre in which he operated was not particularly hospitable to that kind of narrative. Yet Robert Finnegan managed to slip anti-fascist and anti-capitalist themes into his crime fiction, and Ed Lacy explored many aspects of racism in unusual situations and from fresh angles. Should we then conclude that they are significant for political reasons alone, and Thompson, still widely read, is more literary? In my view, that's not a tenable distinction; the politics in all three are probably masked to some degree, and there are all kinds of things that Lacy accomplishes in his art that I see nowhere in Thompson. In general, I think we can go so far as to say that there are certain aspects of the crime genre that especially lend themselves to a Marxist imagination - the urban setting, the theme of corruption by wealth, the possibilities of having a diverse range of characters (in terms of class, colour, gender), the problem of the state, and so on. And clearly there have been many left novelists and screenwriters in the pulp/noir/crime genre who availed themselves of opportunities to make anti-capitalist observations through appropriate dramatic techniques and characterisations, with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, ideologues who go to these works in search of stories about conversions to Marxist ideology, the depiction of frankly Communist heroes, the use of episodes to openly express solidarity with the USSR, and so on, as the signs of a Communist presence, are bound to be disappointed.
Regarding Fast, Guy Endore and Ed Lacy, you have noted their use of ethnic minority characters to highlight the racial injustices in American society. Tell us more about this strategy.
There's a long tradition among left writers of using racism against people of colour as a prime example of capitalism's horrors. There has also been a sense of identification with the nineteenth century abolitionists (and especially John Brown) as models for how revolutionary minorities can be transformed into a victorious majority. Anger about racism (sometimes identified with the anti-Semitism that was growing in Europe) could propel writers toward the left, and it was also the central concern of the propaganda, agitation and cultural work of the major left organisation in the mid-twentieth century, the CPUSA. Moreover, prior to the 1960s, it was fairly acceptable for white and Jewish writers to address black themes and create black characters. Of course, they ran the risk of being criticised harshly if a case could be made that they used stereotypes or displayed other signs of racism. Even Richard Wright was attacked by black Communist Party activists in Harlem for his portrait of Bigger Thomas as lumpen and his failure to show politically conscious black characters. There is also the famous case of the Jewish writer Earl Conrad (Earl Cohen): previously praised by the Communist Party for Scottsboro Boy; Conrad was completely driven from Party circles due to attacks on his anti-racist novel Rock Bottom for allegedly showing blacks as degraded. In some cases the black characters were attractive to left writers as symbols of resistance who dramatised certain issues; this was the case with slave rebel Denmark Vesey's refusing to 'name names' in Aaron Kramer's anti-McCarthy dramatic poem. In other cases, black characters seemed logical choices for fiction in relation to the political work that the writer had carried out. For example, Guy Endore, author of Babouk, wrote pamphlets for the Scottsboro and Sleepy Lagoon cases; and David Alman, author of The Hourglass, worked for the Civil Rights Congress. Howard Fast has claimed that he was inspired to write his magnificent Freedom Road after hearing reports about Nazi atrocities while employed by the Office of War Information. Such examples suggest that there was a political concern about expressing political solidarity, but we can't let that account for the entire artistic process. So far as I know, no particular political event gave rise to John Sanford's The People from Heaven; it began with an image of an act of racism against a black woman. Nevertheless, being a committed anti-racist is certainly a reason why writers such as Lacy and Fast would have so many characters of colour in their mystery fiction (in Fast's case, he created a Japanese-American detective). But Lacy was also married to a black woman and lived in Harlem, so he had plenty of handy resource materials.
You're also working hard to ensure that these lost writers don't stay lost and have got Ira Wolfert's Tucker's People back in print. Tell us more about this project…
My effort to rescue 'lost' writers centres on the University of Illinois Press series, The Radical Novel Reconsidered, although I also have co-operated in bringing out neglected novels and short story collections with other presses, and I am on the advisory board for the American Poetry Recovery Project. So far as the Illinois series goes, I have tried to stay away from big name authors whose books are just momentarily out of print, and to emphasise books that were never reprinted after first publication, or that have never received recognition as radical novels due to their unconventional content. (Actually, Tucker's People is the one exception to these criteria, since it was reprinted as a paperback in the 1950s, and scholar Walter Rideout praised it highly as a radical novel.) In about half of the cases, I am personally convinced of the outstanding literary qualities of the book - The Big Boxcar, The People from Heaven, Burning Valley, The World Above, The Great Midland - and in other cases I have deferred to the judgements of the younger scholars writing the introductions, and to other evidence of merit. There is no special emphasis on including crime/pulp novels, but such texts are certainly plausible for the list. I myself am working on a big book - perhaps in the form of several volumes - trying to re-narrate the story of US left culture by including such non-canonical works and their authors, as well as by giving a special emphasis to the 1940s/1950s rather than the canonical 1930s.
As we move into the new millennium, what lessons can we take from the various authors at the heart of your research?
Well, it's possible that the new millennium will produce new efforts to rethink and synthesise past experiences of cultural production, which will be an excellent development if hitherto lost and neglected texts (and lives) are included in the mix of materials that are reassessed. If we are talking about specific 'lost' texts, those in the radical crime/pulp genre as well as others from the left, I have no doubt that there is much to be learned about the multifarious ways in which white supremacism distorts our lives, and about the 'nature of the system', the dilemmas and costs of 'commitment', historical experiences (reconstruction, the Haitian revolution, the Harlem rebellion), and so on. But what we 'get out' of a particular text is significantly dependent on what we bring to it. And here I can only redouble my emphasis on the importance of doing bottom-up research - letting the theorisations flow from what has actually been reproduced, rather than starting with an impressive theory and then selectively unearthing features from a wide terrain that seem to ratify the theory. This is by no means an anti-theory position; it is a development of the theoretical method of Marx, and, I think, useful for any responsible scholar wishing to appropriately adapt (so far as it is possible) scientific methods to the study of culture. Too often the discussion of Marxism and fiction begins by positing the political themes in the Marxist vision of revolution, and then looking at literature to see if those themes are dramatised. What we need, instead, is a view that starts with the understanding that writers are humans with a certain biography, and who are for various reasons driven to recreate and imagine experiences through literature. Then at some point he or she starts to relate to Marxist ideas and movements along a continuum of possibilities. What is produced in the end - that is, over a lifetime, which usually involves important changes in one's relation to Marxism - turns out to include an extraordinary range of texts. If I am correct - that socialist-type thinking is, in fact, quite central and not marginal to the actuality of US cultural history - then we have great reason to be optimistic about the political future, even in these times of crass materialism, greed and insensitivity to the structural inequalities of the world economy (so long as we do our utmost to preserve, extend and understand that tradition).
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