The Search for the 30’s
Part of Our Time.
by Murray Kempton.
Simon and Schuster. 334 pp. $4.00.

I have found this an oddly moving book, though it is sentimental, philistine, and a little ingenuous. As a matter of fact, it has brought me as near as I hope I shall ever come to an appreciation of those mild vices. For it is precisely his sentimentality, his ingenuousness, and his philistinism which enable Mr. Kempton to tell certain truths about the 30’s—or, as he prefers to say, “the myth of the thirties.” Now “myth” is a tricky word, but Mr. Kempton makes it quite clear what he wants it to mean. “Any myth,” he tells us, “is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.” And the reality intolerable to the “very few” Communists and fellow-travelers turned informer, bureaucrat, and Hollywood hack with whom his book deals is “the reality that man is alone on this earth.” Mr. Kempton’s victims and sufferers turned from the realization of this truth to the “myth of community,” which is for him not only false but viciously false, “the malignant unreal.” And those who subscribed to it can only be classified as “a little group of the sick” still (in large part) trying to convince themselves that once, for better or worse, they were the voice and conscience of the nation.

I do not want to argue here the nature of “reality,” but I must insist that it is hard to see in what essential way the statement that “no man is an island” differs from the assertion that “man is alone on this earth.” Both are poetic generalizations aimed at coming to terms with incoherent experience—and there is no sense in which one qualifies as a “myth” more than the other. In my book, both are entered as gospel. As for Mr. Kempton’s contention that all those drawn toward the declared ideals of the Soviet Union in a time of depression and disenchantment were no more than a handful of the sick, an “island of guilt in a sea of innocence”—this is obviously a polemical exaggeration, prompted by the desire to neutralize an opposite exaggeration of certain repentant radicals. I am sure that it is Mr. Kempton’s kindly intent to call off the dogs of the investigating committees by proving that there was never any large-scale, meaningful internal Communist threat in our country; and, it seems churlish to protest so benign a piece of apologetics. But I cannot help believing that there is more truth in the counter-proposition, the cry of a young fellow I once overheard at the point where he was being refused a commission in the navy for the political sins of his adolescence. “Hell,” he shouted, “in those days anyone with guts and brains was a Communist or fellow-traveler.”

Behind Mr. Kempton’s temperate dismissal of the committed minority (not evil, you understand, just sick) is the philistine conviction that our major problems have all been solved—were, indeed, being solved by the uncommitted while those incapable of facing reality were pursuing their myth. How hard it is to be just in these matters! Of course, it is a fact that men without a dream have improved Negro-white relations, taught labor and management to mitigate their conflicts, extended social security, etc., etc. But the real and remaining problem that vexed those sensitive and desperate enough to dream the dream of community Mr. Kempton does not trouble to mention: the drying up of creativity, the flight to conformity, the obsession with violence, the enervating fear of war and poverty, the alienation of men from each other, from their work, and from the natural world itself. Has our revulsion from the 30’s gone so far that we have to say things like this as if they were a revelation?

In America no large portion of the working class was ever impelled toward Communism; not economic but moral dissatisfaction drove a sizable portion of the intellectuals into the arms of the Communists. To call their real revulsion from real lacks in our life a flight from reality is utterly misleading. True, they were not especially good people, these marginal malcontents, not if measured by the goodness they dreamed of, since they were hopelessly children of the world they despised. They were, God knows, no worse than the “innocent” who never flirted with Communism—rather a little better in their discontent, their unwillingness to confuse, like Mr. Kempton, man’s essential loneliness with his special lostness in an industrialized, dehumanized society.

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Yet it is Mr. Kempton’s temperamental inability to think of man as truly a political animal that gives his book its special value and appeal. To him the struggle over leadership in a union, the fight for a program in a party is a matter not of issues but of personal antipathies and private passions. There is something ironically apt in an author who is capable of believing only in the lonely person writing about a period which found it hard to believe in the person at all. For the uninitiated reader, who never even sat in the largest mass meeting of the most thinly spread front organization, perhaps this is the only way of communicating some sense of the times: not in terms of insight and understanding, but of the feel of the thing.

But even the simplest soul must find it hard to convince himself finally that the Communist movement is simply the sum total of the pathologies of its members. In the midst of biographical detail and psychological surmise, one longs for the evident, the obvious historical or political fact, for the rich and complicated social context in which Mr. Kempton’s heroes and villains lived their individual lives. There are two lacks which seem to me especially disabling.

The first is any specific understanding of the relationship of the American radical movement to Russia and the Communist International. I find in Mr. Kempton’s book no awareness of the decisive fact that at the moment when Communist-oriented individuals were entering for the first time positions of influence in the American government and in the trade unions, all autonomy in national Communist parties had disappeared. Russia, itself hopelessly committed to autocracy, was making even the most trivial local decisions for all member countries. One of the things that gives the appearance of utter madness to American Communism is the fact that its tactics were a response not to American conditions but to European-Asiatic affairs as understood by parochial and ill-educated members of the Russian Politburo. The very decision of a Communist organizer in Akron, Ohio, to learn or not to learn to dance or play bridge was dictated by what a leading Bulgarian member of the Comintern had said at the Sixth Party Congress.

More than this, American comrades (and at their proper remove, sympathizers, fellow-travelers, etc.) came to live in the half-invented world of the party press and to judge themselves by its editorials rather than by the reactions of their neighbors. If there is a legendary world that replaced the real world for the vanguard of the 30’s, this is it, and not the quite proper notion of the indivisibility of mankind. What baffled American Communists was the fact that what was real abroad remained lunacy or a game here. If a slight difference in doctrine made or broke the Chinese Revolution, why did it not also matter cataclysmically on the campus of City College? Ben Gitlow, one of Mr. Kempton’s favorite, misunderstood examples, “shambling from one splinter group to another, still hoping to find the true light somewhere in their weak phosphorescence,” differs from a tragic Trotsky or a triumphant Tito only by the accident of his living in the United States. But this immense joke on Gitlow and history and us, Mr. Kempton is not political enough to appreciate.

For similar reasons, he fails to understand that there is not even in his sense a single “myth” of the 30’s, that inside the Communist mind there is no unified 30’s at all, but rather two distinct and contradictory “myths”: the surviving super-revolutionary dream of the Third Period; and after 1935, the genteel dream of conformity proper to the Popular Front. This is a clue to all sorts of discrepancies which Mr. Kempton tries vainly to analyze in terms of personal limitation and cowardice; the sudden collapse of the “Proletarian Novel” in the middle of the decade, the replacement of the Edmund Wilsons by the Donald Ogden Stewarts as the intellectual mouthpieces of Communism, the contrast between the amazing spread and minimum effectiveness of the front organizations, the shifts in trade union policy, etc. Even the odd contrast of Hiss and Chambers, to which Mr. Kempton dedicates an interesting chapter, rests upon their embodying the two contrasting myths which arise ultimately from the maneuverings of the Russian Foreign Office.

The price which Mr. Kempton pays for preferring a personal to a contextual approach is great enough in political matters; but there at least it reveals from time to time the real way in which tics of character actuated men who saw themselves as the personifications of the march of history. In the field of literature, the same sort of narrowing down brings much slighter rewards—and Mr. Kempton’s essay called “The Social Muse” is for me the least effective in the book. This seems an especial shame, because we have still no satisfactory study of the general literary scene in the 30’s and of the “Proletarian Novel” in particular. In setting up his customary sentimental melodrama of a reality-loving hero set against a group of myth-ridden failures, Mr. Kempton has drafted James T. Farrell to play the Joe Curran of the literary world.

Now Farrell is beyond question a decent, dogged, and admirable man, who has never betrayed his real if limited talent; but as a writer, he is far from being the most successful or interesting of the period. There is in him no new technical achievement, no breakthrough to a new way of seeing or rendering reality; but there was during those years one figure who, though he died before resolving all his problems of technique and feeling, did catch in three novels the bitterness, the mad humor, the tempo of the times. This is, of course, Nathaniel West, whom Mr. Kempton does not mention.

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And there was, in addition, one novel whose pathos and truth make it the most distinguished piece of fiction based on Jewish life in America. This is Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a book Mr. Kempton misleadingly lumps together with Studs Lonigan as “unvarnished” and “without much grace”—an example of “plebeian naturalism.” Actually, it is the adaption of Joycean techniques to a border region where two cultures meet—a constant shifting from the mind to the world, from symbol to fact, from poetic levels of language to the grossest talk of the street. The introductory chapter alone could stand as a short story capable of redeeming ten years of literature with its spare rendition of all the rage and hopelessness of a Castle Garden reunion of husband and wife. Henry Roth, who after this single novel lapsed into silence, has never had the recognition due him—and Mr. Kempton’s cursory dismissal will not help.

The chief task confronting a historian of the literature of the 30’s is to define the typical novel of the period, not simply to describe books that happened to be written in that decade. Indeed, some novels written then (Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury is an example) belong in tone and inspiration to the 20’s; though Sanctuary by the same author belongs, perhaps alone among his works, to the era of the Great Depression. What is the difference? Some doctrinaire and artificial definition of the Proletarian Novel out of the New Masses will, of course, not do at all. It is not a matter of political allegiance, though the influence of Marxism at some remove is a requisite; books as different in commitment as Wyndham Lewis’s Revenge for Love, R. P. Warren’s At Heaven’s Gate, Hemingway’s To Have and to Have Not, Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, reflect what is essential: a vision of the world so desperate that it breaks through the lyrical self-pity characteristic of the 20’s to a kind of impersonal rage and nausea.

There is another sort of depression literature, too—the kind of sentimental, middlebrow melodrama practiced variously by such authors as Budd Schulberg and the John Steinbeck of Grapes of Wrath. But this is only accidentally and by virtue of subject matter implicated in the world of the 30’s; change the setting a little, make the redeeming hero a priest rather than a Communist organizer and one can play it out with the same writers, director, and cast in the mid-50’s, as On the Waterfront eloquently testifies. No, the real sensibility and passion of the depression years for me find their literary expression in the penultimate scene of Nathaniel West’s least popular book, now long out of print, A Cool Million: or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. The protagonist (who is later to become the hero of an American fascist movement) stands on the stage of a cheap theater between two comics, who belabor him with rolled-up newspapers until his wooden leg, his artificial arm, his false teeth and glass eye roll out on to the floor while the crowd howls in delight. Or there is Faulkner’s impotent Popeye, spawn of alleys, slobbering over someone else’s lust.

Here, in the poet’s sense of the word, is the true “myth” of the 30’s: the sense of sterility, the despair, the outrage before the senseless waste of the human turned crazy laughter and at last art; but for most people this is too strong, too “morbid,” too real a vision to be endured. And so we do not have finally any shared myth of the age. The 30’s do not yet exist in our common imagination—as do, for instance, the 20’s, securely fixed in a single continuous legend from John Held Jr. to Scott Fitzgerald.

This imaginative vacuum the newspaper accounts of confessions and accusations and invocations of the Fifth Amendment cannot fill; and it is into this vacuum that Mr. Kempton has nobly rushed. What he gives us is no more real poetry than it is real history; but it is a substitute for what the literature of the times has not given, perhaps cannot ever give to more than a few. It is the beginning of the search for an age; and it has encouraged me to rummage a little in the untidy attic of my own mind for what I was surer than I should have been that I had safely stowed away. For this at least I am grateful to Mr. Kempton.

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