Alan Wald, or, the Bohemian Professor

Alan M Wald in 2010 by Gregory Fox – CC BY-SA 4.0

No one is likely to be surprised to learn that large numbers of political left-wingers have been “Bohemians,” by any definition of the word. Free Lovers, the occasional homosexual (or cross-race) lovers, also jazz lovers and poets, the list could go on and on. Any description would include a lot of territory highly doubtful to the socially conservative Christian, or Jew, or Muslim. These bohemian radicals might seem, at first glance, to be poor material for the Old Left that often claimed to be part of a more respectable proletariat. Only when we get to the 1960s and beyond does being “transgressive” seem itself an act of defiance.

Wald places himself in this world, at least cerebrally speaking. Avant-garde literature, early on, competed in attention with his youthful socialist activism. His tastes have remained far-sweeping, favoring left-wing literature of every kind, realist to existentialist to surrealist and beyond. Among his prolific scholarly output, three volumes on left-wing novelists and poets in the US have taken his readers through issues and styles of wide variety, handled without laying down lines of realist or non-realist, politically consistent, charming or downright repulsive politically in his eyes.

An outsider (that is, myself) may be forgiven for having viewed Wald as any kind of orthodox Trotskyist. Formed by several years in Students for a Democratic Society (including a stint on its Economic Research and Action Project in Cleveland with Paul Potter), he became a member of the Young Socialist Alliance and then the Socialist Workers Party from 1968 to 1983. Yet his political views were always more influenced by New Left Review and heretical Marxists like Ernest Mandel, Michael Löwy, and Tariq Ali. He has been, by his own account, a French-style existentialist in his philosophical views, as well as a Left or dissident small “c” communist critic of what once was the Communist political mainstream.

He has endeavored, for a half century, to use primary research and interviews to tell us something fresh and interesting about many subjects, for instance the 1930s-40s novelist James T. Farrell who later became the literary companion of the CIA-related Social Democrats USA without, according to Wald, losing his compassion for the capitalist-deformed lives of ordinary working people. Or, in more of a favorite category for Wald, the 1930s Communists who grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union but remained loyal to a general Marxist vision and complicated their art with approaches that they could not easily have followed in the days when a righteous certainty about the future of the CPUSA limited their horizons.

More than a few of the essays come up against a stubborn historical reality: history turned out very badly for the hopeful would be Bolsheviks Afar. The literal proletarian revolution, real life or imagined, inspired tons of radical manuscripts written out by hand or on primitive typewriters during the 1920s-30s. The rise of fascism ended much early optimism, which had always been threatened by certain doubts embedded in the apparent triumph of American capitalism, a veritable anti-Bolshevik model of progress. Fascism actually did prompt anti-fascism in the Popular Front, a huge and radical but definitely non-revolutionary movement across Europe and sections of immigrant communities in particular, within the US. Then came disillusionment and detachment for artists as anyone else.

Wald takes special pleasure in scholarly studies of the complexities in the famous works of, say, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck. Or the forgotten novels of Alexander Saxton and K.B. Gilden among many others, and those whose little-known works seem always on the cusp of discovery, like Willard Motley’s works offering new angles on Black literary homosexuality. A figure like Howard Fast, an important Communist until no longer a Communist, writing best-selling novels about corners of American life and experience, receives especially close and insightful treatment. Poets from Muriel Rukeyser to Aaron Kramer exist in their own categories, defined or redefined by Wald.

Meanwhile, “many lovers” might be one apt phrase for the less-known lives of creative left-wingers that he explores, with cross-race bonding then rare in the general population. Sanora Babb, sometime Hollywood writer, is thus married to the famed Asian-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, but also exploring wider attractions, inspiring a half-dozen later scholars to ruminate about her life and loves.

Had Wald taken up the lives of screenwriters as extensively as he took up novelists and poets, it is safe to say, the picture would have looked quite different. They had their high historical moment in Hollywood from the very late 1930s until the very early 1950s, with good and occasionally great pay, enthusiastic participation in a successful organizing movement (the Screenwriters Guild) and nearly uniform acceptance of the Communist-connected Popular Front as their political lodestar. They were also overwhelmingly Jewish, and overwhelmingly bohemian, sexually active to the point of abandon—a potent political-cultural mixture combined with plenty of alcohol. Few if any followers of Trotsky could be here, and only a handful who shifted ideologically from Left to the Right, even among those who “made a career move” by “giving names” to Congressional committees.

These writers looked back at the best, the happiest times in their lives, as oldtimers related to me, the oral historian, almost a half century later. Recollections allowed them to escape otherwise near-universal disillusionment with the Soviet Union. Or perhaps they were not nearly as introspective as the writers taken on by Wald. Scriptwriting was regarded, even by the writers themselves, as more craft than art, and the best-crafted scripts were likely to be chopped up to suit the “stars” and imagined audience of a successful aka money-making film.

Your reviewer indulges himself at the expense of a closer review of Wald’s writers because the two milieux come together in disillusionment with the American experiment itself. Ironically, some of the best writing and (for Hollywoodites) screenwriting came with the postwar mood of film or literary noir. The happy unity and social sharing public of the anti-fascist years swiftly became the narrow-spirited pursuers of individual success even at the cost of political repression.

The noir angle of criticism, never far away, grew closer and more intense. Many writers across the spectrum of the Left adopted psychological angles that Communists in particular had earlier avoided. Here, they found the study of character in a collective “American” character that did not look so good. Where individualism reigned, personal, psychological solutions uncertain and likely unpleasing followed.

A handful of Wald’s favorites found new lives, within and after the Cold War, through Science Fiction, a natural progression from wild hopes to creative despair. Others found their newer muse in the civil rights movement of the 1940-50s and beyond. By the dizzy later 1960s, with a new range of radical visions or illusions, they had mostly aged out. But not without leaving a rich legacy behind for the next generations.

Near the end of this long book, Wald points to doubts and disillusionment with Israel, the more so as the fate of the displaced Palestinians became better known. These all, I think, inspire Wald in the last essays, where he sees today “the growth of a new and different type of radical socialist left, “ (p.484), challenging the disillusioned. This is a message of hope, the takeaway from the rich and dense details and analysis that Wald offers.

Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.