American Literary History

American Literary History Advance Access originally published online on March 6, 2009
American Literary History 2009 21(2):368-403; doi:10.1093/alh/ajp010

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Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

Alan Wald

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven G. Kellman. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert K. Landers. Encounter Books, 2004.

The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Ruth Price. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad. Knopf, 2007.

In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is "compulsive."¹ The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.

In 1988, the University of California at Berkeley Press published a copiously researched 400-page biography, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. This was the first endeavor to detail the intimate experiences and literary-political career of journalist and novelist Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) in North America, Europe, and Asia. The co-authors were the husband and wife team of Stephen R. MacKinnon, a well-published academic specialist in Late Imperial and twentieth-century China, and Janice R. MacKinnon, an importer of antique Chinese furniture. The MacKinnons described their labor as "basic detective work" on several continents over a period of 14 years. Such industriousness was required to reconstruct Smedley's dispersed archive of publications in multiple venues as well as to "collect her letters, track down and interview her old friends and enemies, and scour intelligence files." Uncommon thoroughness was demanded because the subject's life was fraught with political controversy; the authors pledged to "view Smedley from every possible perspective" (MacKinnon and MacKinnon ix).

Literary scholars are familiar with Smedley because in 1973 the Feminist Press launched a popular new edition of her 1929 proletarian feminist literary classic, Daughter of Earth. From the Afterword to this volume, as well as from reviews and academic essays, they learned that Smedley's publishing and activist career had in point of fact commenced in the era of World War I, when she was a determined proponent of birth control and the independence of India from Great Britain. After 1920, Smedley lived in Europe and Asia until World War II, becoming famous as a sympathetic frontline journalist with Mao Zedong's Red Army during the dramatic events preceding the Chinese Revolution. These were reported most notably in her popular work about the Sino-Japanese war, Battle Hymn of China (1943), issued by the Knopf publishing house when Smedley returned to the US. Then the Cold War erupted and Smedley faced accusations of one-time membership in the "Sorge Spy Ring" in China on behalf of the Communist International. She was soon living as a near-pariah in Oxford, England, where she died at age 58 following surgery for a duodenal ulcer.

The MacKinnons' narrative opens with Smedley's birth into a childhood of "miserable poverty" as the daughter of a tenant farmer in Missouri (1). They subsequently trace her travels among Western states and then her transit to California. Early in 1918, Smedley, by then a resident of New York City's Greenwich Village, experienced two traumatic events. While engaged as a partisan in the movement of expatriate radical nationalists from India, Smedley found herself pressured into sexual intercourse by a veteran Bengali activist named Herambalal Gupta. Smedley already suffered acutely from conflicted feelings about sexuality, and the incident precipitated an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The episode became one of the most shocking and powerful scenes of her autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, where Gupta is called "Juan Diaz."

Afterwards, Smedley made headlines when she was imprisoned under the Espionage Act. The allegation was that she accepted funds from the German government to assist her agitational work against British rule of India. But the MacKinnons treat the charges as a frame-up similar to the federal prosecution of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who received a ten-year sentence for allegedly interfering with military recruitment. Released on bail, Smedley commenced a 15-year friendship with a young bohemian poet named Florence Lennon; the MacKinnons report that a psychoanalyst's later suggestion that there might have been "latent homosexual feelings" toward Florence brought the rage of denial from Smedley. The authors themselves do not speculate about the sexual nature of the intimacy (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 113).

The MacKinnons next track Smedley's adventures in Germany and the Soviet Union, with special attention to her tormented love affair with Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chatto Padhyata. Then the story switches to China in 1928 to cover her journalism career for the next 13 years. Returning in 1941 to the US to live as a lecturer and writer, Smedley was before long under close monitoring by the FBI. She departed for Europe in 1949 when reports were published about her alleged association with the espionage ring led by German Communist Richard Sorge against Japan before World War II. The authors conclude the volume by dismissing all such spying charges, emphasizing that Smedley never held membership in any Communist Party and affirming that she was "fiercely independent" (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 350).

Agnes Smedley was published to considerable acclaim. The MacKinnons' research was hailed by military and Cold War historian Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times and the China historian and now UC Berkeley Dean Orville Schell in the Nation, as well as in scholarly publications such as Journal of American History, Journal of Asian Studies, and American Historical Review.² No factual criticisms or questions were raised. All these reviewers seemed in accord with the announcement on the book jacket that the MacKinnons' scholarship "will very likely become the definitive work on Smedley."

And so it was, for 17 years. But now Ruth Price, a former press secretary for Congresswoman Bella Abzug and a self-identified Leftist, has published a 500-page biography under a variation of the MacKinnons' title, The Lives of Agnes Smedley. Although Price steers clear of a systematic comparison of the details of her research with the claims of her predecessors, the new narrative contradicts many of the MacKinnons' key points, including those in the above account. Smedley was not a product simply of wretched, proletarian poverty; her father had his economic ups and downs, but was variously a cattle broker, an herbalist with a traveling medical show, a deputy sheriff, a transporter of houses for a coal company, and so forth. The unwanted sexual intercourse was pressed on Smedley not by Herambalal Gupta but the world-famous Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy. Smedley was not a frame-up victim during World War I but was indeed collaborating with the German government. Florence (originally Florence Tennenbaum, then Florence Becker, and finally Florence Becker Lennon) was almost certainly a lover as well as friend. Crucially, Smedley was without a doubt an espionage agent of the Comintern. She consciously lied to friends and potential liberal allies about her relationship not only to the German government in 1918, but also to the Communist International. Yet Price remains admiring of Smedley's commitment to "principles" that "transcend the realm of ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles" (10). She proclaims that Smedley was no "tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear," but "as cunning and crafty an operator as her detractors on the right ever alleged" (9).

Which version is accurate? What are the implications of each for assessing Smedley as an activist and writer? In the main, Price's appraisal of events seems the more persuasive, and yet it is not an open and shut case for Price on every detail. The MacKinnons commenced their research earlier and had unique access to many individuals for personal interviews. To be sure, Price positions her claims on the discovery of new materials and the re-examination of familiar ones with a fresh eye, but she acknowledges certain problems:

Some of my sources are no longer available. The conference proceedings of the S-S-S Society [sponsored by China's Academy of Social Sciences to memorialize Smedley, Edgar Snow, and Anna Louise Strong as friendly journalists], published in an open period just before Tiananmen Square, provided a great deal of candid information that is no longer acknowledged. A few people I interviewed cannot be named, to protect their safety. Agnes's "personal" file from the Comintern did not make it to the Library of Congress. Unpublished oral histories and memoirs, passed hand to hand to those deemed trustworthy, arrived in difficult-to-read longhand drafts—in several versions without pagination. (425)

This situation, combined with Price's abbreviated method of indicating sources, renders the comparison of documentation occasionally agonizing. It is also of note that the MacKinnons chose to use primarily the Pinyin romanization system in the spelling of Chinese names and places, whereas Price opts for the earlier Wade-Giles system "since it allows more name recognition for the general reader" (x).

Furthermore, the individual pieces of evidence used by Price are in several instances ambiguous. One begins to sense that the explanation for some of the contradictory characterizations in the two Smedley biographies derive from unspoken definitions and the amount of emphasis each scholar decides to give to one factor or another in a multifaceted situation. This is likely the case in questions such as the criteria for judging poverty, the characterization of a person or relationship as homosexual, and the identification of a fictional character with an historical personage. The state of affairs is comparable with biographical studies of other writers, and rare is the scholarly work innocent of all mistakes; but a lack of exactitude is particularly vexing when one presents as beyond question a dramatic challenge to previous conclusions about hot topics such as espionage and sexual assault. What is clear is that, at some point, Price decided to take a more skeptical view than the MacKinnons of Smedley's self-representations, especially in regard to the fictionalized persona "Marie Rogers" in Daughter of Earth.

Some divergences in the two biographies are minor; but it can be difficult to choose between the two versions without carrying out independent and tedious research, or else merely deciding in advance to trust one author or the other. For example, in giving emphasis to the poverty of Smedley's childhood, the MacKinnons, inasmuch as they accept sections of Daughter of Earth as thinly veiled fact, mainly quote from the novel and provide few endnotes for corroboration. Price, in contrast, presents the reader with data external to Daughter of Earth that contradicts the novel's portrait of Smedley's father's work history; but Price's evidence is not always easy to locate, understand, or assess. An instance of this is when Price depicts Smedley's father's employment as "an independent contractor, hiring two dozen former cowboys"; she gives her source simply as "Marby, interview" (27, 437). Who is that? If one searches through earlier endnotes, there is a reference to "Dean Marby, interview by author, Trinidad, Colorado, 15 July 1985," but the name "Dean Marby" is not in the index, and neither the passage in the narrative nor the endnote explains who the person is or why the testimony should be seen as reliable (434). (In the acknowledgments section under "Interviews/Correspondence," Marby's name merely appears in a list.) For the reference to Smedley's father's work "transporting houses," which is said to have allowed the young Agnes to attend a "well-equipped school" where she passed her time reading books about law and behavioral psychology, Price gives the following citation: "‘Tercio,’ Camp and Plant, 6 February 1904" (30, 435). An examination of prior footnotes discloses nothing else about the nature of this article (is it a news story? an autobiographical statement?) or who the author might be, and there is no bibliography.

With reference to Price's far more vital identification of M. N. Roy as the basis of "Juan Diaz," who is regarded as a rapist by many readers of the novel, the evidence presented is also less than flawless. Price never directly quotes a source where Smedley (or anyone else) equates the two men. Instead, she reproduces a passage in the novel as if the reference is to Roy—and one would not know that this is the source unless one jumps to the endnotes (61). She also refers to a 1980 letter from someone named "Samaren Roy," stating that M. N. Roy was "attracted" to Smedley. Samaren Roy is not identified in the endnotes nor does he appear in the index; like Marby, he is on the list under "Interviews/Correspondence." However, according to Google, he is a scholar of Indian and Bengali culture, one time associate of M. N. Roy, and employee of the US Consulate General in Calcutta.³ Thus he has some credibility as a person who may have heard a confession; and yet, stating that M. N. Roy was "attracted" to Smedley is not the same as "sexually involved with," nor does it confirm brutish behavior similar to that of Juan Diaz (Price 61). Price states decisively of Smedley that "she allowed Roy to physically overpower her," but the source in the endnote once more turns out to be from the novel in reference to the fictional Marie Rogers and Juan Diaz. Price then links this excerpt from the fiction to a paraphrase of M. N. Roy's published memoirs to the effect that "he could not understand why Agnes seemed to have a grudge against him" (61). How does this recollection provide a confirmation that he was Diaz? A hundred pages later, Price revisits the issue and writes that Diaz was a composite of both Gupta and Roy. But she then asserts that Roy wore a belt like the one worn by Marie Rogers's father in Daughter of Earth, which also resembles the one worn by the character Diaz. Price concludes by insisting that the sexual "liaison" was with Roy, this time providing no source at all (142).

In contrast, the MacKinnons explicitly identify Diaz as Gupta in their book (42), and then state the following of Gupta in an endnote: "Called Juan Diaz in Daughter of Earth. Convincing evidence that the man was Herambalal Gupta includes the following: 1) National Archives, Army Intelligence, RG 165, file 10541722/42, report dated September 26, 1918, indicating that Gupta forfeited bail and left for Mexico in February, 1918. 2) Interview with Florence T. Lennon. 3) The alias Gupta used in the United States and Mexico was Juan Lopez. 4) Gupta resurfaced in Berlin in 1921 and gossiped about the incident (see Chapter 5)" (358n13). The first and third corroborations are highly circumstantial. If Florence Lennon provided the MacKinnons with "convincing evidence" that Diaz was Gupta, it would likely be quoted or more specifically paraphrased. In Chapter 5, there are just two inconclusive references to Gupta as the model for Diaz. The first is based on Daughter of Earth where the MacKinnons simply state that Diaz is actually Gupta (75). The second is a long quotation from a letter from Smedley to Florence; but there is only reference to a "dirty man" who "has gossiped" (76)—Gupta is not named! (Clearly Price, who also relies on the Smedley–Florence correspondence, did not see such a connection.) On the basis of what the reader has available in both of these biographies, it is hard to see how one can reach a firm conclusion about the identity of Juan Diaz or even the degree to which the fictionalized incident, despite its brilliance and insightfulness, can be read as fact.

Price's claims about Smedley's lesbianism may be a bit stronger. She cites a personal letter from Florence asserting that she was "in love" with Smedley, had been "attracted" to other women, and found Smedley open to erotic "massages" (although they were not administered). Moreover, Price asserts that Smedley had in "later years alluded to a period of homosexuality that probably referred to her relationship with Florence" (83). This paraphrase is from a 1927 letter to Florence, but no quotation is given (Price 443). The label of "lesbianism" may be of small significance, but the topic of Smedley's sexual attitudes—including an apparent homophobia aimed at men she perceived as effeminate—is of concern to many feminist scholars. Still, with the indications of homosexual activity more suggestive than absolute, the MacKinnons were perhaps wiser than Price in remaining agnostic about a physical relationship between Smedley and Florence.

In regard to Smedley's work for the Germans in World War I, the proof is either poorly documented or not made readily available to the general reader. Price states that a leader of the Ghdar Party, a predominantly Sikh organization formed in the US to liberate India from British rule, "apparently asked Agnes to transport some documents" (56). These are said by Price to pertain to the German foreign minister's payment of $50,000 to the Berlin India Committee on the East Coast, but an endnote source is not offered. However, an endnote in regard to a statement related to the accusation claims to refer indirectly to documentary confirmation of "Smedley's willingness to accept German money": "[S]ee U.S. Grand Jury Testimony, Arthur U. Pope, 21 October 1918, MID 9771-72/4-23" (Price 440). What is probably most convincing in Price's scenario is her assertion that Smedley's connections with the Ghdar Party have been underemphasized in previous scholarship. Inasmuch as the organization was understandably willing to accept all material aid it could acquire on behalf of India's national liberation movement, Smedley's taking German money on the Ghdar Party's behalf would not be a surprise. Yet one does not know what the Pope testimony says. If it offers unambiguous corroboration of the charge, or at least a statement pointing in that direction, why not quote it directly?

On the foremost question of whether Smedley was a Comintern spy against Japan, Price's perspective makes perfect sense to me. But tracking the thread of the argument requires considerable attentiveness to her effort to identify "Confidential Informant T-1," which is how an unknown person is labeled in an FBI interview. Price had originally dismissed T-1's claim that Smedley "had a very high standing in the Secret Department of the Comintern" because T-1 linked Smedley with a figure called "Mironov"—and such a name was not in several "encyclopedias of the Comintern" that Price checked (7). But when Price discerned in a biography of German Communist Willi Münzenberg that T-1 might actually be a man named Louis Gibarti, Münzenberg's "point man on China," she checked up on his career and concluded that his activities "dovetailed neatly with the accusations the British Shanghai Muncipal Police had leveled against Agnes in the 1930s," which Price had "previously dismissed" (7). Then Price was given "several articles" in Chinese, and conducted "interviews" that "corroborated Agnes's connection to the Comintern"—although no endnotes are given for these references (8). Next she obtained "additional Soviet documents" and "newly released material from Great Britain's Government Code and Cypher School, whose Project MASK [this acronym is not identified in her list of abbreviations] had decoded OMS [Comintern Department of International Liaison] radio messages in the 1930s." These "referred to the end of Smedley's relation to the Comintern" (8). Such broad claims are not footnoted; when repeated more specifically later on, the endnotes read: "Confidential Informant T-1 [Gibarti], FBI NY 100-68282" and "Julian Gumpertz, interview by FBI, 19 June 1945, FBI NY 100-68282" (453). It would be nice to know precisely what was said.

The academic endorsement on the book-jacket is from Alice Kessler-Harris, a splendid historian of US labor and gender. Kessler-Harris's field of expertise has a relevance to Smedley's activities, but does not really touch the controversial core of Price's new interpretation; one wonders if a specialist in German and Comintern espionage double-checked the crucial documentation, especially in light of the amount of effort that would be required. Price makes a generous offer in her section on "Sources and Citations": "For anyone with questions, my files are available" (426). Nevertheless, what are the chances that scrutinizing Price's files will provide substantiation more clear-cut than that which she selects to present in the book? Would it make sense for her to publish only the "soft" evidence (general references to letters, testimony, etc.) while holding back on the "hard" (quoted or paraphrased statements)? Based on the method we have seen, the additional material is likely to consist of yet more inferred, contingent, and anecdotal material. If so much verification is mainly speculative, why package it as a certainty?

That said, I grant that Price's overall portrait of Smedley works for me, in light of my current understanding of the historical record of the Old Left; moreover, if one leaves aside the question of labyrinthine and sometimes inconclusive documentation, the book is written with a passion and vigor that is near spell-binding. Since the MacKinnons' earlier, sanitized version of Smedley was also an impressively crafted work in its own right, and acclaimed by liberals and the Left, Price is to be admired for following her unanticipated hunches to a logical conclusion even when the results caused discomfort to her radical political convictions. A scholar like Price, whose own work embodies tensions, is well suited to be a compelling biographer of a writer like Smedley, herself profoundly marked by paradox. When one examines Smedley's personal choices in the historical context of the rapacity of US capitalism, and European and Japanese imperialism, contradictions should be anticipated. Smedley was an extraordinarily committed person who combined a generous spirit and astute intelligence with blind-spots and tragic rationalizations about the brutal reality of the Comintern-affiliated parties in the Stalin era. Her acts of deception can be rationalized as altruism. If one was active in 1918 to liberate India from British colonialism, or in the 1930s to defend China from Japanese aggression, the acknowledgment to US authorities of one's collaboration with a foreign government would mainly expose good people to persecution and strengthen the hand of powers opposed to national liberation, decolonization, and (at that point) a common front or independent action against proliferating fascism. Smedley's candid revelation of her former status in China during the emerging McCarthy era would also have led to an intensification of the hysteria that was more successful in hurting individuals involved in working for positive change than in exposing actual security risks, and it is worth noting that there is no evidence that her activity against Japan involved espionage against the US.

The MacKinnons appear to have been fixated on the superficial aspects of Smedley's outward organizational autonomy from the Comintern, and they were especially misled by Smedley's sometimes poor relations with the Communist Party of the US. If one can earn the political characterization of being "fiercely independent" merely by refraining from official party affiliation, displaying something less than 100% robotic agreement with Stalin's political line, and exhibiting some element of eccentric and individualistic behavior, there will be no one left to play the part of Comintern loyalist—including Whittaker Chambers. Even without her espionage work for the Comintern, the obstinate and cantankerous Smedley should be viewed as among her generation's tragically deceived devotees of Stalinism.

Not only the MacKinnons, but Price, too, fall short of tackling the relatively light-weight nature of Smedley's criticisms of the Soviet system, not to mention the leaderships of the Communist parties of the USSR and China. Of special note is the oddity that Smedley was far more fault-finding of political authoritarianism under Lenin than of the later Moscow Purge Trials and post-World War II repression under Stalin. Indeed, after 1927 when Smedley continued her stance of not wanting to function as any sort of party member in the US or Europe, she fervently believed (in Price's paraphrase) that the USSR was "governed by the noblest motives" (157). Her frustration with the US Communist Party in the 1940s was not owing to its dogged belief in defending the USSR "to the last stone," which meshed with her own view, but due to its alleged "isolation" and corrupt internal regime (361). Her primary objection to the power-hungry Mao is that he was "a thinker rather than a doer" (304). Like so many other US radicals, Smedley was on the mark in her critique of US capitalism and colonialism, but fundamentally amiss in her estimation of the political reality of far off lands—despite the unusual feature of her having visited them and knowledge of Chinese.

Happily, the matter of documenting espionage on the part of US writers is of infinitesimal significance in the historiography of the Literary Left; only a half-dozen other figures—most certainly Whittaker Chambers, who wrote short stories and a play; and, possibly, John Herrmann, a novelist; Martha Dodd, a novelist; Haakon Chevalier, a translator and novelist; Joseph North, a journalist and editor; and George Oppen, a poet—probably merit attention on such grounds. But matters of political perspicuity, the capacity for self-delusion, and the emotional trauma of the Communist experience are vital to understanding the temper of US literary life from the 1920s to the late 1950s. In some cases, the particulars may be beneficial for a complete appreciation of substantial works of the literary imagination. Price's book on Smedley is but one of a fresh crop of biographies that in concert make available new political information about a cross-section of novelists hit hardest by what Vivian Gornick aptly called The Romance of American Communism (1979), and whose lives were altered evermore by the encounter.

[M]atters of political perspicuity, the capacity for self-delusion, and the emotional trauma of the Communist experience are vital to understanding the temper of US literary life from the 1920s to the late 1950s

 

Among the political mystery men of the 1930s era is certainly Henry Roth (1906–95), author of the modernist classic Call It Sleep (1934). In the Great Depression, Roth's book was published to mostly appreciative reviews; yet it sold modestly and was followed by no additional novels until a year before the author's death. For the three decades prior to Call It Sleep's sensational revival in 1964 as an Avon mass-market paperback, only a handful of specialists in Jewish-American and radical literature kept its memory alive. Since its restoration to literary history, readers and critics have been fascinated by topics such as the novel's aesthetic foundation in 1920s High Modernism (especially the influences of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce); its dramatization of a near-textbook version of Sigmund Freud's oedipal Complex (the prepubescent protagonist, David Schearl, is sexually fixated on his mother, Genya, and sees his father as threatening competition for her affection); its multi-lingual and polyphonic technique (featuring a phonetically spelled "Yinglish"); and its inauguration of a writer's block that tormented Roth for the next 60 years. A sub-theme of scholarship has been the question of whether or not Call it Sleep qualifies as a "radical" or even "proletarian" novel, inasmuch as Roth acknowledged joining the Communist Party at the time of its publication, and the book's setting is similar to defining works of the genre such as Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) and Isidor Schneider's From the Kingdom of Necessity (1935).

Scholars made firm progress in the comprehension of most of these matters in the decades prior to the publication of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (2005), a conscientious and graceful new biography of Roth by the prolific and wide-ranging scholar Steven G. Kellman. Werner Sollers, among others, provided numerous sources for the novel's Modernist features drawn plausibly from Roth's intellectual environment of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Sollers also expanded the reasons for doubting a strictly autobiographical interpretation of the novel's Oedipal Complex; he observed not only that the fictional Genya was unlike Roth's mother, but also that Genya bore a striking physical resemblance to New York University professor Eda Lou Walton, Roth's lover from about 1928 to 1938.⁴ Barbara Foley proposed that Call It Sleep lacked the political content and author's motivation to qualify as a "proletarian novel" (324), while Michael Denning advised that both Gold's and Roth's novels should be understood as a new form of proletarian literature called "ghetto pastorals" (237). Scholars also concluded that Roth had exaggerated the legend of his writer's block; a published section of his incomplete second novel was discovered, along with several short stories from magazines in the late 1930s. A 1987 collection of Roth's miscellaneous work, Shifting Landscape, demonstrated that the landscape was not quite so barren as was thought at first; there was an essay from a student publication, a piece of literary criticism, a brief political essay, an article for a trade magazine, and other forgotten and neglected pieces. Then came the shocking disclosure by Roth that, as a 12-year-old, he had initiated incestuous acts with his ten-year old sister, Rose; four years later this culminated in episodes of furtive sexual intercourse that lasted until Rose was 20. Moreover, when Roth was 18, Roth also commenced intercourse with his first cousin, 14-year-old Sylvia Kessler, the daughter of his mother's sister, Bertha.

According to Redemption, the evidence for this incest emerged when Roth submitted the manuscript of A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995) to St. Martin's Press in 1994. This was the second of Roth's four-volume magnum opus on which he embarked in 1979, all parts appearing ultimately under the general rubric of Mercy of a Rude Stream. The first volume was A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994), the third was From Bondage (1996), and the last was Requiem for Harlem (1998). The first volume in the series presented a diagram of a family tree for the eight-year-old protagonist, Ira Stigman, which seems similar (except for name changes) to that of David Schearl (protagonist of Call It Sleep) and author Henry Roth. There were also photographs of young Roth on the book jacket to reinforce the identity of Stigman and Roth. However, as editor Robert Weil poured over the manuscript of the installment of the second volume—what was, in effect, a chronological sequel to Call It Sleep—he was startled to find a new character, a younger sister, Ruth, who had not been included in the tree or mentioned in the previous volume. Moreover, in the new novel Ira was engaging in sex with both the previously unmentioned Ruth and a first cousin named Stella. Although Roth's sister, whose married name was Rose Broder, was still alive, his cousin, Sylvia, had died long before, at age 57. Weil contacted Roth and urged him to notify Rose of his forthcoming novel, and there was also a proposal from the publishers to alter Rose's fictional name from "Ruth" to the less similar-sounding "Minnie."

Kellman's Redemption depicts the reported incestuous relations in the Roth family as essentially fact, documented primarily by the ensuing sister–brother correspondence (available in folders at the American Jewish Archives) and a videotaped interview (presumably in possession of Weil) conducted with Roth for protection against a threatened lawsuit by Rose. Kellman's paraphrase of Rose's side of the correspondence would indicate her acknowledgment of the incestuous relationship, even as her primary aim was to discourage publication for fear of public embarrassment; however, the only actual quotation provided from Rose's letters expresses her goal of exposing Roth as a liar motivated by money (306).⁵

It should be stressed that the disclosures about Roth's incest with his sister and cousin are only the tip of the iceberg of sexual revelations described in Kellman's book. As these pile up, they dwarf even Kellman's additional narration of a sequence of horrendous family feuds between Roth and his father, Roth and his in-laws, and Roth and his sons. Using incidents in Mercy of a Rude Stream, Kellman reports that Roth's mother, Leah, was sexually obsessed with her own brother Moe (called Morris in the novel), and that Roth's father (Herman, called Chaim) was (like the son) engaged in "sexually assaulting" cousin Sylvia (called Stella) (70). Kellman also devotes several paragraphs to homosexuality, informing the reader that Roth's first impression of his future wife, Muriel Parker, was that she was a lesbian; and that Roth tended to be "hypersensitive" when the subject of male homosexuality was raised, calling homosexuality a "degeneration" in 1981 and protesting (perhaps too much) that he had never had sex with a man (69). Then there is the complicated nature of the ménage-á-trois among Roth, Walton, and lawyer David Mandel during the 1930s; although Roth and Walton were known as a couple, Roth kept to his own bedroom when Mandel came to spend the night with Walton. Kellman additionally asserts that a fictionalized scene of Ira masturbating in bed against the leg of his mother is a biographical fact; and he quotes Roth's son, Hugh, as believing that the marriage of Henry and Muriel Roth was based on an abnormal sexual relationship (which is never explained) (69). The corroboration of all this is a bit uneven, and weakest when derived exclusively from interviews with Roth, passages from fiction, or an estranged son's enigmatic remark. But the prevailing portrait of colossal sexual dysfunction, and its relevance to the content and trajectory of Roth's writing, is undeniable.

Moreover, in light of the delicacy of the issues under consideration, Kellman achieves splendid poise. He never hides his revulsion at Roth's behavior, especially Roth's brutal treatment of Rose Boder, who typed the manuscript of Call It Sleep and acted to prevent Roth's disinheritance by their father. But Kellman in no way lets disgust overpower the narrative and he wisely avoids a reversion to moralism regarding the sexual peculiarities of Roth, Roth's immediate family, or Walton. The reader may feel some discomfort about the appropriateness of Kellman's providing such a detailed exposure of embarrassing and humiliating sexual acts, including his gratuitous naming of even the spouses and children of those involved. I doubt that I could go this far, but a biographer of Roth must be prepared to make hard choices; in this instance, much was already in the public eye, and a good number of those involved are deceased.

As a comprehensive biography, Redemption chiefly falls down in addressing the import of Roth's having been pro-Communist for some 33 years. This would be from approximately age 28 to 59, coinciding with Roth's literary obscurity after Call It Sleep. Kellman convincingly puts Roth's joining the Party in 1933–34, but is vague about when and why Roth departed the movement: "Disillusioned with the Party, [Roth] would finally sour more than thirty years after joining" (120).⁶ Information about what Roth actually did while a Party member seems rooted almost entirely in what Roth himself reported in a manuscript of amorphous material endnoted in the following manner: "Henry Roth, unpublished known as ‘Batch 2’—Henry Roth Papers, American Jewish Historical Society, New York (cited hereafter as Batch 2)" (333n10). Especially exasperating is Kellman's Chapter 10, "Precision Grinding," which reviews Roth's movements from 1939 to 1946. At this time Roth was often a militant Communist machinist in New York and Boston, and at one point editor of a union paper and the head of a Communist Party industrial branch. One is grateful for what is largely a new chronology of employment and even a list of his addresses, but it all seems rather thin. The documentation provided for the chapter relies overwhelmingly on "Batch 2," which in turn is dependent on what Roth chose to remember and how he remembered it. Some of the assertions about Roth may also come from reports of FBI informants; if so, this source is not cited in the endnotes of this chapter.

On the subject of Roth's Communism, Kellman undoubtedly offers noteworthy new details, such as an interview with another Walton protégé, the gay poet Ben Bellit, who recalls Roth as "a real Communist zealot," and Roth's own recollection that he used the Party name "Berry" (117, 166). Yet there are some curious statements, minor in themselves but undocumented and undeveloped even when presented as fact; such a stratagem cumulatively works against a compelling portrait of Roth's Communist engagement. Kellman twice mentions that Roth was a member of the John Reed Club that was founded in 1929, but no evidence is cited. Membership is certainly conceivable; Horace Gregory, a partaker of Eda Lou Walton's literary salon in the early 1930s, was at that time a John Reed Club member and taught at its Writers School. Yet the John Reed Club milieu was an intellectually exhilarating one, from which minutes, reports, publications, and memoirs have survived. Roth's participation would contradict the self-image he promoted in later interviews as being alienated from writers even as he hung out on the edges of Eda Lou Walton's salon, then immersing himself directly in the proletariat after Call It Sleep appeared. This leads one to wonder about Kellman's undocumented statement that, "On a mild May morning in 1935," Roth "grabbed a pile of leaflets from the John Reed Club" to distribute to dockworkers (141–2). Maybe so, but a motion was passed to dissolve the John Reed Club at a conference in the summer of 1934, with the organization replaced by the League of American Writers launched when the American Writers Congress was held in New York City from 23 to 25 April 1935. (Partisan Review's last issue as a John Reed Club organ was the one presenting documents for the April discussion.) So, the organization probably did not exist in May, and Kellman does not mention that Roth was a public signer of the call for that April American Writers Congress, and also for the fourth and final Congress in 1941 (93, 316). Moreover, in contrast to the John Reed Club, the League of American Writers published newsletters providing specifics of Roth's activities.

In another peculiar moment, Kellman asserts that, "By supporting the purge of Trotsky (né Lev Davidovitch Bronstein), he, like many other American Stalinists, also followed a familiar pattern of repudiating his own Jewishness" (118). This claim surely requires more clarification than parenthetical identification of Trotsky's Jewish birthname. After all, many Jewish Stalinists exhibited a great deal of ethnic consciousness (and produced Yiddish publications where Trotsky was condemned). In contrast, the most famous Jewish pro-Trotsky intellectuals (the Partisan Review editors, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook) professed a universalist-internationalism. In light of the growing power of the Nazis, a pro-Communist like Roth may well have thought that he or she was defending Jewish interests when declaring support to the Soviet leadership during the Purge Trials. In another undocumented reference, Kellman states that Walton joined the Communist Party just a few months after Roth signed up in 1934 (143); she may well have considered herself in sympathy by then, but it seems more likely that she joined several years later, in the very different climate of the post-1935 Popular Front turn.⁷

The problem is not that a massive amount of material about Roth's decades in the Party is readily available and that Kellman ignored it. Roth apparently burned just about everything connected with his Party affiliation at the inception of the McCarthy era, although he later made brief references to select incidents. The question is whether Kellman aggressively pursued sources likely to clarify Roth's three decades as a Communist (which was a commitment shared by his lover and then his wife). Based on the evidence of the book, Kellman seems to have been too restrained in investigating this topic beyond reviewing resources already available, which consist of the extant interviews with Roth, "Batch 2," and Roth's FBI file (which Kellman was the first to obtain). For example, Roth has testified that members of Walton's salon first attracted him to the Party's ideas. Were the literary papers of salon participants, especially those who may have been in the John Reed Club, examined? A quick check of the Horace Gregory manuscripts at Syracuse University reveals a 25 July 1933 letter showing that Roth was aware of Michael Gold's attack on Archibald MacLeish's poetry as fascist; more important, perhaps, are comments on Ezra Pound's Cantos in response to a review by Gregory. This is not earthshaking news, but suggests that it might be fruitful for a future scholar of Roth to search further among the archival collections of this milieu. One might add to this inquiry the papers of Communist literati among Walton's pro-Communist colleagues at New York University, or among those connected with Party publications at the time Call it Sleep was reviewed and discussed.⁸

One can only go by the evidence a scholar reports, but there is little in the book to indicate that Kellman searched for writings by either Roth, or "Berry," in a run of the Daily Worker, smaller Party internal bulletins or journals, or the trade union publication mentioned in Chapter 10 (possibly described in an FBI report). An examination of the Communist Party's 1943 Daily Worker literary debate over Ruth McKenney's novel Jake Home, indicates that Roth did jump in—mainly to praise Michael Gold's column on the book (Roth 4). Is not it likely that the Roths had friends in the Party and the unions during the activist years of the 1940s who might provide insights into his state of mind? If he was already a loner, how was he elected to his various posts?⁹ Did Roth, in fact, achieve some genuine sense of pride and self-respect in this life as a revolutionary? Were the Communist years destructive to his creative talents, or emotionally somewhat therapeutic, as one of his interviewers believed?¹⁰

The overarching theme of Kellman's biography is that Roth was blocked in his artistic development due to self-hatred stemming from the incest of his youth; Roth ultimately concluded that "redemption" might come through the public confession in Mercy of a Rude Stream. This seems reasonable and calls into question earlier speculations that the villain in Roth's literary career was Communist Party pressure on him to produce a crude version of "proletarian literature." Kellman, to his credit, steers clear of the misleading emphasis that others have given, as evidence of the Communist attitude toward Roth, to a brief unsigned editor's note in the New Masses that repudiated Call It Sleep (134). But I would go further and suggest that no other literary milieu of the time devoted as much attention, and favorable commentary, to Call It Sleep, as did Communist intellectuals. While one might speculate that some of the motivation for this welcoming attitude among Communist literati was because Roth was "one of us," the quality of the various reviews (a second one and several letters in the New Masses, along with pieces in Partisan Review and the Daily Worker, and by pro-Communist Horace Gregory in the Nation) shows considerable empathy for Roth's aims and objectives.

Kellman is also almost alone among literary scholars in mentioning that the comments of praise attributed to novelist Alfred Hayes in the blurb on later paperback editions of Call It Sleep are actually taken from the Daily Worker. (In my Noonday edition of the novel, Hayes is among the five critics whose acclaim of Call It Sleep appears on the inside page; publication sources for all are given except in the case of Hayes—the Daily Worker is omitted.) While Kellman cites nothing beyond the same sentences from Hayes that are used in the blurb, the full review is worth careful scrutiny in order to recognize the quality of thinking going on in the literary Left of that moment. It is a beautifully written tribute to Roth's "act of memory" and a thoughtful, fair-minded consideration of the ambiguities of the novel's symbolic structure, conveying an inscrutable "meaning over and beyond the crisis of David's family life, and the life of the streets" (Hayes 5). One wonders if these two young Jewish Communists from the streets of New York ever met to discuss the novel or the review.

Hayes's insights suggest that the ties of Call It Sleep to the proletarian literary movement were in its synthesis of a naturalistic vision of urban life (compatible, perhaps, with an intuitive Marxism but expressed through Modernist strategies) that was fused with a romantic desire for transcendence. These blended elements resonated with other rank-and-file creative writers on the Left, even as Communist policy in the hands of some authoritative editors and journalists pointed to the promotion of literature more accessible to a working-class audience and less politically ambiguous. Thus the sources of Roth's creative vision in Call It Sleep and his major commitment to Communism, coming to fruition in the same year, are homologous; they have common origins in a transcendent desire suffusing a class conscious perspective. Kellman cites an interview where Roth states: "I think that one of the reasons I joined the Communist Party was to feel that I was doing something to redeem myself" (117). The specific reference is to Roth's feeling of privilege due to his living off the largesse of Walton during the early Depression; but it is now clear that the redemption sought was also for transgressive sexual desire. One question, then, is whether Roth's post-1934 decades of thinking like a Communist have any bearing on the emotional structure of the four volumes published between 1994 and 1998. Can life and art operate so independently? But about these four novels Kellman presents only a relatively few pages that combine plot summaries, quotations from reviews, and intermittent reactions to style, never really addressing complex problems. Were these decades of the 1930s to the 1960s merely a black hole? One cannot answer until the substance and texture of the Communist years are restored.

In preparing his monumental Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007), Stanford University Dean for the Humanities Arnold Rampersad countenanced problems comparable to those of Price and Kellman. As with Agnes Smedley, there already existed an impressively researched biography of the African American novelist Ralph Ellison (1913–94). Lawrence Jackson's adroitly written Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002) terminates in 1953, but covers many of the chief and previously hidden biographical and political uncertainties in the first half of Ellison's life. Moreover, while Ellison was far from the activist that Smedley was, and espionage is no factor in his politics, his official connection to Communism similarly remains in dispute; was he or wasn't he a Party member? For some five years, 1937–42, Ellison's criticism and journalism sounded very much like the work of a Communist, and he published as well as spoke in Communist venues. But he never acknowledged membership and there is no record of a public break from the Party nor of persecution in the McCarthy era; his sparse references to the Party in later years are mainly aimed at presenting his cultural outlook as consistently adversarial, and promoting the disingenuous claim that "The Brotherhood" in Invisible Man is not intended to represent the Communist Party.¹¹ The half-dozen book-length literary studies focusing on Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952), tend not to challenge his self-representation, treating him as a one-time fellow traveler. The second hurdle for Ellison biographers is that, as an artist, Ellison comes close to Henry Roth as something of a one-book wonder in the production of novels. Ellison, too, bequeathed a late manuscript of uncertain character and quality, Juneteenth (1999), which he left unfinished and was posthumously published.

Most of the press notice that will be given to Ralph Ellison is likely to concentrate on Rampersad's nuanced and balanced coverage of the four decades subsequent to Invisible Man. The novel's publication propelled Ellison to fame, especially after he received the National Book Award in 1953. Rampersad's story is both tragic and ugly, especially since Ellison truly possessed literary genius and was almost the lone African American in the cultural world of the white literary establishment. Yet Ellison was progressively rewarded and had loyal, well-situated white friends, which makes it painful to read about his pettiness, egotism, lack of generosity to other black writers, cruelty to his second wife (Fanny), and lust for prestige. Rampersad, like Kellman, must possess remarkable stamina to persist in the relentless reportage of such depressing unpleasantries. Moreover, the dissection is conducted without rancor, even though Rampersad is clearly less empathetic with his subject than he was in generating his unrivaled two-volume The Life of Langston Hughes (1986, 1988).

Even before Jackson, Ellison's itinerary on the Left was documented in its outlines, largely due to the public character of his activities in journals and organizations known to scholars of the Left. Born in Oklahoma City, Ellison at age three had witnessed the accidental death of his father who was injured while hauling ice for his business as an ice and coal dealer. Ellison endured humiliating poverty as his mother worked as a domestic and in hotels, escaping when he could into the city's Blues and Jazz scene. Then, as a talented trumpet player, Ellison won a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute's School of Music. After a hair-raising journey to Alabama by freight train, Ellison passed a year in college where he shifted his primary allegiance to literature. A July 1936 trip to New York resulted in his swift introduction into the Left-wing cultural scene through an accidental encounter with Langston Hughes. Ellison decided to remain in the city permanently, and several months later he met the newly arrived Richard Wright, who in turn brought Ellison around the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker and the pro-Communist black journal New Challenge. As records show, Ellison then attended the second American Writers Congress, commenced reviewing for the New Masses, participated in the National Negro Congress, and collaborated with the famous black Communist Angelo Herndon in publishing the Negro Quarterly. When Richard Wright quietly withdrew from Communist activities in 1942 (this was two years before announcing his break in public), Ellison disappeared from the Communist cultural and political milieu. Yet an alteration in his political views was not obvious, inasmuch as this absence mostly coincided with his two years of war-time service in the Merchant Marine, the break-up of his first marriage (to the popular entertainer Rose Poindexter), and his winning a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship to write a novel about an African-American pilot captured by the Nazis.

Lawrence Jackson dedicated about 120 pages of Ralph Ellison: The Emergence of Genius to simply filling in the details of these sorts of activities by Ellison from 1936 to 1942, and Rampersad, in his full-length biography, devotes about 90 pages to the same period. What do we learn from the two scholars? On the central matters and most of the details both are in agreement; it is unmistakable to me that Ellison was as much of a Communist as one could be, so long as one dispenses with the notion that a Communist must be a one-dimensional hack who brandishes an official membership card. As with Wright, Ellison's Party experiences initially encouraged and facilitated his development as an intellectual and an artist. If Party authorities had any fantasies that they would simply exploit the two black intellectuals for the cause, the situation backfired; in a familiar pattern for writers, Ellison, like Wright, little by little outgrew the strictures of the Communist world-view. But in the process the men learned an enormous amount from Party debates and political activities, lived more fully interracial lives, and were brought in contact with the dynamic international cultural milieu surrounding the movement. Further, the problems that both developed with Communism were not originally generated by a perception of white supremacism in the Party nor obeisance to Soviet totalitarianism; the germs of their later opposition evolved at first from conflicts with African-American activists whom Wright and Ellison thought their intellectual inferiors (especially on cultural matters), and then from the marked turn toward liberalism that came under the leadership of General Secretary Earl Browder when the USSR was attacked in June 1941. Rampersad also believes that Ellison was unhappy with the Party's downplaying of race issues for the sake of war-time unity because "it threatened his future as a writer by making expendable his writing about race for radical publications" (255).

For Ellison, the high point of Communist fervor came during the era of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, 1939–41; then the Party was most sectarian, and Ellison was gleeful at A. Phillip Randolph's defeat at the National Negro Congress while hoping for Hitler's successful invasion of England (133, 135). While both Wright and Ellison are later associated variously with Cold War anticommunism, the stages of their breaks did not correspond to the "anti-Stalinism" exemplified by the New York Intellectuals. Ellison and Wright's political unhappiness was certainly due to the Party's subordination of the black struggle to anti-fascist unity, which was carried out in the interest of defending the USSR, but neither writer blamed the USSR for this policy. While they initially saw a positive aspect to the Popular Front of the late 1930s, they now judged that the Party was too close to liberalism, and they sought to maintain the more "Leftist" manifestation of Stalinism (including a top priority given to anti-racism) that was inspirational to the two men in the era of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. By the 1946 expulsion of Browder and his replacement by the ultra-Stalinist William Z. Foster, Ellison and Wright had already embarked in new directions. In contrast, the New York Intellectuals developed a critique of the Soviet regime much earlier, incited by its policies 1933–34 and 1936–37.

Some specificity about Ellison's Marxist political stance in the 1940s is needed for the fullest apprehension of the background to Invisible Man; this should include Ellison's sectarianism toward liberal democracy, and also a proletarian elitism in the belief that his views (more than those of the black Party leadership) directly expressed the desire of the black masses. The novel may be understood as perhaps the most painful record of disillusionment with Communism in US literary history. Although the unnamed protagonist cannot be wholly correlated to Ellison, and a near-comic book exaggeration of personalities and events is part of his literary strategy, the novel's chronology and emotional development correspond closely to Ellison's own political journey. He was not, of course, an activist-orator, but a journalist and critic; however, his belief in his own powers was increasingly unleashed and nurtured by Party opportunities and institutions. No doubt he was fulfilling his own psychological needs even as he genuinely promoted Party positions, but, granted a touch of cynicism, his was no arm's length or half-hearted affiliation. The experience was compressed and intense, and hence vital to his life and his most memorable art, and also to the essays that would subsequently express a brilliantly complex view of race and culture.

A central literary puzzle of Invisible Man is, of course, the strange machinations of the Brotherhood in Harlem. For this reader, the portraits of male Communist leaders, including Brother Jack, are more admirable than offensive, particularly in light of Ellison's previous representations of Bledsoe and Trueblood. Brother Jack's glass eye certainly connotes partial blindness; but the point is that Jack lost the eye in devotion to the cause, humanizing his fanaticism in a sympathetic way. Ellison's depiction of Brother Tod Clifton—emblematic of a generation of idealistic young black Communist militants—is especially compelling in light of what we know about historical figures such as Ed Strong and Louis Burnham. What is vexing is Ellison's representation of the Brotherhood as willfully pulling out of Harlem during a moment of calamity, hoping that a violent catastrophe, which Ellison then recreates as the 1943 Harlem Riot, would ensue due to the absence of their leadership. The record, of course, shows that the Communist Party was not at all happy with the riot; indeed, the Party abhorred the interruption of a focus on war-time production and the implicit suggestion that racial harmony was not actually increasing in accord with the Popular Front.¹²

Moreover, Rampersad judges that the absence of "a plausible reason" for the Brotherhood's abandonment of Harlem in Invisible Man "leaves behind something of a dramatic gap... . A crisis of spirit and technique haunts this last section" (255). I am not certain that I share this aesthetic response, but Rampersad's observation is astute. The absence of a rational explanation for the Brotherhood's switch in policy could have been used to reinforce the idea that the Brotherhood is an exemplification of a universal tendency for class-based organizations to sacrifice the needs of specific sectors of the population. This would be consistent with the notion that the Brotherhood is based on the Communist Party yet meant to illustrate something more general, as was the case with the episodes about "The Founder" and the figure of Booker T. Washington. Such a gambit might have worked more effectively than an attempt to recreate the actual explanation, which was the Communist Party's mechanical fidelity to perceived Soviet foreign policy needs. After all, if Ellison had depicted the Brotherhood in this fashion, he would have confined the reader's perception of the Brotherhood episodes to the mere recreation of the history of a specific organization. Yet Ellison went in the reverse direction and decided to attribute an over-the-top Machiavellianism to the Brotherhood. This diminishes his credibility as a compelling critic of the actual Left, surely one of his aims in Invisible Man. Zealotry in the belief that what is good for the USSR is good for the African-American population is one thing, and obviously part of the truth of the US Communist tragedy; but the unleashing of violent chaos under the delusion that the Brotherhood may one day return to rule the rubble is more apposite to the story of an evil genius out to conquer the world in a science fiction story.

Rampersad's Ralph Ellison is a thoroughly researched, gracefully written, and masterful biography, one worthy of consideration for the Pulitzer Prize. Also inspiring is the excellence of documentation. When Rampersad makes a claim, he usually provides a straightforward quotation from a source presented in a clear and accessible citation. When he is uncertain of an allegation, especially in the most controversial areas of political-literary biography—which as a rule are found in matters of sex and Communist affiliation—he tells us what he knows and possibly suspects, but refrains from waxing definitive. The following episode gives the flavor of his approach:

A curious aspect about Ralph's life that vital fall [1936], given his critical although tolerant attitude to male homosexuality, was that he was working for a gay or bisexual man [Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan] and living with one who was openly gay [African-American sculptor Richmond Barthé]. In fact, Ralph's job had probably come about because of a circle of gay acquaintances, male and female, of which Barthé was a part. Although Ralph's relationship with Dr. Sullivan was almost certainly circumspect, his ties to Barthé might have been more complicated. This was another of Ralph's friendships about which he later spoke or wrote virtually nothing. Perhaps in Barthé's case he had something sexual to hide; perhaps not, because even before he became famous, Ralph was not inclined to admit any personal debts. (85)

This is not to say that every bit of documentation is perfect. At one point Rampersad asserts that Ellison reviewed his friend Alvah Bessie's "book Bread and Stone [actually, Bread and a Stone] ... later in the year [1941] under a pseudonym"; he does not tell us the alias, place, or date (147).¹³ An article about blacks and Jews is reported by Rampersad to have been published in the spring of 1939, and some quotes from Ellison are given. But these lines are actually from a manuscript in the Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress; there is no citation for the version that appeared in print (124, 580). (The article was in Jewish People's Voice 3 [April 1939]: 3, 8.) Some topics seem left out, such as religion: Was Ellison ever a believing Christian, and what were his views about religion in black life?

But are there no differences at all between Jackson and Rampersad on the treatment of Ellison's Communist years? The two narratives are quite compatible, and strangely not redundant. Some minor matters are handled in a superior manner by Jackson. For example, while Rampersad tells us that playwright Theodore Ward was regarded by Ellison as one of the three artists who were leading the "radicalization of black American creative life" (the others being Ellison himself and Wright), Rampersad never calls Ward anything but "Ted" (comparable to referring to playwright Arthur Miller only as "Artie," which is what Miller's friends did) (138). Ward appears as an insubstantial figure in Rampersad's narrative to anyone who is not already familiar with the history of black drama. Jackson, in contrast, succinctly gives a clearer sense of Ward's identity and importance (210–11). More significantly, Jackson includes eye-catching information about material cut from Invisible Man. Referring to the excision of a section he calls "Leroy's journal," Jackson convincingly speculates that its insertion "would have reflected the international scope of Ellison's earliest intentions" which would have added a more advanced understanding of race and colonialism; the omission of Leroy's journal made Ellison's book "even more vulnerable to the criticisms of the radicals" (426–7).

Rampersad, however, has ample new personal details about Ellison, such as in regard to Ellison's first marriage to Rose Poindexter and his extra-marital affair with the Hollywood-based fiction writer Sanora Babb. Concerning the latter, Jackson reports the external facts, but Rampersad gives us documented material about the emotional complexities, which is far more helpful to understanding Ellison. On Party membership, Jackson is certain that Ellison never officially joined; Rampersad states: "He probably became, at least for a while, a dues-paying Party member" (185; 93).

To my satisfaction, neither author entirely clarifies the subsidization and purpose of the remarkable journal edited by Angelo Herndon and Ellison, Negro Quarterly, especially in terms of its relation to the Communist Party. Rampersad, however, acknowledges that there are contradictions between Ellison's claims and the journal's content (152). I expect that Ellison was using the Negro Quarterly, as he used everything else, partly as a vehicle for his own ends. But it also seems credible that there was a voluntary understanding on the part of the editors and the Communist Party leadership to the effect that Negro Quarterly was to rally black artists and white allies to the Communist perspective. Otherwise, it is hard to explain such a turn-out of talented Party members and sympathizers among its contributors. So, even if the publication did not operate under direct control of the Party's Central Committee, I would regard it as a black Communist publication.

Additionally, there remains some sketchiness in both books about the role in Ellison's life played by the mysterious Ida Guggenheimer, the wealthy pro-Communist Jewish widow of a conservative lawyer. Jackson proposed that Ellison's dedication of Invisible Man "To Ida" served the double purpose of honoring both Ellison's mother, Ida Milsap Ellison, and his benefactor, Ida Guggenheimer; he cites (but does not quote) a 13 May 1996 interview with Ellison's brother Herbert as his source (413, 418). Yet Rampersad is unambiguous in stating that the dedication was only to his patron: "Ralph had dedicated the book to Ida Guggenheimer, passing over both his wife and the memory of his dead mother" (258). A check of other book-length works on Ellison indicates no references at all to Guggenheimer, although a novelist's choice of dedication of such a grand work seems like a substantial issue to address in a body of literary analysis so obsessed with the production of one particular novel.

As pertains to Guggenheimer, both authors point out that she gave Ellison, like other black writers and intellectuals, some degree of financial support and entrance to a cultural milieu. Still, neither the amount of money nor the intellectual sustenance (Guggenheimer's pedestrian letters to both Ellison and Wright have survived) seem enough to merit such a book dedication. This is all the more perplexing since, in 1952, Ellison was aware that Guggenheimer was pro-Stalinist (and would remain so to her death; Invisible Man's publication ended her relations with Ellison). The information that Ellison earlier had used Guggenheim as a kind of sounding board to defend his and Richard Wright's political heterodoxies in the mid-1940s may have some significance here, especially if one sees the published version of Invisible Man as differing from its original goal. Perhaps Ellison had intended the novel to be more of an inquiry into the contradictions of revolutionary practice, one that reached out to well-meaning individuals of Guggenheimer's persuasion rather than the Cold War anticommunist manifesto it appears to be today. But the whole topic of "Ida and the Black Literary Left" may be one that awaits further exploration.

Up to now, we have examined biographies of pro-Communist writers who issued classic novels in proximity to their Left commitment, yet all passed nearly the rest of their lives without a comparable follow-up achievement in fiction. What is more, all three of these writers—Smedley, Roth, Ellison—spent their time on the Left beguiled by Stalinism. One might expect, then, that the first biography of James T. Farrell (1904–79), Robert K. Landers's An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell (2004), would provide a thought-provoking alternative. Farrell, after all, produced an early work, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1936), which, if not quite of the current stature of Call It Sleep and Invisible Man, can certainly be looked upon as in the same league. In its day, Farrell's trilogy was assessed as a work as ground-breaking as Roth's Call It Sleep. It was also a language experiment, one deeply suffused with a modernist sensibility yet driven by urban naturalism informed by Marxism. There the parallel stops, although one might speculate that most of the subsequent divergences would favor Farrell. In contrast to Roth and Ellison, Farrell was certainly not blocked; his literary output included over 40 books of fiction and nearly ten of non-fiction. Whatever the disagreements among his critics in newspaper and journal reviews, he long sustained a popular audience. As late as 1963, his newest novel received positive front-page notice in the New York Times Book Review.

Distinct from Roth, Ellison and Smedley, Farrell saw through the fraud of the Moscow Trials in 1936 and the USSR's machinations in Spain at the time the events were occurring. Farrell also departed from Roth and Ellison in that his disillusionment with the Left had an evolving logic to it. He did not, like Roth, transmogrify overnight into a kind of Zionist chauvinist. Nor did he emulate the secretive Ellison. Farrell was straightforward after 1936 about his switch of allegiance first to pro-Trotskyism, then to Left social democracy of the Walter Reuther variety, and finally to Cold War liberalism. Of course, Farrell had his demons; his conduct under the influence of alcohol was shocking, and later in life he became addicted to amphetamines, which increased his eccentric behavior and may have accidentally killed him. When he finally broke with radicalism, he lost much of his political sophistication; some of his pro-Americanist utterings were an embarrassment even to his colleagues in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Still, there were many sides to Farrell; when I was close to him during 1974–9, he spoke with passionate enthusiasm and no vindictiveness about his revolutionary years in the 1930s and 1940s, and seemed happy to be in dialogue with a young Marxist.

Thirty-five years ago, Farrell's career to 1971 was accurately documented by a devoted research scholar, Edgar Branch, who afterward produced extensive bibliographical essays and played a part in archiving the Farrell papers.¹⁴ Moreover, for the final two decades of his life, Farrell's companion, Cleo Paturis, who worked for trade magazines, additionally devoted herself to preserving every scrap of his literary legacy.¹⁵ The basic story of Farrell's career has further been narrated in numerous journalistic portraits, dissertations, introductions to reprints, and monographs. The traumatic event of his youth was his removal from his parents' home at age three, to be raised by his grandparents, two aunts, and an uncle. This constituted a shift in economic surroundings, from dire poverty to the middle class, and most certainly played a part in his evolving sensitivity to distinctions of class and culture among the Irish immigrant population. Landers depicts the separation as a formative moment producing chiefly a "psychic wound" about parental love, although he does not satisfactorily enlarge upon this assertion in his ensuing treatment of Farrell's life and writing (4).

Following graduation from a Catholic high school in 1923, Farrell worked several years for an express company and then a service station, while he took courses at DePaul University and then the University of Chicago. It was in 1927, while studying composition with Professor James Weber Linn, that Farrell pledged himself to the literary life, and for the next few years moved among aspiring young writers in New York, Chicago, and Paris. By the time he relocated permanently in Manhattan in 1932, he was published in little magazines, married to Chicago sweetheart Dorothy Butler, and gravitating directly into pro-Communist circles. That year Young Lonigan, the first volume of the trilogy, was published, followed by the proletarian-modernist Gas-House McGinty (1933) and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934). Volumes of fiction, collections of short stories, and diverse non-fiction would appear practically every year until his death.

There are few secrets about Farrell's political itinerary. Like other literary rebels of his generation, he was drawn to socialist thought while a student, appearing in the pro-Communist New Masses in 1930. His literary and personal associations began to blend with Communist political and cultural circles as soon as he moved from Paris to Manhattan. Inasmuch as his novels were coming out at that time, he inaugurated his period of Communist belief near the top, a recognized literary figure publishing in the Daily Worker and John Reed Club's Partisan Review. In 1935 he provided a major (and brilliant) lecture on the short story for the First American Writers Congress during the time it was organized as a revolutionary organization.

Farrell's shift to a pro-Trotskyist position grew out of a perfect storm of political crisis and personal turmoil, no single aspect providing a full explanation. Farrell's irascibility in literary matters was already in evidence; he was keen on having his own say about literary likes and dislikes, prided himself in going against the grain in his preferences, and was hyper-sensitive about critical judgments of his work as an artist. As Landers documents, the Communist International's switch to the Popular Front troubled Farrell first of all due to its reformism; Farrell was an angry militant and wanted to take a stand for socialist revolution. He attended the 1936 Communist Party convention where Earl Browder was nominated as the presidential candidate, but felt as frustrated by the apparent call to support Roosevelt against "reaction" as he was inspired by the waving of red flags by the audience (Landers 172). He was already annoyed by the tendency of some pro-Communist critics to judge writing by political criteria, and personal acquaintances had alerted him to the facts behind the Purge Trials. At the same time, his marriage was in crisis and his new love was Hortense Alden, an actress who had traveled in the Communist theater milieu where playwright Clifford Odets was a previous lover. Was Farrell's new political turn extra-courageous because it was likely to damage Alden's career? Or was it partly motivated by a desire to put distance between her and Odets? Landers is undecided as to how much Farrell knew about the affair (162).

In the end, it is hard to sort out all the factors to elucidate why Farrell made what were ultimately the wise political choices that he did in regard to the USSR. He was smart and widely read, but no more intelligent than other leading writers on the Left, such as Smedley, Roth, and Ellison. The opinion that Farrell was in possession of a unique integrity has some plausibility in light of his stubbornness. Yet intellectuals who chose to endorse the Trials, such as Malcolm Cowley and Granville Hicks, also believed that they were acting according to their consciences. Among the New York literary set, it was fashionable to be a Communist, but there were always career risks if one could be simplistically labeled before the public or if the country's political mood changed. Accident and personality surely played their role in Farrell's entire trajectory. When he pulled out of his stint in Hollywood in 1935, was it due to greater integrity than others who stuck it out, like Nathanael West and Daniel Fuchs? Or was it simply that Farrell was no good at that kind of writing? Landers's narrative suggests the latter (155–7).

Other factors enabled Farrell to take a minority position within the revolutionary Left. One was his growing standing as a significant novelist with a loyal publisher, Vanguard Press, and a promising future. So far he had been successful on his own terms, and he had an endless fund of ideas for books—so why not forge ahead? There was also the existence of an alternative literary-intellectual base for Farrell among those who backed the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and launched the post-1937 version of Partisan Review. Although most of those involved were little-known at the time, Farrell had long admired John Dewey and Edmund Wilson. Farrell's political journey is depicted by Landers as a "lonely" one, but, in the late 1930s anti-Stalinist Leninism was inaugurated in an atmosphere of a good deal of hopefulness and camaraderie (xiii). Farrell and the pro-Trotsky intellectuals were young, gifted, and full of revolutionary enthusiasm. Unluckily, like everyone else, they faced a world rapidly moving toward unanticipated international disasters.

The meaning of what happened in succeeding years varies according to how one constructs the events, which is where Landers's An Honest Writer makes its weakest interpretative bid. Landers depicts Farrell's voyage through the ensuing decades as a kind of Pilgrim's Progress to political maturity and good sense as an ideological anticommunist social democrat. By the 1950s, the last vestiges of revolutionary Marxism were shed and Farrell passed his final three decades as a mainstream Democratic Party supporter, exhibiting some features of neo-conservatism but not living long enough to undergo the final evolution. In telling this story, Landers does a good job of putting forward the documented record. He grants, at least tacitly, that Farrell was indeed a Communist at the time of his most prominent literary achievement (The Studs Lonigan Trilogy), despite his Smedley-like resistance to the discipline of Party membership. Landers offers a factually accurate, if uninspired, narrative of the all-important transition period of some 10–12 years when Farrell fought, in mounting isolation, for a new revolutionary trend in Marxist culture. Farrell's outlook as an anti-Stalinist revolutionary was based on a blend of Trotskyism, neo-Trotskyism (he shared some of the views of Max Shachtman, although he felt a personal attraction to the more orthodox James P. Cannon), and some of his individual thoughts. On cultural matters Farrell always spoke his own mind, although he did so as a zealous Leninist. What is missing from Landers's account is an appraisal or at least some conveyance of Farrell's intellectual depth.

I consider Farrell's post-1936 anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism as maturation; it is the culmination of the qualities that made Farrell a distinctive and rousing force in US literary-intellectual history before the 1950s. This accomplishment is partly due to the "moment" of Farrell's pentalogy about the O'Neill and O'Flaherty families, which in the view of Farrell and some Farrell scholars is his foremost accomplishment in fiction. The period is also when he produced his sequence of unique Marxist literary studies: A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), The League of Frightened Philistines (1945), and Literature and Morality (1947). Inspired by memorable trips to Mexico (where he met Leon Trotsky) and Ireland (where he met James Larkin), Farrell also gained stature as an internationalist. His accomplishments of the early 1930s—his wonderful short fiction, stimulating reviews, and The Studs Lonigan Trilogy—augured a promise that now came to fruition. After World War II Farrell might have developed even more as a writer and thinker, but the last 30 years reveals an uneven decline. To make this judgment is not to propose some crude correlation between Farrell's holding a radical political position and his capacity to create powerful writing. On the contrary, there is body of opinion, shared by Landers and myself, that The Face of Time (1954) is Farrell at his literary best. Yet the novel was written at the very moment when Farrell was at his politically most conventional and uninteresting, a burned-out radical riding the anticommunist wave. On the other hand, at the height of his Trotskyist fervor Farrell published Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939). This is a largely forgettable novella about the Father Coughlin movement explicitly informed by his Marxist politics. It is dwarfed by Arthur Miller's extraordinary Focus (1946), a book on the same topic but from a pro-Communist perspective. In sum, political line and artistic quality have no necessary connection.

Landers, however, fails to convey that there is a true intellectual complexity and dramatic excitement involved in Farrell's literary/political projects. This is precisely what should be stressed when examining the profundity of Modernist influence (Joyce, Proust) at the birth of Farrell's career, and the gravitas of his fascination with Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky (reflected especially in the deepening of Farrell's historical sensibility) in the revolutionary years. Nor does Landers candidly acknowledge Farrell's palpable intellectual decline in the Cold War, since this is the political side of Farrell toward which Landers is most sympathetic. Landers, of course, considers those antipathetic to Farrell's "tough-minded liberalism" as expressing the bias of "tenured radicals" (xiii). But the admission that Farrell produces much less original work with the onset of the Cold War need not be a conclusion based on political partisanship. After all, intellectuals such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Lionel Trilling found their true voices as compelling thinkers only following deradicalization and commitment to anticommunism. If Farrell likewise moved on to some higher wisdom during the Cold War, I would be pleased to acknowledge it, but this is evident in neither his criticism nor fiction. What is noteworthy is that Farrell entered the 1950s in a state of exhaustion. There had been a steady sequence of catastrophes involving a devastating fire in his apartment (apparently due to his smoking while drunk), the break-up of his second marriage (the ugly rupture with Hortense), family tragedy (the birth of a severely retarded child), and a decline in health (a major abdominal operation in 1952). Farrell's circle of intellectual associates was moving to the Right, while the revolutionary forces with which he had allied (the Socialist Workers Party and then the Workers Party) had continued to dwindle and split.

Most imperative was that his political perspective was in shambles. Like other Trotskyists, Farrell had believed that Stalinism would come apart under the impact of World War II followed by a post-war working-class upsurge in the West. Instead, the anti-fascist Resistance had increased the Communist movement's prestige in Europe; the revolution against colonialism in China was carried out under Stalinist leadership; and the Soviet Union was expanding into Eastern Europe. In light of what happened, Farrell's "opposition" to World War II is difficult to grasp, especially the sound-byte version. To be sure, Cold War liberalism turned out to have been a terrible choice to which he succumbed by 1948. This was evident to the generation of the 1960s, not only due to US policies in Vietnam and Cuba, but because of "tough-minded liberalism's" complicity in McCarthyism and back-seat role in the civil rights movement. Ultimately, a central trend within liberal anticommunism degenerated into neo-conservatism. In the early 1950s, however, only a handful of individuals were open to the idea of reinventing Marxism and revolutionary socialism, and Farrell was not among them.

Although An Honest Writer is not a work of literary scholarship, Landers is a satisfactory guide when it comes to many of the literary problems in Farrell's legacy. How and why did Farrell move from the status of a "titan" at the outset of his career to the status of "largely forgotten" today (ix)? One explanation is that his literary strategy became tedious. It is a common misperception that Farrell simply replicated material in his novels, although a vast amount of his narratives rely on urban Irish-American experiences. Yet it is surely the case that Farrell's method was more or less the same: He aimed to create the illusion for the reader of witnessing unmediated reality through the minds (and in the words) of his characters. These were frequently, but not exclusively, members of Irish-American families. Of course, this technique requires that the author engage in a careful selection of materials and possess keen psychological insight. When the method worked, it was due to Farrell exhibiting these talents. At his best, his writing was usually animated by an affecting compassion for mundane individuals who had no voice or power in the general culture.

Landers ably captures Farrell's personality in his depiction of him as a man intensely self-centered yet interested in others. Nevertheless, Landers's stress on Farrell's childish behavior and personal messiness will make it tough for readers to grasp that Farrell impressed many of us through his teacher-like capacity to inspire an exhilarated fascination with history and literature. Moreover, Landers's argument relies too much on validating Farrell on the grounds that he possessed an "honesty" that is "rare and precious" (xiv). This assessment is the foundation of the biography's title, perspective, and conclusion. But Farrell was honest compared to whom? Are most writers "dishonest"? Was Farrell himself always honest? Even autobiographically, it is worth noting that Farrell's novel-length tribute to his father, Father and Son (1943), dissembles in regard to the elder Farrell's racism (Landers 10). To draw attention to this misrepresentation is not to take a potshot at Farrell; there is something admirable about his hatred of bigotry going so deep that he was unable to address its existence in a man for whom he felt so much compassion. In his "honest writer" theme, Landers unintentionally lowered the level of literary discussion.

We have now come to the moment of the near-disappearance in historical memory of a crucial endeavor from the mid-1930s into the Cold War, one precious for those seeking a usable past clear of the apologetics generated for either the bloody Soviet tyranny or US expansionist empire. These were the two decades when the independent revolutionary Left (of which Trotskyism was an element but not sole proprietor) sought, and ultimately failed, to grab a foothold in US culture. The liberal/Left scholarship about that era, assisted by not a few memoirs, rarely transcends the original obfuscating polarization of anti-anti-Communism and anti-Communism. One side of the spectrum depicted US Communists as mainly victims, and the USSR as imperfect but not a threat. From this narrow angle, most varieties of Cold War liberalism and anti-Stalinist social democracy (even when represented at its best, by radical Dissent editor Irving Howe) are adjudged as mainly providing cover for the anti-radical repression; moreover, even Marxist critiques of Soviet totalitarianism are decried as "Red-Baiting." From the opposite angle, the "progressive" version of liberalism (exemplified heroically by Nation editor Cary McWilliams) becomes amalgamated with Stalinism, characterized as the liberalism of "innocents" who could not fully imagine the perfidy of Soviet-style Communism. The polemical heat emanating from the two sides in the 1950s, the former calling for "Peace" and the latter demanding "Cultural Freedom," failed to allow for much subtlety, or the understanding of nuances existing among their opponents. Moreover, both seemed at the time to be joined in erasing the potential of the alternative—the also-variegated legacy of independent Marxism, which was mostly morphing into the dead end of anti-Stalinism.

It is not surprising, then, that the central literary and political achievement of Farrell's legacy, too, has nearly vanished.¹⁶ Today Farrell is remembered as a lesser figure than he was. What mostly remains of his image, in the public mind as well as in academe, are the beginning and the end. On the positive side, there is the Great Depression moment of Studs Lonigan, now largely validated (in Landers's view, too) by its recreation of Irish immigrant life. On the negative side, there is the compulsive productivity of the 1950s and after, a record of mostly unrelieved dreariness lightened by just a few bright moments. After reading the biographies of Smedley, Roth, and Ellison, I wonder if Farrell's literary fate would have been dramatically different if there had been only The Studs Lonigan Trilogy. What if Farrell had vanished afterwards, like Roth? Or else, like Ellison, confined himself to a few stories and major essays? Or is it possible that part of the reason for the eclipse even of the early Farrell is that Irish-American culture has failed to catch the imagination of academe as have Jewish-American and African-American?

From my classroom experiences, Farrell is still eminently readable. In numerous ways his rendering of the illusions of prevailing social values, not to mention his devastating exposés of conventional notions of gender and the social construction of race and ethnicity, speak directly to aspects of mass culture that fascinated Farrell at the onset of the 1930s and are with us to the present. Yet there still remains a problem; nothing in Farrell's corpus of writing reaches the brilliant energy of Call It Sleep or Invisible Man. For all that Farrell poured out on paper in regard to the misery of personal relationships, as in This Man and This Woman (1951), there is nothing as wrenching on that subject in his writing as the final chapters of Daughter of Earth. Farrell's literary triumph was more extensive than intensive. He has a genius for recreating certain kinds of language, an atmosphere of stoicism, and poignant moments of nostalgic longing. While one would not want to suggest that trauma is a prerequisite for outstanding art, it may be pertinent that there was little in Farrell's family life to parallel the horror of Roth's incest; in his untidy romantic life to compare with Smedley's humiliation through the double standard; or even in his political life to match the agonizing disillusionment of Ellison. Perhaps Farrell, in spite of his drinking and sometimes peculiar behavior, was cursed by having a sane intellectual center right to the very end. He knew what he wanted early and achieved success at a remarkably young age. He read thoughtfully and continually, especially in areas such as history, pragmatism, and social theory. His art was almost mechanically aligned with his philosophical ideas.

With the arrival of these four biographies, we have perhaps reached a kind of turning point in the scholarship about major writers of the mid-twentieth century who were drawn to Communism. It will be more difficult in the future to discuss central works of US literature without acknowledging the deep Communist commitments of Ellison, Farrell, Roth, and Smedley, whatever their official Party status. Many controversial issues in the lives of Smedley and Roth, obscure before now, are illuminated by Price and Kellman. Until Rampersad and Landers, no full-length biographies of Ellison and Farrell even existed. Still, these new volumes hardly suggest closure. As indicated, Roth's Communist years remain a topic requiring fuller investigation, and some issues in Ellison could be further clarified. Farrell has never really gotten his due as an exemplary Marxist or from the perspective of contemporary critical theory.

If we add these volumes to the growing shelf of other outstanding biographies of writers on the Left—Jack Conroy, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Josephine Herbst, Langston Hughes, John Howard Lawson, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Don West, Nathanael West, Richard Wright—the weight of an engagement with Communism in the making of US literature in mid-century becomes incontestable. The magnitude of the phenomenon will become possible to appraise as more attention is allocated to middle-range writers, especially those in popular genres (science fiction, pulp, historical novels, mystery fiction), as well as the neglected cultural Left functioning in the Cold War era itself. Even so, there will always be some scholars who simply cannot stomach the idea that a major artist could actually have been a real "Communist," or that the cultural movement around the Party could have been as inspiring and nurturing in one situation as it was constricting and vulgar in another. There is also the temptation to invalidate a credible achievement of the Communist movement (such as its exemplary contribution to anti-racism) by pointing to a deep flaw (blindness to brutal dictatorships). Such conundrums can cause scholars to try to abridge or tiptoe around the whole matter. With considerable success, the four biographers in this review opted to take the more difficult road.

	Notes

TOP Notes Works Cited

 
Alan Wald is H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. American Night, the conclusion of his trilogy on the Literary Left, will be published in 2010.

¹ The text was published as Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture (Faber and Faber, 2006). It is also available through Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art,_Truth_&_Politics.

² See Herbert Mitgang, "China Hand," New York Times, 30 January 1988, 12; Orville Schell, "Agnes Smedley." Nation 245, no. 21 (Dec. 19, 1987): 761; Rosalyn Baxandall, "Agnes Smedley," Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (Mar. 1990): 1296–1297; Patricia Stranaham, "Agnes Smedley," Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (Nov. 1988): 862–3; Eileen Eagan, "Agnes Smedley," American Historical Review, April 1989, 534; Deirdre English, "Agnes Smedley," Washington Monthly, Oct. 1988, 53–54; Seldon Rodman, "Pink Ladies," New Leader 71, no. 6 (Apr. 4, 1988): 19. The only critical concern raised in these reviews was from a feminist perspective about an alleged failure to go deeper into Smedley's psychology.

³ Accessed 15 July 2007: www.google.com.

⁴ See Werner Sollers. "A World Somewhere, Somewhere Else." New Essays on Call It Sleep. Ed. Hanna Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge UP, 1996. 127–88.

⁵ Newspaper articles also appeared in 1998 stating that Rose Broder accepted $10,000 from her brother following publication of A Diving Rock on the Hudson. See Kellman, 327.

⁶ In 1988 I interviewed Roth in New Mexico. The information I received was used for several pages on Roth in my book Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade (U of North Carolina P, 2007). At that time Roth told me that he joined the Party in late 1933, but for personal reasons had changed his status to that of a fellow traveler at the time he defended the Moscow Purge Trials in the New Masses in March 1937. Then, after his marriage to Muriel Parker in 1939, the couple both joined. He let his membership lapse once again after the 1951 Doctor's Plot, but continued to think as if he were a Party member (supporting the 1956 Soviet Invasion of Hungry, the USSR during the 1962 Cuban missile Crisis, etc.) until the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.

⁷ Roth told me that Walton joined while he was at Yaddo in 1938, Trinity of Passion, 152. Bonnie Lyons reported in Henry Roth: The Man and His Work (Cooper Square Publishers, 1976), 15, that Roth joined the Communist Party in 1933 and that Walton "became politically active several years later." As observed in endnote 6, Roth may have been out of the Party during much of the Popular Front and then rejoined during the time of the Hitler Stalin Pact. In that same interview, he emphasized that his passionate pro-Sovietism during the war was connected with his fear for the fate of the European Jews if Hitler were victorious.

⁸ Without much difficulty, one can find letters by Walton and Muriel Roth about Henry Roth to personal friends in well-known archives such as UC Berkeley and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College.

⁹ In an article in the Nation after Roth's death, Marshall Berman reported that in 1949 Roth had been part of a "group" planning to move to China to support the revolution. If accurate, this seems potentially significant, not only psychologically but also suggesting that he and his wife were part of a network of intimates within the Communist movement. See Marshall Berman, "The Bonds of Love," Nation, 23 September 1996, 25. The topic of US radicals who moved to Communist China during the early Cold War has been the subject of several memoirs and newspaper articles.

¹⁰ See Jonathan Rosen, "Lost and Found: Remembering Henry Roth," New York Times Book Review, 14 January 1996, 47. Rosen reports of Roth's years as a Communist precision-tool grinder: "He spoke about the work with pride and a kind of humble joy that astonished me. It was my first inkling that the life he lived outside of literature wasn't mere banishment but an almost mystical encounter with the material world."

¹¹ See Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison (UP of Mississippi, 1995), 16, 73.

¹² Documentation is provided in the chapter "A Rage in Harlem" in Alan Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade (U of North Carolina P, 2007), 108–45.

¹³ As an admirer of Bread and a Stone, this is big news to me, although very minor for the biography. On p. 156 Rampersad provides the fresh information that Ellison wrote a Daily Worker essay review of an anthology of black literature under the pseudonym of "David Wilson."

¹⁴ See Edgar Branch, James T. Farrell (Twayne, 1971).

¹⁵ Ms. Paturis has in her possession a fascinating unpublished memoir of 150 pp., "James T. Farrell: A Bio by Cleo."

¹⁶ But not quite. The University of Illinois Press is engaged in the republication of a uniform paperback edition of all five volumes of the O'Neill-O'Flaherty series, with a strong introduction by Charles Fanning.

	Works Cited

TOP Notes Works Cited

 

Denning Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996) London and New York: Verso.

Foley Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (1993) Durham, N.C: Duke UP.

Folsom Franklin. Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers (1994) Niwot, Colorado: UP of Colorado. 1937–1942.

Hayes Alfred. Fine Recreation of Immigrant Boy's Childhood. Daily Worker (1935) 5(March):5.

Jackson Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002) New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Kellman Steven G. Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (2005) New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Landers Robert K. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell (2004) San Francisco: Encounter Books.

MacKinnon Stephen R., MacKinnon Janice R. Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (1988) Berkeley: U of California P.

Price Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley (2005) New York: Oxford UP.

Rampersad Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) New York: Knopf.

Roth Henry. He Shudders. Daily Worker (1943) 29(March):4.

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