Harry R. Targ
Mike Gold, was a literary critic, novelist, playwright,
journalist, who learned his politics in the era of the construction of various
radical movements-anarchist, socialist, syndicalist, and communist. His lifelong
activism was shaped growing up in impoverished tenements in the Jewish sector
of the Lower East Side in New York City. In his twenties he became a member of
the Communist Party USA and served as editor of the New Masses and a columnist in the Daily Worker. During this period he developed and articulated a
critical stance and an analysis of the relationship between politics and art.
He is credited with initiating an artistic genre he called "proletarian
literature."
Gold was born as Itzok Granich in 1893 in New York City.
He attended school until the eighth grade, took one year of journalism courses
at New York University and spent one year as a special student at Harvard
University in 1914. He published in the political magazine edited by Floyd Dell
and Max Eastman, The Masses, and in
the newspaper, The New York Call between
1914 and 1920. Also he wrote three one-act plays that were performed by the
Provincetown Players in 1916, 1917, and 1920.
He spent time in Mexico during World War One to avoid
the draft and upon return and in the atmosphere of the Red Scare of the early
1920s changed his name to Mike Gold. In 1920 he became the editor of The Liberator after The Masses was closed down by the government. In 1926 he became
editor of the successor of The Liberator,
The New Masses (in the literary orbit
of the Communist Party) which he edited for twenty years. In 1933 be began
writing a column for the Daily Worker,
the Communist Party newspaper, and continued to contribute to it until his
death in 1967. Perhaps, most significant in Mike Gold's left literary career
was the publication of his partially fictionalized account of growing up in the
poverty of the Jewish tenements at the dawn of the twentieth century, Jews Without Money.
Michael Folsom, editor of one of three anthologies of
Gold’s essays and columns, wrote that Gold was a man who
"....spent his literary life, as a Communist and a
revolutionary, working to build socialism in America. There were lots of people
who did that, once upon a time. But Gold stuck it out. He died a little tired
after the ravages of the McCarthy period, and a little cynical after many a
disappointment, like the truth about Stalin, the ‘Moscow trials,’ the defection
of so many old comrades. But he died still holding to the dream of his
youth."[1]
On
Proletarian Literature
When political partisans and analysts alike reflect on
the Marxian idea of "class struggle," they work from mental images of
militant contestation on the factory floor, or at the factory gates, or they
construct images of armed workers storming the seats of political power. Most anti-Marxists
read Marx in a reductionist way claiming that he and his followers were
"economic determinists." They claim that Marx believed that ideas did
not matter. However, a careful reading
of Marx clearly demonstrates that ideas were terribly important for
understanding and changing the world. Marxists have argued that oppressed
people have to reflect self-critically about their economic and political
circumstance; they must know their history as a people, and they must develop
the capacity to create images of their future, as well as their past, and
present.
But as fashioning a commodity takes the right tools,
fashioning consciousness takes the right intellectual tools. Gold believed that
the great political battles in the United States before World War One and World
War Two had to be fought over culture as well as who controls the factories and
the state. While the products of culture flowed from the apex of economic,
political, and theological institutions, they also were generated by people at
the base of economic and political structures as well. Class struggle for Communists
like Mike Gold involved the development and dissemination of a workers’
culture. Class struggle was just as much about what constitutes good art as
good economic practice.
So Mike Gold spent a career in class struggle and in
contestation about what was "good art." In 1921 Mike Gold published
an essay in The Liberator called
"Towards Proletarian Art." In 1930, Gold published a series of
remarks in The New Masses elaborating
on the themes of the earlier article. Folsom complied them as an article entitled
"Proletarian Realism."
In the 1921 essay, Gold presents a world in turmoil, one
in which the demise of capitalism seemed imminent. While this prediction in
retrospect was wrong, Gold identified how pervasive the resistance to change was.
"We have been bred in the old capitalist planet, and its stuff is in our
very bones. Its ideals, mutilated and poor, were yet the precious stays of our
lives. Its art, its science, its philosophy and metaphysics are deeper in us
than logic or will....We cling to the old culture, and fight for it against
ourselves." [2]
Then, Gold offered a project for the artist, to produce works that help people
see the possibilities of the new in the bedrock of the old. And he said that
the old includes vivid renditions of the reality of human existence not some
abstractions about "human nature," "good and evil,"
"the nature of beauty and love" or other images so common to artistic
creation.
For Gold, himself, it was most significant that "I
was born in a tenement....It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music
of humanity rise to the stars...There, in suffering youth, I feverishly sought
God and found Man....I saw him, not as he has been pictured by the elder poets,
groveling or sinful or romantic or falsely god-like, but one sunk in a welter
of humble, realistic cares; responsible, instinctive, long-suffering and loyal;
sad and beaten yet reaching out beautifully and irresistibly like a natural
force for the mystic food and freedom that are Man's."
Gold claimed that all he knew came from the tenements.
He saw the compassion of mothers and fathers for their young, the courage of
the sick factory worker, the children finding pleasure in the playing of
fanciful games in the dark tenement hallways. Gold wrote: "The tenement is
in my blood. When I think it is the tenement thinking. When I hope it is the
tenement hoping. I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group
poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail."[3]
Gold argued that
artists born in tenements should not have to apologize for it or go beyond the
experience and indeed should not forget it. For what is art but "...the
tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive and articulate
sons and daughters." Because life for us, he said, "...has been the
tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain."[4]
He contended that the artist had assumed the egoistic,
solitary, and even competitive individual stance that comports with capitalism.
As individual artist, she or he, combated with God, then Reason, then logic, so
that now he wrote, "they have turned to the life of the moods... Most
critically intellectuals have become contemptuous of the people...The people
live, love, work, fight, pray, laugh; they accept all, they accept themselves,
and the immortal urgings of Life within them. They know bread is necessary to
them: they know love and hate. What do the intellectuals know?"[5]
For Gold, the artist must root herself/himself in the life of the people.
Central to social ferment, is human solidarity.
"Man turns bitter as a competitive animal…From the solidarity learned in
the family group, they have learned the solidarity of the universe, and have
created creeds that fill every device of the universe with the family love and
trust."
The revolutionary project for Gold was the creation of
the unity of humans. Its secular manifestation might be in strikes,
revolutionary agitation and many other forms of particular struggle. But its
ultimate goal was human oneness. And what was the place of the artist in the
drama, he asked? "If he records the humblest moment of that drama in poem,
story or picture or symphony, he is realizing Life more profoundly than if he
had concerned himself with some transient personal mood."[6]
After offering Walt Whitman as an example of a
proletarian artist, Gold ended his essay by criticizing writers whose audience
is the "leisured class" and whose vehicle is the little magazine.
No Gold says; "It
is not in that hot-house air that the lusty great tree will grow. Its roots must be in the fields, factories and
workshops of America-in the American life. When there is singing and music
rising in every American street, when in every
American factory there is a drama group of the workers, when mechanics paint in their leisure, and farmers write
sonnets, the greater art will grow and only then. Only a creative nation
understands creation. Only an artist understands art. The method must be the
revolutionary method-from the deepest depths upward."[7]
Folsom assembled a variety of Gold's 1930 musings about
"Proletarian Realism" which the editor viewed as a continuation of
the arguments presented in the 1921 essay. First, culture did not emerge in a
social vacuum; indeed culture was a social product. Intellectuals would
acknowledge the existence of "nationalist cultures" but never a working
class culture. Despite the protestations of bourgeois intellectuals,
proletarian art was spreading all across the face of the globe.
About the method of writing proletarian fiction Gold
counseled writers to describe what workers do “with technical precision. “Deal
with the real conflicts and dramas of workers lives, not the isolated dilemmas
of artists and other intellectuals. Only write fiction that makes a point. Use
as few words as possible. Have the courage to draw upon your personal
experience and background. Develop plots that are clear, direct, and fast
moving or use ‘cinema in words.’ Do not just portray the drabness and
sordidness in workers lives but portray the hope in such lives as well. Write
about humans in all their complexity, framed neither by superficial notions of
human evil or good. Finally, draw upon the drama of life without inventing ‘supreme
melodrama.’"[8]
(This is the first of three
essays on Mike Gold to appear in Diary of a Heartland Radical.)
