Book Review: Socialism and
Democracy, March 15, 2022
Harry R. Targ
Examining the Life of a Radical Writer: Mike Gold
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-in the context of being born and raised in impoverished
tenements in the Jewish sector of the Lower East Side in New York City. In his
mature years, he became a member of the Communist Party USA as editor of the New Masses and columnist in the Daily Worker. During this period he
developed and articulated a critical stance and a more or less systematic
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 (1912-1913), 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.
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. His contributions to the Daily
Worker continued 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 in his famous "proletarian novel," Jews Without Money. Mchael
Michael Folsum, a editor of one of three anthologies of his essays and columns wrote of
his life, 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."
On Proletarian Literature
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 elaborating on the theme of the earlier article in The New Masses.
This article in the Folsom anthology was given the title "Proletarian
Realism.
In
the first essay, Gold presents a world in turmoil, one in which the demise of
capitalism seems eminent. While this prediction in retrospect seems foolish,
Gold reminds his readers of how pervasive the resistance to change is. "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."
Then, Gold offers a project for the artist to produce works that help people
see the possibilities of the new in the bedrock of the old. And 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
claims that all he knows comes 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 claims: "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."
Gold argues 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."
Gold
contends that the artist has 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?"
For Gold, the artist must root herself/himself in the life of the people.
A
Biography of Mike Gold
Patrick Chura in Mike Gold: The People’s Writer, SUNY Press, 2020, does a wonderful job developing the life
and times of Mike Gold. He highlights the context in which Gold lived and
learned his radicalness; powerfully described in Gold’s under-appreciated
novel, Jews Without Money. Not only does the novel help us understand
the class and ethnic background that shaped Gold but it provides a window into
Gold’s idea of proletarian literature, a concept he invented and promoted
throughout his life in and around the left.
Since
older radicals were educated during the depths of the Cold War and
anti-communism, their exposure to literature was framed by a “canon” which
denied the value of any fiction, poetry,
drama or visual arts that which reflected upon the lived experiences of really existing
working people and the exploited in general. Literature was judged by the
interiority of the text, not the contexts in which fictional characters
resided. To challenge this bourgeois conception of art, Gold spent a lifetime
of activism.
In addition to developing the centrality
of Gold’s advocacy of proletarian literature, Chura provides us with a rich
textured and sympathetic narrative of Gold’s life. Through it the reader is
exposed to much of the literary left of the first half of the twentieth century:
The New Masses, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neil, John Reed, and others
from The Masses. Later as a literary icon, editor of The New Masses, literary
spokesperson for the Communist Party USA, and member of its John Reed Clubs,
Gold was close to writers such as Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and James
T.Farrell. And, almost paradoxically, Chura touchingly describes Gold’s
longstanding friendship with Dorothy Day even though their politics moved in
different directions fro the end of World War One and the 1930s.
Reading Chura is like reading a history
of the literary left of the first half of the twentieth century and
particularly giving rich examples of what Michael Denning called “The Cultural
Front.” And as the biographer points
out, the lessons young Itzok Granich learns
in the seamy tenements of New York city formed the basis of his politics and
his lifes’ work as a writer.
And Chura does not
shy away from understanding, and probably embracing Gold’s advocacy of art
forms that speak to and speak from the working class. The biography addresses
the inextricable connections between the arts and the times in which they are
produced: from the high tide of bourgeois art in the “roaring twenties,” to the
art borne of economic misery in the 1930s, to the virulent anti-communism and
the new criticism characteristic of
post-World War America. And throughout all this time and the varied
political struggles of each generation Gold remained committed to artistic
creations that spoke to and about the working class, the downtrodden, the
victims of racism and sexism. And it is to this stance that the political
culture of the 1960s and beyond makes sense. Perhaps the most important
takeaway of this fine biography of Gold is that art and culture matter. The
arts can give voice to human needs, can inspire political activism, and can
speak truth to power.
The only addition I
would have preferred would have been a richer description of Gold’s
relationship to the Communist Party, connections between party decisions and
the content of The Masses, and Gold’s concrete role with the John Reed
Clubs. Was Gold’s practice independent of the Party or a byproduct of Party
decisions on matters of culture and the arts?
(For a rich grounding of Mike Gold’s work
in the context of working class literature, politics, anti-racism, and
immigrant experiences see Benjamin Balthaser, “Mike Gold, the Writer Who
Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves,” Jacobin, July 12, 2021. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left)
