Book Review / JASON SCHNEIDERMAN

‘Nothing Is Too Good for the People’

Modernism’s Communist Context

• Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry 1945-1960 by Alan Filreis (The University of North Carolina Press, 422 pages)

The basic idea driving the Modernist revolution was that things are not what they seem. Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein essentially insisted that common sense was insufficient to help you understand the world — that if you looked closer, you might find the opposite of what you thought you saw. This created a division between the “expert” with his outlandish ideas (you’re a monkey!), and the “common man” with his common sense (I’m not a monkey!). And of course, this is a conflict still being played out — Ben Stein’s film Expelled being the latest volley over evolution — and an interesting illustration of just how much “expert” and “common” belong in quotation marks.

In art, the question of expert and lay-person becomes even more complicated — both through questions of support for the arts and through concerns over a lack of empirical evidence for what makes good art. Once the questions of aesthetics and politics become entangled it becomes impossible to ever fully extricate one from the other. To foreground one would seem to always ignore the other. In the history of aestheticism, it seems that someone has always been trying to hide something with every claim of Art for Art’s Sake. There’s a steady continuum from Oscar Wilde’s insisting that there is only good and bad writing (despite insisting that Life imitates Art) to Laura Bush insisting that her symposium on Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman should not contain a political dimension. Her spokesperson said of the (indefinitely) postponed symposium, “it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum.” Apparently no one told her that Langston Hughes was a card carrying member of the Communist Party of the United States of America.

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The trajectory that Filreis traces in this book is a complicated one — although the broadest outlines go something like this. From the early 1900s to the 1930s, there was a significant overlap between Modernist experiment and Communist experiment in poetry. Particularly in the 1930s, there was a great deal of cross-pollination between modernism and communism. The political binary prior to World War II seemed to be Communist/Fascist — with most artists falling into at least a sympathy with communism (a “Fellow Traveler), if not actively participating in the Communist Party or writing poetry expressed a communist viewpoint. In 1938, Louise Bogan could jokingly signal her opposition to both Communism and Modernism by jokingly signing a letter, “Your Fascist friend, Louise” (118). But after the defeat of the Fascists in World War II, the new binary was Communist/Capitalist (or Communist/Anti-Communist, or even Communist/Democrat). Suddenly, Communism shifted from being the bulwark against freedom-hating-Fascism to being the rigid Soviet ideology of freedom-hating-traitors — or so said the House Un-American Committee. Beginning roughly in 1945, conservative forces began to work to blur all distinctions between Communism and Modernism, retroactively insisting that the 1930s had been a decade thoroughly inflected by communism, and began working to rout out the communists who might still hold sway or power in American arts, letters, or politics. Poets were not spared — and many poets who had been communists or fellow travelers were blacklisted and professionally punished. But the attack was not simply retroactive. Having blurred modernism and communism, the attacks continued, now branding anyone working within what might be considered a modernist aesthetic a communist (while also insisting that any leftist was a modernist). The revision looked backwards as it pushed forward, advocating a conservative aesthetic along with a conservative politics for most of the later forties and into the sixties.

Filreis works to undo the legacy of these attacks. First he goes back to the poets and poetry of the 30s, sorting out the differences and overlaps between modernism and communism. In the second half of the book he shows the inconsistency and the groundlessness of the attacks through the 25-year period covered by the book. His method is painstakingly thorough, and the sheer amount of research is stunning. His ability to put the period in context is remarkable, and he’s often able to show the way that what might look like a purely aesthetic disagreement is often grounded in a larger political conflict. The attention of the book is often minute in scope, tracing the smallest capillaries of the organs of attack, telling individual stories and slowly building up the story through a steady accretion of quotations. While most of the book presents archival research, Filreis takes sides when the modernist toolbox is under attack, and passionately defends the right of writers to work in non-traditional modes (although even the charge of being “non-traditional” is a bit silly, since a modernist tradition was in place by the beginning of the 1940s).

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The methods of attack are un-surprisingly familiar. Aesthetics and Politics are muddled, elitism is the province of the less well off, you’re with us or against us, God’s order is the only order that counts, you should make sense even if we don’t, a pretense of defense is a pretty good offense. The book is most exciting when it follows the career of an individual poet through the changes of the decades. Filreis tracks the progress of Martha Millet through the first chapter, as she explores her communism and her interest in avant-garde poetry. The passage that Filreis quotes from her poem about Emmett Till sounds like it was lifted from Williams’ Spring and All. The literary life of Norman Rosten, as he goes from celebrated young radical poet to unpublishable pariah is fascinating.

At times the book can feel a bit too much like reading someone’s note cards. The long series of quotations from various journals by various commentators can feel undigested or lacking trajectory. In places, the connections feel tenuous — a paragraph that begins with Jackson Pollack being denounced in front of HUAC as having made communist art moves on to an essay in Poetry that referred to Kenneth Koch as having committed the literary crime of infantilism. Filreis shows that the language of crime extended across the arts, but the danger to Pollack and Koch feel worlds apart. And since Pollack and Koch are both artists who knew great success and are remembered fondly, it’s hard to feel much urgency in responding to the attack. Similarly, I wasn’t quite convinced that William Meredith’s negative review of Norman Rosten’s The Big Road was part of the larger political movement afoot to conflate modernism and communism, although Filreis certainly does contextualize Meredith’s review in ways that show him to be lacking.

Filreis is much more on point when responding to the substance of the attacks themselves. When Rukeyser comes under attack for “formlessness,” Filreis quickly scans a few lines from the book to demonstrate how baseless the charges against her are.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is the way that Filreis ultimately shows the arguments coming full circle, and the positions changing over time. Martha Millet is criticized by the Communists for her modernist experimentation before she is criticized by the Anti-communists for it. The Anti-Anti-Communist Communists (that label gives me a headache too) go on the offensive. Arguments that parataxis is un-American seem so absurd, as to almost need no refutation at all, although it does bear repeating “our diplomats and Far Eastern Experts long had a habit of declaring that there was a Red Russia and a Red China, with the tender implication that such a conjunction [and] was entirely innocent” (292). e e cummings is attacked from all sides.

The most compelling parts of the book concern those unjustly destroyed by Anti-Communist forces. Lost jobs, unpublished poems, financial desperation, suicide, and literary marginalization crowd the tales of the authors attacked. It’s the lost work that stings the most.

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So who won? Well, in a certain way, the very necessity of the book shows that conservative forces were very persuasive. Laura Bush can contemplate a symposium that need not mention the political affiliations of Langston Hughes or Walt Whitman — and one presumes that their homosexuality would also have been off the table (although maybe not — Lynne Cheney wrote a novel about lesbians, after all). In a wonderful little book called A Director Prepares Anne Bogart discusses the way that she felt her heritage as a politically engaged artist to be cut short. “I could trace influences back to about 1968 and then everything stops” (24). And why? She “quickly ascertained that between the years 1949 and 1952, the theatre community was struck by a cataclysmic event: The McCarthy era” (25). She concludes, “Like Stalinism, the most effective political manoeuvre is one that is later forgotten. And we have forgotten because the actions of the McCarthy machine succeeded” (25).

One way to gauge the success of either side is to look in anthologies — or to check to see who’s still in print. Both antagonistic anti-modernist Robert Hillyer and object-of-attack Kenneth Fearing made it into The Library of America’s American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Neither made it into the current Norton Anthology of Poetry (at least not the shorter Fifth Edition that I have), although Muriel Rukeyser (a prominent modernist and leftist, subject to frequent attack) did. Contemporary poets, because of their marginal place in American arts and letters, often feel like they can fly beneath the radar, and its often surprising to see how much energy conservative forces expended on poetry in the middle of the last century. More recent calls for a return to traditional poetics don’t carry the same destructive energies. (I’m thinking of Jarman & MacDowell’s The Reaper Essays and Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?) It’s not hard to imagine the New Formalists voting republican, but it is hard to imagine them driving anyone to suicide — the worst charge that’s leveled at poets is usually narcissism these days, not treason. The recent smear tactics of the website Foetry approached the kind of energy and ferocity of the mid-century attacks, but it was hard to discern a political stance beyond hating anyone who had published a book or won a prize. And should anyone wonder if Foetry still has teeth, a quick visit to PostFoetry will clear that up.

I think that most of us who have come of age in creative writing departments have found ourselves simply being taught about what is “good” or “bad.” The modernist is usually more valued — in fact, one of my professors at NYU (where I was pursuing an MFA in poetry) was able to give us Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” with perfect confidence that we had all been raised to follow these rules without knowing their origins (he was right). And while I was once accused of being a corporate pawn for writing sonnets (don’t ask), it seems patently absurd at this point to equate clarity, rhyme or meter with conservative values and religious dogma at this point. The slam poets are probably the most politically radical writers in America, and their toolbox is decidedly conservative — at least according to the debate as it was being had last century.

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