Word: aarons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...AARON ELMORE...
...liberal writers Aaron talks about were men thoroughly convinced that the Depression had finished off capitalism. They had tired of the stale Progressive dogmas of the '20's, and the reality of class antagonisms was an enormous shock to them. Also, as Bohemians, readers of Veblen and Mencken, they hated the men and the ideas that dominated American society. Most, of course, satisfied personal needs in joining the party. But, as Leslie Fiedler has pointed out, a radical movement is not to be explained by adding up the pathologies of its individual members. It was not the writers who were...
...Aaron's various sketches are uneven. The least original are those where he painstakingly describes the Party's cultural affairs and the amazingly scurrilous and passionate squabbles in the magazines that were closely identified with the Party. No part of Writers on the Left seems more remote from our own concerns than the world of little Marxist magazines, writers' congresses and manifestoes that flourished during the '30's. Nowadays the kind of book review that devotes 11 paragraphs to telling you about the crisis in capitalist culture and its last 3 paragraphs to explaining why the reviewer is a better...
...America's liberal culture could not assimilate Marx; American writers felt increasingly that the Party was an enemy of any sort of creativity. Aaron's conclusions and his story may lay to rest the ghosts of some myths of the '30's. Particularly his chapter on Granville Hicks should be read by anyone who thinks that Americans were total dupes of a foreign ideology...
There was never a time during the years from 1929 to 1939 when being anti-Communist wasn't easier and more lucrative for a writer than being Communist. The Party was not important because it put any kind of stamp on American thought; Aaron shows that it exerted a totally negative effect on American literary radicalism. The Party seriously crippled radical political and cultural criticism of American society, and left scars that would still hurt twenty years later...