Word: aarons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Writing recent history can become a painful exercise in intellectual humility. There is no quicker way to discover how much the present dominates our concerns than to try to write about our fathers and their generation. Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left is a brave, if futile, attempt to exorcise some myths about Communism and the American literary Left during the period between the world wars; myths which, despite Aaron's absorbing book, are not likely to die soon...
...ideology mattered to Americans, when a genuine American workers' movement seemed possible, and when some of the country's most brilliant minds gladly collaborated with the working class. The Left has tended to forget how much it let the Communists occupy the center of the stage. The villain of Aaron's piece is the American Communist Party, as servile and stupid a group of men as ever tried to engineer a cultural revolution. For, if there is one theme linking his loose collection of episodes, it is the destruction of American cultural radicalism at the hands of an alien party...
...party was successful when it could act with American writers on an issue like the Scottsboro case, or join intellectuals in picketing for Sacco and Vanzetti, but it displayed a great, lumbering ineptness whenever it interfered in strictly cultural and artistic matters. This ineptness that Aaron writes of, this inability to deal with American writers on American terms is something that the myths of both the Right and the Left have forgotten. Even someone as useful to the Party as Dreiser was continually embarrassing its leaders; he was, at heart, an individualist, and his allegiance was always conditional. Dreiser talked...
...able to adapt itself to it. It was not simply that Marxism produced no literary criticism worth printing, though that was true enough; but even the social criticism of the American Left during the '30's came from men like Parrington, Beard, and Veblen, rather than from Marx. And Aaron's sketch of a figure like Edmund Wilson shows how the its ideology blinded the Party to the efforts o the few liberal thinkers consciously seeking to adapt Marx to America...
Writers on the Left, by Daniel Aaron...