Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...German Garden, finding Sinclair Lewis "turning rancid'' in Elmer Gantry, moving on to the discovery of the "terrific" Ernest Hemingway (who does, however, earn a boy's stern moral disapproval as "one of the crowd of degenerate Americans who settled . . . in Paris after the war"). Dreiser's English is "bum," and John Dos Passos rouses a boy's puritanism with the "unalleviatedly filthy" Manhattan Transfer...
...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 of "equity" and "service," and "opportunity," and his social protests always were closer to the moralistic Progressives than to agitprop...
Writers like Dreiser and Dos Passos stayed close to the Party because it seemed that the Communists were one of the few outlets for serious social protest in the country. Since the First World War, political and cultural radicalism had followed separate paths in the United States; in more sentimental pre-war days, you could meet radicals from Max Eastman's Masses and Wobblies like Big Bill Haywood at Greenwich Village tango teas--and if there was something frivolous and arty about such political reformers, there was also a close identification on their part with cultural reform. Literature...
...decade later in the Depression, art-for-art's-sake writers like Malcolm Cowley became interested in politics, but the Communists had in the meantime preempted the positions of radical social protest. As the instances of Dreiser and Dos Passos show, they were not able to make any cultural use of their pre-eminence. The American intelligentsia turned left in the grim years between '28 and '32, but the Party was never 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...
...tactics, and in For Whom the Bell Tolls he conveyed some of his disillusionment, to the anguish of his left-wing admirers. Dos Passos considered joining the party, but was soon disillusioned and paid for it by being denounced as the possessor of a "poisoned ideology and sick soul." Dreiser became a steadier, more devout believer and platform Marxist, died in the party...