WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:02 — 81.1MB)
Today’s show is a somewhat altered version of a program that first aired on November 3rd, 2015, called Tracking Subversives with the noted scholar of the “literary Left,” Alan Wald. According to Wald, the aim of the literary radical is “to endow history with meaning.”
Wald has published a trilogy of books brought out by the University of North Carolina Press comprised of Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left; Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade; and most recently, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.
Though hundreds of radicals are detailed in Wald’s books we’ll focus on just three: Communist Party polemicist Mike Gold, African American novelist Ann Petry, and radical poet Thomas McGrath.
The art ideals of the capitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it among the people.
-Mike Gold, “Towards a Proletarian Art”
Mike Gold was communist, a novelist, and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money from 1930 was a bestseller. During the 30s and 40s Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature.
Ann Petry was an American novelist who became the first Black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street. But Wald declares The Narrows her masterpiece…on a level with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In some ways she’s more typical of the literary left than Mike Gold, in the sense that her Communist identity was not public or known and is somewhat elusive.
Thomas McGrath was a celebrated American poet. McGrath produced a prolific array of titles, in several genres but he is best known for his long poem “Letter to an Imaginary Friend,” published in sections between 1957 and 1985 and as a single poem in 1997 by Copper Canyon Press. He was very open about his Communist politics and was actually quite dogmatic.
GUEST
Alan M. Wald is the Emeritus H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. In addition to his Literary Left trilogy, he’s the author of several other books including Writing From the Left and The Responsibility of Intellectuals.
RELATED
Interchange – Out of a Brick Throat: How Poets and Poetry Matter
Interchange – Five Days in Spain: Muriel Rukeyser and the Revolutionary Muse
Interchange – The Unknown Knowns of Cultural Diplomacy
Interchange – Writing Red: Joshua Clover on Strikes and Riots
The Movie at the End of the World: Thomas McGrath (YouTube)
Writers on the Left, by Daniel Aaron, review in the Harvard Crimson, March 14, 1962.
MUSIC
“Bella Ciao” performed by Savage Rose
“Which Side Are You On” by Woody Guthrie
“Ticket Agent Blues” by Blind Willie McTell
“Blue Horizon” by Sidney Bechet
“Song of Myself” by Peggy Seeger
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
