Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.43.2.0198

2161-4318

David Roessel,

American and British Literature Analysis

In our present circumstances, when the need for movement on social and economic issues is so pressing, there can be impatience with the notion that art bears no responsibility to be an advocate, if not a weapon, for a more equitable society. So the timing is very good for Patrick Chura’s book on Mike Gold, for Gold was always clear that the purpose of writing was to further the political and cultural goals of the revolution, to “change the world,” to use the title of his column in the Daily Worker. Gold was remarkably consistent and dedicated in his stance on the left from his literary beginnings in Greenwich Village through the nightmare of McCarthyism. In fact, Chura states that “part of this book’s purpose is to consider how Gold stayed the course in the ‘class struggle,’ through abidingly human moments of failure and uncertainty, during a long career” (98). With the use of many new archival sources, Chura has given us the fullest account we have of Gold’s commitment to Socialism, and his continued optimism that the workers of the world would one day unite provides inspiration. As Chura notes, Gold shared both his commitment and his optimism with his lifelong friend and kindred spirit from Greenwich Village, Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement.But one main difference between Gold and Day, and one that has always complicated views of Gold, was his tendency, indeed eagerness, to throw literary bricks through nearly everyone’s window. This can seem refreshing at first, as when he used a review of Thornton Wilder in 1930 to generate a discussion of what American fiction should look like during a depression, an episode that Chura examines in detail. Yet ten years later, when Wilder was able to examine and adapt his attitudes to social problems in The Skin of Our Teeth, Gold was still hurling his literary bricks with the same force at the “social fascists” who had issues with the Communist Party position about the Moscow Trials, or the fate of Trotsky, or the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. Gold did not simply have disagreements with old friends and acquaintances, he “canceled” them. Chura provides an account of many of these broken relationships, and an especially insightful account of Gold’s involvement with the Provincetown Players and Eugene O’Neill, with whom he forged “a close bond that involved meaningful artistic influence” (221). There is also a good analysis of the column that Gold wrote years later about the opening of The Iceman Cometh in 1946, a “review” in which the reviewer claims that there was no need to see the play to be able to tell what was wrong with it. In Chura’s view, Gold now sees that O’Neill never had a good understanding of the poorer classes and lacked “vital contact,” an important concept in Chura’s earlier Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Herman Melville to Richard Wright. If Gold had seen the play with its talk of pipe dreams, his comments would probably have been much harsher.Chura says that Max Eastman’s remark that Gold was “an intellectual robot in the cause of communism” was “a grossly misleading label” (100). I would agree, and yet it is not entirely wrong. Gold saw the Communist movement as a way to change the world in a way he desperately wanted, but that led to an intolerance in freedom of thought for others. Many of those who suffered Gold’s literary bricks thought that he did have the intellectual stamina to sit through a performance of The Iceman Cometh, so it is enlightening that this volume demonstrates that Gold was in fact well read. Chura asks us “to distinguish Gold’s personality from his politics and make fairer judgments about the type of activists the US Communists really were” (8). And Chura’s book is a major step in helping to understand Gold’s journey as an American journey. But can we make fair judgments about Gold by separating personality from politics? Those interested in Gold, Chura included, want to wrestle with the problem that, with this writer particularly, the personal is political. Mike Gold was in fact a political, indeed revolutionary, cultural creation.It started with the name Mike Gold. Chura, like others before him, sees the change from Itzhok Granich to Mike Gold as a conscious choice with political implications. This was not, as Chura observes, simply the use of a literary pseudonym. Nor was it an alias to avoid arrest after Gold returned to the United States from Mexico, where he went to avoid the draft in 1918. Chura makes quite clear that, from 1920 until his death, the FBI knew where to find Mike Gold if it wanted to detain him. Itzhok, or Irwin, or Irving Granich, had vanished, and many old friends who had known the young man by those names now called him Mike Gold (such as the aforementioned Dorothy Day). Even those who had become literary enemies, like Max Eastman, hurled abuse at Mike Gold rather than annoying him with the name he no longer used. With his brothers, wife, and children, all of whom used the last name of Granich, he was Mike Gold. Chura has insightful things to say about “the identity-based struggle” by which Mike Gold emerged from Itzhok Granich (96). And Chura, building on Alan Wald’s excellent Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Left (2002), also shows how in 1930 the Communist Party promoted Gold as the American Communist author. This lofty status allowed Gold more freedom than other writers, but it also placed a burden upon him that others did not carry.If Gold’s literary friends and contacts diminished over the decades, and cratered during the McCarthy period, it is important to stress that Gold was never a solitary, isolated figure. He remained close with a number of figures from Greenwich Village and the Masses, not only Dorothy Day, but Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Robert Minor among others. His interest in music, on which Chura has much to add to what we know, led to associations with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. In addition, the revolution was a family affair for the Granich family, and Gold’s brothers Manny and George were as dedicated and committed to the cause as he was from the time that they joined until the end of their lives. Chura gives us our first examination of the work of all the brothers and how they interacted, using archival sources such as the transcript of Gold’s oral memoirs (as told to Michael Folsom) as well as the transcript of an oral history by Manny Granich. These sources both expand and correct the fictional account of Gold’s childhood in Jews without Money. It also lets us see Jews without Money as more than the effect of the tenements on one child, but as the collective story of three brothers who made a similar journey from Chrystie Street on the East Side to the revolution.Chura takes us through the stages of Gold’s career, from the 1920s leading up to 1930, with the publication of Jews without Money, his emergence as the leading advocate of proletarian writing, and his coronation as the foremost American Communist writer at the International Writer’s conference in the Soviet Union. The heady days of the 1930s were followed by the difficult ’40s and ’50s when Gold was no longer a major literary figure. Yet, as Chura rightly points out, Gold kept writing and stayed engaged even as his audience shrank.It should be noted that Chura claims not to write a definitive biography but focuses instead on Gold as a writer, and he calls attention to his large body of work in addition to Jews without Money, including poetry and fiction, but especially his newspaper columns and periodical articles for the Daily Worker and New Masses. Chura is surely right when he asserts that “defining Gold as insufficiently accomplished as a writer requires a willful dismissal of a vast body of work” (6). This is a welcome and healthy change of focus. To put things in perspective, no one would attempt to limit an analysis of the work of H. L. Mencken to his autobiographical volumes Happy Days and Heathen Days. Mencken’s cultural significance came, as much of Gold’s had, from his newspaper and magazine work. While the importance of Jews without Money in Gold’s output is acknowledged, Chura’s focus on Gold’s newspaper and magazine work is a needed recalibration.Chura has offered us our first extensive study of an author who has long needed attention. One hopes, as Chura suggests, that the Change the World columns will become available in a more accessible way, and perhaps the book will spur that effort. One hopes we can employ the example of Gold in our current situation, not only in how we can use art to advocate but also in how not to employ language that alienates. The refreshing thing about the Gold that appears in Chura’s pages is that he is not a literary robot, and he would want us to learn how to do things better. Alan Wald has observed that “Too often the preoccupation with Communist affiliations leads to a deductive fallacy of making presumptions about the artistic process according to the supposed political loyalties of authors” (Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade [2007], 14). Importantly, The People’s Writer never makes this mistake. Chura’s Gold was a writer who happened to be a Communist. And, as Chura reminds us, he really wanted to change the world. And he never stopped thinking that it could happen.