Michael
Gold: Writer Out of the Shadows
Biography
and new generations ponder the rebel proletarian novelist
by John Pietaro
In the pantheon of 1930s revolutionary
writers, Michael Gold has too long faltered on historic periphery. A close
associate of the leading literary voices of his time, Gold was not only overshadowed
by the celebrity of others but blighted by decades of enduring discord from within
and rabid anti-communism from without. And while his novel Jews without
Money was a bestseller in 1932, catapulting him to renown, Gold’s own story
has been purposely disappeared.
Michael Gold (born Itzok
Granich, 1894) came of age in a New York that is but a distant memory. His
Lower East Side was a stifling encasement of the poor, an exhausted swath of
immigrant sights and sounds in the shadows of tightly winding cobblestone streets.
The organic sense of deprivation as much as the cultural pride and
revolutionary furor of his time remained glaring, outlasting the decades. Gold
matured into a decidedly radical author who chronicled strife as he engaged in fearless
activism. But the fight that emitted from his pen went beyond the realm of the
Left press he shaped, and even surpassed his call for art as a weapon. Gold
offered a pioneering style which established the model for urban storytelling
and in doing so forged the American proletarian novel. His work may be
described as a literary Ashcan: dark realism, sure, but with a hyper
sense about it. Hell, Gold wrote in social realism. His words were streamed in
a plainspoken manner which felt conversational yet were anything but. The
challenge, the confrontation, was always lurking just behind orderly dialogue.
Writers on the political left,
in any case, have always looked to the breadth of Gold’s mission: literary fiction,
poetry and dramaturgy thrived as much in his work as gripping, outspoken reportage.
The prolific Daily Worker columnist and editor of New Masses was also
a champion cultural organizer and inspiring public speaker. Odd that with so
much literary adoration about him, with equal amounts of derision from other
quarters, Gold’s biography would arrive at this juncture, some fifty-three
years beyond his lifespan. But given the
depth of quality in Patrick Chura’s Michael Gold: The People’s Writer (SUNY
Press, 2020), the long, ridiculous wait was worth every decade.
Chura, an English
professor at the University of Akron, tore into definitive research to tell the
story, enliven the realities, and reveal the once hidden. The biography, written
not in the language of the academic but more in narrative fashion, shines,
glows with investigative detail. Made clear is Chura’s profound ability to
absorb streams of journalism, unpublished poetry and early pencil visions of fiction,
memoir notes, letters, seemingly lost first drafts as well as overlooked and forgotten
works of certain stature. It’s all here, interspersed with first-person
interviews and of course Gold’s FBI file.
As biographers are wont
to do, Chura exposes the reader to the days of his subject, offering not only
facts and analyses, but the ability to see these through his subject’s eyes, to
feel the sweat and survive the strain of his often conflicted life. As told by
Chura, Gold’s early years of poverty were centered around his family home, a crowded,
nearly airless flat infested with lice and crushing dysphoria. Gold faced long
hours of child labor when his ailing, bed-ridden father lost his newfound business,
and the family was left destitute. An excerpt of one of his earliest writings
stated, “The streets of the East Side were dark with grey; wet gloom; the boats
of the harbor cried constantly, like great bewildered gulls, like deep booming
voices of calamity…”. Much later, Gold would write of his formative years: “It
was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the
stars. The sky above the airshafts was all my sky; and the voices of the
tenement neighbors in the airshaft were the voices of all my world. There, in
my suffering youth, I feverishly sought God and found Man.”
Knocked to the ground by
a policemen’s nightstick during a Union Square protest, he moved rapidly to a
macro view of the problem and delved into newfound militancy. After one of his
pieces was published in The Masses, then-Itzok
Granich began writing for this iconic magazine and other progressive periodicals.
Membership in the Industrial Workers of the World came, too, in 1916 and he
spent some time in anarchist circles, absorbing a kind of DIY individualistic
approach to the Marxism he’d thrive on in the years to come.
By 1917, the youthful
writer resided in Greenwich Village—the heart of bohemian life and radical
cultural work—and became affiliated with the Provincetown Players. Founded by
author Susan Glaspell, this left-wing playwrights’ collective included Edna St.
Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Emjo
Basshe and Theodore Dreiser. Like most of the other intellectuals in his
circle, Granich joined the Socialist Party but quickly declared his sympathies
for the Bolshevik Revolution. His art and politics were driven by the same
passion and intricately enmeshed.
During the first World
War, to evade conscription into a war he morally opposed, Granich moved to
Mexico. He was back in New York for 1919’s tumultuous Palmer Raids and began
using the pseudonym “Michael Gold”, named for a noted Jewish veteran of the
Civil War. His ties to the literary Left were strong enough that Gold became an
editor of The Liberator, the
Communist journal which grew from the embers of The Masses, silenced by reactionary forces. The Liberator
was a formidable voice against right-wing injustice and boasted the talents of
not only the usual Village suspects but the likes of Claude McKay, Dorothy Day
(later the founder of the Catholic Worker movement), illustrators Hugo Gellert
and Boardman Robinson, Bertrand Russell, Louis Fraina, Louis Untermyer, Norman
Thomas prior to his celebrity as a noted pacifist and leader of the Socialist
Party, modern art painter Stuart Davis, and Helen Keller, then an anti-war
radical traveling the circuit, communicating her dissent to huge crowds with
the assistance of a translator.
Biographer Chura isn’t a
New Yorker, but his book is an accurate capture of the city’s streets and shadows
over the years bridging the early 20th century and Gold’s later
years, but in particular his 1920s-40s period of greatest activity. The reader is
walked through the headquarters of the John Reed Club at 102 West 14th
Street, and offices of the Communist Party, then at 35 East 12th. It’s
no small irony that rent for a single bedroom apartment in either now tops
$5000 per month and apartment sales in the latter recently averaged at more than
$4 million.
The biographer also brings
alive Mike Gold’s grave financial and emotional struggles while briefly at Yale,
his relationship with Dorothy Day and entry into and unfailing dedication to
the Communist Party. Some of Gold’s dramatic sketches were published in Party
periodicals including his Strike! of 1926, a “mass recitation”, and Futurist
play, Hoboken Blues, that same year, not long after he and Day were arrested
for protesting the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1927, Gold established the New Playwrights Theatre with John
Howard Lawson and John Dos Passos. So strong was the output of this new collective,
both artistically and politically, that they drew attention in mainstream press.
Time magazine, in March of 1927, took note:
“The New Play-wrights—John
Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, Francis Faragoh, Michael Gold, Em Jo
Basshe—impatient with the restraint of conventional theatre, have set up one of
their own...Here, at old Bim's, now the 52nd Street Theatre, they propose to
experiment with those radical dramatic forms of whose marketability the
commercial producers are suspicious. As expected, it is staged against a
"constructivist" background and presents the subjective state of the
principal characters as well as their objective actions. The virtue of such
staging is that, by affording the playwright several planes of action on one stage,
it allows greater flexibility than is permitted by the rigid three-walled
limitations of ordinary theatre…By proper punctuation and emphasis, such a
production may be made colorful, clear, rapid, nervous, like jazz music.” (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,846123,00.html#ixzz1HoPY32nN)
But Gold’s ‘creative
writing’ was never exclusive to poetry, fiction or drama. In his 1921 article “Towards
Proletarian Art”, he eloquently warned that, “a mighty national art cannot
arise save out of the soil of the masses.” And of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions
in 1927 Boston, he presciently reported, “It is August 14th, eight
days before the new devil’s hour... I am writing this in the war zone, in the
psychopathic respectable city that is crucifying two immigrant workers…Boston
is possessed with the lust to kill…the subconscious superstition that the death
of Sacco and Vanzetti can restore their dying culture and industry. At last
they have a scapegoat…They are insane with fear and hatred of the new America…”
This packed biography reveals,
too, the protagonist’s battles with major depression and his lesser-known literature
including previously lost or forgotten verse, such as the 1929 collection 120
Million (after Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 150,000,000), long out of print.
Gold’s numerous speaking engagements are
cited, including moments experienced at lecterns here and abroad. Gold traveled
on behalf of the Communist Party, to Los Angeles, San Francisco and then through
much of Europe. This stint included stays in London, Paris (for the First
International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture), Berlin, and
ultimately the Soviet Union to Kharkov, for the International Union of
Revolutionary Writers conference. Interactions with European notables including
Andre Gild, E.M. Forster, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Mayakovsky, Poet Laureate of the
Soviet Union, are highlighted. The Constructivist Theatre of Meyerhold and
Mayakovsky melded standard theatre productions with pantomime, acrobatics and
formalized scenery as non-verbal communication with the audience. Gold was
greatly influenced by this daring brand of drama and was a major proponent after
returning to New York.
1929, the notorious year
of the Crash, saw the birth of the John
Reed Club. The Communist Party cultural brain trust led by V.J.
Jerome, Joseph Freeman and Gold quickly set plans for a radical artists’ force
in Reed’s name, focusing on writers but encompassing cultural workers of every
fold. Once proven in New York City, the John Reed Clubs nationally took the
lead in the push for a proletarian literary drive while producing events by
musicians, actors, dancers, painters, filmmakers and others. The Reed Clubs hosted
classes, lectures, concerts, readings, plays, screenings and exhibits; it founded
Partisan Review, published a series of magazines, newsletters, pamphlets
and books, and offered tutelage combining social change with the arts. Membership
included the celebrated, the up-and-coming and the fledgling who sought to
create artworks of social, or at least creative revolution. Langston Hughes, John
Dos Passos, Kenneth Fearing, Richard Wright, Josephine Herbst, William Gropper
and Art Young were among its noted members and Maxim Gorky held honorary membership.
The Clubs also spawned a series of off-shoots specific to different genres including
the modernist concert music Pierre DeGeyter Club and its Composers Collective
of New York (which counted Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Alex North and Marc
Blitzstein in the ranks), the Red Dancers (led by Edith Segal) which produced modern
dance of social conscience, and the far-reaching Workers Film and Photo League.
In January of 1930, Gold,
by this time the best-known radical journalist and a high priest, so to speak,
of cultural work, wrote of the origins of the John Reed Club, its multi-disciplinary
nature, and his intent to guide it in a manner securing the artist’s
relationship with the worker:
“The John Reed Club was
organized about two months ago here in New York. It is a small group of
writers, artists, sculptors, musicians and dancers of revolutionary
tendencies…Several activities have begun. The artists arranged an exhibition at
the Workers Co-Operative House in the Bronx. About 35 pictures were hung. The
exhibit will be shown for about four weeks. Over 300 workers came to the opening.
There was a furious discussion led by Lozowick, Basshe, Gropper, Klein and
others…At the next meeting I shall propose the following:
“That every writer in the
group attach himself to one of the industries. That he spend the next few years
in and out of this industry, studying it from every angle, making himself an
expert in it, so that when he writes of it, he will write like an insider, not
like a bourgeois intellectual observer. He will help on the publicity in strikes,
etc. He will have his roots in something real. The old Fabians used to get
together and write essays based on the books they had read. We will get close
to the realities” (Gold, Michael. The Daily Worker, January 1930;
source: Dilling, Elizabeth, The Red Network: A Who’s Who and Handbook of
Radicalism for Patriots. Self-published, 1934, page 180).
Apparently, many years of
struggle proved productive for Gold, and by 1932, he gained his personal
celebrity with the novel Jews without Money. Though a fictionalized
account of a poverty-stricken family on the Lower East Side, it is based on his
own family’s experiences, thus quite visceral in the telling. He’d been publishing
bits and pieces as fiction in The New
Masses, but once compiled into a solid, beautifully composed novel, the
concept of the proletarian writer became an accepted—and popular—standard of
literature. With this degree of success, Jews without Money brought him
national attention. Two years hence, Gold’s status as an important new voice of
radical literature had gone global, at least for a period. The second printing
of the novel was translated into French, Swedish, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Romanian,
Slavic, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, Dutch, and
other languages.
And while biographer Chura remains a proponent
of Gold, the bitter discord surrounding the man is here examined with jarring
clarity. Though deeply committed to both the Communist Party USA and the wider Communist
International, Gold’s rebellious, unbridled nature never allowed for the
discipline exhibited by other Party officials. The missed meetings and avoided
functionary duties soon clarified that Gold’s decades as a revolutionist began in
the company of anarchists. Ironically, his fights with Party bureaucracy were eclipsed
by the attacks he launched on progressive and liberal writers in his position
as the CP’s most profound and controversial arts critic: Gold denounced the
works of progressive novelists, dramatists and screenplay writers whenever they
softened or strayed from doctrine. Following early battles with Masses’ editor
Max Eastman, his association with Claude McKay, too, became embittered (though
he described McKay’s sonnets as “crystal songs”). Gold sought to shred Thorton
Wilder and railed against Gertrude Stein, stating in blind anger that her work
resembled, “the montonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums...” Stein,
an avant gardist, was an out lesbian, a social and literary revolutionary who
forged a new modernism in Paris. Yet Gold wrote: “The literary idiocy of
Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values.
It is part of the signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the
walls of bourgeois society."
The Communist writer also
lobbed continuous pot-shots at Albert Maltz (whom he accused of social fascism)
and Howard Fast, among others. In his book The Hollow Men (1941), an overview
of writers he saw as having refuted the cause, particularly those of wealthier origins,
Gold’s opinions were unfettered, often bloodthirsty in the pursuit of forging
an all-important literary force toward an egalitarian society and in opposition
of fascism. And its title doesn’t seem to have been selected randomly; T.S. Eliot’s
epic poem of sixteen years prior was so named in describing the post-World War broken,
empty “straw men”: “Our dried voices/when we whisper together/are quiet and
meaningless…Shape without form/shade without color…sightless, unless the eyes
reappear…between the essence and the descent/falls the Shadow…” The inspiration
seems all too obvious, albeit, angled outwardly. Gold saved a particular
hellishness for former friends, most blatantly “Ernest Slummingway”. After publication
of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gold’s review called the book “a minor story”
in spite of its “narrative genius” as it was “so painfully fair to fascists”. Hemingway’s
heroic figure of Robert Jordan, according to Gold, was ignorant of the class
conflict in Franco’s Spain, so central to the story. Famously, Hemingway left a
message at the New Masses office directing the critic to “go fuck
himself”.
This raises the question:
what is the mission of an artist of radicalized activism? It was impossible, it
seemed to some, to be both revolutionary and disciplined-- Gold himself fell
victim to this conflict throughout his career. Perhaps, he was not aware of how
to rise above this and became entrenched in the murk of uncertainty. Gold’s despair
over the Moscow purges and Nazi-Soviet Pact, as well as his championing of
experimental theatre works, belied doctrinaire sensibility. Yet, simultaneously,
he both disavowed modernist art as a bourgeois tool and remained a leader of arts
organizing within the Party and Popular Front. The conundrum rolled on. This
combination—and a constant rain of blows from the Right--established an array
of opponents that stretched over a lifetime. Still, following his own advice to
young writers, Gold would “write, persist, struggle”, toeing the Party line through
depressive episodes and doubt.
Gold's Daily
Worker column ‘Change the World’ included praise for the early
folksong revival, then largely ignored by American Leftist leaders, and he
offered insight into the need for, "a Communist Joe Hill", referring
to the legendary martyred songwriter-organizer of the Industrial Workers of the
World. Gold's words did not go unheeded, for they alerted the CP to the
importance of home-grown music as a voice of the people; by 1939, the Party had
discovered Woody Guthrie, whose ballads of the Dustbowl, poverty and strength would
be widely celebrated and whose song "This Land is Your Land" would eventually
be called an alternative national anthem by many.
During the worst of World
War II, Mike Gold was a constant source of strength for intellectuals and other
Daily Worker readers in the fight against fascism. And though a target
of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and constantly profiled by the
FBI, he maintained a busy literary and speaking schedule into the 1950s and ‘60s.
A respected editor of the Cold War-era Masses & Mainstream, Gold
anticipated the coming global liberation fight for indigenous peoples as an
outgrowth of his continuous work towards racial and religious equality.
Still, Gold was embattled
by obscurity during most of his life. Largely, critics ignored his post-Jews
without Money work; when it received any press at all the notices were negative,
often severely so. The irony was that his peers, even through critical
lambasting, held the writer in high regard. Perhaps the best description of the
radical literary figures Mike Gold walked with in his time is supplied by Gold
himself in a 1946 article, perhaps in anticipation of the post-war Red Scare, already
developing among opportunistic conservatives:
“Marxism flourished…during
the first half of the 1930s…New writers wrote “proletarian novels”, plays and
poems and became a main stream in our national culture, that formed the finest
literary epoch our country has known since the Golden Age of Whitman, Emerson
and Melville. It was a fighting art, a Marxist art, and frankly a weapon in the
class struggle then raging so openly…We must find our way back to the main highway…We
must rebuild the Marxist cultural front, with its literary magazines, theatres,
music and art.” (Gold, Mike, Daily Worker, March 1946).
According to historian
Alan Wald in his study of Leftist writers, Gold more than any other established
the proletarian novel: “All who came after Gold would stand on the shoulders of
his legacy”, citing “his colorful semi-autonomy from the Party officials...The
dazzling blend of proletarianism, bohemianism, romanticism, and even a strain
of modernism that comprised the early 1930s mix of Left poetry was quite evident
in Gold’s own personality and career. (Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future
Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 2002, pp 39-40).
In a bitter irony, Gold
aged into poverty, stifled by depressive episodes and physical ailments. He lived
out his final years not in New York but San Francisco, writing his ‘Change the
World’ column for the Party’s west coast paper, People’s World until not
long before his 1967 death. He was never able to complete the second novel
planned for so long but remained a survivor of our nation’s notorious red scare
periods, each carrying its own butcher’s bill of repression, conviction, deportation,
and ruination: 1919-20, 1938-9, and 1947 through each frigid year of the Blacklist
and Cold War.
While
our New York City is today crippled for the people by astronomical rent costs
and harshly gentrified neighborhoods, the Lower East Side in which Gold lived,
worked and fought now stands as a community marred and ruled by trendy wealth. One
asks where the poor can call home, thus, the Communist writer’s proletarian
literature becomes deeply, sorely missed. Gold, always one to analyze
Marxian, seeking the wider, greater reality, wrote near the end of his life of
the red scare terrors, citing on manifold levels: “the lined faces which had
seen the trouble and white hair as the result of sleepless nights…We had lost
all our youth”.
The biography, Michael
Gold: The People’s Writer by Patrick Chura PhD, is available via SUNY Press.
