At Tablet Ron Capshaw reminds readers that The Forgotten Founder of 'Partisan Review' Wrote Porn and Thrillers -- looking, sort of, at: 'What happened when Kenneth Fearing's Communist sympathies came up against his ideas about art ?'
Best known as author of The Big Clock (you've heard about the movie versions -- read the book !), Fearing was sympathetic to the Communist cause -- apparently responding to the HUAC-posed question:
Capshaw's hypotheses of, for example: "a Marxist ending" are as limiting as the worst directives of Soviet-censor times; leftist/Marxist/Communist fiction could (and can) be, and often is, more nuanced than he allows for -- and the fact that Fearing's work is not simply categorizable as 'Communist fiction' speaks for it, without necessarily denying or undermining its author's ideological sympathies.
Best known as author of The Big Clock (you've heard about the movie versions -- read the book !), Fearing was sympathetic to the Communist cause -- apparently responding to the HUAC-posed question:
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party ?" -- he answered, "Not yet." While this was possibly a throw-away line or an attempt at humor, Fearing was more right than he knew. He never quite made the leap into social realism. Instead, when writing hardboiled mysteries, he served the story rather than the Party's aesthetic dogmas.Americans' ideological blinders (witness the claim: Obama-is-a-socialist -- an insult to every possible conception of socialism) continues to baffle me, but this is the kind that really bugs me. Communist sympathies can not be equated with an embrace of Zhdanovite (non-)aesthetics: just because authors were/are sympathetic to Communism or Marxism does not mean their writing must fit some simplistic template:
The typical proletarian novel had a protagonist, either apolitical or vaguely liberal, who watches a strike from the sidelines. The story usually ends with the murder of a union organizer friend by the bosses. The murder radicalizes the protagonist, who in Tom Joad fashion, pledges to carry on the work of the martyr.Certainly, that kind of 'literature' exists/existed -- especially in the Soviet/satellite states -- but as elsewhere the best literature was and is nowhere near as ideologically obvious or simplistic. (The laughable in(s)anity of Adam Bellow's Liberty Island is an example of seeing so-called 'conservative fiction' in a similarly ideologically blinkered fashion -- and where, predictably, there's also no art at all.)
Capshaw's hypotheses of, for example: "a Marxist ending" are as limiting as the worst directives of Soviet-censor times; leftist/Marxist/Communist fiction could (and can) be, and often is, more nuanced than he allows for -- and the fact that Fearing's work is not simply categorizable as 'Communist fiction' speaks for it, without necessarily denying or undermining its author's ideological sympathies.