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Edmund Wilson and The Modern Monthly, 1934–5: a Phase in Wilson's Radicalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Haim Genizi
Haim Genizi
Affiliation:
Bar-Ilan University, Israel
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Extract

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was one of America's most distinguished critics. As an international man of letters, he did not confine himself to literature alone, but also investigated main areas of human thought. He fluently pursued learning in seven languages, making it alive for American intellectual readers. He was indeed a ‘ superlative interpreter ’, as Alfred Kazin pointed out. Due to Wilson's wide horizons and perspectives, his works included such diverse areas as literature, politics, language, history and travel. During the 1930s he was mainly interested in political and industrial reporting, as well as studying Marxism, partly neglecting literary criticism. His activities of that decade were not only the outcome of an intellectual curiosity, but a personal need as well, that strongly influenced his political outlook. The growing concern for social justice and for the suffering of the lower classes was the dominant force in Wilson's thought during the thirties. One of the stages in his gradual radicalization was his association in 1934–5 with The Modern Monthly, an anti-Marxist journal. What led the prominent critic, the literary editor of the prestigious New Republic, to join the editorial board of the Monthly, a little magazine with a small circulation? What was Wilson's contribution to the magazine's political approach? Why did he resign after a fourteen-month editorship? How did his association with the editors V. F. Calverton and Max Eastman — who had been denounced by the Communist Party as ‘ social fascists ’ and Trotskyists — influence Wilson's political standing with the Communists? These questions deserve close examination.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , December 1973 , pp. 301 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

1 Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 346Google Scholar.

2 Until 1933 it had been The Modern Quarterly and 1938 it was to revert to that title.

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35 Mauritz Hallgren had been also invited, but he refused to join the magazine. Hallgren to Calverton, 24 September 1933; Calverton to Eastman, 18 November 1933 (VFC). Thus, the editorial board of March 1934 included, in addition to Calverton, Wilson and Eastman, the remnants of the old staff, Ernst Sutherland Bates, Sterling Spero and Nina Melville. Diego Rivera, the radical artist, became the magazine's art editor in June 1933 (Rivera to Calverton, 31 May 1933 (VFC)).

36 Calverton to A. J. Muste, 28 October 1933 (VFC).

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43 Calverton to Eastman, 18 November 1933 (VFC). Since Wilson and Eastman joined the magazine, officially, only in May 1934, Calverton was free, meanwhile, of Wilson's censor-ship and ran an editorial in the October issue, that was very similar in its contents and even in its phrases to the ‘ Statement ’. Editorial, MM, 7 (10 1933), 518Google Scholar.

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51 Spero to Calverton, 14 June 1934 (VFC).

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56 Beginning in June 1934 this paragraph appeared on the front page of every issue of the magazine.

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59 ‘ I like [it] very much and … I think [it] is essentially sound ’, wrote Calverton to Eastman, referring to an editorial that Eastman had prepared. ‘ My only fears are that Bunny Wilson may not like it…. Of course while it is signed by you he is in no sense responsible for it. ’ Calverton to Eastman, 28 July 1934 (VFC). Nevertheless, Eastman's editorial never saw light in the pages of the Monthly.

60 Eastman to Calverton, 26 June 1934 (VFC).

61 Wilson, 's introduction to Malraux's Conquerors, MM, 8 (03 1934), 69–70Google Scholar; Wilson, ‘ Beppoand Beth ’, ibid. (May 1934), 217–24, 231; Wilson, ‘ The Zero Hour in Washington ’, ibid. (July 1934), 327–36.

62 Wilson to Calverton, 19 March 1934 (VFC).

63 Eastman to Calverton, 26 June 1934; Wilson to Calverton, 2 June, 16 July 1934, 25 February 1935; Hook to Calverton, 23 April 1934; Humphries to Calverton, 15 September 1934 (VFC); interview with Eastman, 10 April 1967.

64 Calverton to Eastman, 28 July 1934 (VFC).

65 Once he was shocked to see his ‘ old friend Mike Gold depicted in a chamber pot ’, in a drawing by John Sloan. He suggested taking his name off the list of editors, ‘ so that I won't be made editorially responsible for anything else of the kind that occurs ’; Wilson to Calverton, 2 June 1934 (VFC).

66 ‘ No reputable magazine does this ’. Wilson to Calverton, 16 July 1934; Eastman to Calverton, 26 June, 25 September 1934 (VFC).

67 Eastman to Calverton, 26 June 1934 (VFC).

68 Calverton to Eastman, n.d. (September 1934) (VFC).

69 Calverton to Eastman, n.d. (June 1934); 30 July; 29 September 1934 (VFC).

70 See Calverton's remarks on Wilson's letter to Calverton, 2 June 1934 (VFC).

71 Wilson to Calverton, 25 February 1935; Eastman to Calverton, 4 March 1935 (VFC).

72 The issue of April 1935 was the last one where Wilson and Eastman appeared as editors.

73 Wilson's remark on his letter of resignation that he is more a Marxist than Eastman, Bates and Hook, with whom he disagreed, could be a hint in that direction. A memorandum referring to Wilson's resignation, n.d. (VFC).

74 Wilson never fulfilled his promise to send some contributions after his resignation. On the contrary, he even refused to provide a review for the special issue of the Modern Quarterly which was the Calverton Memorial Issue. Wilson to Calverton. 25 February 1955; Nina Melville to Wilson, 3 January 1941; Wilson to Melville, 10 January 1941 (VFC).

75 Wilson to Eastman, 4 November 1933 (VFC).

76 Calverton to Carter, 14 April 1934 (VFC).

77 Wilson, , The Shores of Light, p. 616Google Scholar.

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82 Wilson, , ‘ Letter to the Russians About Hemingway ’, Internatsionalnaya Literalura, 2 (1936)Google Scholar, in The Shores of Light, pp. 618–25Google Scholar. The quotations are from pp. 625–6.

83 Wilson's reports on his Soviet tour first appeared in a series of articles in the New Republic between March and May 1936. The quotations are from the last article, ‘ Russian Paradoxes ’, NR, 87 (13 05 1936), 12–13Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., p. 13.

85 Cowley's review of Wilson's Travels in Two Democracies, in Thinly Back on Us, p. 116.

86 His admiration of the Communist regime in Russia, that he so colourfully described in Travels in Two Democracies, soon faded and he became growingly critical of Stalin's political and intellectual dictatorship. ‘ Stalin's violent methods of silencing ’ his political enemies led to the extinction of ‘ the last sparks of intellectual light ’ in Communist circles. Wilson was convinced, therefore, in 1937, that it was ‘ pretty difficult to hope that any intellectual health will ever come out of Stalinist Communism ’; (Wilson, , ‘ The Literary Left ’, NR, 89 (20 01 1937), 345–6Google Scholar). The Moscow trials of 1936–8, the assassination of Kirov and the condemnation of Radek, Zinoviev and Kamenev, of which ‘ a good deal must certainly be false ’ (ibid., p. 345), led him to disillusionment with the Communist dream. He strongly criticized Cowley's support of those trials. (See Wilson to Cowley, 20 October 1938, in Aaron, , Writers on the Left, p. 349Google Scholar.) In the light of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, Wilson disapproved not only of Soviet Russia but of the Marxist idea as well. In 1940 he considered Marxism not as a key to the events, but only a ‘ technique of analyzing political phenomena in social terms ’. As far as Marxism was concerned, Wilson was convinced that ‘ an era in its history has ended ’ (Wilson, , ‘ Marxism at the End of the Thirties ’, Shores of Light, pp. 742, 732Google Scholar).