Patrick Chura, Mike Gold: The People’s Writer (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), 354 pp., $26.95, paperback
Mike Gold was a literary critic, novelist, playwright, and journalist, who learned his politics in an era of radical movements – anarchist, socialist, syndicalist. Also his politics where shaped in the context of being born and raised in a tenement in the Jewish sector of the Lower East Side in New York City. In his mature years, he became a member of the Communist Party USA, editor of The New Masses and columnist in the Daily Worker. During this period he developed and articulated a critical stance and an analysis of the relationship between politics and art. He is credited with initiating an artistic genre he called "proletarian literature."
Gold was born Itzok Granich in 1893 in New York City. He attended school until the eighth grade, took journalism courses at New York University (1912-13), and spent one year as a special student at Harvard University in 1914. He published in the political magazine edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, The Masses, and in the newspaper, The New York Call. He wrote three one-act plays that were performed by the Provincetown Players in 1916, 1917, and 1920. He spent time in Mexico during World War I to avoid the draft. Returning in the atmosphere of the Red Scare of the early 1920s he changed his name to Mike Gold. After The Masses was closed down by the government (1920), he became editor of The Liberator, and later (1926) of its successor, The New Masses (in the literary orbit of the Communist Party), which he edited for twenty years. In 1933 he began writing a column for the Daily Worker. His contributions to the Daily Worker continued until his death in 1967. Perhaps most significant in Gold's literary career was the publication of his famous “proletarian novel,” Jews Without Money, about growing up in the poverty of the Jewish tenements at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Michael Folsom, editor of one of three anthologies of Gold’s essays and columns, wrote that Gold
spent his literary life, as a Communist and a revolutionary, working to build socialism in America. There were lots of people who did that, once upon a time. But Gold stuck it out. He died a little tired after the ravages of the McCarthy period, and a little cynical after many a disappointment, like the truth about Stalin, the “Moscow trials,” the defection of so many old comrades. But he died still holding to the dream of his youth.
Mike Gold spent a career in class struggle and in contestation about what was "good art." In 1921 he published an essay in The Liberator called "Towards Proletarian Art." He would elaborate on this theme in a 1930 article in The New Masses, published in the Folsom anthology under the title "Proletarian Realism." In the first essay, Gold presents a world in turmoil, one in which, although the demise of capitalism seems imminent, there is a pervasive resistance to change: "We have been bred in the old capitalist planet, and its stuff is in our very bones. Its ideals, mutilated and poor, were yet the precious stays of our lives. Its art, its science, its philosophy and metaphysics are deeper in us than logic or will.... We cling to the old culture, and fight for it against ourselves."
Gold offers a project for the artist to produce works that help people see the possibilities of the new in the bedrock of the old. And the old includes vivid renditions of the reality of human existence, not abstractions about "human nature," "good and evil," or "the nature of beauty and love." For Gold, it was most significant that
I was born in a tenement.... It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars.... There, in suffering youth, I feverishly sought God and found Man.... I saw him, not as he has been pictured by the elder poets, groveling or sinful or romantic or falsely god-like, but one sunk in a welter of humble, realistic cares; responsible, instinctive, long-suffering and loyal; sad and beaten yet reaching out beautifully and irresistibly like a natural force for the mystic food and freedom that are Man's.
Gold claimed that all he knew came from the tenements. He saw the compassion of mothers and fathers for their young, the courage of the sick factory worker, the children finding pleasure in playing fanciful games in the dark tenement hallways. Gold claims: "The tenement is in my blood. When I think it is the tenement thinking. When I hope it is the tenement hoping. I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail."
Gold argued that artists born in tenements should not have to apologize for it or go beyond the experience and indeed should not forget it. For what is art but "...the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive and articulate sons and daughters." Because life for us, he said, "has been the tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain."
Gold contended that the artist has assumed the egoistic, solitary, and even competitive individual stance that comports with capitalism. As individual artists, they combated with God, then Reason, then logic, so that now "they have turned to the life of the moods..." Most critically, "intellectuals have become contemptuous of the people...": "The people live, love, work, fight, pray, laugh; they accept all, they accept themselves, and the immortal urgings of Life within them. They know bread is necessary to them: they know love and hate. What do the intellectuals know?" For Gold, the artist must root herself/himself in the life of the people.
Patrick Chura does a wonderful job developing the life and times of Mike Gold. He highlights the context in which Gold lived developed his radical perspective, as powerfully described in his under-appreciated novel, Jews Without Money. Not only does the novel help us understand the class and ethnic background that shaped Gold, but it provides a window into his idea of proletarian literature, a concept he invented and promoted throughout his life.
Since older radicals were educated during the depths of the Cold War and anti-communism, their exposure to literature was framed by a “canon” which denied the value of fiction, poetry, drama or visual arts that reflected upon the lived experiences of really existing working people. Literature was judged by the interiority of the text, not the contexts in which fictional characters resided. To challenge this bourgeois conception of art, Gold spent a lifetime of activism.
In addition to developing the centrality of Gold’s advocacy of proletarian literature, Chura provides us with a rich, textured, and sympathetic narrative of Gold’s life. The reader is exposed to much of the literary left of the first half of the twentieth century: Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neil, John Reed, and others from The Masses. Later, as a literary icon, editor of The New Masses, literary spokesperson for the Communist Party USA, and member of its John Reed Clubs, Gold was close to writers such as Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and James Farrell. Almost paradoxically, Chura touchingly describes Gold’s longstanding friendship with Dorothy Day even though their politics moved in different directions from the end of World War One through the 1930s. In addition, Chura describes in some detail Gold’s influence and advocacy of proletarian music, the emerging folk tradition made popular by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Almanac Singers.
Chura does not shy away from embracing Gold’s advocacy of art forms that speak to and from the working class. His biography addresses the inextricable connections between the arts and the times in which they were produced: from the high tide of bourgeois art in the “roaring twenties,” to the art born of economic misery in the 1930s, to the virulent anti-communism and the New Criticism characteristic of post-World War II America. Throughout all this time and the varied political struggles of each generation, Gold remained committed to artistic creations that spoke to and about the working class, the downtrodden, the victims of racism and sexism. And it is possible to see how he helped plant the seeds of the political culture of the 1960s and beyond. Finally, perhaps the most important lesson of this fine biography is that art and culture matter. The arts can give voice to human needs, inspire political activism, and speak truth to power.
The one thing I missed was a richer description of Gold’s relationship to the Communist Party, connections between party decisions and the content of The New Masses, and Gold’s role in the John Reed Clubs. Was Gold’s practice independent of the Party or a byproduct of Party decisions on matters of culture and the arts? Even so this is a wonderful introduction to the rich cultural life of the political left in the years between World War I and the 1960s.
Harry R. Targ
Professor of Political Science, Emeritus
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
