70
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the immigrant, the slum, and the ghetto, the failures of the American
dream, above all the persistence of poverty and inequality amid plenty -
a subject with few parallels in earlier American literature.
One attempt to grapple directly with social reality was the proletar–
ian novel, a middle-class experiment in creating militant, revolutionary
fiction about the working class. Many of these novels centered on indus–
trial conflict. At least six of them dealt with the same strike in the cot–
ton mills of Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. These writers reshaped
journalistic material into ideological fables. In this they were encouraged
by the Communist Party, which in the early thirties saw literature as a
weapon, a way of fostering class consciousness. Debates on proletarian
writing proliferated in left-wing journals in the early 1930s, with some
critics discounting books (like
Call It Sleep)
that merely focused on
working-class life without stressing its revolutionary potential.
The standard view of proletarian novels used to be that of Malcolm
Cowley, who drew a composite sketch of their plots as follows:
A young man comes down from the hills to work in a cotton mill
(or a veneer factory or a Harlan County mine). Like all his fellow
workers except one, he is innocent of ideas about labor unions or the
class struggle. The exception is always an older man, tough but
humorous, who keeps quoting passages from
The Communist
Manifesto .
Always the workers are heartlessly oppressed, always they go
out on strike, always they form a union with the older man as leader,
and always the strike is broken by force of arms. The older man clies
for the cause, like John the Baptist, but the young hero takes over his
faith and mission.
Described in this reductive and amusing way, the novels seem even
more pat than they actually were. Partly inspired by Soviet experiments
in proletarian art, these books have never fared very well with readers or
critics. By 1939,
Partisan Review
editor Philip Rahv, once a theorist of
proletarian writing, could dismiss the whole episode as "the literature of
a party disguised as the literature of a class." Yet proletarian writing was
part of a much broader tradition of fiction and poetry in the thirties and
forties. Many key works of Depression journalism and social documenta–
tion resemble proletarian fiction, which also overlaps with mainstream
social novels like
Studs
Lonigan
and
U.
S.A.
that have few working-class
characters and no simple conversion fable. There are also strong similari–
ties between proletarian fiction and the thirties road novel, as well as the
hard-boiled crime fiction of writers like James M. Cain and W. R.
