Lasch—The Artists' Road to Serfdom

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left (1969)

Mike Gold, writing in The Liberator in February 1921, issued a call for "proletarian art" in which he attacked The Seven Arts, one of the voices of the Greenwich Village awakening. No "great lusty tree," Gold wrote, could grow in "that hot-house air." Subsequent articles by Gold denounced "the mad solitary priests of Dada" and other purveyors of sterile pessimism and "pure art." "Since 1912," Aaron [Writers on the Left, p. 89] writes, "a polarizing process had been under way which divided the Bohemian from the revolutionary" and forced writers to choose between art and radical politics. But this polarization had not become critical so long as American radicalism remained a broad and inclusive movement devoted, among other things, to creating a better understanding of life under the existing order—something art is supremely equipped to do. Only when the new left wing shattered the Socialist party and substituted for long-term efforts to revolutionize American consciousness a mystique of immediate revolution did art come to be suspect in radical circles. The role of artists then came to be defined as one of dutiful servants of the "revolution"—that is, propagandists for mass culture against the stale and artificial culture of the literati, as it had come to be regarded.
(p. 50)

So, perhaps the conceit to creating a better understanding of life actually protected art and artists against mere servitude to revolutionary pretensions. Really there is a vulgar functionalism at the heart of both of these imperatives; but there is at least something to be said for being one's own propagandist rather than somebody else's.

Partisan Review represented the most ambitious attempt since prewar Village days to fuse radical politics and cultural modernism. From the beginning it tried "to put forward the best writing then produced by the Left," in Rahv's words. Attracted to communism for the same reasons that attracted other radicals of the thirties, because it seemed to represent the best hope of social change, Rahv and Phillips had also been strongly influenced by Eliot, Joyce, James, Lawrence, Yeats, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and other architects of the modernist tradition, and by Edmund Wilson's defense of that tradition in Axel's Castle, published in 1931. Somewhat disconcerted by the fact that much of this literature had been written by political reactionaries, they nevertheless recognized in the modern European classics a powerful statement of the terror and pain of contemporary existence—a revelation, they rightly perceived, that was of infinitely greater value to radicals than the shallow "realism" preached by V.F. Calverton, Mike Gold, and in slightly different form by Granville Hicks. "It is true," Gold sadly observed, "that the intellectual brings into the movement many of his bourgeois hangovers, but they can be controlled." Rahv and Phillips, however, as James Gilbert writes, were not prepared "to bury the culture of the past."
(p. 53)