JEAL 9 review

Review of Milton A. Cohen's The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Milton A. Cohen. The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s.

Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018.  ISBN 978-0-8262-2163-6,pp, 373. $50.00  (hardback)

                Given the urgency of explaining how art and politics have a long history of being linked and of illuminating how the pull of early twentieth-century American politics shapes peculiar problems of interpretation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Milton . Cohen has made a genuine contribution to ongoing literary and cultural discourses.  His primary objective is to direct attention to what one might argue is a fortunate occurrence  in American literary history, namely the confluence of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ernest  Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). As contemporary scholars grapple with uncertainty and the ethics of ambiguity, Cohen provides his readers  with  a case study of how writers make deliberate choices at one moment in history and may later, for sundry reasons, depart from those choices as they navigate the motions of history. In addition to enlarging or revitalizing cultural memory of the 1930s, The Pull of Politics nudges one to consider the implications of that past for thinking about  American politics and art in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.  Cohen is clear about his  purpose, but  the relativity of history may resist assumptions of clarity and expose limits which challenge purpose and explanation.

                In Cohen's discriminating choice of words, the book "situates each novel within the political development of its author: the personal and historical events that awakened his commitment to a leftist cause; his earlier literary works reflecting stages of that commitment; and following analysis of his major novel, the biographical and historical events that ultimately severed that commitment" (4). And Cohen is much aware that one must qualify conclusions about severing, because they are subject to debate and refutation.  That Steinbeck, Wright, and Hemingway did indeed in the 1940s move away from what Cohen identifies as "the comforts ---and complications ---of a leftist political cause or organization" (314) doesn't liberate us from accounting for their transmuting the traces of commitment into different forms of engaging aesthetic and social issues. Cohen's cautions are instructive.  How one situates research , selects evidence, and  arrives at provisional conclusions are crucial aspects of literary and cultural scholarship.   

                The Pull of Politics is divided into three parts.   Part 1, Chapters 1-3, entails biographical analyses of what motivated Steinbeck (1934-1939), Wright (1933-1939) and Hemingway (1932-1939), and Chapter 4 summarizes the artistic and ideological differences as well as the kinship among the three writers as they embraced the Left.  Their choices were determined, in various ways, by communist and non-communist literary politics and their desires to use art in producing social change. They did not simply jump on the bandwagon of leftist fashion.  They were concerned with capitalist exploitation; with  labor, systemic racism; environmental and ecological changes in the United States; the horrors of war and fascism, within and beyond the dictates of the Communist Party USA.  Part 2, Chapters 5-7, consists of special readings of The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, readings that combine textual analysis with relevant historical information.  While the readings of the novels are generally persuasive, they might have been richer had Cohen supplemented use of secondary sources with examination of archival resources.  His silence about archives is intriguing, especially in light of  growing conviction among cultural  scholars that using manuscript collections and  archives can move us toward a bit more certitude about what is at stake in interpretation and the making of literary histories.  Part 3, Chapter 8, provides a very good overview of the multiple reasons ---including harsh criticisms from both the Right and the Left ---Steinbeck, Wright, and Hemingway had for dissociating themselves from overt leftist commitments.  In itemizing reasons, Cohen makes an observation that invites commentary beyond the scope of The Pull of Politics:  "Significantly, in shedding their links to leftism, all three writers moved ---or returned ---to a belief in individualism" (266).

                Is the gesture of return to be dealt with a prelude to postmodernism?  Was the renunciation for Steinbeck and Hemingway a return to a conservative liberalism or a reification American exceptionalism in the arena of politics and art?  Was  it for Wright a new beginning of or return to his penchant for unfettered radical thinking?    It is judicious that Cohen does not distort his objective with meditation on such questions but places the onus of the questions on the shoulders of his readers.  In this sense, Cohen's study might inspire Steinbeck, Wright, and Hemingway scholars to compare his speculations with Michael Szalay's more theory-driven  analyses of works by  Wright, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and other writers of their generation  in New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press,  2000). Both books are necessary and rewarding as scholars look back on the 1930s from the vantage of the twenty-first century and inquire, as Szalay bids us, about the significance of "aesthetic paradigms based on their supposed hostility to a concept as unrelentingly abstract as 'the market' "(265).  Perhaps  the pull of politics obligates us to shop in the supermarket of the dialogic imagination.