Michael Gold: The People’s Writer

Abstract

In our present circumstances, when the need for movement on social and economic issues is so pressing, there can be impatience with the notion that art bears no responsibility to be an advocate, if not a weapon, for a more equitable society. So the timing is very good for Patrick Chura’s book on Mike Gold, for Gold was always clear that the purpose of writing was to further the political and cultural goals of the revolution, to “change the world,” to use the title of his column in the Daily Worker. Gold was remarkably consistent and dedicated in his stance on the left from his literary beginnings in Greenwich Village through the nightmare of McCarthyism. In fact, Chura states that “part of this book’s purpose is to consider how Gold stayed the course in the ‘class struggle,’ through abidingly human moments of failure and uncertainty, during a long career” (98). With the use of many new archival sources, Chura has given us the fullest account we have of Gold’s commitment to Socialism, and his continued optimism that the workers of the world would one day unite provides inspiration. As Chura notes, Gold shared both his commitment and his optimism with his lifelong friend and kindred spirit from Greenwich Village, Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement.But one main difference between Gold and Day, and one that has always complicated views of Gold, was his tendency, indeed eagerness, to throw literary bricks through nearly everyone’s window. This can seem refreshing at first, as when he used a review of Thornton Wilder in 1930 to generate a discussion of what American fiction should look like during a depression, an episode that Chura examines in detail. Yet ten years later, when Wilder was able to examine and adapt his attitudes to social problems in The Skin of Our Teeth, Gold was still hurling his literary bricks with the same force at the “social fascists” who had issues with the Communist Party position about the Moscow Trials, or the fate of Trotsky, or the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. Gold did not simply have disagreements with old friends and acquaintances, he “canceled” them. Chura provides an account of many of these broken relationships, and an especially insightful account of Gold’s involvement with the Provincetown Players and Eugene O’Neill, with whom he forged “a close bond that involved meaningful artistic influence” (221). There is also a good analysis of the column that Gold wrote years later about the opening of The Iceman Cometh in 1946, a “review” in which the reviewer claims that there was no need to see the play to be able to tell what was wrong with it. In Chura’s view, Gold now sees that O’Neill never had a good understanding of the poorer classes and lacked “vital contact,” an important concept in Chura’s earlier Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Herman Melville to Richard Wright. If Gold had seen the play with its talk of pipe dreams, his comments would probably have been much harsher.Chura says that Max Eastman’s remark that Gold was “an intellectual robot in the cause of communism” was “a grossly misleading label” (100). I would agree, and yet it is not entirely wrong. Gold saw the Communist movement as a way to change the world in a way he desperately wanted, but that led to an intolerance in freedom of thought for others. Many of those who suffered Gold’s literary bricks thought that he did have the intellectual stamina to sit through a performance of The Iceman Cometh, so it is enlightening that this volume demonstrates that Gold was in fact well read. Chura asks us “to distinguish Gold’s personality from his politics and make fairer judgments about the type of activists the US Communists really were” (8). And Chura’s book is a major step in helping to understand Gold’s journey as an American journey. But can we make fair judgments about Gold by separating personality from politics? Those interested in Gold, Chura included, want to wrestle with the problem