Mainstream

MAINSTREAM. During the tumultuous late 1930s, the Communist Party periodical the New Masses had shifted from monthly to weekly publication, promising to devote considerable space to literary and other cultural fields. The coverage proved uneven and rarely achieved the level of aesthetic sophistication maintained by the then still vaguely Marxist Partisan Review. In 1945–1946 a group of young writers, largely members of the cultural section of the Communist Party, projected a magazine to publish fiction, poetry, literary and art criticism, and theoretical explorations of a possible Marxist aesthetic. Notable in this group was Charles Humboldt (1910–1964), a World War II veteran then studying mural art in Mexico, via the GI Bill.

The first issues of Mainstream, especially noteworthy for such authors as Tom Bell, Alexander Saxton, and Meridel Le Sueur, evoked considerable enthusiasm. Although circulation began to climb, Party membership and funds had begun to decline, and cultural needs possessed no political priority. The New Masses, which had meanwhile lost many readers, merged into the Masses and Mainstream, with all four editors carryovers from the New Masses. Charles Humboldt was listed merely as part of a cosmetic board of nineteen contributing editors. Masses and Mainstream, as unwieldy as its name, floundered until a major reorientation in 1956. Milton Howard remained titular editor but Humboldt was listed as managing editor and became the de facto editor of the monthly, renamed Mainstream in September. In 1957 he became sole editor in fact.

Until Humboldt’s resignation in 1960, the magazine achieved an extraordinary level of literary sophistication, imaginative breadth, and cosmopolitan interests. Especially notable was its emphasis on Latin American artistic development, a first in the US Left. Through all the financial and political hazards of the Cold War and all the problems of an ever more rigidly philistine Communist leadership, Mainstream managed to grow. Humboldt remained responsible for almost every function, meeting weekly with four contributing editors (novelists Barbara Giles and Philip Bonosky and two critics, Sidney Finkelstein and Annette Rubinstein) to secure advice and help in his successful solicitation of material from such distinguished non-Communist radicals as John Berger, Joseph Needham, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kenneth Tynan, and others.

As early as 1956, the divergence of the official Party outlook and Mainstream culminated in a searching effort by Humboldt to question the accepted view of the artist’s responsibility to society. After many compromises, ultimatums, and continued financial crises, Humboldt resigned in 1960, along with a number of contributing editors. (He went on to work at the National Guardian until shortly before his death.) The magazine grew steadily more characterless and isolated, and expired in 1963, the final notable American Communist literary publication.