New Left Literature

NEW LEFT LITERATURE. The New Left culture of the 1960s did not generate a distinctive literary movement of the kind associated with previous radical movements in the United States. No one work, political organization, geographic location, aesthetic style, or political theme provided a common reference point. Literary people associated with the New Left generally followed individual goals and were more likely to be involved with other writers in feminist, racial, language, or sexual movements than with writers who shared their specific political ideology. In contrast to a parallel phenomenon among radical filmmakers, the diffusion of radical writers tended to subordinate the Left message as such into broader perspectives demanding cultural egalitarianism and equal access of specific constituencies to political and economic power.

While lacking a coherent literary component, the New Left did not lack for creative energy. A common circumstance, in fact, was that many activists wrote poetry or short fiction in addition to doing political and academic work. During the time of the struggle against the war in Vietnam, thousands of poems using radical rhetoric were directed against U.S. policies. This work appeared in the underground press, was read at rallies, and inched its way into literary journals. During Angry Arts Week of 1967 and for some time thereafter, scores of poets in New York City used flatbed trucks to publicly read from at busy intersections throughout the five boroughs. No single voice captured the radical movement as Bob Dylan’s songs had at one time, but the totality of the poems had considerable impact. Outstanding anti-war poems from all sectors of the literary world were collected by Walter Lowenfels in Where Is Vietnam? (1967). Radical contributors included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Will Inman, Jack Lindeman, Clarence Major, Tom McGrath, Al Katzman, Dan Georgakas, Denis Knight, Sidney Bernard, Walter Lowenfels, and Leslie Woolf Hedley.

New Left writers were acutely aware of the need for a journal on the model of the Masses, but their various attempts to create such an organ usually lasted only a few issues and barely got beyond immediate affinity groups. Some of these undertakings were Crawdaddy, TRA (Toward Revolutionary Art), 100 Flowers, Insurgent, Treason, Weapon, Chalk Circle, Black Mask, the Unrealist, Sez, and Left Curve. Few political journals had literary sections although poems occasionally appeared in the Minority of One and Radical America. The Guardian, however, ceased publishing poetry in the 1960s and fiction had to find a place in the few literary journals, like Minnesota Review, that were open to radical work. More common than creative work in Left cultural publications were critiques of dominant culture, particularly mass media, a tendency that also dominated the journals of the 1970s and 1980s such as Cultural Correspondence and Zeta. Despite the difficulties of publication, radicals continued to produce an amazing amount of poetry. Todd Gitlin edited an impressive collection in The Campfires of the Resistance (1971). Radicals were also included in such textbooks as The Now Voices (1971), edited by Angelo Carli and Theodore Kilman, and The City Today (1978), edited by George L. Groman.

The single most influential Left literary enterprise was El Corno Emplumado, edited by Margaret Randall in Mexico City. Randall had been involved with the abstract expressionists of the 1950s and had close contacts with exiled Spanish loyalists. She began her bilingual journal after moving to Mexico in the 1960s. What distinguished El Corno was that it mingled the best of the new Latin American authors, many of whom were active revolutionaries, with American writers of various dissident movements. Randall’s criteria were literary but her journal provided a rare cross-cultural writer-to-writer link. The magazine suspended publication in 1969 when Randall received governmental death threats for supporting the rebellion of Mexican students.

Randall tried to return to her native United States but was denied entry because she had given up her citizenship to marry a Mexican writer. Randall was forced to seek asylum in Cuba, and in the years that followed, she became a New Left Anna Louise Strong, writing of the revolutionary process in Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua with an emphasis on the role of women. She continued to write her own poetry and was a major translator of Spanish-language writers. She was able to return to the United States in the early 1980s but soon became embroiled with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which wanted to expel her under the provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act. Randall became a major cause célèbre for the radical and feminist movements, and finally had her citizenship reaffirmed in 1989. Her poetry, her nonfiction, and the contents of El Corno were cited by the government as proofs of her subversive intentions. Randall, in fact, had become increasingly involved with the women’s movement, and her poetry was more personal than political. Her most political writing is found in the collection Part of the Solution (1973).

Randall’s interfacing with other movements was quite typical of the times and could be applied to radicals as diverse as Susan Sherman, Diane Di Prima, Pedro Pietri, Vincent Ferrini, Etheridge Knight, and Amiri Baraka. Susan Sherman was identified with the women’s movement and gay rights, but her Ikon magazine took on hard-core political issues such as apartheid in South Africa and she was an editor of the radical poetry anthology Only Humans with Songs to Sing (1969). Di Prima had roots in the Beat movement but was best known for her “Revolutionary Poems” cycle, which were a fixture in the 1960s underground press. Pietri was associated with the Puerto Rican movement but wrote in English with such a strong class perspective that Monthly Review Press published his Puerto Rican Obituary (1973). Vincent Ferrini pursued ethnic and regional themes related to his home base of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in poetry that he consciously set up as a Left alternative to Gloucester’s avant-garde poet laureate, Charles Olson.

Etheridge Knight began publishing poetry while in prison and radicals helped secure his release. Like many prison writers, he linked black crime with capitalism and was representative of the prison writers’ movement, which enjoyed Left support. Amiri Baraka had originally won literary fame with plays published under his given name of LeRoi Jones and was loosely associated with the Beats. He later moved into a black nationalist period and was associated with cultural radicals such as Larry Neal. Still later he declared himself a Marxist. Other black writers moved in and around the Left in similar fashion. Among the best known were Sonia Sanchez, Don Lee, Julius Lester, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major.

Novels directly about the radical movement were abundant in the 1960s–1970s, but they only occasionally addressed the New Left. A major exception was Max Crawford’s The Bad Communist (1979), which looked at the cult of “direct action” and at Maoism in a California group focused on black prisoners. Marge Piercy contributed several works related to political movements. Going Down Fast (1969), a story of urban renewal reflecting participatory-democracy ideas of Students for a Democratic Society, was followed with Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), a novel set in the near future in which an unsuccessful armed rebellion by New Left types is underway, and the science-fiction Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Vida (1979) treated the direct action, Weatherman-like minimovement emerging from the disappointments of the New Left. Several other Piercy novels, such as Small Changes (1973), Braided Lives (1982), and Gone to Soldier (1987) touched upon radical movements in passing.

A different body of literature sought to recapture the traditions of the Old Left and relate them in some manner to the New Left. Helen Yglesias’s How She Died (1972) treated the devastating effect of the Cold War on the cancer-stricken daughter of a famous jailed Communist, her New Left-age housekeeper nurse, and her Old Left mentor. K. B. Gilden’s Between the Hills and the Sea (1971) analyzed the Cold War in a blue-collar Connecticut town, where the approaching victory of the anticommunist factions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations leaves little surviving but personal determination. Harvey Swados’s Standing Fast (1970) focused mainly on a fictionalized version of the Workers Party and the later fate of its activists and sympathizers, down to the tragic murder in Harlem of the most idealistic of their children. Swados’s Celebrations (1980) showed a New Left-style militant stripping away the accumulated respectability of an aging former radical and bringing the old man (actually his biological father) back toward the fray. Clancy Sigal’s Going Away (1962), the earliest and perhaps best of the genre, is an on-the-road novel in which the writer crisscrosses America visiting comrades with various reactions to the Khrushchev revelations and the invasion of Hungary. The novel ends with the writer expatriating to England, the path of the author in real life.

A literary device in many radical novels was to have a character who belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) symbolize unblemished American dissent. More rare were accounts of IWW struggles such as Robert Houston’s Bisbee ‘17 (1979) and Thomas Churchill’s Centralia Death March (1980). The misfortunes of a Communist-oriented trade union were the subject of Leonard Kriegel’s Quitting Time (1982). The interaction between immigrant and working-class oppression was a more popular theme. Illegal Mexican immigrants are dealt with in Eugene Nelson’s Bracero (1973), Chinese railroad workers in Moonfoon Leong’s Number One Son (1975), and Hispanic migrant workers in Raymond Barrio’s The Plum Plum Pickers (1972). This was a continuation of a tradition found in earlier works such as Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California (1949), a novel about working-class Japanese Americans. Alienation rather than revolution was the theme of most books about the working class. Truman Nelson’s The Torture of Mothers (1975) dealt with racism in Harlem, Chuck Wachtel’s Joe the Engineer (1983) with blue-collar workers, John O. Killens’s ’Sippi (1967) with civil rights activists, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1981) with health workers, Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven (1987) with coal miners, and Henry Noyes’s Hand over Fist (1980) with Sicilians and blacks in Chicago’s Forty-second Ward.

Socialists often wrote books in which the Left view was part of the fiction’s structure and assumptions rather than a focus of direct discourse. Sol Yurick’s The Bag (1968) and The Warriors (1965) dealt with lumpen street gangs in such a fashion. A film version of The Warriors got a controversial homage from the influential film critic Pauline Kael and the publicity led to most of Yurick’s fiction being released in paperback for a mass audience. Ernie Brill’s I Looked over Jordan and Other Stories (1980) dealt with health-care problems with a similar strategy and one story was excerpted for a television play by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. John A. Williams included a devastating critique of the Central Intelligence Agency in his The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and celebrated blacks who had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in his Captain Blackman (1972). Meredith Tax favorably featured radical Jews in her immigrant epics Rivington Street (1982) and Union Square (1988). Tax wrote a nonfiction account of women garment workers in The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (1980). Brill had been on the staff of TRA and worked in the Congress of Racial Equality and the Progressive Labor Party. Williams served as a fiction adviser for Monthly Review Press and Yurick spoke often at Marxist forums in New York City.

Science fiction, or what might be called historical fantasy, became, for the first time since the 1910s, a major mode of Left and protest expression in the 1960s–1970s. Along with Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, this genre saw Ursula K. Le Guin, daughter of noted anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, write several novels analyzing the destructiveness of militarized Western (especially American) culture and seeking out alternatives. The Word for World Is Forest (1969) was a thinly disguised allegorical comment on the war in Vietnam, with dreamy creatures brutalized and turned into revolutionary warriors by a galactic invasion from the Earth. The Dispossessed (1971) posed the collective effort of planetary anarchism in conditions of scarcity against the rich but corrupt American-like planetary authoritarianism. Philip K. Dick wrote a series of novels about spreading authoritarianism, declining ecological conditions, and the manipulation of the drug culture to make protest and revolt increasingly difficult. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and A Scanner Darkly (1977) were his most convincing efforts. Ishmael Reed, before abandoning Left ideas entirely for black nationalism, penned the remarkable Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), a savage satire of Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty program; Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), a caricature of the western novel, with anti-realist black and lesbian heroes; and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), an imaginative novel about the making of Western civilization and the subversion of it in the 1920s by black culture in the United States. By the later 1970s, this entire phase of Lettish literature had passed.

Another populist blending of art and politics is found in the work of Edward Abbey, a philosophical anarchist and radical environmentalist. His Monkey Wrench Gang (1976) combined his major passions by having environmentalists use violent direct action in an all-out effort against developers and other “defilers” of the West. The novel sold half a million copies and made him a cult hero. His Brave Cowboy became a 1962 Kirk Douglas western, Lonely Are the Brave, and a 1981 TV movie, Fire on the Mountain. Abbey’s essays were unrelenting in their condemnation of capitalist ethics and economics. Shortly before his death in 1989, Abbey became strongly identified with the Earth First! movement.

Ultimately, the energies that had been generated by the New Left were absorbed by dominant culture and other movements. Specific writers gained a measure of influence and even best-seller status but were usually not politically identified as radicals by the general public. The radical movement itself, highly focused on critical analysis of mass media and capitalist cultural hegemony, devoted few of its limited resources to literary endeavors or promotion of radical authors.

Baxandall, Lee, ed. Radical Perspectives in the Arts. Baltimore: Pelican Books Original, 1972.

Buhle, Paul, ed. Popular Culture in America. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.