Damned Agitator: A Michael Gold Reader

New editions are justified by the absence or shortage of available editions, reliable editions, or editions thought satisfactorily to address certain audiences at certain times. Happily for readers who value breadth, lofty canonical status is no longer a criterion. As Patrick Chura observes in his clear and forceful introduction to Damned Agitator, “significant portions” of the far-left polemicist and miscellaneous writer Michael Gold’s corpus were collected in 1936, 1954, and 1972 (2). But Gold (1893–1967) was spottily represented therein: his late work is of course absent from the earliest edition; the second ignores his drama and thus his brief affiliation with the Provincetown Players; and the third, as its subtitle indicates, is a “literary anthology,” concerned neither with Gold’s journalism nor the dramatic work likely to interest readers of this journal (2). Damned Agitator, Chura notes, “is the first Gold anthology by a scholarly press, the first to include the full range of Gold’s work in all genres, and the first in more than fifty years” (2). Readers will learn much from Chura’s explanatory headnotes, which model accessible erudition.Chura lets his “more than fifty years” waft over an introduction that neither belabors nor ignores the juxtaposition of Gold’s Communism with the present-day mushrooming of income inequality and other evidences of a creeping tyranny that he, like Gold, calls “fascism” (11). The subtlety of Chura’s approach telegraphs a contrast between his and his subject’s rhetoric. Chura’s modulations among biography, history, and exegesis invite and reward a reader’s attention, as do the polish and precision of his writing. He writes as a teacher-scholar with strong and honorable ideological commitments. Gold writes as an ideologue for whom rectitude moots rhetorical obligation and the courtesies, concessions, and seductions it entails: by assuming his readers’ approval, Gold frees himself of obligation to them.The range of Gold’s work that Chura celebrates is in this sense illusory: Gold’s writings include poems, plays, and fictions, as well as topical essays; but we often don’t know why the poems are poems; the plays, plays; and the fictions, fictions. In Gold’s 1920 Provincetown Players outing, Money, Abram declares that “money is a terrible thing” (70)—an oversimplification but not an irresponsible one. But when Gold ends the play with his characters “enter[ing] a new discussion on the endless problem of the world’s misery and Money” (74), we recognize the “problem” as the author’s idée fixe and the “discussion” as the shared purpose of a superficially diverse oeuvre. No special talent is required to appreciate the legitimacy of Gold’s anxieties about capitalism, but one needs patience to withstand their unrelenting iterations, compromised time and again by the substitution of amplitude for thought.What Gold lacks, essentially, is imagination—a suspect affectation where truth is felt to be obvious and inflexible. He often writes about art but is skeptical of artistry. He regards “genius” principally as a “social” phenomenon (276) or, cleaving closer to etymology, as an impersonal essence (198). So he praises Woody Guthrie for his “sincerity” (224), not for the remarkable imagination that allowed Guthrie to make art of that neutral quality. In a 1928 passage akin in tone (and vehicle) to Antonin Artaud’s silly “all writing is pig shit,” Gold declared literature “one of the products of a civilization like steel or textiles. . . . not any more mystic in its origin than a ham sandwich” (126). Why, then, do we have more bridges and britches than Bards? Two years later, Gold responded to unspecified “bourgeois intellectuals” who had apparently posed such a question:The mathematics are dizzying—nearly one “proletarian Shakespeare” a month for a full decade, summers off—but what’s important here is not Gold’s failure as a prophet but his inability to admit that the creation of art requires more than ham, mayonnaise, mustard, and bluster. Gold in effect truncates Matthew Arnold’s theory that only the coincidence of “man” and “moment” can create meaningful literature by chucking the “man,” the person—the ham. Hyperbole comes easily to Gold. In an intermittently clever assault on Thornton Wilder, he numbers Ibsen among the “waxwork[s]” in H. G. Wells’s 1920 compendium, The Outline of History (148). He names no worthier modern but opts rather to gesture dubiously at—those numbers again!—the “thousands of books and articles on the theories of proletarian literature” published in the Soviet Union (and elsewhere), some no doubt by writers who would not survive the madman who succeeded Gold’s beloved Lenin (153; see also 159). Till the soil, spin the theory, take the ham from the fridge: fruit, art, and sandwich follow perforce. No imagination, much less genius, is required.One playwright widely suspect of genius appreciated a side of Gold not evident in Chura’s collection. In 1925, Eugene O’Neill tried, hard, to secure the rights to Gold’s “Mexican comedy,” Fiesta, for his, Robert Edmond Jones’s, and Kenneth Macgowan’s Experimental Theatre, Inc. O’Neill judged the play “fresh and amusing” and “like[d] it damn well,” notwithstanding its “negligible” plot.1 O’Neill had praised some of Gold’s earlier plays, too, although his nondramatic work did not interest him.2 By 1926, O’Neill was concerned that Gold had allowed his politics to cheapen his plays. After reading the script of Gold’s Hoboken Blues, O’Neill advised the playwright “to keep the artist, Mike Gold, and the equally O.K. human being, the Radical editor, rigidly separated during their respective working hours.”3 Chura had no cause to defer to O’Neill’s judgment in assembling his collection; but I, personally, would have liked to encounter more of the material that had passed muster with the period’s preeminent dramatist.If some of my problems with the edition arise from Chura’s choice of material, others owe to my distance from Gold’s intended audience, with respect to education, ideological temperature, and historical moment. Also at issue is the artificial manner in which I encountered these selections. Gold never meant anyone to read 350 pages of his work, seriatim; and no doubt plenty of working people in the Gilded Age and its dark aftermath drew reassurance and inspiration from his columns in The Liberator, New Masses, The Daily Worker, and elsewhere. So, too, I suspect, from the creative work. For example, the formal inadequacies of “The Rosenberg Cantata” (1954), on the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, need not have troubled an untrained reader sickened by that display of brutalism. In point of fact, Gold was reporting from the front lines of an apparently interminable war and addressing its victims as a comrade and fellow sufferer. I imagine that their responses to his work were often profound. To me, though, Gold now feels distant. A flesh-and-blood collectivist, he rallied his troops on docks and in picket lines and union halls. All this seems far from a postmodern techno-tyranny that cordons its citizenry into discrete “bespoke realities,” in the exquisite formulation of David French (New York Times, November 30, 2023). Ours is a lonelier anger, dangerously untempered by companionship. One might be forgiven for reading Gold’s polemic nostalgically.Regardless, students of radical drama will welcome Chura’s publication of the full text of Money and of excerpts from Battle Hymn, staged by the Federal Theatre Works Progress Administration in 1936, and The Honorable Pete, an unproduced 1950 commentary on Douglas MacArthur’s 1932 assault on picketing World War I veterans. And my own tour d’or provided scattered pleasures and healthy provocations. Conceptually, the essay “Just Like Lindbergh’s Baby” (1934) could hardly be simpler: the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. is recounted alongside the later and largely unnoticed slaying of a three-year-old Black child in Florida. The emotion is visceral; the prose weeps and rages; the effect is devastating. “This Troubled Land” (1954), an attractive travelogue, finds Gold traipsing across the country protesting union-busting, pollution, and corruption and remembering gratefully the kindness of his hosts—another simple contrast, another striking effect. “Smoke and Steel” (1922) resonates compellingly with the just-premiered Hairy Ape and O’Neill’s proposed 1926 screen treatment of it (see EOR 39, no. 1). This is an aggregate worthy of further attention, the more so given Gerhard Bleifuss’s recent essay on steel, The Hairy Ape, and the Futurist and fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (see EOR 43, no. 2).Nearer to my heart, a 1965 assessment of Bob Dylan’s embrace of electric music counterpoints the snotty tut-tuttings with which some socially conscious folkies responded to this heresy. Indeed, Dylan seems to have had a remarkable effect on the septuagenarian—and socially conscious folkie—Gold: “I have become a partisan, in my late years, of rock and roll,” Gold writes, “for the reason that it is . . . a positive music with a strong life beat in its veins. It is a great music to get up to in the morning, and do a little exercise, when all your bones are creaky” (315). Who can resist the image of the grizzled warrior pouring himself a cuppa, dropping Highway 61 Revisited down the spindle, and wheezing through his Royal Canadian Airforce Exercise Plan? Not I.My remarks about art and ideology will sound rote and weary to some readers. Fair play, that. But halfway through my fourth decade of academic employment, I remain impatient with showy denunciations of great writing as ham, pig shit, and, to relish the paradox, elitist: Gold’s criticism; last week’s faculty meeting; howlings against the humanities from within and without the academy—enough, please. Here, perhaps, is Gold’s triumph, partial and dispiriting: while the selfless, grinding stick-to-it-iveness that Gold embodied is scantly evident in today’s academic left, the underinformed mouthiness for which he sometimes settled is abundantly so. Perhaps Damned Agitator will show Gold’s ideological children the sweat that glistens beneath the author’s bluster. If it does, Chura will have provided a service beyond even the production of a first-rate edition.