The history of the left is by no means forgotten. “After all,” Alan Wald writes, “it is the subject of a considerable amount of superb research and theorization, much of which has contributed significantly to the de-erasure of this inheritance.” Uncovering lost histories of the previous century is no longer the central present work, rather, the importance now is how we remember our past history on the left, and vitalize our collective aspirations to move forward, without repetition of failure or regression.
Wald is a tour de force of American literary and cultural studies. He is the living expert on the subject of the US literary left, without whom many of his subjects may have been completely lost to time, due to neglect or intentional acts of suppression. He has authored countless essays and articles, and nine full-length books, including Bohemian Bolsheviks, his latest. Wald’s trilogy of books with University of North Carolina Press (1994-2007) is his opus and is perhaps the single greatest contribution to literary leftist historiography ever published. However, the new book is a remarkable addition to his legacy, a collection of 37 essays sorted into six themed sections, which operates as a generous dramatis personae of the literary left, both to its familiar headliners and lesser-known hidden gems.
The subtitle of “dispatches” most immediately conjures to mind Michael Herr, whose Dispatches famously chronicles his time as a war correspondent for Esquire in Vietnam. As a vocabulary choice, it makes sense for Wald who came of age at Antioch College in the late 1960s, a college he selected intentionally due to its notoriety for countercultural political protests and civil disobedience. While at school, Wald launched his own magazine, endearingly titled The Antioch Masses, an homage to The New Masses. He subsequently went on to graduate school at nearby UCA Berkeley, where he completed a dissertation on James T. Farrell, which would become the body of his first book James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years in 1978. Farrell is best remembered now for his Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-1935), which highlights the life of an enterprising young Irish American man in Chicago during the depression, who despite his aspirations, is eventually consumed by alcoholism and poverty. These novels, along with some of Farrell’s more difficult to find works, showcase a writer with prose as enduring as a Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, and gratefully remains widely available as a single volume with the Library of America (although it is currently out of print).
Farrell, while already a frequent subject of Wald’s, only appears incidentally in Bohemian Bolsheviks, mostly in passing in the marginalia, save for a feature in the book’s most unwieldy (and first) chapter: “Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum.” Here, Wald examines historical/biographical works by four scholars on four writers: Farrell, Agnes Smedley, Henry Roth, and Ralph Ellison. These biographies are complimented and scrutinized by Wald, whose larger project here seems to be the unenviable task of encouraging younger Marxists to not shirk the responsibility of engaging with the entirety of the history. Which for writers such as Ellison and Farrell, includes both authors’ latter disillusionment with CP-USA and disappointing liberal epilogues. Indeed, this is not an unfamiliar story with the Anti-Stalinist left—many of whom turned so far away from their leftism that they became neoconservative reactionaries: Norman Podhoretz, Sidney Hook, novelist John Dos Passos and poet Claude McKay.
To anyone who has participated in a left-leaning publication, or even simply read the discourse on a given day on Twitter, the prevailing anxiety of this scholarship is only too familiar: the political and the aesthetic at war, party lines, infighting, divisions. It is equal parts comforting and aggravating to know we are relitigating these same discourses almost a hundred years since the John Reed Clubs began. For his part, Wald sees the current political horizons as optimistic, a new-new-new left, void of some of the inherent collateral damage of his generation’s relationship to communism:
Writers for publications such as Jacobin, Viewpoint, New Politics, N+1, and many more are mostly free of Stalinist baggage, so that old arguments about Communism as totalitarianism don’t distract them: many of the new forces, including some in Democratic Socialists of America, are to the Left of the Democratic Party and therefore no longer under the sway of world-weary liberals; and the most inspiring are strongly anti-imperialist and associated with anti-Zionism and BDS, and hence in a situation to challenge the deradicalizing Boomers populating Dissent and the New Republic.
While simply being “Left” of the Democratic Party, feels like a relatively unimpressive superlative these days, the overwhelming sentiment here is encouraging, and one that seems more cogent as time presses on too: ten years ago, discussing socialism on the internet would be met with a deluge of ridiculous comments about the Soviet era. Many of those same conversational eddies are dammed off with recent public fervor over the excitement over Zohran Mamdani and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Millennial and Gen-Z’s fresh perspectives on the politics of the left. As someone who has witnessed this changing perspective in the last 15 years both online and in the university, it is very energizing.
Bohemian Bolsheviks is dedicated to three men, all Trotskyist academics Wald knew and had complex relationships with: Farrell, Ernest Mandel, and George Novack. Mandel was an important participant in the Fourth International, led by Trotsky himself in 1938, and he provides the introduction to the Penguin editions of the Ben Fowkes/David Fernbach translations of Marx’s Capital. Mandel’s 1962 book Marxist Economic Theory is a two-volume is an accessible introduction to Marx’s notion of economic theory and is still widely taught by Marxist academics. Novack was a co-founder of the Socialist Workers Party, the main party of the American Trotskyist movement, and published all of his academic works with their press, Pathfinder. Wald knew all three men, and while he certainly does not reproduce some of their lesser characteristics and beliefs, some of the intellectual legacy of the earlier generation has obviously influenced him.
Haymarket Books’s Historical Materialism book series is a recognizable feature of any respectable lefty book collection (for more than twenty years they have published “[peer-reviewed] monographs, translated texts, reprinted classics across the bounds of academic disciplinary agendas and across the divisions of the left.”) They have published over 300 titles in the series. Many are stellar in their own right—titles by Gregory Elliott, Daniel Hartley, Jason Read, and Rebecca Carson are some personal highlights—but because of the hyper-specificity of subtopics and dense philosophic rhetoric, the titles are sometimes limiting to readers. Wald’s book, at 621 pages, certainly could not be called sparse, but never gives the sense that it is treading water in theory terminology without sensible application.
The recurring topic of “literary radicalism” can bring some residual exasperation to bear. Many may take exception to even the notion that literature could ever be radical. Continuously I find myself attending conferences and symposiums with titles reassuring me how the convened subject matters and their representatives are revolutionary and radical—which always feels very distant from the subjects discussed. Literature has had its moments historically where it is inextricably tied to various movements, but these ties have been severed by the state and the private foundations which operate in tandem with the state. Right now, we are in a moment where this detachment has been such a successful endeavor that it has removed the possibility of a poem or novel from being a potential resistant genre and instead turned it into one that is primarily in service to the state. Even if that does not appear to be the case on the surface. What Louis Althusser referred to as the “teeth gritting harmony” of the intermediation between the state and ideological state apparatuses.
Wald’s project approaches the notion of literary radicalism scholarship as requiring a dialectic of historical reckoning, “a scholarly praxis with something of a divided soul.” He does not shirk away from the complexities of authoritarian oppressions, highlighting American communist party lines in the 1930s and 40s, including opposing the African American Double V campaign, supporting Japanese American internment and supporting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, Wald also brings forth a methodology called reductio ad Stalinum, hyperbolic misrepresentations where “Marxist writers are perp-walked through the pages of literary history as martinets of a crude and malign ideology.”
The familiar names in the book are rewarding, given Wald’s excellent stewardship of their legacies—key chapters here on John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Antonio Gramsci. Of special significance, I think to Wald and to myself as well, is the continued importance of ensuring that the highly political aspects of these novelists not go unincorporated. The Grapes of Wrath and Native Son are Red books and we mustn’t allow the defanging of their works to continue.
Also rewarding is the discovery of writers of the literary left one may have not encountered before. Sanora Babb, John “Jack” Wheelwright, Nicolas Calas, Theodore Ward, Aaron Kramer—these are names that may not bring familiarity, but who are recounted enthusiastically enough by Wald to intrigue any reader to begin collecting their works. Indeed, Wald’s second full-length work The Revolutionary Imagination, was a literary biography of Boston poet Wheelwright and fellow New England poet Sherry Mangan. The chapter included in Bohemian Bolsheviks serves a dual purpose, both as an acceptable cursory introduction to the poet’s life and legacy, and also as a gracious and thoughtful epilogue to that earlier monograph on Wheelwright. Wald reflects on the ambiguities that cloud Wheelwright’s legacy, mainly his uncertain sexuality, and cautions future scholars from making leaps and assumptions one way or the other. Likewise, Wald expresses a general frustration for presumptions about Wheelwright’s politics too, and a general gripe against this trend among academic writers: “Too often scholars acknowledge a general sense of a ‘Left’ involvement, treating Marxists and revolutionaries more or less as liberals, and armchair ones at that because they were not as open in affiliations as a Mike Gold or Richard Wright.” There is a certain generosity here granted to the notion of a ‘fellow traveler’ which I am sympathetic to, with all of what we have come to understand about the red-baiting occurring as early as the 1930s. One wonders how future scholars will handle the radical and leftist poets of our time and their politics: surely the late comrade Joshua Clover will be represented accurately, but will Hanif Abdurraqib get the same treatment?
As a scholar of poetry, I found Wald’s chapters on Marxist poets like Wheelwright to be the highlight of the book. One such is “The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet in the ‘American Century’” is of particular interest, a chapter that delves deep into the biography of a forgotten leftist poet, whose style ranged from reminiscent of Heinrich Heine, an aggressively anti-modernist plain vernacular, and later, a cryptic observations void of the previous political fervor of his youth. Wald alludes to a 2004 book, Wicked Times: Selected Poems of Kramer’s work, from University of Illinois Press, the only current available version of his poems, which range from dull to brilliant.
Wald also resuscitates a seldom-sung Greek-American Trotskyist poet Nicolas Calas. Calas is an excellent Marxist experimental modernist poet. Only recently has his first selected poems collection in English appeared, Oedipus is Innocent, translated by Lena Hoff and published in 2022 by Andy Croft’s press Smokestack Books. Besides this, he is remembered by his latter work as a passionate art critic in New York in the 1960s and 70s, publishing frequently with Artforum and the Village Voice. Wald credits Hoff’s work, especially an additional literary biography she wrote on Calas as helping to restore his name to wider recognition.
Another such chapter is “Hero – International Brigades” a book review, but which also operates as an introduction to the book’s author, James Neugass, a forgotten poet who served as an ambulance driver for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Neugass wrote but did not complete a journal, which has since been released as War is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War. The manuscript for this memoir was found among the papers of Max Eastman, the once-leftist editor of The Masses and The Liberator who later became a neoconservative, and McCarthyist. The predominate leftist literature of the Spanish Civil War that is most often anthologized and celebrated, is almost always exclusively British—George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the writings of Christopher Caudwell, poems from Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and George Barker. The American representation of the war has typically been rendered only by Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the poems of Edwin Rolfe, and by Langston Hughes’ poems from his brief stint as a war correspondent in Madrid. What has not been widely spread is the writing of the other members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, with various out-of-print memoirs and documentaries, and difficult to find one-off poems in anthologies. Wald’s review helps elevate Neugass but is not simply a matter of once again rescuing a figure from potential obscurity, but more returning to the notion of what to do with the history we contend with as we receive it.
Poetry scholarship is a tricky arithmetic. There is a careful balancing act of historiography and theorization which comes with academic writing, and sometimes (often) scholars do not leave room for the actual close reading of poems, but Wald emphatically includes close reading of poems throughout the poetry chapters of the book, engaging on the level of the line with poems by Wheelwright and Kramer, as well as Delmore Schwartz. The Schwarz chapter, “A Tale of Two Delmores: Marxism and the Modernist Poet” will be of great interest to current scholars. Schwartz as a figure, has risen in popularity in recent years, likely due to a combination of recent releases from FSG: the republication of James Atlas’s 1977 biography, or the release in 2024 of a complete edition of his collected works. Like many fans of Schwartz, I first arrived to his work via the music of one of his former students at Syracuse University, Lou Reed, who dedicated the song “European Son” on the Velvet Underground’s first album to Schwartz (early pressings of VU+Nico actually contained a parenthetical dedication in the song title: “European Son (To Delmore Schwartz).”) His influence on Reed’s lyricism is obvious and Schwartz as a poet will only continue to gain in popularity. The chapter in Bohemian Bolsheviks focuses on the complexity of Schwartz’s political beliefs, which have never been accurately represented in print. This is due somewhat to his estate having been managed after his early death by Dwight MacDonald, sometime editor of Partisan Review and self-proclaimed ‘Conservative Anarchist.’ MacDonald, according to Wald, was apathetic and apolitical, refusing to take a stance in print on World War II, specifically on the issue of draft resistance, but on political absolutes in general. Later, Wald remarks “Delmore [was] politically bound in a straitjacket of his own fashioning. […] His name was prominent on the letterhead of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a grim voice of anti-communist liberalism…” The chapter as a whole contends with the issues of political readings of poets whose exterior lives often create a cognitive narrative dissonance (here I am reminded of C.D. Blanton’s excellent book on T.S. Eliot). Wald summates:
History is always selective in how it tells deeply complicated narratives. Nonetheless, the arrhythmic heart of the matter is that we have two stories about the life and work of Delmore from which to choose. They contradict each other, and the first one lets you feel OK about skipping the knotty political debates that were central to the literary Left in the 1930s. […] The example of Delmore as a socialist and poet once again illustrates that few intellectual problems are more fraughtful than confronting the intricate symbiosis of politics and art.
This dilemma continues to perplex us to this day. There is not a simple answer, particularly when dealing with literary radicalism—we want to privilege the poets and writers whose politics we champion and abdicate those whose politics we find abhorrent. Of course, this is a simplification, but to pretend that writing and art are or should be apolitical (as some public figures have recently found themselves groveling about in the press), is absurd. There is no vacuum where ideology has not already ransacked the art object, by the time you read/see/hear it, interpellation has already taken place.
Undeniably Wald’s politics are multifaceted and will not please all readers all the time. Some of his unyielding defenses of the New York Trotskyists may at times come across to the largely Marxist-Leninist readers of Protean as frustrating, but he is a principled Marxist, who has been shockingly consistent his entire career with his beliefs, and demonstrates a willingness to critique even friends and mentors when they stray from their own.
Wald is also an ardent and outspoken antizionist, an ideology which persists throughout Bohemian Bolsheviks pronouncedly when tackling the legacies of Jewish writers of the popular front, and some Jewish intellectuals subsequent turn toward support of the Zionist project. In a prescient 2018 essay “The Straight and the Crooked: BDS Versus Settler-Colonialism,” included in the book, Wald foreshadows the Third Intifada, predicting the current political moment’s importance eight years ahead of time, particularly among the youth:
Reports of the death of internationalist idealism among millennials have been greatly exaggerated. These two recent books, Ashley Dawson and Bill Mullen’s feisty anthology Against Apartheid, from a leading radical publishing house, and Sunaina Maira’s concise primer Boycott!, from a major university press, are rollouts for the ascending embargo of academic and cultural collaboration with the Israeli state. The suggest that the pro-Palestinian political activism of today known as BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) could well be en route to becoming the emblematic global solidarity campaign among the mostly young BDS supporters in class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality, they exhibit the generosity and imagination to see other oppressions, and the will to fight for a better social order for all.
This is or more or less the present state of things, as we are all too aware. The corporate impact has shifted from infinitesimal to significant: corporations like McDonalds and Starbucks reported drops in global sales in 2024 respectively, losses partially attributable to the BDS movement. The emphasis on millennials is also noteworthy: millennials and gen-z are demographically more supportive of BDS than any other generations. A 2022 Pew Survey found that only 41 percent of millennials had favorable views toward Israel, compared to much higher percentages from gen-x and baby-boomers. One can only imagine those numbers have plummeted since the onset of Israel’s war crimes. For Wald, his perspective is consistent with his world view, as indicated by his recent appearance on the Emancipations podcast with Daniel Tutt: “Certainly I was affected by the Holocaust, all my life I’ve thought we can’t let this holocaust thing happen to anybody else, which is why I’m drawn to antizionism.” Continuing later, with Tutt, discussing his book on the New York Intellectuals that came out of the Menorah Group Wald expands on this thought: “There was something in the evolution of Jewish internationalism […] I saw that the solution to antisemitism was an internationalist vision and to align with other oppressed groups. Not going to the holy land and building a fortress, and attacking all kinds of other countries, expropriating the indigenous population, but through solidarity with other oppressed groups.”
The final section of the book continues to champion legacy figures on the left (Vivian Gornik, Daniel Bensaïd, and Michael Löwy) and also aspires to hopeful futurities. There is a real enthusiasm here about a new even-keeled approach to the scholarship of communism, and to always historicize as a maxim, one which Wald hopes will continue with the next generation: “[To] build a socialist movement one could do worse than ransack the archive of Communists, Trotskyists, and Socialists, to make a substantial, critical-minded visit to Leninism’s past.” It’s a strong suggestion, and an agreeable one. In particular, the praise lauded to Gornik’s journalistic opus The Romance of American Communism, which, when republished in 2022, 45 years after its’ original publication in 1977, went from obscurity, to renown, must have been very satisfying for Wald to see a peer like Gornik recovered from the dusty shelves and given the claim she deserved.
So much of the book hinges on the forementioned hope that younger socialists will see the value in returning to the archives, of familiarizing themselves with the names of the elder Marxists and radicals: not just the New Left, but the Old Left too. Not limiting themselves to what is trendy or easily accessible, but to further resources, to the unsexy questions we do not want to always ask about our own beliefs. So many millennial academics like to interpolate Fredric Jameson’s words from The Political Unconscious in their essays, and, same, definitely. But here, Wald challenges his younger readers to hone their craft as historians, for the sake of political futures. “Historical narrative not only shapes our sense of the terrain under our feet,” Wald thus concludes his introduction to Bohemian Bolsheviks, “but also the horizon in front of us.”
