Gold and Swingler

From the 1920s-1940s, in America and Britain, many writers, artists, poets, musicians and other cultural workers were drawn to socially democratic artforms, influenced by Popular Front cultural aesthetics. The very broad group, which may have been ‘pro Communist’ politically and interested in diverse expressions of egalitarianism culturally, are frequently defined mainly in relationship to the 1930s, and to ideas about socially committed literature. However, as these two biographies of neglected writers—Randall Swingler and Michael Gold—demonstrate, though the cultural history of the 1930s may seem an overploughed field, there is still much to be learned about writers, political commitment, and the 1930s, and about how these influence broader intellectual histories.

Michael Gold and Randall Swingler, the subjects of these extensive, enlightening biographies by Patrick Chura and Andy Croft, have not been accorded fulsome credit for their roles as key writer-activists and cultural enablers of central importance, in a tumultuous period in British and American letters.  Chura and Croft take us through a high point in the 1930s, when both Gold and Swingler boasted national and international recognition, as part of larger transnational cultural networks opposing fascism, condemning the brutalising poverty of the Depression era, and turning to Communism as a solution. These books look to release their subjects from a shroud of obscurity, restoring their reputations as significant cultural figures, and adding meticulously observed detail to histories of the frenetic interwar era.  

Gold, in comparison to Swingler, has garnered some attention and controversy, as the subject of a previously unpublished biography, and via copious critical analysis in relation to his novel Jews Without Money, a best seller published in 1930, translated into 16 languages. Yet, despite his fame in the 1930s, this is the first full length biography of Gold.  Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, and Michael Denning pioneered the reassessment of the anti-fascist cultural movement in mid-century America. [1] As Critic Susan Curtis argued:

Denning challenged the widely held view that the turn to the left in the depression decade was both brief and of no lasting importance.  He demonstrates how the cultural front “proletarianized” American culture, and his portrayal of Thirties culture places working people, emigres, and racial minorities at the center of this renaissance. [2]

Gold, playwright, poet, novelist, radical journalist, and editor, was at the very heart of that renaissance. As Chura argues: ‘…Gold set the tone for the 1930s by endorsing novels about starvation, breadlines, labor strikes, and factory work while insisting that literary art serve political purposes by reflecting and addressing the injustices of the capitalist system…’ [3]

These books about two complex, larger than life, charismatic communist writers are groundbreaking in shining a light on both men’s multiple cultural endeavours and arguing persuasively that they were more influential than cultural historians have appreciated. Both biographers have benefited from access to interviews with family members, and security services files, as well as fresh, extensive archival material. Both authors retrieve and analyse the prolific and extremely varied cultural output of their subjects—a veritable trove of articles, reviews, novels, poems, songs, librettos, plays, literary criticism, and newspaper columns.

 Reading these richly detailed biographies also underscores the immense difference in perception and interpretation that dogged archival work makes to re-configuring cultural and literary histories of the interwar period. With the focus in one case on the rambunctious American scene, and in the other the British milieu, surprising similarities emerge, as well stark differences. As Croft points out, the Communist Party of Great Britain was able, in spite of its small size (about 40,000 members) to attract a surprising number of prominent writers and artists. In the decades when countering fascism was the main political priority, these cultural workers were affiliated to a party with a significant cultural infrastructure of publishers and publications. [4] Gold operated on a larger cultural canvas—during the Depression years, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) boasted membership of up to 66,000 by 1939.

Michael Gold and Randall Swingler could not be more different in social status, education, and class in their childhood and adolescence, yet they fervently embraced similar causes and progressive cultural pursuits. Swingler was nephew of Randall Davison, Archbishop of Canterbury, he was related to Sir Walter Scott, educated at Winchester and Oxford—in other words from a family at the heart of the British establishment. Swingler defiantly crossed the class divide by joining the Communist Party and, unlike many others who joined up in during the 1930s, he remained in the CPGB until the late 1950s. He gave away much of his inherited wealth, some to the Daily Worker, and worked committedly for the CPGB.

Itzhok Isaac Granich (he changed his name to Michael Gold in 1920) was born, in 1893, into an impoverished Jewish immigrant family. After his father became ill and confined to bed, he worked from a young age at a variety of jobs, educated himself at night, and briefly and unhappily attended Harvard in 1914. After radicalisation in the early 1920s, he remained committed to the cause of social—and racial—equality for the rest of his days, within the CPUSA. Gold was regarded as both ‘leading advocate and foremost practitioner’ of what was overly-simplistically called, ‘proletarian literature,’ through his landmark semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money. Ironically, its fiercest critics were on the Left, arguing that the searing staccato portrait of tenement life did not have enough class consciousness. But, as Chura argues, there is so much more in Gold’s oeuvre which merits revisiting: anti-racist and anti-fascist plays; the radical journalism and criticism; Gold’s championing of folk music and his cultural criticism which can, according to Chura, broach the lineage from 1930s radicalism to the counterculture era of Ginsberg and Dylan.

In these texts we have the life stories of two very different cultural activists, their different fates and life trajectories, very much influenced by the broader American and British social and cultural context, in the 1930s. These stories illustrate new aspects of a cultural history of the Left, as well as the sobering aftermaths of living through the ‘nightmare’ of Cold War politics. Both books are not merely biography but a timely reminder that the cultural history of the 1930s and 1940s, and the life stories of those prominent during that era, still constitute a rich terrain for research, with new aspects and interpretations to discover. Together they describe in a wealth of detail not just two remarkable cultural figures but the commitment with which many artists and writers espoused anti fascism, and sometimes communism, as a response to a decade of global crisis, which was to end in a Second World War. Both men reached an apogee in the 1930s, though it was the war years which brought out in Swingler a remarkable talent for converting firsthand experience of unspeakable atrocities into searing war poems. For a time, Gold’s role as emerging potential literary star brought him the friendship of Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill, and the admiration of Edmund Wilson. But his abrasive, at times derisive critiques of those writers, and several others, exacerbated Gold’s outsider status after the 1930s.

Swingler was a poet, novelist, publisher, librettist—‘cultural enabler,’ in modern parlance, of a vast number of activities and cultural events, from festivals to plays—plus publisher and editor of key journals of the 1930s. At Oxford he stood out even amongst the most talented, and many references to his charisma are recorded by his contemporaries (Years of Anger, p.31). At a crucial point in the cultural timeline of the 1930s, his poetry was widely reviewed. There was even the odd comparison to Auden. It seems perplexing, then, that his war poetry is completely forgotten, even though some of these poems, forged in the white heat of his own harrowing experiences, stand comparison with classics of the Second World War. Critic Robert Chandler asserted he  ‘…deserves a place in every anthology of English poetry, above all for the poems he composed as a soldier fighting in the Italian campaign during the last two years of the Second World War.’ [5] Andy Croft believed his poems count as ‘some of the greatest in the Italian campaign’ (Years of Anger, page iii).

He was prolific across artforms—he wrote plays for the radical Unity Theatre, edited The Left Song Book with Alan Bush and ‘Authors Take Sides in the Spanish Civil War’ with Nancy Cunard, founded Fore Publications, was editor of Left Review in its heyday and had three collections of poetry published between 1933-1950. As Croft highlights, ‘Swingler’s words were set to music by almost all the major British composers of his time’ (Years of Anger, xii). Croft is particularly astute about Swingler’s war experience and its influence on his poetry. A member of the Signal Corps through the Italian campaign, he was buried for hours at the battle of Camino and realised, when he was eventually dug out, that he was sole survivor of his unit. The aftermath of war took its toll on his mental and physical health.  He was awarded a military medal and was generally regarded as possessing great leadership qualities by officers even though he did not want a commission. Then came Cold War isolation, bad health, and early death.

The study of culture and politics in the 1930s may be well documented in British literary history. However, Croft, with his book Red Letter Days, was one of the first to challenge orthodox narratives focused on Auden, MacNeice, and Day Lewis, with Janet Montefiore and Maroula Joannou taking on the gender deficit. Croft points out that Left Review had a circulation of 5,000 a month at its peak, and the Left Book Club a membership of 157,000—hardly minority interests. These were not niche or minor cultural phenomena, as implied by earlier literary and cultural assessments. Maroula Joannou states: ‘A.T.Tolley has claimed that the amount of left wing journalism in the late 1930s was so overwhelming that someone of left wing sympathies might well have been described as living in a culture as pervasively Left as the Culture as a whole was pervasively Christian”. [6]

Both Gold and Swingler wielded considerable influence as editors and contributors to influential journals and magazines—Gold of the Liberator and then New Masses, at a time when the latter was the leading left-wing periodical of the 1930s, and Swingler at Left Review. These publications were conduits of ideas, outposts for cultural and political debate. Gold’s regular column ‘Change the World’ in the Daily Worker (US version) ran for over 25 years, with thousands of readers. In a revived version of the column, he even wrote on “Bob Dylan-Voice of America’s Youth” (People’s Writer, pp. 281-2).

Gold is also relevant in the politics of literary representation as regards the Jewish self. The emergence of ‘proletarian literature’ in the United States also brought a number of Jewish American and African American authors into the spotlight, with tales of their own tenement or ghetto lives. Jews Without Money was one such strand of Jewish self-representation, though controversial too in its unsparing and unsentimentalised portrait of ghetto life. One would have welcomed some more analysis of Jewish communal reaction and response to the book, and indeed to how Gold’s prominence and high visibility was perceived by Jewish communal leaders. Gold was also a supporter of writers such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, recognising their talent and the need for voices from Black American and Caribbean perspectives within socially-conscious literature.

Both books communicate vividly the sheer hectic pace of the lives of Gold and Swingler in their prime. There was scarcely an hour of any day that wasn’t filled with meetings, organising, writing, distributing pamphlets, editing columns, giving talks, editing publications. Their own creative work often came far down the frenetic pecking order of tasks and both worked across many artforms and cultural enterprises. Chura and Croft  also meticulously assemble a back catalogue of forgotten plays, poems, polemical articles, and literary criticism, by both men, a number of which have real  socio-literary merit, and are of interest today for the lineage they present of literature and theatre on  anti-racist and anti-imperialist themes.

Inevitably, the crises of the Khruschev revelations on the Stalin era, and the invasion of Hungary in 1956, took their toll on the world view of both men. In the United States, within weeks of the revelation of Stalin-era atrocities, 30,000 US Communists left the Party. Gold was not one of them. Chura devotes very little space to the effect of these crises on Gold. By this point, he had already become prematurely aged by ill health:  beyond reference to one public appearance, very little evidence is presented of Gold even discussing the crises  of 1956, and the seismic impact they must have had on him  and his circle. Croft devotes an entire chapter to the fallout from the events of 1956. Swingler resigned from the CPGB soon after the Khruschev revelations, and it cost him dearly in terms of friendships, most notably with Edward (E.P) Thompson. Then came Hungary. By the end of 1956, Swingler was joined by another 7,000 Party members in resigning.

Croft’s The Years of Anger follows biographical convention more closely than Chura’s text and is packed with detail plus extensive analysis of Swingler’s poems, novels, articles, and music projects. First published in 2003, to an almost unanimous critical silence, the re-publication in 2020 represented  some, but not enough, acknowledgement of Croft’s extraordinary tenacity in championing Swingler, and his determination to document fully Swingler’s prominent role in shaping interwar English culture.

Chura’s book takes more a ‘life and times’ approach, chronological but united under themes such as war and family, McCarthyism, and the folk music scene. Chura has also extensively mined archival material not previously available, skillfully interweaving Gold’s unpublished autobiographical notes, and interviews with Gold’s sons, Nick and Carl, with the retrieval of Gold’s journalism and even speeches. He has also availed himself of FBI files on Gold, whilst aware that ‘….FBI documents of this period [the McCarthy era] are notoriously inaccurate’ (People’s Writer, p. 247).

Both books are a vivid reminder of the vibrancy of the Left cultural milieu in America and Britain in the 1930s. Taken together, they illuminate further hidden corners of Left cultural history and highlight the differences in 1930s cultural politics in Britain and the United States. Both authors are keen to establish the depth of cultural erasure that has excluded their subjects from the canon, and from  regular inclusion on academic curricula. The arguments may be more or less convincing, but certainly give pause. Cold War politics certainly contributed to Gold’s erasure.  Is it possible that  his personality—at times, a highly abrasive one—also played its part in this erasure, along with his searing critiques of other writers both inside and outside the Communist tent?  Chura and Croft themselves have had to wait quite some time for their projects of salvage and reclamation to elicit recognition. In the case of Croft, we are talking over 30 years, in fact. After many years trying to place his manuscript on Swingler, it was published as Comrade Heart in 2003. In 2020, Routledge issued a revised updated version now entitled The Years of Anger: A Life of Randall Swingler. In the long interim period, Croft gained access to the MI5 files on Swingler, which not only fill out the minutiae of his activities but reveal the extent of the surveillance he was subjected to. Historical surveys of the McCarthy era clearly highlight the role of surveillance and state committees, and the effect these had on careers and any wage-earning ability. Gold, feted in the 1930s and befriended by Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill, was working as a waiter in the Catskills at one point in the 1950s. He was never formally subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But, as Chura points out, the goal of rendering him unemployable had already been secured. (People’s Writer, 266) The panoply of actions during the McCarthy era that rendered writers, artists, teachers and government agency employees informally or formally blacklisted included anything from having to take loyalty oaths to being fired in a corridor as Irish Jewish writer Michael Sayers was. Alan Wald has called the McCarthy era ‘American Night’. [7]

The extensive pursuit of British intellectuals and writers has only come to light in last decade, with release of classified files. There are files on Swingler which remain closed to this day. (Croft speculates that this is to prevent the revelation of the identity of an informant deep within Swingler’s own circle of friends and associates.) The descriptions of MI5’s surveillance and interference in job opportunities, which curtailed Swingler’s chance to earn a normal living, demonstrate the extent of MI5’s pursuit of figures of cultural note on the Left. Eric Hobsbawm, although losing out on employment at Cambridge, at least managed to obtain a place teaching at Birkbeck. Most alternatives for Swingler were shut down, in further or higher education, or at the BBC, ‘These were the years when prominent Communists were expelled from British cultural life’ (Years of Anger, p. 225).  Even a job at a motorcycle repair centre linked to the Army was lost because, directly or indirectly, MI5 had a word. These state surveillance pursuits carried real and devastating consequences, compounding his descent to abject poverty, and limiting his access to any sphere of cultural influence. Indeed it is hard not to detect a connection between this limbo, dire poverty, and his bad health and early death at 58. The pursuit of Swingler seems particularly sustained and vindictive, given that never once was he found in any compromising status, or meeting Soviet agents. Compare his cultural activities and Party meetings with the lethal betrayals of Kim Philby et al, which took place at the heart of MI5 itself. Nonetheless, Croft is too clear eyed a biographer to paint Swingler solely as a martyr of the Left. He does not shy away from presenting Swingler’s own self-destructive tendencies—heavy drinking in particular—though how much these were a result of his pursuit by MI5 or enhardened by previous habits it is impossible to say.  Both Gold and Swingler had heroic spouses—Elizabeth Granich and Geraldine Swingler—who kept their households afloat even in dire times, often as main breadwinners. They might have been accorded more attention, given their pivotal role in sustaining two committed activists through very difficult times.

These writers belong within the parameters of a cultural history that is often assumed to be an overploughed furrow from which we can learn nothing new. What both these monographs do, taken together, is to loudly contest this assumption. Future studies could highlight, as some already have, the cultural role played by women and minorities within the anti-colonial and anti-fascist literary circles of this era. [8] This can only emphasise the diversity and energies of the ‘cultural front,’ and the internationalist cultural movements of the 1930s, their transnational nature, and the forced compromises those involved underwent as a result of repression by state authorities in the 1940s and 1950s. Such an approach would  intersect with histories of official and intelligence community activities. By, in essence, writing Gold and Swingler back into the radical literary tradition with a prominence previously denied them, these two doughty biographers provide fresh understandings and new perspectives on the larger history of Left cultures, not just in the 1930s but over greater swathes of the 20th century.

Katrina Goldstone’s book Irish Writers and the Thirties Art Exile and War, Routledge Studies in Cultural History is now in paperback.

Footnotes

1. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front:  The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, New York:  Verso, 1997.) Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2002); Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade  (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2007) American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
2. Susan Curtis,  “Democracy as Struggle and Commitment:Revisiting Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American  Culture in the Twentieth Century,” North Meridian Review, 13 January 2022 https://thenorthmeridianreview.org/blog/democracy-as-struggle-and-commitmentnbsp-revisiting-michael-dennings-the-cultural-frontnbsp-the-laboring-of-american-culture-in-the-twentieth-century
3. Michael Gold, The People’s Writer, p. 19.
4.  Andy Croft , “Their Cookery From Paris and Their Opinions From Moscow,” http://andy-croft.co.uk/cookery.php
5. Robert Chandler, “A Forgotten Poet of the People” The Critic, September, 2020, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/september-2020/a-forgotten-poet-of-the-people/
6. Maroula Joannou, ”The Woman Writer in the Thirties, On Not Being Mrs Giles of Durham City “ in ed. M. Joannou, Women Writers of the 1930s Gender, Politics and History, (Edinburgh University Press 1999,  p. 3.
7. On Michael Sayers, Katrina Goldstone, Irish Writers and the Thirties Art, Exile and War, 201 ; Alan Wald, American Night, the Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (University of North Carolina, 2012)
8. Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (Lawrence & Wishart 1990); Janet Montefiore, The Dangerous Flood of History Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (New York: Routledge, 1996) and Maroula Joannou, Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows: Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918-38 (Oxford, Berg Publishers, 1995)