The hollow men / by Michael Gold.

"Appeared originally as a series of articles in the Daily worker under the title 'The great tradition: can the literary renegades destroy it?'"--Note, p. 3.

1. At King Mencken's court -- 2. The people come on the stage -- 3. Renegades: a warning of the end -- 4. War: the final curtain -- Epilogue

"Michael Gold originally wrote a series of articles for the Daily Worker under the title "The Great Tradition: Can Literary Renegades Destroy It?" In 1941 these articles were put together and published as a book, under the title The Hollow Men. As with the articles, the book poses the following question: Can literary renegades destroy the great democratic tradition of American life and literature? Gold's answer is a clear "no," but his answer, nevertheless, dramatizes the obstacles faces by the democratic forces, especially during the 1920s and 30s. During the 1920s, argues Gold, the democratic forces were inhibited by the post–war economic boom. As in Europe, where Nazi–fascism was on the rise, in the U.S. the forces of monopoly capitalism "killed off the spirit of labor; it destroyed the march of a socialist movement that had registered in one election almost a million votes" (Gold: 21). The American Wasteland of the 20s produced both a leisure class divorced from the people's aspirations and, as a consequence, supporters of Fascism (Pound, Eliot and others), and also the so–called "Lost Generation"—liberal expatriates who tried to drown the sterility of the decade in Parisian cafes. Both groups separated themselves from the day–to–day struggles and quests of the American proletariat. The 1929 stock–market crash brought the light which revealed the dramatic crisis of the capitalist system even to liberal intellectuals. Capitalism was in shambles and the opportunity to organize workers and intellectuals was there. And so it happened. Besides the misery to "20 million disinherited Americans," the economic crisis brought "the first mass demonstrations for unemployment insurance" (Gold: 33), a national congress of writers in 1935, a national congress of dancers, musicians and artists who got involved in a nationwide investigation of labor conditions, the creation of The Federal Arts Projects, and finally, a new democratic cultural renaissance. The Great Depression is, then, not seen by Gold as simply a period of bourgeois crisis—it was also a period of proletarian organization—an experience which enormously strengthened the workers' bargaining powers. Because of Gold's constant reference to the degree of organization achieved by the lower classes, and because of the unprecedented intellectual empathy with the workers' difficulties, the reader of Hollow Men sees the period with a certain nostalgia—not a nostalgia for the crisis, but a sense of regret for having "lost" all that organization and faith. The forces of monopoly capitalism, which with fascist–like strategies led America into the Second World War, temporarily unified a divided country, but ended the dreams of millions of workers and intellectuals. But the intellectuals—those who deserted the communist ideals and the Party, and also those who helped to promote America's involvement in the war—are the target of Gold's harshest criticism. In fact, the book presents interesting analyses of the reasons (Gold calls them "alibis") which intellectuals presented to break with the Communist Party. Especially interesting are the sometimes lengthy discussions of writers like Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Lewis Mumford, Gertrude Stein, William Saroyan and Robert Sherwood. All of them became what Gold calls hollow men—men who lost the hope in a better future for society and the love for humanity. The Hollow Men is a book for those who wish to look at the 30s from a Marxist perspective. Looking through Gold's eyes, many of our idols change color and some are literally destroyed. Despite its iconoclastic nature, however, Gold manages to make his perspective as real as any other, and enriching." -- from a book review by Dilvo I. Ristoff found in Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 2008 (https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Ilha-do-Desterro-A-Journal-of-English-Language-Literatures-in-English-and-Cultural-Studies-2175-8026).

From the library of Karl and Elizabeth Niebyl.