LITERATURE, ART, AND REVOLUTION
The relationship between literature and politics, between high culture and social revolution, has long vexed leftists and their critics. Insurgency in art and in politics have seemed natural allies to some scholars and inevitable enemies to others. Eastman successfully combined the two partly by an act of will, but also because the times in which he lived made such an alliance easier than it subsequently became.
Eastman's philosophy resolved one traditional issue, the supposed conflict between social activism and the disinterested pursuit of truth. Truth, for Eastman, existed only in relation to a goal; the scientist or activist viewed all phenomena from a perspective which was itself determined by the end he had in view. Eastman believed, however, that poetry inherently conflicted with any goal-oriented activity, and thus with science and social activism. Poetry in life and literature concerned "realization", the vivid experience of reality. Poetry saw the intrinsic qualities in things and loved them for its own sake; it intimated "the nearness of infinite and universal being."[91] The poet loved all life and existence, not just some parts of them; he could not abide fanaticism, consecration, or absorption in a single goal, however enthralling or noble in itself.
Although Eastman was himself a poet, a humorist, and a philosopher (he even wrote a novel in the 1920s), he valued science above all. Asked by Lincoln Steffens what books he should read, Eastman advised him (and by implication other Masses subscribers) that "what you need is not literature but science. And in that you are typical of the best democrats, the best rebels, the best friends, to be found in these days" when "scientific technique" would dominate "literary moralism." Science defined a person's goal as well as the present facts bearing on that purpose. Literature, on the contrary, "loves to dwell on the goal, and dwell on the rule of conduct, because these give a more edifying expression to the individual temperament of the author. But literature will never carry us beyond edification until that happy day when authors are scientists--or, still more happy, when scientists know how to write." The sciences of heredity, evolution, the class struggle, and psychology illuminated "the brute facts about human organisms in society, the unalterable data which must underlie all plans of progress.... the crude unavoidable basis of culture and learning."[92]
Science and scholarship, therefore, were fit servants of revolution; but what of poetic realization? Eastman thought that a truly great personality could combine creative literature and social revolution. The unification of these two pursuits--poetry and science, the pursuit of the full life and the fomenting of revolution--defined Eastman's life project. Science was itself an aspect of the full life rather than merely a means towards an end; even scientists exulted "not in any conquest or destination" but in their progress towards it. Eastman himself could "bear the prospect that the world may never be free" but not "the prospect of my living in it and not taking part in the fight for freedom."[93]
For Eastman, poetry encompassed the universe and signified an effervescent, exuberant embrace of all life's riches. True poets must fully experience life rather than merely reading about it and versifying; they must immerse themselves in the concrete realities and struggles of their day. Poetic realization, as well as scientific truth, depended on intense involvement in human affairs. When Edmund Gosse declared English exhausted as a literary language, Eastman exclaimed that only academic poets were worn out. "Great poetry will never be written by anyone who has spent his life burrowing in an extensive and complicated literature" or by "anyone who has specialized in letters," Eastman declared.
It will be written by persons who are innocent of the smell of old books. Let Edmund Gosse burn up his library, and all the shelvings in his mind, and go down to the street, and out into the fields and quarries and among the sips and chimneys, the smoke and glory of living reality in his own time; let him learn to love that, and language only as it enriches that--then when he speaks of the poets of the future we will listen. For he will be a poet, and not merely a taster of the connotations and the music of ancient phrases. The poetry of England is wonderful, a treasure house, but those who live in that house will never add to its riches. Poets are lovers of the adventure of life. And the adventure of life is ever new, and words are as young as the minds that use them. In a continually unfolding world their flavors are continually altered and refreshed. Only in the musty chambers of a house of books does the language cease from change, or could it by any effort of a decadent imagination be conceived to be used up or worn by those who spoke it in the past.[94]
Although poetry meant individual expression and experience rather than general truth, it did not contradict revolution. Indeed, the revolution was poetry, and would make existence poetic for all. The revolutionary who eschewed dogmatism and fixation on but one aspect of life could remain a poet; the poet who joined the revolution could live most truly and freely. Eastman demonstrated the unity of poetry and revolution at Ludlow, where he arrived shortly after the massacre of the wives and children of the striking miners. Retiring from the smoldering ruins of the Ludlow tent colony to a sunny hilltop, Eastman meditated on his poem, "To a Bobolink," even as he was writing incendiary political articles which startled America.[95]
Eastman did not believe that critics could fairly judge poetry by extrinsic or non-literary criteria--certainly not by political ones. Poetry, he thought, could further goals outside itself, such as beauty, truth, wisdom, or morality, but it was "of its own nature foreign to them all." Indeed, even formalistic aesthetic criteria based on past literature were vapid. "There is a new principle, and a new rule, for every act of greatness," he proclaimed. Neither beauty nor ugliness, truth nor untruth, or simplicity or complexity, sufficed as standards of evaluation; "there is no master principle for that art whose very nature is to shun generality, and cleave to the unique nature of every individual experience." Poetry's one rule consisted of eschewing the conventional. "Habit is the arch-enemy of realization," whereas "surprise is close kin to consciousness itself."[96]
Yet Eastman occasionally injected political considerations into his judgment of literature. Indeed, his assertion that creative literature had no necessary connection with justice, truth, or wisdom, but could as well serve their opposites, inexorably focuses critical evaluation at least partly on non-literary aspects such message and effect. If great art could express execrable politics, anyone valuing both literary art and social justice might well evaluate art by both aesthetic and social criteria. Eastman considered Rabindranth Tagore a great poet but deprecated the mystical relief from the torments of the world with which he comforted his readers. "Henceforth the ideal shall not be a way of escape from the crude terms of existence, but a way of altering those terms until the joy and the reality, the poetry and the science are in harmony.... We seek the poet who can redirect the extramundane yearnings of all broken spirits into a reckless will to reconstruct their disappointing world." Eastman contemptuously dismissed Henry James as a priggish esthete who evaded real life in favor of "culture, nobility, the not being provincial, the being able to behave in your intellect as though it were a drawing-room...." James's renunciation of the United States symbolized "the littleness of his thirst, and the consequent limitations of his wisdom and genius. America is in truth a terrible place. But it is a place--and that is all one needs in order to move the world, if he can move it." Eastman preferred Whitman and Twain as more popular, earthy, and social writers.[97]
Eastman linked poetry with social revolution by the exuberant living of life and by the science that characterized the contemporary world. But poetry and revolution were also allied because capitalism throttled poetry in elites and masses alike. Because poetry required the suspension of effort towards a goal--required idleness and detachment--it was impossible for the vast majority under capitalism. "They who cherish hopes of poetry" in life or literature would therefore "favor in their day every assault of labor upon the monopoly of leisure by a few. They will be ready for a drastic redistribution of the idle hours."[98] The idle elite was deprived of poetic enjoyment by the baleful constraint of respectability, "a more sure destroyer of poetry, than even necessity." The rich gloried in their "refined insulations" from real life; wealth became a requirement for art for "those whose judgments of merit are determined by a pecuniary standard." The precincts of the rich resembled "a polished museum wherein were kept packages of human remains."[99] The poor, who were vibrantly alive, lacked the leisure and detachment necessary for the poetry of life or of literature; the rich, blessed or cursed with leisure, were deadened to life. Eastman hoped that a redistribution of wealth would undermine the ideal of respectability that stemmed from class society. The individual person or poet could not achieve liberation in isolation or a small clique. Poet-rebels who repudiated respectability within capitalist society became self-conscious and artificial; they were subverted by the very ideal against which they revolted.[100] Poetry could not flourish in enclaves such as Greenwich Village, Eastman strongly implied; capitalism killed the poetry of life just as it inculcated superstitions of class, race, gender, and nationality in its victims. Social revolution was a poetic as well as epistemological necessity.
Indeed, Eastman strongly asserted that commercial civilization inevitably poisoned art. True art emanated inexorably from the distinctive personality and experience of its author; it therefore strongly pleased a select few kindred spirits while alienating or boring the majority. Yet commercial civilization, which evaluated everything by its popularity and profitability, pandered to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Commercial art and literature aimed not at delighting its audience, but mildly pleasing and above all avoiding offense. The result was drab uniformity, endless repetition, and insipid standardization. Eastman railed against this commercialized debasement of literature and art more than against censorship or the hegemonic ideology that pervaded popular culture.[101] He did not specify how a socialist society would produce or distribute art, but he urged that young rebels, who in previous times would have revolted only against "philistinism, the middle class monotonies, and.... provincial obtuseness", instead direct their scorn "against a more important evil--against the ground-plan of money-competition built on industrial slavery which orders our civilization, and makes all our judgments of value, even the most cultured, impure." Eastman thundered that "we suspect everything that is called culture--suspect it of the taint of pecuniary elegance.... We have read Tolstoy's great and mad indictment of European art. We have made ready to knife the whole canvass, if necessary, in favor of a coarser and more universal reality.... Our scorn makes us rank and democratic revolutionists instead of over-exquisite and rather priggish aesthetes."[102] Mike Gold soon fostered a proletarian aesthetic upon such sentiments.
Eastman's editorial policy on The Masses expressed his deep convictions that science, literature, art, social revolution, and every other aspect of life deserved expression. The Masses was not devoted exclusively to propaganda, but championed liveliness, humor, and unorthodoxy in all fields. "Aside from enhancing life," he later said, "that seems to me the wisest way to conduct propaganda." There was much art for art's sake--pictures that communicated only the artist's idiosyncratic view of the world. "I tried to have plenty of things in every number which had nothing to do with socialism," he said. "I wanted everybody to express his individuality to the limit, so long as he did not transgress the principles of socialism."[103] Asked by a disgrunted reader why The Masses rejected articles favoring non-Socialist "radical reform movements," Eastman replied that Socialism was revolutionary rather than reformist and advocated class conflict rather than "literary evangelism."
Therefore to invite into a Socialist magazine those who oppose the conflict, would be neither liberal nor illiberal. It would be simply foolish and untrue to principle. Liberality demands that we be hospitable to ideas which are other than ours; it does not demand that we lend ourselves to the propagation of ideas which contradict ours.[104]
When The Liberator caused an uproar by rejecting paid advertising for books of which it disapproved, it merely continued this policy.
Although Eastman championed revolution across the whole spectrum of human experience, he disdained the ostentatious flaunting of rebellion. While warmly extolling Margaret Sanger, he criticized her short-lived publication, The Woman Rebel, for its "over-conscious extremism and blare of rebellion for its own sake." He similarly faulted The Revolutionary Almanac (compiled by Masses ally Hippolyte Havel) for its "strong literary infatuation, a love of the flavor of ideas of revolt, rather than a concentrated interest either in an end to be achieved, or in ideas as working hypothesis for its achievement." Havel's anthology neglected "the spirit of experimental science" in favor of "rather undiscriminating hurrah."[105]
Eastman similarly rejected John Reed's proposed statement of editorial policy, which declared that The Masses was "bound by no one creed or theory of social reform, but will express them all, providing they be radical," because it was vapid and imprecise. Eastman patiently informed Reed that The Masses championed "not just rebellious talk but a carefully thought-out program of class struggle which put us in relation to a world movement." Eastman's revised editorial statement did indeed endorse revolution while repudiating reform; but it did not even mention class struggle or proletarian internationalism. However, these became mainstays of his editorial policy. Eastman also attacked the self-consciousness and sex-obsession of Greenwich Village, and later claimed that The Masses retained a distinctly anti-bohemian ambiance. "Hardly a month passed that I did not take some action designed to hold the propaganda of revolutionary class struggle clear of the mere rebel moods of those who mistake the delights of a venturesome life, or of creative art itself, for the effort toward world transformation," he said.[106]
Eastman's hard left editorial policy contradicted a main tenet of The Masses ethos: that the magazine promoted pure self-expression by its editors and contributors. At the New York Legislative hearings concerning the banning of The Masses from subway newsstands, and later in both Masses trials, Eastman downplayed the importance of the magazine's revolutionism, claiming instead that The Masses was an open forum expressing the diverse views of its editors and contributors.[107] Its self-proclaimed policy of conciliating nobody, not even its readers, would indeed undermine the advocacy of a cause, which requires finesse, some degree of unity, consideration of the audience, and an effort at persuasion. Eastman said that the editors
have an ideal of what an illustrated magazine ought to be, and we want to give such a magazine to America. THE MASSES has never paid a cent for any article, story, poem, or picture, and yet it is edited and contributed bo by the people whose things are purchased at a high price by all the popular magazines.... And I will tell you why it is: it is because they have a religion.... The main purpose of their religion is to make humanity in this world more free and more happy.[108]
Writers and artists could not fully express themselves in the commercial magazines, so they "give the most intimate product of their hearts and brains to THE MASSES." Such a free magazine must display "a very wide range in the material it publishes"; The Masses would, "within the limitations that are inevitably set by our own temperament," encourage "every strong and sincere expression of opinion or feeling that cannot find a voice in the money-making press. My ideal is a free humanity, and I think the best way I can serve that ideal now is to help these gifted men and women get out one free magazine in America." Masses editors gave the American public "their own intimate conviction, their own art, their own most sacred personal feelings."[109]
Eastman's editorship of The Masses embodied the same disciplined revolt that characterized his political and artistic philosophies. He wanted each issue to comprise a unified whole, with items accepted and placed for overall effect; it was not to be an art gallery or a miscellany. He wrote editorials that appeared to speak for The Masses itself rather than merely stating his own personal opinion. And of course The Masses collective, and Eastman himself, included, modified, or rejected submissions according to their own tastes. As we will discuss shortly, many of the artists left the magazine in March 1916 in protest against Eastman's imposition of a more specific editorial policy and, in particular, his habit of placing captions on their drawings. This, the artists felt, unduly politicized their art and restricted their self-expression.[110] This latent contradiction between individual self-expression and a political program was never fully resolved. Eastman himself admitted that there was no topic upon which all of the editors agreed, and that at least one major editor rejected the very idea of an editorial policy. A reader, criticizing the magazine's flaunting of nudity, ugliness, and free verse, pointed out that the magazine's incessant appeal for new subscribers indicated that its editors wanted to change the world, not merely express themselves. Eastman himself sometimes said that his magazine had a "message" other than individual self-expression by its editors.[111]
The Masses also alienated some readers by its alleged pessimism and focus on the sordid and ugly aspects of life. Although it is justly celebrated for realism in art and literature, this was not exclusively its editor's doing. Eastman was largely indifferent to schools of literature and philosophies of art; he felt that realism was only one of many valid forms. But the owners of, and contributors to, The Masses could not get their realistic stories, articles, and drawings printed in the commercial press, and hence created The Masses. Eastman himself argued that literature and art should reflect all of life, and thus joyfully accentuated those aspects of life and styles of art ignored by contemporary culture. His desire to depict all of life happily combined with the needs of his associates and fitted him "to preside with sympathy over an outburst of dirt and dreariness in realms before consecrated to sweetness and light." In an era of manufactured optimism, he said, "it becomes almost an honest duty to remain in a state of gloom."[112]
When readers complained about the lack of pleasing stories and drawings, Eastman replied that The Masses would gladly print light-hearted material if it had the space and the money to pay for them. "As it is, we do not pretend to reflect the whole of life. We do not imagine THE MASSES to be the only thing you read in a month. It is a part of what you read, a part of life reflected, a part of American journalism--and--if we may explain--a very definite part.... The part that doesn't pay." Artists and writers did not give away material they could sell for a fair price. "Indeed, there is no reason for giving things to THE MASSES which would attain a wider circulation in a magazine that paid for them. THE MASSES exists to publish what commercial magazines will not pay for and will not publish. It cannot, therefore, cover the whole range of what has value in current literature and art. It tends to cover the range of what has value without having commercial value." Pictures of woodland nymphs and girls in wet bathing suits, such as appeared everywhere in the commercial magazines, were certainly a worthy fine part of life. But The Masses showcased "the goods whose value is too peculiar, or too new, or too subtle, or too high, or two naked, or too displeasing to the ruling class, to make its way financially in competition with slippery girls in tights, and tinted cupids, and happy stories of lovers." Eastman told one irate reader that if he did not like The Masses he should not subscribe. "None of us are depending on you--we get our living elsewhere."[113]
Despite controversies over literary and artistic realism, Eastman reconciled literary innovation and social revolution more easily than did subsequent generations of the avant-garde. Before World War I much new literature, especially realist literature, was popular in both content and form. Exciting new writers exposed social conditions long ignored by high culture and by the nation's elite. In opposing the false, saccharine, and evasive culture of the Gilded Age that shielded people from life and reality, realism performed an important social function. Eastman, of course, believed that art need not be beautiful, but only capture experience and depict it vividly. Much new literature was socially conscious, clearly written and accessible to the general public. Eastman's vision of The Masses as "a popular Socialist magazine--a magazine of pictures and lively writing" was congruent with contemporary literary and political developments.[114]
Eastman's editorship coincided with the last moment when literary and artistic experimentation fully coincided with radical politics. Conservative on matters of literary form, Eastman condemned blank verse concerned with merely private experience and meanings as too subjective and as incomprehensible to almost everyone. He preferred, in poetry as in revolution, disciplined structure that achieved a purpose, rather than anarchistic rebellion. He favored rhymed and metered poetry and complained that social rebels who endorsed blank verse defeated their goal of communicating with the masses and winning them for socialism. Both the form and content of the new poetry, he felt, were antithetical to the goals of educating or inciting the masses. However, because Eastman eschewed dogmatizing about literary form, The Masses did print experimental verse.[115]
Eastman was attacked by both the literary avant-garde and realists for his relatively moderate and ecumenical stance. Writing in Seven Arts, Waldo Frank criticized Eastman's "treacherous conservatism." Lamenting that "a form of poetry projecting man's individual revolt and society's coherent heterogenity disturbs him," Frank charged that Eastman was "driven to subtle rationalizations to buttress his distaste." Frank found it "unbelievable that Eastman, of all men, should be even fractionally against" new forms of poetry that rejected meter and rhyme. Eastman replied that poetry induced "a state of the body and mind in which all emotions and sensations, and more especially all imaginations, are intensified"; as meter and rhyme accentuated this effect, they were vital aspects of a good poem. Upton Sinclair and other Masses subscribers, however, complained that The Masses printed free verse at all; Sinclair recommended that it be formatted as prose.[116]
Eastman was indeed poised between two worlds. Some literary rebels, having fought for a realistic literature that confronted the social evils of their day, opposed any new literature that evaded those problems and took refuge in mysticism, esotericism, or merely private meanings. Waldo Frank completely ignored the political dimension of Eastman's critique. For his part, Eastman acknowledged that some free verse was deservedly remembered through the centuries, and favored experimentation in every sphere of life. This seemingly marginal debate over poetic form, therefore, symbolizes an approaching cleavage, a more radical bifurcation of culture between an elitist modernism incomprehensible to the masses and a more traditional popular culture. Only a short time later, surrealists and modernists who attempted a fusion of literary and political radicalism confronted more imposing difficulties. High culture had gone its own way, and had little natural affinity for social causes of any sort. Partisan Review never considered addressing a popular audience.
The Masses, however, discussed in a popular idiom topics that vitally concerned workers. It alienated some readers by its irreverant content, innovative form, and critical approach towards religion, sexual conventions, and other cultural icons. Its critics divined its meaning only too well; obscurity was not among their complaints. But literary modernism is characterized by erudition, complexity, and difficulty; it is largely self-referential; matters of form and technique often eclipse content. Many of the greatest modernists have been conservative, reactionary, or politically indifferent.
If The Masses fortuitiously avoided a head-on collision between revolutionary politics and experimental literature, it did confront a similar political dilemma. Eastman bewailed the scarcity of truly revolutionary poetry and exulted when the rare genuinely revolutionary poem came in. "There just wasn't any blending of poetry with revolution," he later lamented. "Nobody wrote revolutionary poetry that was any good." Eastman himself tried but failed. "It just happens that political emotions did not move me to write poetry.... It was a limitation of my nature that I would occasionally try to overpass. But there's no use trying to write poetry."[117]
Eastman suspected that his failure occurred because his political emotions were "less profound, less organic, less clear perhaps, less wholly myself."[118] His impasse reflects the dilemma of any conscious creation of a new literary sensibility informed by politics, and particularly of a revolutionary artist in a conservative society. Injecting politics into literature--or even combining a political stance with a literary sensibility in one movement or periodical--risks inauthenticity and unreality. The plot, characters, situation, and philosophy of most great works of fiction, for example, flow from the innermost depths of their creators, who communicate their intensely personal view of life. Many novelists virtually lose control over their creations. Characters take on independent lives of their own, transcending their creators and developing in accordance with their own inexorable laws. Whatever the relation of great art to the subconscious and unconscious, great artists must will their creations with their whole personalities. They cannot write according to a formula, even if the formula meets with their own approval. Ideological expectations--even the author's own--result in artificial scenes, one-dimensional characters, and contrived plots. Political novelists too often write not what they think and feel, but what they think they should think and feel, or what they want to. The conscious politicization of poetry (as opposed to the authentic outpouring of political emotion) even more risks artificiality.
Few persons, even committed leftists, completely embrace a truly radical sensibility that permeates their entire personalities and informs their whole outlook. Unless they create a hermetically sealed community, members of radical subcultures are usually divided against themselves. Radicals seldom fully assimilate the values they strive and profess to believe; powerful emotions and fundamental ideas originate in the life around them, in the larger society whose overthrow they seek. Radicalism is almost inevitably a superficial and self-conscious intellectual engraftment upon a bedrock of feelings and beliefs generated by the existing institutions and practices that the radicals detest. Despite heroic efforts, most revolutionaries cannot fully commit their whole conscious and subconscious personalities to a world which does not yet exist, or to values denied rather than reinforced by social experience. Radical literature, therefore, is too often sterile and artificial, the result of calculation rather than heartfelt emanations from the depths of the author's personality.
Eastman could not resolve the fundamental contradiction between revolutionary desire and working-class reality. A literature that simultaneously embodied radical politics and actual proletarian experience and sensibility was impossible as long as the American working class remained conservative and largely unorganized. The characters, the situations, and emotions appropriate to a class-conscious, insurgent proletariat were absent from society, and therefore could not occur in a realistic literature that accurately reflected that society. Philosophical Marxists realize that if high culture stems from the economic structure and expresses the relations and forces of production (or more broadly the general level and type of economic, social, and political development), radicals cannot will a particular type of literature into existence by fiat. There can be no revolutionary literature without a revolutionary sensibility, and no revolutionary sensibility in the absence of a strong revolutionary movement.[119] Upton Sinclair encountered this exact difficulty. Having written a vivid account of the tribulations of a Chicago packinghouse worker, he could not devise a plausible ending for The Jungle. He interrupted work on his novel, founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and finally tacked on an ending which both he and his publisher considered a boring Socialist sermon. Jack London's fiction was similarly vitiated by a contradictory politics unreflective of American life. Eastman reconciled art and politics by his free acceptance of great art as a good in itself, apart from revolutionary politics, and yet fully consistent with it. This balancing act became increasingly difficult with the rise of modernism, as Eastman's own experience attests. The rise of Communism after World War I further intensified the difficulties in reconciling revolutionary politics with artistic creativity, authenticity, and freedom.
As "a popular magazine of revolutionary socialism," The Masses featured art as well as literature. Unlike the commercial press, The Masses encouraged artists to paint as they pleased, rather than subordinating their pictures to stories. This creative freedom attracted artists of genius. Initially, The Masses' pictures were superior to its prose, and both Eastman and Dell promised readers that its literature would soon equal its drawings. However, conflict between the artists and writers simmered. According to one contributor, "the writers were accepted with very little controversy; the artists were vigorously applauded or violently condemned." Eastman often sided with the artists, even risking the wrath of the writers.[120] Amidst the upheavals of the Great War, however, most of the creative artists withdrew in anger, and some of them started their own ephemeral publication. The "artists's strike," as Eastman called the imbroglio, illustrated the tensions inherent in combining art with politics and revealed the limitations of Eastman's understanding and appreciation of art.
John Sloan protested editorial interference with artistic freedom on behalf of himself and other artists in early 1916. The Masses, he charged, no longer represented "the ideas and art of a number of personalities," but had developed a specific political philosophy, a "policy." He objected that the literary editors captioned "our human interest drawings" and thus gave them "a propaganda slant which we never intended." Sloan's complaint arose from a rather peculiar editorial quirk. The Masses was organized as a collective; the editors met each month and voted on each submitted story, poem, and picture. When a picture or cartoon was accepted, the board (or, if the drawing was submitted after the editorial meeting, Eastman or Dell) decided upon an appropriate caption. Some of the artists apparently experienced difficulty in deciding upon the caption that would best express their meaning, and accepted this procedure as helpful. Sloan, however, vociferously objected, and demanded that the artist decide what caption, if any, should accompany his work. He proposed abolition of the position of editor, having a committee (rather than Dell or Eastman) paste up each issue, the creation of separate and autonomous editorial boards for art and literature, and lessening reliance on outside donations. (Because Eastman largely raised these donations, they increased his power.) He also demanded that the editorial board vote on all submissions; no more surreptitious, last-minute additions imposed by Eastman or Dell.[121]
Eastman and Dell, and Art Young, one of the two artists who sided with them, objected. According to Dell's later account, these editors demanded that each picture "have some kind of meaning." Young complained that the dissenters "want to run pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio street--regardless of ideas--and without title." Young asserted that such pictures belonged in art magazines and exclaimed that "to me this magazine exists for socialism. That's why I give my drawings to it, and anybody who doesn't believe in a socialist policy, so far as I go, can get out!"[122] Young, however, was an exclusively political cartoonist who captioned his own work; his style was blunt, effective, and easily understood. He did not create the kind of art under discussion. Sloan, however, was a painter as well as drawer, sketcher, and cartoonist. He had fought the regimentation of art by the Academy (he was a key sponsor of the Exhibition of Independent Artists and the Armory Show) and worried that his politics distorted even the way he saw potential pictures. As a painter he increasingly moved away from city and social themes, and he demanded uncensored self-expression in his more socially-conscious drawings and sketches. Despite appearences, the imbroglio over Masses art did not stem from fundamental political disagreements; both Sloan and Young were Socialists. Sloan, indeed, claimed that Eastman's incessant pursuit of outside funds from rich donors undermined both the magazine's socialism and the self-expression of its owners. He charged Eastman with the same bohemian, dilettante frivolity that Eastman most deplored. He also championed untrammeled freedom of expression and claimed that Eastman and Dell regimented the artists. Finally, he accused Eastman and Dell (who had salaried positions on the magazine) for commercializing The Masses and appealing to an elite constituency. The Masses now "roars as gently as a sucking dove," he said. Eastman, for his part, declared that "If I am going to edit The Masses, I intend having the last word on what goes into the magazine." If the editors managed it as a cooperative, he would participate and also contribute articles but "resign as editor."[123]
The Eastman-Dell position seems inexplicable because both men extolled the beauties and necessity of non-political art. Eastman praised Chinese painting, composed lyric poetry, and included many items of pure beauty, humor, or whimsy in each issue of The Masses. Moreover, just at the time of the artists' strike Dell articulated the meaning of the art of The Masses in terms that perfectly express Sloan's own philosophy. Enlightening readers who wondered what Masses pictures meant, Dell explained that
Each of us lives in a world of his own: a world that, in proportion as one really is an individual, is different from any other person's world. The artist is one who has the power to show the rest of us what his world is like.... For his world consists not merely of the circumstances among which he exists by preference or accident, but more essentially as the way he regards those circumstances.[124]
Dell perceptively appreciated John Sloan's art as revealing "a strange and inevitable beauty, half compounded of ugliness, a disorder surprised and yet studied calmly, until it reveals some deep-lying trait of human nature, an accidental intimacy pursued with grim and yet wistful thoughtfulness." Stuart Davis (who sided with Sloan in this controversy) lives in "the oddest, maddest world that ever was, but as real as brass tacks." Addressing those who asked what idea Davis's pictures expressed, Dell said that Davis was the kind of person who could see the world he created, and help us enter it. Dell enjoined his readers to "enjoy The Masses' pictures if you can. If you can't, forgive the people who made them. For artists will be artists!"[125]
Eastman's and Dell's insistence on captioning Sloan's and Davis's artwork against their will contradicted their own aesthetic pronouncements. The captions undeniably did degrade and distort the drawings by imposing alien meanings upon them, or at least simplifying the artist's vision. Captions unintentionally encouraged subscribers to read the caption, grasp the point, and move on, without lingering over the drawing itself. This practice subordinated the art to the political point or joke, in a magazine which attracted great artists by promising the freedom from subordination to a story that the commercial magazines did not offer. It indirectly limited the artists' freedom to depict whatever they wanted, by allowing others to determine the meaning of their pictures. Sometimes the editors could not compose an appropriate caption, and settled on a manifestly inappropriate one. Captions sharpened the message of political cartoons while simplifying the intentions of more subtle artists whose meaning resided in the works themselves rather than in any overt or extraneous political message.[126]
Sloan cheerfully drew biting political cartoons and drawings for the Socialist party. But he considered some of his warm and realistic interpretations of city life as more elevated. He was fascinated by the vibrant, teeming life of the city and perceived beauty, gaiety, and personality where others saw merely degradation, misery, and oppression. His sensibility found an ethereal and poignant beauty in the slums and in other aspects of city life ignored or stigmatized by conventional artists; it embodied the realization of all of life that Eastman extolled. His art depicted real individuals and neighborhoods, not merely faceless masses or abstract representatives of a class. "Sloan and his colleagues presented a vision of the working class as a positive entity, worthy of examination in its own right," Rebecca Zurier says in The Art of The Masses. "In their better moments they depicted a complex, coherent working-class culture with its own customs, its own pastimes.... They described an intimate city of old neighborhoods and alleyways, its drama found less in its architecture than in its polyglot residents."[127] Eastman and Dell approved of this in poetry, the short story, and the novel; why then could they not comprehend it in painting? Sloan advocated a partial separation of art from politics, the same freedom that Eastman and Dell claimed for themselves. Just as Eastman and Dell were political activists and propagandists who wrote lyric poetry and novels that often lacked overt political content, so Sloan demanded that his non-cartoon art remain free from didactic purposes and political messages, especially those imposed by others. He would combine politics and art in one life, but not necessarily in any single work.
Eastman's intransigence probably stemmed from a fundamental confusion of "ashcan school" art with political cartoons. Although Eastman enthusiastically praised many kinds of beautiful or aesthetically pleasing art, Sloan's drawings interpreted urban phenomena such as workers, slums, and poverty. Moreover, they did so in a newly-evolved crayon technique that, partly by historical accident, connotated leftist politics. As Zurier says of that crayon technique, "the style conveyed meaning; the medium itself had a message." Eastman and Dell, therefore, probably overlooked the difference between Sloan's didactic political cartoons, which expressed a definite opinion, and his other art, which invited lingering appreciation and leisurely enjoyment rather than provoking a narrowly political response. To an untutored eye, Sloan's two forms were similar in both content and style. His drawings resembled a cartoon with a message except that their meaning was more oblique and more dependent on the interaction of the viewer with the drawing. Such art frustrated those engaged in a single-minded search for the idea or point. Other forms of pictoral art, however, such as landscapes, nudes, or abstract drawings, evoked no yearning for a political message; Eastman could accept them on their own terms, without attaching any extraneous meanings. Sloan later summarized his complaint by stating that captions "on satirical human interest drawings" gave them "a preaching twist... the editors wanted to keep hammering on propaganda and the satire lost its subtlety." George Bellows, another Masses artist, agreed; in 1917 he complained that "The Masses had placed the artists in the conventional position, illustrators of literary lines.... You have got to get rid of the obvious, heavy propaganda. The public will not read it." Nor would creative artists contribute under such restrictions.[128]
Eastman had no intention of politicizing art. After Sloan and five other artists left in a huff, The Masses actually increased its sponsorship of art-for-life's-sake, art with no political theme. These drawings, however, consisted of landscapes, nudes, and poster art based on French graphic design; little of the "ashcan" cityscape art, which irritated by approaching but avoiding a direct political message, remained. Zurier speculates that as war increasingly engulfed the United States and its radical movements, Eastman increasingly contrasted ethereal, joyous, and beautiful art with directly propagandistic drawings; social realism, the via media sponsored by Sloan, was no longer tenable. Sloan himself quickly abandoned it; and by the early twenties, most former Masses artists were scattering off on divergent paths. Meanwhile, Eastman accepted Sloan's division of the editorial board into literary and artistic wings, with the artists having autonomy over art, and no captions placed against the will of the individual artist.[129] This, however, did not placate the departed artists, who never returned. Eastman replaced them over the next year with other stellar figures, including Boardman Robinson and Robert Minor, whose bitter, trenchant political cartoons accentuated The Masses' increasingly strident antiwar and anticapitalist editorial position.
War, revolution, repression, and the subsequent nihilistic disillusionment only accentuated previous literary and artistic trends. In art as in literature, a new generation was quickly abandoning both schools represented in The Masses, creating a chasm which Eastman could neither predict nor forestall. Dell complained of the "incompetent, unintelligible, and uninteresting" modernist verse and "ugly and silly" cubist art that innundated his desks at The Masses and The Liberator, as well as "the incoherent and semi-mystical thinking that accompanied it."[130] Some emerging radical artists fused politics and art by creating new artistic forms which disoriented the viewers, thus causing them to "transvalue values" and reconceptualize reality. Radical art, according to this theory, would undermine capitalist hegemony and all received ideas; revolutionary artistic forms would generate a revolutionary politics.[131] Such bridging of the chasm between modern art and revolutionary politics was, however, mere fantasy. Modernism in art and literature repelled and alienated most workers, who found it incomprehensible. There was no logical, asethetic, or historical connection between revolutionary politics and radicalism in literary form. In fact, modernist artistic styles subordinate explicit political content beneath esoteric form, thereby negating rather than propagating transformative social values. The hope that abstract art would disorient people or undermine their perception of their world has proven chimerical. Furthermore, the experience of the 20th century suggests that confused souls whose confidence in their reality is shaken embrace fascism more often than any democratic philosophy. Zurier comments that "if the urban masses ever looked at The Masses, they would have seen pictures that showed their world in a manner they could recognize. No other contemporary art could make this claim."[132] Nor could the self-styled radical artists or artistic radicals of subsequent decades.
Eastman's philosophy resolved one traditional issue, the supposed conflict between social activism and the disinterested pursuit of truth. Truth, for Eastman, existed only in relation to a goal; the scientist or activist viewed all phenomena from a perspective which was itself determined by the end he had in view. Eastman believed, however, that poetry inherently conflicted with any goal-oriented activity, and thus with science and social activism. Poetry in life and literature concerned "realization", the vivid experience of reality. Poetry saw the intrinsic qualities in things and loved them for its own sake; it intimated "the nearness of infinite and universal being."[91] The poet loved all life and existence, not just some parts of them; he could not abide fanaticism, consecration, or absorption in a single goal, however enthralling or noble in itself.
Although Eastman was himself a poet, a humorist, and a philosopher (he even wrote a novel in the 1920s), he valued science above all. Asked by Lincoln Steffens what books he should read, Eastman advised him (and by implication other Masses subscribers) that "what you need is not literature but science. And in that you are typical of the best democrats, the best rebels, the best friends, to be found in these days" when "scientific technique" would dominate "literary moralism." Science defined a person's goal as well as the present facts bearing on that purpose. Literature, on the contrary, "loves to dwell on the goal, and dwell on the rule of conduct, because these give a more edifying expression to the individual temperament of the author. But literature will never carry us beyond edification until that happy day when authors are scientists--or, still more happy, when scientists know how to write." The sciences of heredity, evolution, the class struggle, and psychology illuminated "the brute facts about human organisms in society, the unalterable data which must underlie all plans of progress.... the crude unavoidable basis of culture and learning."[92]
Science and scholarship, therefore, were fit servants of revolution; but what of poetic realization? Eastman thought that a truly great personality could combine creative literature and social revolution. The unification of these two pursuits--poetry and science, the pursuit of the full life and the fomenting of revolution--defined Eastman's life project. Science was itself an aspect of the full life rather than merely a means towards an end; even scientists exulted "not in any conquest or destination" but in their progress towards it. Eastman himself could "bear the prospect that the world may never be free" but not "the prospect of my living in it and not taking part in the fight for freedom."[93]
For Eastman, poetry encompassed the universe and signified an effervescent, exuberant embrace of all life's riches. True poets must fully experience life rather than merely reading about it and versifying; they must immerse themselves in the concrete realities and struggles of their day. Poetic realization, as well as scientific truth, depended on intense involvement in human affairs. When Edmund Gosse declared English exhausted as a literary language, Eastman exclaimed that only academic poets were worn out. "Great poetry will never be written by anyone who has spent his life burrowing in an extensive and complicated literature" or by "anyone who has specialized in letters," Eastman declared.
It will be written by persons who are innocent of the smell of old books. Let Edmund Gosse burn up his library, and all the shelvings in his mind, and go down to the street, and out into the fields and quarries and among the sips and chimneys, the smoke and glory of living reality in his own time; let him learn to love that, and language only as it enriches that--then when he speaks of the poets of the future we will listen. For he will be a poet, and not merely a taster of the connotations and the music of ancient phrases. The poetry of England is wonderful, a treasure house, but those who live in that house will never add to its riches. Poets are lovers of the adventure of life. And the adventure of life is ever new, and words are as young as the minds that use them. In a continually unfolding world their flavors are continually altered and refreshed. Only in the musty chambers of a house of books does the language cease from change, or could it by any effort of a decadent imagination be conceived to be used up or worn by those who spoke it in the past.[94]
Although poetry meant individual expression and experience rather than general truth, it did not contradict revolution. Indeed, the revolution was poetry, and would make existence poetic for all. The revolutionary who eschewed dogmatism and fixation on but one aspect of life could remain a poet; the poet who joined the revolution could live most truly and freely. Eastman demonstrated the unity of poetry and revolution at Ludlow, where he arrived shortly after the massacre of the wives and children of the striking miners. Retiring from the smoldering ruins of the Ludlow tent colony to a sunny hilltop, Eastman meditated on his poem, "To a Bobolink," even as he was writing incendiary political articles which startled America.[95]
Eastman did not believe that critics could fairly judge poetry by extrinsic or non-literary criteria--certainly not by political ones. Poetry, he thought, could further goals outside itself, such as beauty, truth, wisdom, or morality, but it was "of its own nature foreign to them all." Indeed, even formalistic aesthetic criteria based on past literature were vapid. "There is a new principle, and a new rule, for every act of greatness," he proclaimed. Neither beauty nor ugliness, truth nor untruth, or simplicity or complexity, sufficed as standards of evaluation; "there is no master principle for that art whose very nature is to shun generality, and cleave to the unique nature of every individual experience." Poetry's one rule consisted of eschewing the conventional. "Habit is the arch-enemy of realization," whereas "surprise is close kin to consciousness itself."[96]
Yet Eastman occasionally injected political considerations into his judgment of literature. Indeed, his assertion that creative literature had no necessary connection with justice, truth, or wisdom, but could as well serve their opposites, inexorably focuses critical evaluation at least partly on non-literary aspects such message and effect. If great art could express execrable politics, anyone valuing both literary art and social justice might well evaluate art by both aesthetic and social criteria. Eastman considered Rabindranth Tagore a great poet but deprecated the mystical relief from the torments of the world with which he comforted his readers. "Henceforth the ideal shall not be a way of escape from the crude terms of existence, but a way of altering those terms until the joy and the reality, the poetry and the science are in harmony.... We seek the poet who can redirect the extramundane yearnings of all broken spirits into a reckless will to reconstruct their disappointing world." Eastman contemptuously dismissed Henry James as a priggish esthete who evaded real life in favor of "culture, nobility, the not being provincial, the being able to behave in your intellect as though it were a drawing-room...." James's renunciation of the United States symbolized "the littleness of his thirst, and the consequent limitations of his wisdom and genius. America is in truth a terrible place. But it is a place--and that is all one needs in order to move the world, if he can move it." Eastman preferred Whitman and Twain as more popular, earthy, and social writers.[97]
Eastman linked poetry with social revolution by the exuberant living of life and by the science that characterized the contemporary world. But poetry and revolution were also allied because capitalism throttled poetry in elites and masses alike. Because poetry required the suspension of effort towards a goal--required idleness and detachment--it was impossible for the vast majority under capitalism. "They who cherish hopes of poetry" in life or literature would therefore "favor in their day every assault of labor upon the monopoly of leisure by a few. They will be ready for a drastic redistribution of the idle hours."[98] The idle elite was deprived of poetic enjoyment by the baleful constraint of respectability, "a more sure destroyer of poetry, than even necessity." The rich gloried in their "refined insulations" from real life; wealth became a requirement for art for "those whose judgments of merit are determined by a pecuniary standard." The precincts of the rich resembled "a polished museum wherein were kept packages of human remains."[99] The poor, who were vibrantly alive, lacked the leisure and detachment necessary for the poetry of life or of literature; the rich, blessed or cursed with leisure, were deadened to life. Eastman hoped that a redistribution of wealth would undermine the ideal of respectability that stemmed from class society. The individual person or poet could not achieve liberation in isolation or a small clique. Poet-rebels who repudiated respectability within capitalist society became self-conscious and artificial; they were subverted by the very ideal against which they revolted.[100] Poetry could not flourish in enclaves such as Greenwich Village, Eastman strongly implied; capitalism killed the poetry of life just as it inculcated superstitions of class, race, gender, and nationality in its victims. Social revolution was a poetic as well as epistemological necessity.
Indeed, Eastman strongly asserted that commercial civilization inevitably poisoned art. True art emanated inexorably from the distinctive personality and experience of its author; it therefore strongly pleased a select few kindred spirits while alienating or boring the majority. Yet commercial civilization, which evaluated everything by its popularity and profitability, pandered to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Commercial art and literature aimed not at delighting its audience, but mildly pleasing and above all avoiding offense. The result was drab uniformity, endless repetition, and insipid standardization. Eastman railed against this commercialized debasement of literature and art more than against censorship or the hegemonic ideology that pervaded popular culture.[101] He did not specify how a socialist society would produce or distribute art, but he urged that young rebels, who in previous times would have revolted only against "philistinism, the middle class monotonies, and.... provincial obtuseness", instead direct their scorn "against a more important evil--against the ground-plan of money-competition built on industrial slavery which orders our civilization, and makes all our judgments of value, even the most cultured, impure." Eastman thundered that "we suspect everything that is called culture--suspect it of the taint of pecuniary elegance.... We have read Tolstoy's great and mad indictment of European art. We have made ready to knife the whole canvass, if necessary, in favor of a coarser and more universal reality.... Our scorn makes us rank and democratic revolutionists instead of over-exquisite and rather priggish aesthetes."[102] Mike Gold soon fostered a proletarian aesthetic upon such sentiments.
Eastman's editorial policy on The Masses expressed his deep convictions that science, literature, art, social revolution, and every other aspect of life deserved expression. The Masses was not devoted exclusively to propaganda, but championed liveliness, humor, and unorthodoxy in all fields. "Aside from enhancing life," he later said, "that seems to me the wisest way to conduct propaganda." There was much art for art's sake--pictures that communicated only the artist's idiosyncratic view of the world. "I tried to have plenty of things in every number which had nothing to do with socialism," he said. "I wanted everybody to express his individuality to the limit, so long as he did not transgress the principles of socialism."[103] Asked by a disgrunted reader why The Masses rejected articles favoring non-Socialist "radical reform movements," Eastman replied that Socialism was revolutionary rather than reformist and advocated class conflict rather than "literary evangelism."
Therefore to invite into a Socialist magazine those who oppose the conflict, would be neither liberal nor illiberal. It would be simply foolish and untrue to principle. Liberality demands that we be hospitable to ideas which are other than ours; it does not demand that we lend ourselves to the propagation of ideas which contradict ours.[104]
When The Liberator caused an uproar by rejecting paid advertising for books of which it disapproved, it merely continued this policy.
Although Eastman championed revolution across the whole spectrum of human experience, he disdained the ostentatious flaunting of rebellion. While warmly extolling Margaret Sanger, he criticized her short-lived publication, The Woman Rebel, for its "over-conscious extremism and blare of rebellion for its own sake." He similarly faulted The Revolutionary Almanac (compiled by Masses ally Hippolyte Havel) for its "strong literary infatuation, a love of the flavor of ideas of revolt, rather than a concentrated interest either in an end to be achieved, or in ideas as working hypothesis for its achievement." Havel's anthology neglected "the spirit of experimental science" in favor of "rather undiscriminating hurrah."[105]
Eastman similarly rejected John Reed's proposed statement of editorial policy, which declared that The Masses was "bound by no one creed or theory of social reform, but will express them all, providing they be radical," because it was vapid and imprecise. Eastman patiently informed Reed that The Masses championed "not just rebellious talk but a carefully thought-out program of class struggle which put us in relation to a world movement." Eastman's revised editorial statement did indeed endorse revolution while repudiating reform; but it did not even mention class struggle or proletarian internationalism. However, these became mainstays of his editorial policy. Eastman also attacked the self-consciousness and sex-obsession of Greenwich Village, and later claimed that The Masses retained a distinctly anti-bohemian ambiance. "Hardly a month passed that I did not take some action designed to hold the propaganda of revolutionary class struggle clear of the mere rebel moods of those who mistake the delights of a venturesome life, or of creative art itself, for the effort toward world transformation," he said.[106]
Eastman's hard left editorial policy contradicted a main tenet of The Masses ethos: that the magazine promoted pure self-expression by its editors and contributors. At the New York Legislative hearings concerning the banning of The Masses from subway newsstands, and later in both Masses trials, Eastman downplayed the importance of the magazine's revolutionism, claiming instead that The Masses was an open forum expressing the diverse views of its editors and contributors.[107] Its self-proclaimed policy of conciliating nobody, not even its readers, would indeed undermine the advocacy of a cause, which requires finesse, some degree of unity, consideration of the audience, and an effort at persuasion. Eastman said that the editors
have an ideal of what an illustrated magazine ought to be, and we want to give such a magazine to America. THE MASSES has never paid a cent for any article, story, poem, or picture, and yet it is edited and contributed bo by the people whose things are purchased at a high price by all the popular magazines.... And I will tell you why it is: it is because they have a religion.... The main purpose of their religion is to make humanity in this world more free and more happy.[108]
Writers and artists could not fully express themselves in the commercial magazines, so they "give the most intimate product of their hearts and brains to THE MASSES." Such a free magazine must display "a very wide range in the material it publishes"; The Masses would, "within the limitations that are inevitably set by our own temperament," encourage "every strong and sincere expression of opinion or feeling that cannot find a voice in the money-making press. My ideal is a free humanity, and I think the best way I can serve that ideal now is to help these gifted men and women get out one free magazine in America." Masses editors gave the American public "their own intimate conviction, their own art, their own most sacred personal feelings."[109]
Eastman's editorship of The Masses embodied the same disciplined revolt that characterized his political and artistic philosophies. He wanted each issue to comprise a unified whole, with items accepted and placed for overall effect; it was not to be an art gallery or a miscellany. He wrote editorials that appeared to speak for The Masses itself rather than merely stating his own personal opinion. And of course The Masses collective, and Eastman himself, included, modified, or rejected submissions according to their own tastes. As we will discuss shortly, many of the artists left the magazine in March 1916 in protest against Eastman's imposition of a more specific editorial policy and, in particular, his habit of placing captions on their drawings. This, the artists felt, unduly politicized their art and restricted their self-expression.[110] This latent contradiction between individual self-expression and a political program was never fully resolved. Eastman himself admitted that there was no topic upon which all of the editors agreed, and that at least one major editor rejected the very idea of an editorial policy. A reader, criticizing the magazine's flaunting of nudity, ugliness, and free verse, pointed out that the magazine's incessant appeal for new subscribers indicated that its editors wanted to change the world, not merely express themselves. Eastman himself sometimes said that his magazine had a "message" other than individual self-expression by its editors.[111]
The Masses also alienated some readers by its alleged pessimism and focus on the sordid and ugly aspects of life. Although it is justly celebrated for realism in art and literature, this was not exclusively its editor's doing. Eastman was largely indifferent to schools of literature and philosophies of art; he felt that realism was only one of many valid forms. But the owners of, and contributors to, The Masses could not get their realistic stories, articles, and drawings printed in the commercial press, and hence created The Masses. Eastman himself argued that literature and art should reflect all of life, and thus joyfully accentuated those aspects of life and styles of art ignored by contemporary culture. His desire to depict all of life happily combined with the needs of his associates and fitted him "to preside with sympathy over an outburst of dirt and dreariness in realms before consecrated to sweetness and light." In an era of manufactured optimism, he said, "it becomes almost an honest duty to remain in a state of gloom."[112]
When readers complained about the lack of pleasing stories and drawings, Eastman replied that The Masses would gladly print light-hearted material if it had the space and the money to pay for them. "As it is, we do not pretend to reflect the whole of life. We do not imagine THE MASSES to be the only thing you read in a month. It is a part of what you read, a part of life reflected, a part of American journalism--and--if we may explain--a very definite part.... The part that doesn't pay." Artists and writers did not give away material they could sell for a fair price. "Indeed, there is no reason for giving things to THE MASSES which would attain a wider circulation in a magazine that paid for them. THE MASSES exists to publish what commercial magazines will not pay for and will not publish. It cannot, therefore, cover the whole range of what has value in current literature and art. It tends to cover the range of what has value without having commercial value." Pictures of woodland nymphs and girls in wet bathing suits, such as appeared everywhere in the commercial magazines, were certainly a worthy fine part of life. But The Masses showcased "the goods whose value is too peculiar, or too new, or too subtle, or too high, or two naked, or too displeasing to the ruling class, to make its way financially in competition with slippery girls in tights, and tinted cupids, and happy stories of lovers." Eastman told one irate reader that if he did not like The Masses he should not subscribe. "None of us are depending on you--we get our living elsewhere."[113]
Despite controversies over literary and artistic realism, Eastman reconciled literary innovation and social revolution more easily than did subsequent generations of the avant-garde. Before World War I much new literature, especially realist literature, was popular in both content and form. Exciting new writers exposed social conditions long ignored by high culture and by the nation's elite. In opposing the false, saccharine, and evasive culture of the Gilded Age that shielded people from life and reality, realism performed an important social function. Eastman, of course, believed that art need not be beautiful, but only capture experience and depict it vividly. Much new literature was socially conscious, clearly written and accessible to the general public. Eastman's vision of The Masses as "a popular Socialist magazine--a magazine of pictures and lively writing" was congruent with contemporary literary and political developments.[114]
Eastman's editorship coincided with the last moment when literary and artistic experimentation fully coincided with radical politics. Conservative on matters of literary form, Eastman condemned blank verse concerned with merely private experience and meanings as too subjective and as incomprehensible to almost everyone. He preferred, in poetry as in revolution, disciplined structure that achieved a purpose, rather than anarchistic rebellion. He favored rhymed and metered poetry and complained that social rebels who endorsed blank verse defeated their goal of communicating with the masses and winning them for socialism. Both the form and content of the new poetry, he felt, were antithetical to the goals of educating or inciting the masses. However, because Eastman eschewed dogmatizing about literary form, The Masses did print experimental verse.[115]
Eastman was attacked by both the literary avant-garde and realists for his relatively moderate and ecumenical stance. Writing in Seven Arts, Waldo Frank criticized Eastman's "treacherous conservatism." Lamenting that "a form of poetry projecting man's individual revolt and society's coherent heterogenity disturbs him," Frank charged that Eastman was "driven to subtle rationalizations to buttress his distaste." Frank found it "unbelievable that Eastman, of all men, should be even fractionally against" new forms of poetry that rejected meter and rhyme. Eastman replied that poetry induced "a state of the body and mind in which all emotions and sensations, and more especially all imaginations, are intensified"; as meter and rhyme accentuated this effect, they were vital aspects of a good poem. Upton Sinclair and other Masses subscribers, however, complained that The Masses printed free verse at all; Sinclair recommended that it be formatted as prose.[116]
Eastman was indeed poised between two worlds. Some literary rebels, having fought for a realistic literature that confronted the social evils of their day, opposed any new literature that evaded those problems and took refuge in mysticism, esotericism, or merely private meanings. Waldo Frank completely ignored the political dimension of Eastman's critique. For his part, Eastman acknowledged that some free verse was deservedly remembered through the centuries, and favored experimentation in every sphere of life. This seemingly marginal debate over poetic form, therefore, symbolizes an approaching cleavage, a more radical bifurcation of culture between an elitist modernism incomprehensible to the masses and a more traditional popular culture. Only a short time later, surrealists and modernists who attempted a fusion of literary and political radicalism confronted more imposing difficulties. High culture had gone its own way, and had little natural affinity for social causes of any sort. Partisan Review never considered addressing a popular audience.
The Masses, however, discussed in a popular idiom topics that vitally concerned workers. It alienated some readers by its irreverant content, innovative form, and critical approach towards religion, sexual conventions, and other cultural icons. Its critics divined its meaning only too well; obscurity was not among their complaints. But literary modernism is characterized by erudition, complexity, and difficulty; it is largely self-referential; matters of form and technique often eclipse content. Many of the greatest modernists have been conservative, reactionary, or politically indifferent.
If The Masses fortuitiously avoided a head-on collision between revolutionary politics and experimental literature, it did confront a similar political dilemma. Eastman bewailed the scarcity of truly revolutionary poetry and exulted when the rare genuinely revolutionary poem came in. "There just wasn't any blending of poetry with revolution," he later lamented. "Nobody wrote revolutionary poetry that was any good." Eastman himself tried but failed. "It just happens that political emotions did not move me to write poetry.... It was a limitation of my nature that I would occasionally try to overpass. But there's no use trying to write poetry."[117]
Eastman suspected that his failure occurred because his political emotions were "less profound, less organic, less clear perhaps, less wholly myself."[118] His impasse reflects the dilemma of any conscious creation of a new literary sensibility informed by politics, and particularly of a revolutionary artist in a conservative society. Injecting politics into literature--or even combining a political stance with a literary sensibility in one movement or periodical--risks inauthenticity and unreality. The plot, characters, situation, and philosophy of most great works of fiction, for example, flow from the innermost depths of their creators, who communicate their intensely personal view of life. Many novelists virtually lose control over their creations. Characters take on independent lives of their own, transcending their creators and developing in accordance with their own inexorable laws. Whatever the relation of great art to the subconscious and unconscious, great artists must will their creations with their whole personalities. They cannot write according to a formula, even if the formula meets with their own approval. Ideological expectations--even the author's own--result in artificial scenes, one-dimensional characters, and contrived plots. Political novelists too often write not what they think and feel, but what they think they should think and feel, or what they want to. The conscious politicization of poetry (as opposed to the authentic outpouring of political emotion) even more risks artificiality.
Few persons, even committed leftists, completely embrace a truly radical sensibility that permeates their entire personalities and informs their whole outlook. Unless they create a hermetically sealed community, members of radical subcultures are usually divided against themselves. Radicals seldom fully assimilate the values they strive and profess to believe; powerful emotions and fundamental ideas originate in the life around them, in the larger society whose overthrow they seek. Radicalism is almost inevitably a superficial and self-conscious intellectual engraftment upon a bedrock of feelings and beliefs generated by the existing institutions and practices that the radicals detest. Despite heroic efforts, most revolutionaries cannot fully commit their whole conscious and subconscious personalities to a world which does not yet exist, or to values denied rather than reinforced by social experience. Radical literature, therefore, is too often sterile and artificial, the result of calculation rather than heartfelt emanations from the depths of the author's personality.
Eastman could not resolve the fundamental contradiction between revolutionary desire and working-class reality. A literature that simultaneously embodied radical politics and actual proletarian experience and sensibility was impossible as long as the American working class remained conservative and largely unorganized. The characters, the situations, and emotions appropriate to a class-conscious, insurgent proletariat were absent from society, and therefore could not occur in a realistic literature that accurately reflected that society. Philosophical Marxists realize that if high culture stems from the economic structure and expresses the relations and forces of production (or more broadly the general level and type of economic, social, and political development), radicals cannot will a particular type of literature into existence by fiat. There can be no revolutionary literature without a revolutionary sensibility, and no revolutionary sensibility in the absence of a strong revolutionary movement.[119] Upton Sinclair encountered this exact difficulty. Having written a vivid account of the tribulations of a Chicago packinghouse worker, he could not devise a plausible ending for The Jungle. He interrupted work on his novel, founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and finally tacked on an ending which both he and his publisher considered a boring Socialist sermon. Jack London's fiction was similarly vitiated by a contradictory politics unreflective of American life. Eastman reconciled art and politics by his free acceptance of great art as a good in itself, apart from revolutionary politics, and yet fully consistent with it. This balancing act became increasingly difficult with the rise of modernism, as Eastman's own experience attests. The rise of Communism after World War I further intensified the difficulties in reconciling revolutionary politics with artistic creativity, authenticity, and freedom.
As "a popular magazine of revolutionary socialism," The Masses featured art as well as literature. Unlike the commercial press, The Masses encouraged artists to paint as they pleased, rather than subordinating their pictures to stories. This creative freedom attracted artists of genius. Initially, The Masses' pictures were superior to its prose, and both Eastman and Dell promised readers that its literature would soon equal its drawings. However, conflict between the artists and writers simmered. According to one contributor, "the writers were accepted with very little controversy; the artists were vigorously applauded or violently condemned." Eastman often sided with the artists, even risking the wrath of the writers.[120] Amidst the upheavals of the Great War, however, most of the creative artists withdrew in anger, and some of them started their own ephemeral publication. The "artists's strike," as Eastman called the imbroglio, illustrated the tensions inherent in combining art with politics and revealed the limitations of Eastman's understanding and appreciation of art.
John Sloan protested editorial interference with artistic freedom on behalf of himself and other artists in early 1916. The Masses, he charged, no longer represented "the ideas and art of a number of personalities," but had developed a specific political philosophy, a "policy." He objected that the literary editors captioned "our human interest drawings" and thus gave them "a propaganda slant which we never intended." Sloan's complaint arose from a rather peculiar editorial quirk. The Masses was organized as a collective; the editors met each month and voted on each submitted story, poem, and picture. When a picture or cartoon was accepted, the board (or, if the drawing was submitted after the editorial meeting, Eastman or Dell) decided upon an appropriate caption. Some of the artists apparently experienced difficulty in deciding upon the caption that would best express their meaning, and accepted this procedure as helpful. Sloan, however, vociferously objected, and demanded that the artist decide what caption, if any, should accompany his work. He proposed abolition of the position of editor, having a committee (rather than Dell or Eastman) paste up each issue, the creation of separate and autonomous editorial boards for art and literature, and lessening reliance on outside donations. (Because Eastman largely raised these donations, they increased his power.) He also demanded that the editorial board vote on all submissions; no more surreptitious, last-minute additions imposed by Eastman or Dell.[121]
Eastman and Dell, and Art Young, one of the two artists who sided with them, objected. According to Dell's later account, these editors demanded that each picture "have some kind of meaning." Young complained that the dissenters "want to run pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio street--regardless of ideas--and without title." Young asserted that such pictures belonged in art magazines and exclaimed that "to me this magazine exists for socialism. That's why I give my drawings to it, and anybody who doesn't believe in a socialist policy, so far as I go, can get out!"[122] Young, however, was an exclusively political cartoonist who captioned his own work; his style was blunt, effective, and easily understood. He did not create the kind of art under discussion. Sloan, however, was a painter as well as drawer, sketcher, and cartoonist. He had fought the regimentation of art by the Academy (he was a key sponsor of the Exhibition of Independent Artists and the Armory Show) and worried that his politics distorted even the way he saw potential pictures. As a painter he increasingly moved away from city and social themes, and he demanded uncensored self-expression in his more socially-conscious drawings and sketches. Despite appearences, the imbroglio over Masses art did not stem from fundamental political disagreements; both Sloan and Young were Socialists. Sloan, indeed, claimed that Eastman's incessant pursuit of outside funds from rich donors undermined both the magazine's socialism and the self-expression of its owners. He charged Eastman with the same bohemian, dilettante frivolity that Eastman most deplored. He also championed untrammeled freedom of expression and claimed that Eastman and Dell regimented the artists. Finally, he accused Eastman and Dell (who had salaried positions on the magazine) for commercializing The Masses and appealing to an elite constituency. The Masses now "roars as gently as a sucking dove," he said. Eastman, for his part, declared that "If I am going to edit The Masses, I intend having the last word on what goes into the magazine." If the editors managed it as a cooperative, he would participate and also contribute articles but "resign as editor."[123]
The Eastman-Dell position seems inexplicable because both men extolled the beauties and necessity of non-political art. Eastman praised Chinese painting, composed lyric poetry, and included many items of pure beauty, humor, or whimsy in each issue of The Masses. Moreover, just at the time of the artists' strike Dell articulated the meaning of the art of The Masses in terms that perfectly express Sloan's own philosophy. Enlightening readers who wondered what Masses pictures meant, Dell explained that
Each of us lives in a world of his own: a world that, in proportion as one really is an individual, is different from any other person's world. The artist is one who has the power to show the rest of us what his world is like.... For his world consists not merely of the circumstances among which he exists by preference or accident, but more essentially as the way he regards those circumstances.[124]
Dell perceptively appreciated John Sloan's art as revealing "a strange and inevitable beauty, half compounded of ugliness, a disorder surprised and yet studied calmly, until it reveals some deep-lying trait of human nature, an accidental intimacy pursued with grim and yet wistful thoughtfulness." Stuart Davis (who sided with Sloan in this controversy) lives in "the oddest, maddest world that ever was, but as real as brass tacks." Addressing those who asked what idea Davis's pictures expressed, Dell said that Davis was the kind of person who could see the world he created, and help us enter it. Dell enjoined his readers to "enjoy The Masses' pictures if you can. If you can't, forgive the people who made them. For artists will be artists!"[125]
Eastman's and Dell's insistence on captioning Sloan's and Davis's artwork against their will contradicted their own aesthetic pronouncements. The captions undeniably did degrade and distort the drawings by imposing alien meanings upon them, or at least simplifying the artist's vision. Captions unintentionally encouraged subscribers to read the caption, grasp the point, and move on, without lingering over the drawing itself. This practice subordinated the art to the political point or joke, in a magazine which attracted great artists by promising the freedom from subordination to a story that the commercial magazines did not offer. It indirectly limited the artists' freedom to depict whatever they wanted, by allowing others to determine the meaning of their pictures. Sometimes the editors could not compose an appropriate caption, and settled on a manifestly inappropriate one. Captions sharpened the message of political cartoons while simplifying the intentions of more subtle artists whose meaning resided in the works themselves rather than in any overt or extraneous political message.[126]
Sloan cheerfully drew biting political cartoons and drawings for the Socialist party. But he considered some of his warm and realistic interpretations of city life as more elevated. He was fascinated by the vibrant, teeming life of the city and perceived beauty, gaiety, and personality where others saw merely degradation, misery, and oppression. His sensibility found an ethereal and poignant beauty in the slums and in other aspects of city life ignored or stigmatized by conventional artists; it embodied the realization of all of life that Eastman extolled. His art depicted real individuals and neighborhoods, not merely faceless masses or abstract representatives of a class. "Sloan and his colleagues presented a vision of the working class as a positive entity, worthy of examination in its own right," Rebecca Zurier says in The Art of The Masses. "In their better moments they depicted a complex, coherent working-class culture with its own customs, its own pastimes.... They described an intimate city of old neighborhoods and alleyways, its drama found less in its architecture than in its polyglot residents."[127] Eastman and Dell approved of this in poetry, the short story, and the novel; why then could they not comprehend it in painting? Sloan advocated a partial separation of art from politics, the same freedom that Eastman and Dell claimed for themselves. Just as Eastman and Dell were political activists and propagandists who wrote lyric poetry and novels that often lacked overt political content, so Sloan demanded that his non-cartoon art remain free from didactic purposes and political messages, especially those imposed by others. He would combine politics and art in one life, but not necessarily in any single work.
Eastman's intransigence probably stemmed from a fundamental confusion of "ashcan school" art with political cartoons. Although Eastman enthusiastically praised many kinds of beautiful or aesthetically pleasing art, Sloan's drawings interpreted urban phenomena such as workers, slums, and poverty. Moreover, they did so in a newly-evolved crayon technique that, partly by historical accident, connotated leftist politics. As Zurier says of that crayon technique, "the style conveyed meaning; the medium itself had a message." Eastman and Dell, therefore, probably overlooked the difference between Sloan's didactic political cartoons, which expressed a definite opinion, and his other art, which invited lingering appreciation and leisurely enjoyment rather than provoking a narrowly political response. To an untutored eye, Sloan's two forms were similar in both content and style. His drawings resembled a cartoon with a message except that their meaning was more oblique and more dependent on the interaction of the viewer with the drawing. Such art frustrated those engaged in a single-minded search for the idea or point. Other forms of pictoral art, however, such as landscapes, nudes, or abstract drawings, evoked no yearning for a political message; Eastman could accept them on their own terms, without attaching any extraneous meanings. Sloan later summarized his complaint by stating that captions "on satirical human interest drawings" gave them "a preaching twist... the editors wanted to keep hammering on propaganda and the satire lost its subtlety." George Bellows, another Masses artist, agreed; in 1917 he complained that "The Masses had placed the artists in the conventional position, illustrators of literary lines.... You have got to get rid of the obvious, heavy propaganda. The public will not read it." Nor would creative artists contribute under such restrictions.[128]
Eastman had no intention of politicizing art. After Sloan and five other artists left in a huff, The Masses actually increased its sponsorship of art-for-life's-sake, art with no political theme. These drawings, however, consisted of landscapes, nudes, and poster art based on French graphic design; little of the "ashcan" cityscape art, which irritated by approaching but avoiding a direct political message, remained. Zurier speculates that as war increasingly engulfed the United States and its radical movements, Eastman increasingly contrasted ethereal, joyous, and beautiful art with directly propagandistic drawings; social realism, the via media sponsored by Sloan, was no longer tenable. Sloan himself quickly abandoned it; and by the early twenties, most former Masses artists were scattering off on divergent paths. Meanwhile, Eastman accepted Sloan's division of the editorial board into literary and artistic wings, with the artists having autonomy over art, and no captions placed against the will of the individual artist.[129] This, however, did not placate the departed artists, who never returned. Eastman replaced them over the next year with other stellar figures, including Boardman Robinson and Robert Minor, whose bitter, trenchant political cartoons accentuated The Masses' increasingly strident antiwar and anticapitalist editorial position.
War, revolution, repression, and the subsequent nihilistic disillusionment only accentuated previous literary and artistic trends. In art as in literature, a new generation was quickly abandoning both schools represented in The Masses, creating a chasm which Eastman could neither predict nor forestall. Dell complained of the "incompetent, unintelligible, and uninteresting" modernist verse and "ugly and silly" cubist art that innundated his desks at The Masses and The Liberator, as well as "the incoherent and semi-mystical thinking that accompanied it."[130] Some emerging radical artists fused politics and art by creating new artistic forms which disoriented the viewers, thus causing them to "transvalue values" and reconceptualize reality. Radical art, according to this theory, would undermine capitalist hegemony and all received ideas; revolutionary artistic forms would generate a revolutionary politics.[131] Such bridging of the chasm between modern art and revolutionary politics was, however, mere fantasy. Modernism in art and literature repelled and alienated most workers, who found it incomprehensible. There was no logical, asethetic, or historical connection between revolutionary politics and radicalism in literary form. In fact, modernist artistic styles subordinate explicit political content beneath esoteric form, thereby negating rather than propagating transformative social values. The hope that abstract art would disorient people or undermine their perception of their world has proven chimerical. Furthermore, the experience of the 20th century suggests that confused souls whose confidence in their reality is shaken embrace fascism more often than any democratic philosophy. Zurier comments that "if the urban masses ever looked at The Masses, they would have seen pictures that showed their world in a manner they could recognize. No other contemporary art could make this claim."[132] Nor could the self-styled radical artists or artistic radicals of subsequent decades.