Books: The Fellows Who Traveled

WRITERS ON THE LEFT (460 pp.)—Daniel Aaron—Harcourt, Brace & World ($7.50).

Less than 25 years ago, as all of their elders remember and some of the young never heard, some of the most eminent of U.S. writers and a great gaggle of lesser literary geese were more than half in love with Communism. It is all over now, but the Fund for the Republic believes that as a matter of history and simple wisdom, it is important that the U.S. should be aware of just how, and to what extent, Communism in the 1920s and '305 managed to infiltrate U.S. society from labor unions to universities. Nine volumes have already appeared, covering Communist activities in churches, mass media and government. Six years ago, the fund commissioned Daniel Aaron, a professor of English at Smith College, to write a history of the time when the Communists were the bullies of U.S. literature.

A cool man, Aaron spares his rod, excuses more than he accuses. But the record he has dug from the fast yellowing files of "little magazines," confessional literature, letters, minutes and manifestoes is a bizarre picture.

"What happened to American intellectual life in the Thirties," wrote Granville Hicks as early as 1943, "already seems mysterious, even to many who were party members." In 1949 Howard Fast mourned: "Where are the great ones of the Thirties, the whole school of talented progressive writers who arose out of the unemployed struggles led by the Communist Party?" It was a good question, for by then Fast himself was the only good name left to dress up the Communist Party's sleazy cultural storefront. (Since then, Fast himself has repented, issued his mea culpa in 1957.)

And the days are long past when the party could exact direct cultural tribute from the U.S. intelligentsia, when anti-Communist writers found it hard to get their books reviewed in the intellectual weeklies. To those much under 45 in the affluent society of today, the Thirties' preoccupation with class struggle and "social realism" must seem as odd as the 19th century's fondness for collected sermons or the debates of medieval theologians.

The Boom Time. The Depression, being the low ebb of U.S. capitalism, was naturally enough the boom time of intellectual commerce between the Kremlin and the U.S. Party Leader Earl Browder could declare with a straight face that "Communism is 20th century Americanism," and half the leading U.S. writers believed him. The aging Lincoln Steffens could return from Russia declaring "I have seen the future, and it works." It was the time of the fellow traveler, and among the famous fellows who traveled were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser.