protagonist. We meet the nameless girl as she begins waitressing in a St. Paul speakeasy and follow her developing affair with Butch, a young, marginal worker. We watch with horror as she becomes the driver for a botched bank robbery plotted by the predatory Ganz and as she and the fatally wounded Butch flee into the countryside. Pregnant, out of work, and separated from all the men who had tried to control her life, the girl returns to the city to become part of a community of 'bottom dog' women, surviving through the bitter winter in an abandoned warehouse, where in the book's climax she gives birth. What the girl discovers can be seen as a version of class solidarity, especially when she communicates with a deaf girl in a scabrous relief maternity home about the Workers Alliance. But the content of that solidarity is markedly different from what Larry Donovan comes to in The Disinherited or Mickey stumbles upon in Jews Without Money. For its emotional basis is the commonality of female experience.
Le Sueur tells us that reading D. H. Lawrence first enabled her to -350- think positively about women's sexuality. She had early been taught that sex meant danger, and, as in many women's novels before and after the 1930s, it continued to be threatening: an illusion fostered by Hollywood, the trapdoor to impoverishment through repeated cycles of pregnancy and childbearing, or a commodity demanded by men as token of their power. Indeed, Le Sueur's young male characters, like Bac in I Hear Men Talking (1984) and Butch in The Girl, are often predatory individualists, strikebreakers, violent to women, intent above all on 'beating.' Nevertheless, heterosexuality opens a way for Le Sueur's young women to discover what 'nobody can tell you,' to step out of the constrictions of selfhood, finding, like the girl, not only unity among women but also a relationship to the earth itself that Le Sueur often symbolized by the Demeter and Persephone myth. Many of Le Sueur's early stories (for example, 'Annunciation,' 'Spring Story') illustrate the intensity of her concern with women's bodies and sexuality — a concern that brought her into conflict with some Left critics and editors and, indeed, with at least some of the audiences for most Left-wing magazines of the thirties.
Ishma Waycaster, the central figure of Olive Tilford Dargan's (Fielding Burke's) Call Home the Heart, is caught in a similar set of conflicts: between her mountain home and the industrial lowland; between her passion for her husband, Britt, and her attraction to the scientific and politicized doctor, Derry; between her desire for the personal satisfactions of her own farm and hilltops and her commitment to the revolutionary struggle of the National Textile Workers' Union to organize the Winbury (Gastonia) mill workers; between irrational desire and the life of reason. These remain ideologically unresolved though humanly convincing in Call Home the Heart as Ishma, after an irrational outburst of racism, retreats from the union struggle back to mountains, husband, home. Dargan's dramatization of the persistence of racism even among enlightened white Southern workers has been praised as an honest effort to confront realistically a main barrier to worker solidarity. But, in fact, the dilemmas of racism are not central to the novel, any more than they were fundamental to the Gastonia strike. What is much more critical in the book, and what seems to me displaced onto the issue of race, are questions about gender and the relation of personal to social transformation. Gender is much more marginal in the Left discourse upon -351- which Dargan is drawing and appears at once less critical and much more intractable than racism, the solution to which is, at least theoretically, clear. As Deborah Rosenfelt comments about another novel on the Gastonia strike, Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932), 'the author [is unable] to acknowledge fully the very subversiveness of the women's issues raised. They are subversive not only of the dominant culture's sex-role ideology but also of the Left's insistence on the seamlessness and unity of the working class.' But more fundamentally, perhaps, the novel is struggling with the question of what Ishma, who is so much an image of American possibility, will finally become. There is nothing fixed and predetermined about that in Dargan's book: Ishma is created and recreated in relation to the material circumstances of her life. The problem, then, is to imagine circumstances capable of energizing both her passions and her intellect — a task neither novelist nor movement accomplished. Indeed, when she tries to resolve such dilemmas in the sequel A Stone Came Rolling (1935), Dargan is much less convincing.
Le Sueur's style also seems pulled in contrary directions: a lyric, repetitive, incantatory modernist technique (influenced, perhaps, by Gertrude Stein as well as by Lawrence) sometimes jostles against the reportorial voice (influenced, perhaps, by Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway) she honed in articles like 'Women on the Breadlines' and 'What Happens in a Strike' (collected in Harvest Song [1990]). The lyrical, Le Sueur writes in I Hear Men Talking, could be 'used as reaction to the deathly action of the economics and history of the town.' But it poses a problem to the audience she seeks: 'A farmer in North Dakota said to me once, 'You write too beautiful.'' So, like some critics, she came to 'question the lyricism of my early stories.' For if the writer's role was to become an 'oracle of the people' (Linda Ray Pratt's term), like Whitman, hearing, gathering, expressing, returning to the people their own stories, she could not distance herself from them by language, as modernist writers often did. Further, to serve a political function in a communist movement, a writer could not simply reproduce the relationships of bourgeois culture, appropriating people's lives into narratives and selling them back as commodities. One can see in Penelope, the developing central consciousness of I Hear Men Talking, Le Sueur's effort to create an alternative to the portrait of the artist as young appropriator that one -352- finds, for example, in Anderson's 'Death in the Woods' or Winesburg, Ohio.
The tensions about the relationship of artists and intellectuals to a social movement were not easily resolved, especially for authors of middle-class origins in the aggressively working-class movement of the thirties. Commenting on Horace Gregory's angst over his conflict between artistic individualism and Communist discipline, Le Sueur wrote in The New Masses (February 26, 1935):
For myself I do not feel any subtle equivocation between the individual and the new disciplined groups of the Communist party. I do not care for the bourgeois 'individual' that I am. I never have cared for it…. I can no longer live without communal sensibility. I can no longer breathe in this maggoty individualism of a merchant society.
But 'maggoty individualism' is never so easily exterminated; indeed, it reappears here as a kind of self- hatred, which can lead to artistic paralysis or to shrill assertion of one's correct politics. Le Sueur dramatizes the effort to cast off bourgeois separateness and step into working-class solidarity in a piece like I Was Marching (1934), but a certain insecurity persists. Indeed, the question comes to be central to a significant number of novels of the time.
The work of Tess Slesinger and Josephine Herbst is not, on the whole, focused on the life of industrial workers. Slesinger's only completed novel, The Unpossessed (1934), and her collection of stories, Time: The Present (1935), concern the personal and political lives of people best characterized as middle-class intellectuals. And while she was later active in Hollywood in the long battle to establish the Screen Writers Guild, her movie scripts are not very involved with working-class struggles. The Unpossessed provides an unusually frank view of the tensions between ideological commitment and personal desires among the class of leftist intellectuals to which most writers of proletarian novels in fact belonged. Loosely based on the group around Elliot Cohen, editor of The Menorah Journal and later, having moved to the far Right, founding editor of Commentary, the novel tells about the efforts of the men in the group, and the student acolytes of one of them, Bruno Leonard, to set up a magazine that will at once express their political aspirations and satisfy their quite varied personal desires. By alternating scenes of public activities —353- meetings, fund- raising efforts, and the like — and private interactions, Slesinger suggests how the personal and the political remain in tension, how, indeed, unresolved personal conflicts come to abort expressed political commitments.
Most particularly, the men in the group seem unable to relate honestly to the women closest to them, much less to the rather callow students who help drive the magazine enterprise or to the variety of ordinary people with whom they interact daily and on whose behalf they would write. The contradictory impulses of the group are most devastatingly satirized in Slesinger's account of the lavish fund-raising party thrown for the magazine, the public climax of the novel. The parallel 'private' climax is provided by the final chapter, in which Margaret Flinders, one of the book's central characters, returns from an abortion, pushed on her by her bitter, withheld husband, Miles. Probably the first widely circulated American fiction to deal in detail with an abortion, the chapter was first published in 1932 as a separate short story, 'Missis Flinders.' The book does mock all the protagonists at one level, playing their withdrawals from commitment against the fanaticism of Dostoevsky's
