Traven’s Mexico in The Bridge in the Jungle

 

 

Flower Vendor by Diego Rivera

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Those in parentheses refer to page numbers in the 1967 Elephant paperback published by Ivan R. Dee.

 

     As a revolutionary exile B. Traven [1] chose like Trotsky and about twenty thousand Spanish Republicans to live in Mexico.  They felt welcome under the progressive administration of Lázaro Cárdenas.  Traven’s attachment to his adopted country was based, however, on his affection for the poor, particularly the Indian campesinos, as well as on a friendly government.  He saw them not only as deserving workers who had been cheated of the fruits of their labor, but also mythologically, possessing a timeless wisdom and a culture more humane and attractive than what he saw in the United States.  Thus his support for their interests rests upon symbolic and philosophic as well as political grounds.

     His radicalism is evident if idiosyncratic.  Bolshevism appears marginally in the narrative though at one point he offers a common sense definition placed in the mouth of a ”ragged” agrarista. 

 

 Communism can be boiled down to one simple formula: give men food, plenty of it, and assure them that they will always have a job.  Keep the bellies well filled and provide lots of movies, admission  one cent, and there will be no more preaching from soap boxes and never any talk about a revolution.              (159-160) 

 

     Traven was far from an ideologue, and this passage contains a bit, perhaps, of condescension, well-earned by his many years in the country, but at the same time it properly emphasizes the material aspect of oppression and the modest needs of the proletariat. 

     In Traven’s view, the campesino’s traditional mode of life, in spite of its material poverty, was closer to his ideals than that offered by large plantations, factories, and modernization in general.  The community remains indigenous in its ethics, unhesitatingly demonstrating its solidarity with the bereaved mother by rallying in  her support with every possible aid delivered with thoughtful discretion.  Their actions are dictated, the reader is told, not by “a cold formula which had been taught them,” but arise rather “out of their hearts” (170), displaying “good taste and delicate tact.”  Those who consider them “dirty and filthy” and their country “badly organized” have spurious values, overrating “radios, Fords, and speed records” while ignoring the peoples’ “hearts and souls, the only things in man which count” (171). 

     He fears in fact that he is witnessing the last days of the old ways and that soon would arrive “Fords, vacuum cleaners, electric refrigerators, air-conditioned grass huts, jungle-colored bathrooms, windmill-driven television, canned alligator stew, and pulverized hearts of young palm  trees” (190).  At present their world-view assures them, with greater confidence than Christianity, that “everything is in its right place” (192). 

     Traven’s affection for the Mexicans accepts their status as members of the working class which should by rights inherit the world, but he is motivated more profoundly by what seems to him their intuitive wisdom.  While denying that they possess magic, his narrator Gales saying “No Indian can do anything more than we can do, and no Indian knows more than we” (140) in spite of the fact that he cannot explain their locating the body underwater with a floating candle, and the reader is in the same difficulty.  The description of finding Carlos’ corpse leaves little possibility for rational explanation.  He thinks that Sleigh’s acceptance of their beliefs stems simply from living among them, yet he concludes that, even for himself, the wiser course is to suspend belief in a sort of enlightened skeptic ἐποχή.

 

I felt a certain comfort in not trying to think things through to the end.  And why should I not have let the whole matter rest?  One lives easier, happier, more in harmony with the universe, if one does not work one’s brain continually about things of which the explanations and analyses cannot make us any happier.   (144)

 

     Here the European’s itch to know is conflated with his constant push after progress, wealth, and power in contrast with the native peoples simply living their lives in a mutual support system.  He thinks that “death is understood by these people” as a “great mystery” (192).  They accept not-knowing as they accept a not-caring cosmos.

 

What does it all matter anyhow?  What does the sun above us care about the dead, about weeping mothers, about funerals, about American foxtrots and hair-removers?  What does it care whether there is genuine culture of faked civilization, whether good music or noise with brass tubes?  That glorious sun doesn’t give a rap about the white man’s dumping the contents of his ashcans over the heads of people he considers inferior.  Whatever woe, pain and sorrow  we may have, real or imaginary, the sun stays mighty and dignified in the universe.  It is a god, the only god . . .  And it never threatens punishments.                                             (193)  

 

     This view that the Indians possess “genuine culture” whereas Gales and his fellow whites have only a “faked civilization” is patently mythological.  In fact Mesoamerican religion was far from indifferent toward morals and did include varied fates in the afterlife determined by behavior with privileges for those who died in battle, special treatment for death by water, and greater challenges in Mictlan for those with less than honorable behavior (though the Mexicans never descended to the barbaric concept of eternal damnation).

     Traven participates in the Romantic European tradition of fetishizing the so-called primitive (2).  A literary convention, this pretense asserting a privileged access to truth for pre-industrial societies is merely a structural artifice constructing a polarity between the supposed good of indigenous peoples and the corruption of the technologically advanced, a reversal of the usual value judgment. The meaning rests rather in criticism of Christian/Capitalist culture than in an accurate description of the campesinos’ worldview.   The author deploys here a rhetorical figure of speech rather than an anthropological claim in the service of compelling storytelling.  Other renditions of the Meso-American indios may offer the insights of historians, anthropologists, or sociologists.  Readers may be glad to have this novelist’s vision though his goals are far from those of a scholarly researcher. 

                                      

 

 

1.  The facts of the author’s life, including name and dates, remain disputed.  The curious could do no better than to have a look at Jonah Raskin’s My Search for B. Traven.  Raskin is the author as well of The Mythology of Imperialism, perhaps the finest work of literary criticism to arise from the radical youth movement of the ‘sixties.

2.  See my article on twentieth century artists “The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-fetish-of-primitive-in-twentieth.html.    

 

Theory and Practice in Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money

 

 

     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is often regarded as the exemplary proletarian novel due to its author’s lifelong loyalty to the American Communist Party and his theoretical manifesto “Toward Proletarian Art” [1].  He receives thereby a secure place in literary history, but one little valued or dismissed altogether by many critics.  He is often blamed but sometimes praised for non-literary factors, the fellow travelers of the ‘thirties and since admiring him for his politics while anti-Communists are all but certain to denounce him for the same reason.  Discernment of the true merits of his work is ill-served by such a non-aesthetic and  reductive standard [2].   

     Those who think little of Gold’s fiction and regard it as mere agitprop without aesthetic value are influenced, of course, of the practice of what was officially recognized as “socialist realism” by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 which required that fiction must be proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.  The policy was reinforced and tightened in the 1946 Zhdanov Doctrine which dominated Soviet culture until the fall of the USSR, resulting in the government’s acceptance of much art of a pedestrian character and suppression of more nonconformist work.

     This rigid management of the arts was far from inevitable after the Bolshevik victory.  In 1920 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published "The Realist Manifesto," arguing for artistic freedom and some prominent Bolsheviks, notably Trotsky, always maintained that writers should have a free hand [3].  The blossoming of certain arts, particularly poetry, film, and graphic design, before Stalin’s assumption of power implies an alternative development that might have been possible under a government calling itself communist. 

     Well before the narrow mandates that dominated Soviet art for decades, Gold published his theoretical essay “Toward Proletarian Art.”  His ideas are best understood in their original context, as a reaction to his mentor Max Eastman whose collection Colors of Life (1918) opened with a prefatory  essay on “American Ideals of Poetry.” 

     Eastman, an editor of The Masses which had declared itself an unreservedly revolutionary journal,  felt he ought to apologize for writing personal rather than political poems, acknowledging with some diffidence the “crimsoned waves” of protest against the capitalist system.  For him “the essence of life” can be found only in the personal, not in “monotonous consecration to a general principle.”  Noting the conflict between a formalist tradition in American literature descending from Poe which aims at crafting beautiful art objects and a more expressive lineage from  Whitman which for him encourages “the free expression of emotion,” he advocates for “a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.” 

     Gold, too, in “Toward Proletarian Art,” in spite of the title, expresses an ambivalence toward explicitly political writing, unwilling to abandon either the goal of a socially revelatory literature or artistic independence.  He is able to articulate the juncture more adeptly than Eastman, however, due to his undeniably working-class origins in the tenements of the Lower East Side, which Jews Without Money describes so unforgettably. 

     Wishing no less than Eastman to strive toward the presentation of a realism of consciousness, he insists that “only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame.  The things of the world are all portals to eternity ”  For each individual “Life’s meaning was to be found only in the great or mean days between each man’s birth and death, and in the mystery and terror hovering over every human head.”  For him that nexus of experience out of which artist creation arises is centered in the circumstances of his childhood.  “All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement.”

     Thus for him there is no contradiction between the personal and the political.  His own solution is authentically individual, true to his own history while at the same time it is collective, reflecting the experience of his whole generation of immigrants.  “I would show only, if I can, what manner of vision Life has vouchsafed me, what word has descended on me in the midst of this dark pit of experience, what forms my says and nights might have taken, as they proceed in strange nebular turning towards new worlds of art.”  For him there is no gap between realism, his autobiography, and propagandizing: each requires the others.  “Only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame. The things of the world are all portals to eternity.”

     The limits of his position are clear in the fact that he is loath to prescribe to others.  After all, he admits that everyone has a story to tell: “Life burns in both camps, in the tenements and in the palaces, but can we understand that which is not our very own?”  To Gold each artist can only offer “the special revelation Life has given them.  I respect the suffering and creations of all artists” which are bound to be “deeper than theories.” 

     There are indications that Gold’s Communist orthodoxy was hardly absolute.  Jews Without Money in fact received a negative review from The Daily Worker which complained about the cover price and called the novel only “semi-proletarian.”  He was according to some sources an “indifferent” party member who rarely appeared at meetings and complained about their “tedium.”  He differed with colleagues who did not wish to include sports coverage in the paper, and, after denouncing swing music in accordance with the approved line, he reversed himself when many jazz fans wrote to object. 

     He is even willing to use the quasi-religious language more characteristic of mystics, Symbolists, and Aesthetes.  “Only an artist understands art,” and for that reason “to censor the poor brute’s murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death.”  He speaks of “holy passion” and “artist-saints” and maintains that “the Social Revolution” is “Life at its fullest and noblest,” indeed, it is “the religion of the masses.” 

     Like Eastman he pays homage to Whitman, with the sole reservation that America’s national poet saw no development beyond bourgeois democracy.  This accusation of failure to glimpse the possibility of a socialist future is, of course, accurate, and, while it makes little sense to complain of Whitman for this reason, it does indicate Gold’s values [5]. 

     “Toward Proletarian Art” opens with a description of the contemporary social turmoil as “The Apocalypse” and argues that, since “the old economic order is dying,” surely innovative forms” of art will accompany the new age.  Gold was notoriously critical of other contemporary movements, attacking not only Surrealism and the likes of Gertrude Stein but also the more manifestly humanist writing of Thorton Wilder.  Since the Romantic Era, critics had particularly praised works of introspection and experimentation, but Gold labels all such artists “self-absorbed.”  They are for him The Hollow Men [6].  Such writers, he feels “have all been sick,” as they lack “roots in the people.”  “The art ideals of the capitalistic world,” he goes on, “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it from among the people. We must lose ourselves again in their sanity.” 

     In practice this meant providing a vivid account of life in the tenements, just as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done earlier for other settings.  Some critics have belittled Jews Without Money as a casual unselfconscious memoir, while its admirers have often celebrated it for much the same reason.  The original review in  the New York Times described the novel as having “no story but a stirring panorama of the east side of his childhood.   with a hand as unerring as truth itself . . .  Mr. Gold has captured all of this life with its radii within the net of his words.  It has the deep shadows of a Rembrandt picture, and the high challenge of a Whitman poem.” [6]  The verisimilitude of his depiction of life on the Lower East Side is uncompromising, including its gangs and prostitutes, its anti-Semites and Jewish villains.  Social injustice is countered by the narrator’s mother’s quiet dedication to her family’s survival, while his father never loses his conviction that he can make it in America.  The story is never overdetermined.  There are no heroic radicals, no caricatured bosses, simply a life remembered, and the reader needs no more explicit justification to understand why the working poor might turn from childhood illusions like Buffalo Bill and adult ones like an imminent Messiah toward the redemptive promise of  socialism.

     Yet the books ends with a strident call for revolution in a tone different from anything which has come before. 

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy.  You are the true Messiah.  You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to love.

     O great Beginning! 

     A paperback edition of Jews Without Money was published by Avon in 1965 omitted the call for revolution with which Gold concluded his novel.  The fact that this was a blatant example of censorship does not alter the fact that the book loses little without those last five sentences.  If the revolutionary imperative is not implied by the entire narration, it is an aesthetic misstep.

     Just as the conclusion of Jews Without Money seems abrupt, Gold’s theory and practice remain imperfectly harmonized.  He clearly calls for innovative artistic work to match contemporary social changes: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.”  Like Trotsky, though, he shrinks from mandating just what new standards would look like.  Both the commitment to change and the disjunction between ideology and fiction are significant, the first to indicate the author’s passionately held values and the second to remind readers that the political and the aesthetic occupy different realms of culture and neither can dictate to the other. 

 

 

1.  Originally published in The Liberator, vol. 4,no. 2 (February, 1921).

2.  Foe an exception, see Richard Tuerk, "’Jews Without Money’ as a Work of Art,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1988).

2.  For Trotsky, see his book Literature and Revolution.  My essay “Marxism’s Limits” discusses Trotsky’s attitude.

3.  J. Hoberman, “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York,” The Nation, May 12, 2021.

4.  This sort of criticism is all to common in recent years.  See the devastating critique of the Norton edition of Emma in James Seaton’s From Plato to Post-Modernism.in which Seaton quotes a feminist criticism of Austen for failing to demonstrate that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.”

5.  This title of one of Gold’s collections of essays turns Eliot’s phrase against itself. 

6.  March 23, 1930, “Boyhood on the Old East Side; Michael Gold Puts Down His Memories of Tenement Life, Pushcart Peddlers and Gang Wars in a Vivid Autobiography.”