Every Reader's Burns

 

by Alexander Nasmyth (1828)

 

     Like others in the Every Reader’s Poet series (of which this is the twenty-second), this essay assumes no knowledge of literature among its readers and aims simply at acquainting people with a few poems by canonical authors while eschewing scholarly jargon and footnotes.  Since Americans will require some annotation due to Burns’ dialect, I am including none of the poems’ texts here.  All are, of course, readily available online, often with glosses for the Scots words.

     Even in this poetry-starved age, virtually all English speakers know four or five poems by Robert Burns: "Auld Lang Syne,” certainly, and very likely “For A’ That and A’ That,” “A Red. Red Rose,” “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled” and perhaps “Address to a Haggis” or “To a Mouse” as well.  Some of his lyrics are popular songs: “Green Grow the Rashes, O” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”  Several of his lines are known by many who may even be unaware of their origin. 

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

                        from “To a Louse”

 

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft a-gley.

            from “To a Mouse”

     This penetration into the general culture would doubtless have pleased the poet who was himself a working man who espoused a radically democratic political view.  Here, however, the reader will find those favorites neglected in favor of comment on several of Burns’ somewhat less-known poems.  He may have been less pleased to learn that he has drawn scant attention among academic critics, though his general popularity and his reputation as Scotland’s national poet are undiminished.

     Conscious of this role and loyal to the land of his birth, Burns commonly employed Scots dialect, though did write some poems in standard English.  Upon first opening a book of his poetry, the language presents an immediate obstacle.  Any persistent reader will find that the difficulty soon vanishes.  At first, one should by all means find an edition with convenient glosses (ideally on the same page), but soon these will be consulted only occasionally.  For Scots people the reward is to hear artful poetry couched in the sounds of home, and for the rest of us a glimpse of yet another way to be human.

     When Burns was active, many Britons held anti-Scots prejudices.  In spite of the considerable intellectual history of the country, including the Scottish Chaucerian poets in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which produced writers like David Hume and Adam Smith, many considered the Scots backward.  Samuel Johnson asked "What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?" and dismissed it as a tourist destination, saying "Seeing Scotland, Madam, is only seeing a worse England.”  An extreme popular expression of the English attitude is the widespread but ill-documented story of Sawney Bean, the supposed cannibal.  Highlanders were considered particularly barbaric and likely traitorous -- the wearing of kilts was outlawed for political reasons in 1746, effectively ending their use in everyday dress.

     However, with the coming of attitudes associated with the Romantic movement, many values were inverted and “primitivism” became fashionable. Macpherson’s Ossian, which purported to be translated from Scots Gaelic, enjoyed a considerable vogue (though to Johnson it was simply "another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood").  Folk songs as well as unlettered poets like Stephen Duck became objects of curious interest to the reading public and Thomas Percy’s collection of traditional songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Sir Walter Scott.  At the same time Burns’ outspoken radical political views, including support for the American and French Revolutions, were more or less consistent with those of many of the Romantic writers, though they continued to attract criticism as well.

     Burns had been struggling as a farmer and was contemplating moving to Jamaica when he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 with the idea of raising funds for his passage, but the book was so successful that the poet never emigrated.  He found that he had sufficient success as an author to decline job offers as an editor and as a professor of agriculture, and was eventually given a post as excise supervisor which, while no sinecure, provided a stable income. 

    “The Twa Dogs” is a beast fable, a form familiar from such medieval examples as Reynard the Fox, The Owl and the Nightingale, and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules.  Caesar, who, as his name suggests, is a dog owned by a rich man, speaks with Luath (a Scots Gaelic name meaning swift or nimble) whose master is a working man.  Caesar, a dog “o’ high degree” of an exotic non-native breed, is “keepit for his Honour’s pleasure.”  He is, nonetheless, no snob and is willing to frisk even with a “tinkler-gipsy’s” mutt.  Luath, on the other hand, is a working dog, "a plough-man’s collie” and thus a Scots native.  Yet the two are great friends, as Burns says, “thick thegither.”

     Caesar describes how the landlord who lives on rents has every luxury, to the point of ”downright wastrie” and asks how the poor can live, saying “I own it’s past my comprehension.”  Luath replies that, though it is true that they are often hard put to hold off “cauld and hunger,” unaccountably they are “moistly wonderfu’ contented.”  The clear-sighted master’s dog notes the attitude of the ruling class.

 

Lord, man!  Our gentry care sae little

For delvers, ditchers and sic cattle;

They gang as saucy by poor folk

As I wad by a stinking brook.

      

    Luath explains what pleasure the poor take in their families, “their gushies weans an’ faithfu’ wives,” though noting that, when they have a bit of leisure and can take a drink or two such that they feel “unco [uncommonly] happy,” their complaints emerge. 

 

They'll talk o' patronage an' priests,

Wi' kindling fury i' their breasts,

Or tell what new taxation's comin,

An' ferlie at the folk in Lon'on.

 According to Luath they are “decent, honest, fawsont [respectable] folk” who are “riven out baith root and branch” “some rascal’s pridefu’ greed to quench.”  Surely, he thinks, the wealthy who have no material want, must be free form care.

      Caesar replies that anyone who truly knows them “wad ne’er envy ‘em.”  Having “no real ills” of which to complain, “they make now themselves to vex them.”  He observes the working people, when labor is done, feel “unco weel” whereas the idle rich are “curst” by “want o’ wark,” and neurotically “loiter, lounging, lank, and lazy,” ”their days unquiet, lang, and restless,” leading many to succumb to “drink and whoring.”  In the end both friends “rejoice they werena men but dogs.” 

     Just as in “For A’ That and A’ That” Burns manages to portray the very real suffering of the laborers and the injustice of the economic system while ridiculing the masters and claiming defiantly that the worker has the better life, feeling the satisfaction of a job well done while, unlike the corrupt ruling class, exemplifying widely accepted moral and family values.  The dogs are a clever rhetorical device, serving as objective observers whose comments are trustworthy and a natural standard against which to measure human society.  Burns proposes replacing the hierarchy of the "great chain of being" with a more natural and democratic order.

     Burns was something of a romantic in the common meaning of the word as well as in its literary usage.  He had a daughter with his mother’s servant, at the same time as he was sleeping with Jean Arthur who bore him twins, shocking her family, though they did marry.  Before long he was in love with Mary Campbell to whom he wrote a number of lyrics such as "The Highland Lassie O."  His poem “Ae fond kiss and then we sever" was written for another woman, Agnes Maclehose, with whom  he had, as far as is known, a warm relationship without physical intimacy.  Written on the occasion of their parting as she sailed to join her husband in Jamaica.

     Burns is often described as simple, direct, and emotional.  He does not shrink from leaning toward sentiment, but then probably most people have moments when sentimentality sems appropriate.   The strength of his love poetry is not in ingenuity (like Donne) or spirituality (like Dante), but rather in the purity and power of simple emotion as experienced by all people.  Reading Burns’ poem, however, and thinking of his biography, one might well think that he is enjoying the display of his loss at parting nearly as much as he might welcome another day spent together.   

     “To a Louse, on Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” like the poems to a toothache, a mouse, and a haggis comically focuses on a “low” theme, here exaggerated by the insect’s crawling about on a lovely lady at church, while the pest better belongs “in some beggar’s haffet squattle” (“squatting in  some beggar’s ‘temple’”).  While amusement is the primary intention of the piece, it satirizes the woman’s pretensions at the same time as praising her, with the noxious louse indicating first, that, whatever her charms, she occupies the same world as those with less status.  She is slightly ridiculous for her failure at self-awareness ("To see oursels as ithers see us!") which leads her to “mony a blunder” and “foolish notions,” due to her putting on “airs in dress and gait.”   

     The language is lively and conversational from the opening “Ha!”  The metric form is close to ballad measure, a pattern also prominent in nursery rhymes, alternating three-beat lines with four beat ones and knitting them with rhymes.  Thus Burns poems, which employs four and two (rather than three) beat lines for variety, sounds more casual and popular than the sustained five beat line of Shakespeare or Milton.  He rhymes AAABAB, intensifying the melody to resemble a dance tune at a village festival.

     His conversational tone is appropriate for poems in the form of letters of which he composed many.  His amiability is evident in his “Epistle to John Rankine," in which the poet’s friend is celebrated for a sometimes raucous conviviality in which the poet is glad to join.  While celebrating their high spirits and occasional frolics, Burns also criticizes the hypocritical moralists who would condemn them.  In the end, the greater part of his verse letter is concerned with the poet’s being apprehending poaching and subsequently fined.  The tone is evident in the first stanza.

 

O Rough, rude, ready-witted Rankine,

The wale o' cocks for fun an' drinkin!

There's monie godly folks are thinkin,

Your dreams an' tricks

Will send you, Korah-like, a sinkin,

Straught to auld Nick's.

 

Notice that the meter and rhyme scheme are the same as in the poem to a louse.

     One need not have Scots ancestry to find Burns one of the most approachable of poets (apart from his dialect).  His poems are generally transparent enough to be understood at first hearing and sufficiently musical to please the ear.  Those uncomfortable with more learned or elite art may enjoy the lyrics of this poet who, like Whitman, thought of himself as a man of the people, and those of us who have bristled at the world’s injustice appreciate his ridicule of the ruling class and praise for the workers.  Finding himself out of the mainstream of English literary tradition, Burns was able to contribute novel sounds and sentiments that continue to capture the imagination of readers far from the fields of his Ayrshire upbringing.  

The Life and Death of American Communes

  

This survey is not meant to be comprehensive – other references exist for that.  Here enough data are presented to suggest the rich and varied history of American communes, to venture a few generalizations, and to pose some questions. 

 

     Nearly every imagined utopia includes social ownership of the means of production.  Yet attempts to put this appealing idea into practice have foundered.  Small voluntary groups, intentional communities for whom communism in the sense of sharing important assets is an ideal, have espoused lofty goals, but they have often been unstable, with many lasting only a few years.  The exceptional cases with greater longevity are often those with a religious or other authoritarian base.  Meanwhile, many countries that call themselves communist have only replicated the class stratification inherent in capitalism while eliminating democracy in order to maintain the power of the new ruling class.   

     In spite of a history of failure, communes have significant inherent advantages.  The substantial savings that result from the sharing of expenses would surely make collectivism far more common, were it not for the clash of egos, the tendency toward hierarchy, and the rapacious greed that reinforce individualistic systems.  Replacing competitive rivalry with the secure support of a cohesive community could be a powerful inducement to communal living, but such promise has rarely materialized, as many groups have bickered and splintered early on.  This instability has been heightened by the fact that unconventional living arrangements have been always so marginal in America that many participants willing to experiment have been religiously obsessed, eccentric, or artistic, not perhaps the most representative, steady, or industrious of citizens.

     America experienced a great flowering of communes in the nineteenth century, most of which lasted only a short time.  Their inspiration came for the most part from three sources: the Bible, utopian socialists, and humanistic philosophies seeking to free people from concerns about supporting themselves in order that they might devote themselves to aesthetic or intellectual interests.  

     Though ignored by most Christians, the Biblical basis for communism is explicit.  Acts 4: 32 declares that early believers retained no private property, “but they had all things common” with the result that none lacked for anything as “distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:34).  Over the centuries small groups have tried to realize this principle in practice including religious houses such as monasteries which present a highly disciplined model of communal life.  In nineteenth-century America such groups included the True Inspirationists of Amana, the Oneida Perfectionists, the Shakers, the Separatists of Zoar, and many others. 

     The Amana Colonies in Iowa were among the most successful American communes.  Founded in 1855 by German immigrants of the radical pietist sect, the Community of True Inspiration, which believed they had modern prophets in their midst, the group prospered for almost eighty years.  Nineteenth century observers noted that their villages had no unemployment, no poverty, no crime, and sufficient resources to provide employment to their neighbors as well as charity to poor outsiders who happened to pass through.  Residents of Amana held all the land and buildings in common; they ate in great dining halls and were governed by a council of elders.  With the Great Change, completed in 1932, Amana was reformed as a joint-stock company with each resident receiving shares.  No new prophets had emerged for a half century by that time, and many of the originally severe principles such as the group’s hostility to marriage and children, had relaxed.  Their use of German had been a factor both uniting the residents and separating them from their neighbors until Harding’s Language Proclamation, a reflection of WWI xenophobia, forbade their use of it in the public sphere.  Meanwhile, automobiles, radio, and movies were eroding the colonies’ isolation.  As long as the residents were unanimous in their world-view, they worked together in  harmony; but when dissent became possible, their cooperation weakened and dissolved [1].  Thus the history of the Amana Colonies illustrates both the factors that can sustain a commune and the dissolution likely to follow the loss of a shared focus. 

     Another nineteenth century religiously based commune was Oneida, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 and lasting until 1881.  Residents were Christian perfectionists, that is, they believed that Christ had returned in 70 C.E. with the destruction of the temple and that a Christian could find perfection in this world, not just in the next.  The group practiced group marriage – Noyes is the first user of the term “free love” [2] -- as well as common ownership of the means of production, and farmed in addition to manufacturing a variety of products so successfully that at one point they employed hundreds of outsiders and spawned four new communities [3].   The community declined when Noyes sickened and died, and his agnostic son  proved an unsatisfactory replacement.  Even with their transgressive sexual practices, the people of Oneida managed to flourish for a generation but only as long as their strong leader was at the helm. 

     The Shakers, or United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, as they called themselves, believed that Christ’s second coming would be heralded by a woman and they regarded their leader Ann Lee as a "manifestation of Divine light."  Though she died, by the end of the eighteenth century the group had adopted new leaders who announced by 1793 that property was to be held in common among them.  Though they required celibacy of all, they increased in numbers, eventually founding eighteen sizable communities with numerous smaller offshoots.  They sold highly-regarded wooden furniture as well as herbs, brushes and brooms, and were highly successful pioneers in selling garden seeds.  Like other religiously motivated communes, the coming of the twentieth century found their spiritual energy waning, while the requirement of celibacy meant they could gain new members only though conversion or the adoption of orphans.  Today three Shakers remain at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, one of whom was only recently accepted.

     The community of Zoar in Ohio was established by pietist immigrants from  Germany who in 1819 established a system of collective ownership of the means of production.  Benefiting from a profitable land sale to the Ohio and Erie Canal, they gained a solid financial base and ultimately owned over ten thousand acres of land.  They expanded into small industry, building an iron forge, a sawmill, woolen and cotton mills, and even operating as an area bank where outsiders could deposit money or secure loans.  They were democratic, electing leaders by popular vote by both men and women, though most looked to their charismatic leader Michael Bimeler for guidance.  After his death the community in 1853 seemed to lose much of its energy, though they remained communal until 1898.

     Among the many other religious groups that established communes in  the nineteenth century was yet another pietist group from Germany, the Hutterites who came to the United States  and settled mostly in Montana, South Dakota, and Canada in the 1870s.  They currently have fifteen communities supported primarily by agriculture. 

     Christian mystic Wilhelm Keil founded Bethel in Missouri in 1844.  By 1855 they had 650 acres of farmland and a distillery whose products were in demand among their neighbors.  Eighteen years earlier Keil had led a group from Bethel west in covered wagons to Oregon where they established the Aurora community in 1855.  Both endured past Keil’s death in 1877 until 1883 when collective ownership ceased and the assets were distributed. 

     In 1805 Johann Georg Rapp, a theosophist and Swedenborgian established the Harmony Society with four hundred followers who had left the Lutheran Church and supported themselves with both agriculture and manufacturing, growing in their several locations to over eight hundred members before a third of their members broke away in 1832 including many younger members who objected to Rapp’s recommendation of celibacy.  The group finally dissolved in 1905. 

     Adin Ballou, an early advocate of Christian socialism and anarchism established the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts which lasted from 1843 until 1857.  Though religious in its orientation, this group was more broadly political than many, advocating anarchism, temperance, abolitionism and women's rights, as well as spiritualism.

     Many more thoroughly secular communes were founded as well.  While Christians found a clear Biblical mandate for communism, non-religious thinkers also provided a range of  ideological bases.  During the Renaissance Montaigne had developed the notion of the bon sauvage and in the eighteenth century Rousseau speculated that competitive greed had produced all human suffering [4].  In the nineteenth century some pioneers in the new study of anthropology concluded that early peoples had long lived under a communist system.  The most significant proponent of this view was Frederick Engels [5] whose The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State outlined a fall, resembling that of Adam and Eve in Christianity, from a peaceful state of mutual support and protection to the rapacious and competitive greed of the slave, feudal, and capitalist systems that followed.  In this context a number of what Marx would call utopian socialists – Owen, Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Bellamy –  set forth plans for creating communist societies not through revolution, but by voluntary associations whose superiority would eventually convince all to participate.  Well over a hundred such “intentional communities” were founded during the nineteenth century in the United States [6].

     Robert Owen, a British textile manufacturer who became a leading early advocate of socialist cooperatives, came to the United States in 1824 and purchased the failing Rappite establishment at Harmony, Indiana.  Owens possessed sufficient resources and prestige that he addressed the American president and congress the following year, declaring that his cooperative system would signal "a new empire of peace and good will to man" leading to "that state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness,...which has been foretold by the sages of past times," fulfilling thereby the destiny of the human race [7].  A good number of Owenite communities were launched in the following decade including Washoba (1825-1829), founded by Fanny Wright for emancipated slaves to earn money with the eventual view of going to Haiti or back to Africa while being managed by white trustees.  The group in Kendal, Ohio, lasted a similar period, while perhaps a dozen others survived for shorter periods.  

   In the early 1840s American disciples of Fourier, in a movement supported by a national organization, the American Union of Associationists and by Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New-York Tribune, launched more than thirty communes, called phalanxes, though most lasted only a few years.  Perhaps the most successful of these projects  was the Wisconsin Phalanx at Ceresco founded by Warren Chase which functioned from 1844-1850, though adherents continued to advocate controversial ideas such as religious free thought and free love until they were attacked by an irate mob.  A noteworthy later Fourierist community was Silkville, Kansas, established in 1869 by Ernest de Boissière and lasting until his return to France in 1892. 

     Among the more successful non-religious communes were those of the Icarians whose ideology was based on Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie.  In 1848 a group of his followers whose socialism had much in common with that of Robert Owen embarked to establish a colony in  the United States.  They established a number of communities in five states and experienced factional splits over the years, but some of their settlements lasted for considerable periods: forty-six years in Corning, Iowa; eighteen in New Icaria, Iowa; eleven in Nauvoo.  In that location by 1878 there  were reportedly eighty-three residents who adequately supported themselves with agricultural operations.  A visitor describes them as “free from material embarrassment” and standing upon a “solid basis,” [8] while operating under a pure democracy in which decisions are made by the voting. 

     Admirers of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards established the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth and a journal called Industrial Freedom to further their egalitarian goals.  Their Equality colony in Skagit County, Washington lasted from 1897 until 1907 when factional disputes resulted in violence.  Four other colonies had been established in  the Puget Sound region including one at Burley, Washington in 1898 which endured until 1912. 

     Other secular utopian organizations included several anarchist communities such as that at Home, Washington (founded in 1898 by George H. Allen, Oliver A. Verity, and B. F. O'Dell) which changed to private ownership in 1909 following attacks and internal dissension over both political and moral grounds.  The Socialist Community of Modern Times, founded by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, in Brentwood, New York survived from 1851 until 1864.

     A les well-defined third group of communards might be called counter-cultural, like the hip movement of the 1960s.  The most celebrated is certainly Brook Farm which attracted some of the greatest writers in America for a time.  Founded by George and Sophia Ripley in 1841 with “transcendentalist ideals,” the community was supported by a farm as well as a school that drew tuition-paying students.  At various times Brook Farm boasted Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker among its residents.  A similar group under the leadership of Amos Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane started the Fruitlands Commune in 1843, but that venture lasted only seven months.  The Ruskin Colony in Tennessee (1894-1901) was founded by Julius Augustus Wayland.  Among its ventures was a traveling band before the group dissolved amid disputes over free love and financial stress.

     Many of the trends evident in this nineteenth century history persist through the twentieth. Religious motivations continue to be prominent in several of the most viable communities.  A twentieth century German Christian sect, the Bruderhof, was founded in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold.  Though its own origins are associated with university youth and their movement of the 1920s exemplified by the Wandervögel, the Bruderhof long sought to unite with the Hutterites, several times attempting a merger only to split again.  Today the Bruderhof has twenty-four communities and operates a number of thriving businesses, among the most successful being the manufacture of toys and a charter jet service used by businessmen and celebrities.

     The Children of God (now The Family International) was founded in 1968 by David Berg, also called “King,” “The Last End-time Prophet", and "Moses,” is a cult that combines evangelical Christianity with the trappings of the hip youth movement and hypersexuality.  Many members of he public came into contact with a child of God when she approached him on the street to invite him to her commune in an authorized practice called “flirty fishing.”  The group's activities persist today in spite of decades of allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

     Other twentieth century Christian communes were founded by Dorothy Day’s anarchist Catholic Worker movement, whose members live communally and operate a number of collective farms while performing charitable works and advocating pacifism and social justice.   

     Two of the most long-lasting American religion-based communes practiced forms of Hinduism.  Lama was begun by Robert and Barbara Durkee and Jonathan Altman under the spiritual direction of Baba Ram Dass, formerly Timothy Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert, who had become a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, a devotee of Hanuman, though the present approach to spiritual practice at Lama is eclectic.  The commune is off-grid and derives its income from both agriculture and summer programs for outsiders.  

     The Krishna Consciousness group under the leadership of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founded New Vrindaban in West Virginia in 1968 which has managed to continue operations in spite of serious scandals including fraud and murder by cult leaders.    

     Among the very few twentieth century communes with a political ideology was Jersey Homesteads, a Jewish collective farm developed by Benjamin Brown who also started a similar group in Utah.  Meant to resettle unemployed garment workers, Jersey Homesteads aimed to have both agricultural and manufacturing arms.  In spite of support from Albert Einstein and Ben Shahn who painted a mural for the school.  Opposed by the garment workers’ union but supported by the Roosevelt administration, the project lasted from 1936-1940. 

   Among the most successful communes without a well-defined ideology, The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin in Tennessee in 1971 with a hundred followers.  Though in the active management of the commune Gaskin was advised by  a Council of Elders and later a Board of Directors, he remained a commanding influence until his death in 2014.

     The East Wind Community was established in 1974 in the Missouri Ozarks by people interested in  the ideas of behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner.  They continue today to support themselves through a number of enterprises, including the sale of sandals, nut, butters, and hammocks. 

     Drop City was an early commune of the second “hip” wave.  Established in 1960 by four students as a venue for avant-garde art to which all were welcome, the location became known primarily for the buildings constructed of junked cars.  They never had any plan for an economic base, and the policy declaring the commune "forever free and open to all people" attracted many transients.  Drop City’s public face reached a peak in June of 1967 when crowds attended a Festival of Joy on the site, leaving founder Gene Bernofsky so disgruntled he remained in his dwelling and departed never to return at the event’s conclusion, though he later said that he had expected to spend his life there.  The other original members left during the next two years, abandoning the property to whoever wished to stop off there.  By 1973 the location was virtually unoccupied, though it was not until 1979 that the land was sold. 

     Another arts-oriented “liberated zone” was Druid Heights in Marin County founded in 1954  by anarchist lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow.  Alan Watts, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder spent time there before the land was acquired by the National Park Service in 1977.

     Slab City was initiated by squatters on an abandoned army base in southern California where several large-scale art installations were created.  Today the spot has become an off-grid rv park where many live – thousands during the summer -- simply to avoid rent.   

     The New Buffalo commune was founded by poets Max Finstein and Rick Klein in 1967.  Residents kept some livestock and grew crops, living in tepees and adobe huts, but never achieved anything close to self-sufficiency.  Though Finstein left after just over a year to found The Reality Construction Company, those whom remained persisted in the location until the early seventies and the land remained collective until 1982 when Rick Klein assumed ownership.  In 1990 the New Buffalo Bed & Breakfast, called “the Far-Out Inn” by the Los Angeles Times, opened.

     Communism has several powerful advantages over private ownership.  Cooperation is surely a key to the enormous success of homo sapiens.  In prehistoric times for hunter-gatherers sharing was the rule.  In economies based on farming and manufacturing, collective ownership of the means of production leads to production based on people’s needs rather than profit.  Living collectively is significantly more efficient than each family unit looking after its own dining and housing.  Further, one might expect a strong emotional advantage in the entire community’s striving for mutual support rather than competitive rivalry.

     Yet communes have typically failed to thrive.  From the histories of the chief attempts in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, certain significant factors emerge.  The anomalous position of such groups surrounded by a free enterprise economy multiplies their challenges, though this disadvantage is difficult to quantify.  “Forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old,” in the language of the Preamble to the  I. W. W. constitution, presents problems in  a capitalist environment.  The business relations of communal societies required their dealing with profit-oriented railroads, wholesalers, shippers, and meatpackers, and, just as small farmers have always been at the mercy of banks and corporations in spite of owning their own means of production, isolated groups have few resources to compete with corporations many times their size possessing immense wealth and political influence.

     The pressures of operating within a non-socialist, indeed, often an anti-socialist country were not financial alone.  In a land where private property is to many a divinely-protected meant that the collective alternative had little appeal for many Americans whom perceived it as “foreign,” “un-American.”  This suspicion was bolstered by the fact that, for instance, many of the religious communards of the nineteenth century were German immigrants and an outsize proportion of Communist Party membership during the ‘thirties was Jewish.

   A major challenge for intentional communities is always attracting and retaining residents.  During the nineteenth century, for many Americans even sustainable subsistence farming was an aspiration and the promise of regular meals attractive.  Similarly, in the twentieth century, though hip communes drew many college-educated youth, they were also an alternative for homeless people, runaways and the addicted.  The more prosperous communes provided a secure material base, often accompanied by high-sounding religious or social ideals, yet once other options became more viable, the appeal of collective farms suffered.  Young people who wished to make their fortune or even simply to live in a big city were drawn away by the many options available in contemporary society.

     What might substitute for an authoritarian leader or a dogmatic religious belief system?  Counter-cultural enthusiasm or commitment to revolutionary ideals has not generally proven an adequate motivator.  Particularly in contemporary American culture in which affluence is the principal marker of prestige and having more than one’s neighbor is perceived as success, egalitarian systems have much to overcome.  Love for one’s partner and one’s family is considered desirable, but we have little experience with a genuine active love of community.  Even social support for the ill, needy, and aged is controversial and true economic democracy has never been considered a goal even by politicians labeled liberal.  Yet a utopia that realizes the slogan “one for all, all for one” has been conceivable to some in every generation, including a few who have been willing to try to build such a system, pioneers who may be honored if a future time ever learns better than our own to place cooperation before competition.  The positive bonds that would then join people together as members of a single family, brothers and sisters who share common interests and can best work in unison to achieve the happiness of all would then replace the waste inevitable with profit, exploitation, and internecine rivalry.  In the end Proudhon was correct in maintaining that property is theft [9], but the crime of stealing the labor of others is unlikely to be even recognized, mush less halted, in any future foreseeable from here. 

        

 

 

 

 

1.  The familiar Amana appliance brand was established in  the colonies shortly after their conversion to a capitalist corporation. 

2.  Noyes also advocated what he called “male continence,” avoiding ejaculation and pursued eugenic schemes.

3.  The Oneida silverware brand originated in the commune, but, like the case of Amana refrigerators, nation-wide commercial success occurred after the group became a corporation.   The other Noyesian communes were in Wallingford, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; and Putney and Cambridge, Vermont.

4.  In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.  Engels had drawn on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan who said in The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois that the native Americans “carried the principle of ‘living in common to its full extent. Whatever was taken in the chase, or raised in the fields, or gathered in its natural state by any member of the united families, enured to the benefit of all, for their stores of every description were common. They had regular hours for cooking through the whole establishment, and whatever was prepared was free to all.” (p. 318)  Kropotkin regarded early societies as anarchist rather than communist.   See his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which uses the example of the San people of southern Africa as evidence.

5.  For Montaigne, see especially his essay “On the Cannibals.”  For Rousseau, his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.  The “noble savage” idea is influential in Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe as well as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in America.  Even Pope found that the native Americans lacked “the Christians thirst for gold” (“An Essay on Man”). 

6.  The classic study of such communes, written by a long-time resident at Oneida who personally visited most of the sites abut which he writes is William Alfred Hinds’ American Communities (1878).  The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875) by Charles Nordhoff and John Humphrey Noyes’ History of American Socialisms (1870) are also valuable sources.  More modern references include Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 (1951).  For the twentieth century the best references are Timothy Miller Communes in America, 1975-2000 (2019) and Yaakov Oved Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1988).  The Foundation for Intentional Communities maintains a global list of collective organizations, including communes, coops, cohousing arrangements, and others.

7. William Alfred Hinds, American Communities, p. 67.

8.  Oakley C. Johnson, ed., Robert Owen in the United States (New York, 1970), p. 51.

9.  From his What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in (1840).  Proudhon was, of course, referring to the means of production, not to personal property such as clothes or books. 

Little Blue Books

 

     The paperback books of the 1950s and the earlier Everyman’s Library and Modern Library made literary classics available at a modest price.  The access to great writing thus given the general public has a value rivaling that  of everyone’s favorite socialist institution, the public library.  Yet an even more accessible series – the Little Blue Books – had brought provocative ideas and beautiful poetry within the reach of everyone who could afford a cover price of ten cents.  I used to see stacks of these with their plain and numbered covers, not all, in fact, blue  – they were published until 1978 – in Chicago’s used book stores and they are traded yet today online, forming an odd niche for collectors.

    These little stapled booklets, three by five inches and never over a hundred pages, were published by the Haldeman-Julius Company of Girard, Kansas which may seem an unlikely location for a popular literary publisher.  The explanation is more unlikely yet.  Girard remains today a small town with a population of two and half thousand, a figure that has varied little since 1890.  Apart from farming, the area once included some mines, a few small mills, an iron-smelter, a tannery, and a brick-yard.  Immigrants, especially from the Balkans, were recruited to serve these industries in the middle of the American plains.  The radicalism some brought from Europe combined in Girard with the populist program of the Farmers’ Alliance and the growing power of American socialist parties.  By far the most successful of these, the Socialist Party of America (founded in 1901), had strong support in the trans-Mississippi West.

     In this context Percy Daniels, an activist in the rurally-based People’s Party (elected lieutenant governor of Kansas from 1892-94), purchased the town’s newspaper, the Girard Herald.  In 1895 Julius Wayland, who had been obliged to flee his hometown of Versailles, Indiana to avoid lynching for his radical views and who later participated in the utopian socialist Ruskin Colony in Tennessee, established the weekly newspaper, the Appeal to Reason which came to have more readers than any other socialist journal in American history, reaching 550,000 around 1910.  [1]

     The editor during the early twentieth century was Fred D. Warren.  The danger he posed to capitalism is evident from his legal challenges.   He was arrested and convicted for offering a reward for the arrest of former Kentucky governor William S.  Taylor who was on the run after being implicated in the murder of his gubernatorial rival William Goebel.  In  this case President Taft commuted Warren’s sentence, saying he did not wish for the editor to be a martyr. To Taft the paper’s views were “wild and perverted” but “for all persons of average commonsense a reading of his articles is the best antidote for the poison he seeks to instill.” [2]  At one point in 1901 the Postal Service  forbade his paper’s distribution system (sending bundles to individuals who would then resell the papers).  Before the charge was dismissed Warren had a glimpse of Leavenworth the published description of which led to a new charge, this time for obscenity (also dismissed).  The Post Office continued to seek any pretext for banning the Appeal. [3]

     In 1912 Wayland, the Appeal’s founder, committed suicide and ownership passed to his sons who sold the company to Emanuel Haldeman-Julius who had been an editor and his wife Marcet.  Persecution continued, particularly with the paper’s initial principled opposition to WWI and the new Red Scare laws.  After a few life support maneuvers, including backing the war effort and emphasizing a kind of patriotic display that anticipated the popular front strategy of the American Communist Party several decades later,  [4]  the paper ceased publication in 1922, replaced by the Haldeman-Julius Weekly which emphasized literature, art, and culture.  That same year the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company began the Little Blue Book series, sometimes called the Peoples Pocket Series or the Ten-Cent Pocket Series.  (The name persisted, though the booklets were not always blue.)

     The political partisanship of the Appeal remained in the new venture.  The first series of Little Blue Books included Rhymes of the Revolution, with an introduction by Debs, as well as editions of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Common Sense.  Works at once political and literary included William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.  Radical critiques of Christianity were represented by Robert Ingersoll, the Lamarckian evolutionist William Henry Hudson, and Carroll Lane Fenton, a prominent opponent of creationism, while progressive social views were contained in volumes from Margaret Sanger (What Every Girl Should Know) and Marriage and Divorce by Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen (whose father had founded the New Harmony Community).  Literature was available in the form of stories by Poe and Chekhov and poetry by Shelley.  FitzGerald’s  “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” an extremely popular poem at the time, was accompanied by an essay by leftist attorney Clarence Darrow (who lived in Girard for a time).  Introductory philosophical texts included Will Durant on Aristotle and on Nietzsche. There was also a rhyming dictionary, for those who wished to compose lyrics themselves. 

     Later series included other self-help title, including How to Become a Writer of Little Blue Books.  These practical guides ranged from How to Cook Fish and Meats, How to Play Golf, How to Save Money, How to Improve Your Conversation, and How to Psycho-Analyze Yourself to How to Write Love Letters, Perhaps the most ambitious publication was called How We Can Live Happily. 

     Some of the literary titles were altered in time in the effort to sell more copies.  For instance, Essays on de Gourmont and Byron was reissued as Masters of Erotic Love, and Essays on Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde became A Sailor and a Homosexual.  Gautier’s The Fleece of Gold was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, Hugo’s The King Enjoys Himself became The Lustful King Enjoys Himself, and George Moore’s Euphorian in Texas gained the subtitle An Unconventional Amour.

     In spite of such concessions to marketing, though, the day of the Little Blue Books was passing.  While paperback competitors gained sales, government repression continued.  Hoover’s aggressive FBI investigation of the company after WWII resulted in the refusal of many stores to carry their publications and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius himself was convicted of income tax offenses before he drowned in his backyard swimming pool in 1951.  His son Henry then kept the business afloat for a twilight period until 1978 when a fire destroyed the printing plant, bringing an end to the long experiment in providing the best literature to the masses. 

     Throughout its run, the literary emphasis had remained dominant, with works by Marcus Aurelius, Washington Irving, Boccaccio, Emerson, Whitman, Carlyle, Emerson, Montaigne, De Quincy, Schopenhauer, “Michael Angelo,” Lamb, Lord Chesterfield, Goethe, George Sand, Gorky, Rousseau, Longfellow, Ibsen, Thackery, Machiavelli, Dante, and Alexander Pope.  Little Blue Books offered a liberal education in manageably brief and mercifully inexpensive increments.  They can now remind us of the fact that not so long ago, many ordinary working people not only sought to understand their place in American capitalism, but also aspired to consume the best writing with the confidence that the taste for beauty and for truth need not be confined to the ruling class.   

     I like to imagine the Little Blue Books in the pockets of factory workers, itinerant farm laborers, hobos riding the rails, and new immigrants working on their English, passed perhaps from one hand to another until they were torn and ragged.  Little Blue Books allowed those whose daily lives may have included few luxuries to form independent opinions on the issues of the day and to taste some of the finest thought and art ever produced.  The history of the Haldeman-Julius company may remind the twenty-first century that the sublime is accessible to all who reach for it, that culture belongs to everyone, and that at one time, in the very heart of America, the radical transformation of society was a genuinely popular cause.

 

 

 

1.  By comparison the Communist Daily Worker had a top circulation of 35,000. 

2.  New York Times, February 2, 1911.

3.  The legal history is detailed in Harold A. Trout, The History of the Appeal to Reason: A study of the Radical Press available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217268777.pdf.

4.  One slogan in the late ‘thirties and early ‘forties was “Communism is the new Americanism.” 

Socialist Parties of the United States

 

     In spite of the obvious advantages of a popular front against exploitation the left has always been a fractious place.  What some participants and historians might see as the struggle to develop a correct “line” that will most effectively advance the people’s cause will seem to others internecine infighting. At times, activists were perhaps influenced by the temptation to defeat one’s comrades when capitalism seemed too big a bully to challenge.  Nonetheless, the history of American revolutionary groups is a rich one, full of heroism and critical to the reforms that have made our economic system more livable for more people over the last hundred and fifty years.  This survey is meant to pay tribute to the generations of activists who have moved the country forward, and socialists have been at the forefront of nearly every campaign for social progress from abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and labor rights, but it may also remind progressives of the energy lost to factionalism.

     I have sought to include in this list all parties explicitly calling for revolutionary change while excluding reformist or mixed groups like the Progressive Parties associated with Robert LaFollette and with Henry Wallace, or the Working Families or New York Liberal Party.  I have concentrated on groups that meant to initiate a mass electoral movement, however limited their success.  The Industrial Workers of the World is included due to its outsize role in American history though it was a union and not a political party.

     Though my arrangement is primarily chronological, some broad general groupings exist.  The early groups contributed to the formation of the Socialist Party which has been the top socialist vote-getter by far, having achieved totals little short of a million in 1912 and 1920 with Debs as candidate and in 1932 with Norman Thomas at the head of the ticket.  The formation of what came to be called the Old Left was inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the formation of the Comintern.  Though the Communist Party was America’s most organized and active left-wing group, its members were obliged to adopt the Soviet line and to suppress internal discussion.  Later, with the arrival of the New Left in the ‘sixties, others imitated the Maoist program while some sought to follow models from Cuba or Vietnam.   Since the collapse of the mass movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, many groups of the New Communist Movement, none very large, argued over correct policy while many other leftists worked in single-issue groups.

     The overwhelming positive implication of this simple listing is the evidence it provides of a grand tradition of workers, both native-born and immigrant, continuously agitating for a better society, thus illuminating a history often ignored.  It suggests as well several negative factors that have contributed to the relative weakness of socialist ideas in the American political forum. 

     First is factionalism itself.  Apart from dividing workers and thus diluting their interests, this tends to encourage the suppression of open discussion essential for a vigorous movement.  In politics, as in science and other arenas, the enforcement of orthodoxy deaden progress.  There can be no certainty that a given analysis or strategy is effective; a healthy organization will be always ready to consider opposing conclusions from the facts and to take new information into account.  For political purposes numbers are far more useful than a theoretically perfect program.

     The development of antidemocratic tendencies was further encouraged by the emulation of foreign regimes whether Soviet, Chinese, or Third World.  Just as the people’s victory in Russia was largekly subverted by the Leninist idea of a dictatorship euphemistically labeled “democratic centralism” and Stalin’s dictatorship.  Communist parties were until recent times intolerant of internal discussion.  The unfortunate effects of Americans “tailing” after other regimes rather than seeking appropriate American solutions include agitation against comrades such as Trotskyites and the artificial linking of the priorities of socialists in the United States with the practices in countries abroad with claims to be socialist.

     The hard fact is that the most disciplined parties, typified by the Communists of the ‘thirties, have been the most effective.   The same pattern emerged again in the ‘sixties as activists from Socialist Workers and Progressive Labor in gained outsize influence in contrast to the more casually organized members of SDS.  An openness to the free discussion of new ideas seems contrary to the unanimity useful for collective action.   This dialectic is evident today on the right wing as the Trumpite fascists have proven far more successful than the more reasonable traditional Republicans.

     Most Americans have a shallow involvement in politics and, unfortunately, little grasp of their own interests.  They have often been distracted and misled by racism, sexism, and xenophobia, but some in every generation have recognized that socialism offers the solution of social and economic problems.  The following list is a reminder of this ongoing struggle.  I am sure it is far from complete.

 

 

1876 The Socialist Labor Party (originally the Workingmen's Party of the United States) was the first socialist party in the United States.  Some elements broke to help form the Socialist Party.  

1898 the Social Democratic Party of America was founded which merged into the Socialist Party in 1901.

1901 the Socialist Party organized including elements of the Socialist Labor Party.  In 1971 the party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA which split in 1973 into two factions, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party USA.

1905 Industrial Workers of the World as a union did not run candidates but included people from the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party.

1919 Communist Party of the USA from a split in the Socialist Party.  Another splinter, the Communist Labor Party of America merged with the CPUSA in 1921.

1928 Communist League of America formed by Trotskyites after their expulsion from the CPUSA which in 1934 joined with the American Workers Party to establish the Workers Party of the United States which lasted until 1936 when its members joined the Socialist Party.

1934 Workers Party of the United States formed by the merger of the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A. J. Muste's American Workers Party.

1935 the Revolutionary Workers League split from the Workers Party of the United States, disbanded in 1946

1936 American Labor Party formed by members of the Socialist Party.

1937 Socialist Workers Party of Trotskyites expelled from the Socialist Party.

1938 the Leninist League broke from Trotsky and the Socialist Workers Party, In 1946 it was renamed the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party.

1959 Workers World Party split from SWP.

1962 Progressive Labor Movement formed by Maoists within the CPUSA renamed Progressive Labor Party in 1965.

1964 Spartacist League split from the Socialist Workers.

1966 Black Panther Party disbanded in 1982.

1966 Freedom Socialist Party feminist split from Socialist Workers, spawned the Radical Women activist group.

1967 Marxist-Leninist Party (USA), dissolved in 1973.

1967 Peace and Freedom Party.

1967 Youth International Party formed by hip radicals

1968 Young Lords, a Chicago gang, reformed as a political group.

1968 Young Patriots formed by white Southerners in Chicago along the model of the Black Panthers.

1968 White Panthers formed by hip white radicals along the model of the Black Panthers.

1970 Gray Panthers, old persons group along the model of the Black Panthers.

1971 People’s Party, a national grouping including the Peace and Freedom Party that functioned only in the 1972 election, reformed in 2017 by supporters of Bernie Sanders

1971 New American Movement, formed by SDS members, merged with DSOC in 1983 to establish the Democratic Socialists of America

1971 Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) was formed from the October League (Marxist–Leninist), many of whose members had been SDS activists who followed a Maoist line.

1972 The African People's Socialist Party.

1973 Communist Workers' Party split from Progressive Labor, dissolved to join New Democratic Movement in 1985.

1975 Revolutionary Communist Party (originally the Revolutionary Union)  split from Progressive Labor.

1986 Labor Militant founded by Trotskyites, changed to Socialist Alternative (United States) in 1998.

1990 Green Party evolved from environmentally concerned Committees of Correspondence

1995 Socialist Equality Party (United States) formed by the Workers League, the US supporters of the ICFI. The Workers League had been founded in 1966 by the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), which emerged out of a split with the Socialist Workers Party

2004 Party for Socialism and Liberation, split from Workers World

The Anti-Aesthetic Aesthetic of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan

 

     Admirers and critics alike must acknowledge that James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan preserves a glorious array of slang from the ‘twenties.  Studs and his young friends on Chicago’s South Side know every mean ethnic slur including some that were unfamiliar to me such as “schonicker” for Jew (though fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow uses it, too).  Their Irish parents may have contributed such Britishisms as “gaffer” and “shag,” while the Black population whose spread dislodged the Lonigans from the old neighborhood contributed “jazz” (in the sense of having sex) and “getting one’s ashes hauled.”  Everything good is “jake.”  Good things may also be “swell,” but this word often carries suggestions of snobbish arrogance.  “That’s a swell suit” means approval but a bit of surprise at the wearer’s implied social pretension.  In Studs’ world one can say “She’s a keen girl” and “keen” carries sexual associations absent from its use today (if, indeed, it is used today). 

     Of course, the elements of a story that are most up-to-date are those that first sound dated and soon require footnotes.  Yet to a twenty-first century reader, it is not the language alone that is out of fashion.  James Farrell himself and his monumental trilogy Studs Lonigan are to a certain extent passé.  With the privileging of the largely European avant-garde tradition and its American lineage descending from Gertrude Stein, with naturalism as a whole démodé, it is little wonder that few critics care to comment on the proletarian novels of the Depression era.  The left-wing views that motivated a legion of agitators among the authors of the ‘thirties are now more likely to be found among the obscure scholarly publications of university mandarins practicing New Historicism or Gender Studies.

     Yet at one time books like Studs Lonigan were not only popular but seemed to many the strongest representatives of American literature, with Studs prominent in most reckonings.  [1]  Readers today might have to think a minute to understand H. L. Mencken’s insistence, repeated at least from 1917 on, that Chicago was the most important city in American literature.  For him the most innovative and authentically American writing developed in the Midwest, the source he thought of “all literary movements that have youth in them, and a fresh point of view, and the authentic bounce and verve of the country and the true character and philosophy of its people.”  In part Mencken’s encomium derived from his conviction that in the West “originality still seems to be put above conformity.” [2]  

     Mencken was surely cocking his snoot at New York City, but the gesture carries a meaning beyond provocation.  If the United States is conceived as the place of liberation from moribund Europe ways, writers from the Midwest and West, further removed from the conservative values and decorum associated with the old wealth of the Northeast and the façade of gentility among the Southern plantation owners, might offer the greatest freedom of all.  Writers from states lying well west of the Hudson River such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edward Dahlberg, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren challenged received ideas in wildly different ways.

     In this American context, influenced by the socially conscious naturalism of Zola, which itself developed from Flaubert and Balzac, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan opus, three novels amounting to nearly a thousand pages, seemed a ground-breaking and monumental achievement.  Farrell’s uncompromising treatment of poverty written on the cusp of the Depression was daring in its sexual content as well as its radical thematic premises. 

     Sex in Studs’ world was often rough and thoughtless.  His story includes descriptions of taboo topics such as masturbation, homosexuality, and gang-rape.  Well aware of the possibility of censorship, Farrell excised certain especially explicit episodes, yet Farrell and his publisher Vanguard remained anxious about the consequences of the content that remained [3].  The original introduction assured readers of the sociological value of the work but cautioned that “it is not for children or for the unsophisticated.”  Its unsparing realism and lack of “prudery” means the book might “shock the naïve adult who has lost touch with youth.” [4]  As a further cautionary move, the 1932 Vanguard dust jacket bore a special notice informing the public that the book was a “clinical document,” directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”  A later edition included a second and bolder introduction, stressing the story’s social implications, in particular the failure of the Catholic Church, as though some ground had been gained in writers’ ability to deal with sexuality [5].  Nonetheless, the book was still to encounter censorship [6].

     No one can doubt Farrell’s role in increasing the writer’s freedom in America.  Whereas Mark Twain had been torn between his rebellious Huck side and his conformist Tom Sawyer tendencies, the milieu of Farrell’s novels is wholly that of his lower middle-class characters, albeit from the point of view of Danny O’Neill, himself on the rise in education and status.  The inclusion of sexual incidents so significant in people’s lives yet long proscribed in fiction is surely salutary.  Furthermore, the open espousal of revolutionary economic views, in Farrell’s case Trotskyite, was novel in his youth, though for a time during the later ‘thirties it seemed as though a good portion of the American intelligentsia had become “fellow travelers.”  Farrell’s role in pushing back sexual and political boundaries is clear.  What has been debated from the start has been the aesthetic quality of his work, whether his fictions possess the style, the beauty to make great novels.   

    The verdict has often been far from flattering.  Most critics, even Farrell’s admirers, concede his weaknesses, prominent among them being a graceless style.  To Alfred Kazin he was the “the plainest” and “most ungainly” of writers; Irving Howe found his prose afflicted by “soggy repetitiveness;” and Mark Shorer observes that “in sheer clumsiness of style no living writer exceeds him.”  The point need not be belabored, since virtually all critics have concurred to one degree or another in defining these weaknesses [7].  Luna Wolf, who worked with Farrell for nine years as a secretary and editor said “He was an extremely creative writer, but he was not a great stylist.  That’s always a problem with his writing.  It’s a shame.  Because he could have been right up there.  It’s terrible that he had this flaw.  He was a writer who, in a way, couldn’t write” [8].

     Farrell was quite aware of modern developments in literature.  He did in fact live in Paris for a year during 1931 and 1932 while writing Studs Lonigan.  His use of popular songs, fragments, newspaper headlines and other materials recalls John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.  Yet, when he attempted a more radical deviation from conventional narrative, as in Studs’ terminal delirium, most of his readers find he had little success.  (He later imagined he might write a Joycean book about O’Neill’s deathbed consciousness.)  While others, like Lola Ridge and Edward Dahlberg, managed to combine a proletarian perspective with innovative technique, Farrell was never at home with anything but straight story-telling.

     It is hardly a justification to claim that, since Farrell’s character were so often bored, asking each other what they should do, seeking intoxication, loveless sex, and risky or cruel pastimes just to get through the day, that readers should feel similar ennui.  The deadening repetition of the daily routine, relieved mostly by suffering, ought, of course, to be vividly portrayed, not reproduced in the reader.  This general truth is apparent in the vernacular, at first quite fascinating, but which becomes tiresome because it is always the same.  The frequent use of vulgarities flattens their impact until the transgressive words fade to having no specific meaning.  Their significance is only general, implying a low social status and a reactive worldview: rough, cynical, semi-anaesthetized, but the same in every utterance.  The worst consequence is that such language, even if it initially shocks, rapidly becomes tedious.

     Yet Studs does retain a readership if no high spot on Parnassus.  How can one account for Studs’ continuing appeal to many readers?  The wealth of local color – not only slang usage, but references to specific Chicago buildings, local politics, and the like – may underly some readers’ pleasure.  Others may applaud Farrell’s principled advocacy for socialism, consistent for a lifetime.  But the primary artistic appeal of Studs Lonigan is paradoxical: the work exemplifies an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.

     Such appreciation of art on anti-aesthetic (rather than non-aesthetic) grounds is not a new practice. The twentieth century produced a theory to explain the beauty of objects considered camp or kitsch, but these are not the only possible categories for ironic appreciation. Some years ago I saw an exhibit of tiny editions of poetry that celebrated poets in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties produced to distribute to friends. Some were mimeographed, all were crude-looking, but this is the very quality that enhanced their meaning for me, indicating unmistakably that the authors were hip enough to cultivate their development with showy disregard for fame and the marketplace.  They intended their work to be defiantly unprofessional-looking.  At the time I myself was making visual poems using paste-on letters, always slightly out of place.  The lack of art school precision seemed just right for broadsides distributed on the street. 

     The shabbiness of the product can be an asset; it can be a seal of authenticity.  I am thinking of a wide variety of examples: Kenneth Anger films or the Cockettes, the off-key ebullience of a Mexican band in the zocalo, the plastic tableware of a marvelous hole-in-the-wall eatery, art brut, the lumpy forms of some Zen pottery, the slapdash simplicity of some graffiti-inspired painting, the creaky voice of an aged Appalachian singer, delivering a tune from a half a millennium ago.  In each case the imperfection seems not just appropriate, but expressively beautiful, however much in contrast to ordinary standards.

     There is a similar technical flouting of the usual rules of art in other writers of whom I am fond. Nelson Algren and then Willard Motley followed Farrell in chronicling Chicago. In Jack Kerouac (and Wolfe before him) the naive sexuality and loping, sometimes wandering, rhetorical periods convey passion and vulnerability. Though many pages of Henry Miller seem to have been hastily written, an intoxicating esprit pervades his narration and, even more, his essays.  His casualness is part of his style and this reader would not have it any other way. Norman Mailer could make stumbling both on the page and in person look like the poignant moves of a great if flawed hero.

     So, while I concur with Farrell’s critics in their negative judgements, I do not regret reading the three volumes of Studs’ life once more. I find in it not just life, but a kind of beauty common as dirt and perhaps sometimes as fruitful.

     At times Farrell can strike just the right note.   Fragments of "Just A Gigolo" are quoted a number of times.  This song was wildly popular, the first hit of Bing Crosby’s long career when it was issued in 1932. In its original form this was an Austrian cabaret song of a hussar fallen in the world to the status of gigolo.  In Crosby’s version the speaker is a WWI veteran in a Paris café who laments; 

 

When the end comes I know

They'll say just a gigolo

As life goes on without me

 

The tone of weary, lack-love suffering, of a life pushed by inescapable currents, directionless, can apply to a poor neighborhood of Chicago as well as to the capitals of Europe.  The confidence implied by the left-wing parade near the conclusion of Judgement Day cannot overcome the pathos of this fragment of song, or the suffering of the lives recorded in the fine detail of Farrell’s memory, not to mention lives not so very different, being lived today on a thousand urban streets, including those of Chicago’s great South Side. 

 

 

 

1.  Vestiges of this prestige persisted.  In 1999 the editors of the Modern Library included Studs Lonigan in their list of the hundred best novels of the century.

2.  The quotations are from the October 28, 1917 Chicago Sunday Tribune.  Mencken also wrote an essay for the London Nation (not to be confused with the American journal of the same name) of April 12, 1920 heralding Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.”  Nelson Algren, a strong but late representative of gritty Chicago realism and left-wing sentiments, cited Mencken’s judgement approvingly in his Chicago: City on the Make.

 3.  One he turned into a short story titled “Boys and Girls” which is included in the Library of America edition of Studs Lonigan.

 4.  Frederic M. Thrasher, “Introduction,” Young Lonigan. Thrasher was a professor of education and author of a study of urban youth titled The Gang.

5.  This was written by University of Chicago English professor and radical activist Robert Morss Lovett.

6.  Studs Lonigan was seized by authorities as obscene in Canada in 1944 and in Philadelphia in 1948.  The latter case led to a significant decision by Judge Curtis Bok who decided in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al. that the works of Farrell, as well as those of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell which had been seized were nothing but “obvious efforts to show life as it is” and could not be suppressed.

7.  Kazin’s comments are in a largely sympathetic obituary in the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1979 titled “James T. Farrell, 1904‐79.”  For Irving Howe, see “Naturalism and Taste” in A Critic’s Notebook and for Shorer, “Technique as Discovery,” The Hudson Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1948).

8.  Robert K. Landers, An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell.  Note the mildly apologetic tone of Landers’ title.  When Wolf left him in 1962 to work at McGraw-Hill, he angrily accused her: “All right!  Go ahead!  Leave the sinking ship!”

9.  The original song was "Schoner Gigolo," (1928), first sung in America by the French star Irene Bordoni.  The song has been recorded by a great many artists, including Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Thelonius Monk, and Louis Prima (for whom it was something of a hit in 1956).