Radiacls, Beats and Beboppers

RADICALS, BEATS AND BEBOPPERS

JIM BURNS

PENNILESS PRESS PUBLICATIONS

www.pennilesspress.co.uk

Published by

Penniless Press Publications 2011

Ebook published April 2018

© Jim Burns

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

ISBN 978-0-244-37645-1

Cover: Greenwich Village New York 1995 – photo Ken Clay

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

JACK CONROY: WORKER WRITER IN AMERICA

RADICALS AND MODERNISTS

WHO WAS ALBERT HALPER?

WILLIAM HERRICK AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

BEN MADDOW

REBEL VOICES

JOHN HERRMANN: WRITER AND SPY

LEFT IN LOS ANGELES

WALTER LOWENFELS

WAS KEROUAC A COMMUNIST?

LAWRENCE LIPTON AND THE BEAT GENERATION

CARL SOLOMON

COOL KEROUAC

JACK MICHELINE: POET OF PROTEST

JOHN CLELLON HOLMES

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: HIP NOT BEAT

BEATITUDE

WHAT BECAME OF CLINT NICHOLS?

ANATOLE BROYARD

BEHIND THE SCENES

HOW  BRAVE WE LIVE

THE AMERICAN CONNECTION

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

CLIFFORD ODETS: SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: THE BEBOP MYTH

ROBERT MCALMON'S POETRY

BIRD BREAKS DOWN

HARRY BISS

BUDDY WISE

BIRD LIVES!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The essays in this book first appeared in the following publications:

Jack Conroy:Worker Writer in America, Critical Survey 7:2, Oxford, 1995

Radicals and Modernists, Prop 3, Bolton, 1997

Who was Albert Halper? Beat Scene 36, Coventry, 2000

William Herrick and the Spanish Civil War, The Penniless Press 9, Preston,1999

Ben Maddow, The Penniless Press 8, Preston, 1998

Rebel Voices, The Penniless Press 16, Preston, 2002

John Herrmann: Writer and Spy, London Magazine London February/March 2000

Left in Los Angeles, The Penniless Press 18, Preston, 2003

Walter Lowenfels, The Penniless Press 11, Preston, 2000

Was Kerouac a Communist? Beat Scene 41, Coventry, 2001

Lawrence Lipton and the Beat Generation, Beat Scene 39, Coventry, 2001

Carl Solomon, Beat Scene 46, Coventry, 2004

Cool Kerouac, Beat Scene Press Pocket Book 17, Coventry, 2008

Jack Micheline: Poet of Protest, Beat Scene 45, Coventry, 2004

John Clellon Holmes, Beat Scene 40, Coventry, 2002

William Burroughs: Hip not Beat, My Kind of Angel: i.m. William Burroughs, edited by Rupert Loydell, Stride Publications, Exeter, 1998

Beatitude, Beat Scene 50, Coventry, 2006

What Became of Clint Nicholls?  Beat Scene 37, Coventry, 2000

Anatole Broyard, The Penniless Press 7, Preston, 1998

Behind the Scenes, Beat Scene 48, Coventry, 2005

How Brave We Live, Beat Scene 57, Coventry, 2008

The American Connection, Beat Scene 35, Coventry, 2000

Maxwell Bodenheim, The Penniless Press 10, Preston, 1999

Clifford Odets: Sweet Smell of Success, The Penniless Press 17, Preston, 2003

Abstract Expressionism: The Bebop Myth, London Magazine London December/January, 2003

Robert McAlmon's Poetry, The Penniless Press 14, Preston, 2001

Bird Breaks Down, Beat Scene 49, Coventry, 2005/2006

Harry Biss, Jazz Journal, Loughton, June 2007

Buddy Wise, Jazz Journal , Loughton, September 2000

Bird Lives!, Ambit 142, London, 1995

William Burroughs: Hip not Beat was first delivered as a paper at a symposium on William Burroughs at Keele University in 1994. It appears here in a slightly different form.

My thanks to all the editors concerned, especially Kevin Ring (Beat Scene) and Alan Dent (The Penniless Press). Also to Ken Clay and Joan Mottram

INTRODUCTION

This book can be seen as a companion volume to a previous collection of essays, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals, published by Trent Books in 2000. It covers some of the same ground in that it looks primarily at American writers active from around 1930 to 1960 and a little beyond. Many of them had radical connections of one kind or another. Some people may wonder why I choose to focus mainly on less well-known writers, and the reason is simple - they are rarely written about and it seems relevant to establish a record of their existence. A couple of the essays deal with very minor figures who got into print during the heyday of the Beat movement, roughly 1957 to 1962, and while they may not appear important enough to warrant such attention they sometimes had something to say and they could be lively and entertaining.

The same can be said about two little-known jazzmen I've included. There is also a piece about Charlie Parker, but so many other critics have written articles and books about him that I've always thought it more interesting to draw attention to rank-and-file musicians who, like the writers referred to above, are often neglected. My spirits sink these days when I open a jazz magazine and see yet another article about Miles Davis or John Coltrane or someone similar to them.

I gather that the article I wrote about Anatole Broyard some years ago is quite popular, though I've been asked why it doesn't refer to his passing for white, which I suspect intrigues certain readers. It doesn't, it's true, and the reason is that I wanted to survey his literary work. I do mention the racial element in his life in another essay, Behind the Scenes, which discusses Chandler Brossard's Who Walk in Darkness, with its fictional portrait of Broyard. I also refer to the fact that a few of his fellow-writers accused him of what R.V. Cassill described as competent malice when he reviewed books by his more-successful contemporaries. My original essay played down that side of his work because I thought there was sufficient evidence to show that, at his best, he was a decent reviewer.

One essay, Bird Lives! is a personal memoir of my early and continuing love of jazz, and particularly the aspect of it known as bebop. My justification for it being here can be summed up by quoting the words of the American writer, Gilbert Sorrentino: Bop, for me, was the entrance into the general world of culture, although at the time, I wouldn't have believed it.

JACK CONROY: WORKER-WRITER IN AMERICA

Proletarian writing in the United States was always a topic likely to arouse heated debate, with few of the participants even agreeing on what the term meant. Did it indicate literature produced by genuine proletarians, or was it a description of writing which identified with them, but could be produced by middle-class authors? A defin­itive anthology, published in 1935 at the height of the proletarian literary movement, included writers such as John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Malcolm Cowley and Albert Maltz, all of them talented and interesting, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, proletarians. The debate was never resolved, and was, perhaps, only settled when the Communist Party line moved away from insistence on the supposed virtues of proletarian values. The Popular Front ideal aimed to incorporate the work of well-known literary figures and played down the productions of genuinely prolet­arian writers.

One of these was Jack Conroy. Born in Missouri in 1898, he was the son of a miner and grew up in a small coal camp, which was, in Douglas Wixson's words,

'bound together in a community of work, shared danger, class struggle, and the special nature of mining itself. The experiences of his younger days were to have a lasting effect on Conroy, whose view of life was shaped more by a collective than an individual philosophy. He started work in a railroad workshop when he was thirteen, and soon began to move toward deeper involvement with the growing labour struggle, cooperative literary enterprises, and identification with the people of the abyss, the disinherited'.

Conroy's father was killed in a mining accident, but he had been a union activist and a relatively well-educated man. His mother was an avid reader of fiction. Conroy himself loved the popular weekly magazines and the cheap novels which spotlighted the adventures of Diamond Dick and other heroes, though he also read Macaulay and learned long poems by heart. Wixson notes that this was a time when union journals printed poetry by workers, and had columns called 'Poems You Ought to Know', and other educational hints. And he adds: 'Conroy followed the oral culture of workers, which included bawdy songs, sentimental ballads, and tales of his child­hood, into railroad shop and factory. His own writing would translate those oral features of workers' lives into an authentic idiom that attracted H. L. Mencken's attention and led to publication in the American Mercury.' As he got older, Conroy read Kipling, Jack London, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Edward Bellamy, and socialist tracts.

He was blacklisted after a major strike in 1922, and a variety of jobs followed as he wandered around the Midwest and tried to look after his family. He was, at the same time, attempting to write, and as Wixson says: 'What was a young worker to do, possessed of a lively intelligence, an interest in books, and writing ability? The natural course of an ambitious, energetic, and talented young person in America was (and is) to struggle upward, out of the working classes.' Conroy, however, had effectively renounced such a direction when he spurned attempts to make him into a white-collar employee. And a brief encounter with student life left him dissatisfied after one term. He wanted to enter into what Gorki had called 'the universities of life'.

His early published work appeared in union magazines and local papers, and by 1930 or so he was in touch with young, radical writers across the Midwest. It is at this point that Wixson's account begins to take on added interest, with a catalogue of now-forgotten writers filling the pages. Little is written these days about H. H. Lewis, Joseph Kalar, Robert Cruden, and many others like them. They did not become professional writers, nor did they necessarily have that aim in mind. Conroy may have summed up their point of view when he wrote an article, 'What if you don't want to write for money?' in 1933, the year when his first novel, The Disinherited, was published in New York. It was, in fact, a lightly fictionalised version of his childhood and first working experiences, and was meant to give a voice to the kind of people that Conroy knew.

The Disinherited brought him some fame, at least around the American Left, though sales were fairly low. And an idea of how some people viewed him can be gained from a publicity photograph which shows Conroy overalled and holding a cow by its tether, and with a hoe clutched in his other hand. This sort of representation of provincial, and particularly working-class writers was (and is) not untypical. And it raises serious questions about how readers and critics rate such writers. There is, inevitably, a loss of seriousness, and a tendency to think: This is a good book because it's written by a farmer, factory-worker, or whatever, and not just because it's good'. The writers were fully aware of the irony inherent in their situation. H. H. Lewis referred to himself as 'the ploughboy poet', and penned a piece of doggerel which summed up his dilemma:

Oh how can I struggle

And win through strife

Looking up a mule's prat

All of my life.

Wixson's survey of the worker-writer movement in 1930 and 1931 is a fascinating story of neglected poets and obscure little magazines. One of the unsung heroes of those years was a printer named Ben Hagglund, described by Wixson as 'a poor man's patron of writing'. Hagglund was hampered by circumstances, and was not always the finest printer there was, but he could be 'a selfless, generous person', hiring himself out for farm work when Conroy was hard-pressed to raise money for his magazine, Rebel Poet, which Hagglund printed. How they managed to finance Rebel Poet, the later Anvil, and a radical anthology, Unrest, is described by Wixson in detail, and is illuminating in terms of explaining how worker-writers had to struggle to see their poems and stories in print.

Conroy, thanks to the publicity surrounding The Disinherited, and because of his energy and enthusiasm for keeping in touch with like-minded individuals, acted as something of a clearing house for radical writers and their work. He had access to the Communist Party magazine New Masses, to which he contributed articles and reviews, and he was in demand for introductions to small collections of verse by young left-wingers. An example of his agit-prop style when carrying out such tasks can be found in When The Sirens Blow, a slim book by Leonard Spier which was printed by Ben Hagglund. Conroy described Spier as 'one of the young worker-poets about whom most literary critics seldom speak unless goaded to it', and he made it clear that he considered it his role to do the goading when he added: ‘The aroma of sweat and the heroism of toil are often very repugnant to the erudite gentlemen who pose as arbiters of literary worth.’ These sentiments were not likely to endear Conroy to sophisticated critics of any political persuasion, and he was to pay for them in later years.

His relationship to the American Communist Party was always problematic, and Wixson has much of interest to say about it. In his words: 'While approving the Party's interventions on behalf of the unemployed and blacks, Conroy nonetheless ignored Party dictates and didactic tendencies among its orthodox ideologues.' There was some advantage in this, as there was in Conroy's location in the Midwest, because it kept him apart from the 'jealousies and backbiting among writers and critics' in New York. He was soon to encounter their influence, despite his distance from them, when his involvement with Anvil brought him into contact with people prepared to manipulate political ideology in order to advance their literary careers.

Wixson's detailed narrative of the rise and fall of Anvil is yet another intriguing look at the problems facing worker-writers. The magazine was, for a time, distributed by the Communist Party, but it also circulated thanks to the efforts of contributors and subscribers. Leonard Spier hawked it around New York bookshops, and the feminist writer Meridel Le Sueur tried selling it at factory gates. With a circulation of five thousand, and a readership higher than that, it was considered important enough for Party officials to object when Conroy printed advertisements for publications frowned on by Communists. He also dared to publish a writer accused of Trotskyism. Conroy, while never challenging the Party line in principle, didn't bother to hold to it in practice. His view was that he'd print anything he thought interestingly written and critical of the status quo, and he wasn't about to quibble over a writer's politics, provided they were generally in favour of the workers and other good causes.

Regional writers like Conroy found themselves under attack from New York liter­ary circles, and Wixson quotes one Midwesterner as recalling that 'regional' was used almost as a dirty word. Changes in the Communist Party programme soon dictated that Anvil shed its regional image, and with it the policy of promoting worker-writers, in favour of printing established authors who, in the spirit of the Popular Front, were travelling with the Party, if not always joining it. The sad tale of how and why Anvil was incorporated into the newly established Partisan Review, and then disposed of altogether, is a depressing mixture of politics, personality clashes, and literary in­fighting, in which the less-sophisticated worker-writers, 'innocent of the city's plots and counterplots in the literary domain', came off worst.

Conroy's second, and last, novel, A World to Win, was neither as interesting nor as successful in critical terms as his first. It would be wrong to say that he wrote it to Party specifications, but he certainly shaped it to suit the political mood, something he had not deliberately done with The Disinherited. It was published in 1935, the year when he delivered a talk at the First American Writers' Congress in New York, and came across to many there as a naive and crude innocent when set among metropolitan intellectuals. That was certainly James T. Farrell's view, and he expressed it some years later in a novel, Yet Other Waters, in which Conroy is por­trayed as a brash provincial, boosted by the Party because of his worker-status and given to wide-sweeping statements invoking the virtues of strike leaflets when com­pared to corrupt novels about bourgeois decadents. Farrell knew that the worker-writers were of little real interest to Communist bureaucrats and their literary allies, and that they would be dropped when it was opportune to welcome acclaimed poets and novelists to the cause. Wixson sees the ambitious left-wing writers on the New York literary scene as anxious to 'reclaim quality and value for their work according to more traditional literary standards', and further notes that 'a shift of power was taking place that sought control of the cultural discourse through systems of exclusion'.

1935 was probably the highpoint of Conroy's activities, although he continued to contribute occasional pieces to New Masses and the Sunday Worker Magazine. In 1939 he co-edited, with Nelson Algren, New Anvil, which was printed by the indefat­igable Ben Hagglund and survived for seven issues. But he had a family to support and obtained a post on the Federal Writers' Project, a branch of Roosevelt's job-creation programme, where he spent much of his time researching folklore and tran­scribing traditional stories. Later, he was employed by popular encyclopedias, cooperated with the black writer Arna Bontemps on several books, and wrote articles and book reviews for various magazines and newspapers. It's significant that Wixson's large book has only sixty pages about Conroy's life between 1936 and his death in 1990.

Jack Conroy made a genuine attempt to promote authentic worker-writing, as opposed to theoretical proletarian writing, but found that it brought him into conflict with the literary establishment. His own work received some initial recognition from that establishment, but was downgraded by its spokesmen when attitudes changed. And he almost inevitably drifted into forms of employment that set him apart from the working class he had been born into and admired. His career raises numerous provocative questions about the position of the worker-writer in a society where the middle class dominates methods of literary production and determines the response to those methods.

This is an essential book for anyone interested in worker-writers, the history of the American literary Left, and questions of cultural norms. It is a little repetitious in places, but generally avoids jargon. And it is well documented, with a mass of information about writers, publishers, editors of little magazines, and printers.

Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwest­ern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990 by Douglas Wixon

Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994) 0 252 02043 X

RADICALS AND MODERNISTS

Cary Nelson, in his fascinating Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945, pointed out that

the modern American poetry we have been most likely to encounter for some time - the poetry most regu­larly anthologised, taught, reprinted, read, and writ­ten about - is the poetry of a limited number of figures (and that) the process by which poets like these are elevated and others marginalised or forgotten (can be) regarded as immensely biased and repressive.

Nel­son's book is a spirited and informative attempt to re­dress the balance by looking at the work of numerous neglected poets, including political radicals, surreal­ists, working class balladeers, and others usually left out of standard surveys of 20th Century poetry. Amongst the poets mentioned are Herman Spector, Joseph Kalar, and Sol Funaroff, all of them at one time linked to the Left and actively publishing in magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. It seems to me that their work says some interesting things about the making of po­etry, and particularly about the relationship between radical politics and modernist techniques. It's too of­ten assumed that many left-wing poets were opposed to modernist ideas on the grounds that they ignored the tastes of the masses, but this was not true of the poets concerned, nor of others like them. Spector, Kalar, and Funaroff were all well aware of what modernism meant and how they could use the techniques it pio­neered in their own work.

All three, and a fourth poet, Edwin Rolfe, were fea­tured in a small volume, We Gather Strength, published in New York in 1933. Mike Gold, the American Communist Party's cultural commentator, wrote the introduction for the book, and referred to them as hun­gry proletarians. Their minds are filled with images of death. They alternate between deathly despair and the wild wonderful dreams of our World Revolution. Noth­ing is clear about them yet, except that they are actors in a great drama. It was, perhaps, a typical piece of revolutionary-hype by Gold, who would often judge a poet by the level or lack of political commitment in the work, but at one point he did also note that the influ­ence of modern bourgeois poetry, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, could be detected in some of the poems. Gold could be dismissive of experimental modernism - We, are not interested in verbal acrobats - this is only another form for bourgeois idleness, he commented elsewhere - but he was prepared to extend a welcome to poets who used modernist techniques that were filtered-through a radical perspective.

Herman Spector

Herman Spector was born in 1905 in New York, the son of a businessman. Little is known about his early life - he dropped out of high school after three years -other than that he worked at a variety of jobs, most of them of a routine labouring or clerical kind. He began publishing poetry in the 1920s, and appeared in avant-garde magazines such as transition and The Exile. According, to Harry Roskolenko, another now-forgot­ten poet of that period, Spector was the bitterest man I ever knew..... Ezra Pound, then extolling social credit economics in Mussolini's Italy, had made Spector one of his far-away proteges.. (he was) savage, brutal and brilliant, an innovator in poetry, and Pound admired his experiments. An example of what Pound liked was Spector's Cloaks and Suits, a cryptic look at a busi­nessman in the rag trades:

The salesmen salaam and kiss his feet and vis

iting buyers respect him because he got more

money than what they got and Mr. Goldberger

figures he could buy every dressmodel in the

building - If he wanted to.....

Spector seems to have almost relished looking at life from the bottom of the social ladder, and he described himself as the bastard in the ragged suit/ who spits, with bitterness and malice to all. Harry Roskolenko suggested that it was some sort of extension of his loath­ing for his upper-middle class background, and said that Spector took shoddy jobs to aggravate the cosmic hatred in his poetry. Throughout his poems there runs a steady stream of images of rusted iron and garbage dumps/flowers and garlic, and windows choked/with faces bereft of colour or hope, and along with them flows a strong social conscience. Pound may have been an admirer of Spector's works but the feeling wasn't necessarily mutual. In a poem published in Partisan Review in 1934, Spector attacked the Objectivist poets (even though some of them were fellow-commu­nists) and alluded to Pound's influence on them:

sadly they perish, each by each,

whispering madness, they disappear...

into the isolate doom, of dreams,

into the cold gray vaults of dust,

and who will gather the darlings up,

arrange them in anthologies?

what mussolini-horse will drop

bouquets upon their mouldering graves?

The techniques that Spector used were, on the whole, derived from modernist sources, though he was not averse to using rhyme and clearly-defined stanzas to make sharp political points. But mostly, the poems broke rhythms, placed lines irregularly on the page, and aimed for a language largely taken from the streets, though there were some uneven excursions into more-literary phrases. If the technique was modernis­tic, though, it was rare for Spector to ever be less than clear in what he was saying. An inward-looking mod­ernism was not for him, and his world was the one in front of his eyes as he prowled the streets:

each morning john hawley jaunts to the job

via streetcar in the summertime,

absentmindedly proffers his fare

(the motorman has a sweaty face),

turns to the sportsection of the paper with habitual in­difference.

Spector's poems appeared in many of the publications associated with the Left,