Abstract
“Hemingway is a power. He has led American writing back to the divine simplicities of the prosaic; he has made a great technical contribution.”2 Not often quick with praise, Michael Gold, one of the chief stewards of proletarian intellectual culture at the time, offered this paean to Hemingway because of the demotic prose with which the latter brought the travails of modern bourgeois life to fiction. The absence of lyricality and abstraction made Hemingway’s work, in the critic’s opinion, elegantly digestible to all who wished to become familiar with it. The bourgeois alienation that served as Ernest Hemingway’s muse, however, impressed Gold much less, and swiftly moved the critic to abbreviate his tribute to the celebrated writer. Gold punctuated his opinion of Hemingway with the following observation: “There is no humanity in Hemingway … He is heartless as a tabloid. He describes the same material as do tabloids, and his sole boast is aloofness, last refuge of a scoundrel. What one discerns in him as in those younger writers close to his mood, is an enormous self-pity … The Hemingways are always running away from something—not going to something.”3 The denunciation so chafed Hemingway that he one day charged into the office of the Daily Worker, the paper that employed Gold at the time, and recommended, through the receptionist, that the columnist should “go fuck himself.”4
The racists assured me that living in such a place must be dangerous. But I was raised on the East Side, and in JWM I described the depth to which a people and their families can be degraded by Jim Crow conditions. The Negroes of Haight Ashbury quarter worked hard and suffered intensely from poverty. They suffer as much as my father and mother and their half-million pauper Jews among whom I grow up.
—Michael Gold, 19651
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Notes
Michael Gold, Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. and intro. Michael Folsom (New York: International Press, 1972), 160.
Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 7.
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 247.
Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 45.
Michael Gold, Jews without Money, with an introduction by Alfred Kazin (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996), 42. Further references will appear as page numbers within the essay.
Christopher Mele, Selling of the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 32.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 353.
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), xxi.
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 75.
Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End: A Portrait of Twentieth Century American Literature and Its Writers (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 71.
William J. Maxwell, “The Proletarian as New Negro: Mike Gold’s Harlem Renaissance,” Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, eds. Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 102.
Michael Gold, “Hoboken Blues,” American Caravan, eds. Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Alfred Kreymborg, and Paul Rosenfeld (New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1927), 568.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 171.
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25.
Lee Bernstein, “The Avengers of Christie Street: Rebellion in Mike Gold’s Jews without Money” The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction, ed. Janet Galligani Casey (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2004), 122.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 44.
Peter Antelyes, “‘Haim Afen Range’: The Jewish Indian and the Redface Western,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 34.3 (2009), 18.
Richard Slotkin, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Mythologization of American Empire,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 164.
Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 220.
Throughout this section of my argument I have purposely used the terms/concepts “whiteness” and “white masculinity” interchangeably because there is ample historical evidence that these ideas were virtually synonymous during the discursive moment that preceded Gold’s publication. These terms became conflated under the ideological regime of Theodore Roosevelt. Gail Bederman demonstrates that Roosevelt understood manliness as an objective that only could be attained by white men and that this manliness only could be achieved through the enactment of white racial supremacy. According to Bederman, Roosevelt saw imperialism “as a prophylactic means of avoiding effeminacy and racial decadence” (187). This philosophy suggested that the more white males participated in racial violence (Indians at home, Cubans and Filipinos abroad), the more they invigorated their masculinity. For more commentary or Roosevelt’s elaboration of the “strenuous life” and how it animated American Progressive imperialism see Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State (New York: Herzl Press, 1999), xiv.
Shmuel Almog, “Was Herzl a Jewish Nationalist?” in Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich (NewYork: Herzl Press, 1999), 181.
Rachel Elbiom-Dror, “Herzl as a Proto-Post-Zionist’?” in Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich (NewYork: Herzl Press, 1999), 248.
Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 8.
Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity; Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79.
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© 2012 Tyrone R. Simpson II
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Simpson, T.R. (2012). To Make a Man Out of You. In: Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature. The Future of Minority Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014894_3
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