Why There Are No Great Soviet (or New Deal) Novels

In The Liberal Tradition (1950), the critic Lionel Trilling called attention to the “fatal separation” he saw between

the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination. . . . Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs, then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.

Trilling believed there was no great novel celebrating the New Deal, in the first instance, or, more broadly, the Welfare State or Mixed Economy or Keynesian Interventionism or “People’s Capitalism” (a term President Eisenhower tried to popularize) or Centralized Planning or, at the extreme, coercive socialism or Communism.

I think he is right. There are great anti-collectivist, anti-Communist novels, but no great pro ones. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) may be the closest thing to an exception. It argues in favor of both government intervention (when the hero, Tom Joad, learns that the U.S. government migrant labor camp he’s driven into has not only toilets, showers, and democratic elections, but dance nights, he cries out, “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t they more places like this?”) and self-sacrifice to build a better world for others (Tom responds to his mother’s worry that, if he works to organize the poor, she may never see him again:

Well, maybe . . . a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then . . . it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the house they build -- why I’ll be there.)

But novel-lovers--apparently even Steinbeck himself, who said he didn’t deserve his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature--would not rank Grapes of Wrath as the equal of, say, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August.

One way to understand why there are no great communist/communitarian novels is to look at what I take to be the central paradox of the American character: Americans’ ideas about people as social beings come from the Enlightenment; Americans’ ideas about people as individuals come from our conservative (read: Calvinist/Counterreformation Catholic) religious heritage, from the Romantics, and from Sigmund Freud.

In our public lives we believe in reason, pragmatism, science, equality based on natural rights and the rule of law, soft-edged utilitarianism, co-operation, democracy, quantification, and, certainly not least, a free market where cream rises to the top. At the same time, we believe that the private self is radically unknowable, rich, perverse (“Every inclination of the human heart is evil” -- Genesis 8:21), self-indulgent, spontaneous, emotion-driven ("In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives" -- Freud), tortured, alienated from others and dismissive of them.

There are no great collectivist or socialist or Soviet novels because the novel is a Romantic art form. Novels focus on individual experience. In a novel, nothing is more important than personal life and relationships -- certainly not such vague, utilitarian things as the welfare of the state or Other People. It was, after all, a novelist (E.M. Forster, a favorite of Trilling’s) who wrote that splendid-sounding, stupid credo, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (But, Mr. Forster, say your friend was going to blow up an airplane or Parliament or pass an A-bomb to al-Qaeda, surely you’d do something.) It is inconceivable that a good novel could end with an admirable hero sincerely announcing to his beloved or a crowd, “I can’t tell you how great it is to be alive in a caring welfare state where I know I’ll never want for food, shelter, and decent medical care.”

Trilling wanted a great New Deal novel, which, like a square circle, can’t exist. If one wants to see the Enlightenment triumphant in great art, one must look to other arts. To music, for example, and not only to composers of the Enlightenment like Haydn and Mozart but to the Beethoven of the Eroica, the Tchaikovsky of The 1812 Overture, practically all of Prokofiev, some Shostakovich, and, of course, John Philip Sousa. The New Deal can claim at least one great composer: the Aaron Copland of El salón México, Billy the Kid, An Outdoor Overture, Our Town, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, The Red Pony. (Copland knew he wasn’t a Romantic. “Agony I don't connect with,” he said. “Not even alienation.”)

The contemporary German novelist and sometime politician Günter Grass understands the different requirements of Enlightenment politics and Romantic art. He has said, “What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both.”

Anthem of 1950s America

It was common for educated liberal Americans in the 1950s to feel, as the novelist John Cheever wrote in 1959, that we were living in hell. The tragedy of life was then as much talked about as multiculturalism is today. The "tragic vision" was smuggled aboard in the New Critical ideology we learned in our college English classes. This vision fed upon the Cold War and on what we'd learned of human depravity in World War II and Korea. The vision emphasized our profound limits: said we couldn't expect to improve life much -- would fail to overcome our own failings, to say nothing of society's. All we could do was stoically keep muddling on, as we had in the war, pushing toward small, nearby, mainly private goals. At times we almost felt we were living a “long day’s journey into night,” which Eugene O’Neill play burst on the scene in 1956 and won all the prizes.

This narrow view of human possibility was set to music by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur in their failed 1956 comic operetta, Candide. At the end of the show, Candide -- having been many times seduced, swindled, and murdered -- turns up in Westphalia, where he began, and finds Cunegonde, the woman he's always loved, who herself has been raped and killed again and again. Her optimism absurdly undiminished, Cunegonde says now they can start over and make a life as harmonious and noble as their "master," the tutor Pangloss, promised them. Candide interrupts:

No, we won't "think noble," because we're not noble. We won't live in beautiful harmony, because there's no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best, and live out our lives. Dear God! that's all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.

And he sings the anthem of the fifties as I knew the decade:

You’ve been a fool, and so have I
But come and be my wife.
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow,
And make our garden grow.

Cunegonde immediately sees the wisdom of this new vision of life; she sings:

I thought the world was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But now I’ll teach my hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

The whole chorus takes up the song, their sound so big the words blur and you have to get them from the script:

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please,
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

And now the chorus overwhelms the orchestra, goes a cappella in multipart harmony for a Messiah-like climax that shakes the stage and phonograph speaker:

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow!
And make our garden grow!

In the original cast recording, you can hear a woman’s voice -- Barbara Cook’s as Cunegonde, I assume -- enter a split second early on the final “And.” I like thinking that much that was positive in my youth is symbolized by Miss Cook’s impulsiveness and energy too great to be contained.

Why There Are No Great Soviet (or New Deal) Novels

In The Liberal Tradition (1950), the critic Lionel Trilling called attention to the “fatal separation” he saw between

the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination. . . . Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation. . . . Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs, then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.

Trilling believed there was no great novel celebrating the New Deal, in the first instance, or, more broadly, the Welfare State or Mixed Economy or Keynesian Interventionism or “People’s Capitalism” (a term President Eisenhower tried to popularize) or Centralized Planning or, at the extreme, coercive socialism or Communism.

I think he is right. There are great anti-collectivist, anti-Communist novels, but no great pro ones. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) may be the closest thing to an exception. It argues in favor of both government intervention (when the hero, Tom Joad, learns that the U.S. government migrant labor camp he’s driven into has not only toilets, showers, and democratic elections, but dance nights, he cries out, “Well, for Christ’s sake! Why ain’t they more places like this?”) and self-sacrifice to build a better world for others (Tom responds to his mother’s worry that, if he works to organize the poor, she may never see him again:

Well, maybe . . . a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then . . . it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . . I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the house they build -- why I’ll be there.)

But novel-lovers--apparently even Steinbeck himself, who said he didn’t deserve his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature--would not rank Grapes of Wrath as the equal of, say, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August.

One way to understand why there are no great communist/communitarian novels is to look at what I take to be the central paradox of the American character: Americans’ ideas about people as social beings come from the Enlightenment; Americans’ ideas about people as individuals come from our conservative (read: Calvinist/Counterreformation Catholic) religious heritage, from the Romantics, and from Sigmund Freud.

In our public lives we believe in reason, pragmatism, science, equality based on natural rights and the rule of law, soft-edged utilitarianism, co-operation, democracy, quantification, and, certainly not least, a free market where cream rises to the top. At the same time, we believe that the private self is radically unknowable, rich, perverse (“Every inclination of the human heart is evil” -- Genesis 8:21), self-indulgent, spontaneous, emotion-driven ("In our innermost soul we are children and remain so for the rest of our lives" -- Freud), tortured, alienated from others and dismissive of them.

There are no great collectivist or socialist or Soviet novels because the novel is a Romantic art form. Novels focus on individual experience. In a novel, nothing is more important than personal life and relationships -- certainly not such vague, utilitarian things as the welfare of the state or Other People. It was, after all, a novelist (E.M. Forster, a favorite of Trilling’s) who wrote that splendid-sounding, stupid credo, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (But, Mr. Forster, say your friend was going to blow up an airplane or Parliament or pass an A-bomb to al-Qaeda, surely you’d do something.) It is inconceivable that a good novel could end with an admirable hero sincerely announcing to his beloved or a crowd, “I can’t tell you how great it is to be alive in a caring welfare state where I know I’ll never want for food, shelter, and decent medical care.”

Trilling wanted a great New Deal novel, which, like a square circle, can’t exist. If one wants to see the Enlightenment triumphant in great art, one must look to other arts. To music, for example, and not only to composers of the Enlightenment like Haydn and Mozart but to the Beethoven of the Eroica, the Tchaikovsky of The 1812 Overture, practically all of Prokofiev, some Shostakovich, and, of course, John Philip Sousa. The New Deal can claim at least one great composer: the Aaron Copland of El salón México, Billy the Kid, An Outdoor Overture, Our Town, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, The Red Pony. (Copland knew he wasn’t a Romantic. “Agony I don't connect with,” he said. “Not even alienation.”)

The contemporary German novelist and sometime politician Günter Grass understands the different requirements of Enlightenment politics and Romantic art. He has said, “What is deadly dangerous to literature is that in politics you have to repeat yourself, and literature and art are about the new and the innovative, about the undiscovered and the unvoiced. We must find ways to show responsibility to both.”

White Boy's Heaven: The Harlem Gospel Choir

Those of us lucky enough to get into the Harlem Gospel Choir’s concert Sunday night saw two shows—three, if you count the audience’s joyful participation in what was on stage. (Four, if you count the 30-plus minutes of encores.)

The first act’s concert was a recital of classic Negro spirituals and a ten-minute medley of songs from “Porgy and Bess.” The second act’s songs were, with the exception of “Amazing Grace,” recent gospel music of a Pentecostal bent.

I have to admit my strong preference for the music of the first act, much of which I learned as a boy from my mother and in elementary school. “Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “There Is a Balm in Gideon,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Summertime”—those were sung, and well sung, leaving so many more I wanted to hear: “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” “Lord, If I Got My Ticket, Can I Ride?”, “Deep River,” “My Lord, What a Morning.”

The choir’s deeper affinity was with the songs of the second act. (A symbol of this: in the first act it sang from sheet music; in the second, no.) These songs, none of which I knew, all had a solo singer, woman or man, singing and shouting while the chorus called out catch phrases from the lyrics. To see what I mean, go to the choir’s website (www.harlemgospelchoir.com/) and click at the top of the page to “view video.”

Now, I admit that the chorus did a terrific job belting out these upbeat songs, that the audience loved them, and that I enjoyed them. It was songs like these sung by a choir like the H.G.C. that moved Steve Martin, the con-man preacher in the film Leap of Faith (1992), to shout out the unforgettable praise, “Is this white boy heaven, or what?” But I don’t remember the melody from even one of the songs, remember at most a word or phrase: “Happy!”, “Freedom!”, “He blesses me!”, “He cares!” Granted, as the choir performs them, the songs are wonderful to see and hear because they give us a bit of the ecstatic, Holy Roller—God’s right with us in this room!—experience.

But the heart loves most what it loves most, and I had tears in my eyes listening to the songs in the first act. How profoundly these “Negro” songs have become part of most American’s experience! My mother, who grew up white and well off in ‘teens and 20s in the Jim Crow city of St. Louis, used to say she wanted “Deep River” sung at her funeral. I feel I have as much right to the songs, or almost, as any of my African-American contemporaries.

And let’s note that whites have done a lot to promote this music. The Czech composer Anton Dvorak said the spirituals (and "Indian music") were America’s greatest musical contribution to world culture and used several melodies in his “American” compositions, most notably of course his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” Jean-Paul Sartre (in Nausea) and John Osborne (in The Entertainer) have written movingly of the transcendent beauty of black folk music. And Allen Bailey, who founded the H.G.C. in 1986, is himself white.

Further—and here we’re really digging back—we could argue that, just as it was the French who kept Faulkner’s name alive through WWII, when none of his books were in print in the U.S., and the French who made jazz and detective films and (some think) Jerry Lewis intellectually respectable, so it was the British of the 1870s, and particularly the most famous Brit of that and five other decades, Queen Victoria, who made Negro spirituals something all educated people should know.

The chorus from Fisk University, an institution for blacks in Nashville, Tennessee, toured Europe in 1873, singing classical lieder to show how cultured black people could become and, more important, raise money for their young school. As encores they sang a few Negro spirituals. (This, incidentally, was what the great black contralto Marian Anderson generally did—classical music for the body of the concert, black music as frosting on the cake.) British audiences were bowled over by the spirituals—music they had never heard before and that fit right in with the Romantic rage for “the folk” and its art. The Fisk students—first generation emancipated slaves, remember—were invited to sing for Victoria, who rewarded them with a painting of her that now hangs in the university’s Jubilee Hall.

If you missed the concert, wait: with any luck the H.G.C. will be back in a few years; its last visit was 2002. Or you can see it in New York, where every Sunday afternoon another edition of the choir performs at B.B. King’s Blues Club in Times Square, or you’ll catch up with it as it travels—as it constantly does—around the world. Between October 3 and December 29, 2006, it will give a total of 71 performances in Ireland (24), the Czech Republic (6), Russia (6), Japan (11), Italy (6), Poland (13), Lithuania (3), Latvia (1), and Estonia (1).

The H.G.C. is notable in ways that have nothing to do with their singing. They are wonderfully dressed: men in black, women in white. They are beautifully polite: a man offers a hand to help the women up and down the stairs to the platforms on which they sing. They are grateful, modest, and good-humored about the audience’s delight in their work. While they don’t take themselves seriously, they do their singing; one man buttoned his jacket as he walked forward to do his solo.

Finally, the choir has a magical conductor, pianist, stage director, silent emcee. My wife and I arrived too late to get a program, but the H.G.C. website leads me to believe this wizard’s name is Solomon Bozeman. Mr. Bozeman, if it was he,* created one of the most casually thrilling theater moments I’ve seen. When the choir sings a cappella, he gets up from the piano and stands to conduct. Once while conducting, he turned around and faced the audience in the middle of a song, and we worried something was wrong. But he smiled and then, for the first and only time, he himself sung, solo, in a warm tenor voice. “If you cannot sing like angels, if you cannot preach like Paul,” he sang, “you can tell the love of Jesus, Who died to save us all.’” On the words “sing like angels,” he gestured slightly toward the chorus. We knew what he meant.


From The Santiago Times, September 30, 2006


*It wasn't. A friend with a program told me later that it was Gregory Hopkins.

FOLLOW-UP: a still later note. It may have been Gregory Hopkins, but it wasn't the Harlem Gospel Choir. The H.G.C.'s manager, Anna Bailey, having seen my review in the Santiago Times, emailed me to tell me the group I heard were imposters and had no right to use the H.G.C.'s name, which is copyrighted in Latin America by the New York City - based H.G.C.