i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

The Cold War Battles / 83with Alice’s continuing productivity. The 1958 date of the letter indicates aline of demarcation between the old and the new left in politics, literature, andin Neel’s career as well. Gold recognized that San Francisco was the center ofa new movement with the creative energy of the old Village, but he was notable to join it. Neel, on the other hand, would not only paint Allen Ginsberg’sportrait (c. 1966, ƒg. 63), but, the year following Gold’s letter, was a member ofthe cast in the classic Beat ƒlm Pull My Daisy (1959).For Neel, Beat literature would have represented another viable oppositionalstance to mainstream culture in the 1950s, one that had strong echoes ofGold’s proletarian literature from the 1930s. 71 Yet despite his debt to proletarianliterature, Ginsberg would hardly have ended “Howl” with words likeGold: “Lenin! / I see the bloody birth you will bring.” And for his part, Goldwould not have been caught dead chanting mantras in a Yoga position in aGreenwich Village coffee house. Neel’s portrait of Ginsberg as a drugged outmystic, painted in the mid-1960s, could not be more different from the stolidportrait of Gold from 1952. For Neel, admiring and recording them both, itwas all part of the changing Zeitgeist from the ƒfties to the sixties. 72In 1967, when Gold died, Neel pulled her portrait of him off the shelf andpainted his memorial, not in terms of socialist realism but in her own “personalrhetoric,” (Mike Gold, In Memoriam (1893–1967), ƒg. 64). Propping thepainting on a dresser, draping it with black cloth, and placing a skull andpitcher of lilacs (the „ower of mourning) on a low stool, she created a privateshrine—the very opposite of a socialist realist icon—to the now-neglected author.The homemade, heartfelt altar was an appropriate “funeral,” because forGold communism was a religion, a faith he maintained until his death. Althoughhomemade altars with portraits of deceased relatives are common inhomes throughout Latin America, as Neel well knew, they look unfamiliar—strange—in the North American context. Neel created an unorthodox memorialto an orthodox communist whose thinking, within the American context,was subversive. So, too, Neel’s memorial subverts the clichés of socialist realistmonuments and brings us back to the historical reality of place and time: Goldexited stage right in 1967, at the moment of the ascendency of the New Left,and shortly before the student protests would erupt at Columbia University, afew blocks from Neel’s apartment.The continuing in„uence of proletarian literature and of Gold’s work inparticular can be found throughout Neel’s career, surfacing in her choice anddescription of her subjects. For instance, in her slide lectures Neel describedFuller Brush Man (1965, ƒg. 10) in a way that suggests how thoroughly she hadabsorbed the subject matter and content of proletarian literature: “He was Jewishand he had been in Dachau. Those things in his pocket are prizes for buyingsome of his brushes . . . He said he had to make twenty-ƒve sales a day for