Notes / 193a man (who loves children). Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (New York: Harper-Collins, 1990), 230–31.47. Tony Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” Jump Cut 14 (1977), 28.48. These ƒlms were restored in 1982 and are in the ƒlm library of the Museum ofModern Art in New York. Information on the League is compiled in the Tom Brandonƒles.49. Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” 29.50. Ibid., 30. In the same issue of Jump Cut, Leo Seltzer described Brody as “somewhatof a writer and a talker and a screamer. Those who did most of the ƒlming, editingand screening were Del Duca, Balog and I.” Ibid., 31.51. Ibid., 29.52. “Horizon Films Presents ‘Of These Our People,’” „ier in the archives of the NationalCenter for Jewish Film, <strong>Brandeis</strong> University. With thanks to the Center’s director,Sharon Rivo, for providing me with this material.53. Ibid., 58.54. His description of the patrician Edmund Wilson ascending the “proletarian ‘bandwagon’ with the arrogance of a myopic, high-bosomed Beacon Hill matron enteringa common street-car” is unforgettable. For his part, Wilson was quite measuredin his assessment of Gold.55. Buhle, et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 414.56. Mike Gold, “Foreword” to catalog of Alice Neel exhibition, New Playwright’s Theatre,1951, in scrapbook 1, Neel Arts, New York City.57. It is hardly coincidental that the vicissitudes of their careers are parallel. In the1950s and 1960s, neither artist enjoyed favorable critical reception, but by the1970s and 1980s, neo-Marxist and/or feminist critics had begun the process of reevaluationand reassessment. In 1961, in an important early history of Americanproletarian literature, Writers on the Left, Daniel Aaron concluded that communistwriters such as Gold produced little more than “journalistic ephemera.” DanielAaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York,Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 393. Thirty years later, in Left Letters: The CultureWars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, James Bloom found that the densityand complexity of Gold’s prose demonstrated a “subtle sophisticated cultural politics[that] belies the surviving image of him as a primitive sentimentalist, merely aCommunist Party mouthpiece.” James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars ofMike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 21,23. A contemporary of Bloom, Morris Dickstein, in his 1990 essay “The Tenementand the World: Visions of Immigrant Life,” also countered the received opinionthat Gold was a bad stylist: “I came to realize that his abrupt, impacted sentencesand paragraphs were long-limbed lines of prose-poetry . . . Gold was the missinglink between the plebian Whitman, whom he idolized, and the youthful AllenGinsberg, who must have read him as a Young Communist in the 1930s or early’40s.” In William Boelhower, ed., The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic WritingBetween the Wars (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 68–69.58. Frederick Ted Castle, “Interview with Alice Neel,” Artforum (October 1983); re-
194 / Notesprinted in Alice Neel: Paintings Since 1970 (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Academyof the Fine Arts, 1985), n.p.59. In Samuel Sillen, ed., The Mike Gold Reader (New York: International Publishers,1954), 28.60. Art Shields, “Pittsburgh: Peace on Trail,” Masses & Mainstream 4/4 (April 1951),18, 21.61. In 1959, when the McKie Memorial Library was opened in Dearborn, Neel sent theportrait to the dedication ceremonies. Correspondence with Lou Leny, Secretary,McKie Memorial Library, Dearborn, Michigan, April 3, 1959; undated letter from1960; Neel correspondence, Neel Arts, New York City. A document of the historyof the U.S. labor movement, McKie’s portrait should ideally be placed with his papers.62. Neel did ask Annette Rubinstein to sit for her, but the writer did not have the time.63. Not until 1974, when they were mainstream issues, did the CPUSA create theWomen for Racial and Economic Equality to address equality of opportunity andpay for women. See Rosalyn Baxandall, “The Question Seldom Asked: Women andthe CPUSA,” in Brown, et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism,158.64. Margrit Reiner, “The Fictional American Woman: A Look at Some Recent Novels,”Masses & Mainstream 5/6 (June 1952), 10.65. Alice Childress, “Florence,” Masses & Mainstream 3/10 (October 1950), 34–47.66. Childress was to enjoy increasing recognition: she was given the Obie Award forTrouble in Mind in 1956 and voted into the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame in1977. In the preface to the second edition of Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich citesthe literary achievements of women of color, praising “Florence” for its depiction ofa mother who is “ƒercely determined to support her daughter’s aspirations in a worldwhich wants her daughter to be nothing but a domestic worker.” Adrienne Rich,“Ten Years Later: A New Introduction,” Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton,1986), xxv.67. In the April 1955 Masses & Mainstream, Charles White’s autobiographical “Path ofa Negro Artist” voiced the author’s frustration when in high school in Chicago heasked about Frederick Douglass, or mentioned the painters Bannister and Tanner:“My teachers answered smugly and often angrily. The histories from which wewere taught, they would say, were written by competent people, and whatever theydid not mention was simply not important enough to mention.” Charles White,“The Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream 8/4 (April 1955), 36.68. Letter of Oct. 31, 1958, from Mike Gold to Alice Neel, Neel correspondence, NeelArts, New York City.69. The four untitled drawings were published in the June 1958 issue.70. The editors remained the old guard: Charles Humboldt, Aptheker, Bonosky, Gellert,Lawson. There were more women on the list—Barbara Giles, Meridel LeSueur, Annette T. Rubinstein, and Shirley Graham—but who precisely the “snootyoung intellectuals” were is impossible to say.71. Both share a disdain for American materialism that marks Gold’s “120 Million”(1929) as the predecessor of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955–1956). Both pummel theears with a rhythmic barrage of short, declarative phrases and rhetorical questions
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viii / ContentsPART II: NEEL’S SO
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- Page 236 and 237: BIBLIOGRAPHYI. Archival Sources and
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- Page 248 and 249: General Sources: Books / 225Leja, M
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