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The “Albert Maltz Affair” and the Debate over Para-Marxist Formalism in New Masses, 1945–1946
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2013
Abstract
This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials.
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Footnotes
This article was first written as a paper for Jeff Smith's “Hollywood Blacklist” course held in the spring of 2007 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I thank Jeff for his comments on that version of the piece, as well as Heather Heckman and Mark Minett for their insights throughout the course, and the two anonymous Journal of American Studies readers for their suggestions.
References
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13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
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61 Ibid.
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63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 25.
67 Ibid.
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70 Ibid., emphases in source.
71 Gold, “Albert Maltz and Plain Speaking,” 6.
72 Fast, “Art and Politics,” 6–7.
73 Ibid., 8.
74 Sillen, “Art and Politics,” 6.
75 Sillen, “Art as a Weapon,” 6.
76 North, “No Retreat for the Writer,” 10.
77 A personal letter to Maltz from a certain “Shep” argues that he was targeted because of his success as a novelist, that he had garnered criticism from writers like Fast, Gold and others who had been forced, due to the New Masses controversy, to confront their own mediocrity. See Shep, letter to Maltz, 23 Feb. 1946, Albert Maltz Papers, US Mss 17AN, Series: Correspondence, Box 15 (Folders 1936–1945 and 1946), Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
78 Cited in Steiner, “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 305.
79 Cited in ibid., 305–6.
80 Cited in ibid., 306.
81 Ibid., 306.
82 Ibid., 307.
83 Ibid., 306.
84 Cited in ibid., 307.
85 Ibid., 308.
86 Ibid., 309.
87 Ibid., 310–11.
88 Cited in Martin, John R., “Marxism and the History of Art,” College Art Journal, 11, 1 (Autumn 1951), 3–9, 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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91 Cited in Martin, “Marxism and the History of Art,” 5.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
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95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., 320.
97 Ibid.
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102 Ibid.
103 Ibid., 170.