I suppose someone had to do it—concoct an earnest analysis, thick with the newest jargon, of the literary productions of Mike Gold, who once characterized Proust as “the masturbator of the bourgeois literature,” and of Gold’s colleague in the Communist literary apparat of the 1930s, Joseph Freeman. The concocter is James D. Bloom, a professor at Muhlenberg College, who in Left Letters guides us through, among other intricacies, Gold’s “traditionalist nostalgia.” This, we are told, “exposes an affiliative identification with the cultural heritage labeled the American Renaissance.” And key passages in Freeman’s novel Never Call Retreat are enriched in their “dialectic deformation” by the “nonverbal analogues” supplied by the canvases of Picasso and the films of Sergei Eisenstein.

Is it unfair to ask what Mike Gold, soi-disant“tongue of the working class,” would make of learning that he was, after all, “engage[d] with issues that now preoccupy literary theorists”—the theorists being university professors like James Bloom? Gold’s own idea of literary theory was the ten-point program articulated at the Kharkov Congress (November 1930) under the auspices of that most far-reaching of metacritics, Joseph Stalin. A delegate at Kharkov, Gold sent home dispatches extolling “the brisk young reporters here, [who] want you to sum up in a few pithy phrases the complete history of American literature and art from the Marxian viewpoint; that’s all.” That’s all, indeed. Gold was soon to become the Cerberus of literary Communism, sinking his teeth into any writer who dared miscalculate the latest turn in