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The
Proletarian Novelist Reconsidered: Phillip Bonosky's Place
in U.S. Letters
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His
books are hard to find in bookstores. Dismissed by the
big business publishers as a writer associated with the school
of "proletarian realism" , his two major novels until recently
were out of print.
He still doesn't write about "the end of ideology" or the
"god that failed". Almost all his work today, as for
the past 60 years, portrays the steel town in Western Pennsylvania
where he was born, grew up and was blacklisted for his labor
organizing in the fifties.
Yet his books, which have been distributed widely in the socialist
countries in the l950s and l960s, are being rediscovered by
a new generation of activists and cultural workers in North
America.
There is increasing interest in the worker culture of the
thirties and forties. You see this in the movies, in
academic treatises, in the rock songs. You see it in
the artists, who are often the first to register cultural
changes. You also see it among the new generation of
labor activists who are working hard to make the labor movement
a social movement, as it was in the thirites.
The University of Illinois has established a series entitled
"The Radical Novel Reconsidered", consisting of reprints of
proletarian novels of the 1930s and 1940s. Edited by
scholar Alan Wald, its books include neglected classics by
authors Josephine Herbst, Grace Lumpkin and John Sanford,
among others.
Reading these one realizes how vibrant these books are, despite
all stereotypes to the contrary. At a time of supposed
diversity and multiculturalism why aren't these books read
in college classrooms? One also realizes that Bonosky's
Burning Valley is one of the best of them. Why isn't
Bonosky celebrated today, let alone adopted as the official
novelist of the United Steel Workers of America?
Bonosky has written at least two great novels of the twentieth
century. It is my position in this article is that Phil
Bonosky is a major creative artist of our time, ranking with
other such fiction writers in this country as Theodore Dreiser,
Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Zora Neal Thurston, Tillie
Olson, Jack Conroy, and Meridel Le Seuer. Long after
the luster of more celebrated "modernist" writers has faded,
readers will read his work for illumination into the life
of the twentieth century, just as they will read Mark Twain,
Herman Melville and Walt Whitman in the nineteenth.
But at a time when when other thirties writers like Henry
Roth, author of the novel, "Call It Sleep" are being rediscovered,
( see the New York Times attempts to renovate Henry Roth before
his death several years ago ) there are several "obstacles"
to Bonosky . His America is not an idealized "melting
pot" of ethnic groupings , but rather one of unrelenting class
struggle, consisting of steelmill owners, bankers and their
cops and courts, and radicalized industrial workers , frequently
looking to communists for leadership. His novels are
thus not easily digested by two big institutions which have
historically determined the literary canon, the big business
publishing houses and the academy.
The AFL-CIO made a big step forward , for instance, in removing
the clause in its constitution forbidding communists.
But it still has a way to go before championing the distribution
among their members of a book like The Magic Fern, a towering
novel of the McCarthyite capitalist witchhunt against class-struggle
labor in one western Pennsylvania steeltown in the 1950s.
And yet it is when workers thoroughly understand their
history that they can understand their future.
I believe Bonosky would have become a talented writer in any
period he was born into. His use of language to capture
at least one slice of life as it is lived in the second half
of the 20th century is masterful. But I believe his
enduring legacy will be his use of artistic techniques to
help bring North American workers onto the stage of world
literature. Before this working people were seen as
a backdrop or atmosphere.
He was able to do this because 1.) he was influenced by an
international tradition of working class writing from 20s,
30s and 40s. He came to base himself on the literary
tradition. But he also extended and in no small way
developed this tradition.
I would argue he did this in four ways.
l.) Unparallelled depiction of the lives of industrial workers
in the North American workplace. Son of a first generation
Lithuanian-American factory workers, he specializes in portraits
of this important immigrant worker group which played a major
role in building the heavy industries of America.
2.) His portrayal of African-Americans as a super-exploited
racial group, and racism as a tool to divide workers.
Bonosky is especially eloquent in showing how the fight against
racism is rooted in the need of African-American and white
(In this case, Lithuanian-American) workers.
3.) His portrayal of workers in their homes, dance halls,
ballfields, picnics, and churches. In particular, his
portrayal of the aspiring priest Benedictus in Burning Valley
anticipates the development of liberation theology in the
1960s. (See Alan Wald's introduction to Burning Valley).
In this, his work serves as a bridge between the thirties
and the sixties.
4.) His masterful use of literary techniques to delineate
how working people grow in consciousness. To be fair,
this is an attribute of all great writers. But in doing
so, Bonosky broke down bourgeois-promoted stereotypes about
working people, and helped place North American workers on
the stage of world literature.
The world Bonosky portrays - a world of steel mills and brutal
speedup on on the line, of church picnics and union meetings,
is not some "other America". It IS America. The
surplus value extracted from workers like Joe Jomaitis at
Tubis Steel created the massive wealth of the big banks and
corporations. It created the railroads, the heavy machinery
and skyscrapers . It also created the wealth in the
twenties which enabled Fitzgerald's idle rich to live, or
Henry James' characters to travel to Europe and philosophize.
Son of Lithuanian-American parents himself, Bonosky casts
a special focus on Lithuanian-American workers. In Bonosky's
novels the steel mill barons seek an ever expanding market
share for their products, as well every cheaper access to
raw materials. They also seek to drive down wages by
dividing the working class. One step above the Blacks
of "niggertown", yet almost as viciously exploited, the Lithuanian-American
workers of "hunkeytown" must decide whether to ally with the
blacks against the boss, or else collaborate with the boss
against the most oppressed black workers.
In Burning Valley, the story revolves around a scheme by the
banks and millowners to clear land in the valley for a new
steel mill by driving workers out of their homes. This
will increase production but lay off thousands. The
workers and homeless rebel, in a replay of the great steel
strike of 1919. In doing so, they transform the myth
of that sleeping worker giant of Eastern European origin,
Joe Magarac. The main protagonist, Benedict, son of
a Lithuanian steel worker, aspires to become a priest against
the backdrop of the steel owners' savage attacks on the workers
and the community.
In his sequel, The Magic Fern, (still out of print) published
in 1961, Bonosky returns to the same town, now undergoing
automation of the plant and replacement of workers after the
Korean war. The milltown now has a big international
dimension. In its ceaseless quest for profits iron ore
is now extracted from Venezuela and the Turpin company's steel
is marketed around the world. To defeat the owners the
workers must organize against the system of production for
profit and U.S. patriotism.
In an attempt to prevent mass layoffs, the union organizes
against the Turpin Company for control over the reclassification
of jobs. A communist club takes a leading role in the
struggle. Subplots in the milltown include a struggle
to free two black youth who are the victims of a racist frame-up,
and the fight against the efforts of Turpin to shift the tax
burden onto the poor and workers. These help create
a broad tableau of working class life. The major protagonist
is Leo, a militant worker who has returned to his hometown
to face down his past, and in doing so, face his future, if
he has any.
The workers in Bonosky's Burning Valley and The Magic Fern
don't just work. They also dance, drink, pray, make
moonshine, and eat kilbasai. They also think - and act.
They can't afford not to, because Bonosky's plots are
as relentless as the class struggle itself.
"Niggers
First, Hunkies Next, " a bystander cries at the eviction of
an African American woman in Burning Valley, the millowner's
opening salvo to clear the land for their new steel mill.
"Bank and Company are one, "says the communist organizer
Dobrik at an organizing meeting, "but workers are one, too".
Rarely has a white writer of this or any period written
so lucidly or convincingly of the need for white-black unity.
On the one hand, Bonosky emphasizes that it is only through
common struggle that any genuine alliance between blacks and
whites can be realized. Each of Bonosky's books, for
instance, involve strikes and the need to defeat scabs and
win the strike.
Lithuanian-American trade unionists must overcome some of
the same stereoptypes that they have been victims of.
A key one is that African-Americans, some of who were brought
into the mill decades earlier to break break the the steel
strike of 1919, are inherently individualistic and unorganizable.
In organizing they learn not only about the strengths of African-Americans,
but also about themselves. In Burning Valley, for instance,
a key organizing leaflet for the campaign, much to the delight
of the Lithuanian workers, is mischievously signed "Joe Magarac".
"What
comes in must come out," says Cliff King, a black communist,
when it is learned that a number of African-American workers
are duped into working behind the picket lines during the
strike. In a daring maneuver--and a dazzling reworking
of labor history--these workers are snuck out of the mill
in the same sealed boxcars in which their ancestors were transported
to break a strike a generation earlier. The homeless
and strikers unite in a camp outside of town, in a gathering
reminiscent of an underground railroad rendezvous as much
as an impromptu strike committee.
But whereas a goal is " unite and fight", Bonosky's work also
underscores the special responsibility white workers have
to fight racism. Key is surrendering their arrogance
and ignorance about black people. Consider this poignant
passage between the young Benedict and mother Mary, an older
black women. Having been evicted and seen her house
burned down by the sheriff, she has joined the forces of the
strikers and homeless headquartered in the forest.
"All
whites are like cats," she said grimly, as he turned with
surprise.
"Cats in the woods, killing all the singing birds."
"Me?" his wounded eyes asked her; but her face remained set.
"Dobrik?" he cried aloud, tilting his head toward the table
where they sat.
She looked over to where they were, and said slowly, almost
against her conviction, "Mr. Dobrik is like a colored man,"
she answered.
He felt as though she had defined him out of her sympathy……
"Now, go away,"she said sharply. "Let me be!"
"I have to help you! Benedict cried.
She turned a look of fiery scorn on him."Help yourself, boy!"
She said.
"But mother, I am not like that!" He lifted his anguished
face toward her. "I'm not like that!" he repeated desperately,
obscurely understanding what her hostility came from.
He remembered her running that day to a house that was already
empty, and soon would go up in flames. He had sat there
by the side and let her go! He turned his face from
her and said, in a lower voice, troubled and filled with pain:
"I don't want to be like that!"
She looked at him and her face softened.
"You ain't now," she said.
His face flashed up at her. "You think when I -"
She shrugged.
"But mother, he said, "how could I?"
She gave a short mirthless laugh, "You'll find the way."
"He continued to look at her, with face stricken. "But
why", he demanded, "why didn't Dobrik?"
She sucked her lip in; her eyes narrowed in thought.
Then she said simply: "Dobrik, you see, he's a Communist;
and they don't allow it."
(P. 273, Burning Valley)
Bonosky offers a number of sympathetic portraits of communist
organizers in his novels. Contrary to the stereotype,
these figures are deeply rooted in the labor movement and
become a class pole for everyone in the book. Communist
club chair, John Stinner, in The Magic Fern, for example,
leads a struggle against a Company scheme to further shift
the tax burden onto poor and working people. The portrait
of African-American Communist organizer, Calvin Boone, makes
clear his deep roots in the town, his humor, humanity and
his tender and penetrating relationship with the men.
The communist, Dobrik, in The Burning Valley, who had such
a big effect on the aspiring priest Benedict, is another good
example.
But arguably Bonosky will ultimately be known not for these
figures, as controversial at the time as they were, but his
portrait of what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called
organic working class intellectuals and other figures of the
working class in motion. Bonosky excels in depicting
the restlessness that lies just beneath the surface of working
class life. He also excels in showing, when push comes
to shove, how workers change, whether in big and small ways.
It should be noted that none of Bonosky's protagonists are
themselves communists. Benedict is a fifteen year old.
He cares for his mother and looks out for his older
brother who is sinking into a life of petty crime. If
he looks to the new parish priest as an example of the life
of service he wishes to live, the church also represents to
him an escape from the griminess of Burning Valley.
Leo in The Magic Fern has returned to his hometown with a
wife and young son. An elected strike leader, he is
determined to steer a course independent of the Party.
He stands for all working people torn between the need for
security and the need to fight back, who are driven to make
socialism and democracy an American reality.
One of the boldest moves in proletarian fiction is Bonosky's
choice of an aspiring priest as his protagonist in Burning
Valley, Benedict Bulmanis. His awakening includes seeing
through "the state-sanctioned evil' of the police murder of
a striker, the collaboration of the church with the millowners,
and the potential power of his class. Against all odds,
he grows like those scrawny flowers amid the red flue dust
of burning valley. How he is transformed from a somewhat
pompous boy into a young man of his class is a tribute to
Bonosky's artistry.
Consider this description by Benedict of the steelworkers
as they gather at the striker's camp in the forest outside
of the milltown.
' No one saw them there, not even stars. And in this profound
darkness they could speak the truth they had kept hidden in
their hearts. The voices were warm and for the first
time it seemed to Benedict - all of them underwent that mysterious
change, as his father did when he changed from English to
his own language, as though they lurked behind their citizens
cloak of humility and obedience, ignorance and even drunkenness
for moments of freedom like this. How confident they
were, he thought with surprise, how free they were - how different
from the way they came to church!' P. `180
In The Magic Fern the company-proposed contract is ultimately
passed - but only after the use of the national guard, and
the entire paraphernalia of "communist conspiracy" is brought
against the strike. In a development that anticipates
the massive restructuring of the steel industry in the l980s,
the ensuing automation will lay off thousands of workers.
Strike committee leader Leo refuses to vote for the
contract - two crucial members who would be no votes are missing
because they have been arrested by the police, with the collaboration
of the bosses and the FBI . Accused himself of being
a communist (he isn't yet ), he also nevertheless refuses
to deny it. The novel ends with Leo coming to terms
with his past in life in an act which in retrospect everything
in the book has prepared us for.
In Burning Valley the class struggle even extends within the
church. As Radical Novel Reconsidered editor Alan Wald
argues in an insightful introduction to Burning Valley, there
is no evidence that after the strike Benedict will undertake
the path of the communist organizer, Dobrik. He will
remain with the church. But if he continues to express
his politics in the religious symbolism, he also sees how
the look on his mentor's face when he spoke of the strike
"was the same as when he spoke of mortal sin ". There
are strong indications that he will fight for a "church of
the poor" and the kind of "liberation theology" espoused by
Latin American priests, influenced by Marxism, in the l960s.
The struggle continues in the factories and the ghettoes,
including inside the minds of its characters. But unlike
the characters in Dreiser or Dos Passos who are crushed and
embittered, Bonosky's protagonists become warmer towards themselves
and each other, as they shield each other from danger, and
seek to turn the destructive power of the mill to their own
benevolent uses. They possess an almost Shakesperean
nobility and dignity in the face of adversity.
If we remember these characters long after we close the book,
it is in part a tribute to Marx's theory that the working
class is the only progressive class. But it is also
because,in building on the tradition of the proletarian novel,
Bonosky has also created a sweeping novel in the great world
humanist (in the original, best sense of the word) tradition.
Bonosky is an example of a writer for whom Marxism and participation
in the workers movement deepened his writing. If he
wrote perhaps fewer novels because of this involvement (because
of the blacklist and "graylist" several completed remain unpublished)
he wrote better. He joined the Communist Party in 1938.
But it is his reading of earlier Soviet worker novelists
like Gorky, Aleksandr Fadeyev and Aleksander Ostrowky, as
well as the the American proletarian writer, Mike Gold, a
columnist for the Daily Worker and author of the classic Jews
Without Money, that gave him a direction as a writer.
"In
short I was missing in American literature - that is, my town,
the people I knew…the men who died workers, just as they were
born….Lithuanian kilbasai and Serbian Tamburitzas and Joe
Magarac…. who wrote about all of that? Nobody. It didn't
exist.
I felt I stood outside the permissible literary realm.. I
had pride in myself…but the books I read did not. "
(Bonosky's public tribute to Mike Gold, 1954, as quoted in
Alan Wald introduction to Burning Valley )
The Burning Valley was published in 1953, the same year as
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed, at the height of
the witchhunt. The situation had dramatically changed
since he began writing. The blacklist not only had a
chilling effect on the workers movement, but had a chilling
effect on proletarian culture. At this time the bourgeoisie
also promoted "modernism" as a competing force to proletarian
realism. Others renounced their party affiliations in
order to continue writing under their own names.
This was not a serious option for Bonosky. In contrast
to some writers who experienced commitment to the Communist
Party as a "conversion" from one kind of life to another,
Bonosky, son of a steelworker, had experienced the Party's
class struggle politics as flowing organically from his entire
previous life experience. Elsewhere, Bonosky, an early
reader of Joyce in Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man,
has written of his determination to at the time to replace
Stephen Daedalus' literary strategy of "silence, exile and
cunning" with one of "openness" and "calling things by their
right names".
It remains to be told how the socialist countries fostered
proletarian writing in the darkest days for blacklisted writers
in this country. Bonosky, who had reason to believe
his first novel would be published by a major publisher, found
himself blacklisted as a novelist, as well. His fiction,
written in the belly of the beast, was shunned by publishers
and critics here. But it struck a chord with workers
in the socialist countries, where his work was published in
the hundreds of thousands.
His second novel, The Magic Fern was published by International
Publishers in 1961. Although it was reviewed by Masses
and Mainstream, it received no reviews by the big business
media. He was cultural editor of the People's Daily
World from 1968-l974 and Moscow correspondent from 1978-1982.
His book of short stories, A Bird in The Hair, was published
by International Publishers in l988. He is also the
author of over eight other books of non-fiction, many ground-breaking
in their own right, covering such subjects as the Chinese
and Afghan revolutions and American labor history. Today
he continues to write, with several novels still seeking a
publisher.
The Magic Fern takes its name from an old Lithuanian fairy
tale that Leo teaches his father, as his father taught him.
Basically , the power of The Magic Fern has the power
to make any wish come true, but with one qualification: you
can only wish for others, not for yourself.
In a moving welding of folk tradition and class struggle politics,
Leo applies (from a jail cell) for membership in the Communist
Party in the spirit of that fairytale. It is a wish
for a future for all the workers of the world, in all the
steeltowns in America, that "nobody's father would ever lose
their jobs again, that big grown men, like my father, would
never have to cry again like little children… "He wishes
for socialism for himself and his family, but he knows he
can have it only if he wishes it for others.
In the spirit of that magic fern, I would like to make a wish.
I wish that Benedict, Leo, Joe Jamaitis, Calvin Boone,
John Stinner, Mother Mary, and Bonosky's other working class
heroes find their way to a new generation of steelworkers
and cultural activists seeking a way to fight capitalism.
For their creator who has fought so hard and wrote so
well, for the dead and the blacklisted and the living of his
fiction, for those struggling for a better life today, we
can wish for nothing less.
But we know that wishes don't make things happen. They
are a start. Struggle makes things happen. The
big publishing houses and big business media are owned, in
the final analysis, by the same forces that own the steelmills
of Bonosky's novels. We can't rely on them to publish
the works of Phillip Bonosky.
We in the working class movement must champion the glints
of working class culture wherever we encounter them - whether
in the CD of an emerging hiphop group or even in the occasional
Hollywood movie. But we must build our own working class
institutions to promote not only literature but music, theater,
sculpture and painting. If necessary, we must publish
the work of working class artists like Bonosky ourselves,
as International Press did with The Magic Fern in l961 and
as we did for Virginia Brodine's Seeds of Fire .
The socialist revolution will create steel and food and jobs
for all. It will lay the basis for a world where culture
is for everyone, not just the few. One day when the
people's history of North American literature is written the
name of Phil Bonosky will be celebrated far and wide.
In some of the darkest days of the twentieth century, writing
within the belly of the capitalist beast, this proletarian
pioneer created works of art which future generations will
read for understanding, inspiration and illumination regarding
their own struggles for a better life.
But why wait until that great day to celebrate his achievement?
At this moment let us take the time to read, study and
celebrate the life and work of our own American Gorky, Phil
Bonosky.
BURNING VALLEY
by Phillip Bonosky
Introduction by Alan Wald
A volume in the series
The Radical Novel Reconsidered
A series of paperback reissues of mid-twentieth century U.S.
left-wing fiction, with new biographical and critical introductions
by contemporary scholars
University of Illinois Press
"Out
of the raw and bitter life of a milltown in the days after
World War 1, Phillip Bonosky has cast a novel as searing as
the yellow hot steel slag which pours over the cliffs of his
Hunky Hollow. Yet for all the pain of the life there
is a tender passion in his narrative which makes it sing with
the truth of poetry."
--James Aronson, National Guardian
"This
novel…. adds a burning page to the story of the immigrant
workers who built the heavy industry of America."
--Michael Gold, The Worker
Other Books in the Series
To Make My Bread by Grace Lumpkin
Moscow Yankee by Myra Page
The People From Heaven by John Sanford
Salome of the Tenements byh Anzia Yezierska
The Great Midland by Alexander Saxton
Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert
Pity Is Not Enough by Josephine Herbst
FOOTNOTES
Alan Wald,"The Wager of Benedict Bulmanis," introduction to
Burning Valley, University of Illinois Press, 1998
Meridel Le Sueur, "Saga of the Steel Mills," Mainstream ,
October 1961
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