[The number of people going hungry throughout the…]

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The number of people going hungry throughout the underdeveloped world— and even in the United States-is on the rise. A major famine is threatening Africa. Meanwhile, there is a mounting crisis of food production. The problem is not a failure of enough production, but exactly the opposite: it is a crisis of over production.

The New York Times examined this topsy-turvy situation in a recent series of articles (Dec. S, 16 and 18, 1983) entitled "Farming in America: The Paradox of Plenty." American farmers, it seems, have done their job too well. They have run amok, growing too much food, and in suspicion for his radicalism. At the same time he secretly worked for the Fourth International as journalist, editor, and translator and as a member of the secretariat.

Mangan labored prodigiously as a political activist, repressing his creative energy for the sake of the revolutionary cause, as an earlier poet and revolutionist, John Milton, had done to serve in Cromwell's cabinet. After some 12 years of activity, he felt that, with the International no longer so short-handed, he could give up many of his tasks to return to literature.

He went to Bolivia to do research for a novel about the struggles of the tin workers of that country, a novel that was never finished. His wife died of a heart attack in the high mountain air, and his own health was ruined. The last years of the former hearty high-liver and ebullient raconteur were spent in poverty and suffering but in continued struggle for the fulfillment of both his literary potential and political duty.

To a boyhood friend who asked him what socialism had done "for" him as well as what it had done "to" him, Mangan wrote, "For me" it has given me a guidance and a purpose far beyond any personal one that I might have conceived, save poetry itself. "To me," yes, Chas, I know what you are getting at—it has made me pay, and pay dear... But I won't change one opinion one iota because of it."

Wald's book is a study of the relation between literary modernism and political radicalism as well as a tribute to these two men. He points out that they were only two instances of writers who joined Marxist politics and modernist literary techniques. This significant tendency has been quite forgotten in the cultural histories of the period.

In the novel form John Dos Passos' USA trilogy, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, and Nathanael West's Day of the Locust are manifestations of the tendency. In poetry the work of Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Fearing is another manifestation.

In criticism the journal Partisan Review championed modernism against such attacks as that of Karl Radek, who at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 dismissed the work of Proust and Joyce as the use of high-powered microscopes for the purpose of studying excrement. Because Partisan Review was briefly sympathetic to Trotskyism (Trotsky himself was skeptical about the durabilty of the editors" attachment to Marxism), it was vilified by the Stalinist writers.

The consequence was that modernism was more than ever regarded as opposed to Marxism. This, however, is an oversimplification despite the fact that many of reactionary outlook such as T.S. Eliot made use of its techniques, which Wald identifies as including complex symbolism, references to myth, stream of consciousness,- recondite literary allusion, montage, a shifting and ambiguous mood.

But, says Wald, while "certain forms, genres, conventions, and devices may become associated with specific classes or stages of development on a historic scale (for example, the romance with feudalism, the novel with bourgeois society), artists have repeatedly demonstrated that they can appropriate all sorts of genres and devices for diverse ends." Just so, it might be added, we have the radical romanticism of Shelley and the reactionary romanticism of Scott.

The Revolutionary Imagination is the product of careful thought and of enormous and painstaking research. The time and labor have been well spent.