Rezensionen 131 Per Seyersted, Robert Cantwell: An American 1930s Radical Writer and His Apostasy. Introduction by Alan Wald. (Novus Studies in Literature, 6) Oslo: Novus Press, 2004. Hans Bak In 1960, during his groundbreaking work on Kate Chopin, the Norwegian Americanist Per Seyersted was directed by Edmund Wilson to seek out Robert Cantwell (1908-1978), who in 1956 had published one of the first serious treatments of Chopin. The meeting formed the beginning of Seyersted’s present biography, which seeks (in Alan Wald’s words) to explain the “central mystery” of “what happened” (vii) to propel this most promising young radical novelist of the 1930s into a deflected career as a mass market journalist, and into virtual oblivion. Seyersted confronts the many paradoxes of Cantwell’s career: a prominent “proletarian” writer who was a Henry James devotee long before it became fashionable, a committed radical who took on the writing of a capitalist’s biography, a believer in solidarity with the workers who went to work for Luce’s magazine empire, and finally: the “circumstances of character and history” that prevented him from fulfilling his promise as a “brilliant” fiction writer praised by Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Whether Seyersted’s book will manage to draw Cantwell out of invisibility remains to be seen, but it justifies the author’s high standing as a first-rate European Americanist. Seyersted has organized a complex mass of highly resistant materials into a nuanced, compassionate yet critical portrait of a complicated individual, against the background of his literary and political times. He writes exceedingly well, in a style lucid, subtle, and free from jargon, yet suggestive of human and intellectual depth and complexity. The book is impeccably researched: it is based on a wealth of archival sources, letters, and diaries; numerous interviews with relatives, literary and political friends; and an immense number of local, regional, and national newspapers. To an unusual degree it distills crucial insights from unpublished manuscripts, drafts, or plans. All this is tricky and treacherous material, demanding sensitivity, circumspection, and respect in the handling and interpreting of it. Seyersted is a remarkably strong biographer in his ability to weigh personal perceptions against documentary evidence, tread a minefield of conflicting and contradictory memories and statements, read between the lines of Cantwell’s cryptic diary entries, and sort out probable truths among “partly suppressed, partly distorted” (66) memories. He is a conscientious and sensitive hypothesizer, and his book shows both the rewards and limits of responsible historical interpretation. Seyersted personally knew Cantwell for the last 18 years of his life, and his approach is a friendly one, evincing empathy and tolerance for Cantwell’s flaws and vulnerabilities. Persuaded of his considerable talents (“the greatly talented Cantwell” [28]), he makes a concerted effort to understand his life and personality, by exploring the intersecting forces of personality, politics, and history impinging upon the trajectory of his career. Yet he also retains distance and critical honesty: Cantwell was not always an admirable or courageous person, but could be evasive, cowardly, and near-delusional in his fear-driven suspicions. The book’s central focus is on Cantwell’s involvement with pro-Communist radicalism and its aftermath of pain, wreckage and disappointment. Filled with what AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1 Rezensionen 132 Wald calls “splendid detail” - one third of the book (100 pages) concerns the personal and political events of 1934 alone - Seyersted’s analysis is uncommonly strong in the richness of its contextualization. The descendant of sturdy Northwestern pioneers with a strong sense of social and racial solidarity, Lloyd Emmett Cantwell (he liked “Bob” better) grew up in a lumber company town, and at age 11 first witnessed the anti-labor violence of American Legionnaires at the Centralia Massacre. The “horror” of Centralia fostered an early radical inclination as well as fear of what rightwing violence could do. Prevented by family poverty from attending college beyond his first year, he worked for four years at Harwood Plywood Company as a veneer clipperman, before moving to New York in October 1929. There, a first published story drew the attention of Malcolm Cowley, who brought him into his flock of leftwing New Republic reviewers. At 22 Cantwell was accepted into New York’s radical literary circles: among his friends were Wilson, Cowley, Meyer Schapiro, Dos Passos, Kenneth Fearing, Fred Dupee, Granville Hicks, Newton Arvin and James T. Farrell. At 23 Cantwell was the author of a first novel and seven short stories of “high aesthetic quality” and “consummate artistry” (33), focused on individual psychologies rather than social analysis. On the basis of Laugh and Lie Down (1931), dealing with the aimless, alienated lives of “lost” youth in the Northwest, Cantwell was “uniformly welcomed as an exceptionally promising new novelist.” (46) That same year he first met Whittaker Chambers, editor of The New Masses and a Communist Party member since 1925. It was the start of a fateful friendship, Chambers effectively becoming Cantwell’s nemesis. Through the 1930s Cantwell sought “aesthetic guidance” (60) from Henry James (he owned the complete New York Edition), even as his Marxian leanings made him into the decade’s foremost “proletarian” novelist. Seyersted feels that it was his Jamesian sense of artistry and character psychology which kept him from becoming a doctrinaire ideologist; his celebrated second novel, The Land of Plenty (1934), ending in indecisiveness and ambiguity instead of on a requisite note of revolutionary hope, showed that Cantwell “to a very large extent” managed “to convey his propaganda through artistically valid means.” (104) Deeply embroiled in left-wing activities, he frequently consorted with Party members, but always remained “an independent person doing his own thinking” (58) and was never a member of the CPUSA. In late 1933 Cantwell’s persistent money problems tempted him into taking on an unusual assignment: the writing of the life of E.A. Filene, a Boston capitalist with a social conscience who tried to reorganize his father’s company business so that it could profit the spending power of the masses. Lincoln Steffens, famous but aging muckraker, had enlisted Cantwell’s help in the project. Cantwell conceived of the book as “the dramatization and analysis of [the] failure [of capitalism, even when wellintentioned].” (73) For the next three years he put his fate in the hands of Steffens and Filene, becoming the play ball of each, until in 1937, embittered and vengeful, he delivered a “consciously unpublishable” (180) manuscript, flabbergasting Steffens and disgusting Filene. The intricate episode of Cantwell’s convoluted involvement with both men fostered his tendency towards suspicion and paranoia: he was berated by his radical friends for having sold out, while inclined to be evasive about his radicalism in front of Filene’s fellow-capitalists - one of many double-binds that would feed his anxieties. Rezensionen 133 In 1934 Cantwell spent three months in California, to work on Filene’s life and report on the big San Francisco strike for The New Republic, becoming part of the radical circle around Steffens and Ella Winter in Carmel (including Langston Hughes, Tillie Olsen and the remarkable Richard Criley, whose deflected lives offer perspective on Cantwell’s). Seyersted’s detailed and original account of Cantwell’s involvement with the Carmel group and the anti-red terror in California offers a unique glimpse into this mostly unillumined West Coast chapter of American radicalism. Immersed in the San Francisco strike, Cantwell witnessed the statewide drive against Communism, the role of the Hearst media in whipping up anti-Red sentiment, the dubious manipulative orchestrations of Right and Left, and the hunting of Reds by the American Legion, resulting in sabotage, violent disruptions of radical meetings, deliberate bloodshed and intimidation, and the violations of private homes. While he was shocked by the violence from the Right, he was horrified by the Communist reading of the police killing of two strikers as beneficial to the “cause”; it signaled the start of his de-radicalization. When Red-baiting reporters sought him out in his own home, not once but thrice, he became so terrified of possible retaliatory violence that he resorted to denial of his radicalism and fled Carmel, first to Oakland, then back to New York, deciding to “lie low” and retreat “from openly being a radical” (159). Cantwell’s flight, read as an act of cowardice by his radical friends, filled him with a “weakened self-esteem” (162) but also a desire to “clear” his name and “redeem” himself (165-6) - it would be a lifelong struggle. Cantwell’s sense of menace was only fed by his close friendship with Chambers, who in 1932 had gone underground to become a Communist secret agent. A domineering, charismatic person, given to heroic and melodramatic posturings, he exerted a strong influence on the impressionable Cantwell. He fanned Cantwell’s latent paranoia by continuously seeking him out in secret for long confidential talks about his espionage maneuvers. Though Cantwell himself was “never directly involved” (86) in spy activities, he allowed Chambers to use his name (Lloyd Cantwell). Seyersted handles the extraordinarily complex story of the Chambers-Cantwell relationship superbly well (including the blatantly false statements by Chambers, evasive or inconsistent testimonies, and corrective evidence from Cantwell’s diaries), as he shows Cantwell’s journey from radicalism to apostasy running closely parallel to that of Chambers. From 1935 Cantwell began work for Time, a magazine considered (semi)fascist by left-leaning New York intellectuals, first substituting as book-editor, later, as part of Luce’s inner circle, on Foreign News and National Affairs. His nervous anxiety intensified by overwork and the threatening international scene, he became circumspect and secretive about his radicalism, hiding it from pro-fascist colleagues, while dreading retaliation from Communists on the staff. Though he came to regard Luce (whose interventionist sentiments he shared) as a father-like advisor and a trusted friend, Cantwell never felt at home at Time (or, later, Fortune). Things grew only worse when, helped by Cantwell, Chambers joined the staff of Time and began using its pages to ventilate his virulent anti-Communism (victimizing among others Malcolm Cowley). Chambers had carefully prepared his break with the Party, but threw much fear into Cantwell with his reports of Communist retaliation. Seyersted feels that Cantwell “was somewhat delusional in harboring an exaggerated sense of being in danger” (234), yet accumulated anxieties (including a strained Rezensionen 134 marriage) in 1942 drove him into a serious nervous breakdown, and a seven-month hospitalization at White Plains (paid for by Luce), where he found spiritual support in religion and was treated by insulin injections and electroshock therapy. He never fully recovered, but always retained a streak of persecution mania. He remained bitter about not being taken back on Time, even when Luce gave him a three-year subvention to write a biography of Hawthorne (1948). When Chambers’ crusade to expose Communists in the US Government led to the Alger Hiss trials of 1949, Cantwell lived in perpetual fear of being called upon to testify. Afraid to speak out, yet fearful that silence might be construed as an admission of complicity, he remained haunted by “irrational fears” and by the “inner storm” of his “unresolved relationship” (271) with Chambers. In 1956 he entered upon a 22-year-long connection with Sports Illustrated, which was his “lifesaver” (274). Respected by his coworkers, he rose to Senior Editor and was “liberated into a new writer’s life” (276). In almost 100 articles for the magazine - as well as work of “lasting value” like The Hidden Northwest (1972) - he now “vindicated” his early promise. Many saw him as a saddened, disillusioned man who felt he had failed and been tragically victimized by the fatal influence of Chambers. Yet, in his final years, Cantwell gradually mustered the courage to confront the ghosts of his past openly and directly. He was shocked to discover that his FBI file (now accessible under the Freedom of Information Act) held 20,000 pages: the bulk concerned Chambers using Cantwell’s name as his alias. It was not granted him, however, to fulfill his self-imposed duty to explore “the subject so long resisted, if not dismissed” (292): he died on 8 December 1978. In Seyersted’s estimate, if we consider “Cantwell’s complex and complicated nature, with its many vulnerabilities, it is very impressive that he managed to achieve what he did.” (289) Given the historical and political conditions under which he had to labor, Cantwell’s career remained a matter of unfulfilled promises. The more tragically so, Seyersted believes, as given his extraordinary talents his name “might have” resounded more lastingly in American literature. Hans Bak American Studies Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt, Space in America: Theory- History-Culture. Architecture-Technology-Culture 1. Amsterdam- New York: Rodopi, 2005. Jaroslav Kušnír This massive collection of essays is loosely arranged around the idea of space and its various forms in the geographical, theoretical, and cultural context of the USA. The essays are grouped around the themes of theory, landscape/ nature, architecture, AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1