Conversations with Trotsky : Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s

Description

This collection presents all of Earle Birney’s known published and unpublished writings on Trotsky and Trotskyism for the very first time. It includes their correspondence as well as a selection of Birney’s letters and literary writings. 

Before he became one of Canada’s most influential and popular twentieth century poets, Earle Birney lived a double life. To his students and colleagues, he was an engaging university lecturer and scholar. But for seven years—from 1933 to 1940—the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was the focus of his writing and much of his life. 

During his years as a Trotskyist in Canada, the United States and England, Birney wrote extensively about Trotsky, corresponded with him, organized Trotskyist cells in two countries, and recruited on behalf of Trotskyism; he also lectured on Trotsky and interviewed him over the course of several days. One of his two novels is based on some of these activities. 

The collection traces the origins of Trotsky’s mistrust of “the British” to his experiences in Canada; shows Birney’s influence on a major shift in Trotsky’s policy of “entrism” in British politics; includes the largest body of Trotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history; and demonstrates the need for a radical re-reading of Birney’s poetry in light of his Trotskyism.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Canadian

Informations

• Publié par: Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780776624655
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Copy editing: Robbie McCaw Proofreading: Michael Waldin Layout: CS Cover design: discript enr. Cover image: Cubo-futurist rendering of Trotsky, uncredited (attributed to Yuri Annenkov, 1922).
Earle Birney s published and unpublished works contained in this volume are reprinted with permission from the Estate of Earle Birney.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Birney, Earle, 1904-1995
[Works. Selections]
Conversations with Trotsky : Earle Birney and the radical 1930s / edited and with an introduction by Bruce Nesbitt.
(Canadian literature collection)
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7766-2463-1 (softcover).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2464-8 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-0-7766-2465-5 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2466-2 (MOBI)
1. Birney, Earle, 1904-1995. 2. Trotsky, Leon, 1879-1940. 3. Birney, Earle, 1904-1995--Correspondence. 4. Trotsky, Leon, 1879-1940-- Correspondence. 5. Authors, Canadian (English)--20th century-- Correspondence. 6. Communists--Canada--Correspondence.
7. Communism. I. Nesbitt, Bruce, 1941-, editor II. Title. III. Series: Canadian literature collection PS8503.I72A6 2017 C811 .54 C2017-902263-6 C2017-902264-4
Printed in Canada by Gauvin Press University of Ottawa Press, 2017
For Carolyn and Wailan
Art, culture, politics need a new perspective. -Leon Trotsky, 18 June 1938
Contents
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
.
I
AN OPTIMISTIC SORT OF REVOLUTIONARY, 1933-1935
1: Report to the Toronto Branch of the International Left Opposition
2: Letter to an American Medical Student
3: Mine Strike, Martial Law and a Student Delegation
4: To the Section Bureau, CPUSA, Salt Lake City, Utah
5: To the Salt Lake Section Committee, CPUSA
6: A Letter Refused by the Salt Lake City Press
7: In Defence of Party Democracy
8: The Struggle Against British Imperialism
.
II
CONVERSATIONS WITH TROTSKY , 1935
9: Birney to Trotsky, 5 November 1935
10: Interviewing Leon Trotsky, 19-23 November 1935
11: Conversations with Trotsky
12: Further Conversations with Trotsky
13: Trotsky on the Canadian Farmer
14: Birney to Trotsky, 8 December 1935
15: Birney to Trotsky, 16 December 1935
III
POLITICAL WRITINGS , 1935-1939
16: Incident in Berlin
17: Trotsky to Birney, 19 January 1936
18: Birney to Trotsky, 14 February 1936
19: Birney to Trotsky, 27 February 1936
20: Birney to Trotsky, 29 January 1937
21: Another Month-January
22: Another Month-February
23: Another Month-March
24: Birney to Joe Hansen, 15 November 1937
25: Trotsky to Birney, 27 November 1937
26: Birney to Trotsky, 2 January 1938
27: Canadian Capitalism and the Strategy of the Revolutionary Movement
28: The Land of the Maple Leaf Is the Land of Monopoly
29: Is French Canada Going Fascist?
30: Trotsky to Birney, 5 June 1939
31: Birney to Trotsky, 6 June 1939
32: War Is Here-What Now?
.
IV
LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION , 1934-1940
33: Escape by Emetic
34: On Proletarian Literature
35: The Brave New Words of Aldous Huxley
36: Cecil Day Lewis, The Loving Communist
37: Proletarian Literature: Theory and Practice
38: What Do Canadians Tell Stories About?
39: R.M. Fox: Worker-Fighter
40: Soviet Fiction and American Fustian
41: The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway
42: Polygamous Communists from Toronto to Salt Lake
43: Yorkshire Proletarians
44: The Rhymes of the Irish Revolution
45: The Lost Irish Lenin?
46: Onward with Edward Upward
47: The Two William Faulkners
48: John Bull s Other Hell
49: The English Worker
50: New Writing in Britain and Elsewhere
51: The Fiction of James T. Farrell
52: The New Byronism: Poets and the Spanish Civil War
53: Steinbeck s Grapes of Wrath
54: The Left Theatre in English
55: Whitewashing the Stalinist Persecutors of Artists
56: The Mad Sanity of Henry Miller
57: To Arms with Canadian Poetry
58: Fashion and Change on Broadway, or Propaganda Is What You Disagree With
59: New Writing and Literary Stalinism
60: Erika Mann and the Middle-Class Martyrs of Fascism
61: Literary Stalinism: Lehmann vs. Birney
62: Changing Minds in Wartime
.
V
ENVOI , 1940
63: In Memory: Lev Davidovich Bronstein
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
TEXTUAL SOURCES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
Preface
N early 35 years ago I appealed for a substantial re-reading of much of Earle Birney s prose and poetry of the 1940s and 1950s, in light of his lengthy association with the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. 1 Birney, after all, was perhaps Canada s best twentieth-century poet writing in English, and for seven years Trotsky was the focus of Birney s own writing and much of his life. For the most part my appeal has gone unanswered.
An obvious question arises. Why, given Birney s comments over the years about his 1930s activities, have most critics of Birney chosen to ignore his Trotskyist sensibility? 2 The reasons for this wrong-headed near-unanimity are not complex. As Alan Wald has observed about the United States and Western Europe, whatever the personal political views of the majority of the university- and business-employed cultural critics, and whatever their social and political commitments might be, the bulk of the literary criticism they produce is filtered through a system of powerful institutional constraints. 3 Other reasons include fear and ignorance.
Nearly all literary critics publishing in English Canada are employees of public and private institutions, largely educational, such as universities, colleges, collegiate institutes and high schools; a few others are journalists writing for newspapers and general magazines. More likely than not the critics reputations and incomes depend on what their colleagues and employers judge to be acceptable, however much their institutions may claim to adhere to standards of academic freedom. 4 Within most departments of literature, the notion that politics could influence creative writing is almost an anathema.
The relatively small number of English-Canadian critics and historians who have identified themselves as Marxists, and the minuscule number of books and articles that include Marxist analyses of Canadian literature, suggest a strong anti-Marxist bias among the overwhelming majority. Canada s prevailing political environment has not been hospitable to Marxism; only two Communist politicians have ever served as federal members of Parliament (Fred Rose, from 1943 until he was expelled in 1947, and Dorise Nielsen, from 1940 to 1945), two each in the legislative assemblies of Manitoba and Ontario, and a handful of municipal representatives in Winnipeg and Toronto. In the 2011 federal general election, the Communist Party of Canada and the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada received a total of 12,819 votes out of 14,823,408 votes cast. 5
The innate conservatism of Canadian universities in training new blood for the professoriate is a further factor. A young Marxist literary scholar in English Canada would have great difficulty in finding a knowledgeable and sympathetic guide or supervisor among senior academic staff for the simple reason that almost no such sympathetic mentors exist. The professoriate is generally bourgeois and self-replicating.
To these may be added fear-a well-founded concern among academics that an open espousal of Marxism could lead to unwelcome scrutiny not only by departmental chairs, deans and other senior administrators, but also by federal intelligence officers. Canada s security service-since 1984 the Canadian Security Intelligence Service-had its origins in the 1920 merger of the federal Dominion Police and the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to form the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). While the RCMP s counter-subversion branch had long had its eye on apparent subversives affiliated with universities, branch officers stepped up their activities on campuses during the Cold War, especially in the 1960s. Recruitment of informers on campuses was well under way in the late 1960s, and telephone taps on university telephones were allowed in 1971 with the authorization of the federal Solicitor General. 6 As early as 1941 Stuart Wood, the Commissioner of the RCMP, identified young radicals-he meant communists--as the Force s most troublesome problem ; since then, members of the world s most famous police force ventured onto campuses to collect information, to spy, to observe, to investigate, to interview, to counter subversion, to search for evidence of espionage, to take classes, and to warn. 7 Few Canadian academics would feel comfortable attracting this sort of attention from CSIS, however unlikely.
A final factor inhibiting any wide-spread recognition of Birney s Trotskyist sensibility is awkward to state baldly, but it must be said. Most English-language literary critics in Canada are quite ignorant about the various strains of the country s far-left literary history, most notably the stark difference