A new book paints far different picture of the life of radical/novelist Agnes Smedley
[Mr. Wald is H. Chandler Davis College Professor,
University of Michigan.]
In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is "compulsive."1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.
In 1988, the University of California at Berkeley Press published a copiously researched 400-page biography, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. This was the first endeavor to detail the intimate experiences and literary-political career of journalist and novelist Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) in North America, Europe, and Asia. The co-authors were the husband and wife team of Stephen R. MacKinnon, a well-published academic specialist in Late Imperial and twentieth-century China, and Janice R. MacKinnon, an importer of antique Chinese furniture. The MacKinnons described their labor as "basic detective work" on several continents over a period of 14 years. Such industriousness was required to reconstruct Smedley's dispersed archive of publications in multiple venues as well as to "collect her letters, track down and interview her old friends and enemies, and scour intelligence files." Uncommon thoroughness was demanded because the subject's life was fraught with political controversy; the authors pledged to "view Smedley from every possible perspective" (MacKinnon and MacKinnon ix).
Literary scholars are familiar with Smedley because in 1973 the Feminist Press launched a popular new edition of her 1929 proletarian feminist literary classic, Daughter of Earth. From the Afterword to this volume, as well as from reviews and academic essays, they learned that Smedley's publishing and activist career had in point of fact commenced in the era of World War I, when she was a determined proponent of birth control and the independence of India from Great Britain. After 1920, Smedley lived in Europe and Asia until World War II, becoming famous as a sympathetic frontline journalist with Mao Zedong's Red Army during the dramatic events preceding the Chinese Revolution. These were reported most notably in her popular work about the Sino-Japanese war, Battle Hymn of China (1943), issued by the Knopf publishing house when Smedley returned to the US. Then the Cold War erupted and Smedley faced accusations of one-time membership in the "Sorge Spy Ring" in China on behalf of the Communist International. She was soon living as a near-pariah in Oxford, England, where she died at age 58 following surgery for a duodenal ulcer.
The MacKinnons' narrative opens with Smedley's birth into a childhood of "miserable poverty" as the daughter of a tenant farmer in Missouri (1). They subsequently trace her travels among Western states and then her transit to California. Early in 1918, Smedley, by then a resident of New York City's Greenwich Village, experienced two traumatic events. While engaged as a partisan in the movement of expatriate radical nationalists from India, Smedley found herself pressured into sexual intercourse by a veteran Bengali activist named Herambalal Gupta. Smedley already suffered acutely from conflicted feelings about sexuality, and the incident precipitated an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The episode became one of the most shocking and powerful scenes of her autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, where Gupta is called "Juan Diaz."
Afterwards, Smedley made headlines when she was imprisoned under the Espionage Act. The allegation was that she accepted funds from the German government to assist her agitational work against British rule of India. But the MacKinnons treat the charges as a frame-up similar to the federal prosecution of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who received a ten-year sentence for allegedly interfering with military recruitment. Released on bail, Smedley commenced a 15-year friendship with a young bohemian poet named Florence Lennon; the MacKinnons report that a psychoanalyst's later suggestion that there might have been "latent homosexual feelings" toward Florence brought the rage of denial from Smedley. The authors themselves do not speculate about the sexual nature of the intimacy (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 113).
The MacKinnons next track Smedley's adventures in Germany and the Soviet Union, with special attention to her tormented love affair with Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chatto Padhyata. Then the story switches to China in 1928 to cover her journalism career for the next 13 years. Returning in 1941 to the US to live as a lecturer and writer, Smedley was before long under close monitoring by the FBI. She departed for Europe in 1949 when reports were published about her alleged association with the espionage ring led by German Communist Richard Sorge against Japan before World War II. The authors conclude the volume by dismissing all such spying charges, emphasizing that Smedley never held membership in any Communist Party and affirming that she was "fiercely independent" (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 350).
Agnes Smedley was published to considerable acclaim. The MacKinnons' research was hailed by military and Cold War historian Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times and the China historian and now UC Berkeley Dean Orville Schell in the Nation, as well as in scholarly publications such as Journal of American History, Journal of Asian Studies, and American Historical Review.2 No factual criticisms or questions were raised. All these reviewers seemed in accord with the announcement on the book jacket that the MacKinnons' scholarship "will very likely become the definitive work on Smedley."
And so it was, for 17 years. But now Ruth Price, a former press secretary for Congresswoman Bella Abzug and a self-identified Leftist, has published a 500-page biography under a variation of the MacKinnons' title, The Lives of Agnes Smedley. Although Price steers clear of a systematic comparison of the details of her research with the claims of her predecessors, the new narrative contradicts many of the MacKinnons' key points, including those in the above account. Smedley was not a product simply of wretched, proletarian poverty; her father had his economic ups and downs, but was variously a cattle broker, an herbalist with a traveling medical show, a deputy sheriff, a transporter of houses for a coal company, and so forth. The unwanted sexual intercourse was pressed on Smedley not by Herambalal Gupta but the world-famous Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy. Smedley was not a frame-up victim during World War I but was indeed collaborating with the German government. Florence (originally Florence Tennenbaum, then Florence Becker, and finally Florence Becker Lennon) was almost certainly a lover as well as friend. Crucially, Smedley was without a doubt an espionage agent of the Comintern. She consciously lied to friends and potential liberal allies about her relationship not only to the German government in 1918, but also to the Communist International. Yet Price remains admiring of Smedley's commitment to "principles" that "transcend the realm of ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles" (10). She proclaims that Smedley was no "tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear," but "as cunning and crafty an operator as her detractors on the right ever alleged" (9).
Which version is accurate? What are the implications of each for assessing Smedley as an activist and writer? In the main, Price's appraisal of events seems the more persuasive, and yet it is not an open and shut case for Price on every detail. ...
Read entire article at Alan Wald in http://alh.oxfordjournals.org
University of Michigan.]
In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is "compulsive."1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.
In 1988, the University of California at Berkeley Press published a copiously researched 400-page biography, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. This was the first endeavor to detail the intimate experiences and literary-political career of journalist and novelist Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) in North America, Europe, and Asia. The co-authors were the husband and wife team of Stephen R. MacKinnon, a well-published academic specialist in Late Imperial and twentieth-century China, and Janice R. MacKinnon, an importer of antique Chinese furniture. The MacKinnons described their labor as "basic detective work" on several continents over a period of 14 years. Such industriousness was required to reconstruct Smedley's dispersed archive of publications in multiple venues as well as to "collect her letters, track down and interview her old friends and enemies, and scour intelligence files." Uncommon thoroughness was demanded because the subject's life was fraught with political controversy; the authors pledged to "view Smedley from every possible perspective" (MacKinnon and MacKinnon ix).
Literary scholars are familiar with Smedley because in 1973 the Feminist Press launched a popular new edition of her 1929 proletarian feminist literary classic, Daughter of Earth. From the Afterword to this volume, as well as from reviews and academic essays, they learned that Smedley's publishing and activist career had in point of fact commenced in the era of World War I, when she was a determined proponent of birth control and the independence of India from Great Britain. After 1920, Smedley lived in Europe and Asia until World War II, becoming famous as a sympathetic frontline journalist with Mao Zedong's Red Army during the dramatic events preceding the Chinese Revolution. These were reported most notably in her popular work about the Sino-Japanese war, Battle Hymn of China (1943), issued by the Knopf publishing house when Smedley returned to the US. Then the Cold War erupted and Smedley faced accusations of one-time membership in the "Sorge Spy Ring" in China on behalf of the Communist International. She was soon living as a near-pariah in Oxford, England, where she died at age 58 following surgery for a duodenal ulcer.
The MacKinnons' narrative opens with Smedley's birth into a childhood of "miserable poverty" as the daughter of a tenant farmer in Missouri (1). They subsequently trace her travels among Western states and then her transit to California. Early in 1918, Smedley, by then a resident of New York City's Greenwich Village, experienced two traumatic events. While engaged as a partisan in the movement of expatriate radical nationalists from India, Smedley found herself pressured into sexual intercourse by a veteran Bengali activist named Herambalal Gupta. Smedley already suffered acutely from conflicted feelings about sexuality, and the incident precipitated an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The episode became one of the most shocking and powerful scenes of her autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, where Gupta is called "Juan Diaz."
Afterwards, Smedley made headlines when she was imprisoned under the Espionage Act. The allegation was that she accepted funds from the German government to assist her agitational work against British rule of India. But the MacKinnons treat the charges as a frame-up similar to the federal prosecution of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who received a ten-year sentence for allegedly interfering with military recruitment. Released on bail, Smedley commenced a 15-year friendship with a young bohemian poet named Florence Lennon; the MacKinnons report that a psychoanalyst's later suggestion that there might have been "latent homosexual feelings" toward Florence brought the rage of denial from Smedley. The authors themselves do not speculate about the sexual nature of the intimacy (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 113).
The MacKinnons next track Smedley's adventures in Germany and the Soviet Union, with special attention to her tormented love affair with Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chatto Padhyata. Then the story switches to China in 1928 to cover her journalism career for the next 13 years. Returning in 1941 to the US to live as a lecturer and writer, Smedley was before long under close monitoring by the FBI. She departed for Europe in 1949 when reports were published about her alleged association with the espionage ring led by German Communist Richard Sorge against Japan before World War II. The authors conclude the volume by dismissing all such spying charges, emphasizing that Smedley never held membership in any Communist Party and affirming that she was "fiercely independent" (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 350).
Agnes Smedley was published to considerable acclaim. The MacKinnons' research was hailed by military and Cold War historian Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times and the China historian and now UC Berkeley Dean Orville Schell in the Nation, as well as in scholarly publications such as Journal of American History, Journal of Asian Studies, and American Historical Review.2 No factual criticisms or questions were raised. All these reviewers seemed in accord with the announcement on the book jacket that the MacKinnons' scholarship "will very likely become the definitive work on Smedley."
And so it was, for 17 years. But now Ruth Price, a former press secretary for Congresswoman Bella Abzug and a self-identified Leftist, has published a 500-page biography under a variation of the MacKinnons' title, The Lives of Agnes Smedley. Although Price steers clear of a systematic comparison of the details of her research with the claims of her predecessors, the new narrative contradicts many of the MacKinnons' key points, including those in the above account. Smedley was not a product simply of wretched, proletarian poverty; her father had his economic ups and downs, but was variously a cattle broker, an herbalist with a traveling medical show, a deputy sheriff, a transporter of houses for a coal company, and so forth. The unwanted sexual intercourse was pressed on Smedley not by Herambalal Gupta but the world-famous Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy. Smedley was not a frame-up victim during World War I but was indeed collaborating with the German government. Florence (originally Florence Tennenbaum, then Florence Becker, and finally Florence Becker Lennon) was almost certainly a lover as well as friend. Crucially, Smedley was without a doubt an espionage agent of the Comintern. She consciously lied to friends and potential liberal allies about her relationship not only to the German government in 1918, but also to the Communist International. Yet Price remains admiring of Smedley's commitment to "principles" that "transcend the realm of ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles" (10). She proclaims that Smedley was no "tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear," but "as cunning and crafty an operator as her detractors on the right ever alleged" (9).
Which version is accurate? What are the implications of each for assessing Smedley as an activist and writer? In the main, Price's appraisal of events seems the more persuasive, and yet it is not an open and shut case for Price on every detail. ...
HNN Editor: The above excerpt is but one small part of a long discussion of a variety of books about writers whose lives were so complicated that the truth about important facts is difficult to establish. The list includes books about Henry Roth, Ralph Ellison, and James T. Farrell.