10-29-07, 10:07 am

US newspapers were all abuzz this month when Doris Lessing, most well-known for her novel The Golden Notebook, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Lessing also raised eyebrows when in an interview she proclaimed that 9/11 wasn't as bad as Americans thought).

The Los Angeles Times 'Books' section printed an interview feature on her titled 'With age comes wisdom, and Lessing's Nobel Prize' last week.

Earlier, the New York Times saw fit to reprint an essay by Doris Lessing it had originally published in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union titled 'Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer.' In a nutshell, its central argument was 'that Communism debased language.'

Lessing accused the communist movement, which she took part in as a member of the Communist Party until 1956, of imposing on its affiliated writers the imperative of using 'mind-deadening slogans' in their works. In this way communism demanded that art, novels, poetry had 'to be about something.' She further argues that feminist 'consciousness raising' and 'political correctness' are the political heirs of communism.


While her views might suit the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, or FOX News for that matter, they are a distortion of history says Phillip Bonosky, a Communist novelist and contemporary of Lessing's.

Bonosky is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. He is the author of two novels, Burning Valley and The Magic Fern, several short story collections, and a number of non-fiction books such as Afghanistan –Washington's Secret War.

'This statement of Lessing’s is ridiculous,' says Bonosky. 'What Marxism did was to liberate language for millions of workers the whole world over, and still does to this day.'

Marx's major contribution in the arena of language, Bonosky states, was in injecting into historical writing the very people who had been rendered invisible in the writing up to his time, the working class and the racially oppressed.

Further, Marx sought precise, scientific language to explain who those people were, how they got to be where they were, and what were the social forces keeping them imprisoned.

Rather than debasing language, insists Bonosky, 'Marxism tried to put history and sociology on a scientific basis. After Marx, history, instead of being about the actions of powerful men, kings and whatnot, or even simply the product of happenstance, now involved ascertainable laws, which Marx was able to isolate and point out. If social events and social behavior could be put on a scientific basis, it meant that all the features involved in historical situations had to be defined very precisely, and words were needed that would fit these scientific needs. Very precise language was needed.'

On the issue of writing fiction, Bonosky's personal experience contradicts Lessing's account. Bonosky's first novel, Burning Valley, which was published by a press that was affiliated loosely with the Communist movement back in the 1950s, was an international best-seller, but was completely ignored in the US.

While McCarthy and others hunted people like Bonosky, an open Communist Party member all of his adult life, and liberals they insisted were controlled by the communists, Bonosky's first novel went through several editions in Russia, his parents' home country of Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, and China. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. In the US, hundreds. (Though the University of Illinois Press republished it along with several other books by leftists as part of its 'Radical Novels Reconsidered' series in the late 1990s.)

No major periodicals outside of the Party's orbit reviewed the book. The New York Times saw a review of it as unfit to print.

'I remember when I was traveling in the GDR,' recalls Bonosky, 'and I was passing through customs, the officers there looked at my passport and said, 'Bonosky, didn’t you write Burning Valley?' He had already read it in German, and there was a big discussion in the German press about it. So there was a literary life that existed for me, but not here in America.'

So was this novel a Party-mandated political tract?

Bonosky chuckles. It was the story of a young Catholic altar boy, an ardent Catholic who is, as Bonosky says, 'a real believer in religion,' living in a Depression-era steelmaking, immigrant community in Pennsylvania not unlike Bonosky's own background.

The young man finds himself caught in the middle of the struggle between the workers and the steel bosses to form the union and to win rights and benefits for the workers. In his own artistic and literary way, Bonosky presents the story of a boy caught be powerful social forces – the church, his family and community, his class, the owners of the steel mills, the law – and has to decide how his actions will conform to his conscience.

But, as Bonosky quickly points out, agitational, social literature has a long history in American letters before the Communists came along. 'When Harriet Beecher Stowe met Lincoln,' Bonsoky says, 'Lincoln is supposed to have said to her, 'So you’re the little lady that started this war?'' Stowe's book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 'was very polemical,' Bonosky says. 'Another example is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which directly attacked a social phenomenon, and by implication at least it implied what the solution should be.' Numerous examples could be cited.

No, Bonsoky says, his book wasn't a Party tract. 'Nobody told me to write the book like that. As a matter of fact, from a formal point of view, that should have been impossible to do. What! A communist writes about this? The church was not attacked; it wasn’t condemned. I didn’t get on a soapbox. I let the events tell their own story, and that’s what I think the truth of the situation was. Let the truth speak for itself. But without Marxism, I couldn’t have seen it myself. I couldn’t have seen the struggle there and where it was going.'

Though polemical literature was a major industry in American letters prior to the Communists, Marxism helped render things once hidden visible, Bonosky says. He had always been a writer as long as he had been conscious, and a part what motivated that was his love for reading.

While reading the classics the aspiring writer is expected to read, Bonosky came to realize something significant. 'There’s something missing,' he says. 'And I answered my own question about what was missing? I was missing. By that I mean not me personally, but that my class was missing. I came from the working class, directly from the working class, and all my friends were from the working class. Everybody in the town of Duquesne, Pennsylvania was working class. We had one industry, steel, and we were all working class, but there was no working class in the literature.'

At the moment of this realization, sometime in the 1930s, Bonosky began to search out those writers who told the story of his class. Those writers were the Communists. They also happened to be the great American writers who told the stories of African Americans and the racially oppressed. They told the story of women; of immigrants. They turned American letters on its head and gave voice to those who had been silenced by the literati celebrated among the canonical 'great writers.'

Another brilliant, if short-lived writer who is deserving of as much notoriety perhaps as Lessing was Lorraine Hansberry, best known for her play 'A Raisin in the Sun,' later made into a film starring Sidney Poitier, in discussing her views of art and writing said, 'All art is ultimately social; that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber.'

While Hansberry and Bonosky, and so many others like them who have been disappeared into the the folds of history by words like Lessing's, sought to agitate. Lessing has tried to simply 'prepare us for slumber.' As the title of the Los Angeles Times suggests, Bonosky brings his own special wisdom to the discussion about writing and communism.

(See our interview with Bonosky here, or listen to portions of it on our latest podcast.)

--Reach Joel Wendland at