AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut - A Life by CHARLES J. SHIELDS & UNSTUCK IN TIME: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels by GREGORY D. SUMNER

AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut - A Life
CHARLES J. SHIELDS
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012, 515 pages, $39.95 (pb)

UNSTUCK IN TIME: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels

GREGORY D. SUMNER
Seven Stories Press, 2012, 355 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Not everyone was impressed by Kurt Vonnegut.  His local paper objected to his famous 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five - ‘his style is not conventional, his approach is not delicate, his themes are not conservative’ – whilst in North Dakota in 1973 the school board of the town of Radke ordered three dozen copies of the book to be shovelled into the school furnace.

Vonnegut’s admirers, however, more than made up for his detractors, as two new biographies by Charles Shields and Gregory Sumner attest.

Born in Indianapolis in 1922 of German-American ancestry, journalism sidetracked Vonnegut from completing higher education but taught the future novelist the virtues of clarity and economy in writing.  He also discovered that, to write well, he needed ‘an axe to grind’.  His coming-of-age years provided him with two whetstones – the Great Depression, which turned him against capitalism’s inequities, and World War 2, which made him a pacifist.

Mobilised to Europe after the D-Day landings, Private Vonnegut stumbled headfirst into Hitler’s last gamble (the Battle of the Bulge) and he became a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany where he was forced to dig the graves of watching American POWs who had been condemned to be shot.  It was, however, the mass murder of the horrific Allied firestorm bombing of Dresden in February, 1945, which scarred Vonnegut.

He survived by sheltering in the storage room of a slaughterhouse, two levels below ground, but the ‘tableaux of horrors’ above the abattoir, and his later reflection that the carnage was for no strategic advantage (‘it didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defence or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp’), turned him against all wars, advocating especially, writes Sumner, for the “future bombing victims” of all America’s subsequent wars.

Along with war, other traditional and newly-hyped ideas and institutions (‘progress’, materialism, nationalism, the moon landing, nuclear power, the ‘conquest of nature’) were debunked by Vonnegut the social critic, radical raconteur and protest rally speaker.  Vonnegut, a once-aspirant labour movement organiser, also flailed at the ‘savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate American class system’, praising trade unions as ‘admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers’.

It would be a mistake, however, as both authors agree, to see Vonnegut as a revolutionary.  Sympathetic to socialism, Vonnegut described himself, however, as a ‘lifelong Northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt tradition, a friend of the working stiffs’ whose political philosophy was ‘unsystematic’ and strategically vague.  He wanted not to overthrow capitalism as to somehow make it fairer, more humane and less destructive.

A child of the family-wealth-sapping Depression, Vonnegut “admired entrepreneurship and could be a shrewd businessman”, writes Sumner, whether that involved Saab dealerships or writing for the mass magazine and pulp fiction market which he did early on when his novels had been distributed “along with westerns and teenage romances to drug stores and bus stations”.  Vonnegut sought the security of wealth, even if this meant investing in big property developers, IBM, anti-union mining companies and Dow Chemical (the maker of napalm during the Vietnam War).

Vonnegut’s novels, however, rose above his political contradictions.  Despite the chaotic absurdity of a world ruled by predatory capitalism and mechanised death, Vonnegut found an inherent dignity, humour and kindness in its victims.  Starved and beaten by sadistic guards as a POW, for example, Vonnegut was also fed by sympathetic local German women at much risk to themselves.

His faith in the counterweight of ‘community’ was resilient, especially amongst the young, those irrepressible questioners of the social order, who (when they looked up from their digital distractions - the typewriter-using Vonnegut had many reservations about the cyber-revolution) strove for meaning and purpose in a better world.

Vonnegut has been dismissed by some in the literary establishment as a cult, sci-fi author.  They dislike his genre-straddling, narrative-subverting, expressionistic style (staccato sentences, short chapters, use of graphics and white space) – the very qualities which make his novels something like poetry.

This is sometimes literary cover for a deeper scorn for Vonnegut’s social and political values.  Alas, this includes one of his biographers, Shields, who disapproves of Vonnegut reminding Americans that Al Qaeda does not have the monopoly on terror because it was the US that was the only nation ever to pulverise civilians with atomic weapons.  Shields also denigrates Vonnegut’s opposition to the US war in Afghanistan as the confused thinking of an 83 year old and a failure to recognise that world freedom and US capitalism are indivisible.  Sumner, fortunately, avoids the political pitfalls of American patriotism, although his close textual analysis of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels requires, to be most useful, familiarity with all of them.

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 from brain injury after tripping over the leash of his much loved pet dog.  After surviving both the Nazis and the Allies during terrible war, the superb ironist might have noted of his own demise, using his famous catchphrase, ‘and so it goes’.

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University by RICHARD HIL

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University
RICHARD HIL
NewSouth Publishing, 2012, 239 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Universities were better in the olden days, says Dr. Richard Hil in Whackademia.  As an Essex University student in the 1970s, Hil joined the Socialist Workers Party (which expanded his political horizons) and the Campaign for Real Ale (which expanded his waistline) whilst his lecturers stimulated his intellectual growth.  With 25 years behind him as an academic in Australian universities, however, he has seen the excitement of higher education stifled by corporatisation and its business model which treats education as a commodity to be sold, a degree as a “passport to a business career”.

The market assault on higher education in Australia was begun by the federal Labor government in the 1980s under the guise of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ and as an attack on ‘elitism’ and a sheltered workshop of pampered scholars who were not paying their way in Australia’s capitalist economy.

Under Labor’s ‘reformers’, the university workplace was redefined by the values of “economic rationalism, commercialisation, managerialism, corporate governance and other outgrowths of neo-liberalism”, says Hil.  Bureaucracy and corporate jargon dominate - all the crud of Key Performance Indicators, performance reviews, ‘quality assurance’, marketing and promotions, and micro-management of academics presided over by all-powerful corporate managers.

In a context of declining government funding, universities search for revenue streams, the most lucrative being full-fee-paying overseas students, whilst entry requirements for domestic students are eased and ‘soft-marking’ and ‘soft assessment’, especially for the semi-literate, compromise quality in the quest to reduce drop-out rates and keep the university’s market share of students, and their dollars, up.

The transformation of universities from places of intellectual passion into dull commercial enterprises designed to serve industry has seen the economic imperatives of the capitalist economy determine which courses survive.  As universities become managed by the corporation for the corporation, the curriculum increasingly suits vocational, market-oriented ends.

As the Business Council of Australia higher education spokesperson and accountant at one of Australia’s largest accountancy firms, demanding a lock-step customer-supplier business ethos, succinctly put it, “I am your major customer – I take 750 of your product each year”.  The liberal arts, especially, are on the endangered list unless they can be tethered to the ‘creative industries’ of visual design, media, publishing and advertising.

For Australia’s 120,000 academics, they have become cogs in a grinding knowledge machine.  Research has become a distant dream as class sizes expand, bureaucratic monitoring and reporting dogs every day and an administrative burden flourishes.  Academics are “overworked, burnt out, not coping, running out of energy, stressed out, not sleeping, and plain knackered”.  The 67,000 casual teachers have the bonus of poor job security.  Meanwhile, like other corporate CEOs, Vice-Chancellors prosper, soaring into the million dollar salary atmosphere.

Hil argues for a return to a university of community, collegiality, fun, soul, interest and delight.  To a republic of ideas and debate where critical thinking and clear communication matter most.  To education for active citizenship in a vibrant democracy.  To a campus that is “critic and conscience” of capitalist society’s unjust status quo.

Academics, like cats, are difficult to herd but, starved of sustenance by government budgets, sedated by forms and tranquilised by bureaucracy, there has been regrettable success in disciplining them.  As Hil’s entertaining book shows, however, there is a way out beyond just complaint – activism, small and large, for education as intellectual discovery, for education for social change.

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution by PETER FITZSIMONS; and EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle by GREGORY BLAKE

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution
PETER FITZSIMONS
William Heinemann, 2012, 696 pages, $49.95 (hb)

EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle

GREGORY BLAKE
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 249 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Labor’s Foreign Minister and history buff, Bob Carr, has dismissed it as a ‘local tax revolt’ and the Liberal Party has stoutly ignored it but the political importance of the gold miners’ Eureka Stockade in 1854, the closest thing Australia has had to an armed insurrection, deserves more than the short shrift it gets from Australia’s politicians who are the beneficiaries of the democratic reforms won through armed struggle by working people, as two new books on Eureka by Gregory Blake and Peter Fitzsimons show.

The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 sucked half the male population of the British colony away from their city and farm jobs and, facing massive wage rises for those left, the squattocracy (the rural ruling class) and the urban capitalists got their colonial government to impose a tax, through a license fee, on the miners to, as Fitzsimons notes, force the diggers back to work for their proper masters.  The tax also pumped a handy £50,000 per month into the government itself, prompting one journalist to note that ‘the Government is the greatest Gold Digger after all’.

Exploited by a tax (paid in advance, gold or no gold), oppressed by police (“uniformed thugs with guns”, says Fitzsimons), chained like beasts to trees and logs if caught without a licence during digger-hunts, denied justice in corrupt courts, their grievances not listened to by government, the tinder was set.  The spark was the connivance of a bent coroner and magistrate in absolving a pub owner and mate from the murder of a miner, and the prosecution of three miners for arson when the pub was torched by angry miners.

When a 12,000-strong miners’ meeting protested by burning their licenses, government officials ordered a license-hunt by mounted police, this time with drawn swords, who arrested seven miners, and by newly-arrived British soldiers with fixed bayonets who fired on the miners.  Incandescent with fury that the government had abandoned all restraint, most miners switched from faith in deferential petitions and ‘moral persuasion’, taking to ‘physical force’ and erecting a defensive stockade on a small hillock called Eureka.

Politicised through English Chartists (working class political radicals), the armed miners united around a manifesto of demands for democratic reforms to Victoria’s parliament of the rich which was elected by just 4,000 propertied men of a total population of a quarter of a million.

Governors La Trobe and Hotham, writes Blake, feared this “conspiratorial democratic political agenda”.  The authoritarian Ballarat Goldfields Commissioner saw demands for the abolition of the license fee as ‘a mere cloak to cover a democratic revolution’, writing of the need to teach a ‘fearful lesson’ about the price of rebellion to any other Victorian democrats.  Hotham had been overheard, as he departed England, to say ‘a little blood-letting would not do the unruly gold-miners any harm’.

When least expecting it (naively thinking the authorities would respect the Sabbath), and consequently with only 120 miners in the stockade, the attack came on Sunday, 3 October, overwhelming the stockade in just twenty minutes.  Around 60 miners were killed, most, notes a rightly indignant Fitzgerald, after resistance had ceased - “the worst of the murderers, for that is what they have become, are the police”.

To justify what Fitzsimons calls its “killing frenzy”, the government tried 13 prisoners for High Treason but could not find a jury of common men willing to convict any of them, so strong was popular sympathy for the miners.  With Governor Hotham’s moral authority listing badly in a sea of popular outrage, Hotham was forced to give the miners reform rather than face revolution, conceding all their demands (abolition of the license fee, granting the miners’ a vote and wider male suffrage not long after).  To ease Hotham’s pain, his own Commission of Inquiry into Eureka also noted that the economic returns from increasingly difficult mining were less than the usual wages the miners could earn and that this would drive them back to their old jobs better than armed troopers.

Democracy, on bourgeois terms, also turned out to be not so bad as feared.  Peter Lalor, leader of the rebels, was elected (minus one arm lost in the battle) to parliament in 1856 where he spent three conservative decades as a Minister of the Crown and strike-breaking mine-owner opposing further democratisation.

Blake, alas, makes little of the politics of Eureka.  His turgid history dismisses the historical relevance and class conflict interpretation of Eureka as driven by the “rigid political ideology” of Marxism but lead-footed doctrine better describes Blake’s own history of Eureka.  It is a myth, Blake says, that poorly armed, “innocent gold miners” were confronted by a “tyrannical government” which “brutally slaughtered” them in a “fearsome massacre” and his aim is to redeem the government, police and soldiers in an “affirmation of Australian nationhood” through Eureka.

Ultimate government responsibility for crushing the revolt was, pleads Blake, a “necessity” when faced with insurrection.  Government officials were poor, helpless cogs in a war dynamic when faced with a political challenge to their rightful authority, whilst the police have been victims of unwarranted “prejudice and vilification”.  The blood-lust behaviour of the soldiers (such as repeated use of the bayonet on the wounded) was “perfectly consistent” with what an army has to do against an “insurgency”.  Blake’s swooning over gun calibres and associated militaria betrays his intention of normalising Australia’s war brutalities.

As for the miners, says Blake, they have been romanticised as underdog heroes.  They brought on their  own heads the state’s military response by aggressively arming for war with guns aplenty and a sturdy fortress.  Fitzsimons shows, however, that the stockade was “a long way from impregnable” and that the rebels’ guns, pikes and theatrical sword props faced a “devastating” firepower disadvantage from the  276 well-armed attackers, including cavalry, with 200 in reserve and 850 more, plus artillery, on the way.

Fitzsimons is not ideologically hamstrung by Blake’s revisionist militarist nationalism although he does share the limitations of the nationalist analytical framework, promoting Eureka, along with the Anzacs at Gallipoli, as part of the ‘birth of a nation’ through bloodletting.

Eureka, in Fitzsimons’ telling, is much more than Blake’s narrow “history of a battle” – it is the history of class struggle.  The conservative columnist, Gerard Henderson, as noted by Fitzsimons, has lauded Eureka as a rising by small businessmen ‘against iniquitous taxes and over-regulation that was stifling their creation of wealth’ but this, whilst technically correct (the miners were independent, petit-bourgeois producers in economic competition with their claim-jumping rivals), misses the point.  The miners united, by manifesto and arms, for economic justice and democratic political rights, as have slave, peasant, national liberation and proletarian rebels, a political process of universal relevance to all oppressed and exploited classes, not just Henderson’s self-employed, small-time capitalists.

Fitzsimons wants his book to be “read like a novel” and this is how it is best read – for the artistic flavour of the drama of a stirring political rebellion by flawed but passionate common people against the power of the privileged.  As Mark Twain put it, Eureka is the ‘finest thing in Australasian history.  It was a revolution … a strike for liberty … a stand against injustice and oppression ... a victory won by a lost battle’.

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC by JOHN HAMILTON

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC
JOHN HAMILTON
Pan Macmillan, 2012, 393 pages , $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Stunning his home-town audience of patriotic Australians in 1919 with his statement that ‘the war has made me a Socialist’, Captain Hugo Throssell, one of nine Australian soldiers to win a Victoria Cross for supreme bravery at Gallipoli in 1915, made headlines, and enemies, on the anniversary of the signing of the Allies’ World War 1 peace treaty with Germany, says John Hamilton in his biography of Throssell.

The civic authorities of the town of Northam in Western Australia listened with increasing disbelief as Northam’s own war hero went on to denounce war for enriching armaments makers, war profiteers and rival national capitalist classes in their competition for territory, markets, resources and profits.

Throssell, the privileged son of a conservative State Premier,  had married Katherine Susannah Prichard, the journalist and feminist who went on to fame as a novelist and founder of the Communist Party of Australia.

Throssell, the dashing cavalry officer, who, in the first flush of battle, wrote how it was ‘most glorious’ to see a bayonet charge and what a ‘wonderful thing’ it was to see men running through an artillery bombardment, had become war-weary and disillusioned after seeing his mates killed and after suffering severe mental injury himself.

With what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, Throssell’s days were filled with nervousness and headaches (he had taken a head wound) and his nights were tortured into sleeplessness by what he had seen at Gallipoli and by the death of his brother who had signed up with Hugo in the belief that war was a thrilling adventure.

Prichard’s communism, and her profound love for a handsome, vital, selfless man, helped Throssell make sense of his ghastly war experiences.  Reading Engels may not have been easy – ‘Hell, girl, what the blazes does this mean?’, he would holler – but ‘usually our political discussions ended in love-making’, wrote Prichard.  Throssell, without becoming a party member, accepted Prichard’s political views as his own.

Australia’s political police put Throssell’s radicalisation down to ‘his wife’s influence’, or ‘his mind perhaps having been affected’ by the cerebro-spinal meningitis he contracted during the war.  Throssell’s biographer hedges his bets, saying it is possible that the brain injury Throssell received from a botched, war-time sinus operation made him “more vulnerable and easily influenced”.   Socialism, apparently, can only be understood as a psychological disorder, the product of a weakened mind.

Throssell, however, knew his own mind – on the back of his will he wrote ‘I have never recovered from my 1914-18 experiences’, shortly before committing suicide by his army pistol in 1933.  He also added an appeal that ‘my wife and child get the usual war pension’.  Owing £10,000 with just £10 in the bank, Throssell’s financial disasters during the economic Depression had been exacerbated, writes Hamilton, by his “enemies at work within the government” who helped ensure his economic projects were costly failures, and by conservatives in the Northam Returned Soldiers and Sailors League who got the government to remove Throssell from his job as soldiers’ representative on the government’s Discharged Soldiers’ Settlement Board.

The Repatriation Department added insult to tragedy by disputing the Coroner’s finding that Throssell’s war wounds were the cause of his suicide.  Prichard angrily defended her husband who ‘believed he would be ensuring a pension to me and my son by his last act.  I consider that his “grateful country” made it impossible for my husband to live.  He thought he had to die to provide for his wife and child’.

It was not until 1999 that a “modest memorial the size of a backyard barbecue” was erected to Throssell in Northam by his ‘grateful country’ whilst during the Depression, Throssell had been forced to try to pawn his Victoria Cross but was offered only 10 shillings for it – the ‘price of valour’ for a war hero who had, as his son, Ric, said later when donating Throssell’s medal to People for Nuclear Disarmament, ‘declared his commitment to peace’.

Throssell has not been well served by official history, nor by his biographer, Hamilton, whose conventional war narrative focuses on Throssell the warrior not the socialist and which includes a disapproval of Throssell’s decision to choose a patriotic occasion of military celebration to denounce war – “not the time nor place”, says Hamilton – but what better time or place could there be.  It took political courage and Throssell had just as much of that as he had bravery on the battlefield.

CLANDESTINE IN CHILE by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

CLANDESTINE IN CHILE: The Adventures of Miguel Littin

By GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
New York Review Books, 2012, 116 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘The most hated man in my life’, declared the casual-dressed, bearded, non-conformist Chilean film director, Miguel Littin, was the balding, near-sighted, clean-shaven, Uruguayan business tycoon who accompanied Littin’s every step on his secret return to the Chile of military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 1985. 

Littin’s true story, told to, and retold by, the Chilean novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, recounts how a false passport, voice coaching, weight loss, plucked eyebrows, new hair-do and ‘fake wife’ transformed Littin into ‘what I wanted least in the world to be: a smug bourgeois’, in order to disguise his re-entry to Chile to direct an underground documentary about the dictatorship.  Littin, a socialist who headed the pre-coup nationalised film industry, had only escaped execution during Pinochet’s coup through the help of a neutral military officer ‘who happened to be a film buff’.

Twelve years after the 1973 US-orchestrated coup, which assassinated the democratically-elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende, and installed Pinochet’s torture regime and a radical free market economic orthodoxy, Littin, one of five thousand permanently banned Chilean exiles, spent six risky weeks filming in Chile, protected by the Chilean underground, narrowly surviving exposure, his own carelessness with passwords, his impetuousness and being tailed by undercover police. 

Littin’s first impression on his return to Chile was one of ‘material splendour’ but the ‘ragged miners’, the poor of the slums, and the child beggars and unemployed peddlers in the shadows of the gay lights of Santiago revealed economic squalor.

So too, the apparent civilian calm – ‘armed policemen were more in evidence on the streets of Paris or New York’ – was deceptive.  Just out of visitors’ sights were the junta’s shock squads in the subway stations, water-cannon trucks on side streets and ‘secret’ police conspicuously present with their short-cropped hair.

This apparatus of repression, and a night curfew, kept many Chileans passive as individuals but collective protest and armed resistance were a daily occurrence.  From the general strike which preceded Littin’s arrival, to the protest hunger march he filmed.  From the poor woman who kept a photo of Allende hidden behind one of the Carmelite Virgin, to the Catholic nun who ran secret missions to and from Chile, including couriering the last reels of Littin’s film  to Europe.  From the young rebels who carried out innumerable ‘anonymous deeds’, to aristocratic Chileans in regime-fooling BMWs who saved Littin from sub-machine guns at roadblocks.

Littin found a supportive writer in Marquez, the novelist himself a friend of Allende, who had announced he would desist from writing as a protest against the coup until the Pinochet dictatorship had fallen.  This impractical gesture was rescinded in 1981 with Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which also marked a turn from the political to the personal in his writing, but, as Francisco Goldman notes in his introduction, Clandestine in Chile offered a chance for Marquez to stick one to the General.  Pinochet felt the blow and seized and burnt 15,000 copies of the book imported into the country.

The rest of Goldman’s introduction, however, is best avoided.  The professor of literature, a “post-revolutionary pessimist” embarrassed about his own radical political past of “idealism and naïve revolutionary dreams”, distorts the book as an illusory attempt by two ageing socialist has-beens to recapture the “political vigour, conviction and ardour” of their immature youth, an “absurdist” farce in which Littin and his film crews “never seem to be in any real danger” with Marquez pontificating as deluded propagandist for left-wing political “fanatics” such as Allende.  A different book entirely to the actual one about the genuine spirit of opposition to capitalist tyranny displayed by the quietly heroic Littin and Marquez.

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times by HAZEL ROWLEY

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times

By HAZEL ROWLEY
University of Chicago Press, 2012 (first published 2008), 626 pages, $38.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Despite being the first best-selling black writer in American literary history (with Native Son in 1940), Richard Wright found that ‘my being a rather well known writer did not help me any’ in lessening the prejudice he faced in the US.  His fame, in fact, so goaded some whites to put him more firmly in his racial place that he fled into voluntary exile to France from 1947.  Hazel Rowley’s masterful biography of Wright recreates the writer whose life and literature was marked by bigotry, violence and disillusion.

Born in 1908 in a wooden shack in Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of slaves, Wright had a stormy childhood, trapped by a puritanical Seventh Day Adventist religion, menial jobs working for ‘nigger’-taunting bosses, and the threat of violence.

Books and writing were his intellectual escape, and Chicago his geographical route out of “semi-feudal conditions in the rural south to the steel and stone grind of modern industrial capitalism” with its own special discrimination, magnified by the Great Depression.

Marxism became Wright’s university, through the Communist party-organised John Reed Club of proletarian artists and writers.  Wary at first, Wright found that communists were the only white people who showed sincere interest in black rights.  A member from 1932 to 1944, the Communist party was central to his life, though never an entirely smooth fit.  Although Wright loyally survived numerous twists and turns of Moscow-dominated political and literary policy, he was seen by hard-liners as an untrustworthy “wayward individualist”.

As Harlem correspondent in New York for the party’s Daily Worker,  he resented having to write propaganda and preferred to put his creativity into his novels.  Until now, he said, black writing had been  ‘the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America for justice’, an approach he set out to exorcise through “urban toughness”, “graphic realism” and “emotional power”.  Native Son featured Bigger Thomas, a tough, bullying hoodlum, a rapist and murderer, the “angriest, most violent anti-hero ever to have appeared in black American literature”, says Rowley. 

Not all liberals, black or white, appreciated, or understood, where Bigger Thomas was coming from.  They lamented the novel’s lack of positive characters and absence of sympathetic white people.  Some of Wright’s party comrades were also ill-at-ease with his portrayal of Communists in the novel and they attacked the book with the Stalinist vitriol of the literary ideologue.  Wright lapsed from active membership in response.

His next book, American Hunger, took a bitter biographical tour of racism in the south and north, and also included a scathing attack on the Communist Party for its reaction to Native Son, for its slavish obedience to Moscow and for its hostility to ‘independent-minded individuals’.  There was some justice in his anti-communist broadside but also much unfairness - as Rowley notes, Wright’s “picture of the Communist Party was not balanced.  He wrote with the righteous anger of a betrayed lover”.

Whilst  Moscow was unsubtle about Wright’s defection (calling him a ‘renegade’ whose works display ‘ever-growing signs of the putrefaction common to American decadent literature’), the FBI salivated at the prospect of a Communist apostate who might prove useful for Cold War propaganda and as an informer.  However, given that another major factor for Wright’s break with the party was its downgrading of  the civil rights struggle in favour of the war effort during World War 11, the FBI rapidly cooled towards someone whose disagreement with the Communist Party was that it was ‘not revolutionary enough’, as an agent put it, ‘with respect to the advancement of the negro’.

Wright was never fully assimilated into the rest of the fold of prominent ex-communist intellectuals who contributed to the 1949 Cold War bible, The God That Failed, by British Labour MP, Richard Grossman.  Wright remained concerned about how anti-communism was being used to clamp down on civil liberties and free expression by radicals of any stripe or colour and he declined Grossman’s invitation to contribute to an updated book.

When State Department officials threatened their troublesome new anti-communist ally with a career-damaging show trial before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, Wright vowed never to testify, and when he found out in 1960 that it was the CIA that was behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had co-opted Wright by funding and publishing him, he was pained that for years “he had in fact been a propaganda tool for the CIA”.

Wright died in mysterious circumstances in 1960, aged just 52.  Although speculation that the FBI or CIA were involved remains just that, the sudden absence of a talented writer who was a fervent critic of racism in the US was happily to the benefit of the capitalist secret police and their political masters.

Wright’s narrative power as a writer is well served by Rowley’s story-telling rhythm whilst her political assessment of Wright is judicious with only infrequent lapses when Wright’s communist decade is distorted through his unfairly negative, latter-day anti-communism.  In the end, though, even this ideological filter could not screen out the blot of racism from the American capitalist tapestry which Wright had portrayed with force and artistry.

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History by FLORENCE WILLIAMS

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History

By FLORENCE WILLIAMS
Text Publishing, 2012, 338 pages, $34.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The reason women have evolved breasts, says science journalist, Florence Williams, is for feeding and protecting the health of infants and not as sexual objects, the usual reason advanced in a field of science for so long dominated by breast-fancying men.  The natural history of the breast, however, is threatened by an unnaturally toxic world.

Breast milk, for example, contains a suite of industrial additives, many of them known or probable carcinogens, never meant to be ingested by mothers or passed onto their infants.  These include flame-retardants, perchlorate (a jet-fuel ingredient), DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls (industrial solvents), mercury, lead, benzene and arsenic.  From paint thinners and toilet deodorisers, they come.  From electronics and furnishings.  From food and from cosmetics.

Phthalates, which guarantee cancer in mice, are ubiquitous in human lives.  Used as scent binders in personal hygiene products, and as a softening agent in plastics, phthalates migrate into human tissue, with a special fondness for the fat-laden breast.  Their partner in cancer is Bisphenol A (BPA), an ingredient of polycarbonate plastic which is perpetually to hand in plastic bottles, plastic toys, rubber gloves, food cans, CDs, mobile phones, shopping receipts and dozens more household objects.

This deadly duo saturate the breast, the site of most tumours in women, and they are amongst the prime chemical suspects for the doubling of the incidence of breast cancer since the 1940s.  Better diagnostics and other post-1940s risk factors (such as oral contraceptive use, ageing, obesity, early puberty, older age of first birth and a smaller number of pregnancies) explain only a small part of this increase.

Left in the frame is the increase in chemical exposure, especially to chemicals which mimic oestrogen and other hormones and which increase vulnerability to cancerous mutation or errors from breast cell replication.  Breast cancer is most common in the developed world which has the highest household presence of toxic chemicals.

This breast-hostile environment pits health against capitalist profit and its government guardians.  BPA, for example, generates annual profits in the US of $6 billion as well as breast cancer.  “The phenomenal power of the chemical industry”, says Williams, ensures a lax regulatory environment allowing the 82,000 different chemicals in use, with 800 more added each year, virtually free reign from government oversight.

Standard business and government policy is to assume that all chemicals are safe until proven otherwise.  Adequate testing is not required whilst food, drugs and cosmetics are exempt from labelling for biologically-active synthetic chemicals.  The long latency between chemical exposure and cancer, allows a chemical industry to cynically “sow seeds of scientific doubt” about the link between chemicals and cancer.

Government reluctance to harm corporate profit also smooths the way for tumours through public health crises.  Obesity, and a diet high in fats and low in fibre, increases the risk of breast cancer but little government action, if any, is taken against the food industry to counter the five thousand commercials, half about junk food, which the average American girl will watch during her childhood.

The same irresponsible corporate and government attitude has marked the rest of the unnatural history of breasts.  For post-menopausal women, the ill-fated Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) assisted only around 10% of menopausal women whose symptoms were clinically serious whilst the other 90% were subjected to HRT’s dangerous dose of synthetic hormones because it is “more profitable to do so”.  The 26% increase in breast cancer associated with HRT use was the human cost of greedy pharmaceutical companies doing business.

As with menopause, so too is ‘micromastia’ (small breasts) a concocted ‘disease’ requiring a profitable technology (a global market of $800 million for breast implants) in a tale of “marketing and mass hysteria” over breast envy.  Mastectomy patients account for only 20% of silicone gel injections or implant surgery but the ‘vanity’ majority bear the health burden of complications such as toxic ruptures (especially if the implant is secretly made from cheap industrial-grade silicone), plus a recipe of re-operations, costly MRIs and reduced ability to detect early breast cancer.

Infant formula rounds out the depressing theme of corporate greed and government negligence.  Breast is best for infant nutrition, for disease protection, for cognitive development (formula milk is as detrimental to child IQ as lead in gasoline and paint) and for immunological future-proofing (the 800 species of bacteria in human breast milk establish essential colonies of pathogen-fighting gut flora).  Formula companies, however, seek to crash this monopoly by exploiting the guilt that can arise from mothers who give up breast-feeding because of soreness and mastitis.

Williams concludes that it is folly to try to individually safeguard one’s family from chemicals and from synthetic breast components.  Government, and chemical and medical companies, she says, “need to change the way they test, manufacture and market” their potentially lethal products.  She is right - keeping abreast of the profit motive is the biggest challenge to women’s health under capitalism.