NATHAN ASCH
By Jim Burns

It could be that Nathan Asch is now mostly remembered as the son of Sholem Asch, the renowned Yiddish writer whose books were popular in the first half of the 20^th century. But Nathan Asch had a literary life of his own, even if he didn’t achieve anything like the output of novels, plays, and journalism, that his father was noted for. He was never a well-known writer, but what he did produce can still be worth looking at.

Asch was born in Warsaw in 1902, and arrived in the United States in 1915 when his father moved the family there. He had attended schools in Poland, Switzerland, and France, and in America he at some point seems to have been at Syracuse and Columbia universities, though details are sketchy. Some accounts suggest he was in Paris in 1921, though a likelier date may be 1923. His first short stories appeared in The Transatlantic Review, edited by Ford Madox Ford in 1924, and placed him alongside Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, Jean Rhys, and Gertrude Stein. One of them, “Gertrude Donovan”, is the story of an office worker who dreams of having a relationship with and marrying one of the managers at the firm she works for. She already has a boy-friend, a young man who wants to marry her, and in an absent-minded moment when she’s thinking of the man at work, she accepts his proposal. The story ends with her anguished realisation, “What did I do? What did I do?”.

The story involves much more than my brief description implies. The girl’s relationship with her mother is referred to, as is the fact that the girl has, with all the other staff, been given her notice that day. The office is closing down due to a lack of business. The seeming ordinariness (one critic referred to a “stubborn allegiance to a stark truthfulness”) of the situation is typical of Asch’s writing, and the precarious nature of employment for many people in the 1920s is suggested though not over-emphasised. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression were still in the future. The story became a chapter in Asch’s first novel, The Office, published in 1925. 

Back in America Asch contributed stories to the 1927 and 1928 issues of The American Caravan, a large annual publication featuring many new and established writers. Asch’s story, “The Country”, in the 1927 volume told how a young man, keen to impress his girlfriend, takes her on a trip to the country, where being city dwellers and used to distractions like cinemas, department stores, and coffee shops, they find themselves arguing because there’s nothing to do. Their relationship is further affected when he attempts to make love to her and she rejects his advances. The story has no significant conclusion and the couple simply head back to the city, though it seems evident that they’re not likely to continue their association.

The 1928 American Caravan had Asch’s story, “The City”, in which a middle-aged woman whose husband has died moves to the city, with her son and daughter, and dislikes it. She wants to return to the small town she previously lived in, but her son has a job and a lady friend who he brings home for dinner. She slowly begins to displace the mother, moving the furniture around, doing the cooking, and generally taking over the running of the household. The mother and the daughter eventually do return to where they came from, leaving the son and his new wife in possession of the apartment.

My summaries of these stories don’t do justice to Asch’s storytelling, which is detailed and builds up the tension slowly rather than heading straight for the climax. The same technique is evident in another of his stories published in 1927. “Business” appeared in American Esoterica, “privately published by Macy-Macius”, and with an introduction by Carl Van Doren. It presumably aimed to publish things which, at the time, might have been considered a bit risque, or “spicy”, as they used to say, though they’re innocuous now. Asch’s story is about a man who picks up, or is picked by a street walker, goes with her, thinks she’s fine and proposes that they live together, but reacts violently when she tells him that she’s “sick”, in other words suffering from a venereal disease: “You lousy whore!” he shrieked. And, pushing her aside, he seized his hat, and ran out of the door”. 

As a matter of interest the story appeared alongside others by Robert McAlmon, Djuna Barnes, John Cournos, Clement Wood, and James Oppenheim. McAlmon’s “Distinguished Air” was from his book of that name, published in Paris in 1925 and banned in the United States, dealing as it did with gay Berlin night-life in the Weimar period.

What is usually considered Asch’s best book, the novel Pay Day, was published in 1930. The action takes place over a less than twenty-four hour period and involves Jim, a run-of-the-mill clerk in a New York office. He collects his weekly pay packet, counts its contents, and plans what he’s going to do. At home he argues with his sister and her boyfriend, gives his mother some of the money, and gets ready to go out. He’s made a date with a lunchroom waitress “whose handsome breasts he has ogled”, and intends to impress her with his familiarity with city life and entertainment. It doesn’t work out that way. It’s a straightforward account and its episodic nature – nine chapters with headings like “The Subway,” “The Street”, “The Movie”, “The Speakeasy” -  emphasises the urban setting and the somewhat shallow content of Jim’s life. He's discontented and, as an antidote to what he can’t obtain, he’s intent on having what he considers to be a “good time”, only to wake up the following morning with a hangover, no money left, and a realisation that nothing has changed in his life.

A reviewer in The Bookman in 1930 got it right when he said that “The real merit of the book is incidental; it does not derive from the picture as a whole, or from the ironic counterpoint of the Sacco-Vanzetti execution which is taking place as Jim goes about his evening. It lies in Mr Asch’s sense of atmosphere and manners – in his downtown New York at night, which captures all five of our senses, in his speakeasy scenes, breathing and dynamic, in his drinkers and dancers made unmistakable by mere conversation. These things are more than documentary; there is drama in them, movement, colour”.

A degree of notoriety was linked to Pay Day thanks to an attempt by the Society for the Suppression of Vice to have the book prosecuted on the grounds of obscenity. By the standards of the day it probably did seem to be going in that direction as Jim thinks about various women he encounters and fantasises about what might happen, but there is little or no descriptive material that could upset the average reader. Certainly, by comparison with what can be found in print today it comes across as quite commonplace.

The allusion to “the Sacco-Vanzetti execution” may not be clear to anyone reading Asch nowadays. References to them occur throughout his book in overheard conversations, newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, etc., and concern the case of two Italian anarchists who were accused of killing a paymaster during a 1921 hold-up in Braintree, Massachusetts. It seems to be generally acknowledged that evidence against them was flimsy and they were, in a sense, almost convicted of being anarchists as much as for the alleged crime. Their trial attracted a great deal of attention, not only in America but around the world and there were demonstrations and riots in London, Paris, and many other cities. They were finally executed in 1927. There have been suggestions over the years that one of them, Sacco, may have been involved in the robbery, but that Vanzetti was totally innocent. A leading anarchist, Carlo Tresca, certainly inclined to that view, though others disputed it.

When Pay Day was published in 1930 the Great Depression was starting to hit America hard. Banks were closing, unemployment increasing, and the general outlook was one of pessimism and doubt. There doesn’t appear to be any evidence to show that Asch joined the Communist Party or sympathised with its policies, as many American writers did in the 1930s, but he certainly associated with left-wingers like Malcolm Cowley, Muriel Rukeyser, Stanley Burnshaw, and Mike Gold. He had stories in early issues of Partisan Review, and he collaborated with Josephine Herbst on a play about the Spanish Civil War. It never got to the production stage, primarily because actors belonging to the Theatre Union, “an organisation closely allied with the Communist Party”, claimed it had “some basic ideological flaws”. Herbst and Asch said that the producer wanted to turn the play into “a stupid propaganda vehicle reflecting a narrow Stalinist Communist point of view”.     

There were no more novels, but Asch did publish a couple of documentary-style books in which he looked at the lives of ordinary Americans as they tried to cope with the ravages of the Depression. One of them, The Road, involved him travelling around the country by bus. He had, however, started to publish stories in the New Yorker, one of which, “The Works”, was later anthologised. A well-written account of an affair between a government bureaucrat and a fragile girl, it ends on a sad note : “After that he saw her only once more. Some time before he went back to New York, on a Saturday afternoon, he stopped his car at a red light on Connecticut Avenue. He saw her standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change. She was dressed in gray and she looked middle-aged. Their eyes met and with an effort he waved, and she waved back. In a moment the light turned to green and he drove away. He had gone a block or two before he thought that maybe he should have offered her a lift”. 

There was also a story, “Mary”, in Contact, a little magazine edited by William Carlos Williams, Nathanael West and Robert McAlmon. It’s a sharp account of a chance meeting with a young woman in a Texas town, and its bleakness evokes the desperation that so many people felt during the Depression. Mary has little to look forward to other than a continuation of her struggle to survive: “If I could only find a home somewhere, to cook and keep a house, and have a room somewhere. I’m a good cook. You don’t need a cook, do you? It wouldn’t cost you much”.

Asch’s books did sell well when translated for distribution in Germany, but that source of income dried up after 1936. As a Jewish writer his work was no longer acceptable. He was employed for a time on the Federal Writers Project, a branch of Roosevelt’s New Deal designed to help struggling writers, and when America entered the Second World War in 1941 he enlisted in the Army Air Force. He continued writing but published little after 1945. There were a couple of stories in The New Yorker, a memoir of his father, with whom he had always had a difficult relationship, in Commentary, and an excerpt from a memoir of Paris in the 1920s appeared in The Paris Review in 1954. Asch moved to California, and taught writing workshops. According to Malcolm Cowley, “His wife had a job and supported him”. Information about his life in the post-war period is scarce, and I’m not sure about the sequence of events.  He died from cancer in 1964.  

I’m not going to claim that Nathan Asch was an important writer. He wasn’t, but he was an interesting one. The best of his work – Pay Day, his short stories, the Paris memoir – can still be read with pleasure.

NOTES

This is a list of the items I had direct access to when writing this article.

Pay Day. Omnigraphics, Detroit, 1990. A reprint of the 1930 edition.

“Business” in American Esoterica, Macy-Masius, New York, 1927.

“The Country” in The American Caravan, Jonathan Cape, London, 1927.

“In the City” in The Second American Caravan, Macaulay, New York, 1928.

“Gertrude Donovan” in The Transatlantic Review, Paris, December 1924.

“Mary” in Contact 2, New York, May 1932.

“The Works” in Short Stories from the New Yorker, Jonathan Cape, London, 1951. Originally published in the magazine in July 1940.

“The Nineteen-Twenties : An Interior” in The Paris Review, Paris, Summer 1954.

Malcolm Cowley : Conversations with Malcolm Cowley, edited by Thomas Daniel Young, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1986. Cowley is one of the few literary critics who tried to keep Asch’s memory alive.

Laura Browder : Rousing the Nation : Radical Culture in Depression America, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1998. Very few academic works about the Thirties mention Asch, but Browder does give some attention to his work, placing him alongside writers like James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Nathanael West, Ruth McKenney, and Sherwood Anderson in attempting to “create a new kind of literature to meet the needs of a nation in crisis”. But there are no references to Asch in standard works such as Walter B. Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (Harvard University Press, 1956), Daniel Aarons’ Writers on the Left (Harcourt Brace, 1961), and Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Asch is also excluded from anthologies of 1930s writing like Harvey Swados’s The American Writers and the Great Depression (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), Jack Salzman’s Years of Protest (Pegasus, 1967), and Louis Filler’s American Anxieties (Transaction, 1993). It may be that Asch’s focus on “ordinary” people (low-status white collar workers, waitresses, shop assistants), as opposed to political militants, strikers, union activists, and the like, doesn’t seem particularly radical in content. They were not the proletariat of Communist ideology.  But it’s the “ordinary” aspect that makes it come across as genuine. There is social realism present, not socialist realism.