MCLC: memoir about Hu Feng to be published

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: memoir about Hu Feng to be published
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Thanks to Victor Mair for drawing my attention to this.

Kirk 

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Source: English Pen (2/7/13):
http://www.englishpen.org/living-with-a-prisoner/

Past Events Disperse like Smoke	
Posted	February 7th, 2013 by Tasja Dorkofikis

PEN Atlas contributor Gregor Benton looks at revolution, resistance and
the Beijing University literature class that harboured three of China’s
best-known intellectual and political adversaries, in light of his
forthcoming translation of Mei Zhi’s prison memoirs F: Hu Feng’s Prison
YearsProbably all revolutions in modern times have fallen out, sooner or
later, with their intellectuals. Critical thinkers have been both the
begetters of revolution, by articulating its ideologies, and its victims,
for the same righteous indignation that fired them up enough to join it in
the first place led many to denounce its abuses once the new freedoms
vanished.

Hu Feng is an example. He became a revolutionary at Beijing University in
the 1920s, secretly joined the Japanese Communist Party in Tokyo, worked
for the resistance in wartime China, and led movements of leftwing writers
in cities controlled by Chiang Kai-shek. He was one of China’s best-known
leftwing editors before 1949 and a pupil of Lu Xun, the giant of China’s
twentieth-century literature and its George Orwell. After Mao’s victory in
1949, Hu Feng worked for a while on the fringes of the Beijing regime, but
after a couple of years he got into trouble with the literary and
political establishment. This was partly because he belonged to a wrong
faction, but mainly because of his liberal view of literature. He
implicitly criticized Mao’s proposal that creative writing should serve
the party, by extolling the masses and reflecting the ‘bright side’ of
life rather than ‘exposing the darkness’. So he was denounced for
‘subjectivism’, i.e., exaggerating the role played by what he called the
inner energy of the active subject. He was also a belligerent man. His
short fuse made enemies, and he was not a party member, unlike his
opponents. He had joined its youth section in 1923, lost touch during the
civil war, and tried to rejoin after returning from Japan, but failed.

Hu Feng spent twenty-five years as a political prisoner starting in 1955,
a record surpassed only by the Chinese Trotskyists’ thirty-odd years in
gaol. After his death in 1985, his wife Mei Zhi wrote her memoir of the
prison years she shared with him. Mei Zhi too was a revolutionary, but by
profession she was a children’s author, so her writing is clear and
jargon-free. Initially gaoled as Hu Feng’s accomplice, she was freed under
supervision in 1961. The nuances of Hu Feng’s literary theory didn’t
really interest her, but she stayed true to him despite the troubles he
brought on her and their children and despite her milder views. She
returned to prison voluntarily after her release, to care for him in his
sickness and old age.

Mei Zhi was engagingly honest about her feelings. She was a stoic, capable
of astonishing self-sacrifice for her family, but unlike Hu Feng she could
be cynical about politics. Hers is one of China’s best prison-memoirs. It
is a gripping story, climaxing in Hu’s madness and a redemption of sorts.
It differs from similar accounts in that despite their calvary, Mei and Hu
remained supporters of the revolution. It is also a love story – of her
love for him, even in the years of his madness.

The book was first published in instalments, starting with Past Events
Disperse like Smoke. I picked this up in Beijing in 1987 for Wang Fanxi,
the exiled elderly Trotskyist leader who shared my house for several
years. On my trips to China, I used to buy books I thought he’d like. It
turned out he and Hu Feng had been class-mates at Beijing University,
along with Wang Shiwei, Chinese communism’s first real dissident, murdered
by the party near Yan’an in 1947 after arguing publicly that writing
should be free to criticise party abuses and to talk about the soul. So
one literature class harboured three of the party’s best-known future
trouble-makers. Wang Fanxi pressed me to translate Past Events and told me
some interesting facts about Hu Feng, which might have got him into
trouble even sooner had his inquisitors known about them.

They concerned Hu Feng’s relations with Lu Xun and Lu Xun’s affinity with
Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s exiled rival. As a literary liberal, Trotsky had
attacked ‘proletarian literature’, a futurist Soviet style, in his book
Literature and Revolution, arguing that the arts should be a sphere unto
themselves rather than a product of official decrees. This was also more
or less Lu Xun’s view.

In notes written after 1979, Hu Feng recalled a postscript Lu Xun had
written in 1926 for a translation of Alexander Blok’s enigmatic poem The
Twelve. According to Hu, reading the postscript freed him ‘from a vulgar
sociological understanding of the creative process.’ In it, Lu Xun had
used Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution to illuminate the literary genius
of the ‘bourgeois’ Blok. He also sponsored a Chinese translation of
Trotsky’s book. He stopped referring to Trotsky after 1929, probably for
diplomatic reasons. After reading Lu Xun’s postscript, Hu Feng realised
that not all Marxists believed that everything in the creative process had
a ‘material’ or ‘economic’ base. So Trotsky’s style of literary
appreciation was a wellspring of Hu Feng’s fateful opposition to
party-decreed ‘mechanicalism’, though he never said so directly.

Stalin’s demonizing of Trotsky was copied by the Chinese communists in
their attacks on Chen Duxiu, the independent-minded founder of Chinese
communism, expelled as an oppositionist in 1929. Similarly, Stalin’s
posthumous cult of Maxim Gorki was mirrored by the cult of Lu Xun, hailed
as ‘China’s Gorki’, also after his politically convenient death in 1936
(the same year Gorki died). Like Gorki, Lu Xun was made into a cult so the
party could cloak itself in his reputation for integrity. But first they
had to expurgate his embarrassing antecedents, especially the fact that he
was influenced by Trotsky, for the link made his enshrinement laughable.
So the affinity between Trotsky, demonized in both China and Russia, and
Lu Xun was richly ironic. And so was the fact that Hu Feng’s ‘thought
crimes’ were in reality a faithful echo of Lu Xun, who had persuaded him
that revolutionary writing did not have to be clichéd and uniform or to
toe a party line and should be free to treat questions of the human spirit.

About the Author

Gregor Benton is professor emeritus at Cardiff University. He has
published books on Chinese Communism, dissent in China, and Chinese
communities outside China. HisMountain Fires (University of California
Press, 1992) and New Fourth Army (University of California Press, 1999)
won several awards, including the Association of Asian Studies’ best book
on modern China. He has translated scholarly books from German, Dutch,
Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese. He has taught Chinese Studies in
Leeds, Amsterdam, Cardiff, Kuala Lumpur, and Barcelona.
 F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years by Mei Zhi, translated by Gregor Benton
received a Writers in Translation award for 2013 and will be published by
Verso <http://www.versobooks.com/books/1154-f> in April 2013.