The Girl.

By Meridel Le Sueur. University of New Mexico Press, $12.95.

Meridel Le Sueur forged several careers over a lifetime, but the most prominent of these was as a leftist writer of poetry, prose, history, journalism, and autobiography. She was the product of a socialist household, where her family hosted meetings of the Non-Partisan League, the IWW, the Farmer-Labor Party, and the Socialist Party. By her early teens, Le Sueur had the rather unique opportunity as a youth to meet such figures as Helen Keller and Eugene Debs. She studied dance and drama, and hunched her writing career around age fifteen. As a young adult, she lived in an anarchist commune with Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, spent some time on the New York stage, worked briefly as a stunt person in silent films (including "The Perils of Pauline"), served the Works Progress Administration with the Minnesota unit of the Writers Project, and functioned as both speaker and presiding committee member at the 1935 American Writers' Congress.

Like Tillie Olsen and Tess Slesinger, Meridel Le Sueur became identified with the literary left during the thirties, and knew many women authors of the era, including Agnes Smedley and Josephine Herbst. She championed the causes of workers--from farms to factories to mines--and published in Partisan Review, The Nation, New Masses, and The Daily Worker. Le Sueur was subpoenaed in 1954 by McCarthy's House Committee and effectively blacklisted as a subversive, subsequently finding a haven of sorts in writing children's books, an enterprise where, strangely enough, she found herself less scrutinized.

The social movements of the sixties encouraged Le Sueur anew. She worked on behalf of land preservation and land rights for Native America, protested poverty and the Vietnam War, and went to Berkeley during the Free Speech movement. The climate created by the women's movement helped precipitate a 1970s revival of Le Sueur's work, as well as the first-rime publication of her 1939 novella, The Girl, in 1978. A lifelong example and advocate of the conjoined roles of writer and worker, artist and activist, Meridel Le Sueur died in 1996.

It is curious, given such a remarkable career, that Meridel Le Sueur is not more widely known and read. Those who do recognize her must wait (too) patiently for her works, such as "I Hear Men Talking" and "Women on the Breadlines" to come back into print. Le Sueur's journals (in excess of 125 volumes), if they ever go to press, may provide ample material to accompany and inform her own literary statements. For now, we must remain grateful to have some of her fiction available to teach again.

In a course on twentieth-century American literature, I sometimes feature figures such as Meridel Le Sueur in a role-play and dialogue assignment:

   Here's the scenario: Tillie
   Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, Tess
   Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and
   Josephine Herbst are to meet
   for a conversation about our
   course and its subject matter.
   During our next class session,
   they will be featured discussants
   in a dialogue about twentieth-century
   American literature. In
   order to make this happen, you
   and the members of your group
   [small, randomly-assigned
   groups of about five or six
   members each] have the
   remainder of today's session in
   which to research and engage
   the writer for which the group
   takes responsibility. Using the
   selection(s) we have read and
   any other materials you wish to
   consult, prepare to assume the
   role and voice of that writer in
   the dialogue in our next class
   session.

   The dialogue will address some
   scripted and some unscripted
   questions. These questions will
   be of three sorts: general questions
   about the role of literature
   within a society, reflections on
   our prior course texts (we'll
   assume each participant in the
   dialogue is familiar with these
   items), and specific questions
   about each writer's work and
   influences. Your group will also
   need to pose at least one question
   of the other four participants
   in the dialogue.

   Below are some potential interview
   questions to help get you
   started with preparation for the
   dialogue. As you formulate
   responses, you will need to
   answer "in character" (as the
   writer your group represents
   within the dialogue). In other
   words, if your group is representing
   Meridel Le
   Sueur, you should
   develop the responses
   as you think Le Sueur
   might.

* At the beginning of the course, we generated two lists (reasons we need literature, and reasons we continue to need new literature). How would you respond to and/or modify these lists? Where would you place your own work in terms of these functions literature serves?

* Is there any literature we don't need? Any that harms us?

* What, at its best, does literature do or contribute?

* How does your work relate to that of other writers--past, present, and future?

* What is the ethical work of literature?

* Does literature have an obligation to participate in social change?

* Is all literature, at some level, autobiographical and/or confessional? Should it be?

* What are the rights and responsibilities of readers of literature? Of your readers in particular?

The format and demands of this assignment are unconventional for most students, and they respond with a lot of nervous energy. I try to put that energy to work by conferring closely with the groups during the preparation session, and making certain they understand what the dialogue session will be like, as well as answering any questions they have about how to formulate responses to the questions. For example, I might suggest that the Le Sueur group would find helpful information in two books that make frequent references to Le Sueur's career: Constance Coiner's Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (Oxford UP, Press, 1995) and Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998).

The dialogue session is similarly charged, but once students get a feel for the role-play aspect of the assignment, they surprise themselves with how well they do and how much fun they find in it. As the session progresses, members of each group learn to improvise and collaborate. An instructor may need to begin by posing very accessible, open-ended questions (with generous follow-up questions when a group falters), be more than usually prepared to follow the conversation's direction (rather than adhere strictly to a lesson plan), and react along with the group to some of the humor of the resulting voicings and exchanges. In my last group the biggest laugh went to a male member of a group who, having done some biographical research on the writer in question, matter-of-factly referred to events that coincided with "my first pregnancy." It's also a good idea to leave enough time at the end of the role-play for participants to drop their poses and speak as themselves--to discuss both the literary/cultural issues and the experience of the dialogue activity itself.

Linda S. Watts

University of Washington, Bothell