Conversations with Trotsky: Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s

This collection presents all of Earle Birney’s known published and unpublishedwritings on Trotsky and Trotskyism for the very first time. It includes theircorrespondence as well as a selection of Birney’s letters and literary writings.

Before he became one of Canada’s most influential and popular twentieth centurypoets, Earle Birney lived a double life. To his students andcolleagues, he was an engaging university lecturer and scholar. But forseven years—from 1933 to 1940—the great Russian revolutionary LeonTrotsky was the focus of his writing and much of his life.

During his years as a Trotskyist in Canada, the United States and England,Birney wrote extensively about Trotsky, corresponded with him, organizedTrotskyist cells in two countries, and recruited on behalf of Trotskyism;he also lectured on Trotsky and interviewed him over the course of severaldays. One of his two novels is based on some of these activities.

The collection traces the origins of Trotsky’s mistrust of “the British” tohis experiences in Canada; shows Birney’s influence on a major shift inTrotsky’s policy of “entrism” in British politics; includes the largest body ofTrotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history; and demonstrates the needfor a radical re-reading of Birney’s poetry in light of his Trotskyism.