The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  David Trilling subsequently married a strong, ambitious woman, Fannie Cohen, who had been born in England. Fannie had long dreamed that their son, Lionel, would receive a Ph.D. from Oxford, and when Columbia University officials refused to admit Lionel as an undergraduate because of a deficiency in mathematics, she personally convinced them to reverse their decision. Meanwhile, David Trilling assumed the manners of a gentleman and became something of a dandy, but failure continued to pursue him. First, he abandoned his trade as a custom tailor to become a wholesale furrier, so that his son could say that his father was a manufacturer rather than a workman. Then, at the start of the Great Depression, he began to produce expensive raccoon coats for chauffeurs, even though open cars were beginning to go out of fashion. His poor judgment on this matter cost him everything, and so it fell upon Lionel to support his parents while he was still a struggling graduate student.

  The father’s anguish apparently generated a fear of failure in the son that was occasionally paralyzing. Although he graduated from Columbia in 1925 and received a master’s degree in 1926, Lionel could not bring himself to complete his doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold. More than twelve years dragged by during which several chapters were rejected by his adviser until, spurred on by a struggle to retain his teaching position at Columbia, he finally finished the dissertation which was published as a subsidized book.

  In several short stories that he wrote for the Menorah Journal, Trilling explores the negative feelings that acculturated Jews can have toward other Jews who are less removed from the shtetl or ghetto environment. In his 1925 story “Impediments,” Trilling uses the first-person narrative to probe the mind of an assimilated Jewish college student repelled by another Jew who is “too much of my own race.”25 In “Chapter for a Fashionable Jewish Novel,” published in 1926, Trilling presents several scenes in which two Anglophilic young Jewish women, Janet and Julia, exhibit virtual anti-Semitic revulsion against the more “common” eastern European immigrant Jews of New York.26

  These stories reflect a remarkable honesty on Trilling’s part in confronting the conflicts experienced by young Jewish intellectuals in the 1920s. A year before his death he wrote that “to speak of the Menorah Journal as a response to ‘isolation’ isn’t nearly enough— you must make the reader aware of the shame that young middle-class Jews felt; self-hatred was the word that later came into vogue but shame is simpler and better.”27

  Do these barely dramatized confessional stories reflect a transcendence of feelings of shame on Trilling’s part or a sense of guilt stemming from a suppressed desire to escape his Jewish past? The purpose of this early fiction was simply to depict the existence of such psychological conflicts among Jews in the hope that an awareness of them would lead to greater understanding. Trilling’s overall participation in the Menorah Journal, however, was within the boundaries of the cultural pluralist and cosmopolitan perspectives associated with Kallen and Bourne. What is pronounced in Trilling’s writing at this time is a desire to divest the treatment of Jewish subject matter of any form of parochialism or chauvinism. His discussions of Jewish novels, including those by Ludwig Lewisohn, were usually harsh and his criticisms were aimed at the narrow horizons of the authors. In 1929 he wrote that “only when the Jewish problem is included in a rich sweep of life, a life which would be important and momentous even without the problem of Jewishness, but a life to which the problem of Jewishness adds further import and moment, will a good Jewish novel have been written and something said about the problem.”28

  Trilling’s youthful opposition to parochialism also comes to the fore in his last fictional contribution to the magazine, “Notes on a Departure.” In a significant episode the protagonist—a young Jewish teacher in a middle western community—admits that he intentionally cuts himself off and isolates himself from participating as fully as possible in the world around him by cultivating an excessive Jewish self-consciousness:

  Once he had held that the town was going to make him do things he must not do. It sought to include him in a life into which he must not go. To prevent this he made use of a hitherto useless fact. He had said, “I am a Jew,” and immediately he was free. He had felt himself the embodiment of an antique and separate race . . . and was unable to partake of what he thought [was] the danger that lay in the town and university. He had made a companion of the solitude he had gained, gazed fondly and admiringly at it; he had made an exorcizing charm of it and when he touched it the town became harmless.29

  This passage, reminiscent of the style of Henry James, may provide a clue to Trilling’s rejection of the Lewisohn movement, which occurred about that time, and his later remark that Lewisohn’s kind of literature made “easier the sin of ‘adjustment’ on a wholly neurotic basis. It fostered a willingness to accept exclusion and even to intensify it, a willingness to be provincial and parochial.”30 After Trilling left the Menorah Journal in 1931, he never again established official connections with Jewish institutions or organizations. Throughout the rest of his life he maintained that even though his Jewish identity had influenced his intellect and temperament, he was unable to pinpoint any Jewish ideas that had inspired him and that he did not regard himself as a specifically “Jewish writer.”31

  PORTRAIT: HERBERT SOLOW

  Not all of the young intellectuals around Cohen shared his feelings about the vitality of the contemporary Jewish experience. For example, Herbert Solow, a Columbia graduate who became assistant editor of the journal in 1928, wrote to Cohen a year later, when he became a contributing editor: “Being a Jew might, in my case, have evolved from the category of unpleasant facts in which I placed it in my early youth, into the category of utterly irrelevant facts. That it achieved interest and significance for me is solely due to the Menorah Journal. . . . once I met the journal my interest was deeply stirred.”32

  Unfortunately, the details of Solow’s upbringing are obscure. Thus it is difficult to conjecture about the significant causes of his negative response to Jewish identity before becoming associated with the Menorah Journal. All that is known is that both of his parents were Jewish and that no intermarriages had occurred before his generation. While in high school Solow attended religious training classes on Sundays and he may have been bar mitzvahed.33 After college, his life and activities become well documented, and they seem not unlike many of the experiences of others in Cohen’s Menorah circle.

  Herbert Sidney Solow was born in Manhattan in 1903. His father, Dr. L. J. Solow, was a successful dentist who had emigrated from Russia; his mother was born in New York of French and German ancestry. He attended P.S. 6 and De Witt Clinton High School, entering Columbia College in September 1920. There he majored in history and literature, graduating in June 1924 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. cum laude. The following year he studied journalism at Columbia, and, in June 1925, received a B. Litt. (“cum grano salis,” he once quipped).34

  During his Columbia years, Solow was a tall, slender, slightly stooped, reddish-haired youth with bored brown eyes, who talked with a drawl. He befriended Whittaker Chambers during his freshman year, worked on the college paper Spectator, and belonged to a circle of precocious Jewish students. One of Solow’s teachers, Mark Van Doren, provided a portrait of Solow in “Jewish Students I Have Known,” a 1927 article for the Menorah Journal. Not classifying Solow among the scholars, like Meyer Schapiro, Van Doren placed him instead, with Lionel Trilling, in a group “lazier than these, though no less intelligent and certainly no less interesting.”

  Van Doren’s memoir reveals a young Solow of exceptional ability, who exuded a melancholia in his speech and bearing:

  It was not a bitter irony, for nothing mattered enough [to Solow] to make him bitter—or so I thought. It was rather a disposition which he had to find that one thing in the universe balanced another, and that all things cancelled out to make a zero. To go in one direction or another would be to lose something of one’s poise here and now; so one might merely stand and gaze, and
none too gaily smile. The first intimation I had that [Solow] was not amused but tortured by the state of his mind was when he showed me an essay in which he maintained that nothing which could happen could hurt—and drew a picture of a young man looking on indolently while someone took a knife and slit the veins of his wrist. Something did hurt, I knew then.

  Van Doren also recorded an important change that came over Solow as he found a calling in journalism during the late 1920s:

  Some years later [Solow] visited me after a year in Europe, and his face was gray all over with the news of some personal calamity—connected with love, perhaps—that he never revealed Another year of looking on and thinking, and word came to me that [Solow] had talked of suicide. Still another year and he found a position as a literary critic on a New York review. Now controversies engage him; he does research for remarkably well-informed articles; he is proud and busy; and I hear he does not speculate about speculation or about suicide.35

  Van Doren concluded that Solow eventually transcended his melancholic inertia and emerged as a dedicated polemical journalist. The former student is portrayed as having become transformed from a cynical nihilist to a fighter for high principles. Yet there remains a contrary opinion as to whether Solow really changed into a poised individual who had overcome the debilitating agonies of his student years.

  In Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), a briefly popular roman à clef about Eliot Cohen and his bohemian-radical circle, the character suggestive of Solow, Miles Flinders, is depicted as still fundamentally a prisoner of psychological compulsions. Slesinger married Solow in June 1927 at the Ethical Culture Society’s meeting hall on Central Park West. In the early 1930s she left her husband and his circle of friends, dedicating her novel to them because its contents explained the reasons for her departure. The analogy Slesinger uses to convey Flinders-Solow’s gloomy disposition is that of Calvinism, and she attributes to him a New England ancestry with a harsh, Puritanical outlook that makes him suspicious of all joy, beauty, and optimism. The fictional Solow is depicted as a purist in Marxist politics, especially ruthless in judgments of himself and his associates.

  Intellectual brilliance, a tortured emotional life, and high political ideals—these elements characterized the Solow emergent in the late 1920s. Yet even though the periodic recurrence of severe depression and his choleric moods were well known to his friends, they did not let these problems interfere with their respect for his political judgment. In later years Solow described himself as a neurotic whose sense of inadequacy and guilt had inhibited his day-today functioning. His friend Felix Morrow, however, thought that Solow’s depressions could not be attributed in the main to neurotic traits and would have been treated by antidepressant drugs if they had been available at that time.36 In general, the recollections of Morrow, Sidney Hook, and other of Solow’s friends are quite at odds with Tess Slesinger’s fictional account of her husband’s psychological malady as the determinant of his highly principled politics.37

  To understand this discrepancy, it should be kept in mind that Slesinger wrote The Unpossessed after both a personal and political break with her husband. Shortly afterward she moved to Hollywood, remarried, and, during the Popular Front period, adapted to the politics of the Communist Party orientation. The bitterness of Slesinger’s breakup with Solow may well have colored her portrait of Miles Flinders as a compulsive fanatic who transfers his psychological frustrations onto his politics (Marxism having replaced his grandfather’s Puritan God). Such a portrayal is also in harmony with the theme of The Unpossessed, which describes a group of would-be radical intellectuals whose political efficacy is negated by their psychological maladies. Sidney Hook acerbically argued that Slesinger simply lacked the political acumen to offer a fair account of the Menorah group’s politics:

  She never understood a word about the political discussions that raged around her. . . . Her book shows that. There is no coherent presentation of any political idea in it—and it has always amazed me to find people giving it political significance. . . . Tess could talk about Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, some of the characters in Dostoyevski—not Ivan Karamazov— but the political isms were something her “obsessed husband and his odd friends” were concerned about—a concern which affected her life. She ended up hating them. . . . Tess caught the psychological mood of some of Herbert’s friends but she was a political innocent until the day of her death.38

  In remarks published at the time of his death, another novelist, Eleanor Clark, offered a strikingly different description of the young Solow from the one found in Slesinger’s novel. Soon after graduating from Vassar in 1934, one year behind Mary McCarthy, Clark met Solow at the home of Margaret De Silver. She recalled that Solow was a man who suffered from intense inner conflicts but never used politics as a means of resolving them. She does somewhat echo Slesinger in describing him as having a “strong streak of the Old Testament,” although this is in reference to her recollection of Solow as a man who lived by his beliefs and was always engaged in full-time work for them, whether or not he received remuneration. While Solow’s brilliance was well known in the New York intellectual community and he had held good jobs, Clark recalled that he consciously rejected a life of security, was lean and ravaged-looking, went years without buying a new suit, and lived in borrowed apartments and wretched abodes during the 1930s.39

  Solow’s experience with the Menorah Journal was crucial in shaping his outlook, as it was for the entire coterie who came under Cohen’s influence. From his early youth Solow had taken no particular interest in his Jewish origin. He passed five years at Columbia without having contact with the campus chapter of the Menorah Society, with which the magazine was associated. But once he encountered the Menorah Journal, he felt his interests deeply stirred. He came to see that a strong point of the publication was its ability to make the concept of Jewishness significant to a young Jew educated in American schools. Furthermore, Cohen’s unusual editorial abilities taught Solow how to write in a way that he found more valuable than all of his college courses.40

  But Solow’s interest in Judaism was never theological—and, like others in Cohen’s group, especially Morrow, he excelled mainly when he wrote against the Jewish establishment. Consequently, a constant tension developed between the Cohen-Solow inspired staff of the Menorah Journal, and the Menorah Journal’s board of directors led by Henry Hurwitz. The friction rapidly sparked a crisis when Solow initiated a series of articles critical of Zionism. Felix Morrow recalls that Solow, although genuinely independent, was then “in the sphere of influence of the Communist International and especially on colonial questions” and that the Zionists had never encountered a critic of Solow’s caliber. Most important, Solow “appeared as it were from within—in a Jewish magazine—and his criticisms were therefore all the more telling. The Solow articles on Zionism were the first real indication of where our group was going.”41

  In a statement published at the time of Solow’s death, Sidney Hook recalled the significance of Solow’s polemic against Zionism. He remembered first meeting Solow at a conference called by the Menorah Journal in the spring of 1930 and presided over by Cohen, who then sported a magnificent black beard. After an address by the Zionist Schmarya Levine, Hook asked an innocent question about the human rights of Palestinian Arabs. This threw Levine into a rage and the meeting into pandemonium. Solow then and later defended Hook, for whom the episode marked Solow’s beginning as a “member of the permanent opposition.”42

  Actually, Solow had attended the Sixteenth Zionist Congress held in Zurich in the fall of 1929 and had sent the Menorah Journal two articles harshly critical of everything that he encountered. Then he went to Palestine, at that time a mandate of Great Britain, as a special correspondent for the Menorah Journal and also on behalf of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Shortly thereafter Solow’s attitude toward Zionism underwent a dramatic transformation from an ambivalent left-wing critic of the main Zionist current to an outright opponent. />
  By late November Solow had become too angered by what he had seen in Palestine to complete his promised articles. He felt morally disgusted by what he called “black Jewish chauvinism of the most repulsive kind,” which he believed had resulted in an unacceptable policy toward Arabs and had even caused the 1929 riots that stemmed from a violent clash at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Solow concluded that many of the Jews in Palestine were behaving like the worst anti-Semites in America. He repudiated the position he had held before; he had merely suspected that the Zionist leaders were corrupt, but he was still bound by such a firm sense of solidarity with Jews that his mind had been closed to the situation of the Arabs. He returned to New York a firm anti-Zionist.

  Once back in the United States Solow wrote a second pair of articles for the Menorah Journal, this time attacking Zionism straight on. But it should be noted that, despite the shrewdness of the exposé contained in “The Realities of Zionism” and “Camouflaging the Zionist Realities,” Solow tended to be long on criticism and short on alternatives. He convincingly demonstrated errors made by Zionists who either depended on British imperialism or looked to support from the rising Arab middle classes. His warning against looking for solutions from the very social forces that caused oppression was prophetic. But his own solution stopped there. Clearly he was gravitating toward the kind of answers that Marxism provides, but he was not yet ready to embrace Marxism openly and fully.43 Both he and Hook, with whom he now began associating, had considerable sympathy for the ideas of the rabbi and educator Judah L. Magnes, who advocated a binational state in Palestine.44

  Solow’s anti-Zionist articles came at the very end of the association between Elliot Cohen’s group and the Menorah Journal. Cohen and Solow agreed to solicit responses to Solow’s article from the Zionist community and planned a special issue containing the responses as well as a rebuttal by Solow. But Solow and Hurwitz quarreled bitterly about the content of both the rebuttal and Hurwitz’s introduction. Solow threatened to resign from the journal’s staff and finally, in October 1931, followed through on his threat, despite the fact that the special issue on Zionism did appear.45