The four stories would scarcely be worth dwelling on were it not for the turn they were to give my whole future. For if they had not been written, I should never have entered the underground, since I should not have been back in the party where the underground could reach me.
Moscow reacted to the stories at once. In International Literature, Elistratova, the reigning Soviet woman critic, wrote of Can You Hear Their Voices?: “It gives a revolutionary exposition of the problem of the agricultural crisis and correctly raises the question of the leading role of the Communist Party in the revolutionary farmers’ movement.” She added: “For the first time (in American writing), it raises the image of the Bolshevik.”
It was the voice of authority. It could scarcely have been more explicit if I had written the party’s theses on the agricultural crisis. “So,” I thought, “my quarrel is not with Moscow or with Comrade Stalin. Raise the line correctly, and Moscow instantly accepts it. My quarrel is with the invincible stupidity and pettiness of the American Communist Party.” That half-truth was to cost me dear. But I have since come to think that Moscow was as mistaken in me as I was in Moscow.
In Washington, one day, J. Peters surprised me by mentioning that he had been in Moscow when the stories appeared. He had fought fiercely to keep the State Publishing House from translating and publishing them. I asked him why. “They are against the party,” he said, and we both dropped the touchy subject. At the time, I thought that Comrade Peters’ views were somewhat narrow.
I think now that anyone who has the patience to read those four stories will agree that I was wrong, and that Comrade Peters was right. For in retrospect, it is easy to see that the stories are scarcely about Communism at all. Communism is the context in which they are told. What they are really about is the spirit of man in four basic commitments—in suffering, under discipline, in defeat, in death. In each, it is not the political situation, but the spirit of man which is triumphant. The success of the stories was due to the fact that for the first time that spirit spoke to American Communists in a context and a language which it was permissible for them to hear: For the same reason, Peters feared the stories. For he rightly sensed that Communism may never make truce with the spirit of man. If it does, sooner or later, it is the spirit of man that will always triumph, for it draws its strength from a deeper fountain.
XXX
It was rather embarrassing. Moscow had spoken. But the American Communist who “for the first time had raised the image of the Bolshevik” was not in the American Communist Party. Something must be done quickly.
Two editors of the New Masses looked me up—Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman (who appeared in the magazine’s masthead as Robert Evans). There had long been widespread dissatisfaction with Carmon’s editing. The ambassadors proposed that I should become the editor of the New Masses.
First my misunderstanding with the party would have to be adjusted. But there would be no difficulty about that. There was a friendly visit to Alexander Trachtenberg who, as head of International Publishers, was the party’s “cultural commissar” and had the New Masses and the John Reed Clubs under his wing, and, as an old Bolshevik (he was said to be a former Tsarist cavalry officer and a doctor of philosophy from Yale), was a member of the Central Control Commission. Trachtenberg arranged an equally friendly talk with Charles A. Dirba, the chairman of the Control Commission. In fifteen minutes I was back in the Communist Party without ever having, officially, been out of it. I was also the editor of the New Masses at a salary of fifteen dollars a week.
But before those great things happened, something else had happened that makes them seem as foolish and offensive as trash.
XXXI
There is always one spring that is our own. Its memory, once we have it, is among the few things that cannot be taken from a man. He has only to let its special light fill his mind, and he feels again the pang with which it is given every man, the dullest and least worthy, to glimpse once in his life, if only for a moment, beyond a beloved head the boughs heave and the petals break and spin along the earth. I was about to find that love whose force, once felt, makes all a man’s other gross or merely tender gropings seem irrelevant and meaningless, as if they had happened in another lifetime or to someone else. I was about to experience that love which, not to have known, seems to the man and woman who have shared it, never to have lived, and entitles them to the small, smiling condescension toward death itself of those to whom, in this sense, life has given all that life has to give.
I was about to meet again the girl who was to become my wife. She was, of course, Esther Shemitz, the girl with black, bobbed hair, whom I had seen walk toward the police clubs in the Passaic strike.
The world’s image of Esther Chambers has been gained chiefly from a few unflattering newsphotos taken at a time of more than human stress. The Esther Shemitz I met again in 1930 was a slender, gay, laughing, utterly artless and unaffected but deeply sensitive and serious young woman. The gentle candor of her eyes, and the strong and pure planes of her face had been refined from within outward by the action of that beauty which outlasts all changes of time because it is cut, not after the fashion of the flesh, but to the template of the soul.
Neither of us had much to do with the fact that we met again. Our meeting came about by what the world calls chance, but in which we now see the workings of a grace before which we feel reason to be reverent. My friend, Michael Intrator, the fur worker, trade unionist and Daily Worker writer ( then expelled from the Communist Party for Lovestoneism), had courted and married Grace Lumpkin. And so I came into their circle.
Grace Lumpkin and Esther Shemitz had been friends for years. They were widely known in the Communist movement for their inviolable “prudery,” which was, in fact, chiefly their way of living uncontaminated by that steaming emotional jungle in which the party had raised promiscuity to a Marxist principle. They had taken a little house together in New York’s East Side, on 11th Street, three blocks from the East River and the gas tanks. It was one of those brick houses that stand at the back of a courtyard behind the cold-water tenements, which towered over it and cut off most of the light. Hence the popular name for such rear houses: tuberculosis traps. The girls were clever with their hands and had remodeled the interior of the little house so that, when the fire was burning in the living-room fireplace, it was like a cozy farmhouse in the heart of the slum. Their rent was eight dollars a month.
They had almost no money. But by eating as seldom as possible, and editing other irrelevancies out of their lives, they were able to dedicate themselves rather relentlessly to Art. Art, in Grace Lumpkin’s case, took the form of a novel on which she had been working for some time, and which eventually appeared as To Make My Bread. It was awarded Moscow’s Maxim Gorki prize for literature, was turned into a play and, some years later, had a successful run at the Civic Repertory’s old theater on 14th Street.8
Art, for Esther Shemitz, took the form of painting. She had been studying at the Art Students’ League, and was designing terrifying posters in which hatless proletarians with clenched fists were always storming somewhere—apparently toward the barricades. For both young women were by now (also rather relentlessly ) dedicated to the Revolution, about which, when I really came to know them, it seemed to me that their lack of practical experience was equaled only by their lack of humor and their implacable ferocity. This was all the more odd, because neither of them was ever a member of the Communist Party. But they were, I presently discovered, strongly influenced by two of the party’s most militant figures—Miss Grace Hutchins and Miss Anna Rochester, whom I have mentioned before. Both of these older revolutionaries had money in their own right. Very properly, they were patrons of proletarian art, and a loan apiece from them had made it possible for the younger women to devote themselves to art and austerity. (Both those loans were paid back later on, painfully and in full. ) Meanwhile, the two patrons of the arts were gently winding their protégés into the Communist Party.
My irreverent views about the American Communist Party horrified and enraged Grace Lumpkin and Esther Shemitz. One afternoon, my future wife, in a flare-up of her Passaic strike spirit, was belaboring me with my “renegacy” and related charges. I sat studying her. As I watched her climbing around on the barricades, I was given one of those rare, total insights into another soul that, for good or ill, we sometimes know. I felt like a man on a hilltop, who bursts through a screen of obstructing undergrowth, and suddenly sees, spread beyond him, the most tranquil of sunlit countrysides with its pattern of blown, green and ripening fields, its hedgerows and cool trees, its winding roads and falling brooks. I thought: “This is no revolutionist at all. This is the most gentle and tender spirit, a child except for its courage and firmness and its capacity for love, should someone understand and awaken that love.” I said: “Why don’t you stop drawing those mob scenes and clenched fists and paint the landscapes you were meant to paint?”
Few courtships can have been much stormier than ours. For the Communist Party, too, soon actively interfered. I called one evening to find Esther Shemitz very silent, grave and evidently distressed. Presently, she blurted through her tears that Comrade Hutchins had paid her an official visit and brought the party’s awful command that she was never again to see the “anti-party element, Chambers.” I was never quite sure how official Miss Hutchins’ mission was, and how much was self-imposed. For I sensed, behind the political ban another force, serpentine and cold, that deeply hated life. Nevertheless, the command was repeated over the months.
One evening, I arrived at Esther Shemitz’s for supper—a very special occasion in that house of bare cupboards. I knocked. No one answered. I was certain that my future wife was inside. I beat on the door with my fist. At last a small voice said through its tears: “Go away. The party says I cannot see you. We can never meet again.”
I went away, very angry. I cooled off by walking around the city streets for hours. Then I climbed up to Jacob Burck’s big studio and went to bed. I could not sleep. Between four or five o’clock in the morning, I dressed. I walked back across town through the absolutely empty streets of the sleeping city.
Again, I knocked on the door of the little house. There was no answer. The door stood at the head of a flight of stairs a story above a flagged court. Just beyond the landing stage was a window. It was open a little way because it was supposed that nobody could reach the window from the landing. Ordinarily, no one could. But I am not the first man who, in my mood, has done what he did not know he could do. I looked down at the flagstones ( even small heights usually make me dizzy). I swung from the rail of the landing, reached the window ledge, pushed up the window and climbed in.
Sitting beside my astonished girl’s bedside in the dawning light, I explained to her that she must make a choice, and that that choice was not between the Communist Party and renegacy, or between any political viewpoint and any other, but between life and death. I do not think that the declaration impressed her at all, or that she was much interested in what I was saying. Like so many women, she has a strong, simple, practical sense, and I think that she had begun to realize that if a man was intent enough on marrying her to climb through her window at five o’clock in the morning, even putting a bolt on it was probably not much use.
We never quarreled again. In the twenty years that we have been married, we have had a few disagreements, but never again about politics and not very often about anything else.
My New Masses stories presently began to have their effect. Grudgingly, Miss Hutchins and Miss Rochester conceded my new standing in the party. When Esther Shemitz and I were married, in 1931, at New York’s city hall, Comrades Hutchins and Rochester, at my wife’s request, were our somewhat formidable witnesses, and gave us our only wedding gift—an electric toaster.
XXXII
The New Masses was on the second or third floor of an old house on 15th Street just off Sixth Avenue. I went over one day to enter upon my editorship. As usual in the party, no one in the office had been told that I was coming. But Walt Carmon had disappeared, and I do not recall that I ever saw him again. His assistant, a young woman who was intensely loyal to him, and correspondingly hostile to me, announced firmly that I could not use the editor’s office at the front of the building. Instead, she led me to a small, dark office, well out of sight at the rear. I sat down quietly. I could tell by the look that I have seen on so many bureaucratic faces that she thought I was a fool to let myself be treated in that way and that she would have no trouble in managing me.
Actually, the little dark office suited my needs very well. I knew that I faced an entrenched opposition on the New Masses staff. I did not wish to waste my time fighting it. The little dark office fought for me. I threw open the editor’s door at once to the writers and artists ( one of the charges against Carmon was his brusque treatment of contributors). Soon my office was crowded, and everyone who had to walk the length of the building to reach it, and everyone who had to crowd into it, had his own thoughts about the opposition.
There was a new spirit in the magazine. Until then, the Communist control had been masked. I edited as a Communist. Nothing was surer to attract the non-Communist intellectuals who were looking for the Communist Party as I had looked for it in 1925, and did not want to be put off with tactful substitutes. Their world had crumbled in the depression, and they were now thronging toward the party. Every year the Communist National Students League was graduating its hundreds from the colleges. These were the first quotas of the great drift from Columbia, Harvard and elsewhere. These were the years that floated Alger Hiss into the party and made possible the big undergrounds, the infiltration of the Government, science, education and all branches of communications, but especially radio, motion pictures, book, magazine and newspaper publishing. An entirely new type of Communist made his appearance, not singly, but in clusters, whose members often already knew one another, influenced one another and shared the same Communist or leftist views. A surprising number came of excellent native American families. Nearly all were college trained from the top per cent of their classes. Those who lacked the hardihood or clarity to follow the logic of their position and become Communists clumped around the edges of the party, self-consciously hesitant, apologetic, easing their social consciences by doing whatever the party asked them to do so long as they did not have to know exactly what it was. From 1930 onward, a small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with scarcely any effort on its part. Within a decade, simply by pursuing the careers that ordinarily lay open to them, these newcomers would carry the weak and stumbling American Communist Party directly into the highest councils of the nation, would subtly (or sometimes boldly) help to shape the country’s domestic and foreign policies. They would, at last, in a situation unparalleled in history, enable the Soviet Government to use the American State and Treasury Departments as a terrible engine of its revolutionary purposes, by the calculated destruction of powers vital to American survival (like China ), or by creating power vacuums (like Germany), which breached the American political outworks abroad. Meanwhile, the party’s agents, working in the communications field, tirelessly justified those catastrophic betrayals to the nation as necessary acts of good faith to an ally (the Soviet Union whose philosophy denied the principle of good faith), or as prerequisites of permanent peace, or, if momentarily threatened with detection, as simply the unhappy blunders of American diplomatic innocence.
On the New Masses I saw only the onset of this tide. But by chance I was touched for a moment by an odd experience. There walked into my office at the New Masses one day a young man who seemed surprised not to find Walt Carmon and talked to me at first a little reluctantly. He was, he said, a minor United States Government official in China. He told me his name and where he was going next in the United States. We sat talking for a while about the Hanyang Arsenal, which had once been in Communist hands, and then he went on his way.9
XXXIII
One hot
June day in 1932, while I was preparing my third issue of the New Masses, I answered the telephone, and an unfamiliar voice said quietly: “This is Comrade Bedacht. I would like to see you right away.”
Bedacht’s office was on the ninth floor of the Workers Center, which, during my absence from the party, had moved from Union Square to 13th Street. I knew of Bedacht only as the fatherly Communist “who had kids to the number of acht,” as a singularly self-effacing member of the Central Committee, and head of the International Workers Order, a Communist-controlled benefit and insurance society. I tried to think of any possible reason why Comrade Bedacht would want to see me. I had no idea that that quiet little man had been for years a permanent link between the Central Committee of the American Communist Party and the Soviet Military Intelligence in the United States.
It was seven years since Comrade Krieger had appeared at my desk in the Public Library to guide me into the Communist Party. Comrade Bedacht was about to summon me into crypts of Communism that I scarcely dreamed existed, into its deep underground, whose door was about to close noiselessly behind me almost as if I had never existed.
5
UNDERGROUND
The First Apparatus
I
Witness Page 35