Cowley had another cohort, very different, by the name of Otis Ferguson, a real proletarian, who had been a sailor in the merchant marine. “Oat” was not in the book department; he wrote movie reviews. But he carried great weight with Cowley, though he may not have been a Marxist—he was more of a free-ranging literary bully without organizational ties. I had a queer time with him one evening when John and I went to look him up at his place on Cornelia Street, the deepest in the Village I had yet been. At our ring he came downstairs, but instead of asking us up to his place, he led us out to a bar for a drink, which seemed unfriendly, after he had given me his address and told me to drop by. I am not sure whether it was John or me who made him edgy, or the pair of us—notre couple, as the French say. Perhaps he and John argued about films—John had worked in Hollywood, after all. Or could it have simply been that we had come down from Beekman Place? Anyway, whatever happened that evening and whatever caused it cannot have been the reason for my sudden fall from favor at The New Republic. No.
It was a book: I Went to Pit College, by Lauren Gilfillan, a Smith girl who had spent a year working in a coal mine—one of the years when I had been at Vassar. Cowley must have thought that here at last was a book I was qualified to review, by having had the contrary experience. The book was causing a stir, and Cowley, as he handed it over to me, benignly, let me understand that he was giving me my chance. I sensed a reservation on his part, as though he were cautioning me not to let the book down. He was allowing me plenty of space, to do a serious review, not another three-hundred-word bit. And with my name, I dared hope, on the cover. I got the message: I was supposed to like the book. For the first time, and the last, I wrote to order. It would have been nice if I could have warmed to the task. But the best I could do was to try to see what people like Cowley saw in the book. With the result, of course, that I wrote a lifeless review, full of simulated praise. In short, a cowardly review. Rereading it now, for the first time in more than fifty years, I am amazed at how convincing I sound. In my last sentence I speak of a “terrific reality.”
But then came the blow. Cowley had second thoughts about the book. Whether the Party line had changed on it or whether for some other reason, he now decided that it was overrated. I cannot remember whether he tried to get me to rewrite my review. I think he did, but, if so, he was unsatisfied. In any case, he printed my laudatory piece and followed it with a correction. The correction was signed only with initials: O.C.F. Oat, of course. In fact, it must have been he who changed Cowley’s mind. As a blue-collar reader, he had looked over the Smith girl’s book—or read my review of it—and responded with disgust. Which he expressed to Cowley. And, “Write that,” said Cowley. Whereupon Oat did. A three-hundred-word snarl; merited or unmerited—who knows? I cannot really blame Oat for the effect of those jeers on my feelings. Cowley would hardly have told him that he had virtually ordered a favorable review.
But had he? Trying to be fair to him, I ask myself now whether I could have misread the signals: Could he have been telling me to pan the book? I do not think so. But either way the lack of openness was wrong. And it was a mean trick to play on a beginner; when my review came out, in May 1934, I was not yet twenty-two. I agree that a lot of the fault was mine: I should have written my real opinion, regardless of what he wanted. But abuse of power is worse than girlish weakness, and Cowley was a great abuser of power, as he proved over and over in his long “affair” with Stalinism; for this, see, in Letters on Literature and Politics by Edmund Wilson, edited by Elena Wilson, under “Cowley.” But it cannot have been all Stalinism; he must have taken a personal dislike to me. I leave it to the reader to decide between us.
I did not write for The New Republic again (nor was I asked to) till six years had passed; Cowley was gone, and Wilson had returned temporarily to his old post as book editor. Meanwhile, I reviewed for The Nation, where kindly Joe Krutch was book editor, assisted by Margaret Marshall. For the Herald Tribune’s weekly “Books,” Irita Van Doren, wife of Carl, told me, in her Southern voice, “We on this paper believe that there’s somethin’ good in evvra book that should be brought to the attention of evvra reader.” No hope there for me, then, and the Times Sunday book review (edited by J. Donald Adams) would never let me past the secretary—their usual policy toward untried reviewers. To make some money while John was “resting,” as actors say, between jobs with a series of flops and writing plays his agent could not sell, I decided to try to write a detective story, since I read so many of them. It was to be called “Rogue’s Gallery,” and the victim was to be based on Mannie Rousuck, but I got so interested in describing our old gallery in the French Building, with the dogs and Mannie and types like Nick Aquavella (later of the Aquavella Gallery), that I had reached the fourth chapter without managing to produce a corpse. It was a sign to me to give up.
Since October 1, 1933, John and I had been living in a one-room apartment at 2 Beekman Place, a new building opposite 1 Beekman Place, where Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller lived. Most months we could not pay the rent. It was a pretty apartment, painted apricot with white trim; it had casement windows and Venetian blinds (a new thing then), a kitchen with a good stove, a “breakfast alcove,” and a dressing-room with bath, besides a little front hall and the main room. Good closet space. Nice elevator boys and a doorman. Fortunately, the man at Albert B. Ashforth, the building agent, had faith in John, and, fortunately also, the utilities were included in the rather high rent. The telephone company, being a “soulless corporation,” unlike dear Albert B. Ashforth, kept threatening to shut the phone off, but gas and electricity would keep on being supplied to us unless and until we were evicted.
If we were evicted and the furniture put out on the street (which did not happen in good neighborhoods anyway), it would not be our own. We were living with Miss Sandison’s sister’s furniture, having not a stick to our name except a handsome card table with a cherrywood frame and legs and a blue suede top, which someone (Miss Sandison, I think it was) had given us for a wedding present. When we moved into Beekman Place, the Howlands (Lois Sandison, who taught Latin at Chapin) let us have their Hepplewhite-style chairs and the springs and mattresses of their twin beds, which we had mounted on pegs that we painted bright red and which we set up in the shape of an L, with the heads together—you couldn’t have beds that looked like bedroom beds in a living-room, as our one-room was supposed to be. Instead of spreads, we had covers made of dark-brown sateen (Nathalie Swan’s idea, or was it Margaret Miller’s?), and at the joint of the L, where our two heads converged, we put a small square carved oak table, Lois Sandison Howland’s, too, with a white Chinese crackle table lamp that we had found at Macy’s.
On the walls we had Van Gogh’s red-lipped “Postmaster” (John’s guardian spirit) from the Hermitage and Harry Sternberg’s drawing of John looking like Lenin. Then there were Elizabeth Bishop’s wedding present, bought in Paris—a colored print, framed in white, rather surreal, called “Geometry,” by Jean Hugo, great-grandson of the author—and Frani’s wedding present—a black-framed, seventeenth-century English broadside, on “The Earl of Essex Who cut his own Throat in the Tower”—not Elizabeth’s Essex, brother to Penelope Devereux, but a later one, no longer of the Devereux family. Probably the apartment had built-in bookcases, which (already!) held the 1911 Britannica. I am sure of that because I wrote a fanciful piece (turned down by The New Yorker) called “FRA to GIB.” I don’t know where that Britannica, the first of its line, came from or where it went to; maybe it was Mrs. Howland’s. On the floor were, I think, two Oriental rugs, hers also, obviously. In two white cachepots (Macy’s) we had English ivy trailing.
To reassure a reader wondering about our moral fiber and ignorant of those Depression years, I should say that Mr. and Mrs. Howland (I could never call them “Lois” and “Harold”) kindly made us feel that we were doing them a service by “storing” their things while they, to economize, lived at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, Mr. Howl
and being out of a job. We had bought ourselves a tall, “modernistic” Russel Wright cocktail shaker made of aluminum with a wood top, a chromium hors d’oeuvres tray with glass dishes (using industrial materials was the idea), and six silver Old-Fashioned spoons with a simulated cherry at one end and the bottom of the spoon flat, for crushing sugar and Angostura; somewhere I still have these and people who come upon them always wonder what they are.
Late one morning, but before we had got the beds made, “Mrs. Langdon Mitchell” was announced over the house phone, and the widow of the famous (now forgotten) playwright sailed in to pay a formal call, which lasted precisely the ordained fifteen minutes, although we were in our nightclothes and she, white-haired, hatted, and gloved, sat on a Hepplewhite chair facing our tumbled sheets. We must have met this old lady at one of Mrs. Aldrich’s temperance lunches in the house on Riverside Drive, where the conversation was wont to hover over “dear Sidney and Beatrice [Webb]” and Bis Meyer, my classmate, daughter of Eugene Meyer of the Federal Reserve Bank, was described as “a beautiful Eurasian,” a gracious way our hostess had found of saying “Jewish.” John and I had gone up to Rokeby, in the country, for Maddie Aldrich’s wedding to Christopher Rand, a Yale classics major and an Emmet on his mother’s side whom Maddie had met, hunting, on weekends. At the wedding, Maddie’s cousin Chanler Chapman (A Bad Boy at a Good School, son of John Jay Chapman and model, in due course, for Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King) had spiked Mrs. Aldrich’s awful grape-juice “libation” and got some of the ushers drunk. Now the couple had an all-blue apartment with a Judas peephole in the door, Chris had a job with Henry Luce, on Fortune, and Maddie had started a business called “Dog Walk.”
Just now I spoke of dances at Webster Hall, organized by the Party. That was where, in fact, I had met John Porter (I had better start calling him “Porter,” so as not to mix him up with “John”), who had been brought by Eunice Clark, the “spirit of the apples” classmate who had edited the Vassar Miscellany News. Eunice was always trendy, and I guess we were all what was later called “swingers”; Webster Hall was an “in” thing to do for Ivy League New Yorkers—a sort of downtown slumming; our uptown slumming was done at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, usually on Friday nights. Maybe real Communists steered clear of Webster Hall, just as ordinary black people did not go to the Savoy on those Friday nights when so many white people came.
I remember one Webster Hall evening—was it the Porter time?—when John and I had brought Alan Lauchheimer (Barth) with us and he found some classmates from Yale there, in particular one named Bill Mangold, who would soon be doing public relations for medical aid to the Loyalists—a Stalinist front—and with whom I would later have an affair. At Webster Hall, too, we met the very “in” couple, Tony Williams, a gentleman gentlemen’s tailor (see “Dog Walk” and the Budge-Wood laundry firm), and his wife, Peggy LeBoutiller (Best’s); they knew Eunice Clark and her husband, Selden Rodman, brother of Nancy Rodman, Dwight Macdonald’s wife.
Selden and Alfred Bingham (son of Senator Bingham of Connecticut) were editors of Common Sense, a La Folletteish magazine they had started after Yale. “Alf” was married to Sylvia Knox, whose brother Sam was married to Kay McLean, from Vassar; both were trainees at Macy’s. At a party at the Knoxes’ I met Harold Loeb, the technocrat and former editor of Broom, and a character in The Sun Also Rises (related also to Loeb of Leopold and Loeb, murderers). Leaning back on a couch while talking to him about Technocracy and having had too much to drink, I lost my balance in the midst of a wild gesture and tipped over onto a sizzling steam radiator. Since he did not have the presence of mind to pull me up, I bear the scars on the back of my neck to this day.
Before that, Selden, in black tie, had led a walkout in support of a waiters’ strike at the Waldorf, which Johnsrud and I joined, also in evening dress—Eunice was wearing a tiara. At another table Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun got up to walk out, too. The Waldorf dicks chased Selden out of the Rose Room and into the basement, where they tried to beat him up. Then he was taken to be charged at the East 51st Street police station while some of us waited outside to pay his bail and take him back home to Eunice. It was all in the papers the next day, though Johnsrud and I were too unknown to be in the story. The reader will find some of it, including Eunice’s tiara and a pair of long white kid gloves, in Chapters Six and Seven of The Group. I always thought it was not a Communist-inspired show. Rodman and Bingham, I supposed, must have been drawn into it somehow by Heywood Broun, the labor-liberal columnist of the old World, who had already led a walkout on behalf of the striking waiters at the Algonquin, where he, like Dorothy Parker, regularly lunched. Yet I have just learned (fan me with a brick, please) from Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism that in New York, at the time, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union was “dominated by two Communists, Mike Obermeier and Jay Rubin.” Klehr does not mention the Waldorf strike. But in another place he writes that by 1937 (two years later) Heywood Broun was “a devoted fellow-traveler.” To me, the walkout brought a different disillusionment. It was the only time I saw Dorothy Parker close up, and I was disappointed by her dumpy appearance. Today television talk shows would have prepared me.
At Selden and Eunice’s apartment—in a watermelon-pink house on East 49th Street—in the course of a summer party in the little backyard, I met John Strachey, then in his Marxist phase (The Coming Struggle for Power) and married to Esther Murphy (Mark Cross, and sister of Gerald Murphy, the original of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night). I was shocked when he went to the toilet to pee—they were serving beer—and left the door open, continuing a conversation while he unbuttoned his fly and let go with a jet of urine. English manners? I wondered. Or was it the English left?
At Dwight Macdonald’s apartment near the river, on East 51st Street, I went to a cocktail party for the sharecroppers, wearing a big mustard-yellow sombrero-like felt hat from Tappé that Mannie Rousuck, a friend of Tappé’s, had procured for me—as my son, Reuel, summed it up later, Mannie was “a good getter.” Fred Dupee, a Yale classmate of Dwight’s, was much taken with my hat; he was just back from a year in Mexico, and I was meeting him for the first time. I was struck by his very straight, almost black hair, like an Indian’s, by his blue eyes, and by a certain jauntiness. This must have been about the time of his conversion to Communism. Or had that already happened in Mexico? At any rate the Party would soon put him to work on the New York waterfront, distributing leaflets; then they made him literary editor of New Masses. It was possibly through Fred that Dwight, who was still on Fortune, was giving a party for the sharecroppers and making an embarrassed speech before literally passing the hat. I was familiar with fund-raising events downtown, in the Theater Union’s ambience: they charged a quarter for horrible drinks in paper cups to help the Scottsboro Boys or silicosis victims, and you sat on the floor with your legs sticking out. The Macdonald drinks were free and in glasses, and to sit on they had dark-blue outsize furniture looking like a design edict and made by a firm called Modernage.
Another Yale friend of Dwight’s, Geoffrey Hellman, who wrote for The New Yorker, was always at those parties, which happened on a weekly basis and usually not for a cause. Every Saturday, during the party, he and Dwight would have a fight about politics (Geoffrey was a tory), and Dwight would throw him out of the apartment. During the week they would make up, until the next party, when Dwight would throw him out again. This went on as long as Dwight worked on Fortune and had that apartment next to Southgate on East 51st Street. When he quit, over a piece he had written on U.S. Steel that the magazine did not like, and moved downtown to East 10th Street, to a walk-up painted black like his brother-in-law Selden’s, he did not have those regular cocktail parties any more or Geoffrey did not come or else a walk-up was not as good a place to throw a friend out of as a modern apartment with elevators to be rung for by an angry host; in any case, those weekly tilts stopped, though the political differences remained.
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br /> I don’t think Dwight and Nancy played bridge, but Selden and Eunice did, and Johnsrud and I, if he was not acting, often played with them for small stakes, usually in their ground-floor apartment, with its Diego Rivera print and volumes of Pareto and Spengler and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens; Selden would be wearing a black shirt. If we played at our apartment on Beekman Place, we used the beautiful cherrywood card table with the blue suede top and we served Tom Collinses during the game and toasted cheese sandwiches afterward—I was suddenly learning how to cook. We played a lot of bridge during those years (when John was on the road he played poker with the stage electricians), almost always with other couples: the Rodmans, Julia and David Rumsey, Maddie and Chris Rand, maybe Rosilla (Hornblower) and Alan Breed, or our new friends, Barbara Hudnut Boston and Lyon Boston (she was Hudnut beauty products and he was an assistant district attorney). A single man, Marshall Best, who lived in our building and worked at Viking Press, was a good bridge-player and not a bad cook (his specialty was little meatballs baked in rock salt in the oven); he would make a fourth with Frani, if she was in town, or with Nathalie Swan, back from the Bauhaus and studying with Kiesler at Columbia, or my dear, droll Catholic friend Martha McGahan, who, when asked later why she supported the Loyalists, answered, “I’m a Basque.”
When the bridge-playing stopped, it was a sign heralding change, though it happened so gradually that at first no one noticed. For a while, Johnsrud and I got into a fast set of poker players who played for high stakes, mostly seven-card stud, and called each other by their last names: “Mr. Lyd” and “Mrs. Lyd,” for example—she had been Kay Dana, from Boston, of the class of ’32, and he was Bill Lydgate, the kingpin of the new Gallup Poll. Those poker games at the Lydgates’ had a funny sexual electricity about them and the sense of a power charge, maybe because most of those Wasp men in their shirt sleeves worked in the field of opinion, for Luce or George Gallup, testing it and shaping it like bread dough. After we were divorced, Johnsrud boasted to me that he had been having an affair with “Mrs. Lyd” (“Mr. Lyd” commuted to the Institute of Public Opinion Gallup had started in Princeton), and I was not surprised. She was a yellow-eyed lynxlike blonde given to stretching herself like the cats she fancied; there was always one purring on her lap or jumping from her sinuous shoulder. Like most female cat fanciers, she was a narcissist and did not care for me, not even bothering to call me “Mrs. John.” And in fact I was out of place in that poker-faced set, all of whom, men and women, had deep, slow-spoken voices, I noticed. When it was my turn to deal, I would always declare draw, jacks or better to open, though I knew that draw, in their book, was the next thing to mah-jongg. For my part, I hated stud, five-card and seven-card alike.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 55