After John and I were divorced, I learned that Eunice Rodman, our bridge antagonist, had been another of his sexual partners. Eunice herself told me, adding the assurance that it was me he loved—she could tell. Actually, I was unfaithful to him myself more than once, but not with anyone we saw regularly as a couple, and I feel sure he never knew. Two of my adulteries were only once, in the afternoon, and the third was with a little Communist actor who wore lifts in his shoes—too earnest for me to really like.
More important, through Common Sense I came to know Jim Farrell—a decisive force in my life, as it turned out. For Selden, I had written a review (very favorable) of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, the second volume of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Farrell called or wrote to thank me. All we had in common was being Irish, Middle Western, ex-Catholic, and liking baseball (and I was only half-Midwestern and half-Irish). But Farrell, gregarious and hospitable, took to me anyway, and when John was on the road with Winterset, I went to gatherings at his place, though I felt like a complete outsider. Farrell was married to or lived with an actress (Hortense Alden; I had seen her in Grand Hotel), but there was nobody from the theatre at those evenings. Now, half a century later, I know that she had had an affair with Clifford Odets and I wonder what Farrell made of that, which may have happened before his time.
In the apartment they shared on Lexington Avenue, the guests were all intellectuals, of a kind unfamiliar to me. I could hardly understand them as they ranted and shouted at each other. What I was witnessing was the breakup of the Party’s virtual monopoly on the thought of the left. Among the writers who had been converted to Marxism by the Depression, Farrell was one of the first to free himself. The thing that was happening in that room, around the drinks table, was important and eventful. An orthodoxy was cracking, like ice floes on the Volga. But I was not in a position to grasp this, being still, so to speak, pre-Stalinist in my politics, while the intellectuals I heard debating were on the verge of post-Stalinism—a dangerous slope. Out of the shouting and the general blur, only two figures emerge: Rahv and Phillips. Farrell made a point of introducing them, and I knew who they were—the editors of Partisan Review. As the popular song said, my future just passed.
It was odd, actually, that I knew of the magazine; it must have had a very small circulation. But a couple who ran a stationery store on First Avenue, around the corner from our apartment, had recommended it to me, knowing that I wrote for The Nation. They were Party members, surely—of the type of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though the wife was much prettier than Ethel. And Partisan Review was a Party publication, the organ of the local John Reed Club. But I had no inkling of that then; skill in recognizing Communists came to me much later. When the pair of stationers showed me an early issue of the magazine, the husband running from behind the counter to fetch it, the wife proudly watching as I turned the pages, I found that it was over my head. It was devoted to an onslaught on the American Humanists—Stuart Sherman and Paul Elmer More—with a few rancorous sideswipes at the Southern Agrarians—Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, the group called the Fugitives. I do not remember any fiction or poetry, only long, densely written articles in a language that might as well have been Russian. I was distantly familiar with the Humanists, having read about them in the Bookman, but these Agrarians were a mystery to me, and PR’s crushing brief against them left me bewildered. As for the dreary Humanists, I was surprised that they needed so much attacking. In fact, Rahv and Phillips and their colleagues were beating a dead horse there.
Nevertheless, to please the stationers, with whom we were friendly, I kept buying the magazine and trying my best to read it. There is a sad little sequel to my introduction to PR. It ceased publication when the Party cut off funds from the John Reed Clubs (it was announced that they would be replaced by an American Writers’ Congress); this may have already happened when I met the editors at Farrell’s. And when Partisan Review resumed, still edited by Rahv and Phillips but without Jack Conroy et al. on the masthead, it had changed color. Dwight and Fred Dupee and I and George L. K. Morris, our backer, were on the new editorial board, and PR was now anti-Stalinist. Some time later, maybe when my first book was published, out of the blue came a shrill letter, many times forwarded, from the Mitchell Stationers accusing me of running out on a bill John and I owed them. I cannot remember what I did about it, if anything.
In our Beekman Place apartment, besides PR, I was trying to read Ulysses. John, in the breakfast nook, was typing his play “University” (about his father and never produced), and I was writing book reviews. Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter—“stately, plump Buck Mulligan”—page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually—but with an effect of suddenness—became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove. During the modernist crisis this was happening in all the arts: imitators and borrowers taught the “reading” of an artist at first thought to be beyond the public power of comprehension. In the visual arts, techniques of mass reproduction—imitation on a wide scale—had the same function. Thanks to reproduction, the public got used to faces with two noses or an eye in the middle of the forehead, just as a bit earlier the “funny” colors of the Fauves stopped looking funny except to a few.
Meeting the challenge of modernism, John and I went downtown to the New School for Social Research to hear Gertrude Stein; while we were there we looked at the Orozco frescoes and compared them to Rivera. Gertrude Stein’s Indian-like face and body commanded our respect, and what she said was not very difficult. I was shocked to hear Louis Kronenberger, who wrote for The Nation, say angrily that she was a charlatan. “Kronenberger is a fop,” declared Farrell, without pronouncing on Gertrude Stein.
John and I read Malraux’s Man’s Fate, in English, without noticing that it had a Trotskyite slant on the Chinese revolution. We read Céline (I never liked him), and one Sunday afternoon the two of us read The Communist Manifesto aloud—I thought it was very well written. On another Sunday we went to a debate on Freud and/or Marx—surely a Communist affair. More hazily I remember another debate, on the execution of the “White Guards” in Leningrad in 1935; this may have been a Socialist initiative, for the discussion was rancorous. Actually, that mass execution was a foreshadowing of the first Moscow trials in the summer of 1936, which ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
The eternal fellow traveler Corliss Lamont, son of a J. P. Morgan partner, persistently tried to seduce me when John was working or away. This pawky freckled swain sought to suborn me by invitations to dance at the new Rainbow Room, at Ben Marden’s Riviera on the Palisades, and at a place in the West 50s that featured a naked girl in a bottle. But, as we danced, while I reminded him that I was married, he tried to gain his end by reasoned argument: “You wouldn’t want to have just one picture, would you?” Fifty years later, he was taking my friend Elizabeth Hardwick to the Rainbow Room, still up to his old tricks. “Transitory phenomena,” he said of the Moscow trials.
Besides going to the Savoy Ballroom on Friday nights, John and I had black friends, who used to come to our apartment, nervously ushered by us past the elevator boys: Nella Larsen, the novelist (Passing), Dorothy Peterson, the actress (she played in the Negro Macbeth), and her brother, who was a doctor. They were high up in the black bourgeoisie. Nella Larsen told stories that always contained the sentence “And there I was, in the fullest of full evening dress.” She lived downtown, near Irving Place. The Petersons had a house in Brooklyn—we liked them, not simply because they were black, and were proud of the friendship. We also liked Governor Floyd Olson, Farmer-Labor, of Minnesota; Selden had taken us to a nightclub with him. Then he died rather young of cancer of the stomach. Probably I would have approved of his working with the Communists i
n his home state in 1936. In Washington, where we went with a play of John’s, we saw Congressman Tom Amlie, of Wisconsin, the secretary of the bloc of Progressives in the House; he got us visitors’ passes to the House and had drinks with us in our hotel room, where he told us that his committees were “Patents, Coins, and Public Buildings—that’s bottoms in committees.” A sad, nice man, who, unlike Olson, could not agree to working with Communist factions.
For The Nation, I was reviewing a number of biographies, which taught me some history—I had not taken any at Vassar. From Hilaire Belloc’s life of Charles I, I learned that inflation, which entailed a shrinking of the royal revenues in terms of buying power, was the cause of the martyred king’s fall. Of all the books I reviewed I was most enthusiastic about I, Claudius; the sequel, Claudius the God, I liked somewhat less. Another enthusiasm was Vincent Sheean’s Personal History, which gave me my line on Borodin and the Communist failure in China. I was greatly excited by a historical novel, Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which ended with the heroine sitting down in revolutionary Paris to read The Communist Manifesto. “Book Bites Mary,” Joe Krutch quipped in a telegram on receipt of my copy from Reno. Writing that review was the closest I came to a conversion to Communism (as indeed may have been the case of the author, for whom the book seems to have been a mutant in a career whose norm was one of wild, apolitical fancifulness—Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot).
As is clear from Krutch’s telegram, the Warner book reversed my ordinary practice with fiction. Usually I was rough. Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Stark Young’s So Red the Rose, Marching, Marching by Clara Weatherwax, February Hill by Victoria Lincoln—I laid about me right and left. My standards were high—higher for fiction than for biography, which could justify itself by instructiveness—as my still Latinate style seemed to attest, nay, to vaunt. I am embarrassed to recall (textually) a concluding sentence that spoke of the lack, in current fiction, “of bitter aloes and Attic salt.” Oh, dear. At least I was forthright and fearless, and I was gaining a certain renown for it; I think I can say that I was truly hated by a cosy columnist in Herald Tribune Books who signed herself “IMP” and doted on the books I attacked.
It was this reputation, evidently, that led Charles Angoff of The American Mercury, a disciple of Mencken, to invite me to lunch one day. It was a business lunch; he was working as a consultant to liven up The Nation, and he had an idea for me: to take on the entire critical establishment in a five- or six-part series, to be called “Our Critics.” Would I want to try it? Obviously I would. The state of reviewing in the United States was a scandal, far worse than today. Book-review pages, daily and Sunday, and periodicals like The Saturday Review of Literature (edited then by Henry Seidel Canby) were open adjuncts of the best-seller lists, book clubs, and advertisements of the publishing industry. Among the dailies and big weeklies, the one exception was the young John Chamberlain, in the daily New York Times, but he rarely reviewed fiction, and I doubt that he reviewed every day. Moreover, his tenure was brief.
Margaret Marshall, Joe Krutch’s assistant, had come to lunch, too. We talked excitedly for a couple of hours and before we separated it was agreed that I would take on the job. Later, there were second thoughts. Freda Kirchwey, who was running the paper under Villard, decided that I was too young to be entrusted with a series of such importance; knowing what I know of her, I suppose she was afraid of me, that is, of what I might write. So a compromise was worked out: Margaret Marshall would be assigned to work on the articles with me. We would divide the research equally; then she would write half the articles, and I would write half. For instance, she would do The New York Times Book Review, under J. Donald Adams, while I would do New Masses, under Granville Hicks. There would be five articles; the first, or introductory one, we would write together. For all five articles, both our names would be on the cover.
We had fun in the New York Public Library reading-room, doing our research in back issues of magazines and newspapers and using lined cards to copy out quotations, some of them unbelievable. Peggy Marshall came from a Mormon family in Utah or Montana; she was about ten years older than I, around thirty-three, and was divorced from her husband; they had one little girl, whose custody they shared. Peggy, I soon discovered, did not have much energy; she was having an affair with a labor writer named Ben Stolberg, and both of them would lie on a sofa or daybed in her living-room, too tired to do anything, apparently too tired to go to bed and make love. Nor can I remember her ever cooking a meal.
Neither was very attractive; she was blond, grayish-eyed, and dumpy, with a sharp turned-up nose, and Stolberg was blond, blue-eyed, and fat and talked, snorting, through his nose, with a German accent. I don’t know what view Stolberg took of himself, but Peggy, to my horror, saw herself as seductive. Once, when we were talking of Ben and whether he wanted to marry her, I saw her look in the mirror with a little smile and toss of her head; “Of course I know I’m kinda pretty,” she said.
Not long after this, on a weekend when we were starting to do the first piece, we decided to work on it in the Nation office, dividing it in two. I typed my part and waited for her to do hers, so that we could turn our copy in and leave. But she could not get it written; on the sheet of paper she finally showed me, there were a few half-finished sentences. She was giggling and making a sort of whimpering sound. This was the first writer’s block I had witnessed, if that is what it was. At length I took her notes and the sheet of paper from her and sat down and wrote what I thought she wanted to say. She thanked me a bit weepily, and I assured her it was O.K. I guessed that she was having a nervous breakdown, from the tension of the divorce, which was quite recent, and living with Judy, the little girl. Stolberg was probably no help.
That was how it was, for five weeks, except that soon she stopped trying and just let me write the pieces, using her notes and mine. She did manage to do half of one—the one on The New York Times Book Review—and made no further effort, though we talked about what would be in the articles and perhaps she suggested small changes of wording. I told Johnsrud of course but nobody else. When the pieces started coming out, the only other person to know that Peggy was not really the co-author was Freda Kirchwey. Peggy had had to tell her something to account for the fact that she was asking for more money for me, but I never knew what Freda knew exactly. They did pay me more money, and after the first week our names, at Peggy’s prompting, were reversed on the cover and in the headings: my name now came first.
John did not approve of any of this. He thought I should make Peggy take her name off the whole series; he did not trust her, he said. One could not trust a woman who was as weak as that. They were buying my silence, he said. It all chimed in with things that had happened to his father when he was principal of that Minnesota high school. I said I could not demand full credit because I was sorry for Peggy. I felt sure that she had not told Freda everything. If the truth came out, when our names were already on the articles, Freda might feel she was too compromised to keep her job. That I was not getting complete credit for work I had done was less important than the fact that Peggy was on her own, with Judy, and barely able to perform. I cannot tell even now whether those were my true feelings. I was sorry for her certainly, but not very sorry, possibly because of that self-satisfied smile and “Of course I know I’m kinda pretty.” Self-deception always chilled me. But I was the stronger, and she was the weaker, so I could not expose her. John said I would see how she repaid my generosity. I am not sure it was really generosity, but about repayment he was right, as the reader will see. She has been dead for years now; there is no reason for me to keep silent. And yet I feel guilty, like somebody repeating a slander, as I write this down.
The series on the critics was an immense succès de scandale. It was time someone did it. Peggy and I, our names now linked together for what looked like eternity, were a cynosure. Seeing her respond to the compliments that came to both of us at the parties we were invited to, I was annoyed,
I found. I felt that she was preening. Repressing my annoyance, I behaved falsely. Between the two of us, once the series was published, no reference was ever made to the division or non-division of labor that had gone into it. Her affair with Ben Stolberg did not last very long, and somehow—I forget the circumstances—he hired me to be his secretary-typist for a book he was going to write on labor.
He was a mine of knowledge, a deviant socialist of some sort, with a witty mind (from the book he was meant to be writing: “Judge Gary never saw a blast furnace till after his death”), but he had a mammoth writer’s block and a genius for wasting time when he should have been working. He had hired me on the theory that if he paid me to come every day he would have to dictate some sort of text to me. But our first week was spent buying a typewriter; under his direction I typed “Now is the time for all good men” on Remingtons and Royals and L. C. Smiths and Coronas, office models and portables, in the various typewriter stores he found in his neighborhood. I could not get him to make up his mind between them, and finally I chose one myself, and he paid for it—he had a rich woman poet as a patron. Then we spent several more days buying office supplies (choosing between weights of typewriter paper, all-black ribbons or red-and-black, sizes of manila envelopes, et cetera), till finally I was seated before a new Royal in his living-room on just the right chair, and he stood behind me.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 56