Sometimes on Sundays, Farrell’s kindly publisher, Jim Henle of Vanguard Press, asked me to lunch at the house he and his wife, Marjorie, had in Hartsdale, half an hour or so from New York. But I could not hope to meet any unattached men there, I discovered. It was an office group like a family, headed by Evelyn Schrifte, eventually Henle’s successor at Vanguard; the only author present was Farrell. Still, going out there was fun; I liked the Henles. But apart from those Sundays, the only break in the monotony of my first months as a divorcee on Gay Street was when the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt—real name George Black—came from Pittsburgh and took me to the World Series. The Giants were playing the Yankees, and Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons was pitching in the game we went to. When, at his insistence, I brought the “man” home, so that he could see how I lived, he was shocked and begged me to move. He still thought he wanted me to marry him, even though I would no longer let him make love to me. In the story I wrote about it nearly four years later (on the Cape during the fall of France), the heroine sees him several times in New York posthumously to their love-affair on the train, but I remember only the once—the excitement of being at the World Series (and with a National League fan; he had arranged our box-seat tickets through the Pittsburgh Pirates), and having dinner with him afterward—at Longchamps, it must have been. I have a very faint recollection of a duck he had shot that started to smell in my icebox because I did not know how to take off the feathers and cook it. In the story, I changed several things about him, including where he was from, in case his wife might somehow come upon it and recognize him. Really he lived in Sewickley, a fashionable outskirt of Pittsburgh, belonged to the Duquesne Club, and worked for American Radiator and Standard Sanitary—plumbing. The man in the story was in steel. (When it came out in 1941 in Partisan Review, Jay Laughlin of New Directions was telling people that the “man” was Wendell Willkie, who had run for president the year before.) George Black’s ardor was an embarrassment to me—a deserved punishment. Hard up as I was for male company, I kept him out of sight. None of my friends knew about him, and until now I have not told his name.
Those must have been the harshest months of my life. My grandfather was sending me an allowance of $25 a week, since the Capital Elevator stocks I had inherited from the McCarthys were not paying dividends any more, or very little. I did some reviews for The Nation and I looked for a job. Someone sent me to a man who lived in the St. Moritz Hotel and needed a collaborator for a book he was writing on the influence of sunspots on the stock market. No. At last Mannie Rousuck, now with Ehrich Newhouse and starting on his upward climb, was able to give me half a day’s work at the gallery, writing descriptions of paintings for letters he sent to prospects. Some of the addressees were the same ones we had written to at the Carleton Gallery—Ambrose Clark, Mrs. Hartley Dodge—though my subjects were no longer just dogs but English sporting scenes with emphasis on horses, English portraits, conversation pieces, coaching scenes: I think he paid me $15 a week, which, with the allowance from my grandfather, was more than enough to support me. I could even serve drinks.
Nonetheless I was despondent. If I had been given to self-pity, I would surely have fallen into it. I did not much regret breaking up with John, especially because he was taking a sardonic, mock-courteous tone with me, and I had almost forgotten Porter. It was not that I wanted either of them back. I saw plenty of John as it was, and I would have been horrified if Porter had appeared on my doorstep. There was no room for him in my multi-faceted apartment. My renting it showed that I had not thought of him as being in my life at all.
At some time during the autumn I had driven to Vermont with Mannie, to see a collection of sporting art that would be very important to him and, incidentally, to see the autumn leaves. On another Saturday I had gone up to Vassar to see Miss Sandison (Miss Kitchel was on sabbatical), and we had talked of my discovery of left-wing politics, which she knew all about, as it turned out, having subscribed to New Masses or read it in the library while I was still in college. Then we talked of love, which she knew about, too, even more to my surprise. I can still hear her light, precise voice tell me that you must “learn to live without love if you want to live with it.” In other words, not to depend on having love. You must come to real love free of any neediness. This thought greatly struck me, and still does. I am sure it is true but, unlike Miss Sandison, I am not up to it. I have seldom been capable of living without love, not for more than a month or so. That afternoon, in her small sitting-room in Williams, where our Renaissance seminar had been held, pouring tea again, she told me a little about her private life. There had been a man (at Yale, I gathered), but, though they were lovers, they did not marry. “I could think rings around him,” she remembered with a mournful little laugh. Maybe that was always the fly in the ointment. She was too intelligent for the men she chanced to meet.
I was moved by that long conversation, inspired by it to try to be like Miss Sandison. She was clear-eyed, a heroine like Rosalind and Celia. I was not so brave. Many years later, after her retirement, her dauntless character was put to the test. First of all, on becoming an emerita, she worked as a volunteer for the Civil Liberties Union in New York (single-handed, she said in a shocked tone, she had straightened out the awful disorder of their files), and also for the Heart Association, that perhaps in memory of Miss Kitchel, with her flushed cheeks, who had died in Toledo of heart trouble. In New York, after a while, Miss Sandison lived alone; her sister had died, too. But then she had to give up her volunteer work, because she was going blind. Frani, who lived nearby, used to go in and read to her and wrote to me in Paris about it. I intended to write, so that Frani could read the letter to her. But I didn’t. Time passed. Her address, in Frani’s handwriting, pleaded with me daily on my desk. At last I learned from Frani that it was too late: Miss Sandison was dead. She had found she was going deaf, on top of being blind, and took the logical step. Without telling anyone, she carefully arranged her suicide—death-by-drowning—putting weights in the pockets of her dress, filling the bathtub, and climbing in. Perhaps she took some sleeping pills, to keep herself from involuntarily coming up again. She even put a message for the cleaning-woman on her door, so that the woman would not be frightened by finding her body. I do not know how she managed, with only the sense of touch to help her. But she did.
And to think that I never wrote. Of course that September or October day was not the last time I saw her. We were reunited a number of times—with Miss Kitchel when I was teaching at Bard forty minutes off up the Hudson—and then, alone. I remember things she said during those later meetings, especially the first one, when I had left Wilson and was living with Reuel, aged seven, in Upper Red Hook, though then it was Miss Kitchel who spoke the immortal sentence over our Old Fashioneds: “Tell us you didn’t marry him for love!” She was speaking, naturally, for them both. I remember how well they both looked, Miss Kitchel with her slightly faded blue eyes and Miss Sandison with her deep, sparkling dark ones, and the Covermark now hiding the disfiguring birthmark on her cheek. I was filled with love for both of them, and the fact that I was teaching literature—my maiden effort—put us on terms of greater parity. Yet, of all our meetings, the most memorable for me has always been that fall afternoon in 1936 with Miss Sandison when I was trying to learn from her how to live alone. In reality I was doing it at Bard in those first months of teaching; I had firmly given up any notion of a new marriage and pictured myself romantically as a sort of secular nun. But Miss Sandison and Miss Kitchel never came to see me at Bard—now, I wonder why not; perhaps just the fact that they were not motorized and I was. Miss Sandison never saw my place on Gay Street or any place I lived, even when it was with her sister’s furniture. I always went to her, at Vassar, and if I took her and Miss Kitchel out, it was downtown to a Poughkeepsie restaurant. This points to a reticence in our relation, characteristic of Miss Sandison, though not of me. She had read Wilson’s work and she and Miss Kitchel had listened to Johnsrud read his first play alo
ud on their screened back porch. But she probably knew very little, unless from other sources, of John Porter and his successors in my life.
We talked that day about Granville Hicks and New Masses, Marxian criticism, so called then (now it is “Marxist”). I wanted to impress Miss Sandison with the fact that I had become political (“radicalized” was the word in the sixties), yet, finding that she, too, was perfectly abreast of the new tendencies, I was able to open my heart to her and suggest the doubts I felt. These were literary doubts, I emphasized; I had no disagreement with the political side of the magazine. But in the literary pages there was a smell of Puritanism. I was reminded of the Marprelate Controversy that we had read about in her senior seminar on the English Renaissance—the same fanatic spirit. Not just “Granny” Hicks, but a lot of those New Masses reviewers brought to mind a character in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the hateful Puritan militant wonderfully named Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy. In the Marprelate quarrel, I had been rather on the side of the Established Church, whose pamphleteers had been University Wits. But above all I had responded to the noble, balanced periods of Richard Hooker (Ecclesiastical Polity), the great defender of the episcopate and anticipator of Locke—Miss Sandison had inspired me to read him.
It came to me that afternoon that the Elizabethans, her “field,” still constituted for me a sort of wondrous paradigm, a model in which the inflections or “cases” of literary practice were perennially recognizable. Spenser’s friend the pedant Gabriel Harvey, for instance, could have been a perfect New Masses contributor and advocate of the prolet-cult in literature. Harvey, the son of a ropemaker in the Norfolk town of Saffron Walden, was a species of crypto-puritan, possessed by a baleful hatred of the University Wits; he attacked the dying Robert Greene and was wonderfully counterattacked by Thomas Nashe. As a Latinist, he wanted to introduce the meters of classical verse into English poetry—in other words, to imprison it in a strait-jacket. I think the pedant and the puritan can never be far apart. To this day, the uncouth Harvey, for me, stands at the antipodes of true talent and its correlate, freedom, and I do not forgive Edmund Spenser, defender of the cruel Irish repression, for being his friend. Have with you to Saffron Walden, I say with Nashe.
Miss Sandison, of course, was pleased to see that the lessons of her seminar had not been lost on a favorite pupil. She was a friend of freedom herself—why else did she go to work for the ACLU? So I wonder how she took the fact that I was still leaning toward Stalinism. As I say, it was their literary practices that I found offensive. I had actually been talking of voting for Browder in the November election, casting what would be my first vote. Had I changed my mind? It depends on the date. Did I go up to Vassar before or after I woke up and found myself on the Trotsky Committee? Almost certainly before, since that took place in November. I have told the story in “My Confession,” and the point I made there was that it happened by pure chance. At a cocktail party for Art Young, the New Masses cartoonist, Jim Farrell, who seemed to be taking some sort of canvass, asked me if I thought Trotsky was entitled to a hearing, and naturally I answered yes, without any clear idea of what he was being charged with. Having been in Reno and Seattle, I had missed the news stories of the first Moscow trials. And I do not know how it was that I had been invited to what was presumably a Stalinist party, still less why Farrell had. Apparently the lines were not yet clearly drawn. But once I answered yes (and Farrell, it seemed, wrote my name down), my goose was cooked. A few mornings later, opening my mail, I found my name on a letterhead; it was a group that was demanding Trotsky’s right to a hearing, and also his “right to asylum.” I was angry that my name had been used without my consent, but before I had time to register my protest by withdrawing it, my telephone began ringing: Stalinist acquaintances urging me to take my name off that committee. Other signers, like Freda Kirchwey, as I learned from the day’s paper, were promptly capitulating to the application of pressure. This only hardened my resolve, as anybody who knew me could have guessed. I let my name stay—a pivotal decision, perhaps the pivotal decision of my life. Yet I had no sense of making a choice; it was as if the choice had been thrust on me by those idiot Stalinists calling my number. I did not feel I was being brave; on the other hand, the Freda Kirchweys hurrying to withdraw their names looked to me like cowards. Though I was unconscious of having come to a turning point, the great divide, politically, of our time, I did know that I had better find out something about the cause I had inadvertently signed up with. Minimally I had to learn the arguments for Trotsky’s side.
Luckily I was the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers. And even more luckily a pamphlet had been issued analyzing the evidence in the first trial from “our” point of view, that is, on the assumption that, despite the defendants’ confessions, Trotsky was innocent of having conspired with the Nazis to overthrow the Soviet state. To my relief, the pamphlet was extremely convincing. I read it with care, testing the arguments as though I were preparing for an exam. And they held water. Yet I cannot remember who wrote it. I think there was a sequel dealing with the second trial, of Pyatakov and Radek, which took place in January. I remember poring over the verbatim reports of both trials on my studio-couch in Gay Street. Yet I have no recollection of when or how the Trotsky Committee was formed. I know that there was already a committee and I was on it by February 14, 1937, because I remember the meeting that night in Farrell’s apartment and that I was the only one who noticed that it was St. Valentine’s Day, which I guess said something about all concerned.
In recent years I have read more than once that Edmund Wilson was on the Trotsky Committee. What an opportunity for us to have got to know each other! But I never saw him at any Committee meeting.
Being on the Committee marked the end of my awful solitude. Some time around Christmas things began to improve. I was meeting people—men. Part of that had to do with the Committee (“Dear Abby” in her column advises her lonely-heart readers to join a group—church group, she recommends), but a lot was coincidence. For instance, Bob Misch of the Wine and Food Society. How had I met him? Maybe through my friends Gene and Florine Katz. Misch was in the advertising business, single, German Jewish, and the very active secretary of the wine and food organization, whose head was André Simon, in London. He fancied himself as a cook and a knowledgeable bon vivant. His short, stocky, dark, well-fed body made me think of a pouter pigeon. Probably someone took me to one of his Wine and Food tastings: on a series of tables various wines were grouped around a theme—Rhine wines, Loire wines, Burgundies—one sampled them, made notes, and compared. On the tables there were also little things to eat, “to clear the palate,” and probably water to rinse your mouth out. It was educational, it was intoxicating, and it was free. After the first time, my name was on their list, and I always accepted. Soon he was asking me to the little dinners he gave in his West Side apartment, quite evidently as his partner; his specialty was black bean soup with sherry and slices of hard-boiled egg. The reader will find something like those dinners in the chapter called “The Genial Host” in The Company She Keeps. If I may give an opinion, it is the weakest thing in the book. No doubt that is because I was unwilling to face the full reality of the relationship. In real life I slept with him and in the story I don’t. I suppose I was ashamed. Misch was eager to make me expensive presents (such as handbags) and to do services for me that I didn’t want. Even after I stopped sleeping with him, which was soon, he kept on asking me to those dinners, and I kept on accepting, because of his insistence and because, as the chapter says (though without mentioning sex between us), I was not quite ready to break with him, being still “so poor, so loverless, so lonely.”
The guests at those little dinners were mostly Stalinists, which was what smart, successful people in that New York world were. And they were mostly Jewish; as was often pointed out to me, with gentle amusement, I was the only non-Jewish person in the room. It was at Misch’s that I first met Lillian Hellman, who had been brought, I guess, by his friend Loui
s Kronenberger. But I may mix her up with another Stalinist, by the name of Leane Zugsmith. It was with Hellman, just back from Spain, that I had angry words about the Spanish Civil War. Probably, as happens in the chapter, I grew heated about the murdered POUM leader, Andrés Nin.
That same evening (more or less as related), I started on a brief affair with Leo Huberman (Man’s Worldly Goods), who was a suave sort of Stalinist and married. But I no longer needed Misch’s dinners to meet new people, not even new Stalinists. Suddenly the woods were full of them. If I met Huberman there, I was also seeing Bill Mangold (not Jewish; it means a kind of beet in German), a Yale classmate of Alan Barth’s whom I had first met at Webster Hall a couple of years before. Now he took me to dinner, at a fun place where we danced. He was separated from his wife; he was going to a psychoanalyst (the first analysand in my personal history); he was amusing and worked for medical aid to the Loyalists in Spain, a Stalinist front. We did not discuss politics, which no doubt eased the difficulty of having a quite active and friendly love-affair with a distinctly Trotskyist girl. Of all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot; I stopped counting), I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to see Philip Rahv.
Once I got started, I saw all sorts of men that winter. Often one led to another. Most of them I slept with at least one time. There was Harold (“Hecky”) Rome, who wrote the lyrics for the ILGWU musical Pins and Needles (“Sing me a song with social significance”); we cooked a steak together one night in his apartment—perfect. There was a little man who made puppets that appeared on the cover of Esquire and another little man, very droll and witty, who was married and worked for a publisher—he came to my place from the office in the afternoon and was a bit nervous despite his aplomb. There was a truck driver whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it, whom I met in the bar at Chumley’s. I did not go to bars alone, so someone must have taken me—probably John—and then left.
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