by Saul Bellow
Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence
(1993)
The National Interest, Spring 1993.
When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, I was two years old. My parents had emigrated from Saint Petersburg to Montreal in 1913, so events in Russia were on their minds, and at the dinner table the czar, the war, the front, Lenin, Trotsky, were mentioned as often as parents, sisters, and brothers in the old country. Among Jews it was scarcely conceivable that the great monarchy should have fallen. Skeptical older immigrants believed that the Bolshevik upstarts would soon be driven out. Their grown children, however, were keen to join the revolution, and I can remember how my father argued in the street with Lyova, the son of our Hebrew teacher, who said he had already bought his schiffskarte. My father shouted that the new regime was worthless, but the young were then accustomed to respect their elders, so Lyova smiled—deferential but immovable. He went off to build a new order under Lenin and Trotsky. And he disappeared.
Much later, after we had moved to Chicago and I was old enough to read Marx and Lenin, my father would say, “Don’t you forget what happened to Lyova—and I haven’t heard from my sisters in years. I don’t want any part of your Russia and your Lenin.”
But in my eyes my parents were Russians, with agreeable Russian traits. They had brought with them a steamer trunk filled with Saint Petersburg finery—brocaded vests, a top hat, a tailcoat, linen sleeping suits with pleated fronts, black taffeta petticoats, ostrich feathers, and button boots with high heels. Of no use in the dim ultima Thule of Montreal or in proletarian Chicago, they were the playthings of the younger children. The older ones quickly and eagerly Americanized themselves in the U.S., and the rest soon followed suit. The country took us over. It was a country then, not a collection of “cultures.” We felt that to be here was a great piece of luck. The children of immigrants in my Chicago high school, however, believed that they were also somehow Russian, and while they studied their Macbeth and Milton’s L’Allegro, they read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well and went on inevitably to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the pamphlets of Trotsky. The Tuley High School debating club discussed the Communist Manifesto, and on the main stem of the neighborhood, Division Street, the immigrant intelligentsia lectured from soapboxes, while at “the forum,” a church hall on California Avenue, debates between socialists, communists, and anarchists attracted a fair number of people. This was the beginning of my radical education. For on the recommendation of friends, I took up Marx and Engels, and I remember, in my father’s bleak office near the freightyards, blasting away at Value, Price, and Profit while the police raided a brothel across the street—for non-payment of protection, probably—throwing beds, bedding, and chairs through the shattered windows.
The Young Communist League tried to recruit me in the late thirties. Too late—I had already read Trotsky’s pamphlet on the German question and was convinced that Stalin’s errors had brought Hitler to power.
Curious how widely information of world politics was disseminated and in what odd corners around the globe positions then were taken. When the poet Mandelstam interviewed a Comintern member in 1923, he asked, “‘How has Gandhi’s movement affected you in Indochina? Have you experienced any vibrations, any echoes?’ ‘No,’ answered my companion”—identified as Nguyen Ai Quoc, known to us later as Ho Chi Minh. Mandelstam describes him to us: “At heart he is but a boy, thin and lithe, sporting a knitted wool jacket.”
Few boys, I need hardly say, became Comintern members. For millions of them worldwide, however, the October Revolution was a great reverberator whose echoes of freedom and justice you could not choose but hear. That revolution was for many decades the most important, most prestigious event in history. Its partisans held that it had brought to an end the most monstrous of wars and that Russia’s revolutionary proletariat had made mankind the gift of a great hope. Now the oppressed everywhere, under communist leadership, would destroy decadent capitalist imperialism. In Depression Chicago, boys at heart—and girls as well—were putting their revolutionary thoughts in order. The program was not very clear, but the prospect was immensely thrilling. Full ideological clarity would not arrive for some time.
In college (1933) I was a Trotskyist. Trotsky instilled into his young followers the orthodoxy peculiar to the defeated and ousted. We belonged to the movement, we were faithful to Leninism and could expound its historical lessons and describe Stalin’s crimes. My closest friends and I were not, however, activists; we were writers. Owing to the Depression, we had no career expectations. We got through the week on five or six bucks, and if our rented rooms were small, the libraries were lofty, were beautiful. Through “revolutionary politics” we met the demand of the times for action. But what really mattered was the vital personal nourishment we took from Dostoyevsky or Herman Melville, from Dreiser and John Dos Passos and Faulkner. By filling out a slip of paper at the Crerar Library on Randolph Street, you could get all the bound volumes of The Dial and fill long afternoons with T. S. Eliot, Rilke, and E. E. Cummings. Toward the end of the thirties, Partisan Review was our own Dial, with politics besides. There we had access to our significant European contemporaries—Silone, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, André Gide, and Auden. Partisan’s leading American contributors were Marxists—critics and philosophers like Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, and Harold Rosenberg. The PR intellectuals had sided with Trotsky quite naturally, during the Moscow trials. Hook had persuaded his teacher John Dewey to head a commission of inquiry in Mexico. We followed the proceedings bitterly, passionately, for we were, of course, the Outs; the Stalinists were the Ins. We alone in the U.S.A. knew what a bad lot they were. FDR and his New Dealers didn’t have a clue; they understood neither Russia nor communism.
But our own movement, we began to learn, was often foolish, even conspicuously absurd. During the Spanish Civil War, the issue of material aid for the Spanish Republic was furiously debated by comrades who didn’t have a dime to contribute. A more serious challenge to our loyalty was the invasion of Finland by the Red Army. Trotsky argued that a workers’ state could not by definition wage an imperialist war. The invasion was progressive, since it would nationalize property, an irrevocable step toward socialism. Faithful to the October Revolution, Trotsky fought the dissenters, of whom there were now many. The split this led to did not come to the attention of the American public, which in any case would have preferred Disney’s Fantasia to our kind.
Although I now drifted away from Marxist politics, I still admired Lenin and Trotsky. After all, I had first heard of them in the high chair while eating my mashed potatoes. How could I forget that Trotsky had created the Red Army, that he had read French novels at the front while defeating Denikin. That great crowds had been swayed by his coruscating speeches. The glamour of the Revolution still cast its spell. Besides, the most respected literary and intellectual figures had themselves yielded to it. Returning from a visit to Russia, Edmund Wilson had spoken about “the moral light at the top of the world,” and it was Wilson who had introduced us to Joyce and Proust. His history of Revolutionary thought, To the Finland Station, was published in 1940. By that time, Poland had been invaded and France had fallen to the Nazis.
Nineteen forty was also the year of Trotsky’s assassination. I was in Mexico at the time, and an acquaintance of the Old Man, a European lady whom I had met in Taxco, had arranged a meeting. Trotsky agreed to receive my friend Herbert Passin and me in Coyoacan. It was on the morning of our appointment that he was struck down. Arriving in Mexico City, we were met by the headlines. When we went to his villa we must have been taken for foreign journalists, and we were directed to the hospital. The emergency room was in disorder. We had only to ask for Trotsky. A door into a small side room was opened for us, and there we saw him. He had just died. A cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat, were streaked with blood and with dried iridescent trickles of iodine
.
He is reported to have said once that Stalin could kill him whenever he liked, and now we understood what a far-reaching power could do with us; how easy it was for a despot to order a death; how little it took to kill us, how slight a hold we, with our historical philosophies, our ideas, programs, purposes, wills, had on the matter we were made of.
The Great Depression was a time of personal humiliation for those who had worked and lived in respectable prosperity. Capitalism seemed to have lost its control over the country. To many, the overthrow of the government looked like a distinct possibility. In the early Depression years, the policies dictated by the communist leadership during its rigid and grim third period had had little success in the U.S.A. A new Popular Front policy was announced when Hitler began to demolish the parties of the left. For American communists, the Popular Front, temperate and apparently conciliatory, was a bonanza. The Party was freed from its foreign-sounding jargon and began instead to speak the language of Wobblies and working stiffs. Embracing native populism, it sang folk songs and played guitars. Not Lenin and Stalin but Jefferson and Lincoln sat at the center of the new pantheon. The New Deal philosophy of FDR as we heard it in fireside chats generated warmth and confidence. Henry Wallace announced that this was the century of the common man. The Popular Front identified itself with this new populism, and the CP learned for the first time how heady it was to be in the mainstream of national life. The country appeared to be having a great cultural revival. Writers and actors were attracted by well-endowed front organizations and fellow-traveling groups. The left had struck it rich.
I was myself a not ungrateful beneficiary of the New Deal. Toward the end of the thirties, I was employed by the WPA Writers’ Project. Our stars in the Chicago office were Jack Conroy and Nelson Algren—neither of them out of favor with the Communist Party. Algren was indeed an original, unfortunately susceptible to ideological infection, a radical bohemian in a quickly dated Chicago style. Few of the younger generation of gifted writers were untouched by the Popular Front influence. I refer not only to those who were later victimized in the hysteria generated by McCarthy but also to certain of the more prestigious contributors to The Nation and the New Republic who had gone along with the CP during the civil war in Spain (e.g., Malcolm Cowley). The Popular Front style was distinctive, and its “culture” was easily recognizable in writers like Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, or Dalton Trumbo, or in critics or radio writers who may as well remain nameless. It survives even now, and you need do no more than mention Whittaker Chambers or Alger Hiss or J. Robert Oppenheimer or the Rosenbergs at a dinner table to learn how durable the issues and dogmas of the thirties and the early postwar years have remained.
It is perfectly true, as Charles Fairbanks has suggested, that totalitarianism in our century has shaped the very definition of what an intellectual is. The “vanguard fighters” who acted under Lenin’s direction in October were intellectuals, and perhaps the glamour of this event had its greatest effect on intellectuals in the West. Among political activists this was sufficiently evident, but the Bolshevik model was immensely influential everywhere. Trotsky and T. E. Lawrence were perhaps the most outstanding of the intellectual activists to emerge from World War I—the former as Lenin’s principal executive, Lawrence as the delicate scholar and recluse, a Shakespearean Fortinbras materializing in the Arabian desert. Malraux was inspired by both men, obviously, an aesthete and a theorist, eager in his first phase for revolutionary action and manifesting a curious relish for violence in a great cause. It was he who set an example for French writers of the forties. Sartre was certainly one of his descendants, and many in France and elsewhere modeled themselves upon him, up to the time when he abjured revolution. There was a trace of this also in Arthur Koestler, who so often exposed himself to personal danger, but it was in France, between the thirties and the time of Régis Debray, that leftist intellectuals presented themselves in the West as soldiers of the revolution.
The Leninist style was adopted by Berlin intellectuals in the twenties. Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken represents the central precept of Leninism, namely the primacy of the Party, and it dramatizes with great power the tragedy of disobedience—the failure of a Party worker to achieve the utter self-effacement demanded by “History.” Martin Esslin tells us most vividly about Brecht himself—the public persona of the literary enfant terrible, the truckdriver’s jacket and dirty visored cap he wore. In proletarian costume, he “drove around Berlin at great speed” but wore the steel-rimmed glasses of a “minor civil servant or village schoolmaster.” Lenin himself has been characterized as a gymnasium teacher from Simbirsk: the Great Headmaster is what Wilson calls him. A powerhouse disguised as a pedant. The Lenin style was also favored by bohemian intellectuals in Greenwich Village. A valuable comment on this has been made by the art critic Clement Greenberg, who was himself preoccupied with the Great Headmaster’s personality. He says of Brecht: “Lenin’s precepts became for him an eternal standard of conduct, and Bolshevism a way of life and a habit of virtue.” And in another place: “the followers of Lenin and Trotsky—like little men aping the externals of those they follow—have cultivated in themselves that narrowness which passes for self-oblivious devotion, that harshness in personal relations and above all that devastating incapacity for experience which have become hallmarks and standard traits of the Communist ‘professional revolutionary’ … it is the cultivated and trained narrowness … which frightens away imagination and spontaneity.” These animadversions, when I read them years ago, increased my respect for Greenberg; I found in them an unusual gift for self-insight. He had carried himself like a Lenin of the arts. Many of the gifted intellectuals of that time took on a Leninist coloration. They were “hard.” To them “lives” and “personalities” were unreal bourgeois conceits, extensions of the idea of property. You eliminated, you cut down to size, you put down frailties and fashions, you welcomed the avant-garde and destroyed kitsch with revolutionary mental rays.
The Russian Revolution was made by a small band of intellectuals under the direction of Lenin, their chief theoretician. Small wonder that intellectuals in the West should have been intoxicated by such an example.
Some of these people were authentic originals and impressively intelligent (Harold Rosenberg, for example). The more clearheaded of the Village intellectuals toward the end of the thirties were beginning to understand that the Revolution was a disaster. Few of them, however, turned away from Marxism. One way or another, they clung to the texts that had made intellectuals of them. The Marxist fundamentals had organized their minds and gave them an enduring advantage over unfocused rivals educated helter-skelter in American universities. What you invest your energy and enthusiasm in when you are young you can never bring yourself to give up altogether. I came to New York toward the end of the thirties, muddled in the head but keen to educate myself, and toward the end of the forties I had become a contributor to Partisan Review and a Villager. All around us was commercial America. The Village was halfway between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. Its center lay in Washington Square. From her apartment facing the benches and the elms, Eleanor Roosevelt might have seen, had they been pointed out to her, some of the most eminent intellectuals in the country discussing French politics, American painting, Freud and Marx, André Gide and Jean Cocteau. Everyone was avid for high-minded, often wildly speculative talk.
For Darwin it was the struggle for existence that mattered; for me, in those years, it was the struggle for conversation. There was no existence without it. There were notable talkers in this group of anti-communist leftists: Dwight Macdonald, tall, loosely held together, bearded, goggled, a rapid stammerer; Philip Rahv with his deep, breathy Russian rumble; Harold Rosenberg, extraordinarily fluent, persuasive, domineering, subtle, and sharp; Paul Goodman, both canny and visionary, looking beyond you as he laid down the law on psychiatry, poetry, anarchism, and sex.
Among these thinkers, small distinction was made between an intellectua
l and a writer. The culture heroes who mattered were those who had ideas. Sidney Hook, in many respects a sensible man, once said to me that Faulkner was an excellent writer whose books would be greatly improved by dynamic ideas. “I’d be glad to give him some,” he said. “It would make a tremendous difference. Do you know him?”
There was indeed much for us to understand: history, philosophy, science, the cold war, mass society, pop art, high art, psychoanalysis, existentialism, the Russian question, the Jewish question. Yet I quickly saw—or rather (since I don’t see quickly) I intuited—that writers seldom were intellectuals. “A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos,” Chekhov said—tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers “should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.” “Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature” was one of his rules, and he recommended also objectivity, brevity, audacity, the avoidance of stereotypes, and compassion. (Ah, for the days before such words had fallen into disrepute.)
I don’t intend just now to go farther into the differences between cognition and imagination; I simply note that I avoided anything resembling a choice by following my bent. I can’t remember that I ever tried to discuss art versus politics with other writers. At a visiting firemen’s dinner, years later, I once asked Günter Grass why he was campaigning so hard for Willy Brandt. Should writers go into politics? He turned a silent glare upon me, as if it outraged him (on this evening, he was the fireman) to be seated beside a village idiot.
Only in America! he may have thought.
For in Europe, writers accepted politics as their absolute. This, as I learned during my Paris years (1948–50), was the thing to do. The year 1948 was a peculiarly bleak and bitter one. Coal, gasoline, even bread, were still being rationed. That Paris was the capital of world civilization could no longer be taken for granted. French thinkers and writers struggled to maintain its preeminence. Americans, recently cheered as liberators, were not warmly received, the right being nearly as hard on them as the left. Mauriac in his columns expressed a decided preference for the Russians—for Russian rather than American literature. (Up to a point, I could agree with him.) On the left, only Americans who had been ideologically vetted were accepted. The rest were thought to be spies. And French-speakers were especially tricky—very likely double agents. Lifelong Francophiles like my friend H. J. Kaplan were suspect, whereas Richard Wright was immediately welcomed, and the existentialists who met in the bar of the Pont-Royal soon had him reading Husserl, whom I ignorantly held in great respect. I might have become an intellectual, but this makes me think of the prostitute in the French cartoon who said, “J’aurais pu faire la religieuse.” Seeing Wright in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, deep in a thick, difficult book, I asked him why this was necessary, and he told me that it was indispensable reading for all writers and that I had better get a copy of my own. I wasn’t quite ready for Husserl. As often as possible I went to music halls and the Cirque d’Hiver. Still, I did keep up with French ideas, read Sartre in Les Temps Modernes and Camus in Combat. I also took in an occasional lecture at the Collège de Philosophie.