The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Thus for a time the Partisan Review, as its political position emerged through Rahv’s essays, considered the impending World War II from a heterodox perspective. The magazine accepted classical Marxist analysis, as reaffirmed by Trotsky, particularly in its critique of capitalism and the way that Trotsky explained the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, in 1938 the editors even applied a Marxist analysis to the coming war itself: “The exigencies of imperialist rivalries makes [sic] a new world war inevitable, especially since, with the degeneration of the Comintern, the threat of revolutionary action has been definitely withdrawn. . . . The war, even if the ‘democrats’ win, will not solve a fundamental problem of society. . . . Only unalterable opposition to capitalism, only utilization of the imperialist war for revolutionary ends, opens any prospect to humanity and its culture.”41 Yet the Partisan Review presented no corresponding working-class program of action to prevent the war; its great concern seemed to be that the forthcoming interimperialist maelstrom would constitute a terrible test for the morality and culture of intellectuals.

  Several documents reveal Trotsky’s attitude toward the Partisan Review group, after it publicly broke with the Communist Party in 1937. In a letter to editorial board member Dwight Macdonald, Trotsky expressed his fear that the Partisan Review was tending to hide behind the abstract banners of “independence” and “freedom,” rather than using these concepts as means of ideological struggle. He also suggested that, in the face of the coming social crisis, the journal might well transform itself into a “small cultural monastery, guarding itself from the outside world by skepticism, agnosticism, and respectability.”42

  In his essay “Art and Politics in Our Epoch,” published in the Partisan Review only a few months later, Trotsky offered a perspective for revolutionary artists and writers challenged by the dual obstacles of capitalism and the Soviet Thermidor: “Generally speaking, art is an expression of man’s need for a harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a class society has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with a rebellion.” Trotsky buttressed his thesis by pointing to the paths—from aesthetic revolt to acceptance in the bourgeois academies—that were taken by classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, cubism, and futurism. However, whether this pattern would continue depended on the stability of bourgeois society. Trotsky asserted that in its decline capitalism was no longer capable of absorbing the rebellion of new tendencies in art: “Hence new tendencies take on a more and more violent character, alternating between hope and despair. The artistic schools of the last few decades—cubism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism—follow each other without reaching a complete development. Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decay of bourgeois society.” Since, from the Marxist viewpoint, art is in itself insufficiently independent to overcome social crises or even to defend itself, such tasks require a social transformation, and “the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution.”

  According to Trotsky, many leftists made the mistake of only supporting the victorious Soviet revolution, thereby giving fealty to the new privileged stratum of the Stalinist bureaucracy instead of declaring their allegiance to the international working class. Furthermore, they failed to perceive how the fate of Soviet art testified to the character of art’s relation to revolution. Following the October Revolution in 1917, Soviet art underwent a great liberation. But after the rise and consolidation of Stalin’s bureaucratic regime, artistic quality greatly deteriorated. Even courtly art, Trotsky noted, although based on idealization, avoided the outright falsification that had so opprobriously marred Soviet art, especially as exemplified by the careers of Vsevolod Ivanov and Alexei Tolstoy, and in the falsification of the events of the revolution in cultural artifacts. In contrast, Trotsky held up the work of Mexican artist Diego Rivera, whose frescoes still drew inspiration from the true spirit of the October Revolution.

  The impending social crisis generated by the coming war, Trotsky argued, demanded a response from dissident artists and intellectuals. Referring to an attack on Trotskyism in a letter recently published in the Partisan Review, Trotsky emphasized that one must not fear smallness and isolation, for “not a single progressive idea has begun with a ‘mass base.’” This condition obtained for art as well as for politics. Trotsky declared that artists should support the revolutionary vanguard of the working class, the Trotskyist Fourth International, but he simultaneously emphasized how necessary it was to oppose supervision of art by any party, whether it be Stalinist or Trotskyist: “The ideological base of the conflict between the Fourth and Third Internationals is the profound disagreement not only on the tasks of the party but in general on the entire material and spiritual life of mankind.” He concluded his essay with the ringing appeal for the independence of art within the revolutionary process:

  Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its own laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only insofar as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of the oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.43

  Later in the autumn of 1938 the Partisan Review published “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” which, although signed by Rivera and the French surrealist André Breton, was written by Trotsky and Breton. This declaration repeated the sentiments expressed in “Art and Politics in Our Epoch,” emphasizing that the artist “is the natural ally of revolution.” It called for the formation of an International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art. In the winter of 1939, the Partisan Review printed a letter from Trotsky to Breton, in which he traced the deterioration of André Malraux’s work as he changed from an adventuristic but truthful champion of the colonial revolution to an apologist for Stalinism: “The struggle for revolutionary ideas in art must begin again with the struggle for artistic truth, not in terms of any single school, but in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self. Without this there is no art. ‘You shall not lie!’—that is the formula of salvation.” The new organization of revolutionary artists, Trotsky elaborated, should not be an aesthetic or political school, but rather it should “oxidize the atmosphere in which artists breathe and create,” for under present conditions of impending social cataclysm, “truly independent creation cannot but be revolutionary by its very nature.”44

  The appearance of Trotsky’s articles and programmatic statements in the Partisan Review did not by any means indicate that Phillips and Rahv completely agreed with his views. The journal, by its very nature, was open to a variety of radical political opinions. Nevertheless there was a definite confluence of sentiment on many questions. In the summer of 1939 the names of all of the magazine’s editors appeared as supporters of the newly formed League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism. The views articulated in the league’s programmatic statement corresponded to those expressed by Trotsky in previous articles, and the organization was intended to be the American affiliate of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art. Among the league’s sponsors were intellectuals publicly known as members of the American Trotskyist organization, including James Burnham, Dwight Macdonald (the league’s acting secretary), Sherry Mangan (a New England poet and journalist living in Paris who under the pseudonym “Sean Niall” contributed the “Paris Letter” column to Partisan Review), George Novack, Harry Roskolenko (a New York poet), and
John Wheelwright (a New England poet).

  But a gap still remained between the Trotskyists who were political activists and Rahv and Phillips, and it would widen considerably during the next few years. The Trotskyists themselves quite prophetically predicted the divergence in an editorial in their paper Socialist Appeal, which was launched as they were being expelled from the Socialist Party in the fall of 1937, just in time to greet the newly reorganized Partisan Review. The editorial, written by George Novack under direction of the editorial board, congratulated the magazine for its break with the Communist Party and its repudiation of the Stalinist method of judging literature by political line. But the Trotskyists disputed some of the formulations employed by the new journal in its first editorial in December 1937, formulations which implied that the editors might be overreacting to organized politics in general because of their experience with the Communists.

  The Partisan Review, the Socialist Appeal’s editorial noted, called for independence not just in art but in politics as well. For the Trotskyists, as for all classical Marxists, political independence or nonpartisanship was impossible in a social environment divided by warring classes, where one’s every act contained political implications and consequences, including even one’s personal desire for neutrality. To the contrary, the Socialist Appeal argued, the lesson to be learned from the experience with Stalinism was not that all relations with political parties are inherently deleterious to art but that only certain ones are. The negative influence of the Communist Party on radical intellectuals and literature did not spring from the party’s role as a revolutionary Leninist vanguard, but precisely from its opposite function as a bureaucratic instrument of the Thermidorean reaction in the Soviet Union. As a corrective, the Trotskyists recommended that the Partisan Review establish a friendly collaboration with their revolutionary party and that the magazine aggressively expose the Stalinists as “a pack of conscienceless scoundrels in the service of the great corrupter and destroyer of the socialist revolution.” The new Partisan Review, the Socialist Appeal asserted, had made a good beginning, but in order to thrive as a genuine revolutionary force it must not only maintain its own art as independent, it must actually link up with the working-class movement. “In avowing itself hospitable, experimental, democratic, the Partisan Review has set its foot on the right road. But it is not enough to have a broad circumference; it is equally necessary to have an ideological and political center from which all the rest logically radiates.”45

  THE AMBIGUITIES OF ANTI-STALINISM

  Although the Moscow trials confirmed Trotsky’s analysis of the malaise that had overtaken the international Communist movement, they also sapped the confidence of many militants who were hoping to build a revolutionary socialist movement. One symptom of this trend was the widespread discussion of “ends and means” among independent leftists in the late 1930s. In June 1938 Trotsky published “Their Morals and Ours” in the Trotskyist journal New International, defending the concept that “the end justifies the means,” with the caveat that some means contradict certain ends. John Dewey endorsed the essence of Trotsky’s argument in the August issue of the same magazine, but insisted that Trotsky violated his own precepts by giving priority to class struggle as a law of social transformation. When a similar discussion was held in the journal Common Sense, virtually every participant with the exception of Sidney Hook agreed with Selden Rodman’s claim that the root cause of the Stalinist terror was “Marxist absolutism and its dependence on violence.” Thus many anti-Stalinists were moving toward a view that communism itself was “amoral.”46

  Herbert Solow, to take another example, had not yet renounced his Trotskyist politics, but he appeared to be incapable of establishing an ongoing collaboration with the American Trotskyist movement. Throughout the hearings in Coyoacan, he and Trotsky argued steadily, wagging “their fingers in each other’s noses.”47 Still, in a 12 June 1937 letter to Harold Isaacs, Trotsky reported that Solow had raised the question of starting a magazine with himself as editor that would involve Walker, Farrell, Eastman, Stolberg, and La Follette. Trotsky was not unsympathetic to the idea, but at the same time he feared that the authentic Trotskyists might be treated as “poor relatives” in such a venture. He thought that perhaps the Trotskyists’ first responsibility was to develop their own new theoretical magazine to replace the New International, which had been abandoned during their entry into the Socialist Party. Once having done that, they could possibly form a coalition with left-wing anti-Stalinist elements.48

  The following year, in March 1938, the Trotskyist leaders of the newly formed Socialist Workers Party held a discussion with Trotsky in Mexico about their relations with American intellectuals in common political defense work. Solow’s name was often mentioned. Trotsky’s attitude toward Solow by then had become somewhat cynical, and he remarked that “our excellent friend Solow will see that he remains a political celibate.” Meanwhile, Solow heard from an unnamed source that Trotsky had also referred to him as “a decent chap but a mercurial dilettante.” Trotsky’s opinion was that the American Trotskyists should not attempt to rely upon or maneuver with vacillating intellectuals but should strive to build a solid political defense organization of their own that would attract the best of minds, including Solow’s.49

  The fall of 1937 found Solow frequently in the company of Sidney Hook. He learned from Hook that his college friends Meyer Schapiro and Whittaker Chambers were talking and that Chambers was getting “fed up” with Stalinism. One night in February, Chambers rang Solow’s doorbell and they discussed the latter’s political dilemma. For the next few months Solow urged Chambers to openly break with the Communist underground by making a public statement so as to prevent his being whisked away in secret, as other secret agents had been.50

  In March and April, Solow still seemed to be in political harmony with the revolutionary elements on the anti-Stalinist left. He contributed to the “Ripostes” section of the Partisan Review several humorous pieces on the Communists’ rapid changes in attitude toward various writers.51 At the same time, under the pseudonym “Junius,” he wrote a series of articles for the Socialist Appeal about the possible political implications of the disappearance in the Soviet Union of a former Soviet agent named Rubens.52 But he also published an article on the Rubens case in the virulently anticommunist New Leader, which perhaps foreshadowed a change in his political orientation. Then he published two articles in late 1939 which unveiled a new Solow, completely bereft of any prosocialist convictions while fully retaining an obsessive anti-Stalinism. Both appeared in the American Mercury, which had come under the editorship of Eugene Lyons. Lyons, born in 1899 in Uzlian, Russia, grew up in New York City. As a radical journalist, he returned to the Soviet Union for six years, serving as a correspondent for the United Press.53 Toward the mid-1930s he came back to the United States where he published a classic of disillusionment, Assignment in Utopia (1937). After some episodic collaboration with the Trotskyists in connection with their publishing projects, Lyons turned wholeheartedly to a career as an anticommunist journalist.

  Solow’s first piece for American Mercury, “Stalin’s American Passport Mill,” provided a more thorough update on Rubens’s disappearance, which Solow theorized might be part of a Soviet plan to stage a new Moscow trial, at which Rubens and his wife would “confess” to being anti-Soviet reactionaries in league with the Trotskyists and anti-Stalinist intellectuals in the United States.54 His second essay, “Stalin’s Great American Hoax: The League for Peace and Democracy,” was a blunt exposé of how the Communists established and manipulated this Popular Front organization, originally known as the League Against War and Fascism. Solow documented the party’s methods of control and how it had purged all officials who fell out of step with the Stalinist line. Most peculiar, from a socialist point of view, was the reason that Solow gave for opposing a government witch-hunt of the league in the tradition of A. Mitchell Palmer’s 1919 “Red Scare” raids. Instead of pointing out that suc
h an investigation would result in the suppression of the rights of everyone involved in the struggle for social change, Solow warned that it would crown the league with a martyr’s halo, which would catalyze support for the organization among its liberal constituency.55 This line of argument is characteristic of the type of “criticisms” of U.S. government repression that the New York intellectuals would develop during the Cold War period under the spurious claim that such “criticisms” proved their independence from the excesses of the witch-hunt.

  In addition to writing the two articles for the American Mercury, Solow investigated the disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, a former teacher at Barnard College, who had vanished from the American Woman’s Club in New York City in June 1937. Poyntz had played a prominent role in American Communism until 1934, when she began carrying out assignments for the Communist International. Solow had unearthed evidence that Poyntz had been in the process of withdrawing from the party at the time that she disappeared, and he suspected foul play.56

  What the two articles and the related Poyntz investigation reveal is how the anti-Stalinist component of Solow’s political outlook was beginning to become detached from his socialist and anticapitalist views, a decisive process that would lead him to become an outright anticommunist and anti-Marxist. From the Trotskyists’ perspective, as well as from the viewpoint of a more revolutionary-minded Solow of an earlier period, one could not object to exposing the sham of the Communists’ front organizations, nor would one have opposed publicizing the Stalinist terrorist apparatus. Indeed, an authentic socialist had the duty to expose the nature of Stalinism. Nevertheless, such exposures would have been regarded by socialists as just one small facet of a general political struggle against Stalinism, a struggle the major expression of which would have been the creation of a movement to win the working class to a genuine revolutionary socialist program. To the Trotskyists, Solow appeared to be placing an undue emphasis on the Communist underground apparatus and elevating anti-Stalinist propaganda above advocating a larger anticapitalist program; this raised the danger of becoming dependent on capitalism as the primary weapon against Stalinism.57