The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  The final sections of the novel largely focus on the children of the New Party group in whom many have invested the hopes once attached to their political commitments. One of these children is Paul, a moral idealist who is killed by a street gang in Harlem where he has gone to live and engage in social work. At Paul’s funeral a single red rose arrives from Comrade Hoover, the retired Afro-American leader of the party who bears a strong resemblance to Ernest Rice McKinny, a leader of the Workers Party. The rose functions as a symbol of the concatenation between the generations of radicals. Meanwhile, Joe Link, a lifelong trade-union militant who seems a literary portrait of Workers Party activist Stan Weir, travels about the West Coast gathering material for a book that will explain the meaning of American labor radicalism to the youth of the 1960s, while Vito Brigante, a left-wing artist dying of stomach cancer, reaches for his sketchpad in an attempt to maintain the only activity that ultimately has given any meaning to his lonely existence. Another child of hope is Norm’s son, Marlen, named for Marx and Lenin. After killing a female companion in a car accident, Marlen’s nonchalant behavior confirms that he suffers from a mental illness that prevents him from feeling any guilt or responsibility. The final pages present a philosophy of simple stoicism. Paul’s father, Irwin, is comforted by his cousin, Sy, with the advice that “the trick is to go on living even when you’ve found out what kind of world it really is.” When Irwin bitterly protests that they wasted most of their lives in pursuit of unrealizable ideals, Sy shoots back, “I have nothing fancy to say. One way or another, we tried to keep an idea alive. There weren’t enough of us, there never are. We were ridiculously wrong about a lot of things but who wasn’t? And what idea did they keep alive, the others?”73

  This pessimism about fidelity to youthful ideals and the possibility of fundamental social change, or even about the possibility of fulfillment through progeny, becomes a peculiar kind of optimism about the endurance of the human spirit in Swados’s posthumously published Celebration (1974). The novel evolved from notebooks that conceived a central character who was an accomplished musician, then became an old man preparing a deathbed repudiation of the life of reason he had led. The end result was Swados’s depiction of ninety-year-old Samuel Lumen as an embodiment of the tradition of American radicalism in the same sense that the life and character of Artemio Cruz embodies the historic experience of the Mexican middle class in Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962).74 Features of Lumen’s life are drawn from a variety of radical intellectuals who championed the cause of youthful rebellion and lived to an old age. In particular, Swados seems to have based the manipulative relationship between Lumen and Rog, his young radical secretary, on the gossip in liberal circles that Bertrand Russell in the 1960s was manipulated by his young leftist aide, Ralph Schoenman.75

  The shocking central act in Lumen’s sexually promiscuous life that torments him is the assault he made on his son’s wife, Louise, who came to visit him while her husband was serving in World War II; the young Lumen is killed shortly afterward, and Louise gives birth to a child, Seth, most certainly the offspring of Sam Lumen and herself, just before she commits suicide. All reviewers of the novel evaded discussion of this pivotal event, either by neglecting it entirely or referring to it as a “seduction.” What is misleading is that, although Lumen forces himself on the woman and she fights him vigorously, he only decides to go through with intercourse after determining that she is “wet between the thighs,” indicating that she was aroused sexually. But this in no way mitigates the rape; Lumen is a highly attractive man, but it is not uncommon for a woman or a man to feel sexual stimulation without the intention of intercourse, which was clearly the case with Louise. Perhaps reviewers were reticent on this matter because they felt that Swados was vicariously confessing some dark secret about himself, too explosive to warrant discussion in reviews that usually amounted to obituaries for the recently deceased Swados. Although it is true that Swados’s feelings toward his own father were psychologically complex, it is more likely that the episode was based on a story Swados may have heard about the violent manner in which a famous radical intellectual allegedly tried to force himself on his son’s girlfriend.76

  Lumen is celebrated as a hero of American culture and honored by the president of the United States despite his posture as part-rebel, part-hedonist. As a vision of the condition of the American intellectual left, Celebration has a ring of authenticity, but it offers little comfort. Swados, who was considerably more sympathetic to the New Left than was Irving Howe, surprisingly depicts the young radicals in the novel as devoid of serious ideas. At the time of the book’s conception, he was in fact in a period of political confusion, exemplified by his activities in 1968. On the one hand, he criticized Irving Howe for having a point of view on the French student-worker uprising that was identical with the conservative one of the French Communist Party; on the other hand, he suddenly broke his longtime policy of refusing to support the Democrats.77 This was followed by a brief period of collaboration with the McGovern-Shriver election campaign, and he even went to Sargent Shriver’s home to work as a speech writer. Yet he walked out in bitter disillusionment after only a few weeks.78 Like Samuel Lumen, he seems to have felt a deep alienation from the establishment as well as the left, Old and New. This was coupled with considerable frustration over the lack of success of Standing Fast, to which he had devoted enormous effort.

  Swados died prematurely at the age of fifty in 1972 of an aneurism. He was, and most certainly would have remained, a committed socialist; he was to the end an intransigent, independent radical, immune to complacency and downright angry about social inequality. In his stance on the Vietnam War and in his friendship with C. Wright Mills, he placed himself considerably to the left of most of his former comrades, some of whom thought he was insufficiently critical of Communism. Still, if not a firm social democrat in the sense of Irving Howe, he had lost the revolutionary socialist vision that had guided him in the 1930s and 1940s, substituting the ambiguous desideratum of a welfare state based on a strong working-class movement. Thus his final political and cultural legacy, like Orwell’s, remains suffused with ambiguity.

  Chapter 11. The Bitter Fruits of Anticommunism

  To bury Stalinism really means to revive the idea of socialism and to begin its construction all over again, a prospect as deadly for the aged leaders of “really existing socialism” as it is for the old capitalist masters.

  —Daniel Singer, The Road to Gdansk, 19821

  COLD WAR II

  On 6 February 1982 the cultural critic, novelist, and filmmaker Susan Sontag addressed a mass meeting in New York City’s Town Hall, which had been organized in support of the Polish Solidamosc [Solidarity] movement. The distinctive feature of the meeting, according to its sponsors, was that a group of artists, intellectuals, and trade unionists would present statements in support of the Polish workers from a pro-working class, left perspective, which would distinguish their support of Polish Solidarnosc from that of President Ronald Reagan and other conservatives. Thus many of the speakers spent part of their time denouncing U.S. intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the union-busting campaign of the Reagan administration against the air traffic controllers, and even Israeli policy toward Palestinians on the West Bank. It was in this anticapitalist context that most of the speakers proceeded to endorse Polish Solidamosc as a more authentic expression of the socialist movement in Poland and the ideals promulgated by Marx and Engels than was the “communist” regime of Jaruzelski and his Soviet backers.

  Sontag began by declaring her opposition to the U.S. government’s war against the people of Central America, decrying Reagan as the “puppet master of the butchers in El Salvador.” This was expected, for she had been known since the early 1960s as a sympathizer of the Cuban Revolution and had published in 1969 in Ramparts a laudatory article about Cuba’s people and culture. Moreover, in the midst of the U.S. war against Vietnam she had traveled in protest to Hanoi; and in
1969 she had published a much-discussed book about her experiences called Visit to Hanoi, which caused some to label her a fellow traveler of the North Vietnamese. During the 1960s Sontag had supported the election campaigns of the Socialist Workers Party and had even met with party representatives to discuss the possibility of joining the party.2

  However, she completely stunned most of those present with the balance of her speech:

  . . . the principal lesson to be learned [in Poland] is the lesson of the failure of Communism, the utter villainy of the Communist system. . . . We tried to distinguish among Communisms—for example, treating “Stalinism,” which we disavowed, as if it were an aberration, and praising other regimes, outside of Europe, which had and have essentially the same character. . . . Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right? . . . The similarities between the Polish military junta and right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and other South American countries are obvious. . . . Communism is fascism—successful fascism, if you will. . . . Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face.3

  These remarks were not merely poor formulations of a more complex point of view but an apparently purposeful posture. In an interview with the New York Times Book Review, Sontag acknowledged that in preparing her remarks she “knew I would be booed and I would make some enemies there.”4 After offering her statement, she simply walked out of the meeting without waiting to hear the responses and, of course, without participating in the other manifestations of support for the Polish workers.

  Sontag’s remarks provided a field day for the press. They were reported in Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Soho News, the Village Voice, the Nation, and the New Republic, among other newspapers and journals, often accompanied by editorials in support of her words of wisdom. Her “defection” was especially welcomed by right-wing Cuban commentators on the radio stations in the “Little Havana” section of Miami.5 No doubt such publicity, which made her more known among a broader public than ever before, accelerated the sales of her books in the conservative climate of the 1980s. A few months later she published a self-edited retrospective selection of her writings called The Susan Sontag Reader; Visit to Hanoi was not included in it.

  What was notable about the response, however, was Sontag’s failure to rally a substantial section of the left to her views. To the contrary, she received a wide range of rebuttals from other intellectuals who were not ready for a repeat of the early 1950s. For example, Garry Wills, a former conservative who had become radicalized in the 1960s, poked fun at her dramatic but obfuscating use of political terminology:

  Communism is fascism, according to Ms. Sontag. And, according to her, “the principal lesson to be learned from the Polish events, is the lesson of the failure of communism.” Then, since communism/fascism has failed, fascism is not successful in Poland, right? Wrong. Failed communism, it turns out, is really successful fascism: “Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism.” If both communism and fascism have succeeded, what has failed? Mainly Ms. Sontag’s powers of analysis.6

  An editorial in the Nation raised some questions about the quality of the information one might obtain by subscribing to Reader’s Digest: “First, there is the helpful vocabulary. Communists, for example, are referred to as ‘Red slave drivers and sadists,’ and Soviet policy as ‘the Kremlin’s harvest of hate.’ Second, there are bold forecasts, such as ‘Why Red China Won’t Break with Russia,’ the title of a July 1957 article, and the repeated predictions of the imminent collapse of the Soviet empire.”7

  Also writing in the Nation, Philip Green was one of several who challenged Sontag’s facile equation of Poland and other eastern European Stalinist regimes with Latin American dictatorships:

  These regimes (e.g., Chile’s and Argentina’s) are built around the violent suppression of organized labor. In Communist Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the hypocritical Marxism of the ruling elite is an unremitting provocation, in constant danger of being taken seriously by the people. Thus, those regimes have generated three exhilaratingly promising revolts in twenty-five years, none of which was anti-socialist. . . . These revolts were also successful in their own (and our own) terms, in the sense that they could only be crushed by direct Soviet intervention or indirect Soviet threats—not by an allegedly “totalitarian” regime forever impervious to change.8

  Philip Pochoda, a New York editor, commented on Sontag’s equation of Communism with fascism: “Before succumbing to the Reaganite mentality of the Reader’s Digest and Alexander Haig, we might at least consider that Auschwitz and Dachau were the triumph, the fulfillment, of Mein Kampf, whereas the Gulag and December 13 are the unspeakable, if all too common, travesties of the Communist Manifesto.” In a closing reference to the editor of Commentary, Pochoda suggested that Sontag was in danger of becoming “Norman Podhoretz with a human face.”9 What also should have been added is that the partial truths contained in her talk were known to and publicized by the anti-Stalinist left fifty years earlier, which is why the content of her speech struck some observers as trivial, thoughtless, and pretentious.

  Regardless of their other shortcomings, at least most of those who responded understood that one cannot effectively fight Stalinism by supporting capitalism and imperialism—any more than a trade unionist can struggle effectively against the bureaucratic or gangsterlike officials of his or her union by running to the bosses for help. This suggests that there are important differences between the Cold War atmosphere of the McCarthy period and the 1980s, which some radical critics are calling “Cold War II.”10 What the Sontag debate indicates is that, in the 1980s, the configuration of left and right forces among non-Communist intellectuals is considerably different from the early 1950s, when a rejection of Sontag’s views by non-Communists would have been unthinkable. The present situation much more resembles the mid-1930s, a time marked by a considerable polarization between Marxist anti-Stalinists and reactionary anticommunists, when right-wing social democrats served as a bridge from the former to the latter. Although organizations and individuals involved use new political labels, the political perspectives are much the same.

  In the 1950s the formerly radical New York intellectuals defended themselves against a conservative onslaught by attacking those further to their left, sometimes using the theory of “totalitarianism” to claim that the concepts “left” and “right” had lost their traditional meanings. Essentially they purged from the pale of respectability those adhering to ideas fundamentally at odds with Cold War liberal ideology, starting with all variants of Leninism. During the 1970s and 1980s, the dynamic of many leftists in transit toward social democracy is to criticize the left—which certainly needs criticism—not from a left position but from the right. This is true not only in the case of Sontag, even though she is still far removed from the neoconservatives, but also in the rightward migrations of two prominent historians: Allen Weinstein, author of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978), who regressed from liberalism to a position close to neoconservatism, and Ronald Radosh, coauthor of The Rosenberg File (1983), who abandoned first pro-Communism and then New Left radicalism for social democracy. In each instance, an investigation of the Hiss-Chambers and Rosenberg espionage cases, respectively, and the reexamination of the Cold War era undertaken in the political climate of the late 1970s, led to an encounter with dimensions of Stalinism (in particular, the underground apparatus) that the two scholars had neglected or minimized in their earlier studies of the cases. Both produced books reconvicting the accused and criticizing their left-wing supporters, largely on the basis of source material provided by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, of which they most likely would have been more skeptical a decade earlier.

  The political transformation of David Horowitz is strongly reminiscent of the type of renegacy characteristic of the 1950s, in which an apostate misrepresents his or her past and fashions a new career out of denouncing his or her former comrades. In 1965 Horowitz published The Free World Colossus, a radical indictment of U.S. foreign policy that won high praise from longtime anti-Stalinist Dwight Macdonald.11 In 1969 Horowitz published Empire and Revolution, which he dedicated to the former Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher, and two years later he edited a collection of essays in honor of Deutscher, Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work (1971). In 1973, in the preface to The Fate of Midas, a collection of his essays from Ramparts and other publications, Horowitz spoke of what a “lonely enterprise” it was to be a radical intellectual in the “present historical context.”12 The introduction that followed was primarily an intellectual memoir in which Horowitz recounted his break with the Old Left and his efforts to establish a radical foundation for a New Left. Having renounced Marxism in the wake of the Khrushchev revelations, he attempted in the early 1960s to work out a radical critique in his own terms. After a few years, he found himself returning to and reaffirming a critical Marxism with a fresh view and a more complex understanding that he wished to transmit to a New Left resistant to theory and thereby prone to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors.