ONE

FELLOW WORKERS, JOIN OUR RANKS!” It was 1936, and there I was, Mary Johnsrud, marching down lower Broadway in a May Day parade, chanting that slogan at the crowds watching on the sidewalks. “FelLOW WORKers!” Nobody, I think, joined us; they just watched. We were having fun. Beside me marched a tall fair young man, former correspondent of the Paris Herald, who looked like Fred MacMurray. Johnsrud was on the road with Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, playing his Broadway role of the blind man. I had been out of college and married to him nearly three years.

The May Day parade was, of course, a Communist thing. The American labor holiday was the first Monday in September and marked by its own parade, with union bands, which certainly did not play the “Internationale.” I had watched those parades in Minneapolis with our uncle Myers. Now, as we marched, singing the “Internationale,” “Bandiera Rossa” (my favorite), “Solidarity Forever,” “Hold the Fort for We Are Coming” (by Hans Eisler, I thought), the marshals, mostly girls, who stepped along beside us, keeping us in line, were noticeably blond and blue-eyed, what one would today call Wasp types. That must have been Party strategy, to give the march a face-lift, in keeping with the new line, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” The previous year had seen the end of so-called third-period Communism and the launching of the Popular Front by Dimitrov at the Seventh Party Congress in Moscow. The point was to meet the menace of Hitler with a merging of working-class and bourgeois parties. In France last February the Popular Front (Radicals, Socialists, and Communists) had won a big victory; next month the Léon Blum government would take office and give the working class its first “congés payés.” France being one of my “fields,” I had followed these developments, suggestive of a René Clair film (A Nous la Liberté), but I was unaware of any change in the policy of the U.S. Party, even though I myself (I now see), swinging along lower Broadway, was part of it. I only observed that what people said was true: our marshals were very blond and blue-eyed, and the cadres of the Party, on the whole Jewish in appearance, were making themselves less visible by staying in the center of our ranks, like the filling of the sandwich. John Porter and I had been placed on the outside, where the onlookers could not fail to see us. Or hear us. Belting out “C’est la LUT-te fin-A-A-L-e,” when the others were rendering “’Tis the final conflict.” Having lived and worked in Paris (he had been with Agence Havas, too), John Porter knew the words in French. And of course I chimed in with him. We were both conscious of being young and good-looking, an advertisement for the cause, and it did not bother us that the comrades had caught on to salesmanship; we were amused that the Party, in our eyes the height of innocence, could be shrewd.

Though I had been to dances organized by them at Webster Hall, the parade was my first experience of being, or looking like, a recruit. That spring and summer marked the high point of the slight attraction I felt toward Communism. I knew something about it because I had been writing book reviews for the liberal magazines The Nation and The New Republic, and Johnsrud had been acting at the Theater Union—a downtown group that was doing left-wing plays in Eva Le Gallienne’s old Civic Repertory Theatre (Peace on Earth, Stevedore, Black Pit, The Sailors of Cattaro, Gorky’s The Mother; he had been in all of them except the first two). With his Populist background, he was full of japes at the expense of the faithful among his fellow actors—Martin Wolfson, Abner Biberman, Howard Da Silva. Over his dressing-room door he had put up a sign saying “Through these portals pass some of the most beautiful tractors in the Ukraine,” and on his mirror he wrote with a wax crayon “Lovestone is a Lovestoneite!” Very funny, I thought, and the comrades forgave him. As emerged a bit later, the two leading spirits of the Theater Union, Charles and Adelaide Walker, were turning into Trotskyites while John was acting there. In 1937 Adelaide’s mother, Mrs. Robert Latham George, would be thanked by the Trotsky Committee for putting up members in the house she took in Mexico City during the great John Dewey hearings, but no word of that imminent crossover reached the acting company, as far as I can tell. Or maybe it did. Was that the motive behind a short-lived actors’ strike—scandalous for a radical theatre, which depended on trade-union “benefits”—that Charlie Walker somehow settled?

It was at the Theater Union, at a Sunday-night benefit, that Waiting for Lefty was first performed. John and I were in the audience; we had an interest in how the Odets one-acter would go: a producer named Frank Merlin held an option on John’s play “Anti-Climax” and also on Awake and Sing!, then called “I Got the Blues,” which was Odets’s first play. Merlin was a fat, fortyish Irishman given to deriding “ca-PIT-alism” (possibly that was how they pronounced it in Ireland); his backer, whom we called “Mrs. Nightgown,” was the wife of a man named Motty Eitingon who traded in furs, with Russia. A six-month option cost $500, and neither Odets’s nor John’s was taken up. “Merlin’s backer faded out on him,” I wrote my Vassar friend Frani Blough in Pittsburgh. John’s play never did get produced. Odets had better luck. He was an actor-member of the Group Theatre, which had been reluctant to do Awake and Sing! (Lee Strasberg did not like it), but the immense wild success of Waiting for Lefty downtown that night at the Theater Union—audience and actors yelling together “Strike!” “Strike!”—assured that the Group would take over Awake and Sing!, with Harold Clurman directing and Stella Adler as the Jewish mother (“Have a piece of fruit”)—to my mind, among the few good things Odets or the Group ever did. Well. When he and John were both under option to Merlin and would meet in his office above the Little Theatre, there was some edginess between them—John with his Standard English diction, stage presence, English-style tweeds and Odets, a Party-lining Jewish boy from Philadelphia, in an old turtleneck jersey. Possibly Odets, an aspiring actor but never at home on the stage, envied John’s aplomb while despising it. Or he was envious because Merlin was planning to do John’s play first. It was John who thought up “Odets, where is thy sting?”—he coined it one night at our dinner table while old Clara, who ran a funeral parlor in Harlem, served smothered chicken and mashed potatoes. Afterward the witticism passed into circulation and was in Winchell or Leonard Lyons, I think.

As for Merlin, I have never found anyone who knew where he came from or where he went to. Variety has no obituary notice of him in its files; though, if still alive, he would be close to a hundred. Maybe, like his Tennysonian homonym, the old necromancer is shut up somewhere in an ancient oak tree. Thinking back (to “ca-PIT-alism”), I see him as a left-wing Socialist, or even, like O’Casey, a queer kind of unorthodox Communist. Unlike Merlin, his backer, Bess Eitingon, and her husband, Motty, the importer of Russian furs, resurfaced in my life several years later, in a house in Stamford, Connecticut, but that is for another chapter. Till now, I have never put two and two together and realized that John’s “Nightgowns” were they.

I had had my own class-war problems with The New Republic. The pipe-smoking Malcolm Cowley—“Bunny” Wilson’s successor as literary editor—though a faithful fellow traveler, was too taciturn usually to show his hand. After the first time, he almost never gave me a book to review, but let me come week after week to the house on West 21st Street that was The New Republic’s office then—quite a ride for me on the El. Wednesday was Cowley’s “day” for receiving reviewers; after a good hour spent eyeing each other in the reception room, one by one we mounted to Cowley’s office, where shelves of books for review were ranged behind the desk, and there again we waited while he wriggled his eyebrows and silently puffed at his pipe as though trying to make up his mind. Sometimes, perhaps to break the monotony, he would pass me on to his young assistant, Robert Cantwell, who had a little office down the hall. Cantwell was a Communist, a real member, I guess, but unlike Cowley, he was nice. He was fair and slight, with a somewhat rabbity appearance, and he, too, came from the Pacific Northwest, which gave us something to talk about. “Cantwell tells me the story of his life,” I wrote to Frani in December 1933. In 1931 he had published a novel, Laugh and Lie Down, and in 1934 he published a second, The Land of Plenty. Both were about Puget Sound and were described to me later by a Marxist critic as “Jamesian”—he counted as the only proletarian novelist with a literary style. I had not read him then; nor had I read Cowley’s Blue Juniata or Exile’s Return (on a theme dear to Helen Lockwood’s Contemporary Press course), but with Cantwell that did not matter. After The New Republic, he went to work for Time and moved to the right, like Whittaker Chambers, who may well have been his friend. The other day someone wrote me that Lillian Hellman tried to stage a walkout from Kenneth Fearing’s funeral service because Cantwell was one of the speakers. Can you imagine? Yes. Now he is dead himself. I should have liked to thank him for his interesting book The Hidden Northwest, which led me to Washington Irving’s Astoria—a happy discovery. I learn from my 1978–79 Who’s Who (he was still living then) that he was named Robert Emmett Cantwell. A misnomer, typically Northwestern, for Robert Emmet, the Irish patriot? A spelling error by Who’s Who? Or just no connection?

Cowley had another cohort, very different, by the name of Otis Ferguson, a real proletarian, who had been a sailor in the merchant marine. “Oat” was not in the book department; he wrote movie reviews. But he carried great weight with Cowley, though he may not have been a Marxist—he was more of a free-ranging literary bully without organizational ties. I had a queer time with him one evening when John and I went to look him up at his place on Cornelia Street, the deepest in the Village I had yet been. At our ring he came downstairs, but instead of asking us up to his place, he led us out to a bar for a drink, which seemed unfriendly, after he had given me his address and told me to drop by. I am not sure whether it was John or me who made him edgy, or the pair of us—notre couple, as the French say. Perhaps he and John argued about films—John had worked in Hollywood, after all. Or could it have simply been that we had come down from Beekman Place? Anyway, whatever happened that evening and whatever caused it cannot have been the reason for my sudden fall from favor at The New Republic. No.

It was a book: I Went to Pit College, by Lauren Gilfillan, a Smith girl who had spent a year working in a coal mine—one of the years when I had been at Vassar. Cowley must have thought that here at last was a book I was qualified to review, by having had the contrary experience. The book was causing a stir, and Cowley, as he handed it over to me, benignly, let me understand that he was giving me my chance. I sensed a reservation on his part, as though he were cautioning me not to let the book down. He was allowing me plenty of space, to do a serious review, not another three-hundred-word bit. And with my name, I dared hope, on the cover. I got the message: I was supposed to like the book. For the first time, and the last, I wrote to order. It would have been nice if I could have warmed to the task. But the best I could do was to try to see what people like Cowley saw in the book. With the result, of course, that I wrote a lifeless review, full of simulated praise. In short, a cowardly review. Rereading it now, for the first time in more than fifty years, I am amazed at how convincing I sound. In my last sentence I speak of a “terrific reality.”

But then came the blow. Cowley had second thoughts about the book. Whether the Party line had changed on it or whether for some other reason, he now decided that it was overrated. I cannot remember whether he tried to get me to rewrite my review. I think he did, but, if so, he was unsatisfied. In any case, he printed my laudatory piece and followed it with a correction. The correction was signed only with initials: O.C.F. Oat, of course. In fact, it must have been he who changed Cowley’s mind. As a blue-collar reader, he had looked over the Smith girl’s book—or read my review of it—and responded with disgust. Which he expressed to Cowley. And, “Write that,” said Cowley. Whereupon Oat did. A three-hundred-word snarl; merited or unmerited—who knows? I cannot really blame Oat for the effect of those jeers on my feelings. Cowley would hardly have told him that he had virtually ordered a favorable review.

But had he? Trying to be fair to him, I ask myself now whether I could have misread the signals: Could he have been telling me to pan the book? I do not think so. But either way the lack of openness was wrong. And it was a mean trick to play on a beginner; when my review came out, in May 1934, I was not yet twenty-two. I agree that a lot of the fault was mine: I should have written my real opinion, regardless of what he wanted. But abuse of power is worse than girlish weakness, and Cowley was a great abuser of power, as he proved over and over in his long “affair” with Stalinism; for this, see, in Letters on Literature and Politics by Edmund Wilson, edited by Elena Wilson, under “Cowley.” But it cannot have been all Stalinism; he must have taken a personal dislike to me. I leave it to the reader to decide between us.

I did not write for The New Republic again (nor was I asked to) till six years had passed; Cowley was gone, and Wilson had returned temporarily to his old post as book editor. Meanwhile, I reviewed for The Nation, where kindly Joe Krutch was book editor, assisted by Margaret Marshall. For the Herald Tribune’s weekly “Books,” Irita Van Doren, wife of Carl, told me, in her Southern voice, “We on this paper believe that there’s somethin’ good in evvra book that should be brought to the attention of evvra reader.” No hope there for me, then, and the Times Sunday book review (edited by J. Donald Adams) would never let me past the secretary—their usual policy toward untried reviewers. To make some money while John was “resting,” as actors say, between jobs with a series of flops and writing plays his agent could not sell, I decided to try to write a detective story, since I read so many of them. It was to be called “Rogue’s Gallery,” and the victim was to be based on Mannie Rousuck, but I got so interested in describing our old gallery in the French Building, with the dogs and Mannie and types like Nick Aquavella (later of the Aquavella Gallery), that I had reached the fourth chapter without managing to produce a corpse. It was a sign to me to give up.

Since October 1, 1933, John and I had been living in a one-room apartment at 2 Beekman Place, a new building opposite 1 Beekman Place, where Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller lived. Most months we could not pay the rent. It was a pretty apartment, painted apricot with white trim; it had casement windows and Venetian blinds (a new thing then), a kitchen with a good stove, a “breakfast alcove,” and a dressing-room with bath, besides a little front hall and the main room. Good closet space. Nice elevator boys and a doorman. Fortunately, the man at Albert B. Ashforth, the building agent, had faith in John, and, fortunately also, the utilities were included in the rather high rent. The telephone company, being a “soulless corporation,” unlike dear Albert B. Ashforth, kept threatening to shut the phone off, but gas and electricity would keep on being supplied to us unless and until we were evicted.

If we were evicted and the furniture put out on the street (which did not happen in good neighborhoods anyway), it would not be our own. We were living with Miss Sandison’s sister’s furniture, having not a stick to our name except a handsome card table with a cherrywood frame and legs and a blue suede top, which someone (Miss Sandison, I think it was) had given us for a wedding present. When we moved into Beekman Place, the Howlands (Lois Sandison, who taught Latin at Chapin) let us have their Hepplewhite-style chairs and the springs and mattresses of their twin beds, which we had mounted on pegs that we painted bright red and which we set up in the shape of an L, with the heads together—you couldn’t have beds that looked like bedroom beds in a living-room, as our one-room was supposed to be. Instead of spreads, we had covers made of dark-brown sateen (Nathalie Swan’s idea, or was it Margaret Miller’s?), and at the joint of the L, where our two heads converged, we put a small square carved oak table, Lois Sandison Howland’s, too, with a white Chinese crackle table lamp that we had found at Macy’s.

On the walls we had Van Gogh’s red-lipped “Postmaster” (John’s guardian spirit) from the Hermitage and Harry Sternberg’s drawing of John looking like Lenin. Then there were Elizabeth Bishop’s wedding present, bought in Paris—a colored print, framed in white, rather surreal, called “Geometry,” by Jean Hugo, great-grandson of the author—and Frani’s wedding present—a black-framed, seventeenth-century English broadside, on “The Earl of Essex Who cut his own Throat in the Tower”—not Elizabeth’s Essex, brother to Penelope Devereux, but a later one, no longer of the Devereux family. Probably the apartment had built-in bookcases, which (already!) held the 1911 Britannica. I am sure of that because I wrote a fanciful piece (turned down by The New Yorker) called “FRA to GIB.” I don’t know where that Britannica, the first of its line, came from or where it went to; maybe it was Mrs. Howland’s. On the floor were, I think, two Oriental rugs, hers also, obviously. In two white cachepots (Macy’s) we had English ivy trailing.

To reassure a reader wondering about our moral fiber and ignorant of those Depression years, I should say that Mr. and Mrs. Howland (I could never call them “Lois” and “Harold”) kindly made us feel that we were doing them a service by “storing” their things while they, to economize, lived at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, Mr. Howland being out of a job. We had bought ourselves a tall, “modernistic” Russel Wright cocktail shaker made of aluminum with a wood top, a chromium hors d’oeuvres tray with glass dishes (using industrial materials was the idea), and six silver Old-Fashioned spoons with a simulated cherry at one end and the bottom of the spoon flat, for crushing sugar and Angostura; somewhere I still have these and people who come upon them always wonder what they are.

Late one morning, but before we had got the beds made, “Mrs. Langdon Mitchell” was announced over the house phone, and the widow of the famous (now forgotten) playwright sailed in to pay a formal call, which lasted precisely the ordained fifteen minutes, although we were in our nightclothes and she, white-haired, hatted, and gloved, sat on a Hepplewhite chair facing our tumbled sheets. We must have met this old lady at one of Mrs. Aldrich’s temperance lunches in the house on Riverside Drive, where the conversation was wont to hover over “dear Sidney and Beatrice [Webb]” and Bis Meyer, my classmate, daughter of Eugene Meyer of the Federal Reserve Bank, was described as “a beautiful Eurasian,” a gracious way our hostess had found of saying “Jewish.” John and I had gone up to Rokeby, in the country, for Maddie Aldrich’s wedding to Christopher Rand, a Yale classics major and an Emmet on his mother’s side whom Maddie had met, hunting, on weekends. At the wedding, Maddie’s cousin Chanler Chapman (A Bad Boy at a Good School, son of John Jay Chapman and model, in due course, for Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King) had spiked Mrs. Aldrich’s awful grape-juice “libation” and got some of the ushers drunk. Now the couple had an all-blue apartment with a Judas peephole in the door, Chris had a job with Henry Luce, on Fortune, and Maddie had started a business called “Dog Walk.”

Just now I spoke of dances at Webster Hall, organized by the Party. That was where, in fact, I had met John Porter (I had better start calling him “Porter,” so as not to mix him up with “John”), who had been brought by Eunice Clark, the “spirit of the apples” classmate who had edited the Vassar Miscellany News. Eunice was always trendy, and I guess we were all what was later called “swingers”; Webster Hall was an “in” thing to do for Ivy League New Yorkers—a sort of downtown slumming; our uptown slumming was done at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, usually on Friday nights. Maybe real Communists steered clear of Webster Hall, just as ordinary black people did not go to the Savoy on those Friday nights when so many white people came.

I remember one Webster Hall evening—was it the Porter time?—when John and I had brought Alan Lauchheimer (Barth) with us and he found some classmates from Yale there, in particular one named Bill Mangold, who would soon be doing public relations for medical aid to the Loyalists—a Stalinist front—and with whom I would later have an affair. At Webster Hall, too, we met the very “in” couple, Tony Williams, a gentleman gentlemen’s tailor (see “Dog Walk” and the Budge-Wood laundry firm), and his wife, Peggy LeBoutiller (Best’s); they knew Eunice Clark and her husband, Selden Rodman, brother of Nancy Rodman, Dwight Macdonald’s wife.

Selden and Alfred Bingham (son of Senator Bingham of Connecticut) were editors of Common Sense, a La Folletteish magazine they had started after Yale. “Alf” was married to Sylvia Knox, whose brother Sam was married to Kay McLean, from Vassar; both were trainees at Macy’s. At a party at the Knoxes’ I met Harold Loeb, the technocrat and former editor of Broom, and a character in The Sun Also Rises (related also to Loeb of Leopold and Loeb, murderers). Leaning back on a couch while talking to him about Technocracy and having had too much to drink, I lost my balance in the midst of a wild gesture and tipped over onto a sizzling steam radiator. Since he did not have the presence of mind to pull me up, I bear the scars on the back of my neck to this day.

Before that, Selden, in black tie, had led a walkout in support of a waiters’ strike at the Waldorf, which Johnsrud and I joined, also in evening dress—Eunice was wearing a tiara. At another table Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun got up to walk out, too. The Waldorf dicks chased Selden out of the Rose Room and into the basement, where they tried to beat him up. Then he was taken to be charged at the East 51st Street police station while some of us waited outside to pay his bail and take him back home to Eunice. It was all in the papers the next day, though Johnsrud and I were too unknown to be in the story. The reader will find some of it, including Eunice’s tiara and a pair of long white kid gloves, in Chapters Six and Seven of The Group. I always thought it was not a Communist-inspired show. Rodman and Bingham, I supposed, must have been drawn into it somehow by Heywood Broun, the labor-liberal columnist of the old World, who had already led a walkout on behalf of the striking waiters at the Algonquin, where he, like Dorothy Parker, regularly lunched. Yet I have just learned (fan me with a brick, please) from Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism that in New York, at the time, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union was “dominated by two Communists, Mike Obermeier and Jay Rubin.” Klehr does not mention the Waldorf strike. But in another place he writes that by 1937 (two years later) Heywood Broun was “a devoted fellow-traveler.” To me, the walkout brought a different disillusionment. It was the only time I saw Dorothy Parker close up, and I was disappointed by her dumpy appearance. Today television talk shows would have prepared me.

At Selden and Eunice’s apartment—in a watermelon-pink house on East 49th Street—in the course of a summer party in the little backyard, I met John Strachey, then in his Marxist phase (The Coming Struggle for Power) and married to Esther Murphy (Mark Cross, and sister of Gerald Murphy, the original of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night). I was shocked when he went to the toilet to pee—they were serving beer—and left the door open, continuing a conversation while he unbuttoned his fly and let go with a jet of urine. English manners? I wondered. Or was it the English left?

At Dwight Macdonald’s apartment near the river, on East 51st Street, I went to a cocktail party for the sharecroppers, wearing a big mustard-yellow sombrero-like felt hat from Tappé that Mannie Rousuck, a friend of Tappé’s, had procured for me—as my son, Reuel, summed it up later, Mannie was “a good getter.” Fred Dupee, a Yale classmate of Dwight’s, was much taken with my hat; he was just back from a year in Mexico, and I was meeting him for the first time. I was struck by his very straight, almost black hair, like an Indian’s, by his blue eyes, and by a certain jauntiness. This must have been about the time of his conversion to Communism. Or had that already happened in Mexico? At any rate the Party would soon put him to work on the New York waterfront, distributing leaflets; then they made him literary editor of New Masses. It was possibly through Fred that Dwight, who was still on Fortune, was giving a party for the sharecroppers and making an embarrassed speech before literally passing the hat. I was familiar with fund-raising events downtown, in the Theater Union’s ambience: they charged a quarter for horrible drinks in paper cups to help the Scottsboro Boys or silicosis victims, and you sat on the floor with your legs sticking out. The Macdonald drinks were free and in glasses, and to sit on they had dark-blue outsize furniture looking like a design edict and made by a firm called Modernage.

Another Yale friend of Dwight’s, Geoffrey Hellman, who wrote for The New Yorker, was always at those parties, which happened on a weekly basis and usually not for a cause. Every Saturday, during the party, he and Dwight would have a fight about politics (Geoffrey was a tory), and Dwight would throw him out of the apartment. During the week they would make up, until the next party, when Dwight would throw him out again. This went on as long as Dwight worked on Fortune and had that apartment next to Southgate on East 51st Street. When he quit, over a piece he had written on U.S. Steel that the magazine did not like, and moved downtown to East 10th Street, to a walk-up painted black like his brother-in-law Selden’s, he did not have those regular cocktail parties any more or Geoffrey did not come or else a walk-up was not as good a place to throw a friend out of as a modern apartment with elevators to be rung for by an angry host; in any case, those weekly tilts stopped, though the political differences remained.

I don’t think Dwight and Nancy played bridge, but Selden and Eunice did, and Johnsrud and I, if he was not acting, often played with them for small stakes, usually in their ground-floor apartment, with its Diego Rivera print and volumes of Pareto and Spengler and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens; Selden would be wearing a black shirt. If we played at our apartment on Beekman Place, we used the beautiful cherrywood card table with the blue suede top and we served Tom Collinses during the game and toasted cheese sandwiches afterward—I was suddenly learning how to cook. We played a lot of bridge during those years (when John was on the road he played poker with the stage electricians), almost always with other couples: the Rodmans, Julia and David Rumsey, Maddie and Chris Rand, maybe Rosilla (Hornblower) and Alan Breed, or our new friends, Barbara Hudnut Boston and Lyon Boston (she was Hudnut beauty products and he was an assistant district attorney). A single man, Marshall Best, who lived in our building and worked at Viking Press, was a good bridge-player and not a bad cook (his specialty was little meatballs baked in rock salt in the oven); he would make a fourth with Frani, if she was in town, or with Nathalie Swan, back from the Bauhaus and studying with Kiesler at Columbia, or my dear, droll Catholic friend Martha McGahan, who, when asked later why she supported the Loyalists, answered, “I’m a Basque.”

When the bridge-playing stopped, it was a sign heralding change, though it happened so gradually that at first no one noticed. For a while, Johnsrud and I got into a fast set of poker players who played for high stakes, mostly seven-card stud, and called each other by their last names: “Mr. Lyd” and “Mrs. Lyd,” for example—she had been Kay Dana, from Boston, of the class of ’32, and he was Bill Lydgate, the kingpin of the new Gallup Poll. Those poker games at the Lydgates’ had a funny sexual electricity about them and the sense of a power charge, maybe because most of those Wasp men in their shirt sleeves worked in the field of opinion, for Luce or George Gallup, testing it and shaping it like bread dough. After we were divorced, Johnsrud boasted to me that he had been having an affair with “Mrs. Lyd” (“Mr. Lyd” commuted to the Institute of Public Opinion Gallup had started in Princeton), and I was not surprised. She was a yellow-eyed lynxlike blonde given to stretching herself like the cats she fancied; there was always one purring on her lap or jumping from her sinuous shoulder. Like most female cat fanciers, she was a narcissist and did not care for me, not even bothering to call me “Mrs. John.” And in fact I was out of place in that poker-faced set, all of whom, men and women, had deep, slow-spoken voices, I noticed. When it was my turn to deal, I would always declare draw, jacks or better to open, though I knew that draw, in their book, was the next thing to mah-jongg. For my part, I hated stud, five-card and seven-card alike.

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 in 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.

Instead of dictating, he talked. On the awful chasm of difference between Harvard and Yale, perceptible in American intellectual history of the present day (e.g., Luce and Archie MacLeish were Yale, Franklin Roosevelt was Harvard); on the early days of John L. Lewis and the rebel mine workers of Illinois; on how I ought to go to graduate school and earn a Ph.D., even at Yale if I had to (Ben of course was Harvard), for without a Ph.D. I could never have a serious career as a critic; on old German cities in the Rhineland (Ben came from Frankfurt am Main); and on the structure of American society (America was the classless society, though not the kind Marx had pictured; Marx could not have foreseen this country of ours, where everybody, workers included, was middle-class).

I listened and laughed, my fingers idle on the keys. Some of his theories offended my patrician prejudices, for I liked to think that I came from a superior class, the professionals, who, together with a very few old-family financiers and land-poor gentry, were different from other Americans, whereas Ben scoffed and snorted at the notion of an American patriciate even more than at the notion of an American proletariat. It was easier for him to convince me of the vast distinction between Yale and Harvard, the more so as it embodied an aristocratic prejudice (Ben being, naturally, a snob in these matters, like most deep-dyed men of the left, not excepting Karl Marx). And he impressed me with the vital necessity of my having a Ph.D., to the point where I got on a train to New Haven to look at the graduate school, spending the night with Arthur Mizener, who was working on a doctorate, and his pretty wife, Rosemary Paris, the Perdita to my Leontes in the Outdoor Theatre at Vassar.

But that was the closest I got to a Ph.D. Something else had happened. When the first Moscow trial took place and Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed in August 1936 (and the Spanish Civil War began), I did not know about it, since I was in Reno. Shortly after that May Day parade, I had “told” John, who was back from playing Winterset on the road. I said I was in love with John Porter and wanted to marry him. This was in Central Park while we watched some ducks swimming, as described in “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment.” Except for that detail, there is not much resemblance between the reality and the story I wrote two years later—the first I ever published. When I wrote that story (which became the first chapter of The Company She Keeps), I was trying, I think, to give some form to what had happened between John, John Porter, and me—in other words, to explain it to myself. But I do not see that I was really like the nameless heroine, and the two men are shadows, deliberately so. I know for a fact that when I wrote that piece I was feeling the effects of reading a lot of Henry James; yet today I cannot find James there either—no more than the living triangle of John, John Porter, and me.

John Porter was tall, weak, good-looking, a good dancer; his favorite writer was Rémy de Gourmont, and he had an allergy to eggs in any form. He went to Williams (I still have his Psi U pin) and was the only son of elderly parents. When I met him, he had been out of work for some time and lived by collecting rents on Brooklyn and Harlem real estate for his mother. The family, de-gentrifying, occupied the last “white” house in Harlem, on East 122nd Street, and owned the beautiful old silver Communion cup from Trinity Church in Brooklyn; it must have been given to an ancestor as the last vestryman. After the Paris Herald and Agence Havas, Porter had worked in Sweden for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but since then had been unable to connect with a job. Collecting rents on the wretched tenements still owned by his parents was his sole recourse, and most of the poor blacks who lived in them dodged him as best they could, having no earnings either. The Porters were very close with the little they had; they neither drank nor smoked and disapproved of anybody who did. The old father, who had once been an assemblyman in Albany, was deaf and inattentive, and John hid his real life from his mother.

He was in love with me or thought he was; my energy must have made an appeal to him—he probably hoped it would be catching. Despite his unemployment, dour mother, and rent-collecting, he was gay and full of charm. He was fond of making love and giving pleasure. By the time John came back from the road, Porter and I had a future planned. Together with a journalist friend who had a car, he was going to write a travel book on Mexico. Mexico was very much “in” then among sophisticated people, especially because Europe, what with Hitler and the fall of the dollar, was looking more and more forbidding. Hence John Porter and his co-author had readily found a publisher to advance $500 on a book contract with royalties.

It may be that Porter already had the idea of the Mexican book at the time he met me and merely needed the thought of marriage to spur him on. In any case, I fitted into the picture. After Reno, where my grandfather was getting me the best law firm to file for divorce, Porter would wait while I visited my grandparents in Seattle, and then the three of us would start out from New York in the friend’s small car. It would be an adventure.

And Johnsrud? He took it hard, much harder than I had been prepared for. I felt bad for him; in fact I was torn. The worst was that, when it came down to it, I did not know why I was leaving him. I still had love of some sort left for him, and seeing him suffer made me know it. Out of our quarreling, we had invented an evil, spooky character called “Hohnsrud” (from a misaddressed package) who accounted for whatever went wrong. Our relations in bed, on my side, were unsatisfactory, and infidelity had shown me that with other men this was not so. It was as though something about John, our history together, made me impotent, if that can be said of women. I had no trouble even with the worn-out little actor in the Adler elevated shoes. Yet I doubt that sex was really the force that was propelling me; had we stayed together I might well have outgrown whatever the inhibition was. I was still immensely impressed by him and considered myself his inferior. Hence it stupefied me, shortly after our breakup, to hear Frani say, by way of explanation: “Well, your being so brilliant must have been difficult for him.”

It is a mystery. No psychoanalyst ever offered a clue, except to tell me that I felt compelled to leave the man I loved because my parents had left me. Possibly. What I sensed myself was inexorability, the moerae at work, independently of my will, of my likes or dislikes. A sweet, light-hearted love affair, all laughter and blown kisses, like Porter himself, had turned leaden with pointless consequence. Looking back, I am sorry for poor Porter, that he had to be the instrument fated to separate me from John. And for him it was a doom, which took him in charge, like the young Oedipus meeting the stranger, Laius, at the crossroads. I wonder whether he may not have felt it himself as he finally set out for Mexico, where he would die of a fever after overstaying his visa and going to jail. All alone in a stable or primitive guest quarter belonging to a woman who had been keeping him and then got tired of it.

Meanwhile, though, before I left for Reno, Porter and I went out for a few days to Watermill, Long Island, where his parents still owned a moldy summer bungalow in the tall grass high up over the sea. With us was a little Communist organizer by the name of Sam Craig. I have told the story of that in the piece called “My Confession” in On the Contrary. The gist of it is that the Party was sending him to California in a car some sympathizer had donated. But Sam did not know how to drive. So he had asked Porter, a long-time friend, to take the car and give him driving lessons on the lonely back roads around Watermill. Sam was a slow learner, to the point of tempting us to despair for him. On the beach, all that week the red danger flags of the Coast Guard were out, and we swam only once in the rough water. In the evenings, over drinks in the moldy old house lit by oil lamps, Sam was trying to convert me to Communism. To my many criticisms of the Party, he had a single answer: I should join the Party and work from the inside to reform it. This was a variant on “boring from within,” the new tactic that corresponded with the new line; the expression seems to have been first used in 1936. Evidently Sam was thinking of termite work to be done on the Party itself, rather than on some capitalist institution. Very original on his part, and he nearly convinced me.

In the end, I said I would think it over. Sam passed his driving-test and went off by himself in the car, heading west. As I wrote in “My Confession,” I ask myself now whether this wasn’t the old car that figured in the Hiss case—the car Alger gave to the Party. I never learned what happened to Sam, since I never saw or heard of him again. He may have perished in the desert or gone to work recruiting among the Okies or on the waterfront. And here is the eerie thing about the Porter chain of events: everyone concerned with him disappeared. First, Sam; next, the man named Weston, Porter’s collaborator on the Mexican guidebook, who vanished from their hotel room in Washington after drinks one night at the National Press Club, leaving his typewriter and all his effects behind.

Porter searched for a week, enlisting police help; they canvassed the Potomac, the jails, the docks, the hospitals, they talked to those who had last seen him. The best conclusion was that he had been shanghaied. By a Soviet vessel? Or that he had had some reason to want to disappear. But without his typewriter? A journalist does not do that. He was never found.

Meanwhile, I, too, had dropped out of the picture. I was in New York, at the Lafayette Hotel, and concurring by telephone with the decision Porter came to: to go on without Weston and get the book started, while he still had the car and half the advance. Of course I had qualms. Even though he had taken it with good grace when, on my return from Reno and Seattle, I had got cold feet about the Mexican trip. I forget what reason I gave. The fact was, I had lost my feeling for him. But I let him think I might join him once he had “prepared the way.” From Washington he wrote or telephoned every day; after he left, I wrote, too, day after day, addressing my letters to Laredo, general delivery. I never heard from him again.

Late that fall, a crude-looking package from an unknown sender arrived in the little apartment I had taken on Gay Street in the Village. Having joined the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, whose members were getting a certain number of anonymous phone calls—Sidney Hook, we heard, looked under the bed every night before retiring—I was afraid to open the thing. As far as I could make out from the scrawled handwriting, it came from Laredo, on the Mexican border; conceivably there was a connection with Trotsky and his murderous enemies in Coyoacán. I am ashamed to say that I asked Johnsrud if he would come over and be with me while I opened it. He did. First we listened, to be sure we could not hear anything ticking—but inside all we found was a quite hideous pony-skin throw lined with the cheapest, sleaziest sky-blue rayon, totally unlike Porter, who had a gift for present-giving. I had already ruled out any likelihood that the crudely wrapped package had anything to do with him, even though Laredo had been on his way. The sleazy throw confirmed this. On Johnsrud’s advice probably, I wrote or wired the sender. In reply, I got a telegram: PACKAGE COMES FROM JOHN PORTER MEXICO.

That was all. At some point that autumn his mother wrote me, demanding that I pay her for the telephone calls he had made to me in Seattle. I refused. Next, his parents wanted to know, perhaps through a third party, whether I had heard from him at Christmas—they had not. But my memory here is hazy. And I cannot remember when I finally learned of his death. It was more than a year later, and it seems to me that it came to me in two different versions, from different sources. Certainly the second was from Marshall Best, the Viking Press editor who lived at 2 Beekman Place and served those meatballs baked in salt. He was a devoted friend of Porter’s and, if I may say it, quite a devoted Stalinist sympathizer. By now, naturally, what with the Trotsky Defense Committee, he disliked me on political grounds. It may have given him some satisfaction to tell me a piece of news that was not only painful but also reflected poorly on me. As though I were the principal cause of Porter’s death. And perhaps, in truth, I was. His mother must have thought so.

If it had not been for me, he would never have been in Mexico. He would still be collecting rents for his parents. And, if I had gone along with him, instead of copping out, I would never have let him overstay his visa, which had caused him to land in prison, which caused him to contract diphtheria or typhus or whatever it was that killed him when, on his release, the woman he had been living with let him come back and stay in her stable.

Well. As an English writer said to me, quoting Orwell, an autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good.

I am not sure why I lost my feeling for Porter. At the time I thought it was his letters—wet, stereotyped, sentimental—that had killed my love. The deflation was already beginning, obviously, when I met the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt on the train that was taking me west. The letters and phone calls completed the process. Whatever it was, I now realize that I positively disliked that Fred MacMurray look-alike when I saw him gazing fondly down at me when he met me on my return. The distaste was physical as well as intellectual. I could not stand him. He had become an embarrassment, having served his purpose, which I suppose was to dissolve my marriage. I was appalled, for him and for myself.

Did he notice that I had changed? Nothing was ever said, and I tried to hide it. “Succès?” “Succès fou!” had been our magic formula after love-making, and “Succès fou!” I went on duly repeating, I imagine. I was telling myself that it was only a few days; in a few days he would have left. Such cowardice was very bad of me. If I had had the courage to tell him, he might not have started out without me. Yet I am not sure. Would my having “the heart” to tell him have made the difference? Probably the truth was that Porter had to go to Mexico; his bridges were burned. That applied to all three of us. Nothing could return to the status quo ante. John and I had left 2 Beekman Place behind, to the tender mercies of Albert B. Ashforth, who painted our pretty apricot walls another color, I suppose. The Howlands’ furniture had been passed on to a friend of Alan Barth’s named Lois Brown. A trunk with my letters and papers in it went to storage, never to be reclaimed. Johnsrud had moved back to the Village. While waiting for my grandfather to fix things up with Thatcher & Woodburn in Reno, I had stayed with Nathalie Swan in her parents’ Georgian house in the East 80s. No, nothing could go back to what it had been. Old Clara returned to her funeral-parlor business—she was proud of having buried a fighter named Tiger Flowers. I never ate her smothered chicken again. Poor “Hohnsrud” of course had died.

Moreover, Porter was sensitive—think of his allergies. He must have heard the difference on the telephone while I was still in Seattle; I am a fairly transparent person. And if he guessed my changed feelings, he kept it strictly to himself. The question I should ask myself is not did he know, but how soon did he know. It is a rather shaking thought.