THE ONE-ROOM APARTMENT I moved into on Gay Street had eleven sides. I counted one day when I was sick in bed. The normal quota, including floor and ceiling, would have been six. But my little place had many jogs, many irregularities. There was a tiny kitchen and a bath suited to a bird. It had been furnished by the owner of the building, an architect by the name of Edmond Martin whose office was on Christopher Street. I am not sure he ever built anything, but he had a genius for getting the good out of space that was already there. At no extra charge, he made me a thin, teetery bookcase to fit into one of the nine perpendiculars—he loved to be given a problem. One nice feature was that the little bath had a window beside it so that you could look at the sky while you bathed. Another amusing oddity of the apartment was that, small as it was, it had two street entrances: one on Gay Street and one, leading through a passageway, to Christopher Street, where the bells and mailboxes were. Mr. Martin, who was an engaging person, owned another old house, on Charles Street, in which Elizabeth Bishop lived. Her living-room was bigger than mine and had a fireplace, I think. It must have been through her that I found the Gay Street apartment after Porter left. Or else it was the other way around and she found her place through me. All Mr. Martin’s rents were reasonable, and he took good care of his properties.
My bed was a narrow studio-couch with a heavy navy-blue cover and side cushions, which made the room into a living-room, and I had a desk with drawers beside a recessed window. I could entertain only one couple at a time for dinner by putting two chairs at a card table and sitting on the studio-bed myself. I invited Farrell and Hortense (Farrell, a true-blue Irishman, always asked for more mashed potatoes), Chris and Maddie Rand, and I cannot remember who else. Probably Martha McGahan and Frani, together or separately. Margaret Marshall.
All this was very different from our life on Beekman Place; it was as though the number of my friends had shrunk to fit the space I now lived in. Not counting Johnsrud, who came around from time to time and made biting remarks, the only men I knew were Mr. Martin and the husbands of friends. The assiduous men who had been after me while I was married, such as Corliss Lamont and the absurd Lazslo Kormendi, had vanished. Nobody took me out to dinner, and when I did not cook something for myself, I ate at a second-floor restaurant called Shima’s on Eighth Street, where the food was cheap and fairly good. But it typed you to be a regular at Shima’s, because no one, male or female, ever went there with a date. Today it would be called a singles’ restaurant, with the difference that there were no pick-ups. Night after night at dinnertime, I faced the choice of hiding my shame at home or exposing it at Shima’s. I always took a book to bury myself in, on the ostrich principle.
Sometimes on Sundays, Farrell’s kindly publisher, Jim Henle of Vanguard Press, asked me to lunch at the house he and his wife, Marjorie, had in Hartsdale, half an hour or so from New York. But I could not hope to meet any unattached men there, I discovered. It was an office group like a family, headed by Evelyn Schrifte, eventually Henle’s successor at Vanguard; the only author present was Farrell. Still, going out there was fun; I liked the Henles. But apart from those Sundays, the only break in the monotony of my first months as a divorcee on Gay Street was when the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt—real name George Black—came from Pittsburgh and took me to the World Series. The Giants were playing the Yankees, and Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons was pitching in the game we went to. When, at his insistence, I brought the “man” home, so that he could see how I lived, he was shocked and begged me to move. He still thought he wanted me to marry him, even though I would no longer let him make love to me. In the story I wrote about it nearly four years later (on the Cape during the fall of France), the heroine sees him several times in New York posthumously to their love-affair on the train, but I remember only the once—the excitement of being at the World Series (and with a National League fan; he had arranged our box-seat tickets through the Pittsburgh Pirates), and having dinner with him afterward—at Longchamps, it must have been. I have a very faint recollection of a duck he had shot that started to smell in my icebox because I did not know how to take off the feathers and cook it. In the story, I changed several things about him, including where he was from, in case his wife might somehow come upon it and recognize him. Really he lived in Sewickley, a fashionable outskirt of Pittsburgh, belonged to the Duquesne Club, and worked for American Radiator and Standard Sanitary—plumbing. The man in the story was in steel. (When it came out in 1941 in Partisan Review, Jay Laughlin of New Directions was telling people that the “man” was Wendell Willkie, who had run for president the year before.) George Black’s ardor was an embarrassment to me—a deserved punishment. Hard up as I was for male company, I kept him out of sight. None of my friends knew about him, and until now I have not told his name.
Those must have been the harshest months of my life. My grandfather was sending me an allowance of $25 a week, since the Capital Elevator stocks I had inherited from the McCarthys were not paying dividends any more, or very little. I did some reviews for The Nation and I looked for a job. Someone sent me to a man who lived in the St. Moritz Hotel and needed a collaborator for a book he was writing on the influence of sunspots on the stock market. No. At last Mannie Rousuck, now with Ehrich Newhouse and starting on his upward climb, was able to give me half a day’s work at the gallery, writing descriptions of paintings for letters he sent to prospects. Some of the addressees were the same ones we had written to at the Carleton Gallery—Ambrose Clark, Mrs. Hartley Dodge—though my subjects were no longer just dogs but English sporting scenes with emphasis on horses, English portraits, conversation pieces, coaching scenes: I think he paid me $15 a week, which, with the allowance from my grandfather, was more than enough to support me. I could even serve drinks.
Nonetheless I was despondent. If I had been given to self-pity, I would surely have fallen into it. I did not much regret breaking up with John, especially because he was taking a sardonic, mock-courteous tone with me, and I had almost forgotten Porter. It was not that I wanted either of them back. I saw plenty of John as it was, and I would have been horrified if Porter had appeared on my doorstep. There was no room for him in my multi-faceted apartment. My renting it showed that I had not thought of him as being in my life at all.
At some time during the autumn I had driven to Vermont with Mannie, to see a collection of sporting art that would be very important to him and, incidentally, to see the autumn leaves. On another Saturday I had gone up to Vassar to see Miss Sandison (Miss Kitchel was on sabbatical), and we had talked of my discovery of left-wing politics, which she knew all about, as it turned out, having subscribed to New Masses or read it in the library while I was still in college. Then we talked of love, which she knew about, too, even more to my surprise. I can still hear her light, precise voice tell me that you must “learn to live without love if you want to live with it.” In other words, not to depend on having love. You must come to real love free of any neediness. This thought greatly struck me, and still does. I am sure it is true but, unlike Miss Sandison, I am not up to it. I have seldom been capable of living without love, not for more than a month or so. That afternoon, in her small sitting-room in Williams, where our Renaissance seminar had been held, pouring tea again, she told me a little about her private life. There had been a man (at Yale, I gathered), but, though they were lovers, they did not marry. “I could think rings around him,” she remembered with a mournful little laugh. Maybe that was always the fly in the ointment. She was too intelligent for the men she chanced to meet.
I was moved by that long conversation, inspired by it to try to be like Miss Sandison. She was clear-eyed, a heroine like Rosalind and Celia. I was not so brave. Many years later, after her retirement, her dauntless character was put to the test. First of all, on becoming an emerita, she worked as a volunteer for the Civil Liberties Union in New York (single-handed, she said in a shocked tone, she had straightened out the awful disorder of their files), and also for the Heart Association, that perhaps in memory of Miss Kitchel, with her flushed cheeks, who had died in Toledo of heart trouble. In New York, after a while, Miss Sandison lived alone; her sister had died, too. But then she had to give up her volunteer work, because she was going blind. Frani, who lived nearby, used to go in and read to her and wrote to me in Paris about it. I intended to write, so that Frani could read the letter to her. But I didn’t. Time passed. Her address, in Frani’s handwriting, pleaded with me daily on my desk. At last I learned from Frani that it was too late: Miss Sandison was dead. She had found she was going deaf, on top of being blind, and took the logical step. Without telling anyone, she carefully arranged her suicide—death-by-drowning—putting weights in the pockets of her dress, filling the bathtub, and climbing in. Perhaps she took some sleeping pills, to keep herself from involuntarily coming up again. She even put a message for the cleaning-woman on her door, so that the woman would not be frightened by finding her body. I do not know how she managed, with only the sense of touch to help her. But she did.
And to think that I never wrote. Of course that September or October day was not the last time I saw her. We were reunited a number of times—with Miss Kitchel when I was teaching at Bard forty minutes off up the Hudson—and then, alone. I remember things she said during those later meetings, especially the first one, when I had left Wilson and was living with Reuel, aged seven, in Upper Red Hook, though then it was Miss Kitchel who spoke the immortal sentence over our Old Fashioneds: “Tell us you didn’t marry him for love!” She was speaking, naturally, for them both. I remember how well they both looked, Miss Kitchel with her slightly faded blue eyes and Miss Sandison with her deep, sparkling dark ones, and the Covermark now hiding the disfiguring birthmark on her cheek. I was filled with love for both of them, and the fact that I was teaching literature—my maiden effort—put us on terms of greater parity. Yet, of all our meetings, the most memorable for me has always been that fall afternoon in 1936 with Miss Sandison when I was trying to learn from her how to live alone. In reality I was doing it at Bard in those first months of teaching; I had firmly given up any notion of a new marriage and pictured myself romantically as a sort of secular nun. But Miss Sandison and Miss Kitchel never came to see me at Bard—now, I wonder why not; perhaps just the fact that they were not motorized and I was. Miss Sandison never saw my place on Gay Street or any place I lived, even when it was with her sister’s furniture. I always went to her, at Vassar, and if I took her and Miss Kitchel out, it was downtown to a Poughkeepsie restaurant. This points to a reticence in our relation, characteristic of Miss Sandison, though not of me. She had read Wilson’s work and she and Miss Kitchel had listened to Johnsrud read his first play aloud on their screened back porch. But she probably knew very little, unless from other sources, of John Porter and his successors in my life.
We talked that day about Granville Hicks and New Masses, Marxian criticism, so called then (now it is “Marxist”). I wanted to impress Miss Sandison with the fact that I had become political (“radicalized” was the word in the sixties), yet, finding that she, too, was perfectly abreast of the new tendencies, I was able to open my heart to her and suggest the doubts I felt. These were literary doubts, I emphasized; I had no disagreement with the political side of the magazine. But in the literary pages there was a smell of Puritanism. I was reminded of the Marprelate Controversy that we had read about in her senior seminar on the English Renaissance—the same fanatic spirit. Not just “Granny” Hicks, but a lot of those New Masses reviewers brought to mind a character in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the hateful Puritan militant wonderfully named Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy. In the Marprelate quarrel, I had been rather on the side of the Established Church, whose pamphleteers had been University Wits. But above all I had responded to the noble, balanced periods of Richard Hooker (Ecclesiastical Polity), the great defender of the episcopate and anticipator of Locke—Miss Sandison had inspired me to read him.
It came to me that afternoon that the Elizabethans, her “field,” still constituted for me a sort of wondrous paradigm, a model in which the inflections or “cases” of literary practice were perennially recognizable. Spenser’s friend the pedant Gabriel Harvey, for instance, could have been a perfect New Masses contributor and advocate of the prolet-cult in literature. Harvey, the son of a ropemaker in the Norfolk town of Saffron Walden, was a species of crypto-puritan, possessed by a baleful hatred of the University Wits; he attacked the dying Robert Greene and was wonderfully counterattacked by Thomas Nashe. As a Latinist, he wanted to introduce the meters of classical verse into English poetry—in other words, to imprison it in a strait-jacket. I think the pedant and the puritan can never be far apart. To this day, the uncouth Harvey, for me, stands at the antipodes of true talent and its correlate, freedom, and I do not forgive Edmund Spenser, defender of the cruel Irish repression, for being his friend. Have with you to Saffron Walden, I say with Nashe.
Miss Sandison, of course, was pleased to see that the lessons of her seminar had not been lost on a favorite pupil. She was a friend of freedom herself—why else did she go to work for the ACLU? So I wonder how she took the fact that I was still leaning toward Stalinism. As I say, it was their literary practices that I found offensive. I had actually been talking of voting for Browder in the November election, casting what would be my first vote. Had I changed my mind? It depends on the date. Did I go up to Vassar before or after I woke up and found myself on the Trotsky Committee? Almost certainly before, since that took place in November. I have told the story in “My Confession,” and the point I made there was that it happened by pure chance. At a cocktail party for Art Young, the New Masses cartoonist, Jim Farrell, who seemed to be taking some sort of canvass, asked me if I thought Trotsky was entitled to a hearing, and naturally I answered yes, without any clear idea of what he was being charged with. Having been in Reno and Seattle, I had missed the news stories of the first Moscow trials. And I do not know how it was that I had been invited to what was presumably a Stalinist party, still less why Farrell had. Apparently the lines were not yet clearly drawn. But once I answered yes (and Farrell, it seemed, wrote my name down), my goose was cooked. A few mornings later, opening my mail, I found my name on a letterhead; it was a group that was demanding Trotsky’s right to a hearing, and also his “right to asylum.” I was angry that my name had been used without my consent, but before I had time to register my protest by withdrawing it, my telephone began ringing: Stalinist acquaintances urging me to take my name off that committee. Other signers, like Freda Kirchwey, as I learned from the day’s paper, were promptly capitulating to the application of pressure. This only hardened my resolve, as anybody who knew me could have guessed. I let my name stay—a pivotal decision, perhaps the pivotal decision of my life. Yet I had no sense of making a choice; it was as if the choice had been thrust on me by those idiot Stalinists calling my number. I did not feel I was being brave; on the other hand, the Freda Kirchweys hurrying to withdraw their names looked to me like cowards. Though I was unconscious of having come to a turning point, the great divide, politically, of our time, I did know that I had better find out something about the cause I had inadvertently signed up with. Minimally I had to learn the arguments for Trotsky’s side.
Luckily I was the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers. And even more luckily a pamphlet had been issued analyzing the evidence in the first trial from “our” point of view, that is, on the assumption that, despite the defendants’ confessions, Trotsky was innocent of having conspired with the Nazis to overthrow the Soviet state. To my relief, the pamphlet was extremely convincing. I read it with care, testing the arguments as though I were preparing for an exam. And they held water. Yet I cannot remember who wrote it. I think there was a sequel dealing with the second trial, of Pyatakov and Radek, which took place in January. I remember poring over the verbatim reports of both trials on my studio-couch in Gay Street. Yet I have no recollection of when or how the Trotsky Committee was formed. I know that there was already a committee and I was on it by February 14, 1937, because I remember the meeting that night in Farrell’s apartment and that I was the only one who noticed that it was St. Valentine’s Day, which I guess said something about all concerned.
In recent years I have read more than once that Edmund Wilson was on the Trotsky Committee. What an opportunity for us to have got to know each other! But I never saw him at any Committee meeting.
Being on the Committee marked the end of my awful solitude. Some time around Christmas things began to improve. I was meeting people—men. Part of that had to do with the Committee (“Dear Abby” in her column advises her lonely-heart readers to join a group—church group, she recommends), but a lot was coincidence. For instance, Bob Misch of the Wine and Food Society. How had I met him? Maybe through my friends Gene and Florine Katz. Misch was in the advertising business, single, German Jewish, and the very active secretary of the wine and food organization, whose head was André Simon, in London. He fancied himself as a cook and a knowledgeable bon vivant. His short, stocky, dark, well-fed body made me think of a pouter pigeon. Probably someone took me to one of his Wine and Food tastings: on a series of tables various wines were grouped around a theme—Rhine wines, Loire wines, Burgundies—one sampled them, made notes, and compared. On the tables there were also little things to eat, “to clear the palate,” and probably water to rinse your mouth out. It was educational, it was intoxicating, and it was free. After the first time, my name was on their list, and I always accepted. Soon he was asking me to the little dinners he gave in his West Side apartment, quite evidently as his partner; his specialty was black bean soup with sherry and slices of hard-boiled egg. The reader will find something like those dinners in the chapter called “The Genial Host” in The Company She Keeps. If I may give an opinion, it is the weakest thing in the book. No doubt that is because I was unwilling to face the full reality of the relationship. In real life I slept with him and in the story I don’t. I suppose I was ashamed. Misch was eager to make me expensive presents (such as handbags) and to do services for me that I didn’t want. Even after I stopped sleeping with him, which was soon, he kept on asking me to those dinners, and I kept on accepting, because of his insistence and because, as the chapter says (though without mentioning sex between us), I was not quite ready to break with him, being still “so poor, so loverless, so lonely.”
The guests at those little dinners were mostly Stalinists, which was what smart, successful people in that New York world were. And they were mostly Jewish; as was often pointed out to me, with gentle amusement, I was the only non-Jewish person in the room. It was at Misch’s that I first met Lillian Hellman, who had been brought, I guess, by his friend Louis Kronenberger. But I may mix her up with another Stalinist, by the name of Leane Zugsmith. It was with Hellman, just back from Spain, that I had angry words about the Spanish Civil War. Probably, as happens in the chapter, I grew heated about the murdered POUM leader, Andrés Nin.
That same evening (more or less as related), I started on a brief affair with Leo Huberman (Man’s Worldly Goods), who was a suave sort of Stalinist and married. But I no longer needed Misch’s dinners to meet new people, not even new Stalinists. Suddenly the woods were full of them. If I met Huberman there, I was also seeing Bill Mangold (not Jewish; it means a kind of beet in German), a Yale classmate of Alan Barth’s whom I had first met at Webster Hall a couple of years before. Now he took me to dinner, at a fun place where we danced. He was separated from his wife; he was going to a psychoanalyst (the first analysand in my personal history); he was amusing and worked for medical aid to the Loyalists in Spain, a Stalinist front. We did not discuss politics, which no doubt eased the difficulty of having a quite active and friendly love-affair with a distinctly Trotskyist girl. Of all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot; I stopped counting), I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to see Philip Rahv.
Once I got started, I saw all sorts of men that winter. Often one led to another. Most of them I slept with at least one time. There was Harold (“Hecky”) Rome, who wrote the lyrics for the ILGWU musical Pins and Needles (“Sing me a song with social significance”); we cooked a steak together one night in his apartment—perfect. There was a little man who made puppets that appeared on the cover of Esquire and another little man, very droll and witty, who was married and worked for a publisher—he came to my place from the office in the afternoon and was a bit nervous despite his aplomb. There was a truck driver whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it, whom I met in the bar at Chumley’s. I did not go to bars alone, so someone must have taken me—probably John—and then left.
It was getting rather alarming. I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else. Though slightly scared by what things were coming to, I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them.
I was able to compare the sexual equipment of the various men I made love with, and there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. One handsome married man, who used to arrive with two Danishes from a very good bakery, had a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil; he shall remain nameless. In my experience, there was usually a relation to height, as Philip Rahv and Bill Mangold, both tall men, bore out. There may be dwarfish men with monstrously large organs, but I have never known one. It was not till later, after my second divorce, that I met an impotent man or a pervert (two of the latter). Certainly sexual happiness—luxurious contentment—did make quite a difference in my feeling for a lover. Yet it was not always the decisive factor. None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal disease.
The best news was that I had found a job in publishing. Before I went to Reno, Eunice Clark, no longer married to Selden, had taken me to the cafeteria in the Central Park Zoo (really a menagerie), where at some outdoor tables near the seal pool a group of young people of the intellectual sort gathered in the late afternoon to drink beer and watch the seals. There I had met Pat Covici, of the firm Covici-Friede, who was aware of my Nation articles. I told him I was looking for a job in publishing. One day in the fall, when I was long back from Reno, there was Mr. Covici again, white-haired and benevolent, who claimed to have been looking for me. “You are as evanescent as a cloud,” he told me, in his accented voice, and offered me a job in his office.
At Covici, I read manuscripts and looked for new authors in quarterly magazines like the Southern Review: when I came on a story I liked, I would write the author and ask for a possible sample of a longer work. One of those I wrote to was Eudora Welty. Besides this scouting and manuscript-reading, I edited, proofread, and farmed out texts in foreign languages to qualified readers to report on. Opposite me, in a medium-sized office, sat a long-nosed Stalinist woman named Miss Broene, who intensely disapproved of my politics, my many telephone calls and long lunch hours, my arrival time at work in the morning. Our boss was Harold Strauss (later at Knopf), who had a lisping disapproval of what he called “photographic realism,” meaning specifically my friend Jim Farrell. Strauss was not especially political, but there were several Stalinists in our top management, not including Mr. Covici, thank God. Mr. Covici read literary books and magazines and was a fatherly sort of person. One day he took me to lunch with his star author, John Steinbeck, at the Prince George Hotel. I did not care for Steinbeck’s work (as I had said in The Nation) and I did not care for him. He reciprocated.
I am eternally grateful for having learned the mechanics of publishing at Covici, how to copy-edit and how to proofread. I learned printer’s signs and the marks to make on a manuscript before sending it to the printer. For instance, you lower-cased a capital letter by drawing a slash through it; to upper-case, you drew three lines under a letter and wrote “cap” in the margin; if you wanted to retain a hyphen, you made it into an “equals” sign. In all this, the dour Miss Broene, who had turned Communist after being fired from Consumer Research for union organizing, was instructive and really quite helpful, all the while she was denouncing me to the office chapter of the Book and Magazine Guild for my persistent lateness to work.
Also to enter on the plus side was Philip Rahv. Remembering him from Farrell’s parties, I called him one day when we needed a reader for a German text Mr. Covici was considering. Or it may have been the memoirs in Russian of the wonderful Angelica Balabanov, who had been close to Mussolini in his socialist days, then close to Lenin, and was now a left-wing anti-Communist. Rahv, who had been born in the Ukraine of Zionist parents, knew Russian, German, and Hebrew and he was able to read some French. When I called him, he came to the Covici office, and we talked a little in the waiting-room. He had a shy, soft voice (when he was not shouting), big, dark lustrous eyes, which he rolled with great expression, and the look of a bambino in an Italian sacred painting. I liked him. Soon he was taking me out to dinner in the Village, holding my elbow as we walked, and soon we were lovers. I gave up Bill Mangold with a small pang. Politically Rahv and I were more alike—he was breaking at last with the Party and joining the Trotsky Committee—and I was greatly excited by his powerful intellect, but Mangold, with his Yale background, was more my kind of person. Had I not got to know Rahv, I might have married Mangold, if he ever got his divorce. Years later an avatar of him took form in The Group, in the figure of Gus Leroy, the publisher, with whom Polly Andrews, poor girl, is in love.
Rahv worked on the Writers’ Project—part of President Roosevelt’s WPA program—and did occasional reviews for The Nation. But he had no other source of income, except odd jobs like the one he was doing for Covici. That did not trouble me. It only meant that we couldn’t get married. Somewhere there was a wife named Naomi, whom I never saw. He had lived apart from her for a long time but could not pay for a divorce. But we did not think of marriage anyway. I believed in free unions, and so, I guess, did he. He and William Phillips dreamed of reviving Partisan Review, but for that they would have had to have money or an organizational tie, such as the one with the Party that they had lost when they crossed over. When we first became lovers, Philip, as I recall, had not yet met Dwight Macdonald, who in turn would introduce him to his Yale friend George L. K. Morris (of the Gouverneur Morris family; his brother was Newbold), an American abstract painter and our future backer.
I believe I had been instrumental in the de-Stalinization of Dwight. When he left Fortune, over their censoring of his U.S. Steel article, I took him downtown to lunch with Margaret Marshall, so that he could have an outlet for his views in The Nation’s back pages. In the course of one of those lunches I discovered that dear Dwight actually believed in the Moscow trials. Once he was set straight by the two of us, he swiftly rebounded as far as one could go in the opposite direction; characteristically, he did not come to rest at a mid-point, such as entering the Socialist Party. Almost before I knew it, he was an embattled Trotskyite, of the Schachtmanite tendency. Meanwhile, through me or through Fred Dupee, he met Rahv and Phillips, who were already seriously talking to Fred with a view to his leaving New Masses to join them in a revived, anti-Stalinist PR and take a list of their subscribers with him. Dwight brought George Morris into the project, proposing to make him the art critic, with a monthly column, and the new PR was born.
By early summer, while all this was starting to happen, Philip and I had moved in together. The Gay Street apartment was too small for us (Philip, though still slender then, was a big man), but by good luck I had friends, Abbie Bregman and his wife, Kit, a descendant of Julius Rosenwald—Sears, Roebuck—who had a Beekman Place walk-up apartment that was going to be empty all summer. Unless I wanted to use it? Of course I accepted; the problem was how to convey that there would be another occupant, to them a complete stranger. Well, I told them, and they still urged me to use the place and the maid who came with it. Thus Philip and I found ourselves living amid severely elegant modern furnishings, all glass, steel, and chrome on thick beige rugs. I think Philip felt compromised by that apartment (which did not resemble either of us) and by the Sears, Roebuck money behind it, which did not resemble us either. He was embarrassed to receive his friends, such as Lionel Abel, whom I remember there one night as a malicious, watchful presence out of Roman comedy.
That was perhaps why we quarreled so much that summer, although we were greatly in love. It was a class war we fought, or so he defined it. I defended my antecedents, and he his. He boasted of Jewish superiority in every field of endeavor, drawing up crushing lists of Jewish musicians and scientists and thinkers—Einstein, Marx, Spinoza, Heine, Horowitz, Heifetz—with which no Gentile list could compare. He invited me to look at the difference between Marx and Engels. I could only argue that in literature and the visual arts Jews did not excel: we had Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the Russians, Flaubert...Philip retorted that literature and the visual arts were mindless in contrast to mathematics and music. And what about Proust and Kafka? His forceful assertions, punctuated by short, harsh laughs, were arousing anti-Semitic feelings in me, which, to my shame, were put into words. Scratch a Gentile and you find an anti-Semite was his reply.
He was a partisan of what he called “plebeian” values—he loved that word. I stuck up for patrician values, incarnate, as I imagined, in the professional class I issued from, exemplified by my grandfather. Lawyers were the hirelings of the bourgeoisie, he rebutted—petty-bourgeois parasites. I did not even belong to the big-bourgeois class. That was the crudest thrust. As for the other side of my family, it delighted him to say that the Irish were the bribed tools of imperialism—he had found the phrase in Marx. I always wondered what it applied to. Marx could hardly have been thinking of Irish cops—New York’s finest. In the England of his day, there were no Irish bobbies. But whether or not Marx said it, the phrase amused me and has stuck in my mind.
Anyway we argued amid the glass and the chromium. Philip brought an enormous zest to the exercise. Dispute was his art form. In some part of his quite complex mind, it entertained him to hear us go at it. For example: Trotsky maintained that you could not build socialism in one country. “In one country!” Philip would comment, listening to us. “Why, you can’t build socialism in one apartment!” That did seem to be so. We polarized each other. He could always offend me by declaring that I was bourgeois because I could not learn to think like a Marxist. I was far from being bourgeois, compared with the genuine article, but I do have a bourgeois side, which comes out in my love of possessions, cooking, gardening. Yet aren’t those peasant traits, too?
During that summer the maid who came with the apartment must have stolen my mother’s diamond lavalliere and other odd bits of jewelry—my sole remaining links with my “bourgeois” or, as I thought, patrician past. I do not see who else could have taken them, since nobody else had access to the apartment and I never locked anything up. I was sorry for the loss, so irreparable, and because thieving is vile. But that was the price I paid for the loan of a Beekman Place apartment. Maybe the woman had reasoned that Philip and I were “robbing” the Bregmans by living in their apartment rent-free.
To earn a little more money, I worked that summer with a collaborator on a book called Kaltenborn Edits the News, a collection of writings and radio broadcasts by the well-known commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. It was really a ghost-writing job, because Mr. Kaltenborn had sold the publisher a stack of manuscript that proved to be mainly carbons—not just in duplicate, but in triplicate—of old, unusable broadcasts. Possibly he had done so in good faith; he had just never looked at the mass of copy he turned in. Faced with the fact, my collaborator and I wrote a new book for him, dividing the material into chapters according to our tastes: I did France, Spain, and the U.S. automobile industry; my co-worker, a New York Times writer, did England, Germany, and a wonderfully named chapter about the Balkans, “Little Firebrands.” We met once a week in Mr. Kaltenborn’s pleasant garden in Brooklyn Heights, drank spritzers with Mr. and Mrs. Kaltenborn (a charming German woman), and reviewed our work to date. I doubt that Mr. Kaltenborn ever read the entire text—an amalgam of New York Times middle-of-the-road politics, my Trotskyizing, and the deep conservatism of his original broadcasts, bits of which we used as filler. Then, toward the middle of the summer, his son turned up from Harvard and actually read a good part of the book his father would be signing. The young man, a Stalinist and a fairly bright boy, was horrified—especially, I guess, by my contributions—and tried to undo the damage by rewriting parts himself. In the end, probably not even the publisher, still another Stalinist, read the whole book through. But it came out, this all-around rip-off, and I own a copy of it that Arthur Schlesinger bought me as a present in a second-hand bookstore in Cambridge. Since only Mr. Kaltenborn was on a royalty basis, I have no idea how the sales had been.
Philip had no interest in my work on the Kaltenborn book; I am not sure that he ever met my collaborator. He and the others were busy lining up articles for the new PR. During the hot weather we went out sometimes to a little house Dwight and Nancy were renting at Brookfield Center, in Connecticut, where there was a natural pool made by a pot-hole in a stream. We all swam naked there and argued about Henry James. Philip’s long love-affair with James had begun; at Vassar I hadn’t cared for him—neither had Miss Kitchel and Miss Sandison. Fred Dupee was a natural Jamesian; I no longer remember where Dwight stood. One Sunday morning on the breakfast table I typed out a devastating review for The Nation of Frederick Prokosch’s Seven Who Fled, which the others read and approved. Despite our failure to “build socialism in one apartment,” it was a happy time. We looked fondly on each other. I read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and liked it. He liked Frani and Nathalie and Martha McGahan, who despite being a Catholic supported the Loyalists, saying “I’m a Basque” with her dark twinkle. Johnsrud came once to Beekman Place to have drinks or dinner with us and was not very friendly.
We followed with passion and anger the fortunes of the war in Spain; before it was over, I knew more about the Ebro than I ever knew about the Battle of the Bulge. On account of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, I was boycotting silk, buying cotton-mesh stockings at Wanamaker’s, which in those days was a downtown department store near Astor Place. I was smoking cigarettes with the union label—Raleighs, I think they were—though I liked Luckies better. Philip was less committed to consumer boycotts, suspecting, I guess, that they were bourgeois.
The Second Congress of the League of American Writers occurred early in June, before we moved into the Bregmans’ apartment. This was a pure Stalinist front. With a certain temerity our small group of Trotsky defenders, all writers, elected to take part, to disrupt the proceedings if we could. William Phillips’s account in his memoir, A Partisan View, is quite different from my memory of the event. He says that he and Philip did not want to go (to the panel on literary criticism) but that Dwight and I insisted. I don’t remember any disagreement among us. At the meeting I chiefly recall one orator declaring, in evident reference to us, that there were some who “looked for pimples on the great smiling face of the Soviet Union”—those pimples were the Moscow trials. And I remember Philip’s saying to me of another orator that he “waved the bloody shirt”—an expression I had never heard before and did not understand. It may have been that day that I first saw Martha Gellhorn—blond and pretty, talking about Spain. Or was it Martha Dodd, daughter of our former ambassador to Germany? Either one could have served as a marshal in the previous year’s May Day parade. That night, at a vast meeting in Carnegie Hall, Hemingway spoke and Donald Ogden Stewart, to a tumult of applause. We all went and sat in the gallery but did not try to heckle; we would have been too unpopular. On another night, I went to a Nation-sponsored appearance by André Malraux, who spoke for Spain at Mecca Temple; I noticed the trembling of his hands. In Spain he had been converted to Stalinism, and I thought it was sad.
I remember a downtown meeting of some Trotskyist group where I first saw Diana Trilling; with her dark eyes and flaring nostrils, she looked like Katharine Cornell. Among Stalinist males, I heard, the Trotskyists were believed to have a monopoly of “all the beautiful girls.” That included Diana and Eunice’s sister, Eleanor Clark, who would soon marry a secretary of Trotsky’s to get him U.S. citizenship. It was said to have been a “white” marriage, like Auden’s with Erika Mann. Pretentious, I thought. I didn’t like Eleanor Clark, and we barely acknowledged each other, though we belonged politically to the same circle and had been a class apart at Vassar. She was Lockwood, needless to say. While I was married to John, she was with an intelligent misanthrope named Herbert Solow. It amused me to think that the self-absorbed Eleanor was paired with a “Mr. Solo.”
By the summer’s end the “boys”—as the two PR editors came to be called by their staff—were looking for an office for the magazine, and I was looking for an apartment for Philip and me. Thanks to a friend of Lois Howland’s, I found one on East End Avenue—quite pretty and only moderately expensive. For Philip, it was too far uptown; he clung to his Eighth Street ways. And perhaps also too close to Yorkville, an enclave of Germans, i.e., Nazis. But he bore it with good grace. Nathalie Swan, still studying architecture, helped us with furnishing advice—a room-divider to make two rooms out of the long, narrow living-room, and bookcases that would be built along one wall by a carpenter and that I could stain myself. Philip and I bought our furniture at Macy’s. I remember a tall, very “contemporary” steel lamp, and it must have been on East End Avenue that I first owned the very square, bright red love seat that followed me for years to my various domiciles. There was an easy chair covered with gray tweed that went with Philip. When we split up—oh wellaway!—we divided the furniture. But that had not happened yet. No. After we moved to East End Avenue, into a ground-floor apartment across from Gracie Mansion, we had months still together, months in which I took the 86th Street crosstown bus and transferred to the Madison Avenue bus to get to work at Covici-Friede, on 32nd and Fourth, and came home by the same route at five, stopping in Yorkville to buy meat and groceries for the dinner I would cook that night.
It was a tight schedule: living on East End Avenue was highly impractical for me, while for Philip it was only a reason to grumble. Yet it was I who had chosen to do it, so I could not complain. We took walks in the park, and if we were approached by a beggar, Philip explained to me why charity was an error: the working-class needed to sharpen the contradictions of capitalism. At night or over the weekend I would write my theatre pieces, to come out monthly in the magazine—the boys had made me the theatre critic, not trusting my critical skills in other fields. They also gave me the job of translating Gide’s Retour de l’U.R.S.S., his second thoughts on the Soviet Union, which were going to come out in our second number. Sometimes Philip would pick me up at the Covici office, and we would go for drinks to the Vanderbilt Hotel, where they served you great trays of hot hors d’oeuvres free; you could eat enough over two cocktails to be able to skip supper. One day he brought along the young, high-cheekboned Delmore Schwartz, his latest find. On Saturday mornings, if I did not have to work, I could go down to the magazine for editorial meetings with the boys and Dwight and Fred and George Morris, our backer. Then we would all have lunch at Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place or at a cheaper spot off Union Square. Now and then Philip and I would have people to dinner, and I cooked. I remember an evening with Bill Troy and his wife, Léonie Adams, and Troy’s lecturing us over pre-dinner Tom Collinses on the difference between symbolism and allegory—symbolism, good; allegory, bad—a burning subject with him. Troy, who was about to begin teaching at Bennington, was an arrogant Irish puritan of the type I imagined Joyce to be; I could picture him leaning on an ashplant.
I was conscious of the discrepancy between Philip’s working time and mine. Philip’s day consisted of dropping in at the magazine, arguing with whoever was there, reading the mail, directing the composition of the “Editorial Statement” that would lay down the line of the new PR, and writing an occasional book review for The Nation. He had to check in every weekday at the Writers’ Project, but that was a formality—necessary to draw the relief check. There he used to encounter types like Norbert Guterman, whom he had known in Party circles—Luftmenschen, he called them. My slight resentment of my heavier load was tempered by the sense of being noble and by pride in being able to do as much as I did. We quarreled but much less than we had. Now the bone of contention was our difference in religion—a curious thing to be angry about, since both of us were atheists. No doubt it was another disguise for the class war.
I discovered that Philip had never read the Gospels. Nor, for that matter, our Christian Old Testament. To me this came as a shock, all the more so as it made one wonder how he had managed to understand Eliot, one of his favorite modern masters. Even before Eliot’s religious phase, there must have been problems. “Ash Wednesday”? The Waste Land? The grail? For once, Philip concurred. I was right, he agreed, and there was also Joyce, who, though not a believer, used the Christian myth. The last word made me bridle, despite his conciliatory intention. Did he think the Crucifixion was a myth? In any case, we came to an agreement. He promised that he would read the whole Bible if I would leave him in peace. I do not remember whether that included the Acts and the Epistles.
The amazing thing was that Philip did it. It took him a full week, but he enjoyed it. Naturally, while he was doing that, he could not be expected to do anything else. My Bible was his alibi for inactivity, and, recognizing it, we both laughed. As a penance, I may have taught him the Seven Deadly Sins, with emphasis on Sloth. One of Philip’s great charms was that he truly loved to learn. Being impressionable, he could not fail to respond to the beauty of the King James version. All this was part of our love for each other; the shadows that fell across our relationship were still mainly an effect of social differences. For example, he did not like my insistence on our having a drink before dinner every single night—even in Reno, alone, I had had two Singapore Slings at the Riverside Inn before having dinner at my boarding-house. He analyzed my dependence on it as a class thing. Or our having to have a tablecloth and napkins and my mother’s silver for just the two of us at supper. But he learned to help with the dishes, which he had never done before.
On my side, I loved hearing about his Russian childhood. His parents had been storekeepers in a village in the Ukraine; his grandmother lived with them. They were educated people—Zionists, as I said—and spoke Russian. He remembered one day when his grandmother came home with the terrible announcement, “The Tsar has fallen,” and to him and his mother it was as if she had said “The sky has fallen.” He hurried to hide behind the counter or under his grandmother’s skirts. For several days they stayed in the house, fearfully, and this happened more than once during the civil war, as their village was taken and retaken by Reds and Whites and the people hid from both. Toward the end of the war, his family emigrated. He remembered a time in Austria—his first acquaintance with German—and, after that, Palestine, and his father’s furniture factory—in Joppa, I think it was—where the workers were Arabs. He felt a sympathy for them—the beginning of radicalization?—noting that they ate and slept and prayed lined up against the walls of the big room they worked in; if they had wives and family, they had left them behind. Out of his young boy’s sense of an alien worker caste, separated from him by language and religion, a view of Israel was slowly worked out that was more complex than that of most New York Jews.
In Palestine, Philip had learned some Hebrew, and he liked to tell the story of the implantation of Hebrew in Palestine by a certain forceful rabbi who was an early settler. This rabbi decided one morning to compel his fellow settlers to forsake the corrupt high German (Yiddish) of the East European ghettoes that was the only common language they had. He began to speak Hebrew to anyone who addressed him and would hear only Hebrew when replied to by his co-religionists. If they answered him in Yiddish, the rabbi admonished them in Hebrew, “Jew, speak Jewish!” Since the rabbi was an important figure whom many people wanted to talk with, the whole Zionist settlement was forced to learn Hebrew from one day to the next. I suppose this was a fable based on a core of truth, but it pleased me to believe it literally since it gave Philip such deep delight.
Another of Philip’s charms was the tenderness of his feeling for the Jewish state and its short history. Unlike most of the other Jewish intellectuals around PR, he was exempt from what is known as Jewish self-hatred. Philip loved being Jewish, so that if one cared for him one came to love that bit of him, too. This may have been related to his love for his mother, which had kept him sweet, at bottom, underneath his sourness. His given name was Ilya Greenberg; the authorities on New York intellectuals say “Ivan,” which I feel sure is wrong. It is true that “Ilya” does not translate into “Philip,” but neither does “Ivan,” which would lead to “John” or “Hans.” “Ilya,” I guess, could be “Elijah” or “Elias,” either one more appropriate. “Rahv,” his pseudonym, chosen, of course, by him, means rabbi in Hebrew.
Though prone to shout when in polemical vein, he had a soft voice, rather breathy, with a touch of a whisper in it. In speaking English, he never lost his Russian accent and could never pronounce the letter “h”—there is no “h” in Russian. A nice story is told of him at a later period: a young writer had submitted a piece of fiction to the magazine based on the Gian-Carlo Menotti-Sam Barber household; Philip rejected it, instructing the young author categorically, “Partisan Review is an ’eterosexual magazine. It does not publish ’omosexual stories.”
The magazine’s initials were usually held to stand for “Philip Rahv.” I am not sure whether Philip, at the beginning, was aware of this identity. I doubt it, because when we were trying to find a new name to go with the magazine’s new politics, we spent many hours discussing it at Brookfield Center and nobody mentioned the coincidence of the original name with Philip’s initials. In the end, we kept the name. The word “partisan,” which we all liked, had surely been thought up by Philip. I can hear it now, pronounced in his caressing voice, as I can hear his highest term of praise, “modern.” Another adjective, this one derogatory, comes back to me in William Phillips’s nasal Brooklyn tones—“home-made.” I do not know why this should be an injurious description of anything, but perhaps William, as a Marxist, felt that ideas and theories ought to be factory-produced. He would have been unaware of the usual application to cakes and candies.
Philip’s eventual mother-in-law, a founder of the Junior League, liked to say of him to her friends: “Yes, isn’t it remarkable, he got his education in our great public-library system!” That was true. He certainly read Marx and much else in U.S. public libraries. “Philip’s alma mater,” Fred Dupee is supposed to have quipped on passing the lions of the 42nd Street branch.
About his public-school experiences in Providence, Rhode Island, I am a bit hazy. I know he lived there with his older brother before and after his time in Palestine and was sent to grade school wearing long pants. As a little boy in those long pants, he must have started to speak English; he remembered trying to look up the teacher’s skirts. After a period in high school, getting Americanized, somehow he got to Portland, Oregon, and found a job in advertising, coining catchy names for products. When the Depression struck, he drifted back east, where he became acquainted with breadlines and Central Park benches as well as the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. What he saw and read made a convinced Marxist of him. He joined the New York branch of the John Reed Clubs, where he met William Phillips (alias Wallace Phelps), a former student of Sidney Hook’s at New York University, and the result was Partisan Review.
That story is told in a number of memoirs and intellectual histories of the time. John Strachey is said to have given a boost to the new magazine (conceived as an organ of the John Reed Clubs) by donating the take of a public lecture he undertook for the purpose. This must have been when I met him at the beer party in Eunice Rodman’s backyard—during his triumphal visit to the U.S. Otherwise my recollections tend to differ from the now canonical versions. For example, as I remember it, Philip said that William had been in the Party (hence “Wallace Phelps,” his Party name) and he himself had not—a strange fluke of chance, he thought, as he was as much of a Party-liner as William, probably more. In the memoir William has written, it is the other way around. Perhaps my memory of what Philip said is wrong. But then, how does William explain “Wallace Phelps”?
None of the histories I’ve looked at tells how I happened to be on the magazine. I am not sure myself, but I suspect that Philip imposed me on the others. And they were not altogether pleased. It was not that they thought poorly of me. At least Fred and Dwight didn’t, as far as I know. But they resented the blunt exercise of Philip’s will. Yet possibly poor Philip was only responding to pressure applied by me. Until the archives are opened (as we said then), we shall never find out. Dwight, it occurs to me, was in no position to cast the first stone, having himself imposed Nancy as business manager. But on that score, I recall no grumbling, not until Dwight moved the magazine to his apartment, where he could have everything under his and Nancy’s control. But that was later.
Yet before we get to that later, which is coming ineluctably anyway, let me pause and go back to that summer, before we moved uptown to the Bregmans’ apartment, before East End Avenue. What do I remember, besides what I have just been telling? Well, I suddenly hear my voice speaking in a rather affected tone, as though I thought I was Hope Williams in an Arthur Hopkins comedy. “My dear, I’ve got the most Levantine lover.” I am in Nathalie Swan’s apartment—she had moved out of her family’s house—and I am telling her about Philip, with whom I have fallen in love. That is what, in a mode of extreme sophistication, that sentence is trying to say. Perhaps I am only telling it to her in her own patois. It was around that time that her wearied New York “social” voice remarked to me, “Oh, dear, Father’s getting rich again.”
Next, Philip and I are on the terrace of the Brevoort Hotel. It is after dinner, and we have ordered a pitcher of beer—an inexpensive way of spending an evening on lower Fifth Avenue watching the people go by. Someone has joined us, drawing a chair up to our table. It is Herbert Solow (the “Mr. Solo” I spoke of), and we are discussing Roosevelt’s appointment of Justice Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Philip and I are taking this calmly, but Solow is excited. “But the fellow is a Klansman!” We are impressed by the seriousness of this worldly, saturnine man. He has been in Coyoacán with Trotsky and has had an affair with Adelaide Walker, well qualified by her beauty to be a Trotskyite. Before the summer is over, he will have the nerve to ask me to go riding with him in his two-seater, without reference to Philip, with whom I am living and who has answered the phone. I told him I couldn’t.
Then an evening at the Jumble Shop, on 8th Street, with Filipino waiters. Philip is haranguing me about formalism and Paul Valéry, and I do not understand very well. He talks about Le Cimetière Marin. Some of his friends join us—Lionel Abel and William? Perhaps Harold Rosenberg. I cannot make out whether they are for formalism or against it, or whether they disagree among themselves. It would seem to me that if Philip is so violently opposed to socialist realism, he ought to be in favor of what sounds like its opposite. Yet the word “formalism” as they pronounce it sounds condemnatory. In fact what was happening was a slow change of mind. Denunciation of formalism went back to the Bolshevik doctrinal creed, and, once the “boys” had broken with Stalinism in politics, should no longer have incurred their ire; for Americans, the concept had been a Procrustean bed all along. The discussion in the Jumble Shop was almost a valedictory.
Meanwhile, the Moscow trials continued; the Spanish Republic was tottering, thanks to non-intervention, though we could still claim some victories. The second Moscow trial—Radek and Pyatakov—had taken place in January; again confessions were followed by executions as the revolution devoured its own children. In June, the great civil war hero Marshal Tukhachevsky and several lesser Red Army generals were secretly tried and executed as Hitler agents; this coincided with the second meeting of the Writers’ Congress—“pimples on the smiling face of the Soviet Union.” But a real and terrible coincidence, which, as they say, was “no coincidence,” was with the disappearance and probable execution of Andrés Nin in Spain; as is now recognized, the two occurrences were related.
A thrill of horror had shot through our group when we heard what had happened, unbelievably, to Tukhachevsky. Emotionally, we did not mind so much the fates of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Radek and Pyatakov, and (soon to come) Bukharin—Old Bolsheviks, all of them, civilians, brain workers like ourselves, not heroes many times decorated, of the Red Army. Our feelings on this subject were strangely mixed, I think; at any rate, mine were. On the one hand, grief and horror; on the other, exultation. The liquidation of Tukhachevsky, we saw, would be fatal for Stalinism, as indeed it nearly proved to have been, in a military sense, when Hitler in 1941 broke the non-aggression pact and invaded: the Red Army, after the bloody destitution of its leaders in 1937, let itself be overrun. Of course we could not see that far ahead, but we sensed that Stalin had overreached himself when he moved against the Red Army. Thus we jubilated in being shown to be right; still, Tukhachevsky’s murder could not make us happy—on the contrary. Much more than I, Philip grieved, I suspect; a boyish part of him was proudly invested in the Red Army. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, when it came, must have had a similar effect on him, validating his arguments and paining his soul. During those years he told Fred Dupee that he sometimes woke up in the night, sweating; the question that jerked him awake was “And what if Stalin is right?”
Now I come to a moment that can still make me flinch more than fifty years later. A premonition of worse to come might have been registered by both of us on the night we went to a big party in a strange apartment somewhere uptown. We are living on East End Avenue. Philip is wearing a new suit, very becoming in purplish browns, which we bought him at Altman’s. Many prominent Trotskyists are present at the party, known to me mostly by name. Among them, lounging on a sofa, is Max Eastman, the editor of The Masses and the old Liberator, who had nearly been lynched for his principles during the First World War—we had had his Enjoyment of Poetry with Miss Kitchel in freshman English. This white-haired spellbinder, the son of preachers from Canandaigua, New York, was handsome, tall, all his life a fascinator of women. His film on the Russian Revolution, From the Tsar to Lenin, was just being shown. In sum, all I remember is what I would like to forget: having had a lot of drinks, sitting on Max Eastman’s lap; out of a corner of memory’s eye, I see Philip’s face. The next morning he was still very angry with me. I had an awful hangover and had to stay home from work for two whole days. That was all. Eventually Philip forgave. I did not see Eastman again for many years. Once was at his house at Croton with Charlie Chaplin, and the second time was at a conference at the Waldorf on cultural freedom—he had become a right-winger and upheld Joe McCarthy.
Nonetheless, the stage was set, all right. On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act. In Seattle, my grandfather would soon die (December 30), aged seventy-nine, which, according to a series of psychoanalysts, deprived me of a “father figure.” But Grandpa was still alive, going to his office and playing his daily golf game, when I first met my fate, in the PR office late on a Saturday morning (I must have worked that Saturday at Covici). I appeared in my best clothes—a black silk dress with tiers of fagoting and, hung from my neck, a long, large silver fox fur—having been told by Philip that Edmund Wilson would be dropping in at the magazine and we would all take him to lunch. My partly bare arms tell me that it would have been a fall day. We were all on hand for the big occasion; we were hoping for a contribution from him for our first or second number and we wanted to make a good impression, although my costume, as I look back on it and as I sensed even at the time, was more suited to a wedding reception than to a business meeting in the offices of a radical magazine.