ON A RAINY FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 1949, Mary McCarthy walked up Park Avenue toward the art deco grandeur of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, exhilarated by the impending conflict. As she approached the entrance, she was forced to pick her way through a crowd: large groups of picketers with their homemade signs, cops trying to prevent fights breaking out, reporters hoping they would. She presented her ticket and entered the lobby. She was where she wanted to be: enemy territory.
Over the course of the weekend, the Waldorf hosted the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, the brainchild of the freshly established Communist Information Bureau. The World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace had been hosted in Wroclaw, Poland, the previous year and now the Cominform wanted to replicate it on American soil, using the National Council for the Arts, Sciences and Professions, one of its American front organizations, to provide funding and logistics. This maneuvering was not lost on the host nation—a report prepared by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) the following April described it as a “supermobilization of the inveterate wheelhorses and supporters of the Communist Party and its auxiliaries.” (The Soviet Union did not have a monopoly on absurd rhetoric.)1
The United States’ anti-Communism extended far beyond the picketers on Park Avenue. In Hollywood, the blacklist was in force and the so-called Hollywood Ten had been convicted of contempt of Congress in April 1948 for refusing to testify in front of the HUAC. The following August, in front of the same committee, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist turned journalist, would accuse Alger Hiss, a senior U.S. government official, of being a Soviet spy. Since January, eleven members of the American Communist Party had been on trial for violating the Smith Act, accused of advocating the violent overthrow of the government.
It is therefore not hard to understand why McCarthy had to pick her way through so many protesters on that rainy March day. Veterans, religious groups, and Russian and East European émigrés picketed all three days of the conference and the police claimed as many as two thousand protesters gathered around the hotel by the end of the first night. Some of it got quite intense: members of the Committee for Freedom of Religion apparently threatened delegates (one woman carried a sign reading “Exterminate the Red Rats” and tried to shoot attendees with a water gun).2
Despite this fevered atmosphere, the organizers of the conference had done an excellent job of securing some 650 intellectual and scholarly “sponsors,” among them Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Prestigious African American intellectuals, including W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, were also sponsors, as were several writers who had stood by the Soviet Union through the trials and purges, including Howard Fast, Clifford Odets, and the celebrity Stalinist couple Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman.
McCarthy had a bone to pick with the latter. In the spring of 1948, McCarthy had taught for a semester at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County and was invited to dinner with the president, along with several students, Stephen Spender, who was also a visiting teacher, and Hellman. According to McCarthy, she arrived at the party to find Hellman trashing the reputation of John Dos Passos, who had, Hellman claimed, “turned against the Spanish Loyalists” because “he was disappointed by the food in Madrid.” McCarthy (who believed Hellman initially mistook her for a student or junior faculty) immediately came to the defense of her old friend, assuring the students that Dos Passos turned against the Communists only because they “were running the show and murdering Trotskyists, POUMists and Anarchists.”3 She said the murder of Andrés Nin in particular had been the cause for Dos Passos’s disillusion. Hellman’s multitude of bracelets apparently began to jangle as she trembled in “fury and surprise.”4 Spender, wryly amused, remembered that the room “divided at once into two little groups” and that McCarthy and Hellman “hurled insults at each other.” It was a foreshadowing of conflicts to come.
At the Waldorf, Hellman and her allies were mobilizing under the banner of “peace.” The Soviet line was this: the world, still ravaged by the legacy of the Second World War, was threatened by American imperialism backed by the appalling power of the atomic bomb. Unless American aggression was curbed and the atomic threat curtailed, another war was inevitable. Evidence of this militaristic character, according to this narrative of Western imperialism, was the impending formation of NATO, negotiations about which were already under way. This account conveniently ignored Stalin’s own land grab in Eastern and Central Europe. Instead, Soviet propaganda sought to keep the focus on the awful power of the American atom bomb, seeking to turn its strategic vulnerability to its advantage by claiming they were the true agents of global peace. Never mind that the network of spies around the Manhattan Project had ensured that Soviet scientists were catching up fast, but for now it was important to paint the United States as an ambitious and aggressive power possessed of an unconscionable weapon.
To McCarthy, the hypocrisy of the conference was too much to take. Here the Soviet Union was clandestinely arranging for a grand gathering of intellectuals in New York City while back in the Soviet Union a whole generation of authors had “disappeared” or been silenced. Direct action was needed and, just as they had done with the Congress of American Writers in 1937, McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald decided to infiltrate the conference and confront the speakers from the floor. On the day, they were joined by the poet Robert Lowell and the composer Nicolas Nabokov. They bought tickets for $3 each and arrived with an umbrella to rap against the floor if they were denied the chance to speak. After a decade on the periphery, McCarthy relished being back on the front lines of the old fight.
HER ENTRANCE BACK INTO THIS ARENA was a long time coming. Even before the first issue of Partisan Review came out in December 1937, events had been set in motion that took McCarthy out of the political fray. That October, McCarthy had showed up to the Partisan Review office in Union Square to find Edmund Wilson there. She had watched him deliver a lecture at Vassar during her senior year and they were both on the Trotsky Defense Committee, but this was the first time she had properly met him. Rahv and Phillips were eager to secure his services as a contributor and invited him for a lunch meeting. McCarthy felt overdressed in a black silk dress and a fox stole, and Wilson ignored her for much of the lunch, with the exception of complimenting her on the articles she and Margaret Marshall had written about the poor state of American literary criticism.5 Two weeks later Wilson phoned Marshall to ask both women to lunch. McCarthy got thoroughly drunk and woke up in bed next to Marshall in a room in the Chelsea Hotel. The third time the trio met, when McCarthy and Marshall were invited for dinner at Wilson’s home in Stamford, Connecticut, McCarthy slept with him. He was forty-two, she was twenty-five. By February they were married.
They lived first in Stamford and then in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. It was far from an idyllic marriage. Wilson was frequently abusive. After one drunken beating, McCarthy, then three months pregnant, began weeping uncontrollably and could not stop. Wilson had her committed to the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York for psychiatric observation. Fortunately, the fetus was unharmed, and Reuel was born the following Christmas day.
Wilson was a spoiled, demanding alcoholic. McCarthy’s nickname for him was “the Minotaur,” and he was determined to keep her trapped in his maze; he controlled their finances and refused to let her have a car. When sober he could be supportive, and he set up a spare room with a typewriter for her to work on her fiction. Looking back on these days, McCarthy was convinced that without this impetus she would never have become a novelist. While Wilson wrestled with the history of Marxism, Communism, and revolution in To the Finland Station, McCarthy threw herself into writing short stories, stories that would become her first novel, The Company She Keeps.
The interlinked stories were heavily autobiographical. Meg Sergent, McCarthy’s fictional alter ego, dumps a husband for a lover (“Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”), has sex with a married man she meets on a train (“The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt”), and works for an antiques con man (“Rogue’s Gallery”). All of this drew on McCarthy’s experiences living in New York City. Her sexual frankness was married to biting satire of the intellectual milieu of the 1930s. In “The Genial Host,” Sergent attacks the smug Stalinism of the guests at a Manhattan dinner, while in “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man” she depicts the disenchantment of an optimistic young Marxist. Jim Barnett, the intellectual in question, begins as an editor at the Communist-sympathizing Liberal but resigns when Sergent is fired from the same magazine for her vocal defense of Trotsky. Barnett has an affair with Sergent and becomes enmeshed in the Trotsky Defense Committee before finally leaving it all behind for a cushy corporate journalism job at Destiny, a magazine modeled on Henry Luce’s Time.
The publication of one of these stories, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” in Partisan Review in the summer of 1941 announced McCarthy as a major new fiction writer. The following year The Company She Keeps was reviewed by Malcolm Cowley in The New Republic, Christopher Isherwood in The Nation, and Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker. The caliber of the reviewers was an indication of the seriousness with which her work was being treated, as were the mixed verdicts; her talent unnerved reviewers, many of whom had been left rattled by her critiques of the general state of literary criticism. Wilson, unable to avoid being patronizing even in a compliment, thought she might make a “female Stendhal.”6 With a true assessment of her work’s worth occluded by the poisonous politics of New York literary culture, perhaps the most accurate barometer was the opinion of Vladimir Nabokov, who privately praised McCarthy’s novel to Wilson; Nabokov was not a writer who gave up praise easily.7
The final story in The Company She Keeps is the remarkable “Ghostly Father, I Confess,” in which Sergent is now married to Frederick, an oppressive and stifling husband. Here was the irony of McCarthy’s marriage to Wilson: it made her profoundly unhappy, but it also made her into the writer she wanted to be. Living on Cape Cod she had felt isolated, detached from the vibrant literary milieu of the city. The only relief was visits from friends, like the Macdonalds or the Nabokovs, or dinner with Katy and John Dos Passos in Provincetown. In the early days of the marriage, even Wilson’s old friend Scott Fitzgerald came up, but he got drunk and McCarthy found his visit depressing.
The end of the marriage was ugly. In an official deposition, McCarthy accused Wilson of domestic abuse; in his response Wilson claimed McCarthy suffered “hysterical delusions.”8 In January 1945, McCarthy took Reuel and left, filing for divorce on grounds of “extreme cruelty.” They formally separated in February 1945 and divorced in December 1946.9 Decades later it emerged that amid all this she had been having an affair with the art critic Clement Greenberg, whose own reputation was made by “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” an essay published in Partisan Review in 1939. McCarthy had been drawn back to that world.
IF MCCARTHY AND THE PARTISAN REVIEW CROWD were right about the Moscow Show Trials, they were wrong about the Second World War. In November 1940, McCarthy wrote a short piece for The New Republic about the way the war was being covered by American reporters (conclusion: badly). It is not, however, her critique of the press that is most striking, it is the glibness of tone. She wrote that “for most of us, the war has been a rather ghastly kind of entertainment, more heartrending—yes, and more exciting, more dangerous—than the Lindbergh baby or the Johnstown flood. Why else do we listen to three, four, five, and six broadcasts of stale news in a day and, on a particularly ferocious day, buy two and three newspapers? And how impatient we get if the news is dull!” Later in the piece she asked a series of rhetorical questions, those that, apparently, “we are all asking”: “Can Hitler survive victory? Will satisfied fascism retain the same character as hungry fascism? What is the new world-state that Hitler is planning? Is there sabotage? Is there resistance? Is there anything left of the socialist movement? Is there any hope for revolution if Hitler is stalemated? And what if he is not?”10
The questions, bizarrely misjudged as they seem now, are revealing in themselves, for McCarthy still believed that the only way to defeat fascism was through revolution, not through supporting the imperialist British. In the autumn of 1939, a Partisan Review editorial opined that the best that could result from a British victory was a “new Versailles, followed by the same round of political convulsions as ended up in the triumph of fascism.” The editors argued that “fascism is produced by the internal development of monopoly capitalism” and “if fascism turned to aggression as a matter of principle, spreading the true faith with fire and sword in Islamic fashion, one would expect to find Italy and Germany fighting together in this war. Actually, of course, the economic and geographical differences between the two nations have proved to be decisive, and Italy is not only neutral but may well repeat her performance of the last war and join the Allies.” It is an editorial to which history has not been kind.
At the end of the same issue of the magazine was a letter from the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism that called upon “all American artists, writers and professional workers to join us in this statement of implacable opposition to this dance of war in which Wall Street joins with the Roosevelt administration.”11 The letter was signed by the editors of Partisan Review—Rahv, Phillips, Dupee, and Macdonald—as well as by many other future Cold Warriors, including James Laughlin, Melvin Lasky, and James Burnham.
Wilson was also an isolationist, although he was in no small part motivated by his acute Anglophobia. Looking back at the war from 1959, McCarthy said that the “psychology of the 1930s spilled over into the 1940s. You were supposed to be wised up about the War and not let yourself be a victim of propaganda . . . We were in terror of being ‘soft.’ ”12 When Rahv did go “soft” in a 1941 editorial (“this is our war”) it divided this new generation of American intellectuals. When the United States finally entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Partisan Review declared its support. Macdonald resigned in protest and McCarthy said it was not until the war was effectively over, with the full extent of the Holocaust revealed, that she could admit to herself that American intervention was justified. At a gathering of friends, among them Macdonald, Dupee, and the Italian anarchist Nicola Chiaromonte, in August 1945 she suddenly said that she had “supported the war all along; we all did.” She felt a tremendous sense of relief.13
Chiaromonte was among a number of European refugee writers who came to New York during or immediately after the war, invigorating intellectual life in the city. As a result, Partisan Review acquired an even more cosmopolitan, transatlantic tenor and developed a close relationship with the British magazine Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. The summer of 1944 edition featured pieces, one after the other, by Koestler, Orwell, and Spender, the anti-Stalinist veterans of Spain. Of the many intellectual emigres, McCarthy became particularly close to Hannah Arendt, a brilliant student of Martin Heidegger’s, who had been held in a Vichy internment camp before fleeing to the United States.
Liberated from Wilson, McCarthy threw herself into life, writing for a larger audience in The New Yorker, taking a teaching job at Bard, and working on a new novel (The Oasis). She became involved with Bowden Broadwater, a researcher and writer for The New Yorker, a bitchy, boyish man in a fine suit, eight years her junior, who ended up becoming a production editor at Partisan Review. They married in December 1946.
If the Wilson years had been a hiatus from political engagement, McCarthy was back with a vengeance. She plunged once more into the argumentative medium of the New York intellectual scene.
Early in 1948, McCarthy set up the Europe-America Groups, an organization to foster greater intellectual bonds between the United States and a recovering Europe. Funds were raised and used to ship periodicals and books (including Darkness at Noon and The Partisan Reader, a compilation of essays from Partisan Review) to Europe. Chiaromonte was the man on the ground, dispensing money to struggling writers as he saw fit.14 The Partisan Review boys were in (admittedly tepid) support, as were old allies like Hook and Macdonald. Albert Camus ran a sister organization in France. The emphasis was on internationalism and a third way between American capitalism and Soviet Communism, both of which, it was declared, constituted a threat to high culture. However, the Europe-America Groups was dissolved when the first tranche of money ran out.
McCarthy had envisioned developing the organization into a political movement that would escalate its criticism of American militarization in Europe. This would have necessitated a split with the Partisan Review crowd and Hook, whose anti-Communism was hardening. The anti-Communist left was becoming increasingly fractious and it was hard enough keeping the peace within the Partisan Review editorial offices let alone between the different groups and interests outside of it. With the Stalinists on their doorstep, the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace should have been an opportunity for solidarity between these different factions, but in the run-up to the event McCarthy and Hook ended up in a dispute about the best way to protest.
Hook, whom McCarthy credited with educating her about Marxism in the late ’30s, was a domineering figure. He was short, bespectacled, and wore a clipped moustache, yet despite this almost comical appearance, gave his ideological opponents the terrors because of his formidable intellect and ruthless methods of argumentation. He thought McCarthy’s idea of infiltrating the conference hopelessly naive. “That just shows how little you know about politics,” he told her in a phone call.15 The situation was complicated by the fact that McCarthy’s satirical novel, The Oasis, had just been published in the British magazine Horizon, much to the displeasure of many in the New York crowd who recognized their unflattering portraits.
Hook’s plan was to create a counterconference. He was a persuasive organizer and had played a key role in assembling the Trotsky Defense Committee. Some of his old allies from that fight, including John Dewey, rallied to his side. The weekend before the conference at the Waldorf began, Hook announced to the press that the newly formed Americans for Intellectual Freedom would be holding its own gathering at Freedom House on West Fortieth Street. The group, which had first congregated in Macdonald’s apartment and included Farrell and Phillips, had secured a bridal suite at the Waldorf to be their headquarters. In imitation of their Communist-backed rivals, they secured prestigious sponsors, among them Benedetto Croce, T. S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, André Malraux, Bertrand Russell, and Igor Stravinsky.16 The plan was to get as much press coverage as possible.
While the methods of these two groups—McCarthy’s and Hook’s—differed, their goal was the same: to expose what they saw as the hypocrisy of intellectuals speaking freely at a convention in New York City while so many of their number were being silenced on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Their actions were motivated, in large part, by a defense of literature, and of literary writers, in the face of persecution by the totalitarian state. In doing so, they were laying the bedrock for Western cultural warfare on the Soviet Union.
THE COVER OF THE JANUARY 1949 ISSUE of Partisan Review had announced its usual stellar cast of contributors. McCarthy was there, writing about Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (her final theater column). Orwell had an essay about Mohandas Gandhi, who had been murdered by a Hindu nationalist assassin the previous January, while Spender included the third excerpt from a chapter of his forthcoming memoir World Within World. Also flagged on the cover was a newly translated short story by a Russian writer who, in the notes on contributors, the editors described as “one of the best known Russian writers of the nineteen-twenties who disappeared during the purge of the nineteen-thirties.”17 The story, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, was titled “The Sin of Jesus” and its author was Isaac Babel.18
Publishing a brilliant modernist short story was par for the course at Partisan Review but publishing a brilliant modernist short story by a Russian writer who was a victim of the Stalinist Terror gave the effort the character of a preemptive strike against the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace. To McCarthy and her group of infiltrators, stories like Babel’s were the key issue. They wanted to confront the Soviet sympathizers with the names of those who had “disappeared.” At an anti-fascist conference arranged by André Malraux in Paris in 1936, Babel had been among the star speakers. Nothing had been heard from him in the West since. Where had he gone?
Despite—or in some ways because of—the anti-Communist tenor of the moment, the conference was packed. “Peace” was not a hard sell in 1949, amid war exhaustion and nuclear anxiety. As well as the two thousand who attended the opening banquet at the hotel, the conference sold out an event at Carnegie Hall on the second day. In a final flourish, the closing session took place at Madison Square Garden, where a crowd of eighteen thousand watched from almost total darkness as a series of speakers were picked out in dramatic spotlights, culminating just before midnight in Dmitri Shostakovich playing the second movement of his Fifth Symphony. The New York Times reported that Shostakovich’s closing performance received a “tremendous ovation.”19
Shostakovich, undoubtedly the biggest draw among the delegates, had not wanted to even attend the conference, but was “asked” personally by Stalin to go. During the purges, Shostakovich had fallen into official disgrace when his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was excoriated for “petit-bourgeois formalism” in an unsigned Pravda editorial reputedly authored by Stalin himself. This trip was part of his rehabilitation. At a press conference held before the proceedings opened, Alexander Fadeyev, the general secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, inveighed against the “North Atlantic Pact” and the U.S. atomic weapons program. While Fadeyev ranted, Nicolas Nabokov watched Shostakovich’s reaction from just a few feet away. Nabokov felt he gave the impression of being “a trapped man . . . disturbed, hurt and terribly shy.”20 It was an accurate assessment: the great composer had nowhere to turn.
At the opening banquet in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf, the organizers had to deal with their first deviation—not from the infiltrators, but from one of their own delegates. There was commotion at the high table when a panicked Harlow Shapley, the toastmaster, rushed over to Lillian Hellman, who was chain-smoking, drinking, and chatting to Shostakovich. Shapley had Norman Cousins’s speech clutched in his hand and, as she read it, Hellman realized why Shapley was shaken. Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, had been presumably invited to speak because of his staunch opposition to the atomic bomb. In his speech, Cousins told the foreign delegates to “tell the folks at home that it is a lie to say that any single group controls the United States—not excluding Wall Street or the American Communist Party. Tell the folks at home that Americans are anti-Communist but not anti-humanitarian, and that being anti-Communist does not automatically mean that they are pro-war.”21 When they realized what Cousins was doing, the audience booed and hissed. Hellman, scenting sabotage, sought to put Cousins in his place when it was her turn to speak. “I would recommend, Mr. Cousins, that when you are invited out to dinner, you wait until you get home before you talk about your hosts,” she told those gathered in the ballroom. The headline on the front page of the New York Times the following morning read “Our Way Defended to 2,000 Opening ‘Culture’ Meeting.”
Hook and his group tried to take advantage of the media’s willingness to print anti-Communist stories. At their Waldorf headquarters they composed and printed press releases and statements; when Nicolas Nabokov arrived at the bridal suite he described it as looking “like a vacated bordello taken over by a printer or a publisher gone berserk.”22 A mimeograph machine churned out pamphlets that were stored in one bathroom, while the other was used for private meetings. Hook was in his rambunctious element, and he even confronted Shapley in his hotel room, demanding to know why he had been denied the opportunity to speak at the conference. According to Phillips, the group “employed questionable tactics, such as intercepting mail and messages and issuing misleading statements in the name of the conference—tactics that upset all but the most hardened veterans of Communist and anti-Communist organizational fights.”23 The group also initiated a telephone campaign urging non-Communist sponsors to withdraw.24
The counterconference was a success. The venue at Freedom House was packed to its 450-person capacity. Thanks to some quick organizational thinking, a space was roped off in Bryant Park for the overflow, with five hundred more listening to speeches by the likes of Hook, Max Eastman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. relayed through loudspeakers. Back at the Waldorf, McCarthy and her allies assembled: Macdonald, Nabokov, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell. “They’ll start hazing you the minute you try to open your mouth,” Hook told them. “What you must do is go in there with chains or ropes or something to tie yourself to your chair so they can’t remove you.” This was far too melodramatic for McCarthy; they left the ropes and chains at home. Not that they were wholly unequipped. “[W]e took the precaution of bringing umbrellas,” McCarthy recalled, “in order to make a demonstration and possibly as a weapon if we had to.”25 As soon as proceedings began at the Writing and Publishing panel, which took place in the eight-hundred-capacity Starlight Roof, McCarthy and her team banged their umbrellas on the floor. Louis Untermeyer, the chairman, told the room that everyone would get two minutes to ask a question but only if the noisy protest ceased.
Norman Mailer, who was among the speakers, recalled seeing McCarthy issuing instructions to her friends in the audience: “Mary was the play caller for the group—the quarterback. She’d turn or point or nod to one or the other of them, signaling them to speak.”26 McCarthy directed her question to Harvard’s F. O. Matthiessen, asking him how two of the authors whose work he championed, Emerson and Thoreau, would fare in the Soviet Union. Matthiessen fudged an answer. Lowell asked Shostakovich how the criticism of the government helped his own work. A nervous Shostakovich—Macdonald described him as physically shaking—offered only some vague clichés about the importance of criticism. This was in stark contrast to the rhetoric of his speech the following day at the same venue, in which he “told 800 cheering persons [. . .] that ‘a small clique of hatemongers’ was preparing world public opinion for the transition from cold war to ‘outright aggression’ ” (although, for all its fiery rhetoric, the speech was read by a translator, not by Shostakovich).27
The most striking confrontation was between Macdonald and Fadeyev, both of whom relished a fight. Macdonald described Fadeyev as “a big, bulky, square-shouldered man, with a ruddy, fleshy, big-jawed face and iron-grey hair; his expression was cold and wooden; he looked more like a plain-clothes detective than a writer.”28 In his own account, Macdonald did not pull any punches, telling the room that Fadeyev “represents precisely that exploitation of culture by the war-making State which it is the alleged purpose of this conference to protest against.” Having put Fadeyev in his place, Macdonald then asked three questions. One was about Fadeyev’s previous attacks on American culture; another was about how he had responded to his own novel, Young Guard, meeting with official disfavor. The third question was the most pointed, however. Macdonald listed six writers—Boris Pasternak, Ivan Katayev, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Pilnyak, and Isaac Babel—and demanded to know what had happened to them: “Are they alive? Are they free or in prison?” In response, Fadeyev simply stated that Pasternak had the dacha next door to his and that Zoshchenko had published a novel in 1947.
There was one more surprise in store. Securing Mailer was a coup for the conference, just like Hemingway was for the Second Congress of American Writers back in 1937. Mailer was one of the most exciting young American novelists on the scene, still high on the success of The Naked and the Dead, published the previous year. “They gave him the floor and he embarked on a masterly sort of Ciceronian speech,” McCarthy recalled. Macdonald said that Mailer spoke with such intensity he began to sweat. He called himself a “Trojan Horse” and attacked both the United States and the Soviet Union for “moving toward state capitalism” and argued that both were “caught in a mechanism which is steadily grinding on to produce war.”29
At the end of the session McCarthy and Howard Fast began arguing vociferously. To his credit, Fast invited McCarthy and her friends to a reception for the foreign delegates at the Hotel Sutton, where scotch was served in a dingy, smoky room. Macdonald came away from the evening struck by how much common ground there was between the two groups: they read the same books, watched the same films, and, for the most part, supported the same left-wing causes. He also came away thinking that “these Stalinoids are much less dangerous and effective than I had expected.”30 He was right.
The conference at the Waldorf was the end of a certain type of Soviet cultural propaganda, the type that had been so successfully masterminded by Willi Münzenberg and the Comintern in the 1930s. Large-scale congresses were too messy, too easily sabotaged, and support among Western intellectuals was waning, particularly in the United States. Selling the idea of “peace” also became more challenging when the Russians tested their first atomic bomb. Yet if it was the death of one form of cultural propaganda, it played an important role in the birth of another: the idea of attacking intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union was to become the focus of an ambitious new phase in the way America waged the cultural Cold War. Sitting among the delegates at the Freedom House counterconference was an Estonian émigré named Michael Josselson, there at the behest of his boss, Frank Wisner, who ran the innocuous-sounding Office of Policy Coordination at the freshly minted Central Intelligence Agency.31 Through David Dubinsky, the head of the Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the CIA clandestinely funneled funds to the Americans for Intellectual Freedom, allowing Hook and his allies to rent the Waldorf suite. The money appeared to have been well spent: what the conference showed was that if attacks on Soviet suppression of free expression came from the left, they were much more credible than coming from the reactionary right. If the Soviets tried to bring the intellectuals of the world together through the concept of “peace,” then the Americans could try to do the same with the concept of “freedom.” Behind the scenes, cogs were beginning to turn.
The key figure in this new American strategy was the dissident writer, denied the freedom to write and publish behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, as Macdonald’s question to Fadeyev had made clear, it was very difficult to know what had befallen those writers who had fallen into political disfavor. What had befallen those whose pens had long been silent? Where they alive? In prison? The emerging Cold War, it turned out, placed all but the most obedient of authors in grave danger. The Stalinist war on writers had entered a perilous new phase.