Trotsky Read online

  All this upheaval took place while Trotsky was in exile. Still a voracious reader of novels, he no longer devoted himself to serious writing about literature, although he occasionally fired off a salvo in the direction of Soviet culture. He was offended most of all by the enlistment of the arts in the cult of Stalin and his minions. “It is impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with horror,” he complained, “or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the ‘great’ and ‘brilliant’ leaders, actually devoid of the least spark of genius or greatness.” Stalinist hegemony over the arts, he asserted, would go down in history as an era of “mediocrities, laureates and toadies.”

  Not all the laureates and toadies were mediocrities, however, a point Trotsky made using the example of Alexis Tolstoy, a gifted writer of science fiction and historical novels and a distant relative of the great novelist. In 1937, Tolstoy used his talents to promote the leader cult with a civil war novel called Bread, which portrayed Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov as heroic defenders of Tsaritsyn on the Volga in 1918. This especially embittered Trotsky, because as war commissar he had removed both men from the Tsaritsyn front for insubordination, even threatening Voroshilov with arrest. Now, as Trotsky looked on helplessly, the Soviet Tolstoy turned this history on its head, elevating the insubordinates and eliminating the true hero of the tale. “Thus, a talented writer who bears the name of the greatest and most truthful Russian realist, has become a manufacturer of ‘myths’ to order!”

  Yet Tolstoy, like so many other artists under Stalin, was merely practicing a different form of realism. With the Great Terror filling the prisons and the labor camps, Bread was Tolstoy’s insurance against a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Besides, he had long understood on which side his bread was buttered. Voroshilov, recently promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, had been made head of the Red Army back in 1925, the same year that the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.

  Trotsky’s reputation as a Bolshevik with an enlightened attitude toward the arts won him a loyal following in literary circles outside Stalin’s Russia. His arrival in Mexico helped to crystallize the disillusionment with Soviet Communism among a group of radical writers and critics who would later become known as the “New York intellectuals.” For a brief, intense moment, these apostates, among them some of the country’s literary luminaries, present and future, were drawn into Trotsky’s orbit.

  This was the era of the Popular Front. In the United States, the Communist Party lined up behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, while New Deal liberals came out in support of the Soviet Union. As the gap between radicalism and liberalism narrowed, the Communists enjoyed a spike in membership and influence. Literature followed politics, as liberal writers gravitated toward the party and its front groups, magazines, and writers’ congresses.

  These abrupt changes in the Party line inevitably produced disillusionment on the left. Among the disaffected were William Phillips and Philip Rahv, editors of the literary journal Partisan Review, founded in 1934 as the organ of the New York branch of the Communist-sponsored John Reed Club. In the autumn of 1936, Phillips and Rahv suspended publication of their magazine, before relaunching it the following year as an independent literary organ of the anti-Stalinist left. The Partisan Review editors were not the first leftists to renounce Soviet Communism, but their recast magazine became the most important rallying point of disillusioned radicals for whom Trotsky became a lodestar.

  The initial source of their discontent was literary. Radical critics like Phillips and Rahv sought to create a Marxist literary aesthetic, but were repulsed by the “vulgarizers of Marxism” who put political before literary standards. Their chief antagonists were the hard-core radicals associated with the Communist paper New Masses, who insisted on a sharp break with the past in promoting a new generation of socially conscious “proletarian” writers. The Partisan Review editors argued the need to assimilate the literary achievements of the past, including 1920s Modernism, as exemplified by Proust, Joyce, and Eliot, which was anathema to the orthodox left. Modernism was bourgeois, they agreed, but must nonetheless be preserved as part of what Phillips called the “continuum of sensibility.” The Popular Front strategy’s sudden shift toward rural, nativist, and patriotic themes intended to appeal to a middle-class audience was the final indignity. Thanks to the financial backing of the painter George L. K. Morris, Phillips and Rahv would be able to publish their magazine without reliance on the Communist Party.

  By 1936 these literary discontents were overshadowed by the two great political controversies of the day: the Spanish civil war and the Moscow trials. Spain was supposed to be the great anti-fascist cause, yet France’s flagship Popular Front government failed to come to the defense of the Spanish Republic, while reports out of Spain told of Soviet persecution of the non-Communist left. The bizarre spectacle of the Moscow trials was the subject of endless debate among liberals and radicals. For the skeptics, Trotsky’s condemnation of Stalinism as a betrayal of the Revolution showed how one could reject Soviet Communism without abandoning fidelity to Marxist principles and Leninist ideals.

  A galvanizing event in the consolidation of the anti-Stalinist forces was the formation in late 1936 of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and the furious campaign by liberal sympathizers of the Soviet Union against the creation of a neutral commission of inquiry. “There is now a line of blood drawn between the supporters of Stalin and those of Trotsky,” writer James T. Farrell told his diary three weeks after Trotsky had landed in Mexico, “and that line of blood appears like an impassable river.”

  At this critical juncture, the Partisan Review circle was an embattled minority in Union Square in lower Manhattan, the epicenter of intellectual radicalism in the United States, yet it conceded nothing in intellectual firepower. Among the writers and academics in its camp were Elliot Cohen, managing editor of the Menorah Journal; Edmund Wilson, the leading literary critic of the day; Lionel Trilling, who would assume Wilson’s mantle a decade hence; Sidney Hook, the Marxist philosopher who helped persuade Dewey, his mentor, to head the commission of inquiry; James Burnham, Hook’s colleague in the New York University philosophy department; Lionel Abel, the playwright and critic; V. F. Calverton, publisher of the Marxist journal Modern Monthly; and James Rorty, a founding editor of New Masses.

  Among the coming generation who fell under Partisan Review’s spell in these years were the Trotskyist students at City College in upper Manhattan—known as the Harvard of the Proletariat—young men such as Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, and Irving Howe. They retreated to an alcove of the lunchroom beneath the neo-Gothic Great Hall to argue radical politics and Marxist theory, joined there by socialist classmates such as Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell, all three of whom went on to become professors of sociology at Harvard.

  Not all of the New York intellectuals were from New York. Farrell moved there from Chicago in 1932, the year the first volume of his breakthrough Studs Lonigan trilogy was published. Its graphic portraits of the lower-middle-class Irish on Chicago’s South Side were drawn from his own experience. Farrell could take credit for enlisting writer and critic Mary McCarthy in the cause of Trotsky’s defense, and he was essential in prodding Phillips and Rahv along the road toward open anti-Stalinism.

  The first issue of the revamped Partisan Review, which appeared in December 1937, included fiction by Farrell and Delmore Schwartz, poetry by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, an essay on Flaubert by Edmund Wilson, a review article on Kafka by F. W. Dupee, and trenchant book reviews by Trilling and Hook. It was the beginning of what became for the next two decades the premier literary journal in the United States.

  Most of the radicals who identified with Partisan Review in the late 1930s would become leading Cold War liberals, some of them evolving into
the original neoconservatives; a few managed to retain their faith in a more modest vision of socialism. As leading public intellectuals in the postwar era, they founded influential magazines of their own, such as Dissent, The Public Interest, Encounter, and Commentary. But during those eventful years leading up to the Second World War, all of them were radicals bound together by their anti-Stalinism; and anti-Stalinism, as the art critic and Partisan Review contributor Clement Greenberg once observed, “started out more or less as Trotskyism.”

  By far most were Trotskysants rather than Trotskyist—meaning they never signed on as members of the Trotskyist party. They were fellow travelers, to use a term just then entering the American political lexicon, although without the pejorative sense it would acquire in the McCarthyist 1950s, when it was used synonymously with “pinks” to distinguish communist sympathizers from the card-carrying sort. Even Farrell never joined, although he went down to Coyoacán for the Dewey hearings, helping to barricade the windows at the Blue House until he developed sinus trouble.

  Trotsky’s appeal to these dissenting radicals went beyond his Marxist critique of Stalinism and his tolerant ideas about culture. He was perceived as the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to the peasant, Asiatic, and nationalistic Stalin. He was a man of heroic deeds as well as enlightened words. “For relaxation on the military train that bore him from one front to another, he read French novels,” enthused Dwight Macdonald, a new member of Partisan Review’s editorial board. “Trotsky’s career showed that intellectuals, too, could make history.”

  The fact that Trotsky happened to be a Jewish intellectual strengthened the connection. Most of the writers associated with Partisan Review, like the New York intellectuals generally, were disproportionately Jews. Many were the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, like Phillips, whose father changed his name from Litvinsky, or had themselves come to America as children, like Rahv, who was born Ivan Greenberg in a small Ukrainian village in 1908.

  In the summer of 1937, Macdonald, acting on behalf of the editors, wrote to invite Trotsky to contribute to the new Partisan Review, calling it an “independent Marxist journal.” As for topics, Macdonald suggested that Trotsky might wish to apply the principles of Literature and Revolution to Soviet letters of the previous decade; or he could present an analysis of “the relation of the Marxian dialectic to the theories of Freud.” Or something on Dostoevsky or on Ignazio Silone’s new novel—whatever Trotsky might like, although Macdonald took care to point out that the magazine would emphasize literature, philosophy, and culture, rather than economics or politics.

  Trotsky sensed timidity behind Macdonald’s invitation, which explains his impudent response. He would be “very happy to collaborate in a genuine Marxist magazine pitilessly directed against the ideological poisons of the Second and Third Internationals,” he wrote, “poisons which are no less harmful in the sphere of culture, science and art than in the sphere of economics and politics.” He could make no commitment, however, until the editors produced a “programmatic declaration” spelling out their political orientation. An editorial statement was sent down to Coyoacán, but Trotsky found it too vague and decided to await the appearance of the journal’s first issue later in the year.

  The wooing continued in January 1938, when the editors invited him to contribute to a Partisan Review symposium titled “What is Living and What is Dead in Marxism?” Trotsky objected to the entire proposition, beginning with the title, which he called “extremely pretentious and at the same time confused.” He may have detected the spirit of Max Eastman hovering over this event. Eastman, who produced the superb translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, had announced his break with Communism at the beginning of 1937 in an article in Harper’s titled “The End of Socialism in Russia.” His defection was total. He renounced not just the Soviet experiment as it had turned out, but the October Revolution itself, portraying Stalinism not as a perversion of Leninism but as its logical outcome. Trotsky was outraged, even though for years he had been concerned about Eastman’s blasphemous comments to the effect that Marxist theory was religious and metaphysical rather than scientific.

  Eastman’s change in outlook was a disturbing new development that Trotsky, taking his cue from his American followers, soon began referring to as the “retreat of the intellectuals.” No one on Partisan Review’s invitation list openly subscribed to Eastman’s views, but nonetheless Trotsky objected to the prospective contributors, American and European radicals of various stripes, such as Bertram Wolfe, Victor Serge, and the French socialist and former Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, author of a recent biography of Stalin. “Some of them are political corpses,” Trotsky objected. “How can a corpse be entrusted with deciding whether Marxism is a living force? No, I categorically refuse to participate in that kind of endeavor.”

  Trotsky’s harshly negative reaction was influenced by his disappointment with the first two issues of the magazine. “I shall speak with you very frankly,” he lectured Macdonald. “It is my general impression that the editors of Partisan Review are capable, educated and intelligent people but they have nothing to say.” A world war was looming, yet the editors seemed content to create “a peaceful ‘little’ magazine” and retreat into “a small cultural monastery.” Partisan Review ought to demonstrate its partisanship, Trotsky felt, by taking the battle directly to the liberal apologists for Stalin at The Nation and The New Republic. Instead, “You defend yourselves from the Stalinists like well-behaved young ladies whom street rowdies insult.”

  This was too much for Rahv, who now took over for Macdonald. He fired a respectful blast back at Trotsky, accusing him of being out of touch with the American scene. Whatever its faults, Partisan Review was the “first anti-Stalinist left literary journal in the world,” Rahv pointed out. As such, it was under “tremendous pressure,” constantly attacked in the pages of New Masses and The Daily Worker as a “Trotskyite” rag, while independents demanded reassurance that it was in fact no such thing. No wonder, then, that Partisan Review was politically tentative, that it “leaned over backward to appear sane, balanced, and (alas) respectable.” We had hoped to receive your support, Rahv told Trotsky, but instead “you have shrugged your shoulders.”

  Rahv promised an unambiguous declaration of principles in the April 1938 issue, and this time he did not disappoint. “Trials of the Mind,” which appeared over his name, equated fascism and Stalinism and portrayed Trotsky as Lenin’s true successor. This was enough to satisfy Trotsky, who wrote a discursive letter to the editors that was published as “Art and Politics in Our Epoch” in the August-September issue.

  “Art and Politics” argued the case for artistic freedom as the antidote to the “lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity” that afflicted the cultural world, most acutely in the USSR. A case in point was Diego Rivera, Red October’s greatest interpreter, whom “the Fourth International is proud to number in its ranks.” An artist of courage and integrity like Rivera, who stood up to the Rockefellers inside the very temple of capitalism, could never be welcomed in the Soviet Union. “And how could the Kremlin clique tolerate in its kingdom an artist who paints neither icons representing the ‘leader’ nor life-size portraits of Voroshilov’s horse? The closing of the Soviet doors to Rivera will brand forever with an ineffaceable shame the totalitarian dictatorship.”

  Nor, in Trotsky’s view, did the state of affairs in the capitalist countries offer much reason for optimism. Just as Marxist theory had forecast, the decline and decay of bourgeois society created an inhospitable environment for artistic achievement. “The artistic schools of the last few decades—cubism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism—follow each other without reaching a complete development.” Even as he wrote these words in mid-June, Trotsky was taking the measure of Breton and his Surrealist project.

  André Breton paid the price for being a writer of openly anti-Stalinist views in the era of the Popular Front. Desperate for money, he solicited from
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs a commission abroad. This is what brought him to Mexico City, where he was to deliver a series of lectures on French literature and art.

  Surrealism preached the virtues of poetry over the novel, a genre that Breton called tedious. Nonetheless, he remains best known for his essays and other prose works, beginning with the first Manifesto of Surrealism, published in 1924, and its 1930 sequel. Surrealism’s defining principle was “pure psychic automatism,” which inspired a technique for the spontaneous generation of pictures or texts without any form of conscious control. For Breton and the Surrealists the key to individual freedom and social liberation was the unconscious mind, accessible through interpretations of dreams and explorations of madness. They prized magic coincidence, chance encounters, and “convulsive beauty”—phenomena at the heart of Breton’s several autobiographical adventure journals, whose ruminative account is supplemented by photographs of individuals, locations, and objects encountered by the narrator. The first of these, published in 1928, was Nadja, which Trotsky consulted before the author’s visit and which remains his most popular work.

  Breton met Freud in Vienna in 1921, and the Surrealists adopted him as their patron saint. It was a distinction Freud did not welcome. He rejected Surrealism’s claims for the scientific validity of its “poetic” variation on therapeutic psychoanalysis. After meeting Salvador Dalí in London in 1938 and contemplating his hauntingly beautiful painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus, he confided to Stefan Zweig that until he had been introduced to the fanatical Spaniard, who impressed him with his intriguing symbolism and his “undeniable technical mastery,” he considered the Surrealists to be “absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol) cranks.”