MAX EASTMAN:
THE MAN UNDER THE TABLE
1. IN REFERENCE TO MYSELF
Boris Pilnyak
FROM NEW YORK
I
HAVE RECEIVED
a clipping about myself from which
I learn, for the first time, that I have been "bought" and "humiliated" by
the Soviet Union. I am referring to Max Eastman's fantasies. In a lame
attempt to cite witnesess for his statements about me, Eastman writes:
"The facts recounted from this point on were given me by two friends of
Pilnyak . . . . both of whom are in a position to know' them, I think,
better than Joseph Freeman." Let us assume that Eastman's "friends"
actually exist and that they know more about me than Joseph Freeman.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there is one person who knows
more about me than anyone else, and that person is myself. Eastman is
barking at me as if I were dead; as a matter of fact I am alive, in good
health, and in excellent spirits.
Permit me to recall a simple truth. A man--even a man of very
good breeding-who sits under the table sees things differently from the
rest of the company which sits around the table. And there is another
simple truth: with people under the table there is no use talking. After
all, they are people, not dogs; they can't bite your leg. And still another
simple truth is that citations from unnamed and unknown "friends" is
called, in plain speech,
.gossip,
which is not exactly the most impressive
type of testimony.
In his article entitled
The Humiliation of Boris Pilnyak
Eastman
cites me as saying that I have not "the leisure to enter a polemic with
emigres." That is true, particularly as in this case, with emigres from the
revolution.
If
it involved Eastman alone I would leave his gossip where
it started-under the table. However, I am not writing for his sake, but
for those readers who are interested in the Soviet Union.
Eastman begins his fairy-tale in the typical style of the American
bourgeois--with money. He states that my "income is estimated at thirty
thousand rubles a year" and that I am "reputed to be one of the richest
men in the Union." He needs these financial calculations in order to
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