62
PARTISAN REVIEW
"This man is almost as universal as Leonardo da Vinci . . . energy
alone creates an American Rotarian; but it is the spirit of the Revolution
that works and ferments in Trotsky, as it onCe fermented in Danton, Vol.
taire, Shelley, Blake, Walt Whitman ~nd John Brown."
In June of the same year, the editors published an article by Trot.
sky, an appreciation of the poet Yessenin, written just after his suicide;
the article proved, said the editors, that Trotsky is not only "an eco-
nomist and revolutionary general," but also "a deep lover of poetry."
But stop! Joseph Freeman set things right, denouncing Trotsky's lather
favorable estimate of Yessenin. It seems Yessenin was a punk-and
Freeman "proved" it by long quotations from . . . Nikolai Bukharin.
HERBERTSOLOW
CORRESPONDENCE
To the Editors:
The copy of PARTISANREVIEWreached me, and I think it is a fine
magazine, and this was an excellent number. I have not in the least been
disturbed by the political tone, and am not convinced that everyone
who has a quarrel with the
New Masses
is per se a Trotskyist or indeed
anti-Soviet ....
I am pretty sick of name-calling, anyway. And I don't
like thuggish tactics no matter how noble the aims-Page 61 of your
January number is hair-raising. ["The Case of William Carlos Williams"
-Ed. ] ...
Myself, I was brought up Catholic with a Jesuit instructor
and confessor, and I learned one thing well:
the end does not justify the
means.
If that is not quite what I was supposed to learn, it is a pity, of
course ....
Doing evil that good may come is the most obvious of all
fallacies. The good is problematical, no one can guarantee it: but the
end having once been gained, the habit of doing evil remains. Let me
tell you frankly, I am not a Trotskyist, but I am not a Stalinist, either.
(According to the
New Masses
line of reasoning, I suppose this makes
of me a Fascist, or a Hitlerite, or an advocate of lynching, or a capitalist,
or an anti-Semite, or a person who beats children. Oddly enough, I am
none of these things, either.) And some of the reasons for this, after all
my years of intense sympathy with the Soviet regime, are given very
clearly and sharply in Gide's
U.S.S.R. Reconsidered.
[January, 1938,
issue.--Ed. ]
I am not going into this any further, at the moment. What I want
to say now is that I am delighted with the PARTISANREVIEW And
I shall be very pleased to send you a story when I have one .
Feb. 12, 1938. Houston, Texas
KATHERINEANNE PORTER
On the train
13 February, 1938.
Comrades:
To-night for the first time I had a chance to pick up PARTISAN
REVIEWfor February, 1938. Will you allow me to comment on one thing
