EASTMAN VS. FARRELL
207
6. "But they do not pursue the task systematically, and with a real
intent to
t~ckle
the problem which it poses for them.... Eastman discusses
the beard of Karl Marx.... These men render trivial the discussions and
controversies which rage over the most ·serious problems which the human
race faces in this era."
As a psychological novelist, and a real person, you know quite well
that if my remark about Marx's beard was in momentary bad taste, the
sole reason is my impatience of idolatry and too great fondness for a
smile. The picture of a man who broaches the long postponed question of
the relation between socialist theory and the sciences of human behavior
employing an allusion to Marx's beard in order to render his own discus–
sion trivial, has no relation either to me, or to any other conceivable
reality. It is all a part of the new art, so highly developed in Moscow, of
hocus pocus vilification.
Your making an amalgam of Van Wyck Brooks and me, and falsify–
ing my whole literary and political life-attitude on the basis of that trick
and these gross inventions, has the supreme merit, from my point of view,
that it does not end in the death-sentence. Otherwise it is both morally
and intellectually on a level with the Moscow trials.
And that, I beg to warn you, is where you are coming out, if you
persist in dodging your own inmost thoughts-divorcing your public
opinions from your private sense of reality. You are coming out in a little
gang of sectarian bigots, pretending to esoteric insight but in reality hiding
behind ideas from facts, dismissing for that reason as apostates, dismissing
without honorable debate-and in the long run, if you get the power,
executing without trial (it is the same thing writ large) -those who ·appeal
against your sacred dogmas to living fact and reason. You can not oppose
totalitarianism and cling to the systems of thought and action that directly
r.nd unquestionably lead to it.
If
you are going to discuss real programs
with real people you have got to make a choice.
A new radical movement must inevitably take form in this country,
based on a straight-out recognition that Marxism is unscientific and com–
plete collectivism a failure, a movement that will find its theoretical guid–
ance in all the anthropological sciences, not just economics, and which
will oppose with arrogance the morbid and monstrous overgrowth of the
state. You ought to have a place in it. You don't belong with the near-
5ighted cranks and cross-patches, the wounded veterans of an exploded
theology.
Yours sincerely,
MAX EASTMAN
