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thought they might even have been learning from
him
a quality of re–
laxation that he himself assuredly did not possess.
In
the Socialist movement, where his rather heavy type of
charm was more familiar, and the issues were after all more important,
his
personality necessarily took on a greater complexity. I was too
young to know anything directly of his more active years; for me,
"the movement" stretched back into a limitless past which, though
it had in concrete ways continued into the present, was in its essence
as remote from me as for instance my father's first marriage.
In
that
past he had talked on the street comers to the unresponding masses,
for whom he nevertheless retained a tender solicitude, and he had met
"historical" figures like Emma Goldman and Trotsky and Debs.
When I grew of an age to be a Socialist myself ,and asked
him
about
these heroic progenitors, his answer expressed an easy detachment
that eventually came to seem typical of his relation to the world of
radicalism. He saw Emma Goldman as
.a
"crazy" and "loose"
Bohemian; Trotsky he remembered as a brilliant and egotistical
man entirely incapable of respecting the opinions of others; and
his great admiration of Debs w,as mingled with a familiar contempt
because Debs had been a drunkard-in this there was surely some
Jewish feeling about the "weaker" moral fiber of the
goyim.
Tow:ard himself
also,
in some contexts, he was capable of
a similar detachment. My own image of politics w,as strongly
af–
fected by his refusal to take himself seriously as a candidate for
public office; once, when he was running for Congress, he went so
far as to deny his candidacy, explaining to a Republican business
acquaintance that the name on the ballot belonged to "some crazy
cousin of mine"-essentially, I think, this was an act not of cowardice
but of mere good nature. Indeed, a certain tone of irony seems to have
been characteristic of the Socialist movement as a whole; few of its
adherents regarded it with absolute seriousness, and many of its
peculiar virtues had their source in the expectation of failure. When
my father took me to shake hands with Norman Thomas (I imagine
it was in 1928, when I was eleven), my excitement at the meeting
was already tempered with an appreciation of the absurdity–
though an "honorable" absurdity-of Thomas' endless running for
office.
Sometimes, falling naturally into the rhetoric of Socialism, my
