FROM AN AUTUMN JOURNAL
27
indeed, I should think no one could read it and be left with any
doubt that Lattimore consistently and consciously undertook to do
what the Soviet Union wanted done in the IPR. Not that Lattimore
was a spy or an agent or even a member of the Communist Party–
nothing so simple as that. He was something far more dangerous
because so much more complicated-an "honest" man, an "in–
dependent" thinker in a position of power whose idealism just hap–
pened to coincide with the Russian realism: the woods were once
full of them. And even today it is generally supposed to be the
part of political decency to defend these men with all the weapons
democracy provides. Yet of course there is no feasible liberal weapon
for legislating our Lattimores out of existence without simultan–
eously legislating true independence of thought out of existence too.
The only responsible means for combating the Stalinized intellectual
is exposure-education, education and more education.
October 31
The other day we learned we may soon be able to get a larger
apartment, something we have been desperately wanting. The tenant
has just died, aged 93, but leaving a co-tenant of almost equal age
on whose failing health we now pin our hopes. I am afraid I shock
my friends by my frank ghoulishness-they look at me the way I
must look at
J.
when he asks me how the chicken was killed, did
the butcher shoot it, and I answer ever-so-carefully no, I guess its
head was cut off, only to have him bubble: "With an ax, Mommy?"
Our plans for refurnishing if and when the new place is avail–
able create a considerable crisis between
L.
and me. Apparently he
had no sooner heard of the possibility of our moving than off he
rushed to the library and read Mary Wright's recent volume on func–
tional living. Suddenly his fantasy life is all compounded of hidden
storage cabinets, composition floorings and furniture so light it can
be
lifted by the frailest housewife. But I, though the housewife in
question, stay with myoid dream of a Madame Recamier sofa up–
holstered in peach-colored velvet and, under my feet, the mellowest
of soft old rugs. And what about
J.
riding his bicycle through the
living-room, L. demands fiercely as I tell him my designs. What do
I plan to do about
that?
Oh, appeal to his budding sensibilities, I
