William Phillips
THE FOX AND TH E GRAPE
It
was a steaming night, with a smell of the East in the
air. The city was sleepless, and people drifted through the streets like
actors in a slow-motion dream.
A little after midnight, Jack Jackson was walking along Broad–
way above Times Square. He did not seem to know where he was
going, as he pushed his way mechanically through the crowd. But
his
eyes kept rolling furtively, as though they had been trained to
act independently of
his
mind.
Jackson had just come from a Communist meeting called to
lay down a new "line."
It
was a routine meeting, yet it left him
uneasy, like the first one he had gone to ten years ago, when he
suddenly felt cut off from everything he had taken for granted. Then,
too, he had gone off alone and found himself walking aimlessly into
the night.
Now Jackson was a functionary, a veteran of many shifts and
turns; and even though the party was making a complete somersault,
abandoning its revolutionary program for a broad popular front,
Jackson permitted himself fewer doubts about the new line than
about the laws of gravity.
In
a short but ponderous speech, he had
repeated the official explanation of the new policy, which denied any
real change, and when he was finished, he had convinced hiinself
he had .always believed in the new line.
The only question on which there was disagreement at the meet–
ing was whether the party should welcome into the fold writers who
did not believe in proletarian literature. When Jackson was asked
his
opinion, he elaborately summed up the arguments on both sides,
concluding with the observation that on the one hand there was one
approach, on the other hand there was another. As soon as he was
