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PARTISAN REVIEW
done, one of the younger women, known for her bluntness, especially
to men, snapped at him, "We are aware, Comrade Jackson, that we
have two hands. What we want to know is which hand." Jackson
looked around to see if everyone was laughing at him.
Before the meeting was over, Jackson again reassured everyone
of his faith in the new line, but still he could not conceal a preference
for the old tough attitude toward non-Communists. For he actually
regarded every non-Communist as a personal representative of the
counter-revolution. He also did not like the idea of the party now
becoming more respectable: unlike most of his fellow Communists
who were really glad to become socially acceptable, he felt compro–
mised by not being at war with the rest of society. Even in the party,
Jackson was known as a chronic leftist, addicted to orthodoxy
and
militancy, which in his mind were one.
Jackson had some reputation as a Marxist theoretician, partly
because he had made a career of finding textual support in the writ–
ings of Marx and Engels for every maneuver of the party, but mostly
because he had appointed himself a watchdog of Communist theory,
protecting it against what he felt was the constant threat of infiltra–
tion by bourgeois ideas. Over the years, he had developed a remark–
able gift for smelling out the minutest deviations, which he hated
almost as much as capitalism.
Very little was known about Jackson's past. One rumor was
that he had been a bank clerk, another a book salesman. He did not
seem to have had very much schooling, at least not enough to justify
his role as an expert on every subject. He had the pomposity of a
self-educated man, talking over his head, in a strange pedantic com–
bination of official jargon and homemade thinking. Still, he was
often invited to lecture before professional groups, who were usually
impressed by
his
revolutionary rhetoric and his intimate knowledge
of party history.
But he was most at home in an atmosphere of conspiracy. Even
when there was no need of it, he acted the part of the conspirator,
whispering out of the corner of his mouth, looking around him when
he talked, endlessly conniving, and never committing himself to a
position until he was sure it was safe, that is, in line with the most
powerful faction in the party. Innocent party members mistook
his
conspiratorial air for political gravity. But those in the know made
