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PARTISAN REVIEW
technical discharge, which would have entitled
him
to five thousand
dollars in severance pay. Such was his integrity." No skilled writer would
juxtapose these sentences, or indeed write the second at all.
Political mythology rarely produces good novels, as Soviet literature
since 1930 has amply demonstrated, and this, in addition to the author's
tin ear, is doubtless responsible for the artistic defects of
The Death of
Kings.
We took ourselves pretty seriously, I suppose, when I worked
for Luce on
Fortune,
but not in the elegant, portentous way of Mr.
Wertenbaker's characters. Like them, we talked a lot, but how differ–
ently! Mostly gossip, shop talk, or arguments in rough-and-ready lan–
guage about limited, concrete matters. Not these lofty Socratic dia–
logues-without a Socrates-about what are principles, really, or whither
the Chinese revolution? I do recall such dialogues, but earlier in
my life-to be exact, at college, and we called them "bull sessions."
There was indeed much conflict on
Fortune
between liberalistic writers
and conservative editors-I left in 1936 partly because I lost a crucial
battle over the final installment of a series I wrote on the U.S. Steel
Corp.-but again it took a more modest form, that of grubby little argu–
ments about data rather than of
grandio~e
expositions of cosmic philoso–
phy. I was also involved, as a Trotskyist, in the left-wing movement of
the '30s, and probably at some time asked someone, "Why did you fight
in Spain?" But damned if I can recall any such scene as that on pp. 230-1
when Berkeley asks Dick Elgin this question. Mter a page of porten–
tous meandering, we get, "'I had to do something, and going to Spain
was the easiest thing.' ... Berkeley refrained from asking what the alter–
natives had been; trust had not gone that far." Finally Dick, after "look–
ing up at the sky a:bove the chasm of Fifth Avenue, as though searching
there for the words to give meaning to an adventure an older man might
think meaningless," reveals he was sore about Franco. "'So I had to do
something, and of the two things that might have helped'-he paused
while their heels rang in unison on the sidewalk-'the other thing I
couldn't do.''' Berkeley, of course, delicately refrains from asking what
"the other thing" was, and it is not until two hundred pages later that
we find it meant spying in the State Department for Soviet Russia. (The
author does not conceal his admiration for such lofty integrity.) I'm
afraid the people I knew on the left, whether Trotskyists or fellow–
travelers, would not have discussed the issue of Spain in this vague and
gentlemanly way, but of course we were real people and not characters
in a liberal soap opera.
Dwight Macdonald
