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ones; in fact, the declarations were urgent and passionate.) Diana
Trilling, with great energy of mind and at considerable length, urged
upon the group the demonic theory of Communism and the Soviet Union
and further seemed to insist that the debate about our national destiny,
insofar as Russia was concerned, should remain static, a contest between
good and evil.
If
I understood it correctly, the drift of the opinion was
much the same as that expressed previously in Mrs. Trilling's occasional
political pieces. She seems to have found, back in time, the meaning
of the struggle and to consider it settled, as if it were some issue of past
history and all the research had been done. Nuclear war played no
special part in her vivid picture. What she feared was the inner weaken–
ing of the intellectual's will to resist, a weakening due in part to the cold
war, the need for negotiation, the necessity-at least as some saw it-for
co-existence.
I bring this matter up because David Riesman played a role; he was
a sort of absent ghost, floating in and out of the argument, and threaten–
ing Mrs. Trilling's religious view of the political subject. Many other
minds might threaten her vision, but it was most dramatic to find
Riesman prominently and urgently doing so in his current writings. It
was unexpected because he had in the past been impatient with radical
criticism and fear, and even scornful at times of intransigence or utopian
vision. But
now-ah, per/idol
In an article in
Commentary
last year,
Riesman (with Michael Maccoby) had written that the political at–
mosphere in America was much less healthy than in England. In England
one could undertake "an active discussion ... of alternatives to nuclear
war, with the proposals ranging from unilateral disarmament to diplo–
matic maneuvers aimed at easing particular points of tension in the
cold war, whether in China or in Germany." Riesman found our ability
to deal sensibly with the issue of Communism much inferior to the
British. "Even after the Klaus Fuchs case, they [the British] in effect
decided that they would rather risk losing a few secrets to a few spies
than turn the country upside down in the alleged hope of flushing all
enemy agents out."
As I remember Mrs. Trilling's paper, she was particularly disturbed
by Riesman's psychological analysis, in the same
Commentary
article, of
the issue of "hard and soft anti-communism." This phrase, or these
phrases, are most unfortunate and of course contain almost infinite
comic possibilities disconcerting to the 11m'mal discussion-group atmos–
phere. The possibilities were not lost on the author of
The Lonely Crowd,
even though he forbore to push them too far. He noted that "American
men seem constantly pursued by the fear of unmanliness, and therefore
