272
DAVID BRONSEN
thought the Party stood for. I carefully gathered the data of his life
as well as my observations concerning him, and wrote about a hundred
pages of manuscript. He had become an organizer for the Party, and
several times I went along with him to distribute leaflets on the water–
front, where I used the Italian I had been studying on my own to make
contacts with the longshoreman. There was no CIO at that time, and
the Party was espousing the cause of industrial unions on the water–
front, in the same way that Harry Bridges had been doing on the West
Coast.
One day while I was accompanying
him
on his assignment, my
"character," whose instincts for danger were better than mine, warned
me, "Better stay close to me." With a hook for a hand he was still a
man that no one was likely to cross. But I wandered away from him
in the process of handing out the leaflets.
The aims of the Communist Party had been coming into conflict
with those of the AFL, which was well entrenched among the long–
shoremen. I was approached by one of the business agents of the
AFL,
who asked me for a leaflet. When I held it out to him he belted me
across the face, smashed my glasses and proceeded to beat me up, all
the time driving me across the highway as he pounded away at me. By
the time my friend came running towards me the incident was over,
but for a man of sensibility no further lesson was needed about the ani–
mosity and antagonism that arise from a struggle over vested interests.
In the meantime, Ballou had gone bankrupt and sold Scribner's
the rights to my second book. During the negotiations I had submitted
the unfinished manuscript to Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins, who
was so enthusiastic that he predicted the novel would be one of the
outstanding books in contemporary American fiction. The poor man–
he died without getting the rest of the manuscript. Once the contract
was signed and Ballou was paid, I did not write another word. I had
mapped out in detail the course I was to follow in each chapter of the
book, but I seemed to have arrived at an utter impasse.
Only after completing all the rest of
Call It Sleep
did I go back
and write the prologue. But after doing the first hundred pages of the
second book I changed directions and did the prologue as a pretext for
not going on to Section II.
My second book was supposed to be a short but substantial novel,
that I was going to follow with a longer one, for which I had
been
saving myself. This work was to be far more ambitious and of greater
scope; in it I would deal with the Jewish intellectual embracing
many
more elements of the social world. But my second novel was not getting
