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PARTISAN REVIEW
tee for Defense of Leon Trotsky, of which Farrell was a member, and
which had sent a commission, headed by Dewey, to hear Trotsky's
rebuttal of the charges made against him in the Moscow show trials.
In
startling confessions, Old Bolsheviks had accused Trotsky of conspir–
ing with them and with Germany and Japan to destroy the Soviet
Union. Much of the evidence was clearly impossible on the face of it.
The Commission published a book-length report, written by Suzanne
LaFollette, entitled
Not Guilty.
Farrell had been kept
0(£
the Commission as irresponsible, but
being then at the height of his reputation and influence, went along
anyway. His Studs Lonigan trilogy, published two years before, had
been a huge success. The even more ambitious Danny O 'Neill series
was well under way. Bubbling over with ideas and satiric inventions,
Farrell appeared in a diversity of journals, a g leeful gadfly stinging the
literary Left and Right alike.
What brought Farrell
to
Coyoacan, what followed from it, and
how Deweyism and Trotskyism warred in Farrell's soul during his
intensely political decade from 1934 to 1944, make the substance of this
short book. Alan M. Wald, himself something of a Trotskyist, thinks
that the "other side" of Farrell , the political side, has been too much
neglected by students of his fiction.
In
any event Wald's scholarly
reconstruction is apposite, now that there is a good dea l of nosta lgic
interest, most of it wrong-headed, in the Left politics of that time.
Farrell came by his Dewey ism naturally. A born Chicagoan, he
studied Dewey, Veblen, and George Herbert Mead at the University of
Chicago, where they had all been teachers. Dewey himself had gone on
to
Columbia University in 1903, the year before Farrell was born , and
worked much later with Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, Corliss Lamont,
and Meyer Schapiro, all of whom were
to
be important in the political
milieu that Farrell entered when he came to New York in 1932. At
Chicago, Farrell had also read some Nietzsche, and been fascinated by
the French Revolution. He had thought of giving up fi ction and
becoming a philosopher.
In
the summer of 1934, Farrell met George Novack a t Yaddo,
where Novack, soon
to
become a leading Trotskyist, had found himself
"the lone oppositionist amidst thirteen Communist members or sym–
pathizers." Farrell formed with Novack the same sort of intense
intellectual fri endship that he was already having with Meyer Scha–
piro. Both his mentors were members of a revolutionary club organized
by Sidney Hook, which included among its members (Wald loves
names) Lewis Corey, Diana Trilling, George S. Counts, Felix Morrow,
