16
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sat in about the fifth row, near en ough for his voice to hurt my ears &
hi s ges tures to exhaust me. He spoke as if he were wearing boots–
strutted, sneered, screamed, drove his fi st, made fun of poor Oak, held
the audi ence in the palm of hi s h and, made them la ugh at will , dead–
p anning his jokes with true insincerity. And all the whil e he raged &
shouted, what was it he was saying? An old, dead pi ece, spoken, how
man y times?-that the Social Democra ts are the betrayers (Oak's
mistake for identifying himself with them ) and not a thought for the
topic-Does Stalinism fl ow from Bolshevism? There he rather gave
himself away in his contempt for " Capitalist Democracy" & his praise
of " Bolshevik dynamism ." But his manner, hi s personality, was the
mos t effective self-refutati on. T he screaming, the ges tures of pain–
who was it, not so long ago, who made the world shudder a t hi s agon y?
Hitler-the suffering leader, hys terical martyr. The Greeks thought
hys teri a was a disease of the vagina, & they were not far wrong.
Shachtman 's was a sexual exhibiti on, female in its fury &in its need to
overcome & devour the opponent.
Few Trotskyites have a ttained the eminence of having heard the
"Old Man " speak. Those who ha ve- & Shachtman is among them–
are fixed up for life. The pattern : heroi sm, martyrdom, fur y, irony,
contempt, idealism by decibels & Marxist-Lenini st fidelity by [unintel–
li gible]. Each has taken fr om the " Old Man" - with here & there a reli c,
copi ed from pictures, newsreels & biographies, of the transmogrifi ed
Lenin-all that he can assimilate to hi s own personality.
There is something curi ously bourgeois- and like all bo urgeois
sadists-innocent-seeming about Shachtman. He is short & inclines to
be plump & fl abby. His hair, combed straight back, is thinning. His
cheeks are full & rosy; a small , cute nose, a weak chin. Pudgy hands, a
red but rather undefined mouth .
In
repose he looks petul ant : & in
acti on he seems unsuited to hi s role. Tha t hi gh-pitched voice, its ri sing
infl ection & hysteri a, its volume, seem to come not quite from him.
The cut soprano quality is hi s, however; it sugges ts an essenti al
weakness in him, his femininity.
And a philistine, too-to judge from his metaphors: "Tha t's a
subj ect for a
nove l"
(sneered ); "One might as well listen to a
sym–
phony"
(ditto ).
What a fantasti c lie the man is living. He is living in Russ ia, 1917;
he is forever addressing a Soviet of railroad &factory workers, an armed
prol etaria t ready to shoot the works. The who le pilCh of his effort is
tha t of the last push-one ounce more & power is ours. He is insane.
Either he knows the truth or not.
If
he does it may be traditi on that
