VIRGIL THOMSON
545
Trilling:
When you think o f the advanced intellectual life of America
between 1925 and 1975 who first comes to your mind, Virgil? Among
Americans, tha t is.
Thomson:
Res ident in America?
Tr illing:
No, native to America even if they were resident abroad.
Thomson:
Well , m y closest associa tion during those years was with
Gertrude Stein. Of course I knew Ezra Pound and I read early Eliot–
I n ever went too far with tha t. I 'd like to point out, though , as we go
in to the intell ectua l life, particularly the poets of high repute, that
whereas the magaz ines you mentioned tended to be liberal in politics
in their editori al pages-that is to say, modified socialist-the most
celebrated and probably the most advanced poets of the time-Eliot,
Stein, Pound , Yeats in Eng land-were practically all conservative to
reactionary in their politics. And the same holds for the French.
Claudel, who was a Catholic convert, and Cocteau, whose famil y
was well-to-do, were politically to the right. The surrealists were
socialist without being members of the Party. They were put on the
spo t in 1928 by the Communist Party: either join up or stop talking
Marxism, and they refused to join up . I think two of them left the
surrea lists a t th a t time and did join the Party, Tristan Tzara and
Louis Aragon. And there were two real Trotskyites, Benj amin Peret
and Rene Char. The res t were more or less like our American
liberals, onl y a lillie more extreme because they were trying to blend
Marx with Freud, and a t the same time to take a classical French
proto-revolutionary position, tha t of insulting everybody and every–
thing. Subversiveness was their ideal and their program. There was
no thing like that go ing on here except in the organized Communist
Party.
Trilling:
It was politica ll y programmatic in this country but artisti–
call y programmatic in France, is tha t it? But tell me, you name these
names and we're immedia tely very remote from the names which
come to peop le's minds in writing about the thirties. They talk o f
Pound , Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, as the influential bridge generation
between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, but their
twenti eth century doesn 't begin with the people you've mention ed .
Parti cul arl y a person like Gertrude Stein is seldom spoken of.
Thomson:
You see, Elio t was considerabl y younger than Stein, and
Pound was a lillie bit younger. Gertrude was born in 1874. That puts
her back w ith the musical mas ters like Ives and Schoenberg, in tha t
part o f th e nineteenth century when people really were radical.
Trilling:
What about Stravinsky? You'd certainl y think of him as
