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persecuted by McCarth y in the fifti es. T hey can 't believe they were
the cultural power they actua ll y were.
Thomson:
New York was Stalinist. T he T ro tskyite center was Boston
and , for union matters, Minneapo lis.
Tr illing:
Yes, the T ro tskyites had the transpo rt workers in Minneapo–
lis; that was their one strong union , the onl y one they reall y
controll ed . But they had grea t power in New York in the intell ectual
world. They formul a ted the dissident th eory.
Thomson:
Trotsky was a far more intelli gent intell ectual than Stalin ,
and probabl y even th an Lenin. He was very verbal.
Trilling:
How were you able to work as comfortably as you did , when
you weren 't a Sta linist, with a ll these Stalinists who were around
you ? Wha t was your method ?
Thomson:
The same way I worked with Jesuits. I get on beautifull y
with Jesuits. I don 't get along with Dominicans very well ; I find
them tri cky. .. .
Tr illing:
Now I want to go to the fo rti es for a minute. When you were
writing for the
H erald Tr ibune,
earning your li ving as a writer, did
you feel th a t you were p art of the New York intell ectual community
and th at you had a natural place in it ?
Thomson:
My fan mail to ld me tha t I did. I didn 't seek to join the
intell ectual ga th erings. Heaven knows I had enough to do to carry
on my own musica l life and my journa li sti c wo rk.
Trilling:
Yo u didn 't have a sense tha t the intell ectual life was a co terie
life?
Thomson:
Oh , I did indeed.
T ri lling:
But you sa id, ''I'm going to fi ght tha t. " Is tha t the idea?
Thomson:
I was n 't fi ghting it; I was just by-pass ing it.
Tr illing:
Did you know tha t a t some time-I believe it was in the
fifti es -Ro bert Lowell and Willi am Meredith were g iven fellowships
o r grants or something to go to the opera all th e time in the hope that
they mi ght write libretti for operas ?
Thomson:
These were the Metropo litan 's ideas, yes.
Trilling:
This came in response to a sense th at there was a grea t rift
between poe ts and composers.
Thomson:
There was a rift between poets and the opera, not between
poets and composers. Poe ts' poetry is the bes t evidence. It 's been set
to music frequentl y by very good composers. But poets lost touch
with th e opera in Eng lish back in the seventeenth century. The poets
th a t you and I have known , and even their predecessors for fifty or
one hundred years, were so compl etely egocentri c, so interes ted in
th eir own pos iti on in the idea l world , th a t they couldn 't write a
