800
PARTISAN REVIEW
DT:
And after that?
DM:
Well, first I was on
Fortune
magazine, working for Henry Luce
from 1929 through 1936. Then I resigned because I felt I'd gotten
enough out of it. I should have resigned a couple of years earlier. I
was making ten thousand bucks a year, which was quite a lot for
then. My mother thought I was crazy. Then I immediately be–
came involved in trying to write a history of the steel industry in
the United States, which I spent at least half a year on; it never
came to anything. Then the Moscow Trials came along, and I
joined the Trotsky Defense Committee. Then I got involved in
Partisan Review.
DT:
What year was that, 1937?
DM:
The end of 1937, when Dupee and George Morris, both of
whom were Yale friends of mine, joined with Philip Rahv and
William Phillips to take it away from the Communists . It had
really been suspended for a year. Rahv and Phillips had a mailing
list which, after all, is all that matters in such a magazine. Morris
financed the magazine . I left in 1943 because I was the only one of
the editors who was so against the war.
DT:
You went on to found
Politics
in '44? You stayed with that until
1949?
DM:
Yes. That was a one-man thing.
DT:
Then what?
DM:
I became a staff writer for
The New Yorker
although in the first
issue of
Partisan Review
I had had an article satirizing and analyz–
ing the first articles in
The New Yorker,
called "Laugh and Lie
Down." Precisely for that reason, I discovered later, Shawn was
delighted to offer me a job as staff writer. My period of real pro–
ductivity there was from '50 to '60. I wanted to be the movie critic,
but for some reason they wouldn't let me do it. So I became the
movie critic at
Esquire.
DT:
What year was that?
DM:
'60 to '66. Then I did the political column: that lasted about a
year and a half. After that, since I couldn't write-
DT:
You had a writing block for a while?
DM:
I had a writing block then and turned to teaching. I did a great
deal of teaching: Buffalo, Texas, California, Santa Cruz, and
New York.
DT:
Did you teach English literature or literature and politics?
DM:
I had three courses that I managed well. I taught a sort of gen–
eral course in Masterpieces of the Film. And I invented two
