802
PARTISAN REVIEW
the first installment of
Politics Past,
the two-part memoir of your
experience of radical politics in the thirties and forties , in
En–
counter;
you called it "Reminiscence of Politics Past" and gave it
the rather arch subtitle, "A Backward Glance at Roads Once
Travelled More than Now." I reviewed it in
The New Leader
when
it came out as a book and I remarked that archness was not what I
expected of Dwight Macdonald . I also didn't expect this kind of
frivolousness about his past from a serious man.
DM:
I remember that review.
If
I might say so, I thought it showed a
certain lack of humor on your part . I was making fun of myself all
the way through because you know, it was called
Memoirs of a
Revolutionary,
the book was, and I was constantly making fun of
the pretenses of these little groups, including the Trotskyists . Yet
I had been part of it. But that doesn't mean I didn't learn a lot and
that I wasn't perfectly serious .
DT:
Well, it was followed by a long letter from you and a rebuttal by
me. I said you seemed embarrassed by your recollection of
yourself as a Marxist and could treat that period of your life only
with irony or humor.
DM:
But I wasn't embarrassed at all. On the contrary, I learned a
great deal in those years as a Trotskyist. That was my second big
intellectual weapon . The first was Exeter and the other school was
the Marxist school, and I wasn't at all embarrassed about it.
D T:
You yourself said I should go on and read the second part of
your memoir, that that was when life became serious. You said
that it wasn't until the forties that politics actually became seri–
ous- that's the chief point I want to raise here. We all did many
things in the radical movement that are hilariously funny when
we look back on them. But it was a very serious time, the period of
the Depression. And we came to our Marxism in the Depression.
DM:
But I wasn't at all involved until 1936. I had no interest in
politics at all when I was on
Fortune
from '29 to '36. I said I became
radicalized-
DT:
Isn't that what we're talking about?
DM:
Well yes, I suppose I did become a
mild
fellow-traveller. But
it didn't amount to anything. In fact, I remember that they [the
Communists] tried to recruit me and they let me into a branch
meeting, which was a big honor in a very secret time, and when I
left I said to myself, my God, these people, they're just simply
wobbits, they don't have any brains and they're scared to death of
each other and they have no sense of humor, no
life!
How could
