DIANA TRILLING
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anybody live in this airless atmosphere? Of course, I had no in–
tention of joining them . What I did was the usual kind of liberal
things like- they gave a pay party for Angelo Herndon and for
the silicosis business- that kind of stuff.
DT:
The fact is , though, that it was in that period in the thirties that
you got your grounding in Marxism, wasn't it?
DM:
No, not until '37 .
DT:
You mean that you sprang full-blown into the Trotskyite move–
ment?
DM:
Yes. I first read Marx on a summer vacation abroad in 1935.
But it was quite boring. Not my style at all. It was the Moscow
trials that awakened the old moralist in me . My attitude, by the
way, toward politics has always been extremely moralistic. I'm a
very moralistic guy. So I was appalled by what I soon learned
about Trotsky and the Moscow trials .
DT:
So as soon as you were really learning about the Soviet Union
you were learning it in the spirit of dissent from it?
DM:
Yes, sure.
DT:
That was of course not the common experience. The common
experience was that one became a fellow traveller, one went along
with it, and then became disillusioned.
DM:
Well, you can read an article I wrote about the Communist
Party in
Fortune
around 1934 with illustrations by Walker Evans .
We went up to Camp- it was a camp for the families of Com–
munists. Don't-give-a-care Camp ...
DT:
It was called
Camp Nicht gedaiget,
Camp Not-to-Worry . (Laugh–
ter.)
DM:
Anyway, this article was on the Communist Party and the
faction parties: the Trotskyists and the Gitlowites and the Weis–
bordites . Some of those. And my attitude towards all of them was
certainly not respectful. I mean, it's not Communist-baiting- I
wasn't even interested enough to be against it.
If
anything, I sup–
pose I thought, well, they must have something if they have all
that country and so on . Well, read it.
It
certainly wasn't en–
thusiastic, it was ironical. The second time I read Marx was when
I was trying to decide whether to join the Trotskyist Party in the
fall of 1939 and finally I decided that I
really,
on the whole , was
not a Marxist. I didn't like their rather arrogant, know-it-all tone .
I hated the whole scientific pretensions of the thing. I joined the
Trotskyist Party, typically, characteristically, after the pact and
when war had broken out. The British had declared war. I joined
