804
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Party for purely moral reasons. This is typical of me. Because
I said , if I really do have this view of the world , which I do, my
place is there too. You know, I have to suffer with them . Of
course, I didn't suffer anything.
DT:
But didn't Trotsky follow the Soviet line about war : if the Soviet
Union was involved in a war, then one had to be on the side of the
Soviet Union?
DM:
Right . I joined the Trotskyist Party just when this split was be–
ginning; a faction fight did break out over exactly that point, the
invasion of Finland. And of course I was on the side against
Trotsky. Trotsky said it was a revolutionary army that was invad–
ing Finland, and we said, it's not a revolutionary army that in–
vades a cou-rftry, it's an imperialist army, and even the cats and
dogs don't stay to be liberated. Oh, it drove Trotsky wild.
DT:
But before the split in the Trotskyists you went down to Mex–
ico, didn't you, for the hearings of the Trotsky Defense Commit–
tee?
DM:
No, I didn't go down. As usual. I never do anything; I miss
everything.
DT:
But you were a member of the Trotsky Defense Committee.
DM:
Oh sure , I joined the Committee .
DT:
When did you first meet Trotsky?
DM:
I never met him . I always miss everything.
DT:
Dwight, you came very substantially from the middle class–
DM:
My mother was upper middle. My father too.
DT:
And as far back as what-Exeter? Yale?-you began to feel
some kind of separation from the class in which you were bred–
DM:
No, not with the class. Just as an intellectual. But that's nat–
ural, of course.
DT:
Was this a separation from the bourgeois ethic?
DM:
No, not at all.
If
anything, I daresay I was rather a priggish
conservative. Certainly at Exeter and Yale, I despised my class–
mates.
DT:
You felt they were stupid?
DM:
Not stupid but they were just ordinary guys and I was quite a
bright fellow. I just had the biggest contempt for them.
DT:
And certainly when you went to
Fortune
you couldn't have had
a very active principle of opposition to the bourgeois world or you
wouldn't have been able to take that job?
DM:
Well, first of all, that wouldn't be possible. I got the job in
1929, at the depth of the Depression . I would have taken any job.
I had no money and I had to support my mother.
