808
PARTISAN REVIEW
with men he could be pretty damn tough . And he had a power
complex too. He thought power was a big thing. He was very
paranoiac, very suspicious, as power people are.
DT:
Tell me about the other people you knew around
PR .
Isaac
Rosenfeld? His
Passage j}om Home
was one of the most talented
first novels of the period. He was very crazy and very gifted .
DM:
Very crazy, yes. The one thing I remember distinctly about
him is the phase when he was an orgone box guy.
DT:
Did you ever get into an orgone box?
DM:
Oh sure . I sat there for an hour and when I came out, he said ,
how do you feel? And I said, just the same, I feel sort of hot. After
all, it's hot sitting in a telephone booth. And his face fell and he
said, why I thought you looked as if your whole vitality was re–
vived.
DT:
Who else believed in the orgone box? Did Saul Bellow? Wasn't
Saul more rationalistic than that?
DM:
Yes . But there were a lot of Reichians around. Of course ,
Reich was a lot more than the orgone box. He was brilliant.
DT:
Brilliant and crazy .
DM:
He wasn't crazy in his earlier books; he became crazy when
he got to this country. But his analysis of repressed sex and fas–
cism was an extremely interesting book.
D T:
Did you know Saul Bellow?
DM:
I knew him slightly. We published his first stuff, you know.
"The Mexican General," I think, was one of his first published
things. Of course, the most outstanding thing about Saul Bellow
is his sensitivity to criticism. I remember a time at some party; I'd
been reading
Augie March
and I made some criticism, but
surround–
ing
it with garlands of praise. He said, well, so that's what you
think of me, that's the gratitude I get for publishing in your maga–
zine!
DT:
You had quite a bit in the earliest issues of
Politics
about this
new third form of state power which is not socialism but also not
democracy.
DM:
Bureaucratic collectivism. I had a long piece in
Partisan Review
about it which came from material I did for the Trotskyists. The
Trotskyists would only publish a quarter of it, and they said, it
was really so dull and I didn't know my stuff, and I said, "I'm the
only professional writer you've ever had, and I couldn't possibly
write an article as dull as everybody else on this goddamn maga–
zine."
