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PARTISAN REVIEW
gangs. They were antagonists, but kindred. Some of us, in fact,
aspired to their condition. Then, in the late forties and early fifties,
the neighborhood changed; my friends scattered or were killed by
cops or Koreans or each other; and I spent a year at the City College
of New York.
There were many political students at City College, but I did
not associate with them: the only sport they were good at was ping–
pong. After the point-shaving basketball scandals, City College
could no longer afford to maintain a football team; I transferred to a
small college up north on the promise of an athletic scholarship.
There were a number of politicals there too, but they cultivated a
scruffy, unathletic look, and the women among them were homely.
Not that with my pegged pants, blue suede stampers, and duck's ass
haircut, I was exactly the cynosure of every eye either. (The one
other student who dressed as I did ran a football pool and absconded
with the yearbook money.) I can't remember anybody saying much
about the events in Eastern Europe, the McCarthy hearings, or the
Korean War. (I got thrown out of R.O.T.C . for appearing on
parade not quite sober and with my pants pressed sideways .) We
were too busy talking about the dangers and inevitability of conform–
ity. The orthodox line among my new friends, mostly sons and daugh–
ters of petty upstate burghers, was that the United States and the
Soviet Union were each day, in every way, getting more and more
to resemble each other. The correct way of announcing this was with
a wry and complacent sigh.
During the late fifties I did time in graduate school, worked at
odd jobs, and ran with the Beats in Greenwich Village, none of
which activities did much to raise my political consciousness. After I
began to work at Columbia University, my senior colleagues tried to
take me in hand. Quentin Anderson convinced me that you were
more likely to get out the truth if you spoke for yourself, rather than
from under the protective cover of a party or -ism. For a priggish
week or two I distrusted Lionel Trilling, because of the way he pro–
nounced his vowels . He taught me, by example, to value both the
long view and Orwell's closeup lucidity, even though he also talked
me into reading Hegel. He convinced me that it was legitimate to
assert a political value you knew to be suspended over the void, that
it was still permissable to believe in heroes, as I believed in him, so
long as your faith was enriched by irony. Sagacious F . W. Dupee,
whose assistant I became, talked me into reading Trotsky's
History of
the Russian Revolution,
among other things.
