WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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was sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered, "William, you aren't a
socialist?" - as though he couldn't believe I had fallen so low. I guess I
was overwhelmed by Howe's questioning of my moral credentials and by
the prevailing temper of the time, so I said yes, I was a socialist. This was
a long time ago.
Howe was both a skeptic and a believer, which, I take it, is a mark of
a true intellectual, though he recently had an excess of faith. Nevertheless,
he was one of our outstanding intellectual figures, in the adversary tradi–
tion - a welcome ally and a fierce opponent.
Histories
of
the Left
Three more books have appeared dealing with the
history of the left in America:
The Rise and Fall of the American
Left
by
John Patrick Diggins (W. W. Norton),
The Responsibility of Intellectuals:
Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment
by Alan Wald
(Humanities Press), and
V.
F.
Calverton: Radical in the American Grain
by
Leonard Wilcox (Temple University Press). They treat different aspects of
the subject, and each has its own merits and flaws. Diggins's book, espe–
cially, has much valuable infonnation. But what I find most significant is
the respect with which they write about the thirties. And, though they
are critical of the Soviet Union and the Communists, they all advocate
the extension of the earlier radicalism. Wald even looks to a renaissance of
working-class writing. This piety toward the radical past is especially odd
when one considers the collapse of the Communist system and
Communist dreams in the former Soviet Union and the fonner occupied
satellites. We might recall Auden's reference to the thirties as a "low, dis–
honest decade."
Apparently, ideology is not at an end. How else can we understand
the disparity between the collapse of the utopian idea and the clinging to
it by many academics? As an explanation, I have suggested the hold on
the liberal imagination since the French Revolution of the idea of the
moral superiority of the left. But this leaves unanswered the question of
why this hold has persisted. It has occurred to me that there might be
another explanation. Perhaps the faithful and the orthodox have never
experienced intimately the actual Communist movement. It is notewor–
thy that anti-Communism has been exceptionally strong among former
Communists. This even has led to the labeling of some of them as reac–
tionary by the leftists who have been impervious to historical change.
This direct experience would of course explain why there are so few
Marxists in the fonner Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Nadezhda
Mandelstam, in her monumental memoir,
Hope Against Hope,
for exam-
