DIANA TRILLING
361
children. But professionally we were nowhere. I had no professional
commitment of any sort, and although Lionel had published a great deal,
more than many of his literary contemporaries, he had not made himself
felt in the writing community: nothing he wrote was referred to by other
writers, and no one sought him out for any activity connected with the
literary life. But there were few of our fifteen or sixteen fellow guests at
Yaddo who had as yet advanced far in their careers. The only one who
even approached fame was Evelyn Scott, a Southern novelist who had
written a much-praised novel,
The Wave;
we could none of us have fore–
seen that in the next years she would be written out of American literary
history as thoroughly as dissidents in Stalin's Russia were written out of
Soviet history. Malcolm Cowley, also at Yaddo that summer, had already
acquired a modest renown as a poet and critic, and Sidney Hook was be–
ginning to be known as a teacher of philosophy at New York University.
Marc Blitzstein was at the start of his career as a composer, and B. H.
Haggin had not yet begun his long and distinguished career as the music
critic of the
Nation.
Max Lerner had yet to win recognition as a journalist.
We were a promising group, not a company of stars. Sassy and provoca–
tive, Blitzstein was the most entertaining of the guests. Hook was the
most vigorous-minded. Long a student of the philosophy ofJohn Dewey,
he had recently become a Marxist. In the course of the summer he con–
verted several of us, including Lionel and me, to Communism.
The thirties made Communists of many Americans, not so much
among the working classes in which, with the breakdown of the econ–
omy, one might perhaps have expected to find a desire for revolution, but
among intellectuals and other members of the opinion-forming classes. In
the wake of the stock-market crash, many intellectuals became disaffected
born
capitalism and turned to Marxism as the remedy for our manifestly
&u1ty
system of social and economic organization. It was now no longer a
mark
of moral superiority for writers and artists to stay aloof from politics;
on the contrary, it was imperative that they have political opinions and
make them known. To this day we still speak blithely of "card-carrying
Communists," as if in the earlier years of this century to have been a
dedicated Communist meant that one had to be a member of the
Communist Party. Actually, only a small minority, a handful of
Communist sympathizers, were Party members. The great majority were
iIlow travelers, people who in one or another degree were committed to
the
Communist cause and who, whether they were wholly conscious of it
or not, took their direction from the Party but did not submit to its dis–
cipline. This was how the Soviet Union wanted it. Even early in the
decade, but increasingly as time went on, Stalin was more interested in
