DIANA TRILLING
363
the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a
Communist-front organization with which we were connected between
mid-1932 and the spring of 1933, we were sufficiently close to the Party
to become well-acquainted with its operations. Lionel's understanding of
the ways in which Stalinism worked within the culture was of course
central to his novel,
The Middle oj the Journey,
and made a connecting
theme among the essays in the most widely read of his critical volumes,
The Liberal Imagination.
As fiction critic of the
Nation
in the forties, I
would write as an avowed anti-Communist, and as a freelance writer after
I left the
Nation
I frequently dealt with issues of Communism and anti–
Communism. In the mid-fifties I became a member of the Executive
Board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, whose parent
organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was a long unacknowl–
edged child of the CIA. This was during a brief period in the history of
the CIA when that organization was unaccustomedly ambivalent about its
relation to Communism. Unlike the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the
American Committee for Cultural Freedom was always forthrightly and
unambiguously anti-Communist.
It
w~s
not easy through
all
these years to
be an anti-Communist in a predominantly "liberal" intellectual commu–
nity. It meant that one swam against the cultural tide. To be an anti–
Communist and also a liberal - that is, to be an anti-Communist without
sacrifice of liberal principle - is even more difficult now that neoconser–
vatism, often of the extreme right, claims so many anti-Communists.
Sidney Hook did not remain a Communist for long: he soon con–
fronted the character of the Soviet regime, its absolutism and injustice and
cruelty, and for the rest of his life he was a passionate opponent of
Communism. But at Yaddo in the summer of 1931 he was still ignorant
of the range of Stalin's power and the means by which it had been arrived
at and was maintained. As he instructed us in Marxism, he could speak of
the dictatorship of the proletariat as if it were merely a neutral tenet of
revolutionary theory rather than the screen for a murderous tyranny. He
spoke not at all of life in a society in which one could be dragged from
bed in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard of again. The
Communism to which he introduced us was that of a practical utopi–
anism: in Soviet Russia one supposedly saw the inevitable first step in the
worldwide move to banish capitalist greed and inequality. We of our
generation were felt to be the witnesses to a great political and social ex–
periment. We had been given the opportunity to embark on a brave new
voyage of discovery. The rhetoric was as swollen as our hopes. Hook's
dialectical skills were formidable. One did not doubt his story that as a
boy of ten or eleven he had converted his Orthodox father to atheism; in
