364
PARTISAN REVIEW
1948, during Henry Wallace's presidential campaign, Mark Van Doren
had the temerity to engage Hook in political debate and was publicly
an–
nihilated. In his later years Hook became boastful in a fashion which I do
not associate with him as a younger man, and this has much obscured the
admiration I once had for him. In his autobiography, published shortly
before his death, he immoderately tells us that it was he who supplied
Partisan Review
with its politics. More germane to my concerns, he also
reports that in 1936, when Lionel was about to be dropped from his job
at Columbia, it was he, Hook, who planned the strategy which won
Lionel his reinstatement. These assertions are untrue. While Hook was
indeed an advisory editor of
Partisan Review
and, like everyone close to
the magazine, expressed and no doubt argued his political viewpoint, a
magazine edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv and Dwight
Macdonald did not depend upon him for its politics. His was only an–
other voice. He also had no part in either the restoration of Lionel's posi–
tion at Columbia or, as he would have us believe, Lionel's subsequent
promotion to a professorship. After Lionel's death, I discovered and pub–
lished a detailed day-by-day record which Lionel had himself made in
his
notebooks of the events which surrounded his projected dismissal. Yet
even with this evidence, Hook refused to concede that he had not sal–
vaged Lionel's teaching career.
Under Hook's guidance, Lionel and I bowed to historical necessity
and embraced the new revolutionary faith. We were not alone among the
guests at Yaddo that summer in believing that in Communism lay our
best hope for the future. Malcolm Cowley lacked Hook's pedagogic en–
ergy, but he was already an eager fellow traveler and would remain so for
most of his long life. Max Lerner was only at the start of his professional
achievement, but he was already turned to the left, and Marc Blitzstein
was already at work on his now-famous revolutionary opera,
The Cradle
Will
Rock
-
in the evenings he played excerpts from it for the rest of the
guests, singing all the roles in his curiously harsh, cracked voice. Another
convert of Hook's that summer was a young woman named Catherine
Bauer, a disciple and friend of Lewis Mumford, who had come to Yaddo
to write a book on city planning. Unable to get on with her work, she
blamed her lack of progress on the breakdown of capitalism: how could
one write in a society unable to feed its own people? She was the first
person I knew to attribute her personal problems to our weak and malign
economic system. As the decade wore on, and throughout the forties, it
would become routine for writers to blame their personal failures and
shortcomings, or those of their fictional characters, on the society. In the
novels which I reviewed for the
Nation
in the forties, capitalism was re-
