32
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Luce organization assumed a decidedly Stalinist cast. He soon became
a sponsor and money-man of pro-Soviet publishing in New York.
Ingersoll became publisher of the Stalinoid newspaper
P.M.
-
a classic
Miinzenberg-style daily. Here too, Otto may well have had his unseen
place. Ingersoll was guided through every step of this enterprise, practi–
cally every paragraph, by Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett.
Hammett regularly interviewed prospective editors in his room at the
Plaza Hotel, and in the paper's first months, every word that appeared in
P.M .
had been approved in advance by Hammett or Hellman, either in
New York or at Hellman's farm in Westchester County.
P.M. was
slated for large circulation, a close American cousin to the
Parisian Stalinist daily
Ce Soir,
a paper for which Otto was certainly a
covert control, run through Otto's protege Paul Nizan, and fronted by
yet another literary celebrity close to him, the Stalinist poet, novelist, and
abject, Louis Aragon.
Did Otto play some similar role at
P.M.?
Was
he
at the Westchester
County farm too? It is perfectly possible, even probable, but must rest
unproved. Certainly it is true that high-level agents of the apparatus, from
Katz to Louis Dolivet, could be found hovering near
P.M.
throughout its
existence. Whatever the game, it would have been scrupulously clandes–
tine.
And Claud Cockburn himself? It's frequently been suggested, by
Peter Wright among others, that Cockburn may well have been a col–
league of Otto Katz in the secret service of the International. By the time
the Spanish Civil War rolled round, it is certain that Cockburn was quite
consciously fabricating disinformation for Otto.
Well,
was
Cockburn
nash :
"ours?" Maybe and maybe not. Finally, the
distinction does not strike me as presenting a very meaningful difference.
Cockburn spent his adult life as the most visible and best-connected
Stalinist journalist in England. He was the perfect incarnation of a certain
glib tone of sneering condescension - the Cockburn tone was
Bloomsbury vulgarized - fused with a wholeheartedly Stalinist soul and
mind. Guy Burgess talked very much the way Cockburn wrote . In Claud
Cockburn, Stalin was in full and public possession of his man.
In the fall of 1933, the Counter-Trial had made its headlines and
served its purpose. Anti-fascism was becoming the central issue that the
age demanded, and London was following Paris as its capital. But there
was more to be done in England than to stage the Counter-Trial.
Among the means used to promote the Stalinist chic was the Left
Book Club, in which Katz played a large role.
It
will
be remembered that
Miinzenberg was one of the inventors of the book club in its modern
form - and that a year and a half before he dispatched Otto to Moscow in
