196
PARTISAN REVIEW
years he was more successful as the author of short satirical sketches - the
great novel he hoped to produce was never written. lowe him a large
personal debt of gratitude, for it was he who introduced me to Dehmel,
the famous Viennese
konditorei,
and other local spots. But he was a quar–
relsome man; one of his few l.asting friendships was with Marlene
Dietrich. She called him from Paris whenever she felt lonely and sad,
which was quite often.
Torberg, like Silone, paid not the slightest attention to what the
Congress Secretariat in Paris thought or wanted or objected to; both were
quite independent. For an organization such as the Congress, Torberg be–
came an embarrassment, and it eventually parted ways with him. I knew
Silone less well than Torberg, and on the few occasions we met, the Ital–
ian writer was for one reason or another ill-humored and taciturn. For a
long time, Silone was overshadowed in Italy by more fashionable intel–
lectual figures. But towards the end of his life, and since then, he has been
the subject of several appreciative biographies.
I was most familiar with the affairs of
Soviet Survey
in the early years.
We were constantly in battle with Paris over obtaining greater allocations
in order to publish a more substantial magazine; there was so much inter–
esting material and so few pages at our disposal. By the late fifties and
early sixties, some of the best issues of
Survey
had come out - on Marxist
revisionism, on the state of Soviet studies, on China, on personal recol–
lections of the early "heroic" period of Soviet history. George Lichtheim,
at work on his books on socialism, had dropped out. I too wanted to
have more time for my own work.
One day, Jane Degras mentioned Leopold Labedz who, like Faust,
had studied almost every subject under the sun . Born in Simbirsk (like
Lenin and Kerensky) of Polish parents, he was thirty-five years old at the
time. I talked to him for many hours and asked him to contribute an arti–
cle about Soviet sociology to
Survey.
Eventually I asked him to join
Survey
as an associate editor. Leo was a man of amazing breadth and depth
of knowledge, at home in the social sciences as much as in the humani–
ties, a thinker of greater stature than more famous men I came to know.
His critical faculties were admittedly more developed than his creative
ones; he never wrote a book, and he lacked the patience of a teacher.
The best essay he ever wrote was a devastating piece on Isaac Deutscher,
the Polish-Jewish writer who had settled in Britain. A former Commu–
nist, Deutscher had for years enjoyed phenomenal success as a
commentator in Europe on Soviet affairs. (To this day, his biography of
Stalin is still treated as a classic in some quarters.) Deutscher was not an
uncritical admirer of Stalin, but an admirer he was, and his seemingly
"objective" approach, very much in contrast to the official Communist
