HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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ago, to the immense number of Dewey's personal papers. And as it was
for Jeffrey, when he held Wyndham Lewis's brain in his hands, it was
for me like opening a new world: you open the first box that will con–
tain the first page of a million pages and know that you are going to
have in your hands a life that has been otherwise lost. When I was writ–
ing the biography of Nathanael West, I discovered something that Jef–
frey spoke of-you become the central recorder and historian,
to
whom
members of the family come, and say, "I knew Pep West from this angle,
or that angle. Tell me what he was like for other people. 1 want to get
the whole family sense together, the real person." So that's one sort of
excitement.
Here is the second excitement. Dr. Yale Kramer said to me, "] feel ter–
ribly sorry for you. Dewey must be the most boring person in the
world."
It
turns out that he led a terrifically exciting life, not merely as
a public intellectual, but as a public doer. He was part of the beginnings
of the CIA, working for Woodrow Wilson in the First World War (Wil–
son had been his teacher). He was the chairperson of the Trotsky hear–
ings when Stalin accused Trotsky of treason. I could go on and on.
Henry Steele Commager said at one point that no question in America
was settled while Dewey was alive until he had spoken on it. Here is a
person who was always ranked during his life as one of the ten great
Americans, and who has almost disappeared from public sight.
for me it's exciting
to
see a person who is, on the one hand, going
down to Mexico City
to
hold a hearing of the most important note
about Trotsky, and going
to
Diego Rivera's house, where Rivera wears
a bandolier with bullets and a carbine in case anybody tries
to
kill Trot–
sky. Dewey received death threats and defied them. He was the only per–
son whom both the right and left trusted
to
hold the tribunal. And while
he prepared
to
chair the tribunal, he was, at the same time, traveling
down
to
Mexico on the Sunshine Special with Jim Farrell the novelist,
staying up nights writing an essay on Leibnitz, reading all of Trotsky's
works, and then writing love letters, at the age of seventy-two, to his lat–
est girlfriend, one of the succession of women that Dewey was
entranced by after his wife's death. His life was so full that when he was
eighty-eight years old, he adopted two children, and when he got mar–
ried at the age of eighty-seven, he wrote in a letter, on his wedding night,
"Oh,
to
be sixty again!" That's a real guy! The immense excitement of
his philosophy, of course, is there for those who wish to write about his
philosophy; Richard Rorty says, and others agree, that with Wittgen–
stein and Heidegger, Dewey is one of the three great philosophers of the
twentieth century. But it's also an immensely exciting thing
to
see a per-
