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PARTISAN REVIEW
HOOK,
Sidney. Born in Brooklyn, he experienced poverty in his child–
hood. Like "all of New York," in the thirties he believed in the end of
capitalism and the world victory of Communism. Educated as a philoso–
pher, originally as a Marxist, he later turned
to
the pragmatism of
Dewey. He broke with the Communists early, and their press called him
a "counterrevolutionary reptile." Although he was not a Trotskyist,
after the Moscow trials he and Dewey organized a committee to study
the alleged crimes of Trotsky and to clear his name.
I became acquainted with him during my first postwar Paris period.
I had been following his activities for a long time and met him in Palo
Alto, where he settled after retiring from the university. He struck me as
a dry, unyielding intellect. rrom the perspective of time, I see that one
was supposed to honor him for his obduracy. He was a fanatic of rea–
son and hated lying, so that his life was an incessant struggle with
admirers and sympathizers of Soviet Russia. He founded the Committee
for Cu ltura l freedom in New York in the beginning of
1950,
before the
June congress in Berlin and the opening of the Congress of Cultural
Freedom in Paris. His and his committee's relations with the Paris Con–
gress are a story of shifting tactics toward the Eastern ideology. The cre–
ators of the Paris Congress represented the NCL, the non-Communist
left, and were critical of many events in America, throwing ballast over–
board, as it were, in order to draw closer to the universal criticism in
Europe of the American system (racism, the Rosenberg trials,
McCarthyism, the war in Viernam). Hook and his colleagues in
ew
York, confronting the well-organized propaganda of anti-Americanism,
attempted to study each accusat ion sepa ra tel y a nd adopt a considered
position. They maintained a sober evaluation of the "revolution" of the
sixties and the politicization of the universities, and defended professors
who resisted it and were, therefore, unpopular. When the Congress was
dissolved and transformed into the Association pour la Liberte de la
Culture in
1968,
after it was revealed that it had been financed by the
CIA, Hook no longer had any points in common with the organization,
whose main personalities were Pierre Emmanuel and Kat Jcleriski, and
the only person who shared his uncompromising stance was Leopold
Labedi, the editor of the London journal
SlIruey.
Hook's most famous essay was titled "Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No";
it defined his stand as a defender of democracy.
KOESTLER,
Arthur. The first international best-seller immediately
after World War II was probably Koestler's short novel
Darkness at
Noon,
published in french translation under the title Le
Zero
et
I"illfilli.
