Dear Readers:  After writing this post, I discovered, to my dismay, that I had started with Vol.6.No.2,and utterly missed Vol. 6.No 1, which was Autumn, 1938.  SO please forgive me and just tuck this away until I have discussed the correct issue…which also begins with an Editorial “Our Quarter”.  So… that’s what you’ll get next Saturday. Ave atque Vale. AJ

Partisan Review, Vol. 6, No. 2. Winter, 1939

The Summer of regret, nostalgia, fear with and without objects, has turned into a Winter of confusion, anger, and debate. The issue is out in late November, 1938.

The Editors introduce the issue collectively with a survey of the state of  politics, ideas, fascism, and the problems rising in the wake of the Moscow Trials and the ‘Popular Front.”

Partisan Review Editors in 1939: F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald, George L.K.Morris, William Phillips, Philip Rahv.

1. The piece begins with “The Crisis in Paris,”  which narrates a history of the West through the fortunes of Paris. Although Hitler’s entry into Paris wouldn’t occur until 14 June, 1940, the editorial piece gives us the fate of the West as the collapse of Paris:  and it is not only political arrangements but the cultural life of the avant-garde, “the best integrated culture of modern times — the avant-garde — the very term is French — in art, literature, has found it least impossible to survive.”   The authors go on to draw the link between France and the Communist Party of the “People’s Front,” the developing positions within the Stalinist movement across Europe and the United States that a war against  Hitler requires a coalition of social-democrats, liberals, and communist parties in order to break fascism.  The editorial ends with a call for Revolution:

“The French masses still have a respite left them — several months, a year, even two, perhaps — in which to set in motion the only kind of anti-fascist struggle that can succeed: a revolutionary struggle against the whole of the capitalist order.  The nucleus of such a movement already exists: in such militant left-wing oranizations as the Lutte de Classe, a semi-syndicalist trade union group, the Pivert Group (PSOP)…..and the International Workers’ Group, affiliated with the Fourth International…”   In this sentence, the editors appear to be in agreement about not only the struggle against fascism, but about the importance of the Trotskyist movement, the FI.

2.The second part of “Our Quarter” must be by Dwight Macdonald — just his kind of word, but correct me if I am wrong. Its titled, “Anti-Fascist Jitterbug” and its a trouncing of Lewis  Mumford’s ignorant version of a “man of good will.” Its got that acerbic wit that Macdonald was known for, and he makes a comic hash of Mumford’s irrational idea that there is something about the ‘German Mind’ that has produced fascism….

“Once an anti-fascist is far gone into jitterbuggery, he suffers a total loss of memory. But Mr. Mumford improves upon most of the jitterbugs by raising amnesia to the level of a principle, He is simply oblivious to the fact that besides poets and philosophers of imperialist conquest, German culture also nurtured the socialist humanism of Marx and Engels.”

“Mr. Mumford and his friends cannot assail fascism for what it is but must picture it as something vast and mysteriously irrational, or as the dreadful aberation  of a particular national mentality.  This has become all the more necessary now, as the New Deal government — of which the anti-fascist jitter-bugs are enthusiastic partisans — is scuttling its domestic program of mild social reforms and moving into the war zone”. 

You might want to look back at this blog for September 17, 2017, which is about Meyer Shapiro’s essay on Lewis Mumford.

3.The third contribution to “Our Quarter” is about T.S. Eliot, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Last Words.’ I think this is a really wonderful one, becase it is so stuck in the problem of what do you do with Modernism’s bad attitude.  Eliot is a great writer; Eliot tried to place London on the metropolitan cultural map alongside Berlin, Paris, Madrid.  It didn’t work. Eliot’s journal, The Criterion, lost its drive as a social crisis emerged….the magazine became ecletic…and Eliot ..”became more and more  the grave apostle of detachment. In other countries the literary humanists have been forced into exile. [aj: think of  that discussion of Thomas Mann by William Troy and James Burnham earlier in 1938.] In England,if Eliot’s decision is a symptom, they are preparing to retire into voluntary seclusion.”  The problem of the reactionary stance of a significant strand of  modernism, with its conservativism, racism, anti-semitism, and among some, its fascism… is simply moderated by the writer into stances of passivity, but, you gotta admit, not seriously engaged.

4. “Hello Reform”, the fourth piece in “Our Quarter” is about John Chamberlain, a jobbing reviewer, and a man who began on the left and moved to the right, including but not limited to a strong individualism, along the lines of Ayn Rand, and other libertarian thinkers and writers. His first book,  “Farewell to Reform,” published in 1931, was an analysis of the failure of reformism to challenge fundamentals in American society. He attacked the ‘trust-busting’ of Teddy Roosevelt, the populism of William Jennings Bryan, and the ‘New Freedom’ of Woodrow Wilson;he became a supporter of FDR’s ‘New Deal’ later in the 1930s, and was one of the those who organised the campaign to support Trotsky after the Moscow Trials, and contributed to the report written by John Dewey: Not Guilty: the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (1938).  He wrote for Buckley’s National Review later on.  Chamberlain’s impact hasn’t survived into the revivals of either liberalism or parties further to the left. So the energy with which the piece ends, doesn’t possess the driving polemical edge that both Rhav and Macdonald were able to provide when they were seriously provoked.

5.“Dictatorship at Cooper Union” is the last of the short editorial essays. It begins with the state of  this Arts and Sciences college, and its faculty.,
“Cooper Union is familiar to most New Yorkers as an antiquate caravanserai on lower Fourth Avenue, huge, dingy, and hideous. Actually it is a large school of Art and Science, handsomely endowed by the Coopers and the Hewitts, which offers completely free tuition to hundreds of acceptable students.” But something wasn’t right with the school. Even though the students were eager to learn and they invited Gropius down from Harvard to lecture and Leger as well, and both men enjoyed teaching the Cooper Union students, the administration and directors of the school couldn’t see the importance of these creative ventures.

After winning a law case against the city of New York, which gave a large new tranch of money to the school, and unfolding a new plan of redecoration, the new Director, Burell, was not convinced of the need to bring the avant garde into the curriculum.

” It is disheartening to come upon the losing battle by the students for the preservation of these courses in modern and abstract painting”

And so, the piece concludes, “And thus ends the history of modern painting at Cooper Union,” another example of the crisis of Western Culture.

We have met Elizabeth Bishop before: she was one of the Vassar Intellectuals, a year behind Mary McCarthy, ( post on this blog’s archive, December 11, 2016). When McCarthy published The Group, Elizabeth Bishop was considered by some of the Vassar Girls to have been portrayed by McCarthy as ‘Lakey’ and her lover, ‘Lota’ as Lakey’s lover, the Baroness. McCarthy protested that this wasn’t the case in a letter to Bishop, but couldn’t entirely exculpate herself from the charge. This was late in the 1970s and I expect that neither of them were overly engaged in the quarrel at this point. (Unlike Lillian Hellman, who cared very much about how her quarrel with McCarthy would end, even after McCarthy had died.).

But Bishop is better known to many as one of the great poets of the ‘middle generation’ of Modernism – along with Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell, with Delmore Schwartz serving as a sometime harbinger and sometime participant.  Bishop was one who ‘ran with the boys’, as it were, and won recognition as a ‘poet’s poet’ as well as public popularity. She was a Pulitzer Prize winner in the 1950s, and the winner of a National Book Award in 1970, and received lots of other honours and Fellowships.

The poems she contributed to  Partisan Review for the August-September, 1938 issue are easy and difficult. And in the context of that summer of the advance of European fascism, they are remarkably cool and removed from the scene, very different from the earlier summer poems we looked at a few months ago, by Julian Symons and Derek Savage (see blog post, 18 August, 2017), attentive as they are to  the Englishness of the contemporary crisis. Bishop is a poet without borders, a woman who made her homes in both North and South America, and who was as at home in Paris as she was corresponding with Robert Lowell in his various geographies of madness:

I find her very hard to read because she hides so much of what she means us to know. I sometimes think she is just testing us, trying us out as readers instead of welcoming us in. Bishop asserts in “The Unbeliever” her own belief, that belief must always ground unbelief.  The unbeliever is stuck on the top of this mast of the sail, not moving, not daring… he sleeps at the top of his mast, with this eyes closed tight.  At the end we see the revenge of belief on the unbeliever:”I must not fall./The spangled sea below wants me to fall./It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.”

It makes sense this summer of 1938 — but it remains a cold comfort.

I: The Unbeliever

II:

  Victor Serge was my guide through the history of the  revolutionary movements of the first half of the twentieth century.  He was a novelist and historian of the Russian Revolution, a memoirist of Boshevism and Stalinism, and a searching poet.  I first read Serge when I was in my early twenties, and I was struck by how different his voice was from the often anxious, often sententious Bolsheviks.  Serge’s fluent writer’s voice, never appears to be reaching after the rules of revolution, but always seems to be achieving the sensibility of revolutionary aspiration and idealism, even when it faces unwelcome truths and the destruction of hopes.

Something about his having started out as an Anarchist and a poet made me consider him a Bohemian as well as Bolshevik, and it added to his posthumous allure.  What secured his place was that while he was a Bolshevik, he became an active member of the Left Opposition, which Trotsky led as a party faction 1923 -7. Nonetheless, Serge had also been a severe critic of the Red Army’s supression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921,when the Red Army had been led by Trotsky. In other words, Serge was capable of the critical thinking that can elude those who fear articulating their disagreements in order to maintain party unity.

Here in this long summer of 1938, Victor Serge writes a short but important essay about Marxism, and the essay’s clarity about what Marxism is at that moment makes the reader attend to its reality rather than to the position planks that were filling up the new world of Stalinism, and making noise where there had been debate and rules where there had been possibilities.

Perhaps most important to Serge’s arguments is his conviction that Marxism is not static but moving, shape shifting and as he writes, “gone through many metamorphoses.”  The  urge to place Marxist theory and practice under the lock and key of atrophied notions of ‘science’ is addressed by Serge’s interest not in the movement’s defeats, but rather, in the strength of capital’s fear of it: “The confused but energetic class-consciousness of the last defenders of capitalism, however, sees in Marxism its most dangerous spiritual and social enemy.”   Serge is what we might call an ecumenical Marxist: “Almost all workers’ movements which have won any appreciable power have been inspired by Marxism.”

From the mess of 1938, Serge is able to address both the innocent bystanders in New York and the bewildered old Bolsheviks in Moscow without reaching for a statement that will explain the rightness and wrongness of either or both.  What is significant is that even when Capitalism surrounded the working class in 1914,

“The workers showed themselves prisoners of the capitalism they fought even as they adapted themselves to it. But it was a Marxist part which, in the chaotic currents of the Russian Revolution, knew how to disentangle the main lines of force, to orient itself constantly according to the highest interests of the workers, to make itself, in the truest sense of the word the midwife of a new world. It is true that German Marxism in its two forms — Social Democratic and Communist –showed itself impotent before the Nazi offensive. Along with the degeneration of the Bolshevism, this is without question, let us note in passing, the greatest defeat that Marxism has ever suffered. Nonetheless, Marxism continues to mount the ladder of world history. While irreconcilable oppositionists are persecuted and exterminated by Stalinism, the Austrian Socialists carry o. struggle, desperate but heroic, which saves them from demoralisation; the Socialist miners of Asturias in ’34 deal a set-back to Spanish fascism. It would be absurd to isolate Marxist thought from these social realities. EVEN more than it is a scientific doctrine, Marxism is an historic fact. 

This remarkably straightforward presentation of Marxism — in its successes and in its limitations — gives voice to an idea of social change that doesn’t exist as an idealisation or as a fait accompli. Instead .it is a process, whose concepts and practices are on-going. “Science,” Serge writes, “is never ‘finished’; rather it is always completing itself. Can science be anything except a process of continual self-revision, an increasing quest for a closer approach to the truth. 

Serge is clear that the categories of the  knowledge disciplines have been change through Marxism. “We are in debt to it for a renewing , a broadening of our consciousness.”  And as he looks at the history of Marxism in his time, Serge can make sense of its errors and failures in a dialectical exchange with its power and intellectual range.

1. The Marxism of the imperialist epoch was split. It was nationalistic and counterrevolutionary in the countries where it had been reformist; it was revolutionary internationalist in Russia the only country in which the foundering of an ancient regime forced the proletariat to carry out completely its historic mission.
2. The Marxism of the Russian Revolution was at first ardently internationalist and libertarian; but because of the state of siege, it soon became more and more authoritarian and intolerant.
3. The Marxism of the decadence of Bolshevism — that is to say, that of the bureaucratic caste which has evicted the  working class from power — is totalitarian, despotic, amoral, and opportunist. It ends up in the strangest and most revolting negations of itself.

So Serge is able to see social consciousness doesn’t escape the effect of the realities it expresses, which it illuminates and which it tries to surmount. He ends the piece with another piece of reality: “IS it necessary to emphasise again that the confused, distorted and bloody Marxism of the gunmen of Moscow — is not Marxism? That it negates, belies, and paralyses itself? 

As Summer draws to a close in 1938, Serge asserts, “The class struggle goes on. For all the dictators’ replastering, we hear the framework of the old social edifice cracking. Marxism will go through many vicissitudes of fortune, perhaps even eclipses. Its power, conditioned by the course of history, nonetheless appears to be inexhaustible. For its base is knowledge integrated with the necessity for revolution.  Its the best piece of summer, 1938, because it is hopeful and also realistic.

Serge was a poet of hope as well. As a member of the Left Opposition, Serge was arrested and imprisoned in 1933. He was sent to the remote city of Orenberg in the Ural Mountains. Most of the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive. When he was released and allowed to return to Moscow, the officials would not let him take his manuscripts. The poems he wrote in the 1930s are political, tender, and attempt to scale the cosmos: here is one example, written in exile, in 1934.

TRUST

I’ve seen the steppe turn green and the child grow; my eyes meet the human gaze

of my good old dog Toby, who trusts me.

The azure touches the earth, we breathe in the sky.

Red cows graze under clouds of glory,

and from afar the slim Kirgiz woman who tends them

seems released from all misery.

Setting sun, here are our breasts, take them!

Here are our bodies that you fill with radiance,

here we are washed,

purified,

liberated,

pacified,

at the point where river, plain, and sky touch,

Nothing is forgotten, nothing is lost, we are faithful,

faithfully men, men faithful to men

regardless of the moment, the risk, the burden, the pain,

the hate,

faithful and trusting.

My son, my tall son, we are going to cleave the water with slow strokes —

let’s trust in the river pierced by sunbeams,

trust in these waters drunk by our brothers, the drowned.

Trust in the frail, supple muscles of the child

who dives from the steep bank and then cries out:

“O father, it’s terrible and good, I’m touching bottom,

the light is mixed with darkness and its quivering, quivering….”

Grace of the slender body darting through the air, through the water,

trust with eyes closed, trust with eyes open.

What could be more parabolic than this flight of birds?

My mind follows it, just as lively, just as sure,

an arrow through abstract space,

laden with moving images by all that was,

ethereal and prodigal,

offering the future many possible futures.

the scarab sleeps on the wild rose,

our shadows scared off the tadpoles in the pond,

a magnificent, peaceful day and the earth goes on

carrying off days, nights, dawns, evenings,

tropics, poles, deserts,

cities,

and our thoughts,

our common journey through the infinite,

the eternal,

the eyes,

toward the constellation of Hercules, itself swept along

by such great floods of stars that all night fades —

defeat swept away.

.

  Victor Serge was my guide through the history of the  revolutionary movements of the first half of the twentieth century.  He was a novelist and historian of the Russian Revolution, a memoirist of Boshevism and Stalinism, and a searching poet.  I first read Serge when I was in my early twenties, and I was struck by how different his voice was from the often anxious, often sententious Bolsheviks.  Serge’s fluent writer’s voice, never appears to be reaching after the rules of revolution, but always seems to be achieving the sensibility of revolutionary aspiration and idealism, even when it faces unwelcome truths and the destruction of hopes.

Something about his having started out as an Anarchist and a poet made me consider him a Bohemian as well as Bolshevik, and it added to his posthumous allure.  What secured his place was that while he was a Bolshevik, he became an active member of the Left Opposition, which Trotsky led as a party faction 1923 -7. Nonetheless, Serge had also been a severe critic of the Red Army’s supression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921,when the Red Army had been led by Trotsky. In other words, Serge was capable of the critical thinking that can elude those who fear articulating their disagreements in order to maintain party unity.

Here in this long summer of 1938, Victor Serge writes a short but important essay about Marxism, and the essay’s clarity about what Marxism is at that moment makes the reader attend to its reality rather than to the position planks that were filling up the new world of Stalinism, and making noise where there had been debate and rules where there had been possibilities.

Perhaps most important to Serge’s arguments is his conviction that Marxism is not static but moving, shape shifting and as he writes, “gone through many metamorphoses.”  The  urge to place Marxist theory and practice under the lock and key of atrophied notions of ‘science’ is addressed by Serge’s interest not in the movement’s defeats, but rather, in the strength of capital’s fear of it: “The confused but energetic class-consciousness of the last defenders of capitalism, however, sees in Marxism its most dangerous spiritual and social enemy.”   Serge is what we might call an ecumenical Marxist: “Almost all workers’ movements which have won any appreciable power have been inspired by Marxism.”

From the mess of 1938, Serge is able to address both the innocent bystanders in New York and the bewildered old Bolsheviks in Moscow without reaching for a statement that will explain the rightness and wrongness of either or both.  What is significant is that even when Capitalism surrounded the working class in 1914,

“The workers showed themselves prisoners of the capitalism they fought even as they adapted themselves to it. But it was a Marxist part which, in the chaotic currents of the Russian Revolution, knew how to disentangle the main lines of force, to orient itself constantly according to the highest interests of the workers, to make itself, in the truest sense of the word the midwife of a new world. It is true that German Marxism in its two forms — Social Democratic and Communist –showed itself impotent before the Nazi offensive. Along with the degeneration of the Bolshevism, this is without question, let us note in passing, the greatest defeat that Marxism has ever suffered. Nonetheless, Marxism continues to mount the ladder of world history. While irreconcilable oppositionists are persecuted and exterminated by Stalinism, the Austrian Socialists carry o. struggle, desperate but heroic, which saves them from demoralisation; the Socialist miners of Asturias in ’34 deal a set-back to Spanish fascism. It would be absurd to isolate Marxist thought from these social realities. EVEN more than it is a scientific doctrine, Marxism is an historic fact. 

This remarkably straightforward presentation of Marxism — in its successes and in its limitations — gives voice to an idea of social change that doesn’t exist as an idealisation or as a fait accompli. Instead .it is a process, whose concepts and practices are on-going. “Science,” Serge writes, “is never ‘finished’; rather it is always completing itself. Can science be anything except a process of continual self-revision, an increasing quest for a closer approach to the truth. 

Serge is clear that the categories of the  knowledge disciplines have been change through Marxism. “We are in debt to it for a renewing , a broadening of our consciousness.”  And as he looks at the history of Marxism in his time, Serge can make sense of its errors and failures in a dialectical exchange with its power and intellectual range.

1. The Marxism of the imperialist epoch was split. It was nationalistic and counterrevolutionary in the countries where it had been reformist; it was revolutionary internationalist in Russia the only country in which the foundering of an ancient regime forced the proletariat to carry out completely its historic mission.
2. The Marxism of the Russian Revolution was at first ardently internationalist and libertarian; but because of the state of siege, it soon became more and more authoritarian and intolerant.
3. The Marxism of the decadence of Bolshevism — that is to say, that of the bureaucratic caste which has evicted the  working class from power — is totalitarian, despotic, amoral, and opportunist. It ends up in the strangest and most revolting negations of itself.

So Serge is able to see social consciousness doesn’t escape the effect of the realities it expresses, which it illuminates and which it tries to surmount. He ends the piece with another piece of reality: “IS it necessary to emphasise again that the confused, distorted and bloody Marxism of the gunmen of Moscow — is not Marxism? That it negates, belies, and paralyses itself? 

As Summer draws to a close in 1938, Serge asserts, “The class struggle goes on. For all the dictators’ replastering, we hear the framework of the old social edifice cracking. Marxism will go through many vicissitudes of fortune, perhaps even eclipses. Its power, conditioned by the course of history, nonetheless appears to be inexhaustible. For its base is knowledge integrated with the necessity for revolution.  Its the best piece of summer, 1938, because it is hopeful and also realistic.

Serge was a poet of hope as well. As a member of the Left Opposition, Serge was arrested and imprisoned in 1933. He was sent to the remote city of Orenberg in the Ural Mountains. Most of the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive. When he was released and allowed to return to Moscow, the officials would not let him take his manuscripts. The poems he wrote in the 1930s are political, tender, and attempt to scale the cosmos: here is one example, written in exile, in 1934.

TRUST

I’ve seen the steppe turn green and the child grow; my eyes meet the human gaze

of my good old dog Toby, who trusts me.

The azure touches the earth, we breathe in the sky.

Red cows graze under clouds of glory,

and from afar the slim Kirgiz woman who tends them

seems released from all misery.

Setting sun, here are our breasts, take them!

Here are our bodies that you fill with radiance,

here we are washed,

purified,

liberated,

pacified,

at the point where river, plain, and sky touch,

Nothing is forgotten, nothing is lost, we are faithful,

faithfully men, men faithful to men

regardless of the moment, the risk, the burden, the pain,

the hate,

faithful and trusting.

My son, my tall son, we are going to cleave the water with slow strokes —

let’s trust in the river pierced by sunbeams,

trust in these waters drunk by our brothers, the drowned.

Trust in the frail, supple muscles of the child

who dives from the steep bank and then cries out:

“O father, it’s terrible and good, I’m touching bottom,

the light is mixed with darkness and its quivering, quivering….”

Grace of the slender body darting through the air, through the water,

trust with eyes closed, trust with eyes open.

What could be more parabolic than this flight of birds?

My mind follows it, just as lively, just as sure,

an arrow through abstract space,

laden with moving images by all that was,

ethereal and prodigal,

offering the future many possible futures.

the scarab sleeps on the wild rose,

our shadows scared off the tadpoles in the pond,

a magnificent, peaceful day and the earth goes on

carrying off days, nights, dawns, evenings,

tropics, poles, deserts,

cities,

and our thoughts,

our common journey through the infinite,

the eternal,

the eyes,

toward the constellation of Hercules, itself swept along

by such great floods of stars that all night fades —

defeat swept away.

.

So far, if you have been a reader of this blog, you will have heard much about Trotsky, and some about Stalin, but you haven’t heard anything about James Burnham or the Socialist Workers Party USA– it doesn’t seem that our Partisans spent that much time in the Trotskyist political parties. Dwight McDonald was a member for a while, Dupee stayed with the Stalinists through the Moscow Trials, others watched and waited, and made their Modernism their politics.  The history of the factions and sub-factions and groupings of the Trotskyist movement is probably the focus of other blogs, but one of the founding members of the American Socialist Workers Party, James Burnham, turns up now in these summer months and takes up the discussion of Thomas Mann initiated earlier in 1938 by William Troy.

James Burnham was another boy from Chicago, excited by and studying the philosophical currents of the 1930s. He came from an upper middle class background, his British father had been an executive of the Burlington Railroad, and James Burnham went to Princeton and to Oxford before joining the faculty at New York University. He mixed with New York Society, and Alan Wald writes that he would “attend political committee meetings in a tuxedo because he had just come from or was en route to cocktails at the Rockefellers or the home of some other wealthy family with whom he was friends.”

If you ever had a connection– real or imagined —  to the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s or the 1960s and 1970s — you will no doubt know about Burnham as a turn-coat who later

became a member of the William Buckley National Review conservative grouping.  The American SWP was founded at the end of 1937, and the Secretariat of the SWP was made up of Max Shachtman, James Cannon, and James Burnham. I knew Burnham’s name that way, and not much about him except that he was involved in the  factionalism that divided the SWP, by 1940, between Max Shactman and James Burnham on one side,  and James Cannon on the other.

Burnham may have been a toff, and an academic, but he was a dedicated SWP theorist and writer who had no trouble turning from academic conventions to political ones. And he had also spent time as a co-editor of the journal Symposium, which had aimed to address cultural questions within a political context…. When the SWP split in 1940, Burnham’s position was that the Soviet Union should not be supported in the war; that it has become a ‘degenerated workers’ state’.   WIKIPEDIA: ” In political theory, a degenerated workers’ state is a socialist state in which direct working class control of production has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed and in other works.  In May 1940, he resigned from the SWP, along with Shachtman and their supporters. He went on, in the War,  to work for the propaganda section of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA…

Now, back to 1938 and Burnham on Troy on Mann. Burnham takes on the method used by Troy by arguing that Troy’s use of ‘myth’ as the organising structure of analysis threatens to overtake and in fact, suggests that it is the ONLY method for analysis.  To use this idea, an anthropological one, “as alone legitimate is to be guilty of the usual and perennial Platonic fallacy of hypostatizing a method into an Absolute.”  His criticism arises from within the Trotskyist convention of ‘altering the question’ that we have looked at in an earlier post: Are we  simply unable to learn that the legitimacy of any method  is decided by the problems we are trying to solve, the purposes to which we hold, and the efficacy of the method in handling the  subject-matters in relation to those problems and  purposes?” 

The argument that Troy makes may be true, and certainly works,  Burnhan writes, but there are equally coherent and persuasive ones that can be brought to bear through the methods developed in psychoanalysis and  sociology.  His inference is that the difference between offering a set of coherent analyses along different ‘Absolutes’ is that between interpretation that reiterates the same point, and analyses that begin with the questions that need to be asked now.  It is a shot across the bow at Troy’s system, and it is a reminder of the urgency of the political and cultural questions of the moment at hand.

Even more troublesome, Burnham argues that Troy’s ‘myth’ isn’t only an ‘Absolute’; its an irresponsible one, disconnected from reality because, as Troy argues it, it exists in the realm of the pure imagination:

“Chucked overboard is all centuries-assembled baggage of laboratory and telescope, of carefully elaborated and ever-revised hypotheses, of plans rationally analysed and predictions precisely made and verified, of theories called ever to account, publicly before the eyes of all who wish to see, by the marshalled evidence. From this Troy beckons us once more to  re-baptizing it as Myth — the dark religion of the blood.”

I love this piece… whatever Burnham turned into later on, he hits pay dirt with the links he sets up and he re-opens the discussion of Mann for Partisan Review’s anti-Stalinist politics and for the journal’s readers.

And then he goes on to surely actualise the context:  “It was in the midst of Mann’s American lecture tour that there took place the third and foulest of the Moscow trials. As he nightly summoned his audiences to join him in aspiration toward Democracy and Truth, not one word of protest, not one suggestion came from him against history’s most degraded and perverted assault on democracy and truth.

A good vindication of Partisan Review’s aesthetics and a good opening for more discussion of Thomas Mann.