180
PAR.TISAN R.EVIEW
he, was completely free of the effects of insidious Communist harrass–
ment, imprisonment, and mental torture. It was the graying of
Czechoslovakia.
But as we probe further into the aftereffects of Communist and anti–
Communist beliefs as well as of Communist pressures, not only in Eastern
Europe but also in America where Communism had no real political
power, it becomes evident that many people's lives and careers were dis–
torted, and some were destroyed. One can think of a number of
Communists whose blind belief in and obedience to the Party line
warped their intelligence and talents and converted them into mental
robots . Even today , when Communism, strictly speaking, no longer exists
in this country, many academics who cling to some version of Marxism
have lowered their consciousness below the level required to function in
their disciplines.
Some anti-Communists have suffered too. I am not thinking of the
many anti-Communists who have kept their political balance while stren–
uously pointing out the false doctrines and bad faith of the Communists.
But given the extent of the politi ca l and intellectual provocation , it has
not always been easy to keep one's balance. And some anti-Communists
perceived only one enemy, one distortion of the truth, one form of doc–
trinaire thinking, one kind of false consciousness in the world at large. To
be sure, the Soviet Union was the principal destructive force - following
the defeat of fascism - but there have been other political forces to con–
tend with, other issues. For example, those intellectuals who supported
McCarthy in the 1950s were not always wrong in their estimation of
Communism, but they ignored the menacing politics at the other end of
the spectrum and too readily accepted McCarthy.
Communism has been not only an all-enveloping doctrine and a so–
cial system. It also has been a pathology, a destroyer of character, a way of
warping one's life by forcing oneself not to think . I recall, for example,
when I was a very critical fellow-traveler, briefly in the thirties, that a
number of talented fiction writers and poets misused their talents. They
either were glued to the Party line and their writing suffered from the
current "proletarianitis," or, cynically, they partially accepted, partially
avoided, the Communist line and wrote out of both sides of their
mouths. One gifted poet lost his gifts as he played the game of literary
spokesman. The rumor was that his attractive wife kept him loyal
to
the
Party, but apparently he was too weak or too compromised to shake off
the influence. There was another gifted poet who solicited for publication
an essay by Philip Rahv and myself, and then failed to support it against
the attacks of the Party. I excused him at the time , perhaps too easily, on
the grounds that he was teaching at a college with a largely Communist
faculty, and that he was ill and had a family to support.
