Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Authors of Their Own Lives

University of California Press

As one grows older, one is always surprised?and sometimes depressed?to realize the truth of "in my beginning is my end" and "in my end is my beginning." T. S. Eliot was, of course, thinking of personal identity in its deepest and fullest sense, but his words also apply to "merely" intellectual beginnings and ends, the more so when reading, writing, and thinking have from a fairly early age been central to one's self-definition.

I decided more or less consciously that I wanted to become an "intellectual" at a moment of abrupt and unwelcome transition in my life several months before my sixteenth birthday. After living two years in Geneva, Switzerland, where my father was Canadian delegate to the League of Nations, my parents sent me to board at a prominent preparatory school in Toronto. The school was not altogether strange to me, for I had been a boarder in its junior division the year before we moved to Europe after living in Washington, D.C., for most of my early life. Until now I had always identified myself entirely, indeed overeagerly, with my peers and had in fact been bitterly unhappy over the previous move to Europe. Twice my parents had dragged me, in a sulky and sullen mood, across the Atlantic. This time I was not only older but, feeling that my European sojourn had made me more refined and cosmopolitan than my schoolmates, I resisted making yet another readjustment to an environment I had not chosen.

We returned in the summer of 1939, and the coming of the war removed all possibility of my going back to Switzerland. It lessened my anger at my parents, but it made me, if anything, more inclined toidealize my years at school in Geneva and more determined than ever not to become a hearty, provincial, prep-school philistine. Since I laid claim to a personal relation to Europe, where the great events of the war were unfolding, I decided that I ought to be more fully informed about them. So I started to follow the world news and tacked maps of the battlefronts from the Sunday New York Times "Week in Review" section on the wall of my dormitory room, which my schoolmates regarded as a pretentious affectation.

I bought my first "serious" book, Fallen Bastions , by a British newspaper correspondent in Central Europe, to learn about the events preceding the war, especially the Munich crisis, which had the year before impinged on even our self-centered adolescent concerns at school in Geneva. The author, G. E. R. Gedye, passionately denounced the appeasement of Hitler and wrote favorably of "socialism." The leading Toronto bookstore?Britnell's, incredibly still there and looking much the same more than forty years later?carried other British Left Book Club publications; I bought a few and was quickly converted by a John Strachey pamphlet entitled Why You Should Be a Socialist . In the next year I read books, many of them British Pelicans that still sit on my shelf by Strachey, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski on socialism, politics, and world affairs.

I also exchanged long, nostalgic letters with my closest Geneva friend, the late Stuart Schulberg, son of pioneer Hollywood movie magnate B. P. Schulberg and younger brother of the novelist Budd Schulberg, who later was for a long time the producer of the NBC "Today" show. I was astounded by his opposition to American entrance into the war, for at school we had all declaimed against the wickedness of Hitler. I wrote a letter to Life magazine denouncing the American isolationists?my first appearance in print?and Stuart wrote a letter disagreeing with me. His opinions, as I began to grasp, reflected those of the Communist party, to which he had been exposed through his brother, who had been a leading figure among the Hollywood Communists of the 1930s. Stuart had always been the older, dominant figure in our friendship, so I wavered in the direction of his views. I bought and read International Publishers' editions of the shorter writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as Capital , managing to plough through at least the first (and most difficult!) chapters. The war maps on my wall were replaced by cut-out pictures of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, though some vague, intuitive wisdom kept me from including Stalin among them.

Never one to do things by halves, I offered my services?at the suggestion of a teacher who claimed to be a secret sympathizer?to the Canadian Communist party newspaper just before it and the party itself were banned, for Canada was at war and it was, of course, the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact. The editor, who was elected a few years later to the Ontario legislature after the Soviet Union had become our ally, asked me to proofread a huge manuscript, so I carried galleys of The Socialist Sixth of the World by Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, back to my dorm room. Even at my tender age, I found it hard to believe that there could possibly be a land of such milk and honey as the contemporary Soviet Union in the dean's description of it. Still, I rather cherish the memory of sitting in my room at Upper Canada College, identified by recent Canadian Marxist sociologists as the seedbed of the Canadian corporate elite, reading tracts for the soon to be outlawed Communist party.

I sometimes wonder if I am perhaps not the only person in the world who became a Communist sympathizer after the Stalin-Hitler pact and was disillusioned within a few weeks by the Soviet invasion of Finland. In my case, at least, the time at which I became politically conscious?which almost invariably meant adopting left-wing views?was undoubtedly crucial in shaping my later outlook. I began to read, even subscribe to, the Nation, the New Republic, and the New Statesman, which during the twenty-two months of the Soviet-German alliance were firmly anti-Stalinist, printing articles, often by former Communists, that were highly critical not only of Stalinism but even of Marxism. All these journals reverted to pro-Soviet apologetics and at times outright fellow traveling after Hitler invaded Russia, but I was immunized forever against the illusion that truth and virtue are always to be found on the left. I also picked up an occasional copy of the Trotskyist monthly, the New International, which provided crucial "anticipatory socialization" for my later encounter in New York with former or near Trotskyists associated with Dwight Macdonald's Politics, Partisan Review, Commentary, and, a bit later, Dissent . I continued to think of myself as at least a qualified Marxist and an ardent democratic socialist, generally sympathetic to the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, the Canadian party modeled on the British Labour party, in which I was later active as an undergraduate.

The political weeklies also contained cultural "back of the book" sections, which were resolutely highbrow, drawing their reviewers and authors from the most advanced Bloomsbury and Greenwich Villagecircles. Here I gleaned an idea of the proper preoccupations and values of the bona fide intellectual, a label that, as Daniel Bell has recently shown, scarcely predates this century and has today acquired a much looser, vaguer, and doubtless less "elitist" meaning than it used to have. I took up smoking cigarettes, cultivated less plebeian tastes in classical music, and plunged into modern literature. In the...