Memories of Yaddo: An Autobiographical Postscript

...As a young Socialist I was predisposed against anarchism because of its association with violence and the reaction it provoked, which often swept away the gradual reforms that had been so painfully won against the weight of tradition and lethargy...

...She became involved with a man whose wife was in a mental institution and for obscure legal reasons couldn't divorce her...

...But as Justice Frankfurter once put it, in a democracy the appeal from an unenlightened majority must be made to an enlightened majority and not a self-denominated enlightened minority or individual...

...Ames, I suspect, knew how we felt but was doing her duty by Mr...

...He had completely misunderstood my meaning, taking what I wrote as a charge of opportunism...

...Musicians, painters, poets, dramatists, even members of the staff of the director, Mrs...

...But a slow movement could suggest the most disparate meanings, which was no surprise to anyone who knew that the music of a Christmas carol was also the music of the English revolutionary song "The People's Flag...

...All the needs of the guests with the exception of laundry were provided for by a large staff...

...It was already clear in those days that there was a profound division within the mass movement to belief in the promised future...

...I had become acutely aware of my lack of sensibility with respect to the interpretation of music and painting...

...I suppose my ego was so strong that I didn't mind the "truths" uttered about me, not even Evelyn's dagger thrust...

...In this way, I became more effective in stilling the doubts of those whose new faith had not yet eroded their critical intelligence...

...I no longer remember where...

...Her question seemed to get the attention of everyone, and all eyes turned to me...

...He played them before the sophisticated Yaddo audience with the request that its members indicate the meanings, if any, they associated with the music...

...We all felt obliged to attend...

...No one would characterize a lively tune as funereal...

...To which I replied, in all innocence, "I am not surprised...

...She was an attractive woman of great vivacity married to, or living with, a taciturn Englishman, also in residence, who was engaged in a study of Husserl, an unusual theme in that period for English philosophers...

...When she was through, she said to me as if bestowing an accolade: "You are the only man who sat for me who hasn't made a pass at me...

...She was a very attractive young woman who, I later learned, was very much interested in the theory of architecture, and under the influence of Lewis Mumford...

...A person is selected or volunteers to leave the room...

...Human beings, who are far from being angels, will fight over degrees of authority, of power, prestige, and precedence, over honor and love as well as over material things, even if not as often or always to the same degree...

...It is starkly utopian...

...There was some kind of official investigation that cleared Mrs...

...It would have been healthier if we had all exploded because Mrs...

...At this everyone collapsed into convulsions of laughter...

...I naively wondered aloud: "Does the poor girl suffer from fallen arches...

...In short order almost all the guests became Marxists and Communist fellow-travelers of a sort...

...And after observing its consequences I have never played it again...

...At which the audience broke into loud and tumultuous applause...

...And long before Lincoln, Aristotle taught that anarchy was the rule of a thousand despots...

...The game broke up at that point and was never resumed...

...As a democrat, I had always been suspicious of anarchist critics who thundered about the tyranny of the majority, since the historical record revealed that human beings more often suffered from the tyranny of minorities and individuals than from the tyranny of majorities...

...This was Marx's view, and is implied in the position of Jefferson and Madison...

...Ames's impositions...

...Each sentence is then read aloud, and the subject is required to guess who penned it...

...It was Lincoln who recognized that democracy was the only alternative to anarchy and despotism...

...Paul to the Gentiles, I could not suppress my heresies about the central dogmas of historical materialism and the class struggle, both of which I interpreted in a pragmatic and pluralistic fashion...

...T o return to the days of Yaddo, it 1 was my reputation not as a wit that counted during those summers but 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 as the leading authority on Marxism and Communism...

...T here was one other disheartening 1 discovery or rediscovery I made at Yaddo, and this was the bestiality of males under the influence of liquor...

...Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order...

...The next night we heard that some vandals had invaded the place...

...When Marc Blitzstein was out, I thought I would say something to his credit and wrote, "A musical reed that will bend to the passing wind but will never break...

...During my first stay, on the opening day when we were assembled at the welcoming get-together, taking one another's measure in the typical fashion of creative and critical "inSidney Hook's autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, was published last year by Harper & Row tellectuals," some brash writer, apropos of some observation I made, cocked his head, and sardonically said: "Methinks I have read that somewhere...

...Ames announced a cultural evening at whichher sister, Marjorie, would sing and read some poetry...

...Ames and developments there...

...She had droll tales to tell about distinguished guests in past summers who had tried to pull her down during the postprandial walks that were a common exercise...

...The fatal flaw in every anarchist theory is the assumption that human beings can live for long without the emergence of some form of government or state power that enjoys within the community an ultimate monopoly of force...

...But as others left the room and the game continued the atmosphere became increasingly pained and painful...

...After all the sentences have been written, their subject is called back...

...Thoughtlessly but honestly, I answered: "I don't know...

...There were no viable alternatives of belief available on the domestic scene...

...The guests were there voluntarily...

...At the same meeting, approaching us from the distant cabin to which she had been assigned, was a latecomer...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 seemed to be a definite partiality on Mrs...

...She called herself an anarchist, which brought out my fiercest polemical instincts and blinded me to the fact that what the term probably meant to her was a courageous defiance of convention—which I really admired—and not a theory, which I detested, about the desirability of a complete absence of government...

...There was of course widespread prowling at night by males, but if it was discreet and noiseless, there were no repercussions...

...0 ne evening we played the game of Truth...

...Of course, majorities are not necessarily right and can do foolish and unjust things...

...It was my first taste of luxury, and was surpassed only by my experience at the Rockefeller Villa Serbelloni, another center for creative labor, years later...

...They were informed of the rules when they arrived...

...I have long since given up the attempt to understand such things...

...The last time we met was by chance in a New Yorksubway train after the American Workers' party was founded and he was in the close embrace of the Communist party...

...My lecture was somewhat abstract, based as it was on Soviet theoretical writings...

...After I left Yaddo I did not keep in touch with Mrs...

...Marjorie was Mr...

...Each one of those remaining then writes a sentence which he believes truly characterizes the person who has left the room...

...Ames...

...Ihave gone through many changes in thought, but from the time I began to think until today I have been an unalterable opponent of anarchism, which I have invariably found the last ideological rampart of socially irresponsible individuals and causes, including the many self-confused persons who preface their remarks with the disarming statement: "At heart I am really a philosophical anarchist...

...There were some exceptions to themass conversions to Communism among the literati at Yaddo in the summers of 1931 and 1932...

...If true, all I can say is: What a waste...

...Every guest had a large room in the mansion, or a spacious, well-appointed cabin if he or she was a painter or musician...

...This was considered, I was told, a devastating retort...

...The results showed that there was the widest variation imaginable, except with some correlations on the rhythms...

...In the mid-forties, when Communist influence was still riding high in Hollywood in the wake of the euphoria of the U.S.-USSR co-belligerency against Nazi Germany and just before the Kremlin resumed its cold war against the West, I was invited by Morrie Ryskind to give a talk on Communism and Art...

...When I offered him a copy of the program of the American Workers' party he rejected it with a smile saying: "You can't influence me anymore, Sidney...

...This was certainly Jefferson's view...

...Oddly enough, most of those at Yaddo who were drawn to the Communist movement by my criticisms of the capitalist status quo and my expositions of Marxism remained faithful Stalinists when I took the field openly against the Communist movement at home and abroad after Stalin helped Hitler come to power in 1933...

...I know of only one guest who was asked to leave and that must have been for some egregiously scandalous reason, for shortly afterward he tried to throw the pilot out of a local airplane he had hired, and was committed...

...I seemed the only one unaware of the fact that her mode of walking had become the rage at Radcliffe, Smith, Mt...

...There was one occasion in which we were properly punished for our lack of spirit in protesting against Mrs...

...The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history...

...Evelyn Scott and I took an instant dislike to each other...

...At which, after a pause, some of the women turned furiously on their husbands and I heard variations of the shrill complaint, "I'll bet you would never have said that...

...Everything was grown on the estate and prepared by excellent chefs...

...I completed a draft of my Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx at Yaddo as the capitalist system in the United States tottered towards total ruin...

...Although not related to Yaddo, another occasion comes to mind when a naive question and an honest answer produced unexpected effects...

...Holyoke, and other elite institutions for young women...

...An extraordinarily beautiful young woman had approached, been duly introduced, and had chatted gaily with some of my companions...

...The novelist Josephine Herbst, for example, was already among the faithful and would growl uneasily when, while defending the ideals of Marx and Marxism, I would criticize specific policies of the American and Russian Communist parties...

...I published it last week...

...His name escapes me...

...Meanwhile every frustration or loss, every absence of opportunity or failure of effort when opportunity was present, could be blamed on capitalism...

...I had become quite friendly with Marc Blitzstein because he helped me to conduct a musical experiment...

...To my astonishment, I learned many years later in a biography of Josephine Herbst that she and Marion Greenwood were lovers...

...Although playing the role of St...

...Peabody and her sister...

...He failed to identify the writer and when I owned up he stalked over to me, burst into tears, and exclaimed: "Is that what you really think of me...

...Ames's secretaries and her husband had become Communists without knowing too much about the subject of Communism...

...From that time on I was never the butt of any wisecracks and jeering criticisms the creative male spirits periodically directed against each other...

...They urinated in the stone urns 1 containing the choice flowers cultivated at Yaddo, and with muffled cries of "Down with capitalism"--muffled so as not to be heard by the night watchman—pushed one of these huge urns off its ledge to be shattered below...

...She asked me to sit for my portrait and I consented...

...Only a former student of mine at NYU, Ozzie Caswell, who had left the purlieus of the academy for the anticipated fame and fortune of writing music for Hollywood, and who was sitting in the balcony, realized that at the time I really didn't know who Gregory Peck was, and what his political connections were...

...They could have left any time if they felt dissatisfied...

...No one can understand this phenomenon who is unaware of the psychological mood generated by the depths of the economic depression...

...Sometimes there was a meeting after dinner...

...Only the rosy propaganda of a planned society with no unemployment, circulated by the Soviet regime and disseminated by credulous pilgrims to the Soviet Union against the growing thunder of German Fascism, seemed believable...

...The most notable, as I recall, was Evelyn Scott, who had won some notoriety for her largely autobiographical Escapade...

...I managed to assuage Marc Blitz-stein's feelings that I had betrayed him in my effort to stress his sensitivity, but he remained distrustful...

...Peabody was the Maecenas of Yaddo...

...rule was not strictly enforced, but I thought it had a good effect in that everyone admitted that he got work done...

...Ihave never regarded myself as a wit or as a master of one-line repartee...

...Elizabeth Ames, rushed to embrace Marxism and Communism as if they were a species of religion...

...I envied the keenness of musical perception which enabled a musical critic to declare that Beethoven's Missa Solemnis was pantheistic rather than Christian or critics of modern painting to see what I could not by invoking a recondite symbolism...

...As I was to learn in a Truth Game we were to play—about which more later—she regarded me as something of an intellectual bully for resorting to argument when views were advanced as an expression of sentiment...

...Ames had married a soldier later killed in the First World War and was an unhappy widow...

...But nothing that we had to endure justified the action one night of about a dozen male guests led by a soused short-story writer from Oklahoma...

...There was one other disheartening discovery or rediscovery I made at Yaddo, and this was the bestiality of males under the influence of liquor...

...She was walking barefoot on tiptoe, and making slow progress...

...I'm still in love with my wife...

...And I considered you my friend...

...It didn't seem to improve anyone's liking for me but gave me immunity from the verbal horseplay in which literary intellectuals engage before establishing the pecking order whenever they appear as a group...

...Impressed and persuaded by a succession of distinguished guests that Communism was coming, in their simple-minded way they took out what they probably thought was an insurance policy and joined the Communist party, and became involved in activities that ultimately attracted the attention of state and federal authorities...

...All this, of course, was to change with the passage of years, but I am writing about 1931 and 1932...

...The food was too rich for some of us, and I remember once going into Saratoga Springs just to have a plate of plain corned beef and cabbage...

...Taken that night or the day after to some famous eating place with an odd name—The Brown Derby—I upset my hosts by an honest answer to a question unexpectedly asked of me by one of the women at our crowded dinner table...

...On this rock every variety of anarchism founders...

...I had read somewhere a learned essay contending that musical tones had intrinsic meanings, which was reminiscent of the claims of some early nineteenth-century German Naturphilosophen that certain colors had intrinsic meanings...

...It was clear that she didn't fight everyone off...

...To be sure, there were various degrees of understanding and dedication among the neophytes to Communism...

...The episode revolted me, partly because of a sense of guilt in being an observer and a kind of silent accomplice, and because of doubts it raised in my mind about the kind of society these converts to the new faith would develop...

...Evelyn Scott declared I was psychic, but that reflected her own naivete...

...It was assumed that my question was a witty way of pillorying the practice—something altogether absent from my mind...

...I'm sure Evelyn Scott was not there at the time...

...I couldn't claim any special virtue for that because at the time I was head over heels in love with someone even more beautiful...

...Without abbreviating the size of my nose, she did an interesting study of me which everyone recognizes although some think it is too flattering...

...Even those who glorify civil disobedience with respect to some special interest are insensitive to the fact that if civil disobedience were to become general—and human beings obeyed only the laws they morally approved—society would soon fall into a state of civil war...

...I had the Tower Room in the main house, which commanded a magnificent view...

...If men were angels," wrote Madison, "they would have no need of government," presumably because having no bodies, they would have no material needs or interests...

...On the other hand there were those who saw in Communism primarily the hope for a better life and a higher culture and whose minds were open to evidence...

...Ames's part towards unhappily married men and, during the two summers I was there, a rather close surveillance of the sexual behavior of the guests, justified by the necessity of allaying the gossip in Saratoga Springs that Yaddo had become a center of free love which might affect its tax status as a cultural institution...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...

...The result The question period was somewhat desultory until a gray-haired lady, who was later identified to me as the mother of Ginger Rogers, rose and angrily asked: "All you say is well and good, but what about Gregory Peck...

...Madison could not be more wrong, and it is surprising that he should have forgotten so completely his Milton, who chronicles in poetry the revolt of Lucifer, as well as the hierarchies of order and power recognized in traditional angelology...

...My first experience of this occurred during the summers of 1931 and 1932 at Yaddo, the colony in east central New York state set up for writers and artists at the palatial mansion of Katherine Trask as a memorial to her by her devoted husband and life-long admirer, the capitalist-philanthropist Peabody...

...It was a beautiful estate...

...I regret not getting to know them better...

...The first sentence about me that was read out ran "A Socratic Mantis" and I correctly guessed Evelyn Scott (as I did the authors of all the other characterizations of me...

...Peabody's favorite, we were told, and Mr...

...To which I answered, as I strode forward to hear her response, "And pray, who is Gregory Peck...

...I was always suspicious of the importance of the alleged gossip in view of the history of Saratoga Springs as a health resort and horse racing center...

...As she turned away and was no longer in earshot, one of my table partners asked me whether I thought the young woman had a great deal of sex appeal...

...With Blitz-stein's help we selected a dozen or so little known musical passages...

...Most of my concrete examples were drawn from the long and sorry history of Soviet repression of the arts and the extravaganzas of socialist realism...

...I know she moved progressively to the left politically and learned that Yaddo had become a kind of winter hide-out for Agnes Smedley, a dedicated Communist fellow-traveler at the time and an early supporter of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists who, Miss Smedley certainly knew, were not merely "agrarian reformers...

...The cocktail hour was at six and dinner for which everyone dressed informally was at seven...

...It was expected that the creative artists and thinkers would remain in their studies (unless they came in for the daily gourmet lunch) until four p.m...

...Long before this I had concluded on the basis of their membership in certain political groups that one of Mrs...

...Marjorie's thin voice could be endured, but when she began to read her poetry all of us were seized with a convulsive fit of laughter that could only be controlled by physical contortion and permanent damage to our insides...

...That is why if human beings are confronted with a choice between anarchy and despotism, they will prefer the latter...

...Needless to say Lionel Trilling was not one of them...

...There were those who were seeking a transcendent faith that could withstand "the niggling criticism" of skeptics, as well as the "lies" of the bourgeois press...

...Someone who stayed out of the Truth game at Yaddo was Marion Greenwood, a very talented painter whose striking and luscious beauty provoked unjustifiable doubts about her capacities...

...But several times as a consequence of innocent or naive remarks, I have enjoyed a brief reputation as a formidable swordsman in the give and take of rejoinder...

...The four p.m...

...The question period was somewhat desultory until a gray-haired lady, who was later identified to me as the mother of Ginger Rogers, rose and angrily asked: "All you say is well and good, but what about Gregory Peck...

...The way Lionel Trilling, with whom I had long talks on the subject, understood Communism was different from the way Marc Blitzstein, the musician, or Anton Refrigier, the artist, understood it...

...I volunteered to be "it...

...Just as utopian are the views of those who believe that human conflicts arise only or primarily from conflicts over property and other material interests, and that where there are no conflicts over material possessions there is therefore no need or justification for the state...

...There were a lot of complaints by the guests those early years at Yaddo...

...This is the bush behind which I fought Waldo Frank off," she would say...

...Today every lapsed totalitarian poses as an anarchist to mask his anti-Americanism...

...It was all rather embarrassing because some of the men later implied that my remark was made with malicious intent...

...Sidney Hook MEMORIES OF YADDO: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POSTSCRIPT A distinguished philosopher recalls the early days of a writers' colony where anti-capitalism flourished in plush surroundings...

...Morris R. Cohen had spent a summer there, as had my friend Ernest Nagel, and I suppose I owed my invitation to their recommendation...