REVIEWS: Memory Hole
H., I.
NEW MASSES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE REBEL THIRTIES, edited by Joseph North. Introduction by Maxwell Geismar. New York: International Publishers. 318 pp. $7.50. THIS CAREFULLY LAUNDERED SELECTION...
...And far from being merely "disheartened," numerous contributors to the New Masses broke away, sick and shamed to have been connected with the terrorism and totalitarianism of the Stalinist movement...
...Down memory hole, again...
...that it denied there was forced labor in the Soviet Union, etc...
...Other than the sentence I have quoted, Geismar has nothing to say about the fact that the New Masses was a violent defender of international Stalinism...
...North has excerpted material (some of it readable) that gives the impression New Masses was just a pure-spirited champion of the oppressed during the hard depression years...
...More interesting than North's editing is Geismar's introduction...
...H. 237...
...But then, running the mammoth purges in the Ukraine may give a man a better memory than writing introductions in Westchester County...
...Khrushchev, neck-deep in blood, was more candid in 1956 than Geismar in 1969...
...and everything that gave the magazine a distinctive political character he has omitted (such as its praise of Stalin's constitution as "a document which for charm, frankness and simplicity can have few counterparts among the state papers in history...
...Preening himself as a nonparty man, Geismar reaches a high lyricism of praise for the New Masses...
...His closest brush with, let us say, the unpleasant is this sentence: "A series of outward historical events—like the Stalin purge trials of the 1930s and the suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists in the closing traumas of the Spanish Civil War—had disheartened some contributors to the magazine...
...THIS CAREFULLY LAUNDERED SELECTION from the cultural journal of American Stalinism during the 1930s has been put together by one of its early editors, one of the few who never kicked the totalitarian habit...
...That's like saying: "Certain unfortunate ex236 CREEPING REPRESSION IN WASHINGTON (continued) cesses of the Nazi regime—such as a lack of legal niceties in disposing of the Jews and a roughness in handling Poles in the closing traumas of the Second World War—had disheartened Knut Hamsun and Ernst Juenger...
...that it proudly upheld the Moscow trials and ran a bitter campaign against those American intellectuals who criticized the trials...
Vol. 17 • May 1970 • No. 3
