STANLEY PLASTRIK (1915-1981)

...When we held Dissent meetings Stanley would gesture to me after a while that it was time to adjourn, though precisely how to bring this about wasn't clear...

...Stanley was the man who took care...

...He took our little project seriously, so much so that he loved to make jokes at its expense, especially at the expense of its miniature condition...

...Not untouched, no one has been untouched, but unscarred: without rancor or resentment...

...This mutual confidence extended to every area of our work and life, even to those parts of private existence we were too inhibited or shy to talk about...

...He was always ready to go out of his way...

...We became the most unyielding and passionate defenders within the left of the absolute necessity of democracy...

...Stanley, he charged, was indulging in a "mood indigo...

...At meetings where this happened, Stanley had a way of dozing off, or seeming to, and I would watch his act with amusement, knowing it was his way of signaling his friends the distaste he felt for easy rhetoric...

...It was too late for us to be lured into the corruptions of bureaucracy...

...Dragging bundles to the post office, dealing with printers, translators, and bank managers, scouring the European press for material, making friends with younger people the rest of us didn't try or know how to reach: that was Stanley...

...He was our Minister of Education...

...The years pass, our lives approach their ends, and in moments of introspection we ask ourselves: what has it all been, the tumult and the noise, the talk and the accumulated paper...

...Though I should add that in the last two or so years we did talk more openly...

...I'd ask Stanley to do something, say, on Monday...

...But I will remember him best in the chair he always chose at our board meetings, making his financial report, intervening patiently, sometimes just a bit impatiently, in our political discussions...

...I don't mean its history, that I could read about in the library, but its immediate past, the personal and political experience out of which Dissent emerged, which wasn't my own experience, but into which I was, with his help, naturalized...

...Sometimes I'd play a little game for my private amusement...

...There were traits, stigmata we all shared...

...Stanley had no patience at all with the puffy agitation, the righteous posturing, and what he came to call the verbal radicalism that had been, and sometimes continued to be, an affliction of the movement...

...We had never been able to experience the early enchantments or delusions of the Marxist vision...

...I don't say we always succeeded, only that we tried...

...MICHAEL WALZER 259...

...We would talk about the hope that each of us would see that the other, if stricken first, did not suffer the indignity of surviving in a vegetative state...

...IRVING HOWE I knew Stanley Plastrik for more than twenty years, but I saw him almost only at Dissent meetings...

...He mellowed...

...And I was one of the young ones, one of the first of the second generation of Dissent writers and editors...

...He had also begun to plan out a book on India and gone there to check impressions, recover memories...

...And to be one meant to be like Stanley...

...But then, after visiting the hospital in which Stanley lay dying, it struck me that the moral basis of socialism had been on the phone with me almost every day these past seventeen years, had been my friend for forty, and my collaborator on Dissent for 27 years...

...If Dissent didn't always scintillate with the emotions of a movement on the rise, we had at least the moral strength of people who wanted to find ideas by which to preserve the values that had impelled them to the generous mistakes—and valid commitments, too—of their youth...

...We had other traits, other stigmata...

...He enjoyed himself immensely this past year and there was every reason to hope for more such years to come...

...Despite the past, he was open to the present, hopeful about the future, kind to the young, receptive to new ideas in ways I already have difficulty imitating...

...He never wavered, so secure was he morally...

...Oh that," he'd grunt when I explained, "that's been done long ago...

...Stanley, as I've said, kept getting better with age...

...a model, for me, always now, of political intelligence and moral integrity...

...For doing this he met with the disapproval of a comrade who would later develop still greater heresies but who then chastized Stanley for his pessimism...

...He was gentle with me even when I needed a kick in the pants, and gentle too with others who have the same need...

...He fought equally against the rightist realpolitiker and the authoritarian leftists who claimed that democracy was good only for "us," not for "them...

...Committed not to this or that doctrine, but to those deep values without which no doctrine is worth anything...

...He worked well with younger radicals...

...There was another common trait: we had had it with meetings—in fact, this was almost a way of defining a generation...

...Maybe also our Minister of Tourism, always welcoming friends from abroad, the Esprit group from Paris, political allies from India, freelance radicals from Israel and Italy...

...We formed the habit of lunching together about once a month at a dive near his house, and I teased Stanley into having Dissent pay for this lunch...

...And perhaps it also helped shape the thought and experience of a few to come after us...

...We were latecomers...

...He was our Interior Minister...

...In the experience we shared since the late 1930s the idea of socialism may have become increasingly problematical, but the rightness of being a socialist had remained clear...

...But we did what serious people should always be doing: we turned answers into questions...

...He was our Foreign Minister...

...He was a man of wonderful steadiness and political judgment, who seemed unscarred by the defeats and frustrations of the left...

...meant to stand fast in good times or bad...

...If ever a man did steady work, it was he...

...and Stanley, who had a life-long interest in and deep knowledge of India, kept arguing that only a democratic foundation could provide the basis in the emerging countries for a healthy social modernity...

...We knew—we children of the '30s—that we were living in a desperate time, that with Hitler and Stalin the darkness of apocalypse had fallen upon us...

...meant to be on call for whatever task was needed...

...I was somewhat taken aback since it was not clear to me whether socialism can claim a moral basis apart from that of other humane persuasions, and if it can, in which ways and to what extent...

...He knew the common emotions of discouragement, but he kept on...

...We were sick of soapboxers, especially if they came to our living rooms...

...We began, in the early'40s, a journey it would take us years to understand: a journey from orthodoxy to the problematic, from Marxist ideology to a quizzical attachment to socialist values, from the claustrophobic security of the sect to the bracing anxieties of independence...

...But it helped change us...

...And I remember both his delight in the beauties of the place and his quick perceptions of its politics...

...What had emerged from our earlier radicalism —"one dripping trophy" as Melville says: yes, dripping with blood—was the principled articulation of our anti-Stalinism, through which, if we could not regain the strength of socialism, we might at least salvage its honor...

...He and I did a lot of the daily work of the magazine together, in almost complete harmony, developing the sort of mutual confidence that requires no talk...

...He agreed, but only on the condition that most of our talk really be about business and that we not exceed together $8 for the bill...

...Often he would really not remember any more, since he had of course completed the task the previous Tuesday...

...He made friends with young people, showing a fine talent for patiently explain258 ing our views, our traditions to those who came near us—a talent, I might add, not all of us quite had...

...he knew when to talk and when to listen, and he was able, more easily than most of us, to establish authentic relations—perhaps for the same reason that he was such a good traveller: though he disliked political adventurism, he was personally adventurous...

...He kept things together, he kept caring for, he held us with his strength, he kept caring for...

...Those of us near Stanley never had to talk about the moral basis of anything, since we felt through him its constant warming presence...

...We would talk at these lunches about when to end the magazine—when it was no longer fun, Stanley used to say...

...We had a very close friendship...

...Before the rest of us, he sensed the disintegration of orthodox Marxism as both world view and politics, though it was not until some years later, in the early '50s, after we had begun our stumbling journey toward an undogmatic democratic socialism, that he put these thoughts down on paper...

...We didn't reknit an ideology or rebuild a movement...

...He had entered the Trotskyist movement during the '30s, when that wasn't exactly a passport to popularity...

...On such questions Stanley and I would almost always agree, for we 257 had been trained in the best of schools: the school of failure...

...To me, he was one of those people who had come into the socialist movement during a time of great trouble in this country, but also a time of great hope for political advance, radical transformation, and who had remained committed when that hope faded...

...We did talk a lot, as it happens, since we sensed that the greatest pleasure in conversation occurs among friends who no longer need conversation...

...But the sharing of our days, the comradeship of friends who have tried to live for—more important, to live through—an idea: that is the value, at once precious and fragile, we can give each other...

...meant to live by a code, largely unspoken yet not to be violated, of concern for the lives of men and women...

...IN ALL THESE YEARS Stanley was our rock, our center, our pivot...

...A year ago he retired from his teaching post and worked almost full time on the magazine, establishing a whole new network of relationships...

...Whatever the disadvantages of having been trained in the school of failure—and these were of course numerous and grave—there was one advantage: we tried to be honest with ourselves, we tried to avoid cant, we submitted to a grinding self-criticism...

...I sometimes wavered, proposing any number of times over the past years to end our venture—enough already!—but Stanley sustained and helped one, with the wry humor of a disenchanted optimist...

...A calm presence, helping to hold us together...

...Knowing him, listening to him talk about the old days and the new, gave me a sense of socialism's past...

...Stanley was a shade more cantankerous than the rest of us, but also more independent...

...I don't know the history of his views on the Jewish question, but he had come, I thought, to the right view: a joy in the existence of Israel, and a critical perspective on each of its governments...

...I saw him once in Israel, he and Simone in Jerusalem...

...within it, though a loyal activist, he kept showing inclinations toward heresy...

...Much of it makes one uneasy, seems questionable: the greying files of magazines, the meetings and debates...

...Nothing could shake him from the persuasion that if something of value did remain in the socialist heritage, it found its heart-throb in the exercise of democracy...

...He quarreled with Trotsky about India, claiming rightly enough that he knew more about that country than the `old man" did...

...I knew him, then, as a political man, which is certainly what he was—to his fingertips—but not all he was...

...This has not changed the world, which proved to be more recalcitrant than any of us had supposed...

...we knew it only in its collapse, in the shame that Stalinism brought, even upon its opponents...

...In the late'30s, when I first met Stanley, all of us were opinionated, lively, cocksure, dogmatic...

...For years we kept teasing Stanley about his "mood indigo," but when I recently looked up his piece I found an all-too-accurate, though gloomy enough, anticipation of thoughts and events to come...

...I have never known him to be happier, more genial...

...He made peace between volatile collaborators who, out of common frustration, sometimes sprang at each other's throats...

...I don't wish to claim too much for this experience...

...I'd wait seven or eight days and ask again whether he had done it...

...we adhered to it only through violent negations of its traducers...

...It's a matter of acute chagrin to us that Stanley died when he did...