DICK AND HARRIET
Putnam, Samuel
Dick and Harriet Samuel Putnam, our guest columnist this week, it renowned as a prolific editor, literary scholar and translator. His original works include Francois Rabelais, Man of the...
...In other words, it is still for her the fashionable attitude...
...As they flounced off the veranda, I caught something about "Redbaiters...
...They were married, and ever since—including a few years in France—they have been living on the somewhat slender but sufficient trust fund left by Harriet's father...
...They subscribe to such publications as George Scldes's In Fact, the former New York Star, the present Compass, and the like...
...Yet both are fairlj| bursting with sympathy for "labor" and the "common man...
...At an art colony one summer she met Dick...
...e DICK AND HARRIET COME OVER TO SEE US occasionally...
...In the period of WPA he managed somehow to get on an art project, and he looks back nostalgically to that time, when he had a transient importance in his own eyes...
...Neither has ever really known what it is to be poor or to earn one's own living...
...His original works include Francois Rabelais, Man of the Renaissance, and Marguerite of Navarre...
...And you will be fair game, for you will be one of the 'former people' while Dick la 'of intellectual origin.' But cheer up...
...Daughter of a prosperous manufacturer, she was educated at Smith College in that awful era, the 1920's...
...It was especially unfortunate that they should have dropped in the other night, just after our Polish-American landlady had received a smuggled letter from the old country, telling how her familly had been treated by the Russians...
...I do not know why they come back...
...Harriet all the while was busy knitting and the clicking of her needles showed her mounting irritation, "There...
...Translator of authors like Georges Duhamel, Luigi Pirandello, Vissarion Belinski, J. K. Huysmans and Ignazio Silone, Mr...
...Dick, meanwhile, has not done so well with his painting...
...There she came under the influence of a radical instructor or two, took part in Sacco and Vanzetti demonstrations, and acquired a "social consciousness" of the kind then fashionable...
...For your "progressive," I have found, can dish it out but cannot take it...
...In theory, that is to say...
...Her brother-in-law, who owned a twofamily house, had found a notice tacked on his door one morning giving him five days in which to get out or face the alternative of a concentration camp...
...Putnam's new translation of Miguel de Cervantes' classic Don Quixote uull be published shortly by Viking Press...
...The rest they get by word of mouth from other "progressives" whom they look up to...
...The truth is that Harriet is still living in the twenties, that heyday of "debunkers," and in addition she remembers certain "popular front" activities of the 1930's...
...He had been given a hovel down by the railroad tracks in which to live, and had been put to forced labor...
...Here was one bit of first hand evidence that hardly could be dismissed as "anti-Soviet propaganda...
...And they speak a common patois...
...So far as I am aware, he has never sold a picture nor had an exhibit—which naturally has soured him...
...I said, "you can see what will happen to you when the comrades take over In our village...
...It is not strange that their visits almost invariably end with their leaving in a huff...
...He was a young art school student with ambitions to be a painter...
...It's getting late...
...There are some shacks down by the river that aren't too bad, and Dick may even like it in the factory or the atone quarry...
...I don't think they'll care for his kind of art...
...Yet I happen to know that they do not read the Daily Worker, they would never run that risk...
...They then hand us, word for word, the latest Daily Worker slogans...
...Nothing infuriates him so much as being confronted with facts and a reasoned analysis based upon authentic documentation...
...I decided to make the most of it...
...The company she and Dick keep is composed of "artists," "intellectuals," and refugees from Greenwich Village...
...They usually descend upon us when they have some particular occasion for gloating, such as the Red victory in China...
...I wondered at first where they got their line, but it did not take me long to discover...
...I "Come, Dick,' said Harriet, giving her needles a final vicious click and rising to her feet...
...When it comes |to associating with the plain people or tak"mg an interest in them as individuals, I have noticed they always shy away, and Harriet, sublimely unaware of any inconsistency, will let drop some such remark as, "After all, they are not our sort...
...For of course your house will be wanted by some local party functionary...
...we must be going...
...By Samuel Putnam IET'S CALL THEM DICK AND HARRIET— j Let us begin with Harriet, for in a sense she is the key figure, though each complements the other...
Vol. 32 • July 1949 • No. 29
