Remembering Bertram Wolfe
STEIN, SOL
Perspectives REMEMBERING BERTRAM WOLFE BY SOL STEIN In the early '50s, I came upon a publishing failure called Three Who Made a Revolution. Though Edmund Wilson, then the dean of American...
...Yes or no...
...Long before that, our relationship had changed...
...I drew up a contract, and once more Three Who Made a Revolution lives...
...Then one day this year I received a second terrible phone call from Palo Alto...
...I worked at other desks in other departments with room in their budgets, doing exactly the same work with Wolfe as always...
...I had no father...
...He got the better end of the bargain...
...Wolfe, of course, went on writing, and receiving ideological converts-some afraid for their lives-in his small Brooklyn apartment...
...It would take three volumes, and resetting it to fit the pocket format would cost too much: The patient was not immortal...
...Though more than three decades apart in age, we became friends...
...Nobody would buy it, the naysayers chorused...
...Then he fled down the street, away from the terrors of expressing emotion...
...it is an understanding our children and grandchildren need to grasp of how, in this most horrific of all centuries, the impulse toward improving the lot of men resulted in the creation of man's greatest disease, the totalitarian state-for which Wolfe's work is a vaccine and for which, at this writing, there is as yet no cure...
...I was young, naive, inexperienced, and found it intolerable that a book that had influenced my perception of the century should be consigned to death...
...If after I die the book is allowed to go out of print, I leave a curse for whoever may be responsible...
...Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...
...So I ran about frantically seeking a reprieve, a cure...
...He wore a long flowing bathrobe that his wife had warned him against...
...Though Edmund Wilson, then the dean of American literary critics, had called it "the best book in its field in any language," its original publisher, the Dial Press, had sold fewer than 1,000 copies a year since its publication in 1948...
...In addition to editing the writers on Wolfe's staff, I had a first startling experience of editing something of his...
...While praising Wolfe's expertise (he knew more about the Soviet Union than anyone else in the State Department) and his methods of analysis (his record for predicting future Soviet actions was unmatched), they warned that he was hell to work for...
...Wolfe had no son...
...When he came out, he threw the pages of his manuscript on my desk and stood looking over my shoulder as I read...
...It caught fire, and when it was finally extinguished the man who was perhaps the most astute perceiver of the central event of the 20th century had passed into legend...
...Men and women in love are unreasonable nuisances to the sane world, and I was now in love not only with the idea of preserving the life of Three Who Made a Revolution but doing so in the new format...
...He put the fresh pages of a totally rewritten piece in front of me...
...There was no point to an interview until he had sampled my writing...
...A day later I was summoned to his presence...
...Among anti-Stalinists he was reputed to be a man of steel...
...Thus it went, page by page, until he was too tired to continue...
...Being in the proximity of Bertram Wolfe meant you were constantly being bombarded by electrons...
...Melvin Arnold, director of the Beacon Press and later president of Harper & Row, said he'd give the book and format a try...
...We would sit side by side as I flipped pages, revealing my presumptuous corrections, and Wolfe saying, No, no, no to each...
...Like all writers who command their ideas as well as their language, he was constantly on guard against disimprove-ment...
...To his everlasting credit, one of the publishers I approached proved as deaf to the naysayers as I was...
...He would arrange for a transfer...
...After I delivered my unhappy verdict, he grabbed the pages off my desk and stalked into his office, slamming the door so hard we all turned around in expectation that the top half of the door, made of glass and shimmering in its frame, would break...
...This was condemned, beyond the cost factor, for "looking like a European book, not an American book...
...When Joe McCarthy launched his attack against the Voice of America, I received Wolfe's approval for an act that some thought treasonable...
...The grapevine said he needed a writer...
...I was working then as an analyst in the Western European section of the State Department's Voice of America...
...And to the Soviets, who have prohibited their people from reading this book since it first saw life nearly half a century ago, I would say in my mother's tongue: Where is your Bertram Wolfe who understands us from his experience within as Bertram Wolfe understood you...
...After failing to involve Anchor Books, I sought to interest two other publishers in what seemed at first glance a hare-brained idea: Why not bring out the book in paper covers the same size as the hardback, thereby offsetting from the original to save composition costs...
...it would die like an animal...
...Because Three Who Made a Revolution is not merely a triple biography and a history...
...It was a lie...
...I stayed amid the cleaning ladies emptying the wastebaskets...
...I was confronted by naysayers...
...At 82 he was cold in the Northern California mornings and would light the gas heater in his bathroom before his daily ablutions...
...He showed no surprise that I had remained behind...
...An article he had promised to Norman Cousins at the Saturday Review was long overdue and a last warning telegram arrived...
...Wolfe and I had a resounding laugh together...
...War, pestilence, traffic cut lives short, but should books, like people, be subject to premature death...
...Two years earlier, in 1951,1 had met the author of Three Who Made a Revolution, Bertram D. Wolfe...
...His eyes were not limpid likea rabbit's, but one is tempted to play upon his name-ike a wolfe's, hunted (as he had been during his years of exile), cunning and knowledgeable, cold to the advance of strangers...
...My heart cried out like a young lover's in despair...
...I asked for an interview...
...He defied protocol, rank, systems, procedures, conventions...
...I could make any mistake once...
...As I handed it back to him, he didn't smile, he didn't shake my hand, he didn't say "thank you," but his quick nod of approbation was for me no less than the Pope's crown for Bonaparte...
...Everyone advised against...
...It was perfect...
...A book, unlike a magazine or newspaper, was supposed to be durable, an object of worth, permanent, to be passed on with lesser treasures to one's children...
...It was Ella Wolfe with the news that her husband's greatest work had been put out of print...
...He was immediately protected by a cordon within the State Department that knew how desperately we continued to need him...
...A decade later, when I was editing Wolfe's The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (which was eventually nominated for a National Book Award), we would meet almost daily in my home because his afflicted back could not find comfort in office chairs...
...One evening, as Bert and his wife Ella (who remains as beautiful today as she was then) and I and my wife parted on a street corner after a social occasion, he took my hand in his and with embarrassment reddening his face, said, "Give my love to the parents of your children...
...And so it was that in 1953, acting as amicus curiae with regard to Three Who Made a Revolution and as a friend of the author as well, I rushed around trying to save the book...
...Wolfe's "failure" sold over 500,000 copies in the Beacon edition until, many years later, Dell's Delta line, then commonly owned with Dial, wisely recalled the rights and reportedly sold another 300,000...
...A total of 800,000 copies of a serious book on the Russian Revolution became its own revolution...
...When we had covered perhaps 10 pages in this fashion he would ask to go back to the first page, query my reasoning behind the proposed changes, and at that point, with thought, he would agree...
...I made a few phone calls...
...I spoke to my friend Nathan Glazer, at the time Jason Epstein's second-in-command at Anchor Books...
...Lesson: Demagogues without a program retreated if you fought back without camouflage or cover...
...He was not only intolerant of mediocrities, he was impolite to anyone, however good, who made a mistake...
...Wolfe, who had broken with Stalin in 1928, was now, in a country that elevated its Rubashovs instead of executing them, the chief of the Ideological Advisory Staff...
...He agreed with me about the worth of the book, but his prognosis was dire...
...for the minds of the less knowledgeable...
...We stayed in touch...
...He let me remain standing...
...We were no longer merely employer-employee, co-conspirators against barbarism, writer-editor...
...The Eastern Europeans who worked for the Voice were certain I would be taken out to the courtyard and shot...
...It was about this time that Wolfe divided our ideological chores: He would deal with what we (meaning America as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson of Monticello and by Bertram Wolfe of Brooklyn) were against, and I would deal with what we were for...
...as a department head, he wanted everyone to write as close to perfection as possible daily...
...I wanted to consult my various Dutch Uncles to get their views on my ability to survive the heat of Wolfe's demanding environment...
...I suggested that Edmund Wilson's quote be put at the top of the cover, on the assumption that the right audience would know Wilson meant it was even better than his own To the Finland Station...
...if you were in his inner circle, your chances of survival decreased...
...Though I had taught a course on the Soviet Union at the City College of New York during the late '40s, I learned more about the subject in the first few weeks with Wolfe than I would have in a lifetime of teaching...
...In 1977, when Wolfe was midway in his autobiography, A Life in Two Centuries, came the terrible accident...
...I, by chance as it were, had meanwhile become a publisher...
...Just as Wolfe was always patient with those who defected from their Communist allegiances much later than he, he was patient with me, a virgin who had never been a Communist...
...Costings were thrown back at me...
...I carefully laid some short manuscripts on his desk...
...I wrote a broadcast denouncing McCarthy, and with the official stamp of the Ideological Advisory Staff it was broadcast to the world in 46 languages...
...the huge book would have to sell for $2.95, and the highest price projected for a paperback in those days was $1.25...
...Three Who Made a Revolution was far too long to fit into a pocket-sized Anchor Book...
...At least once each year Bertram Wolfe was denounced on the floor of Congress...
...In time, he shifted his ground to the comforts of Palo Alto, California, where, with the resources of the Hoover Institution, he continued his work, taking his hydrochloric acid capsules and only the mildest of pain killers that would not numb his brain...
...Paperbacks, I was told, were pocket books, and Wolfe's big book would never fit in the pocket...
...I was not then in publishing...
...It was ready for the scrap heap...
...With each decade its relevance increased...
...Finally Wolfe emerged from his office...
...At the appropriate hour, others left for home...
...I am ashamed to say that it took me 11 months to plug my ears against the din and to accept his offer...
...You learned fast or you were exploded...
...He had a wide-ranging disrespect Sol Stein is president of Stein & Day Publishers...
...The next meeting would go exactly the same way, No, no, no, and then back to the beginning...
...My instinct cried yes, my inexperience waffled in trepidation of being exposed daily to Wolfe's scythe of a mind and his equally scythelike temper...
...My position was cut out of the budget...
...Not without fear of his immediate wrath, I asked for a bit of time to think things over...
...As a stylist, Wolfe was unsurpassed by anyone in his field...
...This article is adapted from his Foreword to a new edition of Three Who Made a Revolution, to be issued next March in both cloth and paperback...
...Heofferedme-it came across as an instruction-the post of senior editor and his second-in-command...
...Wolfe closeted himself in his office...
...It is said that if you would stop a hunter from pulling the trigger, let him first see the eyes of a rabbit...
Vol. 66 • December 1983 • No. 23
