The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972

By Edmund Wilson

The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960–1972--a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times.

Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite -- Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin -- as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether noting the routines of his normal neighbors or the struggle of his own aging.

"Candor and intelligence come through on every page--in this always absorbing journal by perhaps the last great man of American letters." - Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781466899698

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

Book preview

A NEW DECADE BEGINS

Harvard 1960

Jan. 1, 1960. At my age, I find that I alternate between spells of fatigue and indifference when I am almost ready to give up the struggle, and spells of expanding ambition, when I feel that I can do more than ever before.

Sometime early in December we went to dinner at old Billy James’s. We had already heard from Rosalind [Wilson] that he had just been married to the mother of a friend of hers, and this was the first time they had entertained. She was a Mrs. Pierce, a daughter of the painter George de Forest Brush. Rosalind thought that she had been rather destructive in her relations with her children. A son had committed suicide; a daughter, Rosalind’s friend, was in McLean’s.* Rosalind had just been to see her, and she had said, Mother did it so quickly that I think Mother must have been pregnant. The girl, while at McLean’s, had had an admirer who suffered from a no doubt neurotic condition of the stomach. The mother, who is a food faddist, had taken him away from the daughter by curing him by a different diet. She seems partly to have taken the step of marrying Billy because she couldn’t bear the idea of his living alone on Irving St. and eating nothing but frankfurters and marinated herring.

He had a very funny account of their difficulties in getting married. It had taken four or five days. In the first place, in order to get a license, they had to pass a Wassermann test. Then, since neither had been baptized, that required some special dispensation. He got someone to intervene with a judge whom he knew; the friend applied to him while court was in session and the judge signed a waiver for them. Then it turned out to be difficult to get a clergyman to marry them, and Billy finally resorted to another friend, a retired dean of the Divinity School, 90 years old. At one office they told him he better hurry up, and when he left the building the girls waved at him from the windows. His wife said there were moments when she had to pretend that she didn’t have anything to do with him. He was obviously very much pleased. He had several drinks and sometimes, in telling us stories, his memory would fail him. Someone told me that he could not always remember the former married name of his wife. Both Leon Edel and I noticed that Mrs. Pierce had something of a Southern accent, but she said that she had always lived in Europe and New York. When I looked up G. de F. Brush, I found that he had been born in Tennessee. She and Billy had evidently known one another from long back in Cornish, N.H.

Gossip in Cambridge: Elena met Elena Levin on the street, who said, I hear you have a new fur coat. Our disastrous dinner at the Lowells’, before he went into McLean’s a few years ago, seemed immediately known to everyone in Boston and Cambridge. When I went to New York, I was at first surprised that Katharine White should know about it, then remembered that she came from Boston. I found, during the last semester, that Robert knew what was going on in my seminar. Mrs. [McGeorge] Bundy, whom I met on the street, knew that I had been very busy. Last Tuesday, the 29th, the Levins and Marian Schlesinger came to dinner and Isaiah Berlin, on his way to New York from an historians’ conference in Chicago, appeared at about half past ten. We thought that the evening had been very successful and that the Levins had been very good-humored, but when I afterwards talked with Isaiah on the phone, he assured me that Harry, on his way back home, had been most disagreeable about everybody.

This is the Oxford-cliquish side of Isaiah. (Just before he went, he got started on the C.P. Snows, whom he wanted to denigrate and discredit, and was worrying like a terrier with a rat.) Harry [Levin] is no doubt a little jealous of Isaiah, on account of his understanding with Elena [Levin]—on the basis of their common Russian background—as well as of his greater freedom as a Jew in academic life; but it is also true that Isaiah’s indistinct way of talking makes it difficult for Harry, with his deafness, to understand what he is saying and so puts him under a strain. Isaiah is behaving more and more like royalty. He first called me up from New York to try to persuade me to come to New York; then, failing that, to meet him halfway in New Haven. Then I got a series of telegrams first announcing then cancelling a visit to Cambridge, then announcing his arrival on the night of the 29th. He had told me over the telephone that he couldn’t possibly come to Cambridge because there would be forty people who would expect to see him; that Mrs. Whitehead and we were the only ones he had to see. His visit was to be strictly incognito. But he had told the Schlesingers the same thing—having seen Arthur in New York—and Marian had asked us, when we called on her, whether we were expecting a mysterious guest. Later on, after his visit, Elena met Stuart Hughes on the street, and he said that he had just seen Isaiah at the historians’ congress in Chicago and that he had said he was paying us a secret visit. We sent him off in a cab to call on Mrs. Whitehead—which he afterwards told me he had failed to do. Mrs. Whitehead is over 90, and it was after 12 at night.

Elena Levin said that Max Hayward was a kind of Raskolnikov, and Isaiah said that he was like Genet—with which my Elena agreed and said the name had just come into her mind. She had seen him, as I had not done, overstaying his welcome at the Chavchavadzes’, putting through long-distance telephone calls at their expense, drinking a lot and letting himself go. He had told them that he never had more than one suit and one pair of shoes at a time; he wore them till they were worn out.

The night of Jan. 1. I read Nancy Hale’s new novel Dear Beast—amusing about Virginia but fundamentally a woman’s magazine production (with a title, I should say, aimed at the movies). Went to sleep late and not long before waking had, for the first time in I don’t know how long, another dream about Margaret [Canby].* I thought that I had quarrelled in an apartment with some woman—I thought she was begging off from going to bed with me at the time I wanted her (this evidently inspired by an incident in the novel)—and an unexpected visit by Ted Paramore gave me an excuse to reject her altogether, to let her go away. Then I went out with him to some kind of bar, taking, however, a bottle of bourbon from my own room (this from the novel, too). I brought up again my old idea that Margaret was still on the Coast, that she had merely cut off communications with me. He refused to tell me where she was, how I could find her again. I said, But you know that I can find out in other ways where she is. He said yes but he wouldn’t tell me. He told me, however, that at first she had been glad when she had been told that I cared about her, that I wanted to find her again (an echo of what the Eichheims or somebody had told me: that when she had had a letter from me at the end of the summer, she had said something like It’s nice to feel you’re wanted). I kept after him, and we kept drinking bourbon. I couldn’t believe that he would keep on refusing, then realized that I should presently have to change the subject, return to our joking conversation and gossip about Santa Barbara. But I would find her now, nevertheless—even after so long a separation.

Charley Curtis’s death just before Christmas. He had been looking at television or listening to radio with his wife when the next room caught fire from the fireplace. She got out the window but he went back to his study to save a manuscript. There was also photographing apparatus there, and the film—I suppose—blazed up. He was blinded and stifled and fell on the floor. The firemen rescued him and he was taken to the hospital, where he died. Though I did not see him often, I miss him—I knew that he read what I wrote, and he occasionally sent me notes about it. When I instinctively say to myself, Charley Curtis will appreciate this, I have to remember that he is no longer there.—Rosalind thinks that he was rather unhappy. When he divorced his wife and married again, his new wife immediately developed some more or less neurotic disease—what I take to have been an hysterical paralysis that made it impossible to move from her chair. She had to be carried and three nurses looked after her. Charley himself was in constant attendance. He had partially given up his law business and seemed more and more to occupy himself with writing. I always had the impression that it was harder for him than most people to resign himself to the position of political subordination that the Irish Catholic dominance had imposed on Boston. I think he compensated for this by such dissidences as taking the unpopular side in his book on the Oppenheimer case.* Then the scandal of his divorce cost him his overseership at Harvard. When Bostonians of this old upper stratum do not become set in the conventional mold, they are likely to become formidably the other way:

Their humor and charm

Become cause for alarm—

I am thinking of Cummings and Curtis.

I had a dream in which I thought that at last I was going to write a wonderful poem. I composed two magnificent lines, then realized that in order to complete it I should have to have something to drink. Yes: Elena had left something in the icebox: scarcely more than a drop of a decanter of sweet white wine, but the better part of another decanter of white wine, which turned out to be almost intolerably sour. However, I started in on it. I found that the first two lines had partly melted away in my head, but I did my best to recover them, then woke up and mustered the strength of mind to go into my study and write them down:

You in that lovely splendor have endured,

Beside that vague and honey-vapored deep.

I think that this last is an echo of a line of Yeats’s: Beneath that … and vapor-turbanned steep (?).*

Stravinsky in New York

We were invited by a Mr. Graf to attend a reception in New York (January 10) to meet Stravinsky. I had never met him so wanted to go. Elena had known his wife, formerly married to the painter Sudeikin, who had played the non-dancing bride in the first production of Les Noces, and her mother had known Stravinsky from almost his first days in Paris. Elena and Olili [Mumm] had known every note of his scores, and he had several times visited Johannisberg. I called up Sylvia Marlowe to ask her who Mr. Graf was, and she said that she knew nothing about him except that he was a man who gave parties for Stravinsky. She and Leonid [Berman] were giving a party Saturday afternoon, and she would give us two seats in her box at the concert Sunday afternoon at which a new work of Stravinsky’s was to be played. We went and had such a spree as we have not been able to afford in a long time. The party was a get-together of the artistic and literary worlds on a scale, I think, unequalled in my experience: Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman; Eleanor Perényi and her dreadful mother, who reminded me who she was and talked to me without ever mentioning that Eleanor was there, so that when Eleanor presented herself I did not at first recognize her—when I inquired what had happened to Perényi, Mrs. Stone [Eleanor’s mother] had said that it was too long a story to tell: he was now rather pathetic, a schoolmaster, I think, in Switzerland; there was also that bearded semi-pansy whose initials are L.L., who teaches somewhere, lives with his mother and entertains celebrities: I had met him first at the Stores; Louis and Emmy Kronenberger, the latter looking very pretty; Virgil Thomson, whom I had not seen since Paris and who, Sylvia said, sulked on the couch because he did not like opera singers and there was an important woman opera singer there; Victoria Ocampo, that splendid old girl, who had just seen Waldo Frank; he had a new grievance about something that made him feel he was no longer appreciated in South America; Margaret de Silver, who surprised us by having become as slim as a sylph—I had to die to do it, she had had an operation; Norman Podhoretz, Jason Epstein and a young man named Marcus, who is interested in Dickens: Podhoretz has just been made editor of Commentary, which he says he is going to revolutionize—I reminded of his remark about  [Thou art the man]; Tony West was standing near the entrance to the front room: I told him that he was all wrong, in his article about me in the London Sunday Times, in implying that I had no more than a smattering of Russian—he said this was just a tease—and that I hated Eliot; Red Warren and Eleanor Clark—I had no conversation with her, but took him into the back room to talk about the Civil War: he displayed his usual intelligence on this subject, said that people like Jefferson Davis were schizophrenic, did really want the South to win—it is his coming from Kentucky that makes him so detached; Kenneth Tynan, but I economized time by not talking to him since we were having him to lunch the next day; Helen Carter—Elliott was in Europe—he had written a new quartet; some Jewish friend of Leonid’s, who po-russki puccku [spoke no Russian]; Robert Craft, who seems to have become to some extent Stravinsky’s impresario and mentor; Mme Stravinsky, with whom Elena sat down and had a long conversation—she is still pretty, amiable, comfortable, the baba [grandmotherly] type of Russian woman, now somewhat expanding, in this respect the opposite of Stravinsky. We had difficulty in making our departure—people kept arriving and it was hard to get out the door—in order to be at the Algonquin at 8, where Henry and Daphne [Thornton], the Lehoviches and the Winkelhorns were going to meet us for dinner.

At the concert—5:30 the next afternoon—Sylvia, sans ambages [without much ado] explained to us the circumstances of the composition of Stravinsky’s new piece. Sylvia, some time ago, had offered him $5,000 to write a piece to which, for two years’ time, she would have the exclusive rights of performance. He had refused but had later on accepted $25,000 to do a piece—a 12-tone 10 minutes—for the daughter of a rich Swiss. Sylvia, as she confessed, was being catty about the young Swiss pianist: she had done so badly at rehearsal the day before that they were afraid she’d go up at the performance: those 12-tone pieces were hard to remember. Actually it went off all right; but the girl was rather clumsy on the stage and, when the usual enormous bouquet tied with a huge pink bow was handed up from the house, didn’t know how to come forward and receive it. Stravinsky attempted to guide her, to make her receive the bouquet and to get her on and off the stage for encores; Sylvia said, Go on and take it—go on, you dope! I couldn’t follow the piece properly, but it had his usual terseness, variety, clear calligraphy, incisiveness. Leonid’s reactions seemed mainly visual: the women in the chorus for the other numbers all had thin waists, legs and ankles; Stravinsky, hunching over to conduct, looked ugly making those jerky motions.

At the reception were Craft, Wystan and Chester and other people that we did not know. The host and hostess were fairly young, evidently fairly well off, had collected some not absolutely first-rate modern pictures. The pianist and her father and I think other members of her family were there. Elena thought the Grafs were in some way Swiss—Mrs. Graf talked French with a very American accent. Mme Stravinsky had told them that Str. would have something to eat immediately after the concert. They had said they weren’t sure that they had enough plates: Give him chicken à la king on an ashtray, but he has to have something to eat. The result was ham, crab meat salad, brownies and bread and cheese. As I was filling my plate, Wystan appeared and said in a hushed voice which was perhaps not quite hushed enough, That ham’s too salt. The only excuse for rich people is that they do things like that right. His face is now crisscrossed with creases; it looks squarer than when I saw him last and like some kind of technical map. He went early, leaving Chester, with whom, for the first time without Wystan, I had a longish talk. He is gentle, not unintelligent, has to surmount a not obstructive stammer.

The Russians made their own little nuclear group, in which we came to be included. I found out from the hostess later that it was the Stravinskys who had wanted us invited. Str. began by saying to me, I read your lines … I didn’t understand this at first, and he explained vashi stroky, making lines in the air with his finger. I tried to tell him how much his music had meant to me—difficult in conversation: I said that it had been to me an inspiration when what I really meant was that, besides my enjoying it so much, it had helped to keep up my artistic morale. "C’est réciproque, c’est réciproque, he said. He was jolly, amusing, even bubbling—quite frank and accessible, I thought, as we find with delight that such masters may be. I had not quite realized what a little wisp of a man he was—in France they used to call him the insect." Even I seemed to have to bend over him, and I felt that his tiny stature, his in themselves unimpressive features, must in certain ways have made him shy, at the mercy of the world around him—I remembered Petrushka and L’Histoire du Soldat. Elena says he looks like a musical note: his legs and feet dwindle to tininess. But his opinions in conversation, like his music, are fearless and firm. Isaiah Berlin and some other friend had persuaded him to read Doctor Zhivago, which he had got through between rehearsals, but he had not liked it at all: he thought it a second-rate novel (comparing it, I imagine, with Turgenev, Tolstoy, etc.)—it was simply a collection of fragments, would have no lasting value—he had not even liked the poems, had never read any of Pasternak’s poetry written before these. He adored—what seemed rather surprising—the writings of Harold Nicolson, thought they were very well written. His spoken English is not very good—his French a good deal better. With Elena he spoke mainly Russian.

He gave me to understand that he hoped that the Dead Sea scrolls had turned out not to be authentic: I remembered that he was very pious and said his prayers every day, so did not pursue the subject. He spoke of Schoenberg with less respect than he had seemed to in his published conversations: he was a man of considerable talent but "désagréable and too romantic for him. I said that Schoenberg came out of Wagner. Mahler—and Wagner, yes." It was Anton Webern that he really admired. I said that the English critics had been writing rave notices of Moses und Aron after the recent performance in Berlin. The English critics are not very certain, he said, meaning not sure of what was what. He was depressing to Elena about Nicholas Nabokov—I had asked him about Nicholas’s opera on Rasputin, which Virgil Thomson had told me was quite good. In the first place, the subject had shocked him: it was too early to write an opera about Rasputin. Then Nicholas was so unsatisfactory—half professional and half amateur. He said that Nicholas would bring him a piece and offer to dedicate it to him if he liked it; would play it and then Stravinsky would say nothing. He told us that if we ever came out to the Coast, we must visit him. He had his wife write their address and number and handed it to me, saying, That’s everything about Stravinsky!

A hanger-on would bring him cheese and brownies. When offered a piece of cheese, he would lean forward and stick his tongue out. She called his attention to a plate at his side and induced him to put the cheese on it, rather than take it on his tongue. All this time, Elena tells me, the Russian ladies—Mme Str. and a woman whom E. already knew, a hanger-on of the musical world, of Stravinsky and the American ballet—were saying all kinds of horrors about the Swiss guests: "What poshlost’ [crassness]! Bogaty [They’re wealthy]. At last Mme Str. advised her husband, You must congratulate vashu shveitsarku [your Swiss lady], so he went to her with hands outstretched. Who are all these people that we don’t know?" said one of the ladies to the other. "Esche shveitsary [More Swiss], with a shrug. When we left, we went down in the elevator with the Russians. Now let’s have a drink, said Str., with the mischievous smile of a small boy. I said that we wanted to go to his ballet—an all-Stravinsky evening, which would be only half over. As he was getting into his car, he faced us and said, Apploud!" first making the motion of clapping, then throwing out his hands.

We took Dawn Powell and the Tynans to luncheon at the Plaza the next day. Tynan was very funny about the rival literary molls in London: Barbara Skelton and somebody else. One would say to the other, "I had Peter Quennell when you were 2 years old."* You’ve never had a dramatist, though.—Yes: Graham Greene writes plays! Also, about the Reader’s Subscription Book Club TV feature, with Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Auden, of which I heard, also, other accounts. Wystan had been sloshed, was holding what was ostensibly a cup of tea, but actually pure gin, which he would from time to time send out for replenishment. In the middle of what was supposed to be a discussion of Robert Frost, he said, How old are you, Lionel?—52.—How old are you, Jacques?—51. (Not sure that I have these ages right.)—Well, I’m two years up on one of you and three years up on the other.—While the camera was fixed on an interchange between Barzun and Trilling, a slithering crash was heard, and you knew that Wystan had slipped off his chair; but presently the camera was turned on him, and you saw him sitting there smiling and holding his cup in his hand. Edith Oliver told me that it had made her so nervous she couldn’t watch it. Wystan, though somewhat piped, was trying to say what he thought, while the other two were sparring for the public.

A page of the journal from 1960

Night of Jan. 16–17 (early morning). I had another dream about running away with Mary Meigs. There seemed to be nothing to prevent it, and she was taking everything coolly, almost as a matter of course. It was one of my railroad dreams but less troubled by anxiety than usual. I had my briefcase on the station platform and was looking for something in it, making sure that I had it. I realized, on awaking, that it was the gimmick that makes the cards rise, which, along with the diamond-point pencil, I like to have with me wherever I am living. But then Mary came to meet me, and I started to go to the train, leaving the briefcase on the bench. Then I remembered and went back to get it. We were not, however, crowded for time. We had to make a connection, but it would be hours before we had to get the other train and only several blocks to walk from the station. I had no idea where we were going—simply somewhere a little farther on. Everything seemed quite natural with Mary, complete absence of strain.

Norman Podhoretz: I was telling him about Pasternak’s postscript to the letter of the writers to Stalin on the occasion of the death of his wife. Podhoretz interjected: "He said, .* I then told him about the man who had written me that the scene between Nathan and David, when the former told the story of the ewe lamb, was not a denunciatory one—Thou art the man!, pointing the finger—but something much quieter: Nathan simply touched the King’s sleeve and said, The story is about you. Why, that’s anti-Semitic! cried Podhoretz. I afterwards wondered why. It was suggested to me by Doc Lowell that this way of saying it was equivalent to You pulled off something there, but Irving Howe thought that it simply made Nathan appear more insidious and sly. In any case, it would have deprived him of his accusatory prophetic role.

Esther [Kimball] came to see us in Cambridge with Bob Hartshorne and his wife and children—a baby who had to be put away upstairs. I thought that she had become more agreeable and comfortable—we talked about our trip abroad and her grandmother’s house at Seabright. She had only come to Talcottville once. She told me that when somebody had once brought Aunt Lin [Rosalind Baker] a fourleaf clover, she had said, rather inappropriately, Its fragrance permeates my whole being!

pied à terre in stability.>*

Cambridge Parties

Feb. 27. Auden read in Sanders Theater under the auspices of the Advocate. He was evidently a little tight but articulated perfectly distinctly and now puts on a much better performance than he used to. But he had brought the whole galleys of his forthcoming book [Homage to Clio] and did not seem to have picked out beforehand the poems that he wanted to read. The proofs would slip out of his grasp and fall on the floor as he fumbled with them, and then he would have to plunge down after them. It was a little like one of those comic paperhanger acts. At one point, when there seemed to be an intermission, we came down from the top tier in order to get better seats and found that in the meantime he had started again and was sitting at the table with his hat on. This also gave a comic effect, and I thought he had put it on in order to indicate a change of mood—something informal, a little droll. But he explained to us, when he came to lunch here next day, that the poem had two alternating elements, one of which he printed in italics, and that for the passages that were italicized he put on his hat and took it off for the non-italicized passages. We had missed this explanation as we came downstairs.

Deafening party for him afterwards at the Advocate office, deafening cocktail party for the Tates at the Lowells’, deafening dinner at the Cunliffes’ the night before. These noisy occasions wear me out, and there are likely to be people with whom you would enjoy talking if you only did not have to shout and to ask people to repeat what they have said. Something ought to be done about this: things do not get so loud in England unless at a very large party where there are too many people for the size of the room. Elena says that at a dinner like the Cunliffes’, the hostess at a given point ought to ask everybody to drop his voice. I used to think that this uproar was entirely caused by too many people in a room till I found at the Chavchavadzes’ one summer they made just as much noise clustering around the back terrace with the whole lawn around them available. Wystan says that there is always a point at which the addition of one or two more persons makes a normal conversation become deafening. Mary [Meigs] and Barbara [Deming] came with us to the Lowells’ and the Advocate party and were evidently quite overwhelmed.

A cocktail party at the blind Indian’s at Eliot House was so deafening that it almost crushed us both; the next day we were invited to another at the Gilmores’; but in the afternoon he [Ved Mehta] came to my study in Widener and suggested that we might like to skip the cocktail party proper and come about 7 for supper with a few other people to meet George Kennan. Though we arrived at the tail end, when most of the guests had gone, those that were left were still shouting. We have decided to avoid these cocktail parties. —At the Walkers’, on my visit to New Haven, there were only eight people to dinner, but the conversation seemed almost as loud as it had at the Cunliffes’ dinner—this, of course, was partly due to the Walkers themselves. —Ed O’Connor suggests that the shouting is competitive; I believe that people want to assert themselves without listening to the other person. Are they trying to forget the Bomb? to rival the Bomb?

I should have noted above, in connection with the Cunliffes’ dinner party, Elena’s conversation with Kenneth Murdock. He rather astonished and horrified her by saying that in order to teach young people properly what good literature was, you ought to begin by having them read bad. A characteristic New England idea: you must first impress people with Sin before they can aspire to virtue.

Two parties for the visiting Russian writers: Leonid Leonov and two other writers of about his age: a popular poet with whom neither Elena nor I talked—tall and thin with white hair, shedding a smug Russian poshlost’ [mediocrity]—whom I sized up as a well-established Soviet hack, and a man from Kazakhstan (if that is right), who Elena said was interesting; the fourth was a young Ukrainian, likable and, I think, innocent, who held some sort of official position. The first affair was at Ted Weeks’s; the second, the next afternoon, at the Schlesingers’. When the delegation was introduced, they were accompanied by several interpreters and a blond and blank-faced young man, who stepped forward and said simply, State Department. One of the interpreters had been brought with them from the Soviet Union, an old Russian-Jewish witch. She had been fastened on Arthur Schlesinger on his visit to Russia, and he found in making a journey that he was supposed to share an apartment with her at night; when it came time to go to bed and he realized the situation, he registered sufficient surprise so that she sought accommodations elsewhere. She became a nuisance in my conversations with Gonchar, the young Ukrainian, kept getting between us and urging me to speak English when I could express myself more directly and forcibly in bad Russian. I finally asked him whether it wasn’t possible for him to meet people here "without interpreters and without State Department chinovniki [petty bureaucrats]." He said that without an interpreter it would be difficult for him to communicate with people. I told him that when I had been in Russia in 1935, it had been impossible for me to buy the volumes I needed of the Marx-Engels Gesammtausgabe, that I had finally had to get them in New York—he said it had been merely accidental. I went on to say that it was surprising that people should think in Russia that Marx couldn’t be read over here, that I had found that the volumes of Marx and Engels had been among those that had been most read in the New York Public Library. Evidently this embarrassed him, and he turned away to put out his cigarette. I felt that I was a little engaged in the same kind of wagging and baiting that I objected to on the part of others. I finally got to the point of saying that the Soviet Union was not a real Communist society nor the U.S. a real capitalist society: they were both just countries run by the army, the engineers and the chinovniki. This ended the conversation. The Russians evaporated. A little later the young government man came up to me—I didn’t know that he had overheard the conversation—and said, "I am the State Department