“Mothers bathed their babies in the sinks,” Helen Schulman read softly at the battered lectern.
Her rapt audience was frozen in concentration, until a firetruck wailed past the East Village window. Schulman paused. The siren receded. “There, like here, was a place to come in out of the cold, the rain, the heat,” she resumed, bringing the audience firmly back. It’s reading night at the KKK Bar.
Klan memorabilia crowds the walls: faded photos of lynchings, white hoods carefully preserved behind glass, busts of long-departed wizards. In New York’s literary hothouse, this is “the heart of what’s going on,” said Fran diLustro Gordon, founder of a tonier reading series at the National Arts Club. “The audiences are full of young writers just beginning their own journeys.” “It’s my favorite place to read,” added Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm. It’s “casual and more open to experimentation and spontaneous magic.”
Okay, okay, it’s the KGB Bar, not the KKK, and the walls are crowded instead with Soviet memorabilia: photos of Red Square parades, Stalinist woodcuts, hammer-and-sickle banners, busts of Lenin, and balalaikas. And the description of it—minus the KKK—is lifted directly from “A Cold War Relic Is a Literary Hot Spot,” a September 25, 1998, article by Glenn Collins in the New York Times.
Collins did note that “some of the leftward literary grazers” were initially “dismayed” by the bar’s apparent lack of respect in turning Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet workers’ paradise into the decor for a theme bar. He didn’t seem to think worthy of mention the dismay that might be felt by those who remember that the toll of communism in the twentieth century approaches 100 million dead.
The signs of what the Times calls “retro Commie chic” can be found all over, not only among the young but also among their elders. There is, for example, the handsome Autumn catalogue from Verso Press, an imprint of New Left Books. It was Verso that gave us, in the spring of 1998, a 150th anniversary reissue of The Communist Manifesto, hopefully subtitled “A Modern Edition,” with an introduction by the British leftist historian Eric Hobsbawm asserting the “almost biblical force” and prescience of Marx’s text. (The Times apparently agrees with Hobsbawm, proclaiming in a June 27, 1998, article “the eerie way” in which the Manifesto’s “1848 description of capitalism resembles the restless, anxious, and competitive world of today’s global economy.”)
The Verso catalogue’s front cover features a striking photograph of Bertolt Brecht (the subject of a new book by the unregenerate Stalinist literary critic Fredric Jameson) and the back cover reproduces Brecht’s poem “Praise of Communism.” One might suppose that Brecht’s attachment to Marxist-Leninism would be, at this late date, an embarrassment for his admirers. To think so, however, is to miss the strategy of retro Commie chic. The garden-variety leftist, agonizing in the pages of Dissent or the Nation, concedes that communism has been weighed on the scales of history and found wanting—while insisting that this doesn’t mean leftism is dead.
But the marketers of retro Commie chic know it’s precisely the definitiveness of history’s judgment that makes communism attractive: attractive not in a way that entails commitment, but as an idea to toy with and enjoy with a certain frisson. The Ku Klux Klan, like Nazism, is still beyond the pale, but the Soviets (the Times explains with a wink and a nudge) are just dangerous enough to be fun.
There are more ambitious exercises in Commie chic: cases in which what started as a form of intellectual play, perhaps—an entertaining of ideas in order to see how they feel—has turned imperceptibly into dogma.
It is easy to see how this happens. American intellectuals still reserve their highest accolades for the “subversive,” and the best way to get noticed is still to take a truism and invert it. So, after the meltdown of the Soviet Union, the hip move is to propose an intellectual history in which the prescient thinkers, the ones on whom we should model ourselves, are Communists. The dull conventional scholar today is engaged in the dreary accounting of communism’s rise and fall—tracing, for instance (as Stephane Courtois’s Black Book of Communism, a bestseller in France, recently did), the capitulation of French intellectuals to Stalinism after World War II. But the wise hipster instead seizes upon a thesis that stands out from the crowd.
Something like this lies behind Ann Douglas’s “The Failure of the New York Intellectuals,” published in last spring’s issue of the journal Raritan. And Douglas’s work forms as well a marvelous example of how what starts as Commie chic easily grows into full-fledged intellectual Stalinism.
Douglas, a Columbia University professor best known for Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, is a familiar figure to readers of the New York Times, where she was featured in an October 17, 1998, piece by Elisabeth Bumiller. Drawing on her work-in-progress on the Cold War, Douglas explained to the Times that Kenneth Starr “has picked up where Senator Joseph R. McCarthy left off”:
Oddly (given Douglas’s sensitivity to “witch hunts” and guilt by association), her Raritan essay is a model of Stalinist “class analysis,” in which the members of the “New York Intellectuals” are lumped together to expose the ineradicable flaws of their class. So too, another ad hoc group—“W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Aime Cesaire, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and even the far less well-known Americans, the black activist and theorist Jack O’Dell and the theologian A.J. Muste”—are proposed as models of the genuine intellectual life.
This setup is bizarre enough. But it’s when Douglas gets down to the details that things turn really strange. She begins with an anecdote. It seems that “at lunch one day in the winter of 1975,” Irving Howe gave Douglas his own assessment of why, despite his many books and his active participation in the life of his time, he had failed to achieve his goals: “I didn’t know enough.” Yes, Douglas says she has come to see, that’s exactly right. And not only does it describe Howe’s case: It is a damning diagnosis of the failure of the New York intellectuals, kit and caboodle. They just didn’t know enough. They were poseurs.
Of course, Douglas doesn’t merely assert the failure of Irving Howe and Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and Co. She gives numerous examples of their obtuseness, their ignorance, the smallness of their intellectual grasp, and above all the ways in which ideological blinders limited and distorted their vision. “Their failure is doubly striking,” Douglas observes, “in light of the fact that New York was exploding all around them with new artistic movements and ideas”—and they just didn’t get it:
(One imagines Norman Podhoretz forced to parade through the KGB Bar wearing a placard saying, “I was blind to Abstract Expressionism, Merce Cunningham, and film noir.”)
Worse yet were the New York intellectuals’ ideological reflexes, about which Douglas is particularly scathing:
They couldn’t see even that? Boy were those New York intellectuals dumb. And not just dumb. They were also craven; in fact, mostly dumb because they were craven. You see, they read Henry—not C.L.R.—James and tried to ingratiate themselves with the Cold War establishment because they were “eager to varying degrees for institutional backing and power.”
And the “internationally minded intellectuals,” Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Fanon, and the rest: What of them? They were a diverse bunch linked chiefly by an inclination to communism, which might seem to require a bit of explanation if we are to take them as paragons of knowledge. But no, Douglas doesn’t bother with that, not does she give nearly as many examples of their knowledge as she does of their opponents’ ignorance. Douglas is most eloquent on Muste’s praise of the “ideal intellectual” who is “open to spontaneous impulse and even anarchic whim, able to ‘cut loose’ from the conventional, a ‘fool and a gambler’ dedicated to the ‘revolutionary’ act of ‘telling the truth.’“
Actually, Muste’s ideal intellectual sounds just the sort of fellow who’d be in the first batch sent to the gulag. What Douglas—dancing on the highbrow edge of retro Commie chic—can’t seem to see is that Stalinism leads inevitably to such absurdities. It is a system of thought based on fundamental untruths, and it can only be pursued by adding untruth to untruth until the result is truly crazy—as crazy, in its own hip way, as New York’s young literary lights gathered for the frisson of flirting with the murderous darkness at the KGB bar. The hip French philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s charmed their Cambodian students with their playful intellectual games—and those students returned home as the Khmer Rouge. God save us when one of Douglas’s young readers decides to do more than hoist a few down at the KGB.
John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.
