Helplessness and Heartlessness

In 1953 Irving Howe accepted a teaching job in the English department of Brandeis University. It was also in 1953 that the first James Bond novel, Casino Royal, was published. ¹ These two events, though not as momentous as the execution of the Rosenbergs in the same year, are linked to it and to each other by a motif of profitable treachery. By May 1953, the first printing of Casino Royal had sold out. Forty-odd years later, it is now the baby-boomer, ex-1960s generation of intellectuals that is said to have sold out—especially those of us who teach in English departments rather than doing “real” politics and who teach things like James Bond rather than “real” literature. And these charges have come, with a certain historical irony, from Irving Howe and the generation of New York intellectuals who, like him, eagerly approved the official story of the Rosenbergs' betrayal. What I have to say about the supposed betrayals of intellectuals and spies, reflections in a time that speaks more readily about a supposed “McCarthyism of the Left” than about the McCarthyism that helped kill the Rosenbergs, will be in favor of selling out in both senses. ²