ABSTRACT
IT was about this time that I met Fred Dupee, who was then the literary editor of The New Masses. I told him how we felt about the Communists and that we wanted to publish a magazine that was free to criticize them, but that we had no money. Dupee was not an ideologue, nor very responsive to abstract political arguments, but he was a person of great sensibility and taste: hence, he was aware of the political atmosphere around the New Masses and he had no difficulty in grasping its ultimately corrupting effect on all literary activity. Besides, he had just come from more romantic radical work on the waterfront and he was not really at home in the rigid, bureaucratic setup of The New Masses. He said he had a friend whom he wanted us to meet, Dwight Macdonald, a classmate at Yale, now a writer for Fortune, who was moving left rapidly, in the direction of the Communist party. We arranged to get together at my house one Sunday—which became known as “Bloody Sunday.” (I lived then on East Twelfth Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place, uncomfortably near the Communist headquarters and across the street from a firehouse, which woke us every night.) As I recall, we 48were at it all day long; and I still have in my mind a picture of Rahv and myself backing Macdonald up against a wall, knocking down his arguments, firing unanswerable questions without giving him time to answer, and constantly outshouting him. Now if anyone has ever argued with Dwight Macdonald, he knows that it was not easy to outtalk him, even on theoretical questions, which was not where his main talents lay. All I can say is that we were fired up sufficiently with the rightness of our position to keep banging away, and Dwight was just uncertain enough—and new to the intricacies of left politics—to listen, with the result that at the end of the day we were all agreed we should revive Partisan Review as an independent literary journal. As for money, Dwight and Fred had a friend, George Morris, a gifted abstract painter, also a classmate at Yale, who, they thought, might be interested and could help finance it. The sum we needed for a year, according to our modest calculations, was fifteen hundred dollars.
