Free Letters by Saul Bellow Page B

It has become painful and sometimes even obnoxious and frequently the whole shmeer seems so transparent and fatuous that I want to abandon it. But I am going to finish it.
    This idea of “finish it” is present not only in Ruben and in my marriage but also in the movement. I was alienated before the factional fight but now the whole affair has become nauseous—the Old Man’s attempt to knife [James] Burnham and cast him out of the movement, the excruciating hysteria of the old timers [ . . . ], the stupidity of the polemics—all this has made me resolve that if the minority capitulates and yields Burnham a few more, I am finished.
    I have begun to read in order to re-evaluate the principles of bolshevism, or better, to learn them for the first time—[Franz] Borkenau, [Arthur] Rosenberg, Rosa Luxemburg’s attitudes to Leninism. It’s a goddam crime that at the time that the war is on us the only revolutionary party in the country falls to pieces. We’ll be crushed too, I think.
    Isaac has quit already. How do you feel about it?
    I don’t intend to drop out immediately. I’m waiting (and plenty of others are also) to see what happens at the convention. I may hold on. I don’t want to leave just when it is becoming dangerous. For that very reason.
    Give my regards to Ruthie and Sid,
    Yours,
     
    No trace remains of Ruben Whitfield , Bellow’s tentative first novel. The political party Bellow and Tarcov still belonged to, and which Rosenfeld had left, was the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist affiliation opposing the Stalinist orthodoxy of the American Communist Party. By the autumn of 1939, however, the SWP had itself broken into two factions, a majority headed by James P. Cannon and blessed by Trotsky (“the Old Man”) from his Mexican exile, and a minority led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham, who, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Soviet invasions of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, declared the USSR an imperialist aggressor and enemy to the socialist movement. At the SWP’s third national convention, in April 1940—to which Bellow is referring here—the Cannon faction would prevail, and Burnham and Shachtman left the party along with forty percent of its membership, including Bellow and Tarcov.
    To Oscar Tarcov
    [Postmarked Chicago, Ill., 9 December 1940]
    Dear Oscar:
    You remember, don’t you, that I didn’t know what my draft-number was? Well I got my papers yesterday and you need feel “singled out” no longer. My local order no. is 282 and with every possible deferment I can’t hope to stay out of a uniform longer than a year. My citizenship is in the hands of the Immigration Department and the man handling my case there gives me his assurance that I will have my first papers by the middle of January at the latest. And since first papers and no more are required I don’t see how I can possibly get out. At best I can only make class two.
    I’m very glad I didn’t know what my number was. It gave me ease of mind, a certain Damoclean peace. Not that I’m terribly disturbed now. It harasses and upsets my friends much more than it does me. I don’t even have to try to comfort myself. Nothing has been changed.
    Isaac feels he is being discriminated against. He doesn’t want to stay home alone. He even speaks now of volunteering and claims it isn’t proper to remain behind when everything he values is in training camp.
    Of course it’s no joke but, frankly, I was surprised that I personally had been getting away with it so long. With every individual in the Western World and a great part of the Eastern either in arms or beneath them it seems incredible that we should go free long. It’s a sort of luck which isn’t designed for me. It’s designed for the Herb Passins of the world, not for me. You remember how you felt about getting and holding a job? Well, I feel the same way about getting out from under. It just isn’t for me—for us, I should say.
    That we got away,