charges. So he deserves a hearing, right?
MARY :
[To the audience re:
JAMES T. FARRELL .
]
I liked him so much.
[To
JAMES T. FARRELL .
]
Yes. A hearing. Absolutely. Everyone deserves a hearing.
JAMES T. FARRELL : Not to mention asylum, don’t you think?
MARY :
[Once again this is a surprise, but she’s trying to bluff her way through as best she can.]
Asylum. Great idea.
She and
JAMES T. FARRELL
toast
. MARY
walks away from the party
.
A few days later I opened the mail and found a letter from a group that was demanding Trotsky’s right to a hearing and to asylum, and my name was on the letterhead. No one had even asked me. They had no right. So I decided to remove my name from the list that very minute. And I meant to. Truly I did. But I forgot. And then, after a day or two, the phone rang. It was a Stalinist I barely knew, calling to persuade me to resign from this committee I hadn’t even joined. I hung up, and the phone rang again, and again. “You must withdraw.” “There will be consequences.” “Think it over, Mary.” It made me very angry. So I never took my name off the list. And—
[Shrugs.]
that’s how I became a Trotskyite. I became a fanatic Trotskyite. I signed letters, I marched, I slept only with other Trotskyites—with a few exceptions—and I went to meetings where I was shouted down and accused of being the sort of person who “looked for pimples on the great smiling face of the Soviet Union.”
LILLIAN : So you were an accidental Trotskyite, just as you were an accidental Mrs. Edmund Wilson. Just out of curiosity, what decisions in your life did you actually make?
MARY : What I believe is that the decisions we agonize over are often the most insignificant—what to have for dinner, beef or chicken. What color to make the rug. But the big things almost seem to choose you. I was like “Stendhal’s hero, who took part in something confused and disarrayed that he later learned was the Battle of Waterloo.” I had no idea that I was making the most important decision of my life—to be serious, to be involved with public affairs, to be an intellectual. And I had no idea that I was choosing not just to be a Trotskyite but to be an anti-communist. Of course, I wasn’t a right-wing anti-communist like Senator McCarthy, I was a liberal, you understand the distinction—
LILLIAN : Well, I don’t, as you know. I don’t understand that at all. Are you done?
MARY
waves to
LILLIAN
to proceed
.
I don’t have a little story that makes my politics make sense. But there was nothing whimsical about my ending up where I did, even though it’s hard to be explicit about why. But I suppose—growing up in the South, seeing the way blacks were treated—well, that’s probably too simple.… Once I was with Sophronia, and I refused to sit in the back of the bus. The driver threw us off, and Sophronia was very angry with me, because she thought I was showing off.…
MARY : Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Rosa Parks—
LILLIAN : When I got older and realized I probably would never make much of a radical, I was nonetheless attracted to them. And then I got involved with Hammett, who
was
committed, no question, and we all hated the Nazis and we all caredabout the workers.…
[Beat.]
Too simple, too simple.… And guilt, guilt played a part. Because I was successful during the Depression.…
[Beat.]
And, of course, I’d gone to Russia before the war, and it was hard to go there and not have feelings for the Russian people. They were our allies at the time. I wanted the revolution to work. Sue me.
[Beat.]
And I had a kind of impatience with … splitting hairs … with people who were always finding ways to get around believing in something, people who were looking for loopholes—
MARY : Finding pimples—
LILLIAN : Seizing on technicalities and using them as an excuse to avoid taking a position on something that was worth taking a position on. Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on. I