In 2010 I published a book unlike any other I had previously published or even thought about writing. It is called The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It deals with four famous or at least once-famous books which first appeared in England or America between 1940 and 1952, and, if my argument is correct, exercised considerable influence on Western attitudes toward Communism in the period of the Cold War. Perhaps the best known of the four, and the only novel among them, was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The other three, in chronological order of publication were Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (pseudonym of Richard Krebs), I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko, and Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Don’t be alarmed if you haven’t even heard of one or two of these. I did say famous or once-famous.
Though I was confident that I could say at least a few interesting things about each of the individual authors and their books, the general intellectual background—the political history in Europe and America of the interwar period, with special emphasis on international socialism—was a vast topic for which I had to read very widely. As I said at the time, to write knowledgeably about four books required me to read some hundreds of others.
For many years the second-hand book market in this country—in marked distinction to that in Europe—has been very advantageous for impecunious readers. The reasons for this are interesting, and might in and of themselves offer material for another essay. But one reason is that a huge Internet aggregator, which brings thousands of sellers together on a single site, provides motive and means to undersell competitors, especially for items that have little or no rarity value, meaning probably 98% of all books ever published. You will find church rummage sale prices combined with nearly endless selectivity. I can almost guarantee you that the red-hot book on the front page of the Times review (current price $39.95) will be available for $15 on Ebay within a couple of months. Ten years from now Better World Books will practically be giving it away. That even most best-selling books enjoy but a fleeting fame or popularity was an implicit theme of my study.
In any event, attempting what for me was a novel kind of writing—a book with a broad subject intended for a general audience, a book with substantial factual presentation and arguments, but without the bibliographical supplements of an academic study—led me to a new model of production. I wrote the book mainly at home rather than in a research library. I was able to do this by putting together, in my study, a library of two or three hundred books I actually needed or thought I might need, practically all of them bought very cheaply second-hand over the Internet. I still had the resources of a major research library when I required them. But if for five bucks you can own a book with a permission slip to scrawl upon it at will and leave as many food stains and tea-cup rings as are needed, fold down pages, or leave overnight to be rained on in the back yard, why on earth would you expend the energy, time, aggravation, and gasoline to drive across town to the library in the never certain hope that the desired book will be on its shelf?
It was a great system, and one I continued to use in writing two subsequent books. But of course there is a “downstream” problem, as you doubtless can anticipate, even if I did my best not to anticipate it. The day will arrive when the world has one more book than it needs—the one you just published—and you have three hundred more than you need. What do you do then? Temporize, of course. What I did was to pack up many carboard cartons and plastic milk crates with the sub-library I had amassed for my project. I then stacked these containers in piles in a partially available closet—the supposed “empty nest” never approaching anything close to actual emptiness with the departure of our adult children over the years. I was able to force the door shut and forget about it, sort of, for about a decade. But even the most long-suffering and supportive spouse has a limit, and in our house the limit is considerably less than three hundred unvisited books in milk crates. Judgment Day has come, and with it the urgent obligation to transport the slag heap from the quarry for The Anticommunist Manifestos to the intake depository warehouse at which donations for the annual Bryn Mawr Book Sale are accepted between the hours of ten and noon on Wednesdays and Saturdays. This Bryn Mawr sale is a very big deal in our town, and it seems to have morphed into the “Bryn Mawr/Wellesley Sale” while I was not looking. As you either already know or can easily guess, it is an annual fundraising effort organized by alumnae of distinguished liberal arts colleges in support of their alma mater. I don’t know how many years it has been running, or how many more it can survive. The constraints of the coronavirus regime are (we pray) temporary; but several seismic shifts in the world of book culture generally are not. My hope, of course is that the sale could go on forever. There is something admirable about a community shake-up and redistribution of library materials in the aid of educational institutions, the advancement of knowledge, and the increase of pleasure.
With regard to the books I am offloading, it is impossible to avoid commenting upon convergent themes of purgation. Stalin’s phony purge trials and their accompanying judicial murders clouded the rosy view that many western intellectuals had managed to maintain of the Russian “experiment”. In its high-minded attempts to preserve its political purity by purging everything that was impure, Bolshevism did a fair job of destroying itself, quite apart from piling up mountains of collateral damage. I recall a lurid passage early in Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (the last of my four “anti-communist manifestos”) in which he identifies as a decisive moment in his own political conversion, in 1935 or 1936, the year of my birth, his first awareness of Stalin’s Great Purge. “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had begun to condition itself for the final revolutionary struggle with the rest of the world by cutting out of its own body all that could weaken or hamper it in that conflict. It was literally sweating blood.” I am trying to be a little less apocalyptic and to keep the blood-sweating at the figurative level. I am not consigning all my books to the basement of the Lubyanka prison. I hope indeed I am offering them a new lease on life, or at least a brief extension of the old one. And as for the bourgeois sentimentalism so despised by Ivanov, the “bad cop” interrogator in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, I am afraid I rather revel in it. I have exempted a half dozen titles from the purge out of personal affection. And I don’t have it in me to give away books inscribed to me by their authors.
