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It did not occur to him, or, indeed, to anyone else, that he was taking the line of least resistance. This state of being unresolved, on call, as it were, was painful to him, and he used to envy his friends who, as he said, were “sure.” The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thou…

[...] Most men had come to socialism by some all-too-human compulsion: they were out of work or lonely or sexually unsatisfied or foreign-born or queer in one of a hundred bitter, irremediable ways. They resembled the original twelve apostles in the New Testament; there was no real merit in their a…

In real life, his concerns were of a different order. The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of Das Kapital and was going around telling peo…

You saw how profitable that exchange had been for you: it had earned you an enemy and, you thought, a lover. The first thing made you feel good, and the second saddened you. The next morning the phone would wake you and you would reach out and take it dreamily and it would be Erdman speaking very s…

Each of Pflaumen’s guests had been selected, as it were, for his allegorical possibilities, and every dinner was presented as a morality play in which art and science, wealth and poverty, business and literature, sex and scholarship, vice and virtue, Judaism and Christianity, Stalinism and Trotskyi…