'My God, Dorothy!' Willie said. 'Lewis can't create a real leftist party, nor can any of us.'

'And yet,' I said, 'there are a lot of you who hold the same views. Isn't there any way you can get together?'

'First of all, there are fewer and fewer of us,' Lewis replied. 'And secondly, we're isolated.'

'And above all, you find it a lot more comfortable to snicker than to try to do something,' Dorothy said.

I, too, was sometimes irritated by Lewis's placid irony. He was lucid, critical; he was even often indignant. But he bore the same intimate relationship to the shortcomings and blemishes he objected to in America as a patient bears to his affliction, a tramp to his filfth. It was enough to make him seem to me vaguely a party to them. [...]