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In February 1981 Susan stunned her world of New York liberals and radicals by saying at Town Hall, during a rally for Solidarity in Poland, that American intellectuals had for decades ignored the horrors of communism in order to take a firm stand against redbaiters in Congress and elsewhere. She added that anyone who’d been reading a conservative magazine for the general public such as Reader’s Digest was more likely to be better informed about the true nature of communism than if they’d been reading the Nation or the New Statesman, which consistently hid the truth. In a resounding peroration she declared, “I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.”

I didn’t attend the event but Susan had told me ahead of time what she intended to do, and that it would create quite a fuss, as indeed it did. She was howled off the stage, and for months afterward left-wing thinkers of every stripe relentlessly attacked her. She was giving comfort to the newly elected Reagan. Much to Susan’s dismay she was embraced by the Right and asked to speak at their dinners, which of course she refused to do. She was accused of giving comfort to the pope, who was militating against communism everywhere but especially in Poland. Of course these very left-wing intellectuals were themselves of two minds since they’d gathered at Town Hall in support of Solidarity, which was struggling to end communism in Poland.

I admired Susan’s bravery. In Europe, where the Left had genuine power still and had had to live out its contradictions, virtually no one remained pro-Soviet. Only in America, where the counterculture had marked a whole generation and where the protest against the Vietnam War had turned so many people against the U.S. government, would she have provoked such know-nothing hatred. She was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, her critics said. She had betrayed the cause—whatever that was at this late date. In fact, Susan was speaking to an isolationist and dated and extremely naïve Left.

Because of her close connections to France, Susan had evolved politically more swiftly and surely than her compatriots in her understanding of the horrors of communism—not just the accidents of history connected to a particular tyrant or a particular national tradition, but also the systemic nightmare of communism wherever it appeared around the world. Inevitably it led to a suppression of human rights, an abrogation of justice, penury for most citizens, a terrifying tyranny, the triumph of military might, not to mention the destruction of the environment. (I remember wandering in the Swiss mountains and seeing all the trees that had been turned brown from the pollution blowing down from Eastern European factories.)

Susan was brave. Just as she had spoken out against the New Age nonsense that had accumulated around cancer treatment, a bad case of Blame the Victim, just as she had—with her rabbinical/ dandified divided mind—condemned the frivolous and morally opaque world of photography, in the same way she was now taking on communism. Nothing she said was startling to the initiated, and I was shocked only that such obvious arguments would be considered so provocative. Her genius was in saying the obvious in a strong and dramatic manner.

Once she read something I’d written where I’d carefully ascribed my thoughts to the sources that had inspired me. She said, “Cross all that out. Claim it for yourself. No one will ever notice who said it originally. It weakens your argument to be so scrupulous.” Perhaps she was right, but this kind of recklessness got her into trouble later, when she was caught for plagiarizing, word for word, in a few passages of her novel In America. She was always encouraging me to publish papers I’d present at the institute—but I knew they weren’t original or thought out enough.