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By Root 1352 0

the thirties, many of whom found a home at Yaddo, had mostly, by 1949, evolved into non-Stalinist leftists, disillusioned by the Trotsky trials and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 — just as Partisan Review outgrew its original thirties stance as official magazine of the Communist-dominated John Reed Club. Yet more conservative Southern Agrarians, and modernists such as Eliot and Lowell — with sympathies for religion, and a visceral response to Communist atheism — still distrusted these reformed “fellow travelers.” Such complex partisan issues were being played out in a nation just a year away from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech denouncing Communist infiltration in the State Department and already engaged in “red-baiting,” and a Cold War with the Soviet Union.

During the fall, Lowell’s foil for dinnertime political rows had been Charles Wagner, who was writing a “pious” history of Harvard. “I wouldn’t give the life of one American soldier he betrayed for Pound’s,” Wagner snarled one evening. To which Lowell shot back, “But no one lost his life because of Pound.” Wagner’s adversarial role was taken up by Kazin, who complained in his memoir New York Jew: “It was a gloomy time for me; listening to Lowell at his most blissfully high orating against Communist influences at Yaddo and boasting of the veneration in which he was held by those illiberal great men Ezra Pound and George Santayana, made me feel worse.” Wright reported Lowell’s intent to turn Yaddo by the next summer into a haven for “the agrarian–little magazine entente.” Pleading writer’s block, and marital problems, Kazin fled back to Manhattan.

The spark finally set to all this Yaddo tinder was a front-page story in the New York Times on February 11, 1949: “Tokyo War Secrets Stolen by Soviet Spy Ring in 1941.” Including an accusation by General Douglas MacArthur, the article reported evidence from the army that Agnes Smedley had run a Soviet spy ring out of Shanghai. A friend of Mrs. Ames, with the special dispensation of being a Yaddo guest from 1943 until March 1948, Smedley was in the midst of writing a biography of Marshal Zhu De, founder of the Chinese Red Army. “She idolized Mao Tse-tung,” remembers Jim Shannon. “She walked around the place like a man, like a soldier marching through the paddy fields.” Eight days later, the army disowned its report. Opposite a February 20 notice of Smedley thanking the army for clearing her name ran the announcement: “Pound, In Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell.”

Yet by the date of the retraction, paranoia had been heightened by the appearance, on February 14, of two FBI agents, questioning Hardwick and Maisel about Communist sympathies at Yaddo, tipped off by Mrs. Ames’s secretary. The first casualty of this “Red Scare” was Clifford Wright — sent packing as Mrs. Ames had the “fantastic idea” that he was the FBI informant. At Saturday dinner, with Flannery and Elizabeth Hardwick, Mrs. Ames defended Smedley as “an old-fashioned Jeffersonian Democrat.” Lowell, incensed by Ames’s control of guests’ stays and by the liberal left in general, pushed for a meeting with the board of directors to demand her ouster. Shortly before the meeting, James Ross took off. “I had refused to join with the other guests in bringing charges against you,” he wrote Ames, “and had expressed my opinions rather violently one night at dinner.”

A bizarre inquisition, orchestrated by Lowell, and attended by eight of the directors of Yaddo, as well as the four remaining guests, took place in the Garage on Saturday morning, February 26. “I shall compare the institution to a body and the present director to a diseased organ,” Lowell began, with an extended simile, “chronically poisoning the whole system.” Hardwick spoke of a summer party where “Molotov cocktails” were served, and jokes made, “Is it too pink for you?” In an Et tu, Brute? moment, Mrs. Ames confronted her accusers: “They frequently came to my house for music or cocktails, a harmonious life, with now and then little affectionate notes . . . then all of