On the Horns

The career of Trotsky is so absorbing, so filled with contradictory mysteries, and in the final analysis so inexplicable, that my feeling after reading one behemoth biography after the other was: “Oh for a definitive third, to reconcile these two!”—probably an impossibility. What Messrs. Payne and Carmichael have achieved, each in his way, is admirable; and each complements the other. Carmichael excels in exposing the fundamental dilemma of classical Marxism, on whose horns the pedantic Trotsky was finally skewered; and at plumbing the depths of the revolutionist’s sick soul to reveal what prevented this man (so ruthlessly adept at exploiting public confusion) from making even a rudimentary defense of his own supreme position in the Soviet apparatus once Stalin moved to oust him. Payne, the professional biographer, is far superior to Carmichael in letting the incredibly dramatic life dramatize itself, and in wrapping up the loose ends tidily. (Impossible to find out from Carmichael, for instance, who Trotsky’s assassin really was, and why he struck; impossible to deduce from Payne why Lenin “succeeded” where Trotsky failed, and why Trotsky offered no real resistance to Stalin.)

When I interviewed Trotsky myself, at Coyoacán in 1940, just before he was murdered, I was struck by two characteristics that Carmichael the psychobiographer gets to the bottom of most tellingly. One was Trotsky’s total indifference tomeasa human being, his unwillingness to discuss anything except the abstractions of Marxist theory. The other was his treatment of that theory as a religious principle. The moment I suggested that dialectical materialism was “unscientific,” he leaped to his feet and shouted: “The interview is terminated!”

SR

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Selden Rodman

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The career of Trotsky is so absorbing, so filled with contradictory mysteries, and in the final analysis so inexplicable, that my feeling after reading one behemoth biography after the other was: “Oh for a definitive third, to reconcile these two!”—probably an impossibility. What Messrs. Payne and Carmichael have achieved, each in his way, is admirable; and each complements the other. Carmichael excels in exposing the fundamental dilemma of classical Marxism, on whose horns the pedantic Trotsky was finally skewered; and at plumbing the depths of the revolutionist’s sick soul to reveal what prevented this man (so ruthlessly adept at exploiting public confusion) from making even a rudimentary defense of his own supreme position in the Soviet apparatus once Stalin moved to oust him. Payne, the professional biographer, is far superior to Carmichael in letting the incredibly dramatic life dramatize itself, and in wrapping up the loose ends tidily. (Impossible to find out from Carmichael, for instance, who Trotsky’s assassin really was, and why he struck; impossible to deduce from Payne why Lenin “succeeded” where Trotsky failed, and why Trotsky offered no real resistance to Stalin.)

When I interviewed Trotsky myself, at Coyoacán in 1940, just before he was murdered, I was struck by two characteristics that Carmichael the psychobiographer gets to the bottom of most tellingly. One was Trotsky’s total indifference tomeasa human being, his unwillingness to discuss anything except the abstractions of Marxist theory. The other was his treatment of that theory as a religious principle. The moment I suggested that dialectical materialism was “unscientific,” he leaped to his feet and shouted: “The interview is terminated!”