LITERARY HERO

Angus Cameron, who died at the age of 93, was not the stereotypical victim of McCarthyism. He chose to walk away from a job in publishing at the peak of his career rather than compromise his principles. Cameron, an Indiana-born "radical Marxist," had been the top editor at Little, Brown when professional patriots wildly charged him with converting the venerable Boston firm into the House of Stalin. Actually, his political views had been known to the head of the house since he was hired in 1938, said Jonathan Coleman, who is writing a biography of Cameron for Simon & Schuster, and caused no problem until Arthur Schlesinger Jr. made a fuss. Schlesinger, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson Cameron had strongly supported, left the house after George Orwell's Animal Farm, which he'd brought in, was rejected by another editor. Schlesinger said he'd not be associated with a house whose leading editor opposed efforts to "check the spread of Soviet totalitarianism." (Four other publishers rejected the anticommunist fable.) Cameron was sympathetic to Communist Party values but not party discipline and was a strong anti-Stalinist, Coleman said. He left his job in 1951 after the redbaiting press charged he had foisted commie authors on the public. Ordered to clear in advance his outside political activities, Cameron resigned and took off with his family to live in the Adirondacks. Later he would call those the "most liberating years" of his life. In 1953, because he did not want to "give anyone the impression that he had fled the argument," Coleman said, he co-founded Cameron and Kahn, which published anti-McCarthyite books like Harvey Matusow's False Witness and leftist books that were too controversial for mainstream publishers. In 1959 the seigneurial Alfred Knopf hired him, and he remained at Knopf until his retirement in 1981. One of his authors was Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, whose PhD thesis on Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin Cameron had somehow got wind of. Cameron wanted to publish it not only because the author was a fellow Hoosier but because, he told Cohen, he simply wondered what Bukharin had been like. (Cameron, the alleged Stalinist, never defended Stalin--who had executed Bukharin, his rival for power--or took issue with Cohen's noncommunist, anti-Stalinist history. When Cohen insisted there be no hammer and sickle on the jacket, Cameron agreed completely. Case closed.) Cameron took a paternalistic interest in young people and kept up with the world. "Always be your own contemporary," he told Coleman, a colleague at Knopf for a time. "Anticipate their desire," he said of authors. He was not bitter about his ordeal and always had something good to say about those who were nominally his enemies, including Schlesinger. "In every face I see the tragedy," he told Coleman.

FATHER PHIL

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.