Other like-minded literati with whom he interacted closely over the years include: Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Theodore Dreiser, Lillian Hellman, and Lewis Mumford.
They have their unmarked place in history as people whose lives were destroyed in the pointless and degrading service of Stalin.
Or it may be that only Isidor's life was destroyed; Helen's was perhaps fulfilled as it would not have been if she had remained the discontented housewife she was when Lionel and I knew her...
Within the Party she perhaps found men who were better suited to her needs than Isidor; report had it that she became the lover of one of the black Communist leaders.
Determined to hold on to his wife, Isidor followed Helen into the Communist movement and became a writer for the Party's literary journal, the New Masses.
The gender-myopic poet became one of the Party's most dependable hatchet men, a well-practiced and efficient literary executioner... Amid the crush and bustle of Macy's then-famous bookstore, he confessed to Lionel that he had never meant to be a Communist.