LIII
I never questioned that my brother’s death was due to great weaknesses in himself. But it was also due to strength and clarity—his undeflected vision of his own weaknesses and of the world in which they had come to light and to grief. That world was dying of its own vulgarity, stupidity, complacency, inhumanity, power and materialism—a death of the spirit. The toxins of its slow decay poisoned all life within it—but first of all that life which was most gentle and most decent because its sensitivity (that is to say, in part, its weakness), made it most susceptible and most incurable.
That this world was dying both brothers knew. We differed as to how to face the fact. My brother’s way had the grace of disdain and simple subtraction. He removed himself from what he found unsolvable or unworthy to be solved, and which he refused to encumber. Such fortitude and such finality are like a smile before a firing squad. When a man makes himself his own firing squad, he is beyond pity or judgment, since it is difficult to pity or to judge those who are merciless first of all with themselves.
This view I understood. In part, I shared it. In so far as I was gentle, I shared it. But I was not only gentle. Deep within me there was a saving fierceness that my brother lacked. If you kick my dog in the stomach, though I have refused to fight one hundred times, and will refuse again, that time I will wait and fight to destroy you. I cannot help myself. Within me there is a force. It says that that gentleness, which is not prepared to kill or be killed to destroy the evil that assails life, is not gentleness. It is weakness. It is the weakness of the merely well-meaning. It is the suspended goodness of the men of mere good will whose passivity in the face of evil first of all raises the question whether they are men. It is the permanent temptation of the Christian who, in a world of force, flinches the crucifixion which alone can give kindness and compassion force.
That dying world, which, in the death throe of the First World War, had just destroyed eleven million lives, and was visibly preparing to destroy as many more in its next convulsion, that dying world, of which my family was a tiny image, and whose poisons had also killed my brother, inspired in me only a passing mood to flinch it. Much more, it stirred a grimness in me, a will to end it, not so that kindness and compassion might reign on earth—we are not children—but that the possibility of kindness and compassion might survive at all, that human life might survive the death that fed on it.
The New Year’s Eve following my brother’s death, I reached the Sand Hill graveyard a little before midnight. It was a very silent night. A wet snow was falling. The raw earth over my brother’s grave had begun to settle. A pool of rain and thaw water had collected. A sheet of ice covered it. As I stood looking at it, the year ended. In an instant, in all the Long Island villages around the horizon, the sirens wailed; bells rang from the firehouses. From a road house beyond the graveyard, a crowd burst, shouting. Someone snapped a clacker. Cars hurtled down the Merrick Road, filled with hooting, singing people. A bottle, tossed from one car, shattered against the cemetery wall.
I listened, leaning against a gravestone. There, as the hubbub died away, I began to compose a poem—one of the last few poems, it turned out, that I would ever write. It was scarcely a poem at all. It was the cry with which I surmounted the spiritual exhaustion of my long struggle to keep my brother alive, and of his death, and a statement of what that experience meant to me in terms of my own life and all life. It was long, and, like my other poems I later destroyed it, so that I can remember only snatches. It began:Blow, whistles, blow,
Ring out, joyful bells,
Shout and caper, happy people,
You have killed him.
Reel, shouting, into your cars.
Where your clotted brains and ugly hands cannot be on him,
He gives you dirt for dirt.
The gentle of heart, the firm of will, is dead.
The fools, the cowards, the evil, the cunning, the low, live on.
His life is well withdrawn from such.
The peace of the graveyard, the night, the snow, took hold of me again. I wrote:This is the silence of the sky
Thrown over us in congelation by the snow;
A clacker in the hands of a fool
Has shattered snow’s silence.
I wrote more about the meaning of my brother’s death, the rightness of the act for him, his courage in retiring from the hubbub of the world to that silence which the world abhorred because it betrayed the world’s inconsequence. I spoke of the quiet of the graveyard and its stones at night, which the world feared, but which I had learned not to fear. (The gentle dead harm no one.) I spoke of my brother’s grave, which I had faithfully visited, but which I would not visit again. For he had made his choice. I had made mine, and mine was not for death. I wrote:Ring out, glad bells,
I shall not die.
By this stone of death I lean against
I hold myself upright for life,
For as long as I seem to serve.
This order must go.
I hold no brief for any other,
But this must go.
Help me, God (if there were God),
Before I die,
In my good time or under the hands of the police,
To make of myself one tiny cell, a bacterium,
To serve the organization of love as hate,
The union of the weak to kill the evil in power,
The outrage and the hope of the world.
And, as I left the graveyard for the last time (I never went back), I ended:Fall on me, snow,
Cover me up;
Cover the houses and the streets.
Let me see only in the light of another year
The roofs and the minds that killed him,
And the earth that holds him,
Forever dead.
I was already a member of the Communist Party. I now first became a Communist. I became irreconcilable.
3
THE OUTRAGE AND THE HOPE OF THE WORLD
I
Sooner or later, one of my good friends is sure to ask me: How did it happen that a man like you became a Communist? Each time I wince, not at the personal question, but at the failure to grasp the fact that a man does not, as a rule, become a Communist because he is attracted to Communism, but because he is driven to despair by the crisis of history through which the world is passing.
I force myself to answer: In the West, all intellectuals become Communists because they are seeking the answer to one of two problems: the problem of war or the problem of economic crises.
This is not to say that personal factors play no part in making a man a Communist. Obviously, they do, if only because every man’s character and experience, and therefore his biography, are different from every other man’s. No two are ever the same. Hence some men will always be more susceptible to Communism than other men, just as some are less resistant to disease than other men. But whatever factors make one man more susceptible than another to Communism once he is driven to entertain it at all, it will be found that, almost without exception, the intellectuals of the West are driven to entertain it in terms of just two challenges: the problem of war and the problem of economic crisis. This is equally true, even for men of untrained minds or without the habit of reflection; men who find it difficult to explain to themselves or to others the forces that move them to Communism. For while the susceptibility to Communism varies among men, the problem of war and economic crisis do not vary. In this period of history, they are constant, and must be until, in one way or another, they are solved.
Some intellectuals are primarily moved by the problem of war. Others are first moved by the economic problem. Both crises are aspects of a greater crisis of history for which Communism offers a plausible explanation and which it promises to end. When an intellectual joins the Communist Party, he does so primarily because he sees no other way of ending the crisis of history. In effect, his act is an act of despair, regardless of whether or not that is how he thinks of it. And to the
degree that it is an act of despair, he will desire the party to use him in overcoming that crisis of history which is at the root of his despair.
There is a widespread notion that men become Communists for reasons of material gain. There are always a certain number of “rice Christians” in any movement that has anything at all to offer them. Of all movements in the world, the Communist Party has the least to offer a man bent on personal advantage. For the intellectual of any ability, it has nothing whatever to offer in the way of gain. In the days when I joined the Communist Party, it could offer those who joined it only the certainty of being poor and pariahs. During the 1930’s and 1940’s, when Communism became intellectually fashionable, there was a time when Communist Party patronage could dispose of jobs or careers in a number of fields. But the jobs that the Communist Party could give, or the careers it could further, presupposed that the men and women in them must have some ability to hold them at all. Almost without exception such men and women could have made their careers much more profitably and comfortably outside the Communist Party. For the party must always demand more than it gives. What material advantage, for example, could the Communist Party possibly offer an Alger Hiss, a Noel Field, a Dr. Klaus Fuchs, equal to the demands it made on him? This persistent notion that men become or remain Communists from motives of personal advantage constantly baffles those who hold it with the fact that Communist parties everywhere are filled with talented men and women, often of good family, and that these people are precisely among the most fanatical Communists, those most likely to be found in the party’s most hazardous and criminal activities.
Nor do Marxist dialectics or Marxian economic theories have much to do with the reason why men become and remain Communists. I have met few Communists who were more than fiddlers with the dialectic (the intellectual tool whereby Marxist theoreticians probe and gauge history’s laws of motion). I have met few Communists whom I thought knew more than the bare rudiments of Marxian economics, or cared to. But I have never known a Communist who was not acutely aware of the crisis of history whose solution he found in Communism’s practical program, its vision and its faith.
Few Communists have ever been made simply by reading the works of Marx or Lenin. The crisis of history makes Communists; Marx and Lenin merely offer them an explanation, of the crisis and what to do about it. Thus a graph of Communist growth would show that its numbers and its power increased in waves roughly equivalent to each new crest of crisis. The same horror and havoc of the First World War, which made the Russian Revolution possible, recruited the ranks of the first Communist parties of the West. Secondary manifestations of crisis augmented them—the rise of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and the Spanish Civil War. The economic crisis which reached the United States in 1929 swept thousands into the Communist Party or under its influence. The military crisis of World War II swept in millions more; for example, a third of the voting population of France and of Italy. The crisis of the Third World War is no doubt holding those millions in place and adding to them. For whatever else the rest of the world may choose to believe, it can be said without reservation that Communists believe World War III inevitable.
Under pressure of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilization which nothing less drastic can save—a civilization foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it.
Thus, the Communist Party presents itself as the one organization of the will to survive the crisis in a civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering or absent. It is in the name of that will to survive the crisis, which is not theoretical but closes in from all sides, that the Communist first justifies the use of terror and tyranny, which are repugnant to most men by nature and which the whole tradition of the West specifically repudiates.
It is in the name of that will to survive that Communism turns to the working class as a source of unspoiled energy which may salvage the crumbling of the West. For the revolution is never stronger than the failure of civilization. Communism is never stronger than the failure of other faiths.
It is the crisis that makes men Communists and it is the crisis that keeps men Communists. For the Communist who breaks with Communism must break not only with the power of its vision and its faith. He must break in the full knowledge that he will find himself facing the crisis of history, but this time without even that solution which Communism presents, and crushed by the knowledge that the solution which he sought through Communism is evil against God and man.
I was one of those drawn to Communism by the problem of war. For me that problem began in 1923. In that year, I went to Europe with Meyer Schapiro who had been my classmate at Columbia College. He had already begun those studies that were later to make him a professor of Fine Arts at Columbia and one of the outstanding art critics in the country. We planned to spend the summer in Europe’s galleries and museums.
I saw the galleries and museums. But I also saw something else. I saw for the first time the crisis of history and its dimension. It was not only that Germany was in a state of manic desperation, reeling from inflation, readying for revolution while three Allied armies occupied the Rhineland and refugees flooded back from the occupied area into the shattered country. It was not only the aftermath of the World War, the ruins of northern France or what Bernanos would presently call “those vast cemeteries in the moonlight.” What moved me was the evidence that World War II was predictably certain and that it was extremely improbable that civilization could survive it. (In this I was mistaken, though, by the end of the Second World War, civilized Europe would shrink to little more than it had been in the Dark Ages.) It seemed to me that the world had reached a crisis on a scale and of a depth such as had been known only once or twice before in history. (And in that I was not mistaken at all.)
During my years at Columbia College, I had known a number of socialists, including two or three extreme left-wingers. They had devoted a great deal of time, tact and patience to winning me to their views. They had no effect on me whatever. What their theories could not do, the crisis did. For, in searching for the answer to the crisis, I found none but socialism.
I returned to the United States and plunged into Fabian Socialism, studying as I seldom had before in my life. I abstracted and made mountainous notes on the dull dry works of the Webbs, R. H. Tawney, Hobhouse and the endless volumes in which G.D.H. Cole urged Guild socialism. There was no life in those books. There were statistics and theories. The reek of life was missing.
I brushed them aside. Socialism was not the answer. It was perfectly clear, too, that if socialism was to stem the crisis and remake the world, socialism involved a violent struggle to get and keep political power. At some point, socialism would have to consolidate its power by force. The Webbs made no provision for getting or keeping power. Moreover, I had a profound antipathy to force. I was glad to shelve the problem.
In that disenchanted period I returned to Columbia College to major in history, attending classes by day and working at night to pay my way. History was medieval history and I rehearsed in the collapse of Rome the crisis of history in our own time.
One day, by sheer chance, there came into my hands a little pamphlet of Lenin’s. It was called A Soviet At Work. In a simple strong prose, it described a day in the life of a local soviet. The reek of life was on it. This was not theory or statistics. This was socialism in practice. This was the thing itself. This was how it worked.
I quickly passed on to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the ABC of Communism (its three authors were all shot during the Great Purge). Here was no dodging of the problem of getting and keeping power. Here was the simple statement that terror and dictatorship are justified to defend the socialist revolution if socialism is just
ified. Terror is an instrument of socialist policy if the crisis was to be overcome. It was months before I could accept even in principle the idea of terror.
Once I had done so, I faced the necessity to act.
II
One day, early in 1925, I sat down on a concrete bench on the Columbia campus, facing a little Greek shrine and the statue of my old political hero, Alexander Hamilton. The sun was shining, but it was chilly, and I sat huddled in my overcoat. I was there to answer once for all two questions: Can a man go on living in a world that is dying? If he can, what should he do in the crisis of the 20th century?
There ran through my mind the only lines I remember from the history textbook of my second go at college—two lines of Savinus’, written in the fifth century when the Goths had been in Rome and the Vandals were in Carthage: “The Roman Empire is filled with misery, but it is luxurious. It is dying, but it laughs.”
The dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it. It was dying but it laughed. And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped. It was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil. This failure I, too, shared with the world of which I was a part.
The dying world had no answer at all to the crisis of the 20th century, and, when it was mentioned, and every moral voice in the Western world was shrilling crisis, it cocked an ear of complacent deafness and smiled a smile of blank senility—throughout history, the smile of those for whom the executioner waits.
Witness Page 26
