Men are as liable to pursue their own ruin as their own advantage. In Hitler’s day Nazi processions sometimes included a little melancholy contingent of opponents or victims of the regime displaying the slogan ‘Down with us!’ Those who marched behind this sad placard were Nazi fellow-travellers. Their slogan defines both the mood and the destination of all fellow-travelling.
If, however, it has often been the case that human beings have passionately advocated causes which cannot but encompass their own ultimate destruction, an historian in the future, trying to piece together the pattern of this strange time will surely still be interested and puzzled by the motivation of contemporary fellow-travellers. These millionaires, he will ask himself, who identified themselves with forces unmistakeably destructive of their wealth; these pious clergymen who lent themselves to propaganda which made a mockery of the faith they professed; these admirable scholars who contentedly swallowed the most monstrous perversions of historical scholarship - what exactly were they after?
In retrospect, the spectacle of professed democrats exulting over the multiplication of Police States, and of internationalists applauding each new triumph of Slav nationalism, will inevitably seem rather extraordinary. However inured to the vagaries of human nature, eyebrows are likely still to be raised at the record of earnest progressives railing against any infringement of civil liberties at home and rejoicing over the arbitrary judgments of People’s Courts abroad; over gentle humanitarians who find the death penalty imposed for crimes of violence brutal and unnecessary, but who so readily overlook brutality and coercion on a vast scale when it is sponsored by the Kremlin.
Seeking enlightenment, our historian may well turn to the vast and often turgid literature of Soviet adulation. If so, he is unlikely to derive much benefit therefrom. Turning over the pages of, for instance, the Webbs’ ‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation’, or of The Dean of Canterbury’s ‘The Socialist Sixth of the World’, would but add to his bewilderment. Did not the Webbs, he would ask himself, devote much of their life and endeavours to improving social conditions? How, then, were they able to tolerate the admitted fact of large numbers of Russian citizens in forced labour camps? Were they not earnest believers in democratic institutions? How, then, when they prided themselves on their exactness and moderation, could they have reached the asinine conclusion that ‘the USSR is the most inclusive and equalised democracy in the world’? Was not the phrase ‘inevitability of gradualness’ actually coined by the Webbs? How, then, did they come so to admire the Kremlin’s most ungradual procedure? Was not the Dean of Canterbury a strong advocate of humane practices? How, then, did he so readily turn a blind eye on the activities of the Russian political police, and so readily accept the results of obviously fraudulent elections in Russia and Russia’s satellite states?
Such questions would scarcely be elucidated by a study of the authorised Communist scriptures. These are full of exhortations to violence and conflict. There is little gradualness to be found in them. They bear about as close a relation to the Thirty-nine Articles as Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ does to the Sermon on the Mount. Between the Lubianka prison and a Fabian Summer School there is set a chasm which would seem impassable, except that ideological athletes like Mr Bernard Shaw have been able to leap nimbly across it.
Again, the Communist Party Line has undergone drastic fluctuations which, our historian will conclude, might have been expected to detach from it all but its most tenacious adherents. How, for instance, he will wonder, was it possible for those who participated in the adulations of the early heroes of the Revolution so readily to accept their downfall, and to believe them to have been guilty from the beginning of ideological heresy and acts of treachery of the most heinous kind? In that remarkable period between September, 1939, and June, 1941, when Ribbentrop received the Order of Lenin, and Molotov was an honoured guest in Berlin, and Stalin and Hitler exchanged cordial and congratulatory messages, did doubts arise in the Canterbury Deanery? Did that forward looking couple, the Webbs, begin to wonder if, after all, the Fabian rainbow ended at the Kremlin?
Not at all. The Webbs were silent, and the Dean had ‘the highest authority for stating that there had been no conversations between Russia and Germany before August,1939’,and that the conversations, when they took place, ‘contained no plan for partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union’. Bombs dropped on Helsinki did not apparently shake the faith of the pacifist Friends of the Soviet Union that the cause of peace was safe in Stalin’s hands, any more than a vast sharing out of spoils with Nazi Germany appeared to diminish the conviction that the only faithful adherents of the anti-Fascist cause were the rulers of Russia.
Our historian is likely, indeed, to be unable to withhold a certain admiration from a faith so touchingly persistent. Cherished revolutionary leaders might be trampled in the dust and disclosed as enemies of the Soviet Fatherland; the Party Line might change with startling suddenness, holding up to obloquy what had been venerated and vice-versa; but in Senior Common Rooms, in the columns of progressive weeklies, in remote Passfield Corner and in the venerable Canterbury Deanery, the stock of the Russians continues to rise. Inconsistency could not tarnish their reputation. Neither immoderate demands for reparations nor the irresponsible exercise of the veto at Lake Success could wean from them the allegiance of those accustomed to be foremost in insisting that reparations were an imperialistic device and the undue influence of the Great Powers an abomination.
Finding in this line of inquiry no solution to his dilemma, out historian might well turn from the general to the particular. If fellow-travelling made no sense in terms of policy, it might be comprehensible in terms of individual psychology. What, he might ask himself, was it in the character of fellow-travellers which made them persist in a point of view alien to their own professed principles and inimical to their own interests? Why, when they were confronted with the spectacle of the liquidation of their like elsewhere, did they persist in inviting the same fate? If the concentration camps in Eastern Germany and other areas under Russian occupation or influence were full of social democrats and pacifists and intellectuals, did it not occur to them that the coming to pass of what they so ardently advocated would make them also inmates?
Did the execution of a Liberal like Petkov, the flight of a Socialist like Mikolajczyk, have no moral for them? Meditating upon this, our historian might recall an apposite thought of Taine’s relating to sympathisers with the French Revolution, some of whom, interestingly enough, remained faithful even after Napoleon had taken over. Nothing is more dangerous, the French historian wrote, than a general idea in a narrow mind. It ferments there like yeast, coming in time to dominate all the mental activity of the individual concerned until, in the most literal sense, he is ‘possessed’.
The fellow-traveller today is in a like case. He has ceased to be able to relate his obsession either to his own interests, or to any coherent system of thought. Reason and self-preservation, those two essential ingredients in a civilised existence, have ceased to be applicable. He is, as Taine puts it, ’possessed’. Argument does not impinge upon him, and the normal restraints of prudence are not operative. He is ready, even eager, to eat yesterday’s words, and to denounce yesterday’s hero. He derives no moral from the melancholy fate of others who, for instance, in Czechoslovakia, have taken the same position as he has. Not even Tito’s sudden fall from favour abates his zeal. The only hope for him is exorcism, so that the Gadarene swine may hurl themselves to destruction in his place.
8
Heroes Of Their Time:
Bertrand Russell And D H Lawrence
The celebrity which is nowadays so lavishly and instantaneously bestowed, often proves to be surprisingly transient. Where Victorian heroes loomed ever larger after decease, with long-winded, adulatory biographies as signposts along the road to posthumous fame, ours have but to turn up their toes to be largely forgotten. When there are adulatory
biographies, more often than not they provide an occasion rather for marvelling at a personality cult that is past than for reviving its practice.
Witness Ronald W Clark’s massive tribute to the late Bertrand Russell. I suppose mathematical specialists still have occasion to make honourable mention of his Principia Mathematical (written in collaboration with AN Whitehead), and students majoring in philosophy to turn over the pages of his History of Western Philosophy. No doubt pious nuclear disarmers are liable to look back nostalgically on the great days of the Aldermaston marches, and there may even be aspiring free-lovers, progressive educationalists and anti-God zealots who refresh themselves from time to time by returning to Russell’s writings on such themes. Of course, too, his name crops up frequently in memoirs and other documentation, especially relating to the Bloomsbury set, now decidedly in fashion. Here, his frequent stays at Garsington Manor, and intimate relationship with Lady Ottoline Morrell, the presiding goddess, ensures him honourable mention, along with Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence and other frequenters of her court.
Even so, all the way through Clark’s well-researched, and well-written tribute to Russell I keep asking myself whether his subject really rated such ample and assiduous treatment. Was Russell, as Clark indomitably insists, a great thinker, a master-mind, a seer, even a rather special kind of near-saint? Or, as I have long believed myself, no more than a quick-witted, excessively randy, displaced earl, who managed to shock his way into being noticed, first academically, then as an authority on shifting contemporary mores, and finally, thanks to the joint efforts of the Kremlin and his Svengali-like secretary, Ralph Schoenman, as a figure of world significance in the shaping of foreign policy and the defining of international relations?
My own impressions of his polemical writings, in which I have had occasion to browse from time to time, and of his radio and television disputations when I have been a participant, is that his thinking was superficial, his intellectual bigotry fluctuating and often absurd, and his capacity for making irresponsible dogmatic statements, limitless. Indeed, in the light of the inconstancy of his views, the recklessness of his pronouncements on contemporary affairs (he once bet me 20 pounds that Sen. Joseph McCarthy would infallibly be elected President of the United States on the completion of Eisenhower’s first term), and his readiness to throw out highly biased opinions on everything under the sun, from the poet Wordsworth to the Crucifixion, it must be considered extraordinary that he continued to be revered as a man of learning and sagacity.
Here, some observations by Thomas Gray, author of Elegy written in a Country Churchyard - lines which at one time all schoolboys were expected to learn by heart - on how Lord Shaftesbury came to have philosophical credentials, may be relevant. They are quoted in Dr Johnson’s incomparable Lives of the English Poets:
‘You say you cannot conceive how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue; I will tell you. First, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe anything at all provided they are under obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. A dead lord ranks with commoners: vanity is no longer interested in the matter; for a new road has become an old one.’
It seems to me to fit Russell like a glove, and will surely seem even more apposite by the year 2010 when he will have been dead 40 years.
It is greatly to Clark’s credit that, while maintaining his attitude of awed reverence for Russell’s gifts and attainments, as far as can be seen he makes no effort to fake the evidence. This would, in any case, have been a difficult, and even risky, undertaking in view of Russell’s relentless, if not shameless, candour about himself in his autobiography; particularly regarding his non-stop amours, whether at the elevated level of his long love-affair with Lady Ottoline, and, later, with Colette (Lady Constance Malleson), or of his persistent efforts to lure female admirers, the younger the better, into his bed. Not to mention his four marriages.
The long tale of his conquests, faithfully monitored by Clark, must be considered remarkable, especially in view of his scrawny appearance; the receding chin, the squeaky voice, the simian features and other intimations of biological exhaustion. Even Lady Ottoline, who, in the light of her Garsington clientèle, cannot be credited with undue squeamishness, complained of Russell’s ‘lack of physical attraction, the lack of charm and gentleness and sympathy.’ Fame, it has been justly remarked, is a great aphrodisiac -a saying which doubtless goes far to account for Russell’s notable success with what used in pre-lib days to be called the fair sex.
In Lady Ottoline’s case an additional impediment was that Russell was a sufferer from pyorrhea, which, he explains, marred their physical transports. Returning from a visit to America, he was able to assure her that he had been cured of his distressing complaint, as well as passing on to her a detailed account of his seduction of Helen Dudley, the young daughter of an eminent gynaecologist who acted as his host during a stay in Chicago. While the seduction was proceeding, he tells us, Helen’s three sisters obligingly ‘mounted guard to give warning if either of the parents approached.’
It was scarcely a Tristan and Isolde situation, but one which, as described in his letter, served, along with the purification of his mouth, to reactivate his sexual relations with Lady Otto-line, for the enjoyment of which they repaired every Tuesday to Burnham Beeches for the day. Poor Helen Dudley, arriving in London in the middle of this rerun of an old idyll, was given a sharp brush-off by Russell on the specious grounds that,as the 1914-18 war had just broken out, and he proposed to take a leading part in opposing it, a liaison such as he had proposed in Chicago was inadmissible.’ The shock of the war,’ Russell writes of the affair in his autobiography, ‘killed my passion for her, and I broke her heart.’ Subsequently, he goes on, she ‘fell a victim to a rare disease, which first paralysed her, and then made her insane,’ and concludes, in a truly philosophical vein:’ If the war had not intervened, the plan which we formed in Chicago might have brought great happiness to us both.’
The episode confirms something Leonard Woolf told me once à propos Russell - that the trouble with him was that he was utterly heartless. He just does not seem to have had any true feelings about individual people, which may explain why, on the one hand, he continued into old age writing mawkish adolescent love-letters, and, on the other, became so ardent a propagandist for humanitarian causes. As Swift pointed out, those who are most concerned about humanity seldom care much about Tom, Dick and Harry. Thus Russell, who worked himself into a lather of frenzy even in his 80s and 90s lest the men in the Pentagon or the Kremlin should blow us and our earth to smithereens, was liable in his most intimate personal relationships to display an almost unearthly callousness.
In this respect, he may be seen as a sort of companion-piece to DH Lawrence; as Russell out of his inhumanity forged his mighty championship of humanity, so Lawrence out of his impotence forged his mighty championship of potency.The cold-hearted earl, following in the tradition of his famous grandfather, Lord John Russell, known as Radical Jack, became a sort of People’s Totem, as the impotent Nottingham miner’s son became the equivalent People’s Phallus.
It was in Cambridge that these two gimcrack prophets of our time were brought together. Initially, they showered one another with compliments and planned future collaboration, but their spheres of interest overlapped too much for harmonious relations to prove durable, and soon they were screaming insults. Lawrence was able to get in a fell blow with one of the characters in Women In Love - Sir Joshua Malleson, ‘a learned, dry baronet who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh horse-laugh.’ Russell weighed in two decades later with a fero
cious attack on Lawrence broadcast by the BBC, and may be said to have won on points.
Russell was in the habit of saying that he would most have like to live in the years before the French Revolution as a compatriot of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. One can quite see why -enjoying the fun of preparing a revolution but departing this world before the tumbrils called. Instead, it was his fate to live into and after the Russian Revolution. He visited the new Soviet regime in the very early days, in 1920, and reached the conclusion that it was ‘a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar’s ...No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead.’
In his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism he wrote about the regime in this strain, in splendid contrast with the sycophantic and abysmally credulous reactions of other intellectuals like Shaw, the Webbs, Gide, Barbusse, etc. etc. Yet before even Russell’s words were printed, on his way to China, when his fellow-passengers asked him to speak about Russia, he felt bound to say ‘only favourable things about the Soviet Government.’
It was the ultimate Trahison des clercs, and epitomizes what was to be the practice of the flower of our Western intelligentsia in the tumultuous years to come, whereby they have been instrumental in undermining and invalidating all the values and aspirations they purported to be upholding, in the process, incidentally, abolishing themselves. In this sense, Russell may be seen as the foremost intellectual of his time, and also the last one of genius; the voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way for the outpouring of meaningless words and the repetition of mindless slogans which lay ahead.
Time and Eternity Page 7
