Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  The Negro people love Mr. Baldwin. And rightly so! He is of us. And no matter what you say, Jimmy—Oh! yes you are—Oh! yes you are a Negro writer!

  FREE SPENDERS

  It is not possible to be thrifty and yet hold a high position in the corner gang.

  —WILLIAM FOOTE WHYTE

  Mr. Whyte, one of the numerous American sociologists whose case histories and findings are used by Mr. Vance Packard in The Status Seekers, tells the story of two boys in the Italian slum “Cornerville”: “Chick went on to ‘Ivy University’ and law school to become a successful lawyer. Doc, in contrast, made little progress, continued to hang out nightly with the street-corner gang.” Mr. Whyte found that the difference in intelligence and ability did not explain their different careers. The explanation lay in different attitudes to money. Chick was thrifty and ignored gang opinion. “In contrast, Doc, to maintain his prestige as leader of his street-corner gang, had to be a free spender.”

  According to the classic American tradition, it is Chick who has adapted himself to American (Protestant) values, Doc who clings to a feckless European (Catholic) way of life. Almost any nineteenth-century version of the story would carry some such implication and many Americans today—probably a majority—would take that nineteenth-century implication for granted. But that is not the way in which the story can be fitted into the world of The Status Seekers and Mr. Griffith’s Waist-High Culture. That world is dominated, not by Chick’s values, but by Doc’s. Chick can move from the corner to a country club—one that takes Italians—but at the club level he will find that he now cannot avoid being “a free spender” and looking after his “prestige.” Mr. Philip Starr, of Yankee City, who, like Chick, pushed his way up from the lower class to the top, was so determined to win prestige at his new level that he “sought to make his parents seem upper class, too, by disinterring their remains in the city’s lower-class cemetery and reburying them in the city’s upper-class cemetery.” Nearer, my God, to thee.

  The point of The Status Seekers is not so much that snobbery is a powerful force in American life—it is in every society including the Soviet Union—as that uncontrolled snobbery, in American conditions, involves such human and material waste as to threaten the coherence, and eventually the survival, of American society. In conditions of plenty, of corporate might and community weakness, brains are diverted from education into advertising—the comparative salary figures quoted by Mr. Packard are convincing on this point—and there used to promote the diversion of material resources into a profusion of status symbols. The cultural impoverishment that results from the eclipse of education by salesmanship is Mr. Griffith’s main concern in his misleadingly named The Waist-High Culture. (“Have we sold our birthright for a mess of pottage that goes pop, crackle, snap?”) And Mr. Emmet Hughes in America the Vincible is preoccupied by the collective weakness and drift of this enormously and often absurdly productive society, confronted, as it is, by an ambitious and disciplined rival. In the picture that emerges from the three books, America today looks rather like a “corner gang” of free-spending, prestige-minded Docs, resenting—in the rising, confident, thrifty Soviet Union—a collective Chick.

  Many will say—many are saying—that this is a grossly distorted picture. They point out, with justice, that America can give her workers and farmers a far higher standard of living than these classes have in the Soviet Union, and that this standard of living is based on higher efficiency all round. They point out also that hardly anyone in America wants or would accept the harsh regimentation by which the Soviet Union maintains a high rate of saving. None of these three writers—who are representative of a growing volume of radically critical comment—would dispute any of this. None of them wants to see this country turn into anything like the Soviet Union.

  They are all successful journalists—Mr. Griffith and Mr. Hughes are both senior Time men—and, despite the example of Mr. Whittaker Chambers and one or two others, good journalists are probably more resistant to the attractions of communism than are members of most other professions. Scientists, engineers, most teachers, actors, managers, doctors, soldiers can all carry out their functions in a communist society, often with an agreeable improvement in status or pay. But the journalist’s function is largely suppressed: he is told by his political superiors what sort of facts to find and what comments to make on them. At a recent international gathering it was proposed to endorse the right of journalists to “seek” information. The communist countries wanted an amendment: delete “seek” and substitute “gather.” Good journalists, like these three, are, by fundamental preference, “seekers” rather than “gatherers.” They know by professional experience that even in Western societies, the theory of “seek” often covers the practice of “gather,” but they know also, and show by their practice, that the amount of “seeking” possible is vastly greater than anything permitted in communist societies. They are therefore anti-communists by profession—as distinct from the professional anti-communists who often, like the late Senator McCarthy, are not seriously worried about communism at all. When journalists of this type radically criticize American society they do so, not in order to exalt its principal rival, but in fear lest that rival and his techniques of regimentation may be about to prevail. They all—although with various reservations—seem to think that is what is now happening.

  “In this time of transcendent challenge and danger to our way of life,” writes Mr. Vance Packard, “it seems clear that we can endure and prevail only if the vast majority of our people really believe in our system.” By the American “system” he means the ideals of independence of mind, equality of opportunity, democracy in social life, etc. As the whole tenor of his book is that his fellow-countrymen profess to believe in these things, but mostly act as if they did not believe in them, the corollary seems clear. “We must, then, seriously ask ourselves,” writes Mr. Thomas Griffith, “whether our society, despite its deceptive vitality, has not entered a parabola of decline, less and less able to cope with what it must face.” And Mr. Emmet Hughes—formerly a speech-writer for President Eisenhower—ends his long survey of what he considers to be the bankruptcy of American policy with two alternative drafts of a letter to his children, to be dispatched in 1976. One of these is written on the hypothesis that there is no radical change in present practices, and it describes the grim process and results of America’s decline. The other and happier draft is based on the premise that a sudden change of heart and practice arrests the decline. There is little in America the Vincible to suggest that it is the second draft which will be dispatched.

  What is a non-American to make of these American prognostications? For anti-Americans of right and left there is no problem; shop stewards in Glasgow and colonels in Algiers can mark the same passages with the same glee, and range America the Vincible beside their well-worn Mao. Uncritical apologists, including the various dollar-parasites, will also find it easy to take up a position: “healthy American self-criticism … American tendency to hyperbole … no reason to question fundamental soundness.”

  But what are the rest of us to think? Can we, as some suggest, write all this off as merely modish debunking? Is it merely stunt-writing aimed at a public frightened by the footprint of a sinister Man Friday in the technological sands? The honest answer of anyone who reads these three books must, I think, be: “on the whole, no.” It is true that Sputnik and its successors prepared a public for inquiries of this kind; and true also that, most especially in the kind of society these writers describe, the existence of the public is apt to produce the inquiry. But that is quite a different matter from saying that the results of the inquiry are distorted.

  Mr. Packard’s manner may be more cheerful than his facts warrant—although the facts have their circus side: it is hard to be solemn about the posthumous migrations of the Starrs. But his findings seem quite genuinely related to a mass of American sociological work over the past ten years or so—the sort of work that has been criticized by
Mr. C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination, not for being sensational, but for being too timid, limited and academic. Mr. Griffith’s book, on the other hand, consists mainly of personal impressions about American life, the personal impressions of the foreign editor of Time. The Waist-High Culture is a much sadder book than The Status Seekers, as if Mr. Griffith felt the quality of what Mr. Packard was describing in terms of quantities. And just as it would be hard to challenge the general factual basis of The Status Seekers, it would be hard to impugn the sincerity in Mr. Griffith’s dry, sad tone—the tone that is there when the reassuring amplifiers of that style which he calls “Third Person Authoritative” are switched off. It is the tone of a well-informed passenger who believes the ship is sinking but doesn’t want to start a panic. Mr. Hughes in America the Vincible talks louder and with more than a touch of rodomontade in the opening generalities—but his anger rings true and his argument is close when he gets down to the known facts of the Dulles years. These three witnesses cannot be dismissed as hostile, as alarmist or as pandering to a national craze for self-denunciation.

  “Our society,” writes Mr. Griffith, “must find a way first to conceive the common good, and then to honor and reward in proper proportions those activities which best serve, not individual employers, but the community’s aims.” The stranger can but agree, thinking perhaps of New York, probably the richest city in the world, with its myriad individual success-stories and its municipal failure, its shining towers and dirty ill-lit streets, its treasure-houses of art and its crowded, frightening schools, its brains on Madison Avenue and its despairing bedlam on the Bowery. New York is not America, granted, and Mr. Griffith and his like want to stop America from multiplying the image of New York’s anarchy. We outsiders can only wish them luck, knowing that so much of our own luck is bound up with their success. We have the same kind of interest in their attempt to bring on a “tightening” of American society, as we have in the attempts of those who are trying to “loosen” Soviet society—and the same almost complete lack of influence over both. Unless Doc can be made to sober up, and Chick to relax a little, the end of the story—the end for us too—is not hard to guess. Not that we should exaggerate Chick’s malevolence. “Doc,” we can imagine him saying, “was his own worst enemy.”

  II

  ENGLAND

  ORWELL LOOKS AT THE WORLD

  “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.” These words, about himself as a boy, Orwell wrote when he was already near his death; and they are both true and an example of their own truth. Not that objectively Orwell was a failure, at school or in life. But he did feel himself to be a failure; he did want to get his own back; he had the ability to face unpleasant facts and knew that ability to be, in his own carefully chosen word, “a power.” In the same sentence he demonstrates his possession of that power by facing two facts about himself: his sense of failure and desire to get his own back. “I am going to tell you some facts about yourself,” he says in effect to the left-wing intellectuals who were for long almost his only readers, “but first you must recognize that I face unpleasant facts about myself, and face such facts in person—facts like bullets. These are things that most of you are very little inclined to do. Through my skill with words, and the power which such skill exerts over people like you, I am now going to compel you to face at least some of the facts which you are trying to hide from yourselves and others.”

  Most of those addressed—perhaps on this page I can say “most of us”—responded to this challenge, I suppose, in one or both of two opposite ways. The first way was to admit that Orwell’s criticisms were largely true: that left-wing intellectuals were, too often, intellectually dishonest, selective in their moral indignation, furtive worshippers of power, and startlingly ignorant both of political realities and of the working class. The quantity and quality of this acceptance no doubt varied. You could, for example, accept Orwell’s indictment as being true about your friends but not about yourself. Or you could, if you wanted to, drop being a leftist—for motives probably even less admirable than those which had taken you to the left—have your eyes conveniently “opened” by Orwell’s fearless honesty. Some of Orwell’s American admirers in the fifties may have been, in reality, more impressed by the arguments of Senator McCarthy than by those of Animal Farm, but an Orwellian conversion lent dignity to retreat. There were certainly also, among those clever and anxious people whom Orwell addressed, those who actually enjoyed submitting to the punishment which he inflicted:

  Come fix upon me that accusing eye

  I thirst for accusation.

  But the main reason why many intellectuals accepted the truth of Orwell’s accusations is that so many of these accusations were true, and the lucidity of Orwell’s prose made their truth inescapable. Intellectuals are probably not more dishonest than other people; their resources for self-deception are of course much greater, but then so is their compulsion to self-criticism: greater forces committed on both sides, and the result equally uncertain. But one characteristic which the intellectual must have, or he ceases to be an intellectual at all, is the ability to see when a real point has been made in debate. It was impossible for anyone with that ability not to notice that Orwell kept scoring direct hits. You knew that certain things he said were true, because you winced when you heard them.

  There can be little doubt that Orwell did change the minds of quite a few people through whom he changed the minds of many others. He cleared out a great deal of cant, self-deception, and self-righteousness, and in doing so shook the confidence of the English left, perhaps permanently. The right, as everyone knows, paid no attention to him except for the valuable ammunition he was to supply against communism, and retained its own variety of cant, almost undamaged. But the cant of the left, that cant which has so far proved indispensable to the victory of any mass movement, was almost destroyed by Orwell’s attacks, which put out of action so much cant-producing machinery in its factories: the minds of left-wing intellectuals. His effect on the English left might be compared to that of Voltaire on the French nobility: he weakened their belief in their own ideology, made them ashamed of their clichés, left them intellectually more scrupulous and more defenceless.

  There was, of course, and is, a second way of responding to Orwell’s challenge: you could question his impartiality and therefore his right to judge. But Orwell has been accused of being essentially a reactionary writer whose work both “objectively” strengthened, and was intended to strengthen, the existing order. On this view the critique of that order which his works contain is held to be perfunctory, a sort of diversion to draw attention from the real attack, which was directed against the left. In its extreme forms, this accusation is very easy to refute. Anyone who calls Orwell a fascist—and I believe the thing has been done—knows nothing at all about either him or his life. Orwell’s life, and the Spanish wound which shortened that life, refuted such absurdities. But if no human type, except perhaps the Communist party member, could be more remote from Orwell than is the fascist, it is also true that he is very far indeed from being “progressive.”

  Sir Richard Rees, in his sympathetic and enlightening book,* brings out well the “old-fashioned” side of Orwell—the deep English patriotism, the distaste for machinery and modern psychology, the love of the country, of animals, even the lingering nostalgia for the Edwardian age. These qualities, in Orwell’s work, growl in many asides, and growl increasingly often. It is a Tory growl: each quality in itself, obviously, is not necessarily Tory, but grouped together they do form a Tory pattern. It is not surprising that Orwell should have taken pleasure in defending Kipling against leftist criticism (his important essay on Kipling is unaccountably omitted from the present volume† of collected essays, the title of which is misleading). If we add to the list a chivalrous but rather insensitive attitude towards the
underdog and a tendency towards self-immolation, what seems to emerge is the character of an English conservative eccentric.

  The character is on the whole an attractive one, and has done much to make English life more decent—a favourite word of Orwell’s. The limitations of the viewpoint it implies are probably more obvious to foreigners than they are to the English. Orwell seldom wrote about foreigners, except sociologically, and then in a hit-or-miss fashion otherwise unusual with him; he very rarely mentions a foreign writer and has an excessive dislike of foreign words; although he condemns imperialism he dislikes its victims even more. Indeed he sometimes goes beyond dislike; he rises to something like hysteria. In Shooting an Elephant, he records fantasies about sticking a bayonet into the belly of a sniggering Buddhist priest. This is the kind of fantasy that Orwell himself found sinister in No Orchids for Miss Blandish. It is really more disquieting in Shooting an Elephant: not that sadistic fantasies are unusual, even in good and gentle men, but that quite unmistakably Orwell was much more likely to have this kind of fantasy about a Burmese than about an Englishman.

  I do not suggest that it is morally better to have such fantasies about an Englishman. The point is that if sadistic fantasies are unevenly distributed by race or nationality, the consequences are more likely to be political—and therefore contagious and dangerous—than if they remain purely personal.