Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Orwell of course was too decent and clear-headed to support any racialist or imperialist program. The presence in his make-up of the kind of feeling that inspires such programs led to no more than a certain deadening of his feeling and understanding where most of the population of the world was concerned. He turned towards foreigners, especially Asians, that part of his mind which brooded darkly about sandals, beards and vegetarians. He could not “think himself into the mind” of any kind of foreigner and he seldom tried to do so. He never thought it worth while to imagine seriously what it would be like to belong to a people with a quite different historical experience from that of the English. As far as he considered such matters at all, I think he felt that not to be a product of English history was a sort of moral lapse.

  Many people, quite obviously, are not less insular today than Orwell, but no one of comparable intelligence can now attain that degree of insularity—short of being whimsical like Mr. Evelyn Waugh or Mr. Kingsley Amis. During almost all of Orwell’s writing career, England was sufficiently central to the world’s political and economic life for an Anglocentric view of the world not to be seen as an eccentric one. Since then, the McCarthy years, the “thaw” in Russia, the rise of African nationalism, the Common Market in Europe, the ferment in Latin America, the Russian-American space race, emanations of Communist China and, in a different category, the Suez experiment and its failure have made a world in which much, though not all, of Orwell’s writing must seem, to readers outside these islands, somewhat provincial.

  We are near enough now to 1984 to see that the world then, whatever it may be like, will not be very like Orwell’s imagining of it. Is it fantastic to see in Orwell’s 1984 the reflection of a feeling that a world in which the pre-1914 British way of life had totally passed away must necessarily be a dehumanized world? And is it altogether wrong to see the inhabitants of Animal Farm as having points in common, not merely with Soviet Russians, but also with Kipling’s lesser breeds generally, as well as with Flory’s Burmese who, once the relative decencies of the Raj are gone, must inevitably fall under the obscene domination of their own kind?

  To insist on the limitations of Orwell’s thought is only to establish the limits within which we admire him. How much there is to admire, how much we owe to him, every page in these collected essays reminds us. That spare, tough prose has not aged; that clear eye sees more than ours do even if there are things which it cannot see through, and which we now can see from the other side in time. What political writer now cares as much as he did, both about what he is writing and about how he is writing it? Subsequent writers who exploited anger seem far off and apathetic compared with this careful writer who tried so hard to keep his judgment and his language from being clouded by an anger as real as Swift’s.

  * George Orwell.

  † Collected Essays.

  CHORUS OR CASSANDRA

  Stalin and the Kulaks:

  … we believe that from its own point of view the Russian Government has often been quite unnecessarily repressive. That, one may notice, is the view of Stalin who put an end to the very misguided efforts to expropriate the whole kulak class by terrorism. (NS & N, July 4, 1931)

  Hitler enters Rhineland:

  … it would be folly to reply by a mere non possumus … the sane policy would be to invite her [Germany] back into the League on terms which will do justice to her and ensure that she is a better neighbour. (NS & N, March 14, 1934)

  Mussolini and Abyssinia:

  Last month the Duce was convinced that he had nothing to fear from the League whatever he did. Today he must be disillusioned. Italy’s arrogance has completely isolated her. When it comes down to brass tacks the League Powers will cooperate in economic sanctions. (NS & N, late 1935)

  Spanish War:

  It is fairly evident that the Spanish fascists are in full retreat. Their desperate acts defeat their own ends by irritating public opinion against them. (NS & N, May 1936)

  Munich:

  If Mr. Chamberlain is prepared for the results of isolation let him say so. We for our part regarding war as the greatest of all catastrophes and recalling the results of one war to prevent Germany from holding the hegemony of Europe, would applaud and support such a decision. (NS & N, March 1938) The question of frontier revision should at once be tackled. (NS & N, August 1938) Nothing we or anyone else could do would save Czechoslovakia from destruction. (NS & N, August 27, 1938) In the last resort there is no doubt that Britain as well as France and the whole democratic world would stand by the Czechs. (NS & N, early September 1938) The Murder of a Nation. (NS & N, September 21, 1938)

  It is characteristic of the honesty which, at more than one level, has come to be expected from the New Statesman—and which makes people like writing for it—that the above material, so rich in ammunition for the paper’s enemies, can be taken from two books commissioned by the paper itself for its jubilee.* Mr. Hyams, a contributor to the New Statesman but not a member of the staff, chronicles, and often perceptively criticizes, the strange, and strangely successful, sequence of contradictions, made acceptable by a consistent and agreeable tone and style, which the New Statesman offered to its puzzled and increasingly anxious readers in the thirties.

  Mr. Hyams concedes the contradictions, the illusions and what amounts to the moral and political Micawberism of the paper in the early years of Mr. Kingsley Martin’s editorship—up to, in his view, the mid-thirties. He writes sympathetically and well of the conflict between pacifism and anti-fascist socialism in the mind of the nonconformist radical in the context of the early thirties. He reveals, in effect, the split in the British left-wing mind between the harsh Marxist assumptions about the nature of society and the English will to believe that most people are pretty decent chaps really. Mr. Hyams makes a very good point indeed when he speaks of a capacity which Mr. Kingsley Martin shares with many of the rest of us inside and outside the British left: the “capacity to be surprised and angry when the man whom he expected to punch him on the nose, punched him on the nose.”

  All this part of Mr. Hyams’s study seems to me clear and fair. It is with his “Came the Dawn” that I regretfully part from him. He tells us that “halfway through the decade” the New Statesman “gave us a clear lead by making a choice between two conflicting sets of principles.” He does not, however, establish that on any really important and critical issue of foreign policy in the thirties (except perhaps that of co-operation with the Churchill wing of the Tories) the New Statesman did give a clear lead at any moment when a clear lead would have been of much use. The original clear lead of which he speaks was an editorial of September 1935, in which the New Statesman endorsed the principle of League sanctions, even at the cost of war, against Italy. Mr. Kingsley Martin, according to Mr. Hyams, “had become willing to give the policeman a truncheon; and by that change had given the New Statesman a ‘hard’ policy in what was to come.” Now first of all, Mr. Kingsley Martin did not have a truncheon to give to the alleged policeman; second, he must have known that the League was not a policeman at all but, generally speaking, the expression of whatever policies could be agreed on by Britain and France (just as for most practical purposes today the United Nations is the expression of whatever policies can be agreed upon between the United States and a sizeable segment of Afro-Asia).

  The League could perhaps have been, and the United Nations is, a useful mechanism of international adaptation, but to regard either of them as an impartial executive “policeman” carrying out the will of the international community as a whole is to take the wish for the reality. (The New Statesman sought to do this after the war when it took up the so-called Baruch plan for preserving the American monopoly over atomic weapons under the cover of an international organization in whose main organs the influence of the United States would have been securely predominant.) Unconditional pacifism had passed; unconditional euphoria was more tenacious.

  On the Spanish War, the New Statesman had a clearer line than it did o
n anything else in these crucial years, perhaps partly because the anti-Catholic element in British nonconformity outweighed the tendency to pacifism. But even here, at its hardest, the hard policy is not very formidable. “In the long run,” writes Mr. Hyams, “New Statesman writers were forced to see that the whole policy of non-intervention had become a plain fraud and to attack it as such.” Why run so long? And why have to be forced in order to see? The “toughest” episode of this period was the refusal to print Orwell’s articles describing what he had seen in Spain: “Kingsley Martin did not disbelieve what Orwell had written, but he decided against publishing it.” Superficially, his reasons for doing so—“damaging the cause”—seemed like those usually attributed to the Jesuits, whom he disliked. In reality, however, I believe that the refusal may well have been motivated not by counter-Jesuitry, but by a temperamental unwillingness to see unpleasant facts.

  Then came Munich, the issue on which the New Statesman took a resolute and uncompromising stand, in retrospect. Mr. Hyams’s account of the paper’s role in the Czechoslovakian crisis should be read in full, but the quotations at the head of this article plot the leading points on the graph: the idea of Britain’s dropping all European commitments and accepting German continental hegemony, the acceptance of the need to revise Czechoslovakia’s frontiers, the assertion that Czechoslovakia cannot be helped in any way, the optimistic assumption about what Britain and France will nonetheless do, and finally the thunder of moral indignation when Britain does avoid commitments, the frontier is revised, nothing does save Czechoslovakia, and the British and French governments do what, on the basis of their previous record, they were most likely to do.

  Mr. Hyams shows this record side by side with Critic’s London Diary for the same period, in which Mr. Kingsley Martin

  talks intimately, an anxious friend, to readers with whom he shares his perplexity and who cannot fail to see that he is in the same state of mind as themselves, that he no longer has any certainties left. It is journalism at its most honest and its most moving.

  Moving certainly, and even a part of the memorable literature of the time. But one may well ask: “Moving what, where?”

  It is understandable enough that Mr. Hyams, in describing the New Statesman’s dilemma—which was also the dilemma of not a few others—in the autumn of 1938, should tend to forget about the famous “hard” policy which we were promised from “the middle of the decade.” The New Statesman was obviously by no means alone in going through its agonizing reappraisals at the time, and hard policies, like others, are open to be reconsidered. What is a little surprising in the light of the New Statesman’s own record is Mr. Hyams’s definition of what the New Statesman’s hard policy, as distinct from the policies of the other papers, actually meant:

  It is my belief that the almost startling success of the New Statesman, from the thirties onward, can only be explained by reference to the fact that its Editor, having thought instead of felt, took a clear decision, as I shall show, between two opposing principles, and out of that decision gave his paper a “hard” policy. The rest of the Press, as far as I know without exception, simply went on behaving like its own readers, went on waffling, went on advocating mutually incompatible policies, or else advocating the basest solution to every political problem.

  With the honourable and important exception of the bit about “the basest solution” every word of this description applies, on Mr. Hyams’s own showing, to the New Statesman and Nation over the period in question.

  On concluding his description of the evolution of the New Statesman’s attitude to Czechoslovakian frontier revision and allied matters, he makes the following comment:

  However, as soon as the Chamberlain-Daladier capitulation to Hitler, entailing a brutal sell-out of the Czechs, was an accomplished fact, the New Statesman supported the National Council for Labour in its declaration that this deal was a “shameful betrayal” and rounded on Chamberlain for doing what did, indeed, run counter to the policy the paper had been advocating for years, yet what it might seem to have justified by its single lapse into pessimism, into a devastating honesty.

  If I understand this oddly constructed sentence—and I am not sure that I do—Mr. Hyams is here treating what he regards as an encounter with honesty—of the devastating sort as is so often unfortunately the case with honesty—as a “lapse.” We must also note that, on Mr. Hyams’s own showing, it is not a question of a single lapse into “pessimism.” Of the quotations I have collected, three point to what the New Statesman later called a “sell-out,” although, of course, a “brutal” sell-out was at no time envisaged.

  In fact there is a fairly close parallel between the attitude of the New Statesman on Munich and the attitude of the Eisenhower/Dulles government to the Hungarian crisis, eighteen years later. Both, on their declared principles, were committed to a stand. Both, for a variety of quite sound and creditable reasons, feared the risk which such a stand entailed. Both, while the issue of possible involvement remained undecided, took a cautious position. On Czechoslovakia, the New Statesman wrote what we have seen; on Hungary, as long as Mr. Nagy’s government remained in power in Budapest, Mr. Dulles’s officials in the corridors of the United Nations used all their great influence against any possible effort to help him. Once the Germans had been given the Sudetenland, once the Russians had occupied Budapest, the New Statesman and the State Department waxed, in their respective situations, morally indignant.

  The point is not that the New Statesman was “soft on communism” as its usual critics allege; the point was that with a sort of instinctive cosiness it usually preferred settling down among the hopeful illusions of its readers—including you and me—to losing popularity and “influence” by rasping those illusions. “It was better,” says Mr. Hyams, “to eschew judgements so sharp and clear that they would bounce off wooden heads, to be less uncompromisingly scientific and more rhetorically woolly.” The paper did not—it does not—care for the commercial rewards of circulation; it did care for popularity and, above all, for “influence”—too often influence in the Lafayettian sense of leading the people where they thought they were going—reflecting, as Mr. Hyams says, their “preoccupations.” This, surely, is the real treason of the clerks: that leaders of opinion, instead of showing to the very best of their ability and knowledge how things actually are, should, in the interests of something or other which usually looks pretty shabby in retrospect, present them with a version which is thought to be better for them or more suited to their limited capacity of understanding, their “wooden heads.” Plato’s Noble Lie is really just another lie, the nobility being in the vocabulary of the liar.

  To many, perhaps to most, readers much of this may appear unfair; and indeed, though true, it would be unfair if left without qualification. There was, and is, much more to the New Statesman than a line of editorial policy; and more to editorial policy than the single theme I have discussed. There is a consistently high standard of writing in every department; there has been, ever since Mr. Kingsley Martin became editor, a firm and decent attitude on racial and colonial questions; there was, in Critic’s page, perhaps the most successful, and certainly the most urbane, feat of personality-projection in the history of journalism; the book reviews carry weight even with those who dislike all the rest of the paper; finally, even those who dislike the paper’s editorial policies like reading it because of its good humour, its good manners and its intelligence (even when, as often, deluded, it is deluded in an intelligent way). It has earned the right, in its fifty years of vigorous life, to be regarded as a great paper—I, perhaps, have earned the right by what I have also said above, to call it so to its face. And it was Mr. Kingsley Martin—inconsistencies, illusions and all—who made the New Statesman a great paper.

  Why concentrate, then, in the bulk of the article, on a few errors of judgment in editorial policy? Because the paper claims to lead, and to have led, opinion, and because, above all, it is only too apt to claim—and Mr. Hyam
s has claimed for it—that in this period, when all other leaders of opinion were giving false leads, it alone maintained a sound, bold and consistent policy. This claim is untrue, although of course the New Statesman has a better record than, say, The Times. Mr. Freeman, like the editors of most other successful papers, could cover the walls of his editorial room with extracts from old issues which involve illusions and inconsistencies. It might be a good idea if he did. The notion that the New Statesman played Cassandra in the thirties ought to be firmly discarded; it was no more than chorus in the tragedy. One would have to imagine, though, a cheerful chorus, in good health and spirits, and generally sanguine about the outcome: “The King must persist in his investigation. The clerical interests, headed by the sinister and shortsighted Archbishop Tiresias, must be obliged to divulge the information they are improperly holding back. There is every reason for confidence that by holding firmly to his present course—despite the inevitable prophets of doom—Oedipus will stabilize the situation and ensure a peaceful and productive future for his family and for Thebes.”

  * Edward Hyams, The New Statesman: The History of the First Fifty Years; New Statesmanship, chosen by Edward Hyams.

  III

  FRANCE

  MICHELET TODAY

  Aspects of The French Revolution

  Luckily, time is marching on. We are a little less stupid. Messianism, the mania of incarnations so carefully inculcated by Christian education, is passing away. We are beginning to understand the advice which Anacharsis Clootz, about to die, gave us: France, cure yourself of individuals.

  These words, dated November 1869, are the conclusion of Michelet’s introduction to the fifth volume of his History of the French Revolution. He was speaking of Robespierre, with Napoleon III in mind, and as far as Napoleon III was concerned he was a shrewd enough tipster. In the wider sense in which he wrote, his words reach us, ninety years later, with an effect of more than Sophoclean irony. This Tiresias, prophesying the downfall of the King, cannot know how his words sound to us. From the vantage point which the passage of time—invoked by him—has conferred on us, his prophetic rage resembles the rage of the Greek king against the reluctant witnesses. For by the standard which he himself invokes, that of temporal progress, it must now seem to us that Napoleon III was right. The advice of Anacharsis Clootz has once again been enthusiastically rejected. The present regime does not repudiate its obvious likeness to the Second Empire. An official exhibition, “Napoleon III and the Imperial Family,” held this summer in the Invalides shows every phase in the life of Napoleon III except the final one—no Ems telegram, no Franco-Prussian war, no Sedan. Officially the Débâcle did not take place; certain visitors to the exhibition probably came to the conclusion that Napoleon III is still reigning, and in a way they are right. As for Robespierre, that “Hymn to the Supreme Being” which symbolized his brief Revolutionary monarchy was restored this year to a place of honour in the Fourteenth of July celebrations in Paris. If Michelet was as wrong about eternity as he was about time, he must be suffering intensely.