Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Mr. Steiner’s reasoning on this matter is not quite as crude as I have had to make it in summary, but I do not think I have distorted his argument significantly. It is because he is a good critic and because his book is important that it seems necessary to challenge him here, on this border of literature and politics, where his argument is weakest and likely to be most influential. For one actual reader, who has considered Mr. Steiner’s admirable detailed criticisms of passages in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, there are likely to be several bystanders who receive indirectly the impression that Dostoevsky was a good man but Tolstoy was a Red. Indeed Mr. Steiner himself very nearly says as much, in a dangerously quotable passage on his last page: “Dostoevsky, preeminently the man of God; Tolstoy one of His secret challengers.” It is hard to see how this judgment could be sustained by anyone except a committed Dostoevskian: one, that is, who not merely admires Dostoevsky’s genius, but also completely and uncritically accepts Dostoevsky’s teachings. For Dostoevsky, as Mr. Steiner shows, had his own very peculiar religious notions, hardly more orthodox than Tolstoy’s. He, no less than Tolstoy, was co-bear in the divine den. If Tolstoy could be accused of atheism, Dostoevsky could be accused of diabolism. Mr. Steiner, without coming to any conclusion, presents the grounds on which such a charge could be made. Both writers were, in fact, heretics. If the Russian Orthodox Church put up with Dostoevsky and not with Tolstoy, that was not for any abstruse doctrinal reasons but simply because Dostoevsky became a conservative and Tolstoy became a rebel. And that also, I suspect, is what Mr. Steiner means when he says that Dostoevsky was pre-eminently the man of God and Tolstoy one of His secret challengers. To reverse Péguy, Tout commence en politique et finit en mystique.

  As regards the relation between the two great Russian writers and the politics of our own time, Mr. Steiner does much less than justice to Tolstoy. Tolstoy was no stranger to the univers concentrationnaire. How could any Russian be, then or now? The prisons, the law courts and the exile trains of Resurrection form a clear testimony against oppression—all the clearer for being matter-of-fact in tone, detailed and measured. The character of Novodyorov in the same novel proves that Tolstoy was not under the illusion that revolution would automatically bring oppression to an end. Tolstoy is uncompromising not only in Resurrection but in all his work about power, about pretence, about cruelty. No tyrant could ever really “make him do.” It is useless for any official critic to expound him as criticizing only the cruelty of “the people who were.” He makes his meaning too plain, and no power can prevent people from trying that meaning against the life around them. Instead then of exclaiming “C’est la faute à Tolstoi!” when we hear that his books are issued in enormous editions in the Soviet Union, we ought surely to be glad and thankful. If Russian history has tended to inculcate callousness and prostration before power, it is surely well that great classics of Russian literature, central texts of the Russian language, work to correct the pressures of history. Since no people is so close to the great age of its literature as are the Russians, and no people reads its own classics so much (they have no thrillers and no telephone directories), it is probable that no other great writer is such a living force in the world now as is Tolstoy. It is hard to see how anyone who—like Mr. Steiner—believes in the moral force of great literature can be indifferent to this.

  Lenin, of course—and this is what Mr. Steiner finds it hard to forgive—saw in Tolstoy’s works “the mirror of the Russian revolution.” Although the responsibility of a “mirror” may be questioned, we may agree to take this as implying that Tolstoy’s works, his critique of the Orthodox Church and of aristocratic life, did help to prepare the way to revolution. But in reality the forces of which Dostoevsky made himself the spokesman had a much greater share in preparing the ruin of the old Russia. Levin’s sullen disapproval of the volunteers for the Balkan War was wiser—from a strictly conservative point of view—than the mystical chauvinism of Dostoevsky, with its nonsense about territorial expansion, as part of “the Christ-bearing mission of the Russian people.” Mystical chauvinism—extreme nationalism, combined with the inefficiency that flows from a superstitious contempt for reason—led logically to war, defeat in war, and the consequences of defeat: the Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905, the World War and the Revolution of 1917. And the other disasters of our time, even outside Russia, can more naturally be traced to something like the Dostoevskian chauvinism than to Tolstoy’s belief in the possibility of moral progress.

  If the rather boring proceedings in the Moscow Sports Palace can fairly be traced back to Tolstoy’s belief in progress, the quite different goings-on at the Nuremberg rallies can, not less fairly, be traced back to the chauvinism and irrationalism of Dostoevsky, an author in whom Dr. Goebbels showed some interest. In both cases it is well to recollect, more steadily than perhaps Mr. Steiner does, the very limited influence which even the greatest writers have on the course of historical events.

  It is true that Dostoevsky’s dramatic genius revealed gulfs in the human mind which the twentieth century has further explored, both in practice and in theory. We are apt, therefore, today to think him closer to us, and “more nearly right,” than the rational Tolstoy. Mr. Steiner encourages this tendency too much. Auschwitz and Dachau are not the ultimate criteria of reality, and Dostoevsky is not necessarily a wiser guide and teacher because he understood better than Tolstoy the extremes of horror which man can reach. There is a kind of understanding which is a complicity, and Dostoevsky’s very deep intuitive understanding of cruelty took the form, in politics, of chauvinism. He was a prophet of disaster who helped his own prophecies towards fulfilment. Dostoevsky’s insights have given, we may hope, their full measure; it may be time to give more of our attention to Tolstoy.

  * Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

  RE-ENTER THE HERO

  Mr. Colin Wilson, in his new book,* is concerned with Man and Society. He is troubled by the apparent insignificance of the individual and the oppressive power of organized people. He illustrates these themes by examples from a few contemporary American sociologists—principally Riesman and Whyte—and many modern writers, including Herman Wouk, James Jones, Tennessee Williams, Sartre, Camus, Zola, Joyce, Shaw, Yeats and others too numerous to be mentioned (in a book 157 pages long) by anyone other than Mr. Wilson. He makes an attempt to introduce “the sociological evidence” into the consideration of contemporary literature, but in practice this turns out to be little more than a pinning of Riesman’s labels “inner-directed” (good) and “other-directed” (bad) on to various writers. The book concludes with a plea for reviving the “inner-directed” Hero, by means of a new existentialism “based upon recognition of the irrational urge that underlies man’s conscious reason.”

  Many middle-aged readers, and no doubt some younger ones, will find The Age of Defeat scarcely less irritating than Mr. Wilson’s earlier books are said by most of their more intelligent readers to have been. They will resent—as I do—his “classics-in-pictures” summaries of so many books and the disc-jockey commentary: “It was startling that a book of such extraordinary merit [Room at the Top] should have been written, not by a widely travelled journalist, but by a Yorkshire librarian.” Most of all they will resent his careless pontification (“Marxian materialism and Freudian psychology are excuses for laziness”) and—as a last straw—his citation of solemn inanities from like-minded or otherwise dubious sages: “Stuart Holroyd has written: ‘in our time, the writer who does not dare to be great cannot hope to be anything.’ This penetrates to the heart of the problem.” “The writer should not underestimate his possible influence. Alexander Werth states that the attitude of Les Temps modernes helped to discourage the Americans from launching an anti-Soviet crusade at the time of the witch-hunts.”

  Yet, trying as he can be, Mr. Wilson is not without importance. He has a real curiosity about life and about books and he can apparently communicate his interest to others. This makes him a medium of communication, a line of approach to
various fields of thought for people to whom these fields might otherwise remain closed. His usefulness here is not diminished by his endurance of platitudes. Undue sensitivity to platitude is, after all, the form of arrogance which most effectively blocks communication between intellectuals and others, and it is often unwarrantably assumed. (As a boy I used to cherish an excessive contempt for the philosopher Plato, in the belief that the word platitude was derived from his name.) Nor does Mr. Wilson’s prophetic posture lessen his value as a teacher. The successful teacher has to be something of a charlatan and Mr. Wilson possesses this qualification in good measure. It is more fun to read something called The Age of Defeat, and feel in the movement, than to read something called, say, Introductory Notes on Some Modern Writers, and feel a neophyte.

  There is a sense, then, in which Mr. Colin Wilson is a more relevant critic than Mr. William Empson: more relevant because more readable, and more read—although Mr. Empson is so much more perceptive than Mr. Wilson that the word “critic” to cover the two becomes almost empty of meaning. The point is, though, that Mr. Wilson, writing brightly and urgently about valuable ideas, is a great deal better than nothing; and nothing, if we are to believe Mr. Koestler and others, is what large numbers of educated young people now are most inclined to read. If Mr. Wilson can catch their attention, so much the better. It is not exactly a question of “the dark places where his apostolate lies”—to adopt a memorable phrase once used in The Tablet by Mr. Waugh about Mr. Greene. What seems to have happened, rather, is that more gifted “apostles” have been too busy discussing abstruse points in undertones for any clear message from them to reach a new generation; and the most lively transmitter of literary culture today therefore is apt to be someone like Mr. Colin Wilson. Those of us who are middle-aged may reflect that our Wilson was Edmund—a teacher-critic, too, but with higher standards and lower pretensions than are now fashionable in that field.

  Through Colin Wilson a certain romantic dissatisfaction with the quality of modern life and literature makes itself heard. That this is in some degree healthy no one who has read The Organization Man or The Captive Mind is likely to doubt. That the protest can be much more deeply felt, and of much higher quality, anyone who reads the work of young Polish writers in the collection The Broken Mirror (edited by Lionel Trilling) will easily agree. But Mr. Wilson’s protest, too, is real and in its own way moving. His breathless, jerky accounts of so many books are the notes of a man who is looking for something and not finding it. He is genuinely oppressed by the discovery that the sense of the individual’s insignificance which pervades modern urban life informs also the literature of that life. The Age of Defeat often suggests the state of feeling of the young Chesterton:

  A cloud was on the minds of man and

  wailing went the weather

  Yea, a great cloud upon the mind, when

  we were boys together.

  Unlike Chesterton, Mr. Wilson hopes the cloud may be dispelled by autonomous human exertion. A criticism renewed by sociology—he seems to imply—can help to renew literature by restoring “the hero,” and “the hero” will re-accredit in real life the image of the “inner-directed” man. This theory raises, but does not answer, a number of more or less interesting questions. What can sociology in fact contribute to literary criticism? Can literary criticism have a fundamental effect on literary practice? Is the restoration of “the hero” in literature desirable? If it occurred would it make the “inner-directed” man more acceptable in real life? And to what extent is it desirable to rehabilitate the inner-directed man?

  Of these questions, the two most worth discussing are probably the first and last. Sociology, like historiography and other “human” studies, is obviously related both to literature itself and, as a method of investigation, to literary criticism. Literary criticism has long been very conscious of historical and social factors and ought to be able to use the insights and discoveries of recent sociologists. In a serious sense literary critics have surely much to learn from the best examples of sociological method. The appendix “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” in Professor Wright Mills’s new book The Sociological Imagination is a model for critics as for other workers in the science/art borderland. And certain pairs of sociological concepts, like Mr. David Riesman’s “other-directed” and “inner-directed,” can stimulate and (within limits) help the literary critic as well as, say, the politician. Yet literary criticism remains a highly specific form, dealing with so complex, filtered and unusual a human activity that it has little enough in common with other social sciences. Ideally, the literary critic should know a great deal about the social sciences and then leave them to one side, forgetting above all their jargon, when he does his proper work. Unfortunately, and naturally, current practice is often very different. “I know the end of the story,” said the society lady, interrupting Léon Bloy’s account of the Prodigal Son, “the son left the swine and came to his father.” “No, madame,” said Bloy, “it was the swine who came.”

  Similar considerations apply to the idea of rehabilitating the inner-directed man. Which inner-directed man? Hitler or Gandhi? The terms “inner-directed” and “other-directed” had useful meaning in Mr. Riesman’s critique of American society; they are probably less useful as general categories. There is much, naturally, in Mr. Riesman’s analysis that is specifically American: other-directedness, in its malignant form, is the disease of a society which has had to be a melting-pot, a society also with a short history of spectacularly quick development. This is a society in which the opinions of elders—who are both “out-of-date” and often less “American”—are necessarily at a discount. It is in this way that, for lack of anything else, the opinion of contemporaries tends to become the super-ego. To generalize from the American case is difficult and rather dangerous, particularly when the generalization is intended, as in The Age of Defeat, to prop up a cult of the hero, as against a supposedly prevailing “cult of the ordinary chap.”

  Mr. Wilson occasionally shows a rather uneasy awareness that parts of his program—cult of the hero, emphasis on will, recognition of the irrational—were associated with an earlier twentieth-century myth. But what he completely ignores is that his program is being put into practice before his eyes, in one of the three countries he is writing about. Modern French literature is not, as he suggests, exclusively dominated by a “cult of insignificance,” inculcated by Sartre and Camus. It has long had a very influential “cult of the hero” school, in which the leading writer was M. André Malraux who now, as Minister for Culture, is giving the watchwords of heroism—audace, énergie, grandeur—to the dynamic French youth of today. The Algerian War, as has been rightly said, is a school for heroism. And the cult of the hero is a school for the Algerian War. Some French people seem to feel that “the cult of the ordinary chap” may not, after all, have been entirely a bad thing.

  * The Age of Defeat.

  POETRY, INSPIRATION AND CRITICISM

  He was not an omnivorous devourer of sensations; he did not scour the world for them or pick tit-bits from many times and places. When something caught him, he was its devoted and responsive victim, who sought to extract all that he possibly could from it and was by his very devotion hampered from looking at anything else.

  This, on Walter Pater as a critic, is typical of Sir Maurice Bowra’s sober and clear appraisals. It is also, I think, a self-criticism, for Sir Maurice is the kind of critic that Pater was not. Omnivorous, in his new book of essays, Inspiration and Poetry, he scours the world from Dorset to the Caucasus and from Moscow to Nicaragua; “devours sensations” as different from each other as a mediaeval Georgian epic can be from the hymns of Hölderlin; ranges in time for his tit-bits from Augustan Rome to the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike Pater, again, he does not seek to extract everything possible from a chosen subject; perhaps he is too sane for that; “sanity” is a favourite word of his. He writes like one who feels that in criticism also there is a margin beyond which it is unprofit
able to cultivate, a point at which it is better to push on and work the surface of new territory, leaving the Paters to scratch in the dust-bowl of unanswerable questions. Not, of course, that he is impatient or American in the vulgar sense; few critics have so even a temper, such catholic sympathies, a mind so open or so quick to fill. Simply, with a restraint which is perhaps classical, he is content to act as the introducer of the poets, the sensible and travelled man who knows the city; an unusually alert chorus, enormously well-read and learned in many languages. This kind of critic is much more obviously useful than the “devoted and responsive victim” of the Pater stamp; but he is a teacher. The devoted and responsive is interested primarily in his own relation to the work; he may be confused, obscure, boring, tortuous, but he is sincere in the sense that he is not interested in deceiving anyone, except perhaps himself. The teacher has already settled accounts with the work; he is interested in the relation between himself and his class, in the act of teaching. If he is to hold the interest of his class he must skim and simplify, therefore to some extent betray. A good example, in the present volume, is Sir Maurice Bowra’s analysis of an effect of Thomas Hardy’s. He makes the sound point that Hardy “supplements a body of simple spoken English with resonant and unusual words of Latin origin and with Anglo-Saxon words which have passed out of currency and have an archaic air.” To illustrate this Sir Maurice quotes the lines from Hardy’s poem on the loss of the Titanic:

  Steel chambers, late the pyres

  Of her salamandrine fires,

  Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.