Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Over the mirrors meant

  To glass the opulent

  The sea worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

  Sir Maurice’s comment on this needs to be quoted in full:

  The contrast is between the proud hopes of those who built the great ship or travelled in it and the cold lifelessness of its present state. He uses his Latin words “salamandrine” and “opulent” to stress the first side of the contrast. Each has a touch of irony. The engines which seemed to flourish like salamanders in the flame are quenched for ever; the mirrors on which the sea-worm now crawls were meant for people whom wealth seemed to protect from any stroke of doom. Against these words of pride, turned with irony to express the huge degree of the catastrophe, Hardy sets his humble words like “thrid,” and “slimed,” of which the first conveys the inhuman, relentless movement of the water, and the second the absolute difference of the Titanic’s present inmates from those for whom it was built.

  This is interesting and impressive; to an audience—it was part of a Byron lecture delivered at Nottingham University—it would be very impressive indeed. But the reader, who can reconsider the lines themselves, will soon have less faith in the commentary. The contrast in Hardy is surely neither so clear-cut nor of quite the same kind as Sir Maurice Bowra suggests. The Latin words are not really symmetrically disposed: “indifferent” applied to the sea-worm is quite as Latin as “opulent” applied to the voyagers, to take only one of several instances. “Rhythmic tidal lyres” are very far from being “humble words” and very far also from suggesting the “cold lifelessness” which Sir Maurice identifies with the present state of the ship; neither the tide nor the sea-worm is lifeless, and the point is surely that their life is “indifferent”—the keyword—to human life, not that there is, or could be, such a thing as an “absolute difference” between the two sets of inmates. The commentary blurs also the curious use of “salamandrine,” applied not to the engines, as Sir Maurice implies, but to the fires themselves: a fact which leaves little room for the supposed irony about the quenched pride of fire-resistant engines. In short, the commentary subtly distorts Hardy’s meaning by simplifying his contrasts, both of language and of situation, and by coarsening his irony. This distortion is natural, and may even be necessary, in the lecture room, to convey something like the general sense of a poem, but a criticism which works in such a way can only be loose and approximate: “an approach to” Hardy and others rather than something that actually tries to arrive.

  Sir Maurice Bowra rightly reminds us that “there is room in the world for more than one kind of critic, and in general it seems foolish to lay down rigidly what a critic ought to be.” His own variety of “approach” criticism makes pleasant reading and has the very considerable merit of introducing us to writers of whom—lacking his formidable linguistic attainments—we should otherwise know nothing. He has the great gift of curiosity, and makes us share something of his pleasure in handling so exotic an object as the mediaeval Georgian epic, Shot’ha Rust’hveli’s The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin—even though, as he so truly says, “we cannot enjoy the many felicities of language which its admirers claim for it.” He is at his best, however, in discussing writers, like Hölderlin and like Rubén Darío, who belong to the literary traditions which we know but who are, because of language difficulties, less read than they deserve to be. He quotes freely and aptly and gives a translation; often what he quotes is something which, we know, will always remain in our mind even if we never read another line of the author concerned. Thus he tells us of Rubén Darío’s poem, “Los motivos del lobo,” the story of the wolf of Gubbio, who was converted by the example and preaching of Saint Francis but relapsed after a spell of convent life and, when appealed to by the Saint, made his devastating criticism of humanity:

  Hermanos a hermanos hacían la guerra,

  perdían los débiles, ganaban los malos,

  hembra y macho eran como perro y perra,

  y un buen día todos me dieron de palos.

  (Brothers made war on brothers,

  the weak lost, the wicked gained,

  woman and man were like bitch and dog,

  and one fine day they all took sticks to me.)

  And the wolf takes leave of the Saint with his own version of “So get you gone, von Hügel, though with blessings on your head”:

  Déjame en el monte, déjame en el risco,

  Déjame existir en mi libertad,

  vete a tu convento, hermano Francisco,

  sigue tu camino y tu santidad.

  (Leave me on the mountain, leave me on the cliff,

  leave me to live in my liberty,

  go to your convent, brother Francis,

  follow your way and your sanctity.)

  The essays on Pushkin and on Lermontov and that on Dante and Arnaut Daniel—the last the most closely reasoned in the book—are rich in both quotations and information; indeed, curious facts come second only to quotations among the attractions of Inspiration and Poetry. One feels a wiser and a better man for knowing that Walter Pater was not invited to the unveiling of the Shelley Memorial at Oxford because “he was not thought quite respectable.”

  The book takes its title from its opening essay, but it is also suggested that the essays collectively form some sort of enquiry into the working of poetic inspiration. “Sir Maurice Bowra starts,” say his publishers, “with a chapter on inspiration and its ways of working in poetical creation. He then looks at some of the problems which this raises, and examines them in individual cases, which vary from [Horace to Rust’hveli] and includes [sic] matters so different as [Dante and Daniel, Gil Vicente and Samson Agonistes].” That this claim to a unity of conception is quite misleading (as well as unnecessary) immediately appears from Sir Maurice Bowra’s own preface, in which he states that the various essays “have indeed been composed for different purposes, often for special occasions, and they cover very various ground.” He hopes that the other pieces “are not too distantly related to the subject treated in the first chapter”; in fact, they are related by being (with one exception) about aspects of poetry. The problems of “inspiration” are hardly discussed except in the opening essay. This is not to be regretted, for Sir Maurice Bowra is not at his best among the foggy generalizations which accumulate round such a subject. “There is no doubt of the fact: what the poets have conceived through inspiration is also what we feel to be their most essential and most authentic poetry, and we are justified in calling it inspired.” And on the following page: “when we say that a poem is inspired, we mean that it has an unusual degree of power.” The problem is surely to find whether, in fact, the poems or the lines conceived by poets in the “rapturous moments” of “inspiration” are always, or even very often, those which the reader regards as possessing an unusual degree of power. Sir Maurice Bowra assumes that they are, but a critical examination of what evidence we have, from the letters and notebooks of poets, would be more interesting than mere assumptions—even the assumptions of a very learned man who loves poetry. Perhaps he has the noble fault of loving poetry too much; he is certainly very credulous where the assertions of poets are concerned. He tells us, for example, that, for Horace, “poetical inspiration is an occasion for Dionysiac joy,” and that Horace takes us “into the secrets of his poetic being” in his lines about the Bacchic frenzy:

  Euhoe, recenti mens trepidat metu

  plenoque Bacchi pectore turbidum

  laetatur; Euhoe, parce Liber,

  parce gravi metuende thyrso.

  of which he quotes Sir Edward Marsh’s translation:

  Still reels my mind with joy and holy fear,

  Still throbs my heart with presence of the God;

  I faint, I tremble—mighty Liber, hear!

  Spare me the terrors of thy rod.

  With all the great respect which is due to Sir Maurice Bowra in such a matter, it is also possible to feel that Horace was simply putting on some highly traditional airs and that these
frigid vers calculés are evidence against the very assertion which they make. But Horace is artistically infallible in the eyes of this admirer: “His words, chosen with unfailing care and insight, are always fresh and alluring, and the result never looks laborious.”

  The criticism which results from “the maximum response which maximum attention can give”—Mr. R. P. Blackmur’s well-known words—is often a pretty grim thing. Critics who remind us that the reading of poetry is a civilized pleasure—and not just a gruelling spell of service in the ambiguity-squad—are rare enough today. So are critics who write plainly and modestly and keep their tempers. On these grounds we have reason to be grateful to Sir Maurice Bowra, and to hope for more of his far-flung essays. The “relaxed” school of criticism has its limitations, as the “tense” school has its excesses; in either school we are apt to wish for the methods of the other. Yet the best members of both schools have something in common: the combination of curiosity and taste which finds for us things we should not have found by ourselves.

  VI

  THE COLD WAR

  CRITIC INTO PROPHET

  From 1946 to 1955 Edmund Wilson did not file any income-tax returns. 1946 was the year in which “for the first time in my life … I was making what was for me a considerable amount of money.” He does not tell us how much, although he does tell us that his top earnings up to then had been $7,500, and also that by the time he was married again—still in 1946, month unstated—his financial situation was “no better than it had been in 1936”; he does not tell us what it was in 1936, but he does tell us that in 1935 he had a tax-free Guggenheim Fellowship of $2,000 “which the Foundation generously supplemented when, just as I was leaving Russia, I came down with scarlatina and had to be quarantined.” In 1947–51 his income “averaged $2,000 a year” and for some reason this led him to think that “before filing for the years since 1945, it would be better to wait until I was making more money.” This happened in 1955—what his income was between 1951 and 1955 he does not tell us—and he then went to a lawyer who gave him good advice: “he thought the best thing I could do was to become a citizen of some other country.” Mr. Wilson did not then take this advice, and became heavily involved with the tax authorities who, after various exhausting interviews, settled for “$25,000 plus a collateral agreement for four years”: the collateral agreement meant that his future literary work is mortgaged ahead for over $30,000.

  Like many another distressed taxpayer, Mr. Wilson has been led by his unpleasant experience to take a closer look at what the state is doing with his money, and to be displeased with what he finds. A man wishing to borrow money from Julius Caesar explained the appalling chaos of his financial position. Caesar replied: “What you need, my friend, is not a loan but a civil war.” Mr. Wilson, in a like financial position, can look forward to no such panacea: he actually has to pay “Caesar” for, among other things, keeping a civil war going in Vietnam, at a cost of a million dollars a day. Nuclear weapons, chemical and bacteriological warfare, napalm, detention camps and the protraction of civil war have two things in common: they are horrible, and they cost money. The fact that they cost money—Mr. Wilson’s money—has caused him to see and to protest against their horror. And the fact that the protest begins with the money, instead of with the horror, may make it more effective than any display of altruism would be. This pamphlet—as Mr. Wilson rightly describes it—can hardly fail to have a considerable impact inside and outside America.* Mr. Wilson is not only one of the most distinguished of living American writers, he is also one of the most American, with even a touch of old-fashioned Anglophobia. That such a writer, nearing seventy, should come to reject his country is certainly a personal tragedy for him; it also has some disturbing implications about what is happening in, and to, his country. It is not merely that he speaks of the present image of the United States as being “self-intoxicated, homicidal and menacing.” He goes further and formally rejects his country in these words:

  I have always thought myself patriotic and have been in the habit in the past of favorably contrasting the United States with Europe and the Soviet Union; but our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I can accept neither this power unit’s alms nor the methods it employs to finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.

  Pasternak never went quite so far as that.

  Would the tax imbroglio, in itself, account for so profound an alienation? As far as one can make out from Mr. Wilson’s confused account of his tax situation, he does not seem to have been treated unjustly, and his own suggestion that he may have been in some way penalized for having had four wives, or having been a leftist in the distant past, seems to lack foundation. His tax offence is quite adequate, by itself, to explain what happened to him. Could his resentment at this—real, natural and excessive as it is—be enough to drive him to this strange declaration, resembling a mediaeval “defiance,” whereby he severs the bond between himself and his sovereign state? If we assume that it is enough—as some will do—then we have to regard what he has to say about the arms race and related matters as no more than rationalization of his resentment at a penalty imposed on him personally. I don’t think that a reader of The Cold War and the Income Tax is likely in good faith to reach quite that conclusion. Rather, he is likely to feel that although it was the income tax which caused Mr. Wilson to look at the cold war, the horror he experienced when he did look at it was genuine, and carried him to his act of “defiance.” The horror comes not so much from the means of mass destruction themselves as from the minds concerned with the means. Not just the military minds, and not perhaps even mainly the military minds, but also minds of politicians and of scientists and other intellectuals. James B. Conant was regarded by many as the epitome of the liberal, humanist intellectual. And up to a point, the late James B. Conant lived up to this reputation when he had to advise on the use of the first atom bombs:

  James B. Conant foresaw “super-super bombs” delivered by guided missiles and urged Secretary of War Stimson to first demonstrate “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” as the bombs were affectionately known, before unloading them on the Japanese.

  Conant’s advice on this point was not, however, taken and he then determined—it would appear—to demonstrate that there was nothing “soft” about him. Subsequently we find an extract from the minutes of the Interim Committee which met in the Pentagon on 31, May 1945 and took the critical decisions:

  After much discussion concerning various types of targets and the effects to be produced, the Secretary [Stimson] expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we could make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant, the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.

  When contemplating the cold war, especially in its present phase of perhaps deceptive mildness, we are apt to comfort ourselves with the thought of a “balance of terror” by which the vast arsenals on both sides somehow harmlessly cancel each other out. The service rendered by a book like Mr. Wilson’s—as by a film like Dr. Strangelove—is to remind us that no balance is automatic, since all depends on decisions made by people, of whom all are fallible, some are liable to panic, some are bloody-minded, and some are afraid of not seeming bloody-minded enough. The strategists tell us that situations can “escalate” from one level of retaliation to another, but what really escalate of course are human minds, as Conant’s escalated from unsuccessfully urging an initial harmless demonstration of the bomb to successfully recommending an initial use against a war plant “closely surrounded by
workers’ houses.” It is uncomfortable to feel that minds more or less like Conant’s are now ticking away in all the crucial capitals. We know that there are those in Washington who are now arguing for an extension of the war in Vietnam, and who maintain that military advantage should be taken of China’s perhaps temporary estrangement from the Soviet Union. What plans for making “a profound psychological impression” are being made for the event of the predictable “deterioration” of the situation in South Vietnam, and for further, also predictable, deteriorations in Latin America?

  Mr. Wilson’s cry of indignation and warning is warranted and may be salutary. Its passion may be more telling than much cool analysis, and its defects, like those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, may prove irrelevant to its historical significance. Logical defects abound; the critic in Mr. Wilson has been struck dumb and blind by the prophet. The confusion which marks the opening pages on personal finance and taxation lifts somewhat, but never altogether clears, in the rest of the book. A chapter is devoted to Major Claude Eatherly, the Hiroshima pilot, said to have become “unhinged by guilt.” It is Mr. Wilson’s bad luck that he has here swallowed, whole, claims that—it now seems—were largely false.

  Mr. Wilson could not have known this, for the evidence has only very recently been published, but were he not carried away by passion, he would surely not have accepted Eatherly’s claims unreservedly. For one thing Eatherly’s account of the Hiroshima decision conflicts with the minute of the decisive Pentagon committee meeting which Mr. Wilson cites in a footnote on the same page and which has obviously far higher evidential value than any “reminiscence”; for another, Eatherly’s claim, after his petty crimes had been detected, that he committed them, in effect, “to try to discredit the popular myth of the war hero” (Mr. Wilson’s words) would hardly be accepted at face value by anyone retaining a normal degree of scepticism about human motivation. Having considered this chapter, one is disposed to suspend judgment about Mr. Wilson’s other heroes, such as Dr. A. J. Muste and the Reverend Maurice F. McCrackin, two advocates and practitioners of tax refusal.