Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  The final chapter, “The Strategy of Tax Refusal,” is important because it contains the writer’s declaration of internal emigration, but it is, logically, a weak and inadequate conclusion. Mr. Wilson, having aroused us to the appalling dangers of our situation, tells us that he intends to “make as little money as possible … so keeping below taxable levels.” But it is as a writer, not as a taxable unit, that Mr. Wilson is important to us, and as a writer, Mr. Wilson here fails us by leaving out of consideration matters of enormous importance, directly relevant to his theme.

  It has been reckoned that the developed countries—that is, the white countries, plus Japan and minus Latin America—with less than one-third of the population of the world have about 80 per cent of the world’s income. This gap is widening, and against the voluntary aid given by the developed countries to the underdeveloped—considerably less than 0.5 per cent of the “developed” income—has to be set the “aid” involuntarily given—in the form of cheap labour and low fixed prices for raw materials—by the underdeveloped to the developed: a sum difficult to compute but certainly considerably more significant than the first, and better known, category of aid. The underdeveloped countries are not only the main theatre of the cold war: they are also the area in which cold war is most likely to pass into hot. This being so, it is strange that in such a book as this the question of more serious, and unrequited, aid to the underdeveloped—with the taxes and restrictions it would involve—is not even mentioned. It seems to be assumed that if military expenditure is cut, taxes will automatically fall, ending the “deprivation and coercion” of which Mr. Wilson and his fellow-citizens are at present, in his opinion, victims.

  The assumption about military expenditure and taxes may well be true. But it is not true, as Mr. Wilson seems to imagine, that if America reduces her military expenditure and tax levels, the cold war will be at an end. The real cold war—that between the underdeveloped and developed countries—has still a long course to run. Even to mitigate it and reduce its dangers would require the intelligent application of great efforts. Such efforts are not compatible with reducing taxation in order to raise American living standards higher still. That is why The Cold War and the Income Tax, helpful by its emotional shock-value, must be considered intellectually frivolous in its conclusions. A severe but just verdict on such reasoning was given, well before this book was written, by Professor J. K. Galbraith in his essay “The Strategy of Peaceful Competition”:

  Finally they will hope that the bill for doing what we must can somehow be avoided. Let there be no mistake. Most of the things we must do to reveal the quality of our society will cost money—public money. Willingness both to advocate and to pay is the test of whether a man is serious. If we haven’t yet learned to mistrust, indeed to ignore, the man who talks about high national purposes and then omits all mention of the price—or perhaps urges strict economy in public outlays as one of his higher purposes—our case could be pretty bad.

  * Edmund Wilson, The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest.

  JOURNAL DE COMBAT

  No one before 1914 or 1917 could possibly have foreseen a situation in which the basic and permanent preoccupation of an important review would be the designs of a great power on the tranquillity and free action of such nations, long immune from outside threats, as Britain and the United States … Encounter from its foundation has been a journal de combat. It has been the organ of protest against the trahison des clercs … the role of a journal like Encounter with its continual concern with reminding us of the realities behind the Iron Curtain is necessarily an ungrateful one … There are many people, some of them merely silly, some of them silly and dishonest and some of them dishonest but not silly, who resent, quite rightly, the obsession of Encounter with the promulgation of uncomfortable truths.

  We ought to be mildly grateful to Sir Denis Brogan, who makes these statements in his introduction to Encounters,* an anthology drawn from the journal’s first ten years, for telling us plainly, if a little testily, what Encounter is about: what its “basic and permanent preoccupation” is. The editors of Encounter have never, so far as I know, explicitly owned to such a preoccupation. In the editorial of the first number (October 1953) we were told that “Encounter seeks to promote no ‘line,’ though its editors have opinions they will not hesitate to express.” We were told also that the Congress of Cultural Freedom which sponsors Encounter was brought together by “two things: a love of liberty and a respect for that part of human endeavour that goes by the name of culture.” Mr. Melvin J. Lasky, co-editor, is even vaguer in his preface to the new anthology:

  a review is a way of looking at the world, a record of glimpses and perspectives, concerned with the colour of things, and not only with their meaning, with the visible surface of life as well as with its hidden patterns.

  He says not a word about any political intent or “basic preoccupation.” It is still part of Encounter’s line, as it was in the beginning, that it “seeks to promote no line.” It seeks rather to carry the impression that its anti-communist and pro-capitalist propaganda is not propaganda at all, but the spontaneous and almost uniform reaction of the culturally free, of truly civilized people. And it does this with much success; there is nothing “silly” about Encounter. It has been ably edited and never less than interesting; almost every issue contains some work of real merit, almost always non-political—and sometimes by people who are known to be opposed to Encounter’s putatively nonexistent “line.” Much of this writing is preserved, happily, in the new anthology. Together with this, almost every issue has contained some cleverly written material favourable to the United States and hostile to the Soviet Union.

  Is this bad? Is there not in fact much to be said in favour of the United States and against the Soviet Union? There is indeed; it is also a fact that communists have often in speech and writing shown contempt for truth and that it would be a case, as Sir Denis says, of trahison des clercs for an intellectual review to ignore or condone this. But clerks can betray in more than one way, and in our culture the communist way is neither the most tempting nor the most rewarding. A clerk who says, for example, that he “seeks to promote no line” and goes on over ten years to promote a most definite and consistent line, may not yet have “betrayed”—for it is possible to argue about definitions—but he would seem, to me at least, to be something of an intellectual security-risk. And the line itself—or “basic preoccupation” if you wish—is not reassuring. There is a significant contradiction in the case for Encounter presented by Sir Denis Brogan. Encounter cannot be both basically and permanently preoccupied with “the designs of a great power”—one great power—and also “the organ of protest against the trahison des clercs” This would make nonsense of Benda, for it would assert that all intellectual dishonesty is, and must permanently be, an import from the Soviet Union. Reading through the files of Encounter, I found little evidence of vigilance against non-Soviet intellectual dishonesty. I did find several examples, in Encounter’s own practice, of the intellectual vices against which Benda warned us.

  The new anthology—which naturally enough presents a more favourable picture than the files—contains one such example in Professor Leslie A. Fiedler’s “The Middle against Both Ends,” a defence of American “comic books.” This was written at a time when hostile criticism of these works of art and literature was considered to be causing some damage to America’s image in the world. Professor Fiedler’s thesis, argued as cleverly as possible in the unpropitious circumstances, was to the effect that anti-comicbook talk was petty-bourgeois and middlebrow; the ordinary man likes these books and real intellectuals, like Professor Fiedler, at least tolerate them. (This same Professor Fiedler shows himself, in a sense, more fastidious in other situations. In an article on the Rosenbergs, published in Encounter after their execution, he showed distress at “the pretentious style” of the letters written by Mrs. Rosenberg to her husband while they were both awaiting electrocution.) The case for �
�comic books” was argued, in the pages of Encounter, within a specific political context. The United States (good) produces these books in enormous numbers; the Soviet Union (bad) neither produces nor imports them, but does publish, in addition to much dull propaganda, very large editions of the Russian classics which are read by, among others, people in similar employments to those who, in America, buy comic books. Let us suppose this situation reversed. Suppose that, in America, subway employees are reading Herman Melville, while the presses of the Soviet Union are pouring out crudely produced, sadistic fantasies for the use of the semi-literate. Would Professor Fiedler then have written in the same sense? I doubt if he would, but I am quite sure that if he did, Encounter would rightly regard his essay as trahison des clercs and reject it without hesitation. Yet the national provenance of these books should not, to a clerk who is loyal in Benda’s sense, be a relevant factor at all. It is not necessarily either “silly” or “dishonest” to dislike in Encounter, not its “promulgation of uncomfortable truths,” but its selection of such truths on cold-war lines. Where the truth in question is uncomfortable for the Soviet Union it is promulgated; where it is uncomfortable for the United States it is mitigated.

  One of the basic things about Encounter is supposed to be its love of liberty; it was love of liberty that brought together, we are told, the people who, in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, sponsored Encounter. Love of whose liberty? This again is conditioned—as it would be for a communist, but in reverse—by the over-all political conflict. Great vigilance is shown about oppression in the communist world; apathy and inconsequence largely prevail where the oppression is non-communist or anti-communist. This generalization needs to be qualified. Silence about oppression has been, if possible, total where the oppressors were believed to be identified with the interests of the United States. Thus the sufferings of Cubans under Batista evoked no comment at the time from the organ of those lovers of liberty, well informed though they undoubtedly are. For Nicaragua, Guatemala, South Vietnam and South Korea the same held good. The Negro problem—that is, the problem of the oppression of Negroes in large areas of the United States today—was consistently played down until quite recently, when the news made it impossible to play it down in the old way.

  Last August Encounter had a special number, “Negro Crisis,” which on the whole put as good a face on things as possible (whites suffering more than blacks, rapid progress, end in sight, and so on). This revealed that “we liberals” had been struggling for civil rights for a long time. Richard Rovere, in the leading contribution, said that:

  For as long as I can remember we liberals have been saying how helpful it would be if the sitting President would put the “moral prestige” of his great office behind the Negro drive for justice and equality.

  These liberals were not saying this in Encounter throughout the reach of any normal adult memory. A check for the first five years (1953–58) shows that at that time they were saying as little as possible about the matter, and giving the impression, in occasional asides that appeared amid the copious comment on the American scene, that it was of no great significance, and in any case well on the way to a solution. (A 1958 book review by Sir Denis Brogan formed an honourable exception to this.)

  Where neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was directly involved, love of liberty neither flared up nor was extinguished; it flickered feebly. Encounter was moderately anti-Suez, pro-Dulles rather than pro-Eden, as one might expect since Encounter’s first loyalty is to America. On South Africa it has presented “both points of view.” The first article on the subject which it carried—in its third year of publication—was a debonair little piece by Emily Hahn:

  “How do you like it here? Isn’t it awful?” she said.

  I said it seemed not at all awful. The place was beautiful, the people, if excitable at times, were charming and friendly; what did she mean awful? Impatiently she explained that she meant The Situation, of course. Unlike me she knew exactly what she thought about it, and what the natives thought about it too. She had had several long talks about it with her maid.

  The context makes it clear that the terms “the people” and “the natives” are sharply distinct.

  Callous flippancy of this kind could not appear in Encounter about Poland or Hungary. The fact that it could appear in Encounter about South Africa combines with other indications to suggest that what Encounter means when it says that it loves liberty is merely that it hates communism. Hatred of something disguised as love of something else is common enough, on all sides of the political fences; special pleading and selective indignation are also common. But it is rash for Sir Denis Brogan to invoke, in tribute to a periodical so prone to these defects, the terminology of Julien Benda. Benda’s point was that writers were not to cheat, for any side.

  * Edited by Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky.

  VARIETIES OF ANTI-COMMUNISM

  Here are three writers who differ fairly widely in talent and in method but who have a conviction in common: Mr. Fitz Gibbon is a lively, and sometimes witty, journalist; Mr. Howard a strenuous and unconsciously entertaining moralist; Mr. Mander, the most important of the three, a political writer, earnest, able, but factually and otherwise misleading.* The conviction which the three have in common is that anti-communism should be a central element in Britain’s foreign policy.

  Mr. Constantine Fitz Gibbon is of course no more a fascist than he is a hyena. He is something less exotic and—in our present environment—more harmful than either: an intellectual propagandist with a gift for blurring distinctions. The theme which underlies his new collection of articles is that communism and Nazism are essentially the same. That blessed word “totalitarian” does much of his work for him, but almost anything will serve. Thus, even Auschwitz, the subject of Mr. Fitz Gibbon’s first article, puts him in mind of the dangers of communism. It might more pertinently have reminded him of the dangers of anti-communism, since the gentlemen who found and paid Hitler did so because they needed, or thought they needed, an anti-communist demagogue. But for Mr. Fitz Gibbon there is, it seems, no important difference between Khrushchev and Hitler: “in our dealings with the Soviet Union we are once again face to face with a monstrous tyranny, just as we were when dealing with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.” A sombre thought if anyone really thinks it; Mr. Fitz Gibbon seems remarkably cheerful for someone who has to live with a revelation of this order. Some of his other “random thoughts” are even more inflammatory. Thus he is able to tell those who live under monstrous tyrannies what their “prime duty” is: “In any European country where democracy has been destroyed or has never existed it is the prime duty of honest men to bring it into existence as soon as possible and with all the means at their disposal, including, if need be, the ultimate means.” This, or something like it, was once the gospel of Radio Free Europe to the Hungarians (though not, I think, to the Portuguese). We are not told, except by implication, what the duties of the honest men who offer such advice are to the more exposed honest men who take it. The implication is that—as was the case in Hungary—those who take such advice must fend for themselves, for the conclusion to Mr. Fitz Gibbon’s bit about the monstrous-tyranny-just-like-the-Nazis is the surprisingly tame: “we must be prepared, if attacked, to fight and defeat this present enemy.” The effect of that “if attacked” after so much breathing of defiance is rather like Saint George announcing that he will defend himself if the dragon tries to bite him.

  For Mr. Fitz Gibbon, the Reds are under the bed; for Mr. Peter Howard, they are already in it. We are introduced in his pages to “some astute observers” who have found that “the disturbing increase in homosexuality … is the result of a Moscow-directed propaganda, expressly designed to corrode the tissues of capitalist society.” How else indeed can one explain the Kremlin’s vociferous support for the British public-school system? As one would expect, the relation of sex and left-wing politics is a two-way affair. Communism begets homosexuality, b
ut sexuality itself if “indulged” (“sex indulged becomes an addiction”) begets anti-colonialism: “men who exploit someone else’s body for their personal pleasure may feel better when they denounce British Imperialism for, as they say, exploiting the body of Africa for national gain.” Fortunately, as Miss Rice-Davies could tell us, most exploiters in Class A (sexual) can steel themselves against the craving to denounce exploitation in Class B (political). In any case the remedy for it all is clear: Moral Rearmament. The remedy is, Mr. Howard admits, a drastic one, but there is nothing else for it: “A fool pretends cancer is nothing but collywobbles. A friend reaches for the surgeon’s knife.” I can see the necessary friendship and daring in Mr. Howard’s eye. What I do not see is what might be more reassuring: his qualifications as a surgeon.

  To a mind assailed by the committed rhetoric of Mr. Fitz Gibbon and the incisive intent of Mr. Howard, Mr. Mander’s calm tone comes as a relief. His tone is indeed calmer than one feels it would be if he were altogether convinced by his own political argument, which is not much less alarmist in content than Mr. Fitz Gibbon’s. Despite the title, Great Britain or Little England? is not so much another “state of England” book as a survey of international politics, with recommendations about Britain’s foreign policy. Britain should, in Mr. Mander’s view, be more wary about communist intentions, more responsive to American anti-communist moves and at the same time more Europe-minded. These are the positions we should expect from an assistant editor of Encounter, and there may not be very much in the book which will come as a surprise to regular readers of that periodical. One exception, perhaps, is the conclusion, which is to the effect that General de Gaulle might be “bought”—Mr. Mander’s own word—with “British nuclear expertise” to permit Britain “to join in shaping the future of Europe.” Alternatively—or perhaps simultaneously—West German support could be bought by giving the Germans control over nuclear arms.