John Strachey 1961
Source: Encounter Pamphlet Series, no 3, published by Encounter magazine, London, 1961. The articles were originally published in Encounter, November and December 1960. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
A literature is neither the worse nor the better for being reactionary: that depends on what it is reacting against.
In this case, however, the reaction cuts deep. For the literature to be discussed is not only, and in the end not even principally, a reaction against the values of present-day Communism; it is also a reaction against five hundred years of rationalism and empiricism; against, in short, the Enlightenment. That is its scandal, and its power.
The literature has exercised, and exercises, an immense influence. From one point of view it is the social and political literature of our day. It is voluminous; it appears in a score of languages; it ranges from books which on the surface have no connection with public affairs to works of overt political polemics. Indeed it has by now so formed the intellectual climate of the West that many people may regard the subject as closed. But to do so is still to suppose that what is at issue is merely a reaction against Communism. In fact what is at stake goes far deeper than that. I have chosen only four authors, and five books, as examples. So drastic a procedure may serve to emphasise those aspects of the literature with which alone I am competent to deal. Since I am by trade a politician those are its specifically political aspects.
Such an approach involves a paradox at the outset. For this is an anti-political literature: it turns away from the public towards the private life. How then can it be said to have specifically political features? But the rejection of politics is itself a political programme. To despair is also to act.
In the spring of 1941, I was serving as the Adjutant, or maid-of-all-work, of No 87 Fighter Squadron of the Royal Air Force, at that time stationed near Bath. One day a pilot opened the door of the Mess and said, with disinterest, ‘Someone to see the Adjutant.’ There entered the rumpled, battle-dressed figure of Private Koestler of the Pioneer Corps, surely one of the oddest men ever to dig a British latrine.
He was a member of that unpardonably brilliant Hungarian emigration which has peopled the universities, the publishing houses, the laboratories and the authors’ societies of the West. Why this particular little country should have become, as it were, radioactive and have thrown off these stimulating, if irritant, human particles is unknown. But it did so. For what Europe as a whole is to the world, namely something small, intelligent, aggravating and indispensable, Central Europe is to Europe. In turn, what Central Europe is to Europe, Hungary is to Central Europe: and finally, perhaps, what Hungary is to Central Europe, Arthur Koestler is to Hungary.
Since his emigration, Koestler has wandered round the world, trailing an aura of novels, equations, amours, alcohol and quarrels. On the second time round, and after abandoning it on the first round in deep disgust, he has apparently resettled in England. But he has not done so, we may be sure, because he has a high opinion of that country. It will be rather because he may have come to feel that just as Churchill characterised democracy as the ‘worst system of government in the world, except the others’ so England is the worst country in the world to live in, except the others.
In the spring of 1941, Koestler’s reputation, already considerable, had just been made worldwide by the publication of Darkness at Noon. It will also be recalled that the situation of Britain was at that time unrelaxed. We met as humble members of the armed forces of the only considerable power which was still withstanding Hitler, who was then in uneasy alliance with Russia. Although Darkness at Noon had been published some months before, I had only just read it. It might have been supposed that I should have been, at that time, in a receptive mood for the main anti-Communist manifesto of the day. (In some respects the book is a manifesto rather than a novel.) But it was not so; I still had strong inhibitions to reading this kind of book about Russia.
Even if I had read such books, I should not have believed them. I should probably have put them down without finishing them. I would have known that, in the war between Capitalism and Communism, books are weapons, and like all serviceable weapons, loaded.
... the fever with which I decided to read my first anti-Communist book. I mean fever quite literally; and furtiveness as if I was committing an unpardonable sin, as I was. For the fact that I had voluntarily opened the book could mean only one thing: I had begun to doubt. (Whittaker Chambers)
There was an element of all that in it, even a year after a break with Communism. However, in the ample leisure which is such a feature of life in the armed services in wartime, during the long hours of sitting in the Adjutant’s office at the airfield from which 87 Squadron operated, I had nerved myself to read the book. Though I had not liked it, it had made a stunning impression. At that time only one thing about the book mattered: was it true? Were things in Russia really like this?
But eighteen years do strange things to a book. To re-read Darkness at Noon today is to appreciate the seismic change in all our points of view. Nobody can today be in the least interested in whether the book is true or not: of course it is true. The murders, the tortures, the confessions, the starvation, all happened. Khrushchev has described them more authoritatively than Koestler. When it was published about twenty years ago, the book caused riots in Paris, broke friendships, split families, and was denounced by many people who were by no means Communists. Today no one is likely to feel particularly strongly about it. As an accusation the book has become beside the point. If it is to survive it must be for other qualities.
What then is left of Koestler’s book, now that its main assertion has become a commonplace? A good deal is left as a matter of fact. This was the first book to begin to reveal the far-reaching consequences upon the mind and spirit of the West of the rejection of Communism. It revealed that Communism could not be rejected without re-emphasising just those aspects of life which had been least emphasised, and not only by Communism. And that might mean calling in question the whole rationalist tradition. The values which the book began to preach were subversive of much more than Communism. For these reasons the things which are left in it even now, when its main assertion is undisputed, are still highly important.
In the first place the book reaffirms defiantly those values which cluster round personal relations. There is, for example, the incident of ‘Little Loewy’. Koestler here portrays a kind of Communist, half-vagabond half-saint, to be found in the Communist parties of the nineteen-twenties and ‘thirties. These men and women really did give their lives, often with great simplicity, for Communism. Koestler makes ‘Little Loewy’ a gentle, intelligent hunchback from south Germany, who has had to fly the country after a theft of arms. He drifts about in France and Belgium, harried by the police, shunted backwards and forwards over the border, and rejected by the local Communist parties because he has had to get out of Germany without his party papers. (And then there is the incident of catching the cats, which readers of the book will hardly forget.) In the end, Loewy establishes himself in a Belgian port. He promptly starts a Communist party branch amongst the dockers and because he has a warm, selfless nature, makes it an outstanding success.
It is now the period of the Abyssinian War. It is the task of all Communist parties of Western Europe to boycott and blockade the Fascist aggressor, especially in respect of his most essential supply, namely oil. Little Loewy’s dockers organise solidly against the handling of ‘black’ petrol destined for Italy. Then Rubashov, Koestler’s composite Trotsky-Bukharin hero, is sent to Belgium to prepare them for the fact that five Russian tankers are approaching their port loaded with petrol for the Fascists. If now, he must inform them, Russia were to stop supplying, other countries would ‘greedily spring into the breach’. Such a substitution ‘would only hamper the development of Russian industry’. In short the blockade and boycott must be raised for the Russian petrol. The dockers’ branch is split and destroyed. All that Little Loewy has accomplished is ruined. So he hangs himself.
‘What are you telling me this for?’, Rubashov asks, when Little Loewy tells him his life story. ‘Because it is instructive’, Loewy answers. ‘Because it is a typical example... For years the best of us have been crushed in that way.’ And that is true. Stalinism passed across the naked bodies of all that was best – and it was very good – in the Communist movement. It either physically wrecked or intellectually and morally degraded just those potential and actual saints of which any church militant has so absolute a need. They were like wild flowers growing in the wasteland of the national Communist parties. They gave that sharp impression of beauty-set-in-desolation that one sometimes got, in the war decade, from the willow herb as it waved upon the bomb sites in London. Some of them were destroyed dramatically like Little Loewy in Koestler’s book. Others were merely dried up from within. They gradually became automata who had so many times overridden, in their perfect obedience, every natural instinct in them that they had ceased to be human beings at all: all were destroyed.
Koestler does not fail to ask why Communism has thus stamped upon almost every spontaneous and natural expression of human personality. Why, in particular, did it destroy, or distort out of recognition, the very best and most attractive of its own, thus doing its cause enormous damage? It cannot have done so for the fun of the thing. There must have been a necessity which forced Communism to push the regimentation of its supporters (which, of course, every creed and every government must impose in some degree) to unprecedented lengths. The answer is simple. All this was done that Russia, the first socialist society in history, might be preserved. The humanity of all the best of the Communists was trampled out of them, in the supposed interests of the safety and preservation of Russia. Nor did this seem to the men and women involved to be an unworthy cause for which to be destroyed. Right through the period Russia remained the promised land of the revolution. Every detail of what was happening there – or of what was supposed to be happening there – every success and every officially admitted setback (for they knew no other) was the impassioned concern of the faithful. Koestler perfectly conveys this attitude to Russia in his description of how Little Loewy’s Belgian dock workers question Rubashov about Russian conditions: ‘They enquired about the development of production in the light metal industry, like children asking the exact size of the grapes of Canaan.’
To such men and women the argument that literally everything was justified for the preservation of Russia, as the bastion of world socialism, appealed with compulsive force. For the sake of this, all the nightmarish qualities of the Stalinist period seemed indispensable to a truly believing Communist. Darkness at Noon does full justice to this argument. In general it is a formidable characteristic of this literature, that it puts the Communists’ own case a great deal better than they have ever succeeded in putting it for themselves. There is no shirking of the ultimate issues at stake. These writers know, not merely with their minds but with their whole beings, the full force of the Communist world view, and they do not hesitate to express it.
In Darkness at Noon Gletkin, Rubashov’s second interrogator, is the spokesman of Communist doctrine as it was in the nineteen-thirties. The Gletkin passages are the core of the book. They express adequately (and in 1940 this was new) the real Communist justification for what Stalin was doing. Gletkin induces Rubashov to sign his confession with this same argument that everything without exception must be sacrificed for the maintenance and security of ‘the bastion’:
‘You know what is at stake here’, Gletkin went on. ‘For the first time in history, a revolution has not only conquered power, but also kept it. We have made our country a bastion of the new era. It covers a sixth of the world and contains a tenth of the world’s population.’
‘The leader of the party’, Gletkin’s voice went on, ‘had the wider perspective and more tenacious tactics. He realised that everything depended on surviving the period of world reaction and keeping the bastion. He had realised that it might last ten, perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty years, until the world was ripe for a fresh wave of revolution. Until then we stand alone. Until then we have only one duty: not to perish.’
‘... Not to perish’, sounded Gletkin’s voice. ‘The bulwark must be held, at any price and with any sacrifice. The leader of the party recognised this principle with unrivalled clear-sightedness, and has consistently applied it. The policy of the International had to be subordinated to our national policy. Whoever did not understand this necessity had to be destroyed. Whole sets of our best functionaries in Europe had to be physically liquidated. We did not recoil from crushing our own organisations abroad when the interests of the Bastion required it. We did not recoil from cooperation with the police of reactionary countries in order to suppress revolutionary movements which came at the wrong moment. We did not recoil from betraying our friends and compromising with our enemies in order to preserve the Bastion. That was the task which history had given us, the representatives of the victorious revolution. The short-sighted, the aesthetes, the moralists did not understand. But the leader of the Revolution understood that all depended on one thing: to be the better stayer.’
For a Communist in the nineteen-thirties who was seized of that argument, the local or temporary state of things in Russia seemed a matter of secondary importance. In front of everybody’s eyes the Marxist prognosis of the development of a latter-day capitalism was apparently fulfilling itself. Outside Russia, it was becoming more and more impossible to use anything like the whole of the productive apparatus; unemployment was consequently becoming endemic; the misery of the wage-earners and peasants was ever-increasing; the violence, hysteria and general irrationality of the governing classes of the main capitalisms was mounting; attempts at gradualist reform by social-democratic methods had failed; finally, Fascism was being established not only in such peripheral countries as Italy and Spain, but also, and decisively, in Germany, one of the major, advanced capitalisms. It was above all this apparition of evil incarnate in the form of Fascism which gave the Communist argument power. For that argument taught that Fascism was no accidental catastrophe but the logical and inevitable consequence of ‘capitalism-in-decay’. Nazi Germany, with its psychopathic propensity for both internal violence and external aggression, was seen as the exemplar which each and every capitalist society must soon imitate if such societies were left in existence. Fascism, the argument continued, was not the product of this or that national characteristic or circumstance, but was the form which all latter-day capitalisms must sooner rather than later assume. In general the capitalist world gave a convincing impression of having fallen into a pit of abomination from which there was no way out. How much did even the ugliest features of the new socialist society matter if it gave even the possibility of the rebuilding of civilisation upon a viable basis?
As a matter of fact Gletkin’s arguments appealed very strongly, when once they were understood, to non-Communists also. I knew one man of first-rate powers, but without previous acquaintance with Communist doctrine, who as late as the nineteen-forties was definitely influenced in a pro-Communist direction by reading Darkness at Noon.
‘But what is the answer to Gletkin?’, he used to say. And the truth is that at that time there was no conclusive answer to Gletkin. If capitalist society had continued its many-sided decline into economic, social, cultural and every other kind of decadence, then there would have been no proof that even Stalinist methods were unjustified in order to preserve a way out for mankind. All that could be said was that one was not prepared to accept those methods: to lie, cheat, murder and in our case in Britain to betray one’s country to Hitler, because there was no conclusive answer to an argument.
But now, of course, history itself has answered Gletkin, and has done so in two equally unexpected ways. In the first place, the apparently predestined curve of capitalist development has abruptly turned upwards again. The major capitalisms have unmistakably taken on a new lease of life. True they have had to undergo considerable changes in their social and economic structures in order to stage this revival. But it has been found that the job can apparently be done by means of measures which, relative to revolution, are very mild. By strengthening trade unionism here, by social security there, by government support for farm prices in the other place, and by a little Keynesian (or crypto-Keynesian) management all round (by, in short, the application of a now fairly well-tried list of household remedies), a new version of the old system can be made to work, not perfectly indeed, but surprisingly well, considering how human institutions do work. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, there are still no signs of the reappearance of those unmistakable symptoms of social decline which stigmatised capitalism twenty-five years ago. To allege that the American or the British wage-earners are now sinking into ever-increasing misery is merely funny. To deny the effectiveness, so far at least, of the democratic process in the key countries of the developed West today, is merely perverse. No one but a blind fanatic can possibly say that such societies as America, Britain, North-West Europe or Japan, are today in obvious decline and offer no way of carrying on human civilisation.
Thus history’s verdict on Russian Communism in its Stalinist form is not that all its outrages were too wicked to be borne; it is simply that they were unnecessary. It did not turn out to be the case that humanity had no other way out than this. Humanity is not confronted with the choice of going Communist or destroying civilisation. There are, it seems, a plurality of ways forward for human society, at the different stages of its development which have currently been reached in various parts of the world. Certainly Stalinist Communism is one of these ways; but it is neither the only nor an attractive way. No well-balanced man or woman is today likely to give it that absolute allegiance which it demands, and which it could often command a quarter of a century ago.
But that is only one side of history’s answer to Gletkin. Its other answer has been given by the character of Russia’s own development. And this is the more subtle answer. For it is not that Stalin’s methods have led to disaster. On the contrary, the bastion has been preserved all right. What we now experience are the consequences not of the failure but of the success of Stalinist policy. Russian conditions have not become more nightmarish: they have become much better – and much more ordinary. The bastion, in the very process of being preserved, has become another country in the process of industrialisation. True, her industrialisation has been rapid. But it is even a myth that it has been uniquely rapid. Russian development has been more rapid than Britain’s but less rapid than Japan’s, for instance. It is true that the peoples of all other countries as well as Russia went through, or are going through, agonies of one kind or another during the process of primary industrialisation. Russia’s tortures during the Stalinist period can now be seen as merely one version of those agonies. But the fatal truth is that the end result, namely industrialised Russia as she emerges, turns out to be familiar. The Russia of the nineteen-sixties is no longer a torture-chamber: it is a fine country in many respects. It has some notable advantages over other industrialised countries: its economy appears to be more stable and to have a more sustained rate of growth; it has less difficulty in devoting a really adequate proportion of its national income to longer-term objectives such as higher education, instead of to television sets and motor cars. These may well prove to be formidable advantages. If we in the non-Communist part of the world do not pull our social socks up we shall have some very unpleasant surprises. Today, however, there is little danger of these Russian advantages being overlooked. On the contrary, after nearly half a century wasted in a denial that we had anything to learn from the Russian system, we are now in danger of being unnecessarily overawed by its achievements. For Russian society has notable disadvantages also. It still lacks many of the most elementary civil liberties and has not developed even a rudimentary democratic control over its government. Again, in external affairs Russia behaves very much like all other powerful countries. The suppression of the Hungarian revolution was perhaps no worse than other such suppressions by other imperial powers: but only the wilfully blind can suppose it to have been any better. The fact is that the torture-chambers were filled, the springs of objective truth defiled and the socialist vision debased, and all in order to carry through the process of primary industrialisation in just about the time (forty years) which it usually takes nowadays.
Koestler, in the well-known ‘photograph’ passage, describes the glory of the socialist vision of the founding fathers of the revolution:
A picture appeared in his mind’s eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the party. They sat at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees; bearded and earnest, they gazed into the photographer’s lens. Above each head was a small circle, enclosing a number corresponding to a name printed underneath. All were solemn, only the old man who was presiding had a sly and amused look in his slit Tartar eyes. Rubashov sat second to his right, with his pince-nez on his nose. No 1 sat somewhere at the lower end of the table, four-square and heavy. They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled.
What has the resultant great power, which behaves in so familiar a way, have to do with all that? Stalinism degraded that socialist vision of a truly human society, which really was – and is – ‘the hope of the world’: and it did so merely in order to create one more modern, industrialised nation-state.
The means have been terrible, the result commonplace.
Twenty years ago both sides of this extraordinary double twist in historical development were still hidden. Both worlds were still in apparently mortal crisis. Everyone who understood still felt that they had to make a desperate choice between the horrible world of Stalin and what Chambers was to call, as late as 1950, ‘the unsavable society’ of capitalism-in-decay. It is this which accounts for the characteristic shrillness of the literature of reaction. There is something hysterical, for example, about Darkness at Noon: everything is pushed not only as far, but a little farther, than it will go. But perhaps the book is none the worse for that: these were hysterical events in an hysterical period. The men who wrote them regarded them as agonised, half-strangled outcries against an advancing, and almost certainly invincible tyranny. Their very manuscripts had, in many cases, to be smuggled out of reach of the agents of this or that dictatorship. Or their authors felt themselves to be, and often were, in danger of persecution or assassination.
In Koestler’s case it was not the Russian dictatorship from which he was in physical danger, but the advancing Nazis. The book was written partly in Paris, and partly in a French concentration camp, in 1939 and 1940, and the manuscript had to be smuggled out by his devoted translator and collaborator, Daphne Hardy. The desperation in these books is not put on: it is justified by the times and by the predicaments of their authors. Moreover, what force the literature gains from the fact that it has been written by men who worked and fought in the great struggles of our time: by men who collided with events and were shattered by them, and then somehow or other, and to some extent, put themselves together again. ‘Only a participant can be a profound observer’, said Trotsky. Of course we can hardly expect balanced, judicial verdicts from such men. Their own pasts stand in the way of that. ‘His whole past was sore, and festered at every touch’, Koestler wrote, nominally of Rubashov. But at any rate their books are not chronicles of what they said to their mistresses and of what their mistresses said to them, a subject of more limited interest than is often supposed.
I recollect asking Koestler at that meeting in 1941 what he had meant by his title, Darkness at Noon. My mind was still so numb that the simple obvious meaning of an eclipse of human reason, just when the enlightenment should have reached its noontide, in the coming to power of the first government to be consciously based upon rationalism, had wholly escaped me. Far more remarkable, it had escaped the author himself. Koestler told me that the title had actually been thought of by Daphne Hardy and that he didn’t quite know what it meant but that it seemed to have the right ring to it. Such are the clairvoyant powers of the unconscious of an author of high talent at a turning-point in history.
Darkness at Noon is the starting-point of the literature of reaction. The book reaches but does not develop what was to become the main theme of that literature, namely the retreat from rationalism. It is still mainly concerned with the intellectual and moral catastrophe to which Communism has led. For no one would have thought of the retreat from rationalism if they had not been stunned by the Communist catastrophe. But already the two themes are interlocked. A few minutes before his execution, Rubashov is made to reflect as follows:
Rubashov stared through the bars of the window at the patch of blue above the machine-gun tower. Looking back over his past, it seemed to him now that for forty years he had been running amuck – the running amuck of pure reason. Perhaps it did not suit man to be completely freed from old bonds, from the steadying brakes of ‘Thou shalt not’ and ‘Thou mayst not’, and to be allowed to tear along straight towards the goal.
What had he once written in his diary? ‘We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logica; we are sailing without ethical ballast...’
Perhaps the heart of the evil lay there. Perhaps it did not suit mankind to sail without ballast. And perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding, twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist...
Perhaps now would come the time of great darkness.
Koestler was to develop the critique of contemporary rationalism in many of his subsequent books. But the theme may be pursued in the works of other writers also.
Arthur Koestler, if you meet him in the street, is Central Europe. George Orwell, walking down the road, was England – not, of course, the England of convention, of John Bull: just the contrary. He was one of the least bluff or hearty men who ever lived. He was another England: subtle, retired, but very sharp. He was the England of the major eccentrics, the major satirists. Lean and long of body, cadaverous, ravaged in face, with shining quixotic eyes, you might easily have taken him for one more English idealist crank. And so he nearly was. But in the end he became, for good and ill, far more than that. He was a major writer, and by means of his pen, he became one of the most effective men of his generation.
Animal Farm was his masterpiece. The contrast between it and Darkness at Noon could hardly be greater. At first glance, you might think that Orwell’s little book hardly merited serious consideration in the context of world tragedy. Animal Farm is called on the title page ‘A Fairy Story'; and so it is. (I met some children the other day who were greatly enjoying it without the slightest idea of what it was about; they were enjoying it not otherwise than generations of children have enjoyed Gulliver.) The farm which the animals capture by their revolution is a real English farm, in real English country. The book is downright pretty! How can one compare this elegant fancy with the unrelenting reportage of Darkness at Noon? And yet a dismissal of Orwell would be hasty.
The most famous passage in the book touches a theme which was to preoccupy Orwell for the rest of his life. After the revolution the animals had written up the seven commandments of ‘Animalism’ upon the barn wall. The sixth was ‘No animal shall kill any other animal’, and the seventh was ‘All animals are equal’. As time goes on, the animals notice, or half-notice, that some of these commandments don’t look quite the same. For instance, after purges have begun the sixth commandment reads ‘No animal shall kill any other animal without cause’. The words ‘without cause’ had not been noticed before. Finally, the animals find that all the commandments have disappeared except the last, and that this now reads ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’.
Thus the subject which, together with physical torture, was to make Orwell hag-ridden for the rest of his life, had appeared. This is the theme of the falsification of the past. Orwell was obsessed with the conviction that in the last resort it was forgery, even more than violence, which could destroy human reason. Of course it must be forgery upon what the Communists call ‘a world-historical scale’. But already, in 1945, when Animal Farm was published, Orwell had before him the elimination of Trotsky, the second figure of the Russian Revolution, from the historical record, almost as if he had never existed. Orwell was here reaching for what was to become his final conviction, namely that Communist rationalism, which sought to be rationalism pushed to its utmost conclusion, abruptly turned into its opposite of total irrationalism. He had had the hair-raising thought that an all-powerful government might have power over the past as well as over the present. If so, he was to show, human consciousness might be made to diverge permanently from objective reality into a land of subjective nightmare.
There is a sort of catch or trap set somewhere in the character of Orwell’s type of Englishman. On the surface everything is easy and charming. The great English satirists write fables and fairy stories and the children love them. How can their fond countrymen compare such books with the furious polemics of continental political controversy? But look a little below the surface. A cold repugnance and despair is hidden in the pretty pages. After all the charm of Lilliput we encounter the Yahoos:
... at three in the afternoon I got safe to my house at Rotherhithe. My wife and children received me with great surprise and joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust and contempt... when I began to consider that by copulating with one of the Yahoo species I had become a parent of more, it struck me with the utmost shame, confusion and horror. As soon as I entered the house my wife took me in her arms and kissed me; at which having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour.
The great repugnance was in Orwell too. And before his death it was to find overt expression.
Orwell’s second major political work was less perfect than Animal Farm just because it was so much more overt. Nevertheless Nineteen Eighty-Four is a formidable book and it has been immensely influential. Orwell lent his powerful, detailed, concrete imagination to the task of describing a nightmare, in order, if possible, which he very much doubted, to avert it. The result is the most intolerable of all the pessimistic, inverted, Utopias. The condition of England in Nineteen Eighty-Four has become, down to the minutest detail, everything which Orwell most abominated and which most terrified him.
The main theme of the book is thought-control in general and control over the past in particular. In this field the particularity of Orwell’s imagination is remarkable. At the first level, thought-control is exercised by two-way television sets in every room, by means of which the ‘Thought Police’ can see and listen to, as well as, if they like, be seen by, every citizen at any time, day or night. At the next level the government is introducing a new language called ‘Newspeak’, the object of which is nothing less than to make it impossible to express thoughts unwelcome to the authorities. The substitution of ‘Newspeak’ for ‘Oldspeak’ (or present-day English) is designed to effect nothing less than the destruction of human reason by linguistic means. I do not know if any of the contemporary school of linguistic philosophers have made a study of Orwell in this respect. To the layman his tour de force of imagination is extremely effective, producing a genuine realisation of the extent to which, precisely, ‘language, truth and logic’ are interdependent. A prime object of Newspeak is so drastically to cut down the vocabulary that the expression of heretical ideas, and with a few simple exceptions, ideas at all, becomes impossible:
All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word ‘Crimethink’, while all words grouping themselves round the concept of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word ‘Oldthink’.
The book has a detailed and learned linguistic Appendix on the problems presented by this enterprise. This Appendix is in many respects much more alarming than the melodrama of the latter part of the book. Moreover, more than the acquisition of the new language is required for the governors themselves, the members of the Inner Party. They must be provided with a philosophy. This need is met by doublethink, a philosophy based on a version of extreme subjectivism – indeed it is solipsism – which enables its practitioners sincerely to believe a proposition at one level and its opposite at a deeper level.
The horror of all this is focused for Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, in the party’s procedure and apparatus for altering the past. When, for example, there is a ‘diplomatic revolution’, and Oceania, the dictatorship of which England (now called Airstrip One) is a part, changes sides in the permanent triangular world war which is being waged, so that she is now fighting, say, Eurasia and is allied with Eastasia, the party at once blots out all record of the fact that up till then she has been fighting Eastasia and been allied to Eurasia. Any verbal allusion to or hint of the change is punished by instant death. Every file copy of every newspaper is suitably rewritten and reprinted. Every record of every speech is amended. (Winston Smith is professionally employed by the Ministry of Truth on this quite skilled rewrite job.) All other records are systematically destroyed by being dropped into great furnaces, down the ‘memory holes’ with which the Ministry is equipped. The same procedure is used when there is occasion to shoot leading members of the Inner Party; a new incriminating past, amply documented from contemporary records, is manufactured for them, and all record of their actual past is eliminated. Smith is especially fascinated and terrified by this past-control procedure. In the end, under torture, his ‘Gletkin’ (O'Brien) explains to him that to a man more adequately educated in doublethink than he is, the past really is altered. For all records, and in a little while all consciousness, of the old past are destroyed, and records and consciousness of a new past are provided. Therefore, as reality is wholly subjective, there is no problem. The party has power over the past also.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four the party has not yet achieved its objective of moulding human nature in a wholly suitable way. Members of the Outer Party are still subject to regrettable lapses, and a tense struggle by all means, from education, spying, torture and shooting, has to be waged to keep them in line. Above all, personal private life has to be eliminated to the maximum possible extent.
Winston Smith, though in his thoughts alone, has begun to deviate. He knows that such deviations, even if they remain forever unspoken, must lead to his death under torture; but he cannot, or will not, wholly control his thoughts. His downfall is simple and natural. The girls of the Outer Party are subjected to an intensely puritanical education, designed to make them incapable of any pleasure in the sexual act. Marital intercourse is permitted, but only so long as it is joyless. It is known as ‘our weekly party duty'; but all other sexual intercourse is punishable by death. Smith has noticed a girl who seems a particularly strident and horrible example of ‘the party norm’. She screams particularly loudly in the ‘hate periods’, volunteers for even more of the party work than is necessary, and appears odiously athletic, puritanical and conformist. To his dismay this girl seems to be eyeing him. Has she sensed his deviations? He keeps running across her, too often for it to be chance. She is probably an agent of the Thought Police. He thinks he is done for. Then she slips a scrap of paper into his hand. He cannot at once look at it.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police, just as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organisation.
At the first safe moment, he unrolls the screwed-up paper. On it is written the three words:
I LOVE YOU
The rest of the book is largely concerned with the resultant love-affair between Smith and Julia, and the innate subversiveness of love is well displayed. Here is a private passion, uncontrolled and unregulated by the party, a passion strong enough to make people act independently and spontaneously. No wonder the party sees the necessity of stamping it out.
Julia turns out to be by no means a romantic revolutionary, nor yet an intellectual. She just wants some hearty sex, normally mingled with tender emotion. Somehow she has preserved her power of natural joy against the conditioning of the party. She has secretly copulated with quite a few Outer Party members already. She simply wants Winston Smith as her man. But it is precisely this assertion of the human ‘norm’ which must lead, Orwell demonstrates (he never asserts), to revolt against the party ‘norm’. Winston and Julia begin, with infinite difficulty and circumspection, to create a secret private life for themselves. The preservation of Julia’s sexual normality has led her to regard the whole party ideology as tosh. This is already intolerable because, though in Julia it does not even prompt her to any kind of action, yet in an intellectual like Winston Smith it leads directly to dreams of revolt.
So far Nineteen Eighty-Four is magnificently achieved. But from the moment when Winston and Julia are, inevitably, caught and their interrogation and torture begins, the book deteriorates. It is not, to be sure, that Orwell’s powers of imagination fail. On the contrary, the fanatical ingenuity with which both intellectual and physical tortures are described cannot be exaggerated. But the fact is that the subject of physical torture, though it was clearly another of his obsessions, was not one with which Orwell was equipped to deal. He had never been tortured, any more than most of the rest of us have been. And those who have no personal experience of this matter may be presumed to know nothing whatever about it.
Be that as it may, Orwell’s preoccupation with torture and terror gives his book the agonised and frenzied note – the note of the strangled cry – which characterises this literature as a whole. In Orwell’s case alone the cause of his frenzy is largely subjective. Both Koestler’s and Pasternak’s actual manuscripts had to be smuggled away from authorities disposed to suppress them. Their authors were in danger of their lives from those authorities. Chambers also wrote his book in an atmosphere of seething melodrama, of papers hidden in pumpkins, of the Communist underground, of FBI agents and the Hiss case. Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the relative stability of postwar Britain. What gives it its frenzy is probably that it is the work of a dying man: for when Orwell wrote it he was already in an advanced stage of tuberculosis.
The practical influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four (and it was appreciable) was, in Britain, reactionary in the narrow political sense of that term. Many of those who for one reason or another felt that their interests were threatened by the British Labour government, which was in its period of office when the book was published, managed to persuade themselves that the British brand of democratic socialism was taking the country along the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four. That almost pedantically libertarian government (which, for instance, made it possible, for the first time in British history for a subject to sue the government) was solemnly arraigned as intending or, at any rate, tending to take us all into the Orwellian nightmare. But of course authors cannot be held responsible for the wilder distortions of their meaning which some readers will inevitably make. In fact it has been the fairly thorough overhaul of the British system, mainly (though by no means exclusively) carried out by the Labour government, which has given a vigorous new lease of life to British democratic and libertarian institutions. This is an example of the tendency of this whole literature to damage the very forces which, by maintaining a tolerable social balance, can avert all that these writers so desperately, and so justly, fear.
On the central issue posed in these pages, namely the issue of the contemporary retreat from rationalism as a whole, Nineteen Eighty-Four is significant in another way. The European, the American, and even perhaps the Russian, authors whose works we are discussing, all consider, we shall find, that Communism is the culmination of the rationalist tradition. In this sense they consider that Communism is rationalism in its contemporary form. Hence when they depict what they consider to be the ghastly consequences of Communism and cry for its repudiation, they must perforce repudiate rationalism also. And to a varying degree this is what each of them does. Koestler considers that reason has run amok: that now it must be limited by the ‘Oceanic sense’, which is his name for mystical experience. Chambers forthrightly declares that there is no alternative to Communism except an acceptance of the supernatural: that no one who does not accept one form or other of supernaturalism has really broken with Communism. Pasternak’s message is, it is true, far more subtle. Nevertheless he devotes his masterpiece to showing how little those sides of life which, he considers, can alone be dealt with rationally, matter as compared with those deeper elements in the human condition which can only be handled by super-rational methods.
Orwell, the Englishman, alone implies an opposite view. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Communism itself, now indistinguishable from Fascism, is depicted as patently irrational. It has lost almost all touch with objective reality and pursues psychopathic social objectives. Moreover, Orwell is here, of course, merely extrapolating into the year 1984 those tendencies of Communism which, he considered, were only too apparent in 1949. The lesson of his book is not that the catastrophe which Communism has suffered proves that reason carried to its logical conclusion leads to horror; that consequently we must retreat from reason into some form of mysticism or supernaturalism. On the contrary, what Orwell is saying is that the catastrophe of our times occurred precisely because the Communists (and, of course, still more the Fascists) deserted reason. He is saying that the Communists, without being aware of it, have lost touch with reality: that their doctrine has become, precisely, a mysticism, an authoritarian revelation.
Orwell nowhere argues all this. He nowhere makes it clear that he is denouncing both Fascism and Communism from a rational standpoint. It would not have occurred to him to do any such thing. His rationalism is of the rough-and-ready, highly empirical, English kind. He is undidactic, untheoretical. But nowhere, equally, does he suggest the alternative of mysticism or supernaturalism. Indeed his whole satire, in both books, is directed to demonstrating that once criticism has been suppressed, a society must inevitably come to depend upon authority, revelation and mystery. His whole message is epigrammatically contained in his famous aphorism that the original proposition that ‘all animals are equal’ will, in the absence of freedom to dissent, inevitably receive the addendum ‘but some animals are more equal than others’. In other words, without the liberty of prophesying, the subtleties of the dialectic will degenerate into the obscenities of doublethink. For him it is not that the Communists have discredited reason by pushing it to its logical conclusion. On the contrary, it is that they have betrayed reason by abandoning its living empirical methodology for an unchanging revelation. His whole satire was an exposure of the consequences of pathological unreason. Therefore, though he did not say anything, or perhaps even think anything, about it, his books are at bottom a defence, all the more unquestioning for being tacit, of the assumptions of traditional English empiricism.
If Orwell had been a more systematic thinker he might perhaps have fused his brilliant linguistic insight with his general political outlook to form a social philosophy of a particularly concrete and applied character. He might have sorted out for us the question of why and how reason may at a certain point tumble over into ‘rationalism’, in the narrow, rigid and dogmatic sense of that word: into a kind of ‘rationalism’ which is fully as authoritarian as the tenets of a revealed religion. He might have given social empiricism a firmer basis, and at the same time shown us how to do justice to those personal, aesthetic and religious values about which we can as yet say so little – except that we can all now see that their neglect is fatal. I do not know whether, if he had lived, Orwell might have attempted something of the sort. This at least is the direction in which his work pointed.
The remainder of my essay is devoted to an American and a Russian who, in very different ways, have struggled with these issues.
Koestler’s and Orwell’s books were fictional in form but factual in content. Whittaker Chambers’ autobiography, Witness, is factual in form but is often considered to be fictional in content. This accusation is not, however, in my opinion well-founded. Mr Chambers is a witness of truth: of truth as he sees it: of his truth. ‘That is my truth’, said Zarathustra, ‘now tell me yours.’
Again, Koestler and Orwell are two fastidious craftsmen in words. Chambers is a writer possessing major powers, but also capable of dreadful failures: of failures in taste, for example, so grave that many of his passages have the opposite effect from that intended. For this and other reasons, Witness is, in its own way, fully as intolerable a book as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moreover it is no fantasy about imaginary events of the future but an ex parte account of the most disastrous political trial in the history of America; of a trial which almost ruined American liberalism for a whole decade. As such it evoked (and evokes) a passionate resistance which no work of fiction could encounter. Indeed I have hardly met an American liberal who was not outraged by the mere suggestion that this was a major work which it was impossible to ignore. Those few who do not regard it as too vile to read, point out the extraordinary atmosphere of lurid melodrama which pervades it: they excoriate its rhetoric, its bombast, its hysteria, and its sentimentality. Above all they dismiss it as the work of that most odious of men, an informer.
But melodrama, rhetoric, bombast and sentimentality are by no means fatal defects in a book. If they were we should have to exclude from the canon half the major works of English literature from the Elizabethans to Dickens. If there is enough else in a book these defects have always been forgiven, as the near inevitable failures of a man who was at least attempting to scale the heights. Let us come at once to the final accusation, that anyhow this is the work of an informer, to be denounced on that score alone. For the very fact that it is the work of an informer is, in truth, one of the main reasons for placing Witness amongst the formative books of our time.
The question of whether or not an informer must be for ever a moral Ishmael has poignancy in contemporary America. For the McCarthyite persecutions (mild as they were by twentieth-century standards) were bad enough to fix a horror of informing in the minds of all those American liberals, and they were very numerous, who had passed, to a greater or lesser degree, through the Communist experience. Men and women who have had no sympathy for Communism for many years are still outraged by those who, under the pressure of the Committee for Un-American Activities, informed on their friends, thus often ruining their careers. The refusal to inform was, and still is, their test of decency. Their especial hatred is reserved for Chambers who, by initiating the Hiss case, both ruined many lives and played an important part in American liberalism’s ejection from office and power. Chambers is well aware of the consequences to himself of what he has done. He has several passages on informing which exhibit both the force and melodrama of his writing. One of them reads:
There is in men a very deep-rooted instinct that they may not inform against those whose kindness and affection they have shared, at whose tables they have eaten and under whose roofs they have slept, whose wives and children they have known as friends – and that regardless of who those others are or of what crimes they have committed. It is an absolute prohibition. It is written in no book, but it is more binding than any code that exists. If of necessity a man must violate that prohibition, and it is part of the tragedy of history that, for the greater good, men sometimes must, the man who violates it must do so in the full consciousness that there is a penalty. That penalty is a kind of death, most deadly if a man must go on living. It is not violent. It is not even a deepening shadow. It is a simple loss of something as when a filter removes all colour from the light. I felt its fore-touch. It was soon to be on me.
It is an agonising issue. On the one hand there can be no doubt that the consequences of Chambers’ denunciations were disastrous for the political and social life of America. For such denunciations were to spread far beyond the eradication of Communists from the actual government service, into a witch-hunt conducted against everyone holding radical opinions even if they occupied entirely non-governmental positions. It was imperative to fight the witch-hunters. And those American liberals who courageously refused to give the names of men and women in private life who were suspected of sympathy with Communism, or who had been, or even perhaps still were, Communists, were fully justified.
But what Chambers felt that he had to do was something different. He was concerned with men who were in high positions in the actual administrative apparatus of the government. He considered it his duty to inform, first privately, and then, when no attention was paid to that, publicly, upon these men. Was he or was he not right to do so? What was at stake was not really the supposed necessity of stopping the transmission of government secrets. Anyone who has had access to Cabinet papers knows that it is only an exaggeration to say that, except in periods of actual war, there are no such things as government secrets. It was much more a question of the unforeseeable consequences of leaving in policy-forming positions men whose motives and purposes – all the more formidable when they are quite free from considerations of personal gain – were to serve not their own government but another government. The answer even to this second question is not necessarily obvious, however. Looking back we may conclude that it would not have made all that difference if Hiss, White and the others had remained in the American government service. The influence of Communism in America (once appreciable) was in such rapid decline that they would probably have been impotent. Any residual harm they might have done in American policy-making would probably have been much less extensive than was the damage to the fabric of American society which the consequences, direct and indirect, of their removal were to cause.
What is really at issue is not the impossible task of weighing the terrible and known consequences of Chambers speaking out against the unknown but possibly unimportant consequences of his silence. In the final analysis, what is at issue is the necessity of a society, like an individual, to face reality. And the conspiratorial aspects of Communism were part of social reality during the decades in question. They were not the only, nor the most important, aspects of Communism. But they existed, and exist. Moreover, in the America of the third and fourth decades of this century, they were sufficiently real to make it inevitable that someone, be it Chambers or another, should make them explicit and public.
American society, however, was unprepared for the revelation of the existence of a real, though not very large or powerful, conspiracy within it. At first this horribly unwelcome, and to many people grotesque, revelation was simply rejected. Chambers had the utmost difficulty in establishing his facts. Then when he did establish them, when he was believed, an avalanche of fear, anger, hatred and revenge was unloosed. Ridden by the politicians of the Right, as the one way in which American liberalism could be broken, this avalanche of reaction rolled on until it reached its loathsome climax in the person of Senator McCarthy. When at last it was over, it was seen to have done enormous damage, not so much to the concrete political and economic achievements of the New Deal – these have survived well on the whole – but to the vigour, freedom and boldness of American thought and culture.
Such were the consequences of the unpreparedness of American society to deal with the terrifying apparition within it of the conspiratorial aspects of Communism. Chambers cannot be held to have been more than a trigger-mechanism. He did what he had to do. In the confusion and misapprehensions of social reality from which not he alone, but almost everyone else also, suffered, he had to inform. The individual cannot take upon himself to judge whether a particular piece of a conspiracy of which he happens to have knowledge is sufficiently significant for his government to deal with drastically and publicly. A wise and self-confident government may conclude that the dropping of a few men from a few committees and the unexpectedly early retirement from government service of a few others is all that is needed: that to do more than this will do much more harm than good. But that must be the government’s responsibility. The individual must supply it with the facts. Only men and women who have never taken Communism seriously, however closely they may have been associated with it, can doubt that it is the duty of an ex-Communist to inform his government of activities, such as espionage, or the penetration of its armed forces or administrative apparatus, by party members, or by anyone working under party direction. The failure of many American liberals, however amiable, to comprehend this fact of contemporary political life is a symptom of their failure to comprehend what have been the tragic necessities of the first half of our century. Perhaps they will not be the necessities of the second half: but precisely in order that they may not be it is indispensable to comprehend them. And Chambers, for all the repulsion of his book, can do more than any other American writer to enable them to do so.
Both the American and the British intellectual ‘establishments’ may dismiss the idea that they have anything to learn either from Chambers’ book or, for that matter, from any further discussion of the Communist issue, such as this essay attempts. The British intellectual establishment, with few exceptions, never did take Communism seriously. The corresponding American circles once did so, but now regard the whole question as closed. In one sense no doubt it is. No well-balanced thinker is likely to accept the seamless robe of Marxism-Leninism again. The objective evidence against doing so is too strong. But it will go hardly with the West if its intellectuals now sink back into a smug disregard of either the Communist faith or the Communist fact. Unless we feel in ourselves the relentless but potentially fruitful tension between Communist values and our own we shall make little sense of the contemporary world. To fail to take Communism with the utmost seriousness is still almost as disastrous a mistake as to take Communism hysterically, as Chambers did and still does. The one misappreciation leads headlong to the other. It is true that Communism as a faith (though not as a national power) is now in evident decline: but those who complacently write it off will receive unpleasant surprises. There is still enough dynamic in Communism – and, of course, more than enough sheer power in Russia and China – for that. And when these unpleasant surprises come, those who have refused to take Communism seriously will be sure to rush to the other extreme and take it hysterically. Communism is not, as all Communists, and many anti-Communists, supposed in the first half of the century, the only thing that matters. But woe betide the lazy philistines who think that Communism does not now matter at all, or that the moral and intellectual dilemmas which it poses are not real and agonising. For even this waning faith could prove irresistible if it were met by a wholly faithless generation: by a generation whose sole silly ambition was to get rich quick.
To put the matter bluntly, Witness is an American book about the life and death issues of our day, which is not superficial. It is not superficial because almost alone of fully articulate Americans, Chambers has had a Marxist training. And whatever else a Marxist training may do to a man – and it often ruins him – it is a sovereign remedy for superficiality. It is, no doubt, one of the many irritating characteristics of all those who have been, to any considerable degree, through the Communist experience that they, at heart, consider that all those who have not are in some degree superficial. Perhaps it may be possible to forgive this intellectual arrogance when it is recalled how much damage of other kinds that experience usually inflicts upon them. But the characteristic is there.
Chambers’ book, however, is the proof that there has been another America: a tragic America, opposite in almost every respect from the glossy, unthinking America of appearances: an America of terrible and searing conflicts, an America which makes our little Britain seem still a haven of tranquillity. It will be by facing and then transcending those conflicts of their own immediate past that Americans of the second half of the century will be able to avoid their repetition. For this purpose, Chambers’ book is of primary importance. It is important precisely because it and its author have had such disastrous effects. For this immensely gifted man was fated to make mistakes in judgement so terrible that in both his Communist, and then in his anti-Communist, periods he has done fearful harm. To understand how all that happened: to see how this man of some genius both suffered and inflicted these disasters, is imperative. For we have to live with the fruits of what he and his generation did and suffered.
First of all we may dispose summarily of the issue which inevitably preoccupied the readers of the book when it originally appeared, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. This was the issue of the guilt or innocence of Mr Alger Hiss and the others accused of conspiracy and espionage by Chambers. Eight years later everyone can see that, just as in the case of Koestler’s indictment of Stalinism, there can be no doubt of the general correctness of the accusations. Precisely what these particular accused men did or did not do may remain to some extent in doubt. But that Communist Party members behaved in this way, as a duty, only the wilfully ignorant can now deny. They would have been intolerably bad Communists, indeed they would not have been Communists at all, if they had not. This issue out of the way, we should examine Witness simply as a major document of our time.
In this book also the Communist case is much better put than its own protagonists have ever managed to do. In a short chapter called ‘The Outrage and Hope of the World’ Chambers splendidly conveys what Communism meant to those who received its message during the first half of the twentieth century. Chambers writes that men in the West are moved to Communism by ‘just two challenges, the problem of war and the problem of economic crisis’, and that ‘both crises are aspects of a greater crisis of history for which Communism offers a plausible explanation and which it promises to end’:
... his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilisation which nothing less drastic can save – a civilisation foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it.
Thus the Communist Party presents itself as the one organisation of the will to survive the crisis in a civilisation where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering or absent. It is in the name of that will to survive the crisis, which is not theoretical but closes in from all sides, that the Communists first justified the use of terror and tyranny, which are repugnant to most men by nature and which the whole tradition of the West specifically repudiates.
It is in the name of that will to survive that Communism turns to the working class as a source of unspoiled energy which may salvage the crumbling of the West. For the revolution is never stronger than the failure of civilisation. Communism is never stronger than the failure of other faiths.
It is clear that this still seemed an extremely powerful argument to Chambers, writing in 1950 or 1951. Today, ten years later, we notice at once that it is no longer fully applicable. One of the two challenges, that of economic crisis, is for the present at least not there any longer. The other challenge, that of war, is. But it has changed its character: there is no longer any high probability of war between ‘rival capitalist powers’. The threat which preoccupies us is of war between the Capitalist and Communist worlds. Hence the adoption of Communism cannot any longer appear to a man as the effort to transcend war by means of international revolutionary action. On the contrary, to adopt Communism today is merely to change sides in a threatened conflict.
It is a strength of Chambers’ book that, like the other writers of this literature, he does justice to the intense idealism, mixed in the most extraordinary way with the basest passions, which pervaded the Communist movement of his time. For instance he writes of a Communist veteran with whom he came in contact: ‘In her worked the revolutionary will to overcome ignorance and prejudice in the name of militant compassion and intelligent human unity.’ Even more strikingly he speaks of ‘the appeal of Communism... whenever it coincides with humanity and compassion, especially when the outside world denies them’. He illustrates this with an account of the effects of his own treatment (obligatory, as he notes, for a Communist) of the Chambers’ negro maid, Edith Murray, in Baltimore:
To those who wonder what the appeal of Communism is, this episode may be worth pondering upon... When Edith Murray first sat down to table with us – and we were the first white people who had ever asked her to sit at the same table with them – she showed fear, then embarrassment. I will not presume to say what her final feeling was. In any case, what we had to give her was not a place at our table. What we had to give her was something that belonged to her by right, but which had been taken from her, and which we were merely giving back. It was her human dignity. Thus, by insisting on acting as Communists must, we found ourselves unwittingly acting as Christians should. I submit that that cuts to the heart of one aspect of the Communist appeal.
Some years afterwards at the second Hiss trial, Edith Murray, summoned to identify Chambers, was the only person willing to say, not merely that what Chambers said was true, but ‘he was a good man’.
It is all the stranger that in spite of these passages, and of much other evidence of his clear appreciation of the positive sides of Communism, Chambers should repeatedly assert that Communism is ‘absolutely evil’. This is no doubt part of the whole mystical or metaphysical position which Chambers has adopted, and which we must consider. But at the level of simple common sense, could self-contradiction be more complete? A dozen times he writes that Communism always was, is now, and always will be, ‘absolutely evil’: and a dozen times he explains with wonderful eloquence that Communism often coincided with humanity and compassion and made Communists behave as Christians should. The un-metaphysical mind can make nothing of this. The tragedy of Communism lies precisely in the fact that it had the most glorious aspirations of any political movement in history. That is why Communism is still worthy of the most serious and searching criticism. It is barely worthwhile to spend time and trouble in denouncing the abominations of Fascism any longer. But we must continue to subject Communism to strict appraisal. For it fell from the highest pinnacles of human aspiration. It was not, is not, and will never be ‘absolutely evil'; for that very reason Communism must be adjudged the graver matter by far. ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’
If Chambers cannot assess the ethics of Communism without self-contradiction, he also disastrously misjudges the resilience and flexibility of the non-Communist society in which he lives. Writing in the early nineteen-fifties he was still convinced that Communism was almost certain to defeat the West: and he implies strongly that the only hope for the survival of the West is world war at an early date. The West is ‘the unsavable society’. ‘We have joined the losing side’, he tells his wife when he breaks with the Communists. ‘The world economic and military crisis closes in from every side.’ He is still convinced that as far as this world is concerned the Communists alone really know what they are about: that they can only be opposed in a mood of metaphysical defiance and despair, because, though almost certain to triumph, they are absolutely evil. Above all it is disastrous even to attempt to modify and reform Western society on New Deal or social-democratic lines, because this plays into the hands of the Communists.
Could political folly go farther? The exact opposite of almost every one of the above propositions has proved correct. How could a man of Chambers’ immense political learning and ability make such fantastic errors? How little intellectual ability and knowledge count, as against emotional stability, for the purpose of reaching wise political decisions! For no doubt it was Chambers’ emotional instability which led him to misread history just as grossly after he had left the Communist Party as before.
At any rate, any fool can now see that far from it proving impossible to make our Western economies work by means of rather limited reforms, it has turned out to be comparatively easy to do so. And as to war, the survival of the West (and the East for that matter) rests precisely in staving off a third world war by every prudent means. Again, Communism, though the official doctrine of two of the most powerful states in the world, is obviously a waning force, less and less capable of inspiring the minds and hearts of men. As such it is virtually extinct in Eastern Europe, and steadily relaxing its hold in Russia. It is still really alive only in China and in a section (but only a section) of the revolutionary intelligentsia of the undeveloped world. In such a situation the one immediate danger for the West would be a failure to carry through and carry on the continuing process of the modification of their economic structures, which has so far given such remarkably favourable results. (The longer-term danger would no doubt be a failure to find a satisfying faith by which the people of an affluent society may live. This is indeed an acute danger, and here a study of Chambers’ book, with all its inconsistencies, can be immensely valuable.)
Chambers was doomed seriously to damage the one force, reforming American liberalism, which could falsify his prophecies of catastrophe. Fortunately, by the time of the Hiss case, the New Deal had done its essential work. The three indispensable modifications of the American economy had taken place. Mass trade unionism had been firmly established. The farmers had been compulsorily cartelised and subsidised under statute. The traditions of meeting the onset of depression with higher, instead of lower, government expenditure, and with lower, instead of higher taxation, had been established (in practice although not overtly). Accordingly, the crisis ceased ‘to close in from every side’. Humanly enough Chambers simply did not notice.
The central contention of Chambers’ book has still to be considered. Chambers is at heart concerned with none of the things which have been so far discussed. They are important to him, but incidental to his main purpose, which is to assert that the catastrophe of Communism is merely a part of the catastrophe of the rational, empirical approach to the universe as a whole: that there is no alternative to Communism except a belief in one or other form of supernaturalism.
Chambers repeatedly makes this assertion; for example, he thus describes his conversion from Communism:
What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralysing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step. If I had rejected only Communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility, the most persuasive because the least hypocritical in announcing its purpose and forcibly removing the obstacles to it.
The book is full of such passages. For example: ‘... man’s occasional lapses from God end inevitably in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action.’ Or again, we are told that the conflict between:
... the two great camps of men – those who reject and those who worship God – becomes irrepressible. Those camps are not only outside, but also within nations. The most conspicuously menacing form of that rejection is Communism. But there are other forms of the same rejection, which in any case Communism did not originate, but merely adopted and adapted... For if my story is worth telling, it is because I rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of life in our time – the revolutionary ending and the success ending. I chose a third ending.
Chambers makes it clear that he means a religious ending.
These passages make Witness the most explicit example of the literature which we are examining. It will be better to postpone comment until the evidence of a Russian witness also has been heard. But let us note one characteristic of Chambers’ testimony. For him the lack of a religious sense (of which lack Communism is merely, he writes, a manifestation) leads to ‘intolerable shallowness of thought’ and, through that, to ‘incalculable mischief in action’. And he implies that this shallowness of thought and mischief in action are characteristic of the two ‘endings of life in our time – the revolutionary ending and the success ending’.
The negative aspect of this conclusion at least is profoundly important. It is the most important single truth of our time that neither the revolutionary ideal nor the personal-success ideal will suffice. The revolutionary ideal is seen to be necessary and good at certain times and places where intolerable and otherwise immovable institutional obstacles stand in the way of elementary social justice and decency. But when that is manifestly no longer the case, the revolutionary ideal becomes simply irrelevant. At such times and places it becomes grotesque to ask men not only to die, but to lie and forge and spy and deceive, for the sake of an irrelevance. Nevertheless it is precisely at such times and places that the emptiness of the alternative ideal of personal success – usually in its simplest form of personal self-enrichment – stands revealed. As Chambers, quoting Dante, puts it, those ‘that were neither for God nor Satan, but were for themselves’, will never make a world worth living in. Chambers is a thousand times right in his pessimistic rejection of both these contemporary ideals. It is because of this that his book should be studied above all perhaps by his fellow countrymen: when they have faced its dilemmas they will have faced the contemporary world.
There remains the question of whether Chambers is right also in his positive assertion that the sole remaining ideal is the religious. And what specifically does he mean by the religious ideal, or ‘ending’ as he calls it? Chambers did not, like so many ex-Communists, enter the Roman Catholic Church and accept the full panoply of religious dogma. Instead he turned to the Society of Friends, the least dogmatic, and the least superstitious, of all organised religious bodies.
The culminating expression of the literature under discussion has come out of Russia itself. In Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago we hear again the characteristic strangled cry. How could it be otherwise when the work could not be published in its own country, the manuscript was probably in danger, and the book had to be smuggled abroad in equivocal circumstances?
The apparition of this Russian novel of the classical tradition, escaping from the Soviet Union of the nineteen-fifties, has made an extraordinary impression upon the world. Not that this has been an advantage; on the contrary, the passions, prejudices and vulgar propaganda which these events have aroused in the West have done nothing but harm to the book. They have obscured the message which it sought to send to us, and confused judgement upon its merits.
For that matter it is none of my business to discuss the book’s literary quality: it has been over-discussed already. As to that an opinion may be quoted rather than asserted. Mr Edmund Wilson, perhaps the most authoritative critic now using the English language, has written: ‘Dr Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.’
One could hardly put it higher than that! But it would be hasty to conclude that Wilson is necessarily wrong. Such a book has a hundred aspects, with many of which these pages have no concern. Indeed, Dr Zhivago contains relatively little overt criticism either of rationalism in general or Communism in particular. It is a positive book; it is an assertion, almost a celebration. ‘In it’, Wilson writes, ‘positive values – Christianity and love and art – are presented with such overwhelming power that the barbarities against which they must assert themselves seem lacking in long-range importance.’ The trinity of values is broadly conceived. It is not only love, in the sense of the passion of a man and woman for each other, but the whole skein of personal relations, which is celebrated. It is a mysterious, unnamed something, the creativeness of which is fleetingly revealed in art, rather than art itself, which is extolled. And it is religion, in the form of the Christianity of the Greek Orthodox Church, but yet religion as an historical phenomenon, which is worshipped. There is bitter criticism of twentieth-century values, Communist and Capitalist alike, in all this; but it emerges only incidentally, and, so to say unavoidably. It emerges because twentieth-century thought and feeling have disastrously disregarded the things which Pasternak believed to be above all important. It is not his fault if his assertion becomes a condemnation.
In one of its aspects Zhivago is a simple love story, as straightforward and tragic as Romeo and Juliet or Anna Karenina. As in a million other such stories, the hero and heroine, Yury and Lara, meet, love, are parted, suffer, come together again, and are finally destroyed by remorseless fate. What has this sort of thing to do with the reaction against a rationalistic view of the world? Yury and Lara could have loved and lost anywhere, at any time. At the heart of the conflict which racks them is a private situation; it is simply that they are each married to other people, whom both of them also love; in this respect their tragedy could have happened in Bayswater as easily as in Siberia.
Nevertheless, the love story in Zhivago is, from the Russian government’s – and most other governments’ – point of view, profoundly subversive. It is subversive in the sense that Julia’s love of Winston Smith was subversive. Of course no one would have worried if Pasternak had just told us that some character of his called Yury was in love with another character called Lara. Such statements are fully permissible even on the standards of the Union of Soviet Writers. But Pasternak has done a great deal more than that. He has somehow conveyed to us the force of their love: he has shown its intolerant power in action. And that was not easily to be forgiven him, for he has asserted that this relationship is in some respects more important than anything else: more important perhaps – and here was his blasphemy – than ‘the revolution’ itself. This part of the book is a hymn to ‘weeping anarchic Aphrodite’. The political, or rather anti-political, impact of the book will be lost unless the force of the love story is recalled.
At the climax of the book, Lara and Yury become acutely threatened by the revolution. In a desperate purge before the introduction of the NEP, the local Communist authorities are rounding up everybody who might be expected to be nonconformist, whether in fact they are or not, all people with questionable pasts, ex-bourgeois and the like. Lara, because her husband (though he has been a famous Red Commissar) has by now been himself purged and is on the run, and Yury because he is so far from being a Communist, are in particular danger. Knowing it is really no good – in order to take advantage of their remaining days in their own way, in order to use them up ‘saying good-bye to life’ – they go to hide in an abandoned, half-ruined house in the Siberian countryside. It is deep winter. They are together there with Lara’s little girl for less than three weeks. At this point two of the book’s main themes, namely the exaltation of physical creation by love, and of aesthetic creation by, in this case, poetry, come together and fuse. Wilson has written that this chapter is ‘like nothing else in the whole of fiction’. They feel ecstasy in being together in isolation. The fearfully hard manual work they have to do to survive in the abandoned house in the Siberian winter is sanctified:
In the rush of some task or other their hands would meet and join and then they set down whatever they were carrying, weak and giddy, all thoughts driven from their heads. And the moments went by until it was late and, horrified, they both remembered that Katya had been left on her own much too long or that the horse was unwatered and unfed, and rushed off, conscience-stricken, to make up for lost time and make good what they had left undone.
(It must be recalled that we are hearing Pasternak’s voice muffled and confused by translation. [1] For example, Wilson writes that the Russian of this last sentence is far richer – ‘the minutes run into hours’. One may sympathise with the translators in their almost insuperable task but one may also mourn this immense impoverishment of language. The impact of the work in Russian must be of a different order of magnitude.)
And now Yury’s other passion, his passion for aesthetic creation, takes possession of him with a grip more ferocious even than his passion for Lara. He sits alone far into the night writing poetry in a way more absorbed than ever before or after. In all this ecstasy, desperation and grinding physical work by day, ‘his greatest torment was his impatience for the night, his longing so to express his anguish that others should weep’.
The themes intersect. The writer’s instinct to communicate so ‘that others should weep’ takes priority. There follows a consummate description of the poetic process itself. For an instant, in the beleaguered house, the flame of creation in both its forms has towered up. We are made to feel that such a force must be omnipotent: that its action although ‘no stronger than a flower’ will indeed ‘raise the wreckful siege of battering days’. Then Yury, disturbed by a strange sound, looks out of the window:
He was dazzled by the white flame playing on the shadowless, moonlit snow, and could at first see nothing. Then the long, whimpering, deep-bellied baying sounded again, muffled by the distance, and he noticed four long shadows, no thicker than pencil strokes, on the edge of the snow-field just beyond the gully.
The wolves stood in a row, their heads raised and their muzzles pointing towards the house, baying at the moon or at its silver reflection on the windows.
All we can say is that those four pencil strokes have now been indelibly drawn upon the sheet of world literature. The miracle of black ink has had its might. In one of the ways that is possible, immortality, which, Pasternak writes, is ‘only a stronger word for life’, has asserted itself against death and corruption.
But in the world of things the wolves immediately close in. In Pasternak’s scrupulously unextenuating narrative, Yury and Lara are parted, separately crushed and degraded, and their dead bodies thrown upon the garbage heap. Yury gets back to Moscow only to go to seed, ‘gradually losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and a writer’, to die pointlessly of a worn-out heart muscle in a broken-down Moscow tram. Lara’s fate is worse. After the most subtle agonies that Pasternak can devise for her, she is still ‘a casually beautiful woman’, still capable of rising to the heights of poetic and emotional imagination. She gets back to Moscow in time to attend Yury’s funeral. She is invited by Yury’s half-brother, who is a high Communist functionary, but who has appreciated him, to help edit the poems he has left. Then Pasternak makes one of his few violent (although still oblique) comments upon the regime. He kills his marvellous heroine, exquisite and strong, on whom he has lavished his creative powers, in two dreadful, icy, off-hand sentences:
One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.
This relentless picture of the degradation and destruction of Yury and Lara’s kind of people by war and revolution raises the issue of whether or not the Yurys and Laras were, after all, feeble sentimentalists – were, to use the inimitable English schoolboy’s expression, ‘dripping wet’. This indeed is what the Russian literary officials reiterate.
There are, surely, two things to say about that. In the first place it is perfectly true that men possessed of the highest creative powers are unusually vulnerable. A man simply cannot have it both ways: if he possesses the immensely heightened sensibilities of a poet, he cannot be as hard as nails at the same time. It is quite true that Yury was ‘too soft’ to survive intact the First World War, the two revolutions, the famine, and the three years’ civil war. If he had not been he could not possibly have been the incarnation of the creative process. No one can give birth while clad in armour.
On the other hand, for us in the West to accuse Yury of being ‘a weakling’ is to make ourselves ridiculous. Are we pretending that we possess the physical toughness to go through a tenth of what Yury went through before he cracked? After all, he was a thoroughly efficient doctor who served in the First World War, was wounded, took part in local administration during the February Revolution, went back to his hospital job in Moscow, stuck to it through the October Revolution when most of his colleagues refused to go on working, survived two Moscow winters of famine, had typhus, got his family out to Siberia, survived two years in the Siberian taiga as the medical officer of the Partisans, and walked back to Moscow through the starving countryside. Are we then to rise sternly from our desks in our centrally-heated rooms and accuse him of weakness?
The really staggering thing is how a Yury can have survived as long as he did. And of course when we ask that question we are really asking the question of how Pasternak survived. We do not know enough of the facts to be able to answer, but we may be sure that his survival could not have been accomplished without both an immense initial vitality and without extraordinary resilience, skill and flexibility. Of the initial vitality I can, as it happens, bear witness.
I met Pasternak at a Writers Congress in Paris some twenty-five years ago. I knew no more of him than that he was a famous Russian poet, and I could not really communicate with him across the language barrier. But I have never forgotten the sense of incomparable aliveness in the man. He was possessed with immortality in his sense of ‘only a stronger word for life’. Of his survival through the darkest times of all in the nineteen-thirties little is, I think, known. There is one anecdote. In one of the very worst years an English visitor to Moscow is said to have somehow got hold of his telephone number and rung him up. Pasternak replied: ‘Oh, but my dear fellow, didn’t you know? I died some years ago.’ All we can say is that by some extraordinary grace, this most vulnerable and most provocative of the creative minds of Russia lived on right through it all, into the nineteen-sixties; and just before he died sent us his genius.
‘Personal relations for ever and ever’, as EM Forster extolled them: even personal relations raised to the point of passionate love, are far indeed from being Pasternak’s be-all and end-all. We saw that at the very climax of his passion, it was not for Lara that Yury could hardly contain his impatience for the night: it was for his desk! One of the things which Pasternak’s whole book extols as an ultimate value in life is aesthetic creation. This whole aspect of his book is highly relevant to our theme.
Pasternak makes only one or two overt statements on the subject of aesthetics:
I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm in which there are innumerable concepts and varied phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle which comes into every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen it as a form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content. All this is as clear to me as daylight. I feel it in every bone of my body, but it’s terribly difficult to express or to define it.
A work of art can appeal to us in all sorts of ways – by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. One is much more shaken by the presence of art in Crime and Punishment than by Raskolnikov’s crime.
There is no plurality in art. Primitive art, the art of Egypt, Greece, our own – it is all, I think, one and the same art throughout, an art which remains itself through thousands of years. You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can’t be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work which includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work.
Pasternak does not know, any more than anyone else does, what this ‘it’ is. But at the crisis of the book he comes nearer to giving an insight into the process of aesthetic creation than perhaps anyone else has succeeded in doing. In a passage which has already become famous he describes how Yury felt (just before he saw the wolves) when he really got going that night in the beleaguered house:
After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was himself astonished, his work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language, his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds, but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed.
At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him; the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future. He was controlled by the next step it was to take in the order of its historical development; and he felt himself to be only the pretext and the pivot setting it in motion.
It will be seen that the process of inspiration is quite unmystically described. There is nothing supernatural ‘above him and controlling him’: it is ‘the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future’. He was ‘the next step it was to take in the order of its historical development’. Again, it is interesting to notice that this passage is not only highly dialectical but echoes a specifically Marxist concept. Just as Marx said that the Hegelian dialectic was standing on its head and that he had turned it right side up, so Pasternak says that in the most intense moments of creation, the correlation of forces controlling the artist is stood on its head: language, the mere instrument of expression, becomes the originating force, and makes the poet its instrument. Pasternak, steeped in Hegelianism at Marburg under Professor Cohen, was, whether he liked it or not, the co-heir of Marx in this whole way of thinking.
There are not many other passages in the book which discuss aesthetic creation. But there are a hundred which exemplify it. The book is saturated with nature poetry, and it ends, uniquely, in a series of poems. These are almost inaccessible to us in translation, but we can faintly glimpse their indispensability to the text. In this specifically aesthetic aspect of the book, Pasternak is surely saying the same thing as he is saying in his love story. He is saying that if you think that either personal relations or aesthetic creation are all very well in their way, but that just now you haven’t time for such frills; that you're too busy waging the class war, or making money, or winning national wars, or running an empire, and things of that sort, well so be it. Only at the end of the day you will make the unpleasant discovery that life is not worth living. No one knows why – at any rate no one can put it into so many words – but these things are aspects of the point and purpose of life. Take them away and nothing is left.
For Pasternak, physical creation through love and aesthetic creation through art are subsumed in the religious conception of the resurrection. Scattered through the book, yet an integral part of it, are a whole series of passages which if they were brought together would give us Pasternak’s cosmology, or his theology if one prefers to call it so. Indeed art, love and religion are for Pasternak barely separable concepts. ‘Art’, he writes, ‘has two constant, unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.’ Thus the whole book is in many respects an uninterrupted meditation upon death and resurrection. Love is the resurrection of the body. Art is the resurrection of the spirit. The agonies and disasters of his characters, their moments of glory and creation, are all, in one of their aspects, incidents in a parable of death and resurrection.
This is for Pasternak the central aspect of religion. But he describes also a whole religious view of history, or as it can equally well be called, an historical view of religion. At the very beginning of the book Yury’s uncle Kolya, who is his main intellectual influence, explains his religious position:
As I was saying, one must be true to Christ. I'll explain. What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why he should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels. Now what is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electro-magnetic waves. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain upsurge of spirit. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment, and for this, everything necessary has been given us in the Gospels. What is it? Firstly the love of one’s neighbour – the supreme form of living energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And secondly, the two concepts which are the main part of the make-up of modern man – without them he is inconceivable – the ideas of free personality and of life regarded as sacrifice. Mind you, all this is still quite new.
At the start then, love and art, and for that matter science, are tied up in a bundle labelled religion. (In this passage it is labelled ‘The Christian Religion’, which will sound rather parochial to many an Indian, Chinese or Japanese reader.) Pasternak believed, so far as I can see, in a completely unsupernatural religion – if that is not a contradiction in terms. The atheist, Uncle Kolya says, can be a perfectly good Christian, if he recognises that the Gospels made the basic ethical discovery upon which everything else hangs. Pasternak’s religion, while saturated with the poetry, the ritual, the forms of communication, of the Greek Orthodox Church, which he loved, seems to be at bottom an ethical doctrine, unmystical, untranscendental.
This impression is confirmed by what Uncle Kolya goes on to say. Christianity to him is essentially an enlargement, an intensification of man’s consciousness. He goes so far as to declare that before Christianity there was ‘no history’. This seems to be a sort of religious equivalent to Engels’ view that everything so far has been social pre-history: that human history proper will only begin with socialism, when man makes his ‘leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom’. Uncle Kolya says that the classical world was all:
... blood and beastliness and cruelty and pockmarked Caligulas untroubled by the suspicion that any man who enslaved others is inevitably second-rate... heavy spokeless wheels, eyes sunk in fat, bestialism, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves. Beastliness convoluted in a triple knot like guts. There were more people in the world than there have ever been since, all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum and all wretched.
And then into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light-footed and clothed in light, with his marked humanity, his deliberate Galilean provincialism, and from that moment there were neither gods nor peoples, there was only man – man the carpenter, man the ploughman, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset whose name does not sound in the least proud [reference to Gorky’s famous saying, ‘Man whose name has so proud a sound’ – JS] but who is sung in lullabies and portrayed in picture galleries the world over.
It is marvellous stuff, but is it true? No doubt you can interpret the message of the Gospels, as Pasternak does here, simply as humanism: as a sort of extreme, mystical, anarchic individualism, which is intolerant of all social groups: of nation, of class, of anything outside the supreme individual. (Pasternak makes it clear in other passages that this is indeed his meaning.) But the Gospels have not always been so interpreted, to put it mildly. Again, can this extreme contrast between the Christian and pre-Christian world really be sustained? Could not some of Uncle Kolya’s denunciations of the Roman Imperial court apply just as well to the courts of, say, the Renaissance Popes? It may be replied that after Christ there was always an ideal to be betrayed, while before him there was ‘no suspicion’ that there was anything wrong with beastliness. But that ignores the existence of all the great pre-Christian and non-Christian moralists, prophets, philosophers, teachers and artists. Pasternak’s strictures on the courts of the Roman emperors do not apply very well to the great centuries of Athens, to say the least of it! Socrates and Sophocles, Pythagoras and Pheidias, Pericles and Thucydides and, in Asia, Confucius and Buddha, Lao Tze and Asoka, have all clean disappeared from his history of humanity! This is surely downright naive? Even if we can agree that there has been an advance in ethical standards over the last two millennia, it must surely be attributed not only to Christianity, but to each of the higher religions, and for that matter to all the major philosophers, teachers and exemplars of mankind. And when we have admitted that, have we not come pretty near saying that there has been, over the millennia, an all-round process of development, of which the creation of higher ethical standards is a part and an expression? Can it be denied, for instance, that the abolition of, say, chattel slavery, accompanying and made possible by the rise in productive technique, has been a part of that development? And when we have said that, are we not back quite close to that view of universal history which Pasternak so dislikes?
Pasternak’s religion must be judged, of course, not by this or that example, but from the book as a whole, since the book is in one way an enormous parable. It may be too soon to attempt that. But I have the impression that in spite of all his peculiarities and historical naiveties, we have here a religious statement much richer than other such contemporary attempts. It is a statement full of all the Byzantine mysticism of the Greek Church, yet it appears to be in essence simply a particular view of universal history: a view independent of supernaturalism or of authoritarian revelation. It is therefore in no ultimate conflict with inductive reason. Pasternak is simply putting up a great warning sign to contemporary reason that there are still whole vast areas of human life – the essential areas at that – which cannot be fruitfully approached by any rationalism which is not much more humble and cautious, and so, much more truly scientific, than heretofore. But Pasternak does not specifically assert that these areas of consciousness can never be approached empirically and rationally. And unless and until a writer does that he has not joined the retreat from reason.
What does all this come to politically?
The priority of the love of human beings for each other, of aesthetic creation, and of religious meditation are each asserted, as Wilson says, with immense power. In a sense this triple assertion is Pasternak’s political programme. For good or ill, however (but no doubt inevitably), he has by no means left it at that. The book has a whole specifically political, or, if you will, anti-political aspect, and it is this aspect about which there has been all the trouble. What the Soviet authorities could not stand, I suspect, was that Pasternak’s attitude to them (although not to the revolution) is simply contemptuous. Is this contempt justified?
For the revolution itself, even in its second Communist aspect, Pasternak has comprehension, although not acceptance. He makes Pasha – Lara’s husband – at the very climax of the book, when Pasha comes in flight to the beleaguered house, a few hours after Yury and Lara have been parted, and a few hours before Pasha shoots himself to evade his Chekist pursuers – he makes Pasha attack Yury for his reactionary attitudes. He explains how Lara, who in youth had been seduced by a rich lawyer, was for him the symbol of everything that was being outraged, trampled upon, degraded by capitalism – ‘you could indict the century in her name, out of her mouth. It was no trifling matter, you must agree.’ Yury replies: ‘How well you speak of her. I too saw her in those days, just as you have described her... I still remember her...’
Pasha: ‘You saw and you remembered? And what did you do about it?’ It is the fierce Communist accusation against the monumental complacency of the world: against the feebleness, as it seems to them, of all the Yurys who deplore and do nothing.
At the time Yury merely answers: ‘That’s another story altogether.’
But Pasternak’s answer in the book as a whole is, I suppose, Simone Weil’s answer to the same question: ‘It is better to fail than to succeed in doing harm.’ Pasha and the Bolsheviks were splendidly virile, effective, robust, compared to the rest of us. But ‘life is not as simple as to cross a field’. (A Russian proverb quoted by Pasternak in one of his poems.) A little less vigour, and a little more insight might have got them further in the end; on the whole they have probably done a little worse, even, than our apparently so ineffective and muddled democracies.
But Pasha rushes on to give a magnificent speech on what the revolution has meant to him:
Yes. Well. So you see, the whole of this nineteenth century – its revolutions in Paris, its generations of Russian emigrants starting with Herzen, its assassinations of Tsars, some only plotted, others carried out, the whole of the workers’ movements of the world, the whole of Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, the whole of this new system of ideas with its novelty, the swiftness of its conclusions, its irony, and its pitiless remedies invented in the name pity – all of this was absorbed into Lenin, to be expressed and personified by him and to fall upon the old world as retribution for its deeds.
And side by side with him there arose before the eyes of the world the immeasurably vast figure of Russia, bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the sorrow and misfortunes of mankind. But why do I tell you all this? To you it must be so much empty noise...
(Incidentally the last sentence hits off perfectly the Communist’s maddening assumption that no one but he has the faintest clue to what everything is about. Yury-Pasternak, who has thought about all this, up, down and sideways, a thousand times, is told that it must be so much empty noise to him.) Nevertheless the passage as a whole shows a commanding realisation of the grandeur of the Russian event. After this, and after several other important passages in the book (for instance, Yury’s thrilled reaction to the first Bolshevik proclamations on the seizure of power: ‘... what splendid surgery! You take a knife and you cut out all the old stinking sores...’) it is merely silly to say that Pasternak never understood the revolution. The whole gravity of his offence to his government is that he understood it and has rejected it.
That rejection is, however, in many respects a measured one. It seems to have been widely overlooked that Lara is made on balance to accept the revolution, while Yury on balance rejects it. Lara says that she accepts the revolution because she saw much more poverty in her youth than he did:
I mustn’t let myself be influenced by your way of looking at things. You and I don’t really think alike. There is something intangible, marginal, we both understand and feel in the same way. But on the wide issues, in our philosophy of life, it’s better for us to stay on different sides.
There is subtlety in this recognition that what matters between two people politically is usually not which side they come down on, which with intelligent people must be a question of balance, of ‘on the whole’. What really matters is the way in which they champion this or that political cause, attitude or party. Any politically experienced person knows that he will know people with whom he has much in common on the other side, and people with whom he has not much in common on his own side. But that does not mean that he will not work wholeheartedly with all the people on his own side or that he will not work wholeheartedly against all the people on the other side. For this is the way in which politics must be conducted, the only way in which, out of their dialectic, a workable system of governing a country can emerge.
Perhaps it was not only the fact that Yury-Pasternak comes down against the revolution which proved so galling to the Soviet authorities when they received the manuscript of Zhivago. It may have been even more the way in which the rejection was put. In the course of the above conversation between Yury and Lara, which takes place when they first meet again in Siberia after several years of separation, Lara notices his changing attitude. He replies that, yes, he has changed: in all this time something definite should have been achieved. ‘Why haven’t the Communists done better? It’s because they haven’t any real capacities, they are ungifted.’ Probably they minded that comment a good deal more than if they had been vulgarly and foolishly denounced as robbers and murderers. After all, in war, revolution and civil war, we are all robbers and murderers; such terms lose their meaning. But it is depressing to be shown to be ungifted robbers and murderers. For then it is all for nothing.
The Communists, of course, have a comprehensive answer to all this. For them Pasternak’s, or anyone else’s, ‘rejection of the revolution’, when it is not simply a disguised way of fighting for the counter-revolution – that they understand – is simply irrelevant and ridiculous. They see the revolution as an absolute historical necessity. The sufferings it inflicted on the Russian people, the damage it did to Russian civilisation, are simply the price that had to be paid for survival into a new epoch of human development. In so far as there is any point in blaming anyone for performing their inevitable historical role in such events, the entire blame for all the suffering and social damage lies on those who resisted the revolution or failed wholeheartedly to support it. Pasternak, in their scheme of things, is just a sentimentalist, whining about the necessities of the historical epoch into which he was born.
History, however, has shown that this is an insufficient answer. A revolution was no doubt indispensable in Russia. But the full Communist theory of class-war-to-a-finish, as the sole reality of social life, has proved to have been a monomania. Pasternak is doing an immense service to the Russians of the mid-twentieth century by reasserting the truth, that men and women are not only workers, peasants, intellectuals, capitalists or aristocrats, but also men and women. Is not this becoming ‘the truth’ – becoming, that is to say, the relevant, needed, appropriate approach – for Russia also – with every year that passes? While any claim that Russia is, on balance, more classless than the West can hardly be sustained, yet what can be said of Russia is that there, as in the West, the general merging and melting of classes is taking place. Therefore the Communist theory of total class conflict will become less and less relevant. The Russians will inevitably wake up to find that what matters to them are, precisely, Pasternak’s ‘values’: that their happiness or misery is being determined by their personal relations, their aesthetic powers and their religious capacity, rather than by their class relations.
There is something else in the book to which the Soviet authorities were bound to object intensely. And that is, not its anti-Communism, but the contempt for politics of any kind which Pasternak sometimes, though not always, expresses. It is true that in some passages there is a recognition of the practical achievements of the revolution: but even in them there is a total dismissal of the philosophy on which it is founded. For example, Sima, a religious friend of Lara’s, is made to say:
In everything to do with the care of the workers, the protection of the mother, the struggle against the power of money, our revolutionary era is a wonderful era of new, lasting, permanent achievements. But as to its interpretation of life and the philosophy of happiness which it preaches – it’s simply impossible to believe that it is meant to be taken seriously, it’s such a comical remnant of the past.
Moreover, more often than not even this tribute to the practical aims and achievements of the revolution is left out. Yury attacks Marxism to an endlessly kind and good Communist, who goes to infinite trouble to help him:
Marxism a science? Well, it’s taking a risk to say the least, to argue about that with a man one hardly knows, but all the same Marxism is not sufficiently master of itself to be a science. Science is more balanced. You talk about Marxism and objectivity. I don’t know of any teaching more self-centred and further from the facts than Marxism. Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to the truth.
There are two objections to this. First, although the criticism of the rigidity of the Communists is fully justified, yet it is a non sequitur to say that this proves that Marxism is not a science. You might as well say that Einstein’s demonstrations that physical theory up till then had been false, in the sense that it did not cover all the facts, proved that physics was not science. Marxism is an attempt at a social science. It is a very early attempt, and in the hundred years which it has now existed it has already been shown that it cannot cover some very important social facts. But the trouble is that no one has come along and given us a comprehensive hypothesis which can cover all the social facts, and until someone has done that we had better be very careful about calling Marxism unscientific. So it may be, but it is not nearly so unscientific as an incoherent jumble of social prejudices without any guiding hypothesis of any kind; and that is only too often the only possession of the critics of Marxism.
Second, if politics really mean nothing to Yury-Pasternak, then it is a pity that he writes about them at all! And this is an issue which Pasternak never faces. He never faces the fact that ‘anti-politicism’ is simply the politics of social despair. Again and again he writes as if decent, sensitive, cultivated men and women should have nothing to do with this dirty business. With respect, this is a vulgar attitude. We are familiar with it all over the world. It is as if the crew of a ship in a storm suddenly remarked that navigation and seamanship generally were a very boring, wet, cold and disagreeable business, which should be given up immediately. Ships, however, do not sail themselves, and the sole effect of the crew going on strike is to hand her over to the first gang of toughs who come along. They will sail her all right: but they will sail her entirely in their own interests. The crew will soon be working again, but not for themselves.
Even the well-known speech of Yury on ‘the reshaping of life’ seems to me open to this criticism:
When I hear people speak of reshaping life it makes me lose my self-control and I fall into despair.
Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life – they have never felt its breath, its heart – however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material which needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my theories about it.
Well, admittedly the Communist attempt at the reshaping of life has proved extremely crude. But life – social life – does not just go on automatically ‘renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself’. Someone or other, representing some social, economic or political interest, is constantly reshaping it whether we like it or not. If we do not attempt to do the job consciously then it will be done unconsciously, and totally without regard for us. It is the glory, as well as the guilt, of the Communists that they attempted to reshape social life consciously. They did it so badly that the results have been worse instead of better, on the whole, than the results of our Western semi-conscious, piecemeal, empirical efforts. But that does not alter the fact that the supreme challenge to the human race today is precisely to achieve a far higher degree of consciousness in the inevitable process of the continual reshaping of social life.
At the very end of the book Lara is made to say the same thing, in the midst of her exquisite lament over Yury’s bier:
The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the beauty of genius, the beauty of loving – that, yes, that we understood. As for such petty trifles as reshaping the world – these things, no thank you, they are not for us.
This is exceedingly arrogant! To achieve a tolerable social system which will allow geniuses such as ‘Yury-Pasternak-Lara’ to live, love and create is not a petty trifle. The work may be too rough for them, but they really need not scoff at the honest journeymen who attempt it.
It will be seen that on this issue of ‘anti-politicism’ which I understood was, unofficially at least, the Soviet authorities’ greatest objection to the book, my opinion is that those authorities were right and Pasternak wrong. Moreover, the concern of the Russian authorities on this issue is understandable. ‘Anti-politicism’ is an old Russian disease, to which the intelligentsia have always been prone. Dostoevsky is its other spokesman of genius. It is the strangled cry of the Russian people, when their government seems to them too hopelessly evil to have anything to do with. It is the inevitable result of the lack, alike under the Tsars and the Communists, of institutions by means of which the people, or even the politically conscious section of the people, can influence their government. It is the result of the gulf which has always stretched in Russia between the government and the governed. It is understandable that the Soviet authorities should have been dismayed when the first spontaneous, enormously powerful, work which came to them after the relaxation of the censorship turned out to be supercharged with this tendency.
It should be needless to say that this is no justification for the Soviet authorities’ suppression of the book. On the contrary, it is pitiable that this vast, apparently omnipotent government, monopolising the means of expression, has cowered back in terror before one man with a pen. Of course they ought to have published Zhivago and then stood up for themselves against it like men. For against what they perhaps most fear in it, namely Pasternak’s ‘anti-politicism’, they have a convincing answer. Moreover, it is an answer which would allow them to by-pass all Pasternak’s other accusations. Even if they were driven to admit them all, they would still be a thousand times right to contend that, however bad they were and are, the more, not the less urgent it is that the Russian people should participate in political life. It was Lenin himself who said that the object of the revolution was to enable every cook to take part in the government of Russia. Why on earth haven’t the Soviet authorities the guts to publish Zhivago and to answer it with arguments from their own classics, instead of making the pitiful pretence that the book would ‘interest no one in Russia'? No doubt the true reason for the members of the Russian literary establishment behaving like poltroons before the phenomenon of Zhivago, is that to Pasternak’s other accusations they have no reply. Or rather they have a reply, and one which has much practical force; but it has implications so humiliating to themselves as to be unusable. In the face of the book’s description of the dreadful consequences for, above all, the ordinary Russian people, of fighting out the class war to a finish, they can say nothing – except that all that is over and done with now. It is not an elevated plea, but it is a familiar one:
‘Thou hast committed...’
‘Fornication? But that was in another country: And besides, the wench is dead.’
It was not in another country, but it was a good many years ago now. Some of it was forty years, some of it twenty years, ago. Did it kill ‘the wench'? If by the wench we understand the Russian people, then of course it did not kill them. This massive and marvellous race survived, and will survive, as one of the very great peoples of the earth. But if we mean by ‘the wench’ the poetry and genius – the Yury-Lara element – in the Russian people, then we must answer that we do not yet know whether that has been killed or no. For a time it seemed that it had been. And if now, and as by a miracle, the moral and aesthetic genius of Russia seems to have been resurrected, that is partly because of the heroic survival of Boris Pasternak until he had written his book.
There they are, the colossi, the giant powers. They seem almost omnipotent and yet, because they suppose themselves to be antithetical, they are almost powerless, stalemated in a balance of mutual terror.
There is something moving about these two huge communities, each so unfitted to rule the world, which yet each feel that they must. How will it end? It might end any day, of course, in a full-scale thermo-nuclear exchange – 1500 missiles in the megaton range each way, and that would be that. But on the whole, ‘the nuclear ending’ seems decreasingly probable. At any rate it is necessary to assume that it is improbable, or all speculation – and everything else for that matter – becomes futile.
There is something extraordinary about the contemporary British relationship to America and to Russia respectively. On the level of daily life we know America a thousand times the better. Without barrier of language, with a hundred interlacing ties between our economies; with large-scale, long-continued migration from Britain to America; with frequent and free intermarriage; with political systems which are different enough to be mutually interesting, but which, when compared to a party dictatorship, are fundamentally similar, we are not quite foreign countries to each other. True, our very nearness produces intense friction: the degree of mutual irritation frequently rises to remarkable heights. British jealousy, American hubris, the memory of past wars, a thousand things, makes this a relationship as restless as it is close.
But close the relationship is, whether we like it or not. You may measure its closeness by a simple contemporary test. No one in Britain, not even the most anti-American Britons – especially them, for otherwise they would not care to indulge their feelings so freely – is frightened of America. And that is a remarkable thing. For after all, the American Strategic Air Force could render the British Isles totally uninhabitable any afternoon, with only a chance of relatively minor retaliation on the United States; and it is a new thing for the British to live completely within the power of a foreign government. But the fact is that none of us gives the matter a thought! We quite simply know that the Americans will not do it. They are not quite a foreign government to us, at least in this crucial respect. There is no way of proving that we are right. But the mere fact that we really are not frightened of them probably means that we are right. For if you are genuinely unfrightened of someone, you can usually get along with him in one way or another.
Compared to all this, Russia is for us still in many ways a terra incognita. Her language is too difficult, her national traditions too strange, the intercourse between us too slight, her political system and her conduct too alarming for, one would have thought, there to be any comparison in the intimacy of our relationship. And yet there is one factor to be put upon the other side. Many people may say that it is too slender even to mention in the same breath with the solid ties which unite us with America; but this may be a hasty judgement. This counterbalancing factor is simply the works of the great Russian novelists. Every educated Briton has read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and now Pasternak. By means of the genius of these ‘master storytellers, master moralists’ (Edmund Wilson) we know what the Russians are like; we actually know them better in many respects than we know even our personal friends in America. The Russians have found interpreters more eloquent than any the world has known. Thus there is a respect in which we in Britain are undeniably closer to the Russians than to the Americans, for we see in the classic Russian literary tradition a flowering of the culture of all Europe.
It may be objected that this tradition no longer corresponds to any living reality in present-day Russia. Was not Pasternak, in particular, writing of an extinct race, battered to death by the terrible forty years since the revolution? Pasternak’s own view on this desperate question appears to be undecided. On the one hand, he ends his novel with the agonising fable of Yury’s and Lara’s abandoned child, Tanya. He declares, both through this fable, and in so many words, that everything has been coarsened and debased.
After Yury and Lara have been parted, Lara bears a child to him while she is wandering with her protector and ex-seducer in the Far Eastern emigration. During these wanderings, the child, Tanya, gets abandoned and is brought up by some Siberian peasants. After a ghastly episode of robbery and murder, she has to fly from the house and become one of the child vagrants who roamed Russia in those years. However she is from time to time put into ‘homes’, given a little elementary education and, during the Second World War, turns up as a regimental laundress. Here two of Yury’s old friends, and his mysterious half-brother, Yevgraf, now a Soviet general, both hear her story and recognise who she is. She is a nice, tough, simple sort of girl: she has become the sort of girl she has had to become to survive such a childhood. After hearing her story, one of Yury’s surviving friends comments:
This has happened several times in the course of history. A thing which has been conceived in a lofty, ideal manner becomes coarse and material. Thus Rome came out of Greece and the Russian Revolution came out of the Russian enlightenment. Take that line of Blok’s, ‘We, the children of Russia’s terrible years’: you can see the difference of period at once. In his time, when he said it, he meant it figuratively, metaphorically. The children were not children, but the sons, the heirs of the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but apocalyptic; that’s quite different. Now the figurative has become literal, children are children and the terrors are terrible. There you have the difference.
This is Pasternak at his most remorselessly realistic. If you break society to pieces, so that, in particular, half the next generation are dragged up without homes or parents, the price is an immense debasement. The child of the marvellous Yury and Lara is merely poor Tanya. But this is not Pasternak’s last word. ‘Five or ten years later’, the surviving friends are reading one of Yury’s books:
Although the enlightenment and liberation which had been expected to come after the war had not come with victory, a presage of freedom was in the air throughout these postwar years, and it was their only historical meaning.
To the two ageing friends sitting by the window it seemed that this freedom of the spirit was there, that on that evening the future had become almost tangible in the streets below, and that they had themselves entered that future and would, from now on, be part of it.
Pasternak is no doubt identifying himself particularly closely with Yury in these passages. He is really writing about his own survival and the survival of his book. He is thinking about the possibility of its reaching the Russian people. He wonders, no doubt, whether it will be suppressed by the government, but more anxiously still he wonders whether the forty terrible years may have rendered the Russians unable to hear such a message as his. But he was hopeful, I think, on both counts.
Nor does it seem that his hopes need be unjustified. On the first and simpler issue of whether the Russian government will in fact be able to keep Zhivago from the Russian people, the evidence seems encouraging. Informed observers who have recently been in Russia report that in the circles of the now rapidly growing educated classes in Russia, ‘everyone’ is talking of the book. Moreover, ‘everyone’ is claiming to have read it, or parts of it. For it is in clandestine circulation, in whole or in part, by means of an ingenious method which it is more discreet to refrain from mentioning. It is ‘the done thing’ to have read, or at least to claim to have read, it, and that is surely extremely significant.
Nor do the risks and penalties seem to be particularly grave. Khrushchev’s Russia is evidently a genuinely different place from Stalin’s. No doubt Stalin’s degree of totalitarianism could have effectively suppressed the book and would probably have physically destroyed Pasternak for writing it and for publishing it abroad. There is no denying the terrible efficacy of suppression and persecution pushed through to their logical conclusion. But once, for any reason, suppression and persecution are modified and moderated: once a limit is set to them, they become ineffective. Then they may actually become self-defeating by awaking an irresistible appetite for the forbidden fruit.
But is there still in existence a Russian public which can understand and appreciate Zhivago? The evidence of an intense interest in a forbidden book is in itself inconclusive. It may be argued that if the Russian government had had the nerve to publish a legal edition of Zhivago, the book would have proved to be too far from anything which the present generation of Russians had ever heard of to make any impact. A generation of ‘Tanyas’ could not be expected to make much of Yury and Lara, even if they were their own mothers and fathers. And indeed so well-informed a Sovietologist as Mr Wolfgang Leonard, himself a graduate of the Lenin School, takes the view that Zhivago is too far from anything which the young Communist students in the advanced party academies have ever heard of for them to be able to make head or tail of it. Again Mr Isaac Deutscher has called Pasternak ‘a voice from the dead’. For the more highly-conditioned members of the present Russian generation this may be so, but will it prove so for either the earlier or the coming generation? A voice from the dead may speak with tongues to the new-born. Rex quondam, Rex futurus. [2] Moreover the opinions of such highly-trained ex-Communists as Mr Leonard and Mr Deutscher do not prove that there is not deep appreciation of Zhivago even amongst the present generation of Russians. After all the graduates of the party schools are a very small proportion of the educated classes in present-day Russia. The rest of these classes have no doubt been fairly severely conditioned: but not to the same extent. It seems possible to believe that Edmund Wilson was right when he ended his review of Zhivago with these words:
As for his [Pasternak’s] enemies in his fatherland I predict that the children, over their vodka and tea, will be talking about the relations between Larissa Fyodorovich (Lara) and Pasha and Yury Andreyevich, as their parents, as I don’t doubt they themselves, have talked about Tanana and Lensky and Eugene Onegin, and Natasha and Prince André and Pierre.
If Wilson is wrong, and there no longer exists in Russia a generation capable of hearing Pasternak’s voice, then the prognosis for their society, and so for the world, must be grave. Not all their physics, their ‘years of economic triumph’, their military might, their rising standard of life, will, unfortunately, avail them in the end. They may annex the barren moon and probe the galaxies for all I know: they may produce ‘fantastic’ weapons and terrorise the world: they may ‘overtake and surpass’ America in production, so that Ivan has ten times as many television sets and motor cars and refrigerators as he can use, while Sam has only twice as many. It will not be enough. But if Wilson is right, it will mean that one man, possessed of a courage and pertinacity of the rarest kind, has preserved across the forty years those things which give meaning to life.
It would be wrong indeed to suggest that it is particularly in Russia that Pasternak should be heeded. In many respects his old-fashioned warning that neglect of the unseen things leads only to dust and disaster, is more needed for us in the West than for Russia. A materialism, more crass than Russia’s, because unilluminated by Communism’s messianic faith, menaces above all the more successful Western societies, such as America and Britain. It would be ignorant and arrogant in the extreme to suggest that Britain, in particular, was exempt from this menace. In some ways she is especially vulnerable to it. Nevertheless there is one respect in which we British may perhaps presume to preach: and that is to preach against the unification of preaching. It is perhaps a fair claim that we in Britain value especially highly the spontaneous individual dissenting opinion: that we value it even when it seems to be manifestly mistaken: that we value spontaneity for its own sake and even when it leads to opinions which seem to have little relation to reality.
For Britain is the traditional land of dissent: of dissent not only in its original religious connotation but of dissent itself: of – if you will – dissent for dissent’s sake. In this respect there seems a persisting difference between the mental climates of Britain on the one hand, and Russia and America on the other. It has been well said that both Russia and America are ‘unanimous countries’. The consensus of opinion at any one time is so strong in each of them that it is difficult indeed for an individual to swim against it. For Russia this is well shown by the letter sent by the editors of Novy Mir, a ‘highbrow’ literary magazine, to Pasternak rejecting the manuscript of Zhivago. [3] It is quite an able, careful and well-reasoned letter, but its essential sense could have been expressed in two of its sentences. The first is: ‘The spirit of your novel is that of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution.’ There follow several thousand words establishing this proposition, which, for that matter, a backward child of ten could find out for himself by glancing through the book. And then comes the conclusion: ‘As people whose standpoint is diametrically opposite to yours, we, naturally, believe that the publication of your novel in the columns of this magazine Novy Mir is out of the question.’
It is as simple as that. The idea that it might be useful, forty years after, to hear a dissenting voice does not so much as enter their heads! There is something both barbarous and panicky about the persistence of such attitudes. When will the Russian authorities get the self-assurance to be civilised?
There is some force in the accusation that the relative mildness of the enforcement of the American consensus is merely a reflection of its overwhelming power, so that there is no need of relatively clumsy compulsions. But what, it may be objected, is wrong with such an, in a sense, voluntary consensus? If a consensus is self-enforced by a vociferous, but yet genuinely spontaneous, unanimity of opinion what need is there to leave room for dissent? What is wrong with a genuinely voluntary unanimity? There is only one thing wrong with it, and that is that it will be sure to be wrong. All experience shows that any such universally held, unchallenged, social dogma will almost certainly be erroneous, in the sense that it will fail to correspond with objective reality. Even if it does not so fail to begin with, it will do so sooner rather than later, for objective social reality will be changing all the time, while the social dogma will remain frozen.
It is for this reason that social dissent, especially, has a value of its own and for itself: that it has a value even when the dissenting opinion appears to almost all of us to be manifestly foolish. The first half of our century has taught us – if it has taught us anything – that we are simply not competent to tell with any high degree of certainty which social opinions are valid and which are not. Therefore a heavy responsibility lies upon anyone who attempts, whether by physical persecution, or by the subtler, but in some respects more deadly, method of monopolising the means of expression, to stamp out a dissenting opinion no matter how apparently foolish. For the foolish opinion has the daunting habit of reappearing, in the next phase of social development, as a precious clue to social reality. If we suppress it we may well commit the suicidal sin of what Pasternak calls ‘quarrelling with history’.
When Lara is telling Yury how much she loves her husband Pasha and why, in spite of that love, their marriage has been a failure, she says of him: ‘He sulked at the course of events. He quarrelled with history.’ How many others, as well as poor Pasha, have in our day ‘quarrelled with history'? Whole nations, whole classes, to say nothing of political parties, groups, sects and individual thinkers, have each and all quarrelled with history. They have all adopted ideas, systems, ideologies, social standpoints which, in the event, have proved to be disastrously out of touch with the real course of development.
First, the old governing classes of Europe quarrelled with history when they blocked social reform before the First World War. And then, between the wars, the governing classes failed everywhere to see that they must, as a minimum, prevent mass unemployment, slump and economic chaos. Next, in the nineteen-thirties, the Fascists and their allies were far more horribly wrong still. The Fascists grasped, it is true, that ‘the contradictions of capitalism’ were fairly readily solvable by means of central control and planning without social ownership. That was so; but in their case this piece of economic, or social, insight merely gave them the power necessary for an attempt to conquer the world by playing upon the most primitive, odious and degraded aspects of human nature. They never dreamt that by such outrages they would rouse an almost universal resistance, which duly crushed them.
Or again, the British Conservatives in the nineteen-thirties supposed that they had only to sit tight in total selfishness in order to survive; and thereby took their country to within an ace of destruction. And then after the second war we socialists, in Britain and elsewhere, supposed that we had only to enunciate the not very profound platitudes of our creed to inherit the government of our countries. It was not so. And now we may confidently predict that the American conservatives, who suppose that the tawdry, trivial, ideal of personal self-enrichment will suffice for a great people, will sooner or later be similarly disillusioned.
Finally, the Communists who are sure that they have put history into their pockets, have again and again quarrelled with the course of events. Marxism attempts to use the historical experience of the race as ‘a guide to action’. That is its glory. Unfortunately that has not prevented its uncritical disciples from getting the whole phasing and timing of the process disastrously wrong. They were wrong, for example, in thinking that capitalism was producing the ever-increasing misery of the masses; in thinking that the break-up of world imperialism must cripple the major capitalisms; and, gravest of all, they were wrong in their appreciation of Fascism. They disastrously underrated Fascism, in one respect, and equally disastrously overrated it in another. For while Fascism by no means turned out to be, as the Communists confidently predicted, an immediately self-contradictory aberration which would be impotent to resolve the economic crisis, yet, on the other hand the Communists grossly overrated the generality of Fascism. They taught that Fascism was not an Italian or German phenomenon. They taught that Fascism was the inevitable political form which every decaying capitalism must adopt if it were not overthrown in good time: that Fascism was the politics of last-stage capitalism. Seeing capitalism as a more or less unified world system, the Communists thought, and think, of the guilt of Fascism as resting not upon the German or Italian capitalists alone but upon all capitalist societies everywhere. Regarding the distinction between the different nations as of secondary importance, they see capitalist development culminating inevitably in Fascism, and contrast it with development in the socialist world culminating, as they fervently believe, in Communism.
History, however, has taken another and more devious course. It did not turn out to be true that every capitalist society, when apparently trapped by the ‘closing in from all sides’ (to recall Chambers’ phrase) of economic crisis would turn to the Fascist ‘way out’. The great slump drove Germany into Fascism, but it drove America into the New Deal and it drove Britain towards social-democracy. Fascism turned out to be merely one of the ‘ways out’ towards which a capitalism might turn when struck by crisis: there was also a liberal and a social-democratic ‘way out’. And each ‘way out’ was practicable.
Who, then, has not ‘quarrelled with history?’ Everyone has been proved wrong, or is in the process of being proved wrong. No one has got hold of more than a bit of the truth. The best that anyone has been able to do is to contribute something necessary and useful. But no sooner have they done so than it has become apparent that their creed was one-sided and had to be superseded to make room for other, and equally one-sided, ideas. After such an experience, how can anyone imagine that they know it all and have the right to suppress, by either the hard or the soft method, a contrary opinion? How can anyone any longer doubt the immense value of, precisely, dissent? For any real, genuine, spontaneously-held personal opinion may, for all we know, contain the grain of truth without which we are all doomed.
In Lara’s speech which has just been quoted, there occurs Pasternak’s well-known protest against all mechanical unanimity:
The great misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined that it was out-of-date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, the notions which were being crammed down everybody’s throat. And there arose the power of the glittering phrase, first Tsarist, then revolutionary.
It is perhaps in respect of the valuation of scepticism, empiricism and so of personal dissent, at their true worth that the British tradition (with all its marked inferiority in some respects: its flatness, its mediocrity, its lack of inspiration) may be worthy of attention.
Zhivago completes, and at the same time transcends, the reaction against mechanical, or ‘mechanistic’, materialism. Pasternak triumphantly demonstrates that analogies, conscious or unconscious, between the working of a machine and the springs of action of a human being are hopelessly misleading. The complexities are of a different order. And, since we have still no means of direct description, let alone of measurement, of these complexities, the crucial aspects of human life remain mysterious to us. They can be approached by the older, much less direct, methods of ascetic, ethical and religious experience alone.
As a matter of fact there is a large element in all this that should be acceptable to minds educated in the Marxist tradition. Marx and Engels were continually inveighing against what they called ‘mechanistic’ materialism. They repeatedly criticised what they considered to be the narrow, oversimplified materialism of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enlightenment. They were pioneers in emphasising that life was an incomparably more complex phenomenon than was allowed for in either the French rationalist or, still more, the English utilitarian traditions which flourished around them. It is strange and sad that the mighty social system which has now been set up in their names should in practice, and whatever its verbal protestations to the contrary, have become more mechanistic – more intolerantly contemptuous that is to say, of everything which is not susceptible to exact measurement – than any Western society has ever been.
Presumably the explanation is that although Western rationalism was in itself crudely mechanistic, it was always balanced and offset by the older, humanistic, aesthetic and religious traditions, which lived on vigorously by its side. Communist rationalism, on the other hand, though in origin much less mechanistic, because based on relatively subtle dialectical distinctions between ‘the laws’ supposedly governing inorganic, organic and social life respectively, has been offset by no surviving pre-scientific traditions. In the event Communist rationalism has run amuck and continually tends to turn into its opposite of a ‘faith’, as arbitrary, authoritarian and rigid as any the world has ever suffered.
Against the awful sterility of this new dogma, the strangled cry of the writers of the literature of reaction has been raised. These writers have convinced us that our attempts to rationalise the social fields have so far been crude and presumptuous. Unless we give far greater weight to the subjective side of man, unless we recognise the power of Pasternak’s troika of values, we shall achieve only disasters. The creativeness of personal relations, of aesthetics, or of religious experience, is what matters today, wherever at any rate the economic problem is on the way to solution. And that will prove equally true whether we are trying to make Communism or merely to make money.
Nevertheless the literature of reaction has now done its work. It is now time to turn our faces in the other direction. The catastrophe of Communist rationalism must not make us despair of reason: reason must for ever strive to encompass all that the old rationalism ignores. We cannot achieve such encompassing reason yet; we do not know how to bring those things which Pasternak celebrates within our universe of rational discourse. It can be argued that we never shall, but I do not know why we should suppose that. Is it not possible dimly to conceive of a science which re-embraced, as did the science of the ancient world, at its own level of complexity, everything that we today think of as ‘not-science'? If so it would, no doubt, become our aesthetic, our ethic and our religion. That may be centuries or millennia away; in the meanwhile scepticism of the social conclusions of reason is our most rational attitude. To doubt, to suspend judgement where the evidence is still inadequate, is one of the highest applications of the reasoning faculty. It is the opposite of unreasonable to recognise the existence of mystery. We can hardly begin to explain the things which, when once we have our daily bread, make life worth living. But that is merely a reason for caution and empiricism when we are forced to take our social decisions.
In so far as the literature of reaction has been a protest, however frenzied, against a reckless failure to take all that into account, it has been justified. If both in intention and in effect it had stopped there, there would be little in it to criticise. But inevitably it has not stopped there; it has sometimes crossed, intentionally or unintentionally, a critical line. On one side of that line are those who point to the unsolved mysteries of social life in order the better to approach their comprehension. On the other side are those who point to the mysteries in order to dissuade us from even attempting to apply reason to society. That is the test. Those who pass this line have deserted, whether they know it or intend it, and whether their inner motive be weariness, class-prejudice or simply despair, to the enemies of civilised life. Who can deny that at its worst and most extreme, some of this literature has thus deserted? That some of its authors have sometimes gloried in our ignorance, exalted our folly, sought to forbid the extension of the frontiers of the known and declared with unmistakable satisfaction that all the most important things in life can never be understood? The effect of this part of the literature has been to promote that ‘loss of nerve’, as Koestler calls it in his most recent work, which has often before in the history of civilisation set a limit to scientific inquiry.
We must not blame these authors for the consequences of their words: they had to utter their cry of protest against the trap into which a mechanistic rationalism had led the world. But though we must not blame them, we must protect ourselves from them. The nightmare of the imposition of mechanism is passing. Now is the time to take up once more the unending task of reason.
The mysteries are seen to be far deeper than we dreamed; reason must become by that much the finer to comprehend them.
1. See Manya Harari, ‘On Translating Zhivago’, Encounter, May 1959; and Edmund Wilson’s reply, ‘Legend and Symbol in Doctor Zhivago’, Encounter, June 1959.
2. Rex quondam, Rex futurus – once king, future king; that is, what was so in the past will be so in the future – MIA.
3. The full text is printed in Mr Edward Crankshaw’s Khrushchev’s Russia (Penguin, 1959).