ONE thing which emerges strongly from any case-by-case study of intellectuals is their scant regard for veracity. Anxious as they are to promote the redeeming, transcending Truth, the establishment of which they see as their mission on behalf of humanity, they have not much patience with the mundane, everyday truths represented by objective facts which get in the way of their arguments. These awkward, minor truths get brushed aside, doctored, reversed or are even deliberately suppressed. The outstanding example of this tendency is Marx. But all those we have looked at suffered from it to some extent, the only exception being Edmund Wilson, who perhaps was not a true intellectual at all. Now come two intellectuals in whose work and lives deception-including self-deception-played a central, indeed determining role.
The first, Victor Gollancz (1893-1967) was important not because he gave birth to a salient idea himself but because he was the agent by whom many ideas were impressed on society-impressed with great force and with palpable results. He was, perhaps, the outstanding intellectual publicist of our century. He was in no sense an evil man and even when he did wrong he was usually aware of it and his conscience pricked him. But his career shows strikingly the extent to which deception plays a part in the promotion of millenarian ideas. Even in his lifetime, people who had dealings with him were aware how cavalier he could be with the truth. But now, thanks to the honesty of his daughter, Livia Gollancz, who opened his papers for inspection, and the skilful fair-mindedness of a first-class biographer, Ruth Dudley Edwards, the exact nature and extent of his deceits can be examined.1
Gollancz was fortunate in his birth and still more so in his marriage. He came from one highly gifted and civilized family and married into another. The Gollanczes were Orthodox Jews, originally from Poland; the grandfather was a chazzan or cantor in the Hambro synagogue. Gollancz’s father Alexander was a hardworking and successful jeweller and a man of piety and learning. His uncle Sir Hermann Gollancz was a rabbi and Semitic scholar who performed a huge range of public services; another uncle, Sir Israel Gollancz, a Shakespearean scholar, was Secretary to the British Academy and virtually created the English department at London University.2 One of his aunts was a Cambridge scholar, another a brilliant pianist. His wife Ruth was also a well-educated woman who had been to St Paul’s School for Girls and trained as an artist; her family, the Lowys, were likewise remarkable for combining scholarship, art and business success, the women being as vigorous as the men in the pursuit of culture (Graetz’s famous History of the Jews was translated into English by Bella Lowy).
Throughout his life, then, Gollancz was surrounded by people steeped in all that is best in European civilization. From the earliest age he was given every opportunity to enjoy it himself. The only son, he was cosseted by adoring parents and obsequious sisters, and treated in effect as an only child. He had plenty of pocket-money with which to indulge a passion for opera. He acquired it very early-by the age of twenty-one he had already seen Aida forty-seven times-and touring Europe’s opera houses remained his standard vacation to the end of his life.3 He won a scholarship to St Paul’s, received a superb classical education-twice a week he translated the Times first leader into both Greek and Latin-and went up to New College, Oxford, as an Open Scholar. In due course he won the Chancellor’s Latin Essay Prize and took a First in Classics.
He was already a radical intellectual, who had derived fiery sustenance from Ibsen, Maeterlink, Wells, Shaw and Walt Whitman. He seems to have made up his mind at a very early age on most great issues and never saw any reason to change his views later. At school and university his contemporaries found him dogmatic and over-sure of himself, and he was popular at neither. He abandoned Orthodox Judaism early, saying he could not abide the forty-minute walk (transport being forbidden on the Sabbath) from his home in Maida Vale to the Bayswater synagogue; this was a characteristic exaggeration-it was only fifteen minutes. He trod the usual path via Reform Judaism to nothing at all, helped at Oxford by Gilbert Murray, a high minded atheist. But he later constructed for himself an idiosyncratic version of Platonic Christianity, centred on Jesus, ‘the Supreme Particular’. This osmotic religion had the great advantage of providing religious sanction for whatever secular positions Gollancz happened to adopt. But he exercised the Jewish privilege of telling innocuous anti-Jewish jokes.
For a time poor eyesight kept him out of the First World War. Then followed a disastrous spell as a second lieutenant in the Northumberland Fusilliers, during which he broke the rules, made himself thoroughly unpopular and was threatened with a subaltern’s court-martial. He escaped to teach Classics at Repton. Taking the Upper Sixth, all of whom expected to be soon at the front, and probably killed there, he proved himself a brilliant if subversive master. He was already half a pacifist (though an exceptionally aggressive one), a theoretical feminist, a socialist of sorts, an opponent of capital punishment, a penal reformer and-at that time-an agnostic. He was determined to proselytize on all these issues: ‘I took my decision,’ he wrote later. ‘I would talk politics to these boys and to any others I could get hold of, day in and day out.’4 This was to be the watchword of his life: he was a seer, a magus, who had got hold of a Truth, or The Truth, and was determined to pound it into the heads of others. The thought that the parents of the boys might not wish them to be subjected to what they would regard as subversive propaganda by a person given privileged access to them, and that there was something inherently dishonest in this abuse of his position, did not disturb him. In fact with his colleague D.C. Somervell he defended his approach, producing two pamphlets, Political Education at a Public School, a plea for ‘the study of politics as the basis of public school education’, and The School and the World. His headmaster, the crafty Geoffrey Fisher (later Archbishop of Canterbury), recognized Gollancz’s outstanding ability, noted most of the staff could not stand him, warned him he was going too far, then-at the behest of the War Office, which had compiled a file on ‘pacifist activities’ at Repton-abruptly sacked him at Easter 1918.
Gollancz’s career continued with a job at the Ministry of Food in charge of kosher rationing, a spell in Singapore, then work for the Radical Research Group and for the Rowntree Trust. He finally found his metier as a publisher at Benn Brothers. The firm put out a large number of magazines like The Fruit Grower and Gas World, which Gollancz found dull, as well as books, mostly works of reference. He persuaded Sir Ernest Benn to let him turn the book division into a separate company, with a commission and a shareholding, and within three years he had achieved an astonishing success. ‘It reflects,’ Benn wrote in his diary, the ‘greatest credit on the genius of Victor Gollancz, who is alone responsible. Gollancz is a Jew, and a rare combination of education, artistic knowledge and business ability.’5 Gollancz’s secret was to produce groups of books which covered the whole price range, and which were collectively immune to seasonal and fashionable fluctuations, and push them selectively with shamelessly brash advertising. He put out works on new technical subjects, like automatic telephones, which those in the business had to have, but also permissive fiction. He started the hugely successful Benn’s Sixpenny Library, an adumbration of Penguins, and at the other end of the scale expensive art books, such as The Sleeping Princess, using Bakst’s designs. According to Douglas Jerrold, the brilliant assistant he recruited, the art books involved some cheating since the colour plates were fakes painted by miniaturists, then photographed.6 By 1928 he was earning £5000 a year. But he wanted a half-share of the company, under a new title, Benn & Gollancz, and when Sir Ernest refused, Gollancz set up his own firm, taking some of Benn’s best authors, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, with him.
The new firm had a curious company structure which bore all the marks of Gollancz’s astonishing ability to persuade people into arrangements which favoured his interests at the expense of their own.7 He put up considerably less than half the capital but he had himself made Governing Director with absolute voting control and 10 per cent of the net profits before dividends were paid. This was rather like the arrangements Cecil Rhodes devised for his diamond and gold ventures in South Africa, and maybe that was where Gollancz got the idea. It worked primarily because the firm made large profits almost from the start and the investors received quite enough to keep them satisfied. Gollancz succeeded because he sold vast numbers of books, especially fiction; and he did this by keeping the prices low, decking out the cheaply produced volumes in a new style of uniform yellow-and-red cover brilliantly designed by a typographer of genius, Stanley Morison, and then boosting the product with high-pressure publicity of a kind never before seen in British or even American publishing.
In addition to these sound, commercial reasons for the firm’s prosperity, there was also constant corner-cutting, sharp practice and humbug. He had spies who reported on the internal affairs of other firms and especially on discontented authors. If Gollancz thought such a writer worth having, he would write a long, ingratiating letter of a kind he perfected. Some came to him without prompting because Gollancz, in his heyday, was better at launching a newcomer or turning a steady-seller into a best-seller than any other publisher on either side of the Atlantic. He perfected the art of hype before the word was even known in London. But, once in the Gollancz camp, authors found there were drawbacks. Gollancz genuinely believed that his publicity methods were far more important in selling books than the texts. So he had no scruple in forcing authors to take smaller advances and royalties in order to raise the advertising budget. He hated agents because they did not like this kind of thing. If at all possible, he would persuade his authors not to employ an agent at all. The kind of writer he loved was Daphne du Maurier, who was not interested in money. He would often make verbal agreements on ‘a friendly basis’. He believed he had a perfect memory. What he had, rather, was an astonishing capacity to rewrite history in his head and then defend the new version with passionate conviction. There were thus rows and recriminations. When the novelist Louis Golding accused him of non-payment of a promised bonus over his best-seller Magnolia Street, Gollancz replied with a six-page letter, blazing with sincerity and injured rectitude, proving that his conduct was impeccable. To an agent who tried to challenge his memory he wrote: ‘How dare you! I am incapable of error.’8 These bold commercial tactics were backed up by formidable displays of rage and shouting. When roused, his voice could be heard all over the building. He liked to have a phone with a long cord so he could march up and down his office while bellowing into the receiver at agents or other enemies. His letters varied from almost hysterical rage to unctuous pleading-at which he was superb-sometimes within the compass of a single epistle. When furious, he would hold up their dispatch for a day to allow ‘the sun to set on my wrath’; and in consequence many in his files were marked ‘not sent’. Some authors cowered and submitted. Others sneaked off to calmer shores. But during the 1930s and 1940s at least the balance of arrivals was in the firm’s favour.
There were other reasons why profits were high. Gollancz always paid low wages. When real need was pleaded, he would make an ex gratia payment or offer a loan, rather than raise a salary or an advance. In many ways he was like a character from Dickens. When being particularly mean, he would invoke his rubber-stamp board, which he claimed enforced parsimony on him, and state: ‘My board, which is here as I dictate this letter, instructs me to add…’9 One reason he could keep wages low, even by the standards of the publishing trade, was that whenever possible he employed women rather than men. This could be justified, indeed made a virtue of, on feminist grounds, but the real reasons were twofold. First, women could be induced to accept much smaller salaries and harsher conditions of service. Second, they were more amenable to his highly personal way of running things. He would storm at them, reduce them to tears, embrace them-his habit of promiscuous kissing was unusual in the 1930s-call them by their first names, or pet names, and tell them how pretty they were. Some of the women staff enjoyed this highly charged emotional office atmosphere. They knew, too, that Gollancz was the one firm where they stood a good chance of promotion to senior executive posts, albeit ill-paid ones. He also gave them opportunities to tyrannize. A staff memorandum of April 1936 gives the flavour of Gollancz’s office in his heyday:
I have detected a certain absence for some time now of the old spirit which used to animate the staff…The absence of the old happiness causes me personally a great deal of unhappiness. I think we may get back to the old position by a little more leadership; and I have decided to make Miss Dibbs general leader and supervisor of all the female staff on the main floor…She will, in fact, be occupying the position which is occupied in a Russian factory by the leader of a factory Soviet.10
Some women flourished under this patriarchal regime. One, Sheila Lynd, was promoted to be his mistress, taken on holiday three times, and allowed to address him as ‘Darling Boss’. The men led an uneasy existence. It was not that Gollancz was incapable of discovering male talent. On the contrary, he was very good at it. But he did not like men and men did not like him. He could not work with them for long. He discovered Douglas Jerrold, one of the best publishers of his generation, but reneged on his promise to bring him into the new firm. He discovered Norman Collins, another outstanding media entrepreneur, but eventually picked a quarrel with him and drove him out, replacing him with a servile woman. His relations with Stanley Morison, one of the architects of the firm’s success, ended in a shouting match and Morison’s departure. There were some epic rows with male authors. In the post-war he brought in his nephew, Hilary Rubinstein, another exceptionally able executive, with the clear understanding that in due course he would inherit Elijah’s mantle; but, after many years of exploitation, Rubinstein was driven out.
It is one of the themes of this book that the private lives and the public postures of leading intellectuals cannot be separated: one helps to explain the other. Private vices and weaknesses are almost invariably reflected in conduct on the world stage. Gollancz was an outstanding example of this principle. Hewasamonsterofself-deceptionand, deceiving himself, he went on to deceive others on a heroic scale. He believed himself a man of great, instinctive benevolence, a true friend of humanity. He was in fact incorrigibly selfish and self-centred. This was most notably illustrated in his conduct to women. He professed devotion to the interests of women, especially his own. In fact he loved them only in so far as they served him. Like Sartre, he wanted to be the baby-adult in the berceau, surrounded by devoted, scented femininity. Because his mother’s existence revolved around his father-not himself-he dismissed her from his life. She figures scarcely at all in his autobiography, and he admitted, in a letter written in 1953: ‘I do not love her.’ All his life he surrounded himself with women, but he had to be their paramount interest. He found the idea of male competition intolerable. In youth he had his adoring sisters. In maturity he had his adoring wife (from another family of sisters) who in due course presented him with a series of adoring daughters. So he was the one male in a family of six. Ruth had brains and ability, but Gollancz had to be her career. She would not yield to him on one point, his desire that she cease attending synagogue. But in all other respects she was his slave. She not only ran his houses in London and the country but also drove him when necessary, cut his hair, ran his personal finances (which, strangely enough, he could not handle) and gave him pocket-money; and, in conjunction with his valet, supervised all his intimate concerns. He was child-like and helpless in many ways, quite deliberately so perhaps, and loved to call her ‘Mummy’. When they went abroad, the children and their nannies were put in a different and cheaper hotel, so that Ruth could devote herself entirely to him. She put up with his many infidelities and his disagreeable habit of pawing women which led J.B. Priestley to remark that any adultery was pure compared to Gollancz’s flirtations. He would clearly have liked her to supervise his mistresses-in the manner of Brecht’s Helene Weigel or Sartre’s de Beauvoir-as this would have formally signified her forgiveness and thus absolved him from guilt. But she could not steel herself to comply. From all his women, family and employees alike, he demanded unswerving loyalty, even in matters of opinion. He refused to give one woman a job solely because she would not endorse his view that capital punishment should be abolished.
He needed unqualified female devotion at least in part to still irrational fears. His mother had believed that, when his father left for work in the morning, he would never return, and she would perform elaborate anxiety rituals. Gollancz inherited this fear which he focused on Ruth. The curious working habits he developed as a boy led to chronic insomnia and this in turn heightened his many terrors. Though his capacity for humbug was prodigious he could never quite still his lurking conscience. It constantly ambushed him in the form of guilt. His hypochondria, which became more intense and varied as he grew older, often expressed this guilt. He believed his frequent adulteries must inevitably end in venereal disease, about which he knew very little. In fact his biographer thinks he suffered from ‘hysterical VD’. In the middle of the war he had a breakdown marked by agonized itching and pain in the skin, fear and a sense of terrible degradation. Lord Horder thought he suffered from hypersensitivity of the nerve-endings. But the most remarkable symptom was his belief he would lose the use of his penis. As he put it in one of his autobiographical volumes, ‘the instant I sat down…my member would disappear. I would feel it retiring into my body.’ Like Rousseau, he was obsessed by his penis, though with less apparent reason. He would constantly take it out to inspect it, to discover whether it showed signs of VD or indeed whether it was still there at all. In his office he would perform this ritual several times a day, near a frosted window he believed to be entirely opaque. The staff in the theatre opposite pointed out that this was not so and that his habits were disturbing.11
Gollancz’s self-deceptions inflicted suffering on himself as well as others. But clearly a man whose grasp of objective reality was so weak in some ways was not naturally suited to give political advice to humanity. He was a socialist of one kind or another all his life, which he believed was devoted to helping ‘the workers’. He was convinced he knew what ‘the workers’ thought and wanted. But there is no evidence that he ever knew a single working-class man, unless one counts the British Communist Party boss, Harry Pollitt, who had once been a boiler-maker. Gollancz had ten servants at his London house in Ladbroke Grove and three gardeners at Brimpton, his country place in Berkshire. But he could rarely bring himself to communicate with any of them except by letter. He hotly denied, however, that he was out of touch with the proletariat. When one of his authors, Tom Harrisson, who ran the ‘Mass Observation’ surveys, accused him of withholding sums he needed to pay his staff, he received a characteristically indignant reply: ‘If by the time you reach my age you have worked as hard for the working class as I have done you won’t be doing badly. And let me tell you that not when I was your age but very much later…I had a damned sight less to live on than you have got.’12 It was Gollancz’s belief that he led a quasi-monastic existence. In fact from the mid-1930s he always enjoyed a chauffeur-driven car, big cigars, vintage champagne and a daily lunch table at the Savoy. He always stayed in the best hotels. There is no evidence he ever denied himself anything he wanted.
It is a curious fact that Gollancz’s participation in the active anti-capitalist cause dates from 1928-30, just at the time when he was becoming a highly successful capitalist himself. He argued that it encouraged man’s natural propensity to greed and so to violence. By September 1939 we find him writing to the playwright Benn Levy that Marx’s Capital was ‘in my view the fourth most enthralling volume in the world’s literature’; it combined ‘the attractions of an A-plus detective story and a gospel’ (can he actually have read it?).13 This was the prelude to a long love-affair with the Soviet Union. He swallowed whole the Webbs’ fantastic account of how the Soviet system functioned.14 He described it as ‘amazingly fascinating’; the chapters designed to eliminate ‘misconceptions’ about the democratic nature of the regime were ‘much the most important in the book’.15 In due course-at the height of the great purges, as it happens-he nominated Stalin ‘Man of the Year’.
Gollancz began his own political activities by asking Ramsay Macdonald, the Labour leader, for a seat in Parliament; nothing came of it, then or later. Instead he concentrated on didactic publishing. By the early 1930s he was putting out a growing proportion of left-wing political books, at low prices and in enormous quantities. They included G.D.H. Cole’s brilliant best-seller The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos and What Marx Really Meant, and John Strachey’s The. Coming Struggle for Power, which probably had more influence, on both sides of the Atlantic, than any other political book at this time.16 It was at this point that Gollancz ceased to be a commercial publisher as such and became a political propagandist; at this point, too, that the systematic deception began. A sign of his new policy was a letter to the Reverend Percy Dearmer, Canon of Westminster, commissioned to edit Christianity and the Crisis. The book, he laid down, had to be and look ‘official’, containing contributions from ‘a considerable number of high dignitaries of the Church’. But, he wrote, ‘I am perhaps a rather peculiar kind of publisher in that, on topics which I believe to be of vital importance, I am anxious to publish nothing with which I am not in agreement.’ Hence the book must start out from the position that ‘Christianity is not solely a religion of personal salvation but must essentially concern itself with politics’ and it must then ‘go “all out” for immediate and practical socialism and internationalism’.17
Despite these clear elements of deception and direction, the Canon complied and the book duly appeared in 1933. Instructions were given to other authors in the same spirit. Leonard Woolf, who was editing The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War, was told by Gollancz that the climactic chapter was the last, ‘International Socialism the Key to Peace’, and that the others must ‘lead up tendentiously to this final section’; however, to conceal this purpose it was ‘desirable’ that earlier chapters should not be written ‘by people definitely associated in the public mind with socialism’.18 As the 1930s progressed, the element of deceit became larger and more blatant. In an internal letter to an editor criticizing a book on trade unions by the communist John Mahan, Gollancz complained: ‘As it goes on the thing becomes very much of a left-wing exposition; and particularly on this subject this is to be avoided.’ What he wanted, he continued, was not a ‘left-wing exposition but an apparently impartial exposition from a left-wing pen’. ‘All sorts of devices will occur to you,’ he wrote meaningfully, and concluded: ‘…both points of view can be represented in such a way that, while there is a grand atmosphere of impartiality which no one can attack, the readers inevitably draw the right conclusion.’
In Gollancz books there began to be, indeed, all sorts of ‘devices’ to deceive readers. For instance, whenever possible, ‘left wing’ was always substituted for ‘Communist Party’. There was also outright suppression, reflected in many of Gollancz’s letters and often accompanied by a self-pitying harping on his agonies of conscience. Thus in a letter to Webb Miller about a book on Spain he ordered the suppression of two chapters he knew to be true, beginning ‘I feel distressed, and almost ashamed, to write this letter.’ He knew that Miller’s account was not ‘exaggerated in any way’, but it was ‘absolutely inevitable’ that ‘a great number of passages will be picked out from those chapters and widely quoted for propaganda purposes as a proof of “communist barbarism”.’ He felt he could not ‘publish anything which, by giving occasion for propaganda on the other side’, will ‘weaken [Communist] support’. Miller might think, he added, that ‘this is playing with truth. It isn’t really: one must consider ultimate results.’ Then his final plea: ‘Forgive me, please’-rather as he wanted Ruth’s formal absolution for his delinquency in keeping a mistress.19
Some of Gollancz’s instructions to authors and editors, though plainly enjoining dishonesty, were extraordinarily muddled-no doubt because of the writhing agony of his conscience-and it was not at all clear what particular dishonesty they were being told to commit. Thus, to an author of history textbooks, he wrote: ‘I want the thing done with the utmost degree of impartiality-but I also want my impartial author to be of radical mind.’ He added that ‘the author’s radicalism’ would give him ‘the guarantee that if any tendency does, in spite of all efforts, get through’, it shall not be ‘a tendency in the wrong direction’. What in effect Gollancz was saying, as his letters at this time constantly suggest, was that he wanted slanted books but books which did not appear slanted.
These letters which have survived in the Gollancz files are peculiarly fascinating because they constitute one of the few occasions when direct evidence can be produced of an intellectual poisoning the wells of truth, knowing he was doing wrong and justifying his actions by claiming a higher cause than truth itself. Gollancz was soon practising dishonesty on a large scale. After Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933 he decided to cut out of his list any book which did not make money or serve a propaganda purpose. He also launched huge ventures designed primarily to promote socialism and the image of the Soviet Union. The first was the New Soviet Library, a series of propaganda books by Soviet authors arranged directly through the Soviet Embassy and government. But unforeseen difficulties occurred in getting hold of the texts, since the gestation of the series coincided with the great purges. Several of the proposed authors abruptly disappeared into the Gulag archipelago or were hauled in front of firing squads. Some of the texts were sent to Gollancz with the name of the author blank, to be filled in later when the executed writer had been officially replaced. A further, and gruesome, setback was that Andrei Vishinsky, the Soviet public prosecutor, who played the same part in Stalin’s regime as Roland Freisler, chairman of the People’s Court, in Hitler’s, was down to contribute the volume on Soviet Justice; but he was too busy getting death sentences passed on former comrades to write it. When the text finally arrived, it was too hastily and badly written to be published. Gollancz’s readers were kept blissfully unaware of these problems.
In any case, by the time the series was out Gollancz was involved in a much bigger venture, the Left Book Club, originally set up to counter the unwillingness of booksellers to stock ultra-left propaganda. The LBC was launched with a huge advertising campaign in February-March 1936, coinciding with the Comintern’s adoption of a ‘Popular Front’ policy throughout Europe: suddenly the democratic socialist parties, like Labour, ceased to be ‘social fascists’ and became ‘companions in the struggle’. Members of the LBC agreed to buy at half a crown a month, for a minimum of six months, books chosen by a committee of three, Gollancz himself, John Strachey and Professor Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. They also got free the monthly Left Book News, and the right to participate in a huge range of activities-summer schools, rallies, film shows, discussion groups, plays, joint foreign holidays, lunches and Russian language classes, as well as use of the Club Centre.20 The 1930s was the great age for participatory groups. One of the reasons why Hitler was so successful in Germany was that he created so many of them, for all ages and interests. The CP belatedly followed him and the Left Book Club showed just how effective the technique could be. Gollancz’s original hope was that he would get 2500 subscribers by May 1936; in fact he got 9000 and the figure eventually rose to 57,000. The impact of the Club was even wider than these figures suggest; of all the institutions of the thirties’ media, it was the one which most successfully set the agenda and directed the trend of discussion. However, it was based on a series of lies. The first lie, contained in its brochure, was that the selection committee ‘together adequately represent most shades of opinion in the active and serious “left” movement’. In fact for all practical purposes the LBC was run in the interests of the Communist Party. John Strachey was completely controlled by the CP at this period.21 Laski was a Labour Party member and had just been elected to its National Executive; but he had been converted to Marxism in 1931 and usually followed the CP line until 1939.22 Gollancz was also a dependable fellow-traveller until the end of 1938. He did everything the CP asked of him. For the Daily Worker, the CP’s organ, he wrote a fulsome article, ‘Why I Read the Daily Worker’, which was used in its publicity material. He singled out its devotion to truth, accuracy and trust in its readers’ intelligence-all of which he knew to be baseless-and noted: ‘it is characteristic of men and women, as opposed to ladies and gentlemen. For my own part, who meet a lot of ladies and gentlemen and find a lot of them exceedingly tiresome, I find this quality extraordinarily refreshing.’23 He also visited Russia (1937) and declared: ‘For the first time I have been completely happy…while here one can forget the evil in the rest of the world.’24
However, Gollancz’s greatest practical service to the CP was to staff the LBC with its people. Sheila Lynd, Emile Burns and John Lewis, who edited all the manuscripts, and Betty Reid, who organized the LBC groups, were all at this time CP members or party-controlled. All policy decisions, even of quite a minor nature, were discussed with CP officials; often Gollancz dealt direct with Pollitt himself, the CP’s General Secretary. None of this was known to the public. The LBC deliberately referred to CP members as ‘socialists’, to conceal their affiliation. Of the first fifteen books selected, all but three were by CP members or crypto-Communists; this worried Gollancz, not the fact itself but the impression it might create that the Club was not independent. Its putative independence was, indeed, its biggest single asset in CP eyes. As the leading CP ideologue, R. Palme Dutt, rejoiced in a letter to Strachey, the fact that the public believed it to be ‘an independent commercial enterprise’ and not ‘the propaganda of a particular political organization’ constituted its value to the Party.
The second lie was Gollancz’s repeated assertion that the whole LBC organization, with the groups, rallies and events, was ‘essentially democratic’. That had no more validity than Miss Dibbs and her ‘office Soviet’. Behind a pretence of oligarchy, it was in fact a personal despotism of Gollancz himself, for the simple reason he controlled its finances. Indeed, he kept no separate accounts for the LBC and its income and expenditure were absorbed in Victor Gollancz Limited. The consequence is that there is no means of knowing whether Gollancz made or lost by the venture. When critics asserted he had made a fortune out of it, he sued them for libel. He told authors in private letters that its losses were appalling but added: ‘this is absolutely confidential: from many points of view it is less dangerous that we should be considered to be making huge profits than we should be known to be making a loss.’25 But this may have been simply to justify paying authors miniscule royalties or none at all. One has to assume that the LBC benefited the firm, if only by sharing overheads and boosting its other books. In any case, as Gollancz handled the receipts and paid the wages and bills, he took all the ultimate decisions. Any idea that Club members had a say in anything was fantasy. Seeking a man to edit the LBC News, he laid down that he must ‘combine initiative with absolutely immediate and unquestioning obedience to my instructions however foolish they may seem to him’.26
The third lie was uttered by John Strachey: ‘We do not dream of refusing to select a book simply because we do not agree with its conclusions.’ Apart from one or two token Labour volumes-Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, was invited to contribute The Labour Party in Perspective-there is overwhelming evidence that adherence to the CP line was usually the chief criterion of selection. A particularly flagrant case was August Thalheimer’s Introduction to Dialectical Materialism which Gollancz, believing it orthodox, had agreed to publish in May 1937. But in the meantime the author had become involved in some obscure dispute with Moscow, and Pollitt asked Gollancz to suppress it. The book had already been announced and Gollancz protested that the Club’s enemies would seize on the cancellation as ‘proof positive that the LBC was simply a part of the CP’. Pollitt replied with his pseudo-proletarian, Old Soldier act: ‘Don’t publish it! Not when I’ve got to cope with the Old Bugger, the Long Bugger and that bloody red arse of a dean!’ (By these he meant Stalin, Palme Dutt and the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury.) Gollancz complied and the book was suppressed, but he later wrote a whining letter of complaint to Pollitt: ‘I hated and loathed doing this: I am made in such a way that this kind of falsehood destroys something inside me.’ Another book the party wanted suppressed was Why Capitalism Means War, by the highly respected veteran socialist H.N. Brailsford, because it critized the Moscow trials. When in September 1937 the manuscript was shown to Burns, he advised that even with massive cuts and changes the book was unacceptable to the Party. On this occasion Gollancz too was all for suppression. He wrote to the author: ‘I cannot act against my conscience in the matter.’ To publish a book criticizing the trials would be like ‘committing the sin against the Holy Ghost’. But Laski, who was unhappy about the trials himself, and an old friend of Brailsford, said the book must go out and threatened resignation, which would have destroyed the LBC’s Popular Front facade. So Gollancz reluctantly did as Laski asked, but brought the book out in August with a total absence of publicity-‘buried it in oblivion,’ as Brailsford put it. Gollancz also invented ‘technical reasons’ for suppressing a book by Leonard Woolf, which contained some criticism of Stalin; but Woolf, who had his own presses, knew more about printing than Gollancz did, exposed the lie and threatened public trouble if his agreement was broken. Here again Gollancz gave way, though he made sure the book failed.
Left Book Club publications were, in fact, deliberately conceived to promote the CP line by deception. As Gollancz wrote to the editor of the Club’s educational books, the Left Home University Library, ‘The treatment should not of course be aggressively Marxist.’ Volumes should be written ‘in such a way that, while the reader will at any point draw the right conclusions, the uninitiated would not be put off by feeling, “Why, more of this Marxist stuff!”’ At times the links with the CP hierarchy were extremely close: the records show Gollancz transferring sums of money to Pollitt in cash-‘I wonder whether you could let me have the money some time this morning in pound notes. Sorry to trouble you, Victor, but you know how things are.’27 CP censorship went down to very small details; thus J.R. Campbell, later the Worker editor, was responsible for having removed from the bibliography of one volume works by Trotsky and other ‘non-persons’.
Gollancz’s behaviour, though indefensible and documented by what his biographer calls ‘a mass of incriminating material’, must be seen in context. Even more than the other decades of our century, the 1930s was the age of the lie, both big and small. The Nazi and Soviet governments lied on a colossal scale, using vast financial resources and employing thousands of intellectuals. Honourable institutions, once celebrated for their devotion to truth, now suppressed it deliberately. In London, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, ‘kept out of the paper’, as he put it, material from his own correspondents which might damage Anglo-German relations. In Paris, Félicien Challaye, a leading member of the famous Ligue des Droits de I’Homme, created to establish the innocence of Dreyfus, felt obliged to resign from it in protest at the shameless manner in which it helped to conceal the truth about Stalin’s atrocities.28 The Communists ran professional lie-organizations whose specific purpose was to deceive fellow-travelling intellectuals through various front organizations, such as the League Against Imperialism. One such was run first from Berlin, then after Hitler’s advent to power from Paris, by the German Communist Willi Muenzenberg, described by the New Statesman’s editor, Kingsley Martin, as ‘an inspired propagandist’. His right-hand man, the Czech Communist Otto Katz, ‘a fanatical and ruthless commissar’ as Martin calls him, recruited various British intellectuals to help.29 They included the former London Times journalist Claud Cockburn, editor of the left-wing scandal sheet The Week, who helped Katz to concoct entirely imaginary news stories, such as an ‘anti-Franco revolt’ in Tetouan. When Cockburn subsequently published his account of these exploits, he was attacked by R.H.S. Crossman MP in the News Chronicle for his shameless delight in his lies. Crossman had been officially involved in British government ‘disinformation activities’ (i.e. lying) in the 1939-45 war. He wrote: ‘Black propaganda may be necessary in war, but most of us who practised it detested what we were doing.’ Crossman who, as it happened, was a typical intellectual who always put ideas before people and lacked a strong sense of the truth, was rebuked by Cockburn, who described the Crossman view as ‘a comfortable ethical position if you can stop laughing. To me at least there seems something risible in the spectacle of a man firing off his own propaganda-lies…but keeping his conscience clear by “detesting” his own activities.’ To Cockburn, a cause for which a man ‘is fighting is worth lying for’.30 (Some cause! Both Muenzenberg and Katz were murdered by Stalin for ‘treason’, Katz on the grounds that he had consorted with such ‘Western imperialists’ as Claud Cockburn.)
Gollancz’s dishonesties should be judged against this background. The most notorious of them was his refusal to publish George Orwell’s exposure of Communist atrocities against the Spanish anarchists, Homage to Catalonia. He was not alone in rejecting Orwell. Kingsley Martin refused to publish a series of articles by Orwell dealing with the same theme, and three decades later he was still defending his decision: ‘I would no more have thought of publishing them than of publishing an article by Goebbels during the war against Germany.’ He also persuaded his literary editor, Raymond Mortimer, to turn down a ‘suspect’ book review by Orwell, an episode which Mortimer later regretted bitterly.31 Gollancz’s relations with Orwell were protracted, complex, sour and mean. He published The Road to Wigan Pier, which was critical of the British left, before the Left Book Club was started, and when he decided to bring out an LBC edition he wanted to suppress the objectionable part. Orwell would not let him. So Gollancz published it with a mendacious introduction by himself, trying to explain away Orwell’s ‘errors’ by saying he wrote as ‘a member of the lower-upper-middle class’. As he was, if anything, a member of that class himself (though of course immensely richer than Orwell) and as, unlike Orwell, he had had virtually no contact with working people, this introduction was peculiarly dishonest. Gollancz was later deeply ashamed of it and furious when an American publisher reprinted it.32
By the time the Orwell row was at its height, Gollancz himself was already having second thoughts about his Communist connections. There were a number of reasons for this. One may have been the belief that he was damaging his commercial prospects. Secker & Warburg had eagerly snatched up Homage to Catalonia, as well as other books and authors who might naturally have been published by Gollancz but for CP objections. Gollancz’s CP line, in fact, created a formidable rival for his firm. A second reason was Gollancz’s limited attention-span. Books, authors, women (except Ruth), religions, causes could never retain his enthusiasm indefinitely. For a time Gollancz enjoyed the LBC and the immense rallies the CP helped to organize on its behalf in the Albert Hall, at which the Dean of Canterbury would intone: ‘God Bless the Left Book Club!’ He discovered he had considerable gifts as a public speaker. But it was always the CP stars, above all Pollitt himself, who got the most applause from the well-drilled audience, and Gollancz did not like that. By the autumn of 1938 he was showing signs of impatience and boredom with the whole thing.
In this mood he was more inclined to be open-minded. During a Christmas holiday in Paris he read a detailed account of the Moscow trials which convinced him they were fraudulent. Back in London he told Pollitt that the LBC could no longer peddle the Moscow line on that issue at least. In February he went so far as to admit in LBC News that there were ‘certain barriers against full intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union’. Orwell was astonished, in the spring, by Gollancz’s decision to bring out his novel, Coming Up for Air, a sure sign of a changed line. By the summer Gollancz was clearly anxious to have done with Moscow and he greeted the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August, if not exactly with relief-it meant war was inevitable-then as a heaven-sent opportunity to complete the break with the CP. He immediately began writing anti-Moscow propaganda, pointing out a large number of instances of evil behaviour which most sensible people had been aware of for years. As Orwell commented to Geoffrey Gorer: ‘It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant should have such influence.’33
The Left Book Club was never the same after Gollancz’s break with Moscow. Its own staff were divided. Sheila Lynd, Betty Reid and John Lewis clung to the Communist Party. Gollancz decided not to sack Lewis and Lynd (who was now no longer his mistress). But he characteristically made commercial use of the occasion to demote them, reduce their salaries and shorten their period of notice.34 Unlike Kingsley Martin, who uneasily defended his thirties’ fellow-travelling to the end of his life, or Claud Cockburn who cynically boasted of his behaviour, Gollancz decided to go the whole hog and make a virtue of repentance. In 1941 he edited a volume, which included contributions from Laski and Strachey as well as Orwell, called The Betrayal of the Left: An Examination and Refutation of Communist Policy. In this he made a formal confession of the sins of the LBC:
I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or bad, because they were ‘orthodox’; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not…I published only books which justified the Trials, and sent the socialist criticism of them elsewhere…I am sure as a man can be-I was sure at the time in my heart-that all this was wrong.
How genuine and transforming was Gollancz’s change of heart and admission of guilt it is hard to say. He certainly went through a dark night of the soul during the middle of the war, culminating in the physical crisis already described. But then, up in Scotland, and unusually for an intellectual, he heard the voice of God, which told him He would ‘not despise’ a ‘humble and contrite heart’. Thus reassured, he acquired a new religion, in the shape of his own version of Christian socialism, a new mistress and a new zest for publishing, which took the form of the enthusiastic promotion of the Labour Party in a series of volumes called ‘The Yellow Perils’. But he was soon up to his old tricks. In April 1944 he rejected Orwell’s devastating satire Animal Farm: ‘I could not possibly publish a general attack [on Russia] of this nature.’ That too went to Seeker & Warburg which also, in consequence, secured Orwell’s famous best-seller, Nineteen Eighty-Four, obliging the furious and remorseful Gollancz to dismiss it as ‘enormously overrated’.35 He was haunted by Orwell’s honesty-as indeed was Kingsley Martin-for the rest of his life, and driven, in exasperation, to attacks on him which do not make much ethical, or indeed any other, sense. He could not accept, he wrote, ‘that [Orwell’s] intellectual honesty was impeccable…in my opinion he was too desperately anxious to be honest to be really honest…Didn’t he have a certain simplicité, which in a man of as high intelligence as he is, is really always a trifle dishonest? I think so myself.’36
Gollancz lived on until 1967 but he never again exerted quite the power and influence that was his in the 1930s. Many held him responsible, along with the New Statesman and the Daily Mirror, for the Labour Party’s historic election victory in 1945, creating the political framework in postwar Britain and much of Western Europe which lasted right up to the Thatcher era. But Prime Minister Attlee did not offer him the peerage he felt he deserved; indeed he got nothing at all until Harold Wilson, a more generous man, gave him a knighthood in 1965. The trouble with Gollancz’s vanity was that it persuaded him he was more famous or notorious than he actually was. In 1946, when the ship on which he was taking a holiday docked in the Canary Isles, he had a sudden bout of the terrors and shouted that Franco’s police intended to seize and torture him as soon as he landed. He insisted the British consul come on board to protect him. The consul sent his clerk to assure him that nobody on the islands had ever heard of him; indeed, a disappointed Gollancz reported, ‘he had never heard of me himself’.
Gollancz’s post-war career, in fact, was a dying fall. He wrote some highly successful books, but his own business was gradually edged out of its market-leader position. He did not keep up with the times or recognize the new intellectual stars. When Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to him in September 1945 pointing out a weakness in one of his public arguments, he responded with a one-line note: ‘Thank you for your letter, which I am sure was very well meant’; he misspelt the philosopher’s name, believing him to be an obscure don.37 He lost some of his best authors and missed getting some important books. He hailed Nabokov’s Lolita as ‘a rare masterpiece of spiritual understanding’, failed to buy it, furiously decided it was ‘a thoroughly nasty book, the literary value of which has been grossly overestimated’ and finally denounced it to the Bookman as ‘pornographic’. He played an important part in one hugely successful campaign, to abolish capital punishment-a cause which engrossed him for longer than any other and which was probably closest to his heart-but his role in this venture was overshadowed by Arthur Koestler, whom he hated, and by the elegant and eloquent Gerald Gardiner, who carried off the honours. Worse still, Gollancz failed to be given the top place in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament when it was formed in 1957. He was away at the time and mortified to return and find he had not even been asked to join its committee. He regarded it, he said, as a ‘devastating insult’ which had left him ‘broken-hearted’. At first he blamed his old friend Canon John Collins, who had been made chairman in what Gollancz saw as his rightful place. In fact Collins had fought a losing battle to get him included. Then Gollancz held J.B. Priestley responsible, attributing his enmity to a dispute they had had over Priestley’s English Journey back in the early 1930s. In fact Priestley was only one of many among the founders who said that they would not work with Gollancz at any price.
In the end, almost all men found Gollancz’s self-centred vanity insupportable, especially as it often found expression in unpleasant outbursts of rage. In 1919 he had told his brother-in-law that he could not decide whether to become headmaster of Winchester or prime minister.38 In fact he was fortunate that his business acumen enabled him to create a private autocracy where no one could challenge him and his inability to make other men like him did not matter so much. Ruth Dudley Edwards quotes a characteristic letter from the Gollancz files which conjures up the man better than any description. He had been asked, and had agreed, to give one of the Memorial Lectures in honour of Bishop Bell, the only man who had spoken out strongly against the area bombing of Germany. But some more attractive engagement had appeared and Gollancz had cancelled his appearance. The organizer, one Pitman, was understandably annoyed and had written Gollancz a reproachful letter. Gollancz replied at length and in furious terms. He rebuked Pitman for ‘writing before the sun had gone down on your wrath’, explained in immense detail the appalling burden of the commitments which had led him to cancel the lecture, objected in the strongest terms to Pitman’s assertion he was ‘under a moral obligation’ to give it and then, warming to his task, went on: ‘In fact, I am beginning to lose my temper as I dictate and I must say that such a remark is patently absurd.’ Then followed two more paragraphs accusing Pitman of being ‘grossly impertinent’, and finally: ‘I am conscious of the fact that I have started this letter in a moderate tone but have ended it in an immoderate one. I am also conscious of the fact that, in spite of my advice to you, I do not at the moment feel like letting the sun go down on my wrath and am therefore instructing my secretary to post the letter immediately.’ This egotistical tirade might have been penned, ceteris paribus, by a Rousseau, a Marx or a Tolstoy. But is it possible to detect a tiny, self-mocking hint of irony? We must hope so.