AT the end of the Second World War, there was a significant change in the predominant aim of secular intellectuals, a shift of emphasis from utopianism to hedonism. The shift began slowly at first, then gathered speed. Its origins can best be studied by looking at the views and relationships of three English writers, all of them born in the year 1903: George Orwell (1903-50), Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) and Cyril Connolly (1903-74). They might be described as the Old Intellectual, the Anti-Intellectual and the New Intellectual. Waugh began a cautious friendship with Orwell only when the latter was already stricken by fatal illness. Waugh and Connolly sparred together all their adult lives. Orwell and Connolly had known each other since their school days. Each writer kept a wary, sceptical and sometimes envious eye on the other two. Indeed Connolly, who felt himself the failure of the three, wrote a self-pitying couplet into a copy of Virgil he gave to the drama critic T. C. Worsley:
At Eton with Orwell, at Oxford with Waugh
He was nobody after and nobody before.1
But this was far from true. In some ways he was to prove the most influential of the three.
Orwell, whom we shall look at first, was an almost classic case of the Old Intellectual in the sense that for him a political commitment to a Utopian, socialist future was plainly a substitute for a religious idealism in which he could not believe. God could not exist for him. He put his faith in man but, looking at the object of his devotion too closely, lost it. Orwell, born Eric Blair, came from a family of minor empire-builders, and looked like one. He was tall, spare, with a short-back-and-sides haircut and a severely trimmed moustache. His paternal grandfather was in the Indian Army; his maternal grandfather was a teak merchant in Burma. His father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. He and Connolly attended the same fashionable private school and later both went to Eton. He received this expensive education because, like Connolly, he was a clever boy who was expected to get scholarships and bring credit to the school. In fact both boys later wrote entertaining but devastating accounts of the school which did it damage.2 Orwell’s essay, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, is uncharacteristically exaggerated and even mendacious. It was the belief of his Eton tutor, A.S.F. Gow, who knew the private school well, that Orwell had been corrupted by Connolly into producing this unfair indictment.3 If so, it was the only occasion on which Connolly persuaded Orwell to embark on an immoral course, particularly one involving lying. Orwell, as Victor Gollancz observed through clenched teeth, was painfully truthful.
After Orwell left Eton he joined the Indian police, serving five years, 1922-27. As such, he saw the seamier side of imperialism, the hangings and floggings, and found he could not stomach it. In fact his two brilliant essays, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’, perhaps did more to undermine the empire spirit in Britain than any other writings.4 He returned to England on home leave, resigned from the service, and determined to be a writer. He chose the name ‘George Orwell’ after considering various alternatives, including P.S. Burton, Kenneth Miles and H. Lewis Allways.5 Orwell was an intellectual in the sense that he believed, at any rate when young, that the world could be reshaped by the power of intellect. He thus thought in terms of ideas and concepts. But his nature, and perhaps his police training, gave him a passionate interest in people. His policeman’s instinct certainly told him that things were not what they seemed, and that only investigation and close scrutiny would yield the truth.
Hence, unlike most intellectuals, Orwell embarked on his career as a socialist idealist by examining working-class life at close quarters. In this respect he had something in common with Edmund Wilson, who shared his passion for exact truth. But he was far more persistent than Wilson in seeking knowledge of ‘the workers’ and for many years this quest for experience remained the central theme of his life. He first took rooms in Notting Hill, at that time a London slum. Then in 1929 he worked in Paris as a dishwasher and kitchen porter. But he became ill with pneumonia-he suffered from chronic weakness of the lungs, which killed him at the age of forty-seven-and the venture ended in a spell in a Paris charity hospital, an episode harrowingly described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He then lived with tramps and hop-pickers, boarded with a working-class family in the Lancashire industrial town of Wigan, and kept a village store. All these activities had one aim: ‘I felt I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.’6
Hence, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Orwell not only gave moral support to the Republic, as did over 90 per cent of Western intellectuals, but-unlike virtually all of them-actually fought for it. Moreover, as luck would have it, he fought for it in what was itself to become the most oppressed and martyred section of the Republican Army, the anarchist (POUM) militia. This experience was critical to the rest of his life. Characteristically, Orwell wanted to go to Spain first and see the situation for himself, before deciding what he would do about it. But getting to Spain was difficult and entry was in effect controlled by the Communist Party. Orwell went first to Victor Gollancz, who put him on to John Strachey; and Strachey in turn referred him to Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party boss. But Pollitt would not provide Orwell with a letter of recommendation unless he first agreed to join the Communist Party-controlled International Brigade. This Orwell declined to do, not because he had anything against the Brigade-in fact he tried to join it in Spain the following year-but because it would have closed his options before he had examined the facts. So he turned to the left-wing faction known as the Independent Labour Party. They got him to Barcelona and put him in touch with the anarchists, and it was thus he joined the POUM militia. He was impressed by Barcelona, ‘a town where the working class was in the saddle’, and still more by the militia existence, in which ‘many of the normal motives of civilized life-snobbery, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.-had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England.’7 He found the fighting, in which he was wounded, in some ways an uplifting experience, and wrote a letter of gentle reproach to Connolly, who had inspected the war, like most intellectuals, simply as a ‘concerned’ tourist: ‘A pity you didn’t come up to our position and see me when you were in Aragon. I would have enjoyed giving you tea in a dugout.’8 Orwell described the militia on active service as ‘a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug’. There, ‘no one was on the make’; there was ‘a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking’. He thought it ‘a crude foretaste of what the opening stages of socialism might be like’. In conclusion, he wrote home, ‘I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in socialism, which I never did before.’9
There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman-the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed-would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent Utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied Utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.10
Such a shift of emphasis necessarily led Orwell to take a highly critical view of intellectuals as such. This accorded well with his temperament, which might be described as regimental rather than bohemian. His work is scattered with such asides as (of Ezra Pound) ‘one has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet’. Indeed it was an axiom of his that the poor, the ‘ordinary people’, had a stronger sense of what he called ‘common decency’, a greater attachment to simple virtues like honesty, loyalty and truthfulness, than the highly educated. When he died in 1950, his ultimate political destination was unclear and he still vaguely ranked as a left-wing intellectual. As his reputation rose, left and right fought, and in fact still fight, for the title to his allegiance. But in the forty years since his death, he has been increasingly used as a stick to beat the intellectual concepts of the left. Intellectuals who feel most solidarity with their class have long recognized him as an enemy. Thus, in her essay on Orwell, Mary McCarthy, sometimes confused in her political ideas but nothing if not caste-conscious, was severe: Orwell was ‘conservative by temperament, as opposed as a retired colonel or a working man to extremes of conduct, dress or thought’. He was ‘an incipient philistine. Indeed he was a philistine.’ His socialism was ‘an unexamined idea off the top of his head, sheer rant’. His pursuit of Stalinists was occasionally ‘a mere product of personal dislike’. His ‘political failure…was one of thought’. Had he lived he must surely have moved to the right, so ‘it was a blessing for him probably that he died.’11 (This last thought-better dead than anti-red-is a striking example of the priorities of archetype intellectuals.)
One reason why professional intellectuals moved away from Orwell was his growing conviction that, while it was right to continue to look for political solutions, ‘just as a doctor must try to save the life of a patient who is probably going to die’, we had to start ‘by recognizing that political behaviour is largely non-rational’, and therefore not as a rule susceptible to the kind of solutions intellectuals habitually sought to impose.12 But while the intellectuals were becoming suspicious of Orwell, those of the contrary persuasion-the men of letters, if you like-tended to warm to him. Evelyn Waugh, for instance, was never a man to underrate the importance of the irrational in life. He began to correspond with Orwell and visited him in hospital; had Orwell lived, their friendship might well have blossomed. They first came together over a common desire that P.G. Wodehouse, a writer they admired, should not be persecuted for his foolish (but, compared with Ezra Pound’s, quite innocuous) wartime broadcasts. This was a case where both men insisted that an individual person must take precedence over the abstract concept of ideological justice. Waugh quickly saw in Orwell a potential defector from the ranks of the intelligentsia. He noted in his diary on 31 August 1945: ‘I dined with my communist cousin, Claud [Cockburn], who warned me against Trotskyist literature, so that I read and greatly enjoyed Orwell’s Animal Farm.’13 He likewise recognized the power of Nineteen Eighty-Four, though he found it implausible that the religious spirit would not have survived to take part in the resistance to the tyranny Orwell portrayed. In his last letter to Orwell, 17 July 1949, Waugh made this point, adding: ‘You see how much your book excited me so that I risk preaching a sermon.’14
What Orwell came reluctantly and belatedly to accept-the failure of utopianism on account of the fundamental irrationality of human behaviour-Waugh had vociferously upheld for most of his adult life. Indeed no great writer, not even Kipling, ever gave a clearer statement of the anti-intellectual position. Waugh, like Orwell, believed in personal experience, in seeing for himself, as opposed to theoretical imagining. It is worth noting that while he did not seek deliberately, like Orwell, to live with the oppressed, he was an inveterate traveller, often in remote and difficult regions; he had seen a great deal of men and events and had a practical as well as a bookish knowledge of the world. When writing on serious matters he also had an unusual regard for truth. His one avowedly political work, a description of the Mexican revolutionary regime called Robbery Under Law (1939), is preceded by a warning to readers. He made it plain exactly what his credentials for writing on the subject were, and how inadequate they seemed to him. He drew their attention to books written by those with views different to his own, and warned them not to make up their minds about what was going on in Mexico simply on the basis of his account. He stressed that he deplored ‘committed’ literature. Many readers, he said, ‘bored with the privilege of a free press’, had decided ‘to impose on themselves a voluntary censorship’ by forming book clubs-he had in mind Gollancz’s Left Book Club-so that ‘they may be perfectly confident that whatever they read will be written with the intention of confirming their existing opinions’. Hence in fairness to his readers, Waugh thought it proper to summarize his own beliefs.
He was, he said, a conservative, and everything he had seen in Mexico strengthened his convictions. Man was, by his nature, ‘an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth’. He thought man’s chances of happiness were ‘not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives’, and that sudden changes in man’s state usually made matters worse, ‘and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons’. He believed in government: ‘men cannot live together without rules’ but these ‘should be kept to the bare minimum of safety’. ‘No form of government ordained from God’ was ‘better than another’ and ‘the anarchic elements in society’ were so strong it was a ‘whole-time job to keep the peace’. Inequalities in wealth and position were ‘inevitable’ and it was therefore ‘meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination’, In fact men ‘naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes’, such being ‘necessary for any cooperative work’. War and conquest were likewise inevitable. Art was also a natural function of man, and ‘it so happens’ that most great art had been produced ‘under systems of political tyranny’ though ‘I do not think it has a connection with any particular system’. Finally, Waugh said he was a patriot in the sense that, while he did not think British prosperity was necessarily inimical to anyone else, if on occasions it was, then ‘I want Britain to prosper and not her rivals.’
Thus Waugh described society as it was and must be, and his response to it. He did indeed have a personal, idealized vision; but, being an anti-intellectual, he freely conceded it was unrealizable. His ideal society, as described in an introduction to a book published in 1962, had four orders. At the top was ‘the fount of honour and justice’. Immediately below were ‘men and women who hold offices from above and are the custodians of tradition, morality and grace’. They had to be ‘ready for sacrifice’ but were protected from ‘the infections of corruption and ambition by hereditary possession’; they were ‘the nourishers of the arts, the censors of manners’. Below them were ‘the classes of industry and scholarship’, trained from childhood ‘in habits of probity’. At the bottom were the manual labourers, ‘proud of their skills and bound to those above them by common allegiance to the monarch’. Waugh concluded by asserting that the ideal society was self-perpetuating: ‘In general a man is best fitted to the tasks he has seen his father perform.’ But such an ideal ‘has never existed in history nor ever will’ and we were ‘every year drifting further’ away from it. All the same, he was not a defeatist. He did not believe, he said, in simply deploring, then bowing to, the spirit of the age: ‘for the spirit of the age is the spirits of those who compose it, and the stronger the expressions of dissent from prevailing fashion, the higher the possibility of diverting it from its ruinous course’.15
Waugh constantly and to the best of his considerable ability did ‘dissent from prevailing fashion’. But, holding the views he did, he naturally did not take part in politics as such. As he put it, ‘I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.’16 Not only did he eschew politics himself. He deplored the fact that so many of his friends and contemporaries, not least Cyril Connolly, succumbed to the 1930s spirit of the age and betrayed literature by politicizing themselves. Connolly fascinated Waugh. He brought him into several of his books, in one way or another, and would annotate Connolly’s own with fierce and perceptive marginal observations. Why this interest? There were two reasons. First, Waugh thought Connolly worth his notice because of his brilliant wit and because, in his writing, he was capable ‘of phrase after phrase of lapidary form, of delicious exercises in parody, of good narrative, of luminous metaphors’ and sometimes ‘of haunting originality’.17 Yet at the same time Connolly lacked a sense of literary structure, or architecture as Waugh preferred to call it, as well as persistent energy, and was therefore incapable of producing a major book. Waugh found this incongruity of great interest. Secondly and more importantly, however, Waugh saw Connolly as the representative spirit of the times, and therefore to be watched as one might a rare bird. In his copy of Connolly’s The Unquiet Crave, now at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, he made many notes about Connolly’s character. He was ‘the most typical man of my generation’, with his ‘authentic lack of scholarship’, his ‘love of leisure and liberty and good living’, his ‘romantic snobbery’, ‘waste and despair’ and ‘high gift of expression’. But he was ‘strait-jacketed by sloth’ and handicapped by his Irishry; however much he tried to conceal it he was ‘the Irish boy, the immigrant, homesick, down-at-heel and ashamed, full of fun in the public house, a ready quotation on his lips, afraid of witches, afraid of the bog-priest, proud of his capers’; he had ‘the Irishman’s deep-rooted belief that there are only two realities-hell and the USA’.18 In the 1930s he deplored the fact that Connolly wrote about ‘recent literary history’ not in terms of writers ‘employing and exploring their talents in their own ways’ but as ‘a series of “movements”, sappings, bombings and encirclements, or party racketeering and gerrymandering. It is the Irish in him perhaps.’ He blamed him severely for ‘surrendering’ into ‘the claws’ of commitment, ‘the cold dank pit of politics into which all his young friends have gone tobogganing.’ He thought this ‘a sorry end to so much talent; the most insidious of all the enemies of promise’.19 He thought Connolly’s obsession with politics could not last. He was capable of better, or at any rate other, things. In any case, how could someone like Connolly give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs?
How indeed! Without being in any way an evil man, Connolly exhibited the characteristic moral weaknesses of the intellectual to an unusual degree. In the first place, while professing egalitarianism, at least when it was fashionable, from 1930-50, he was a lifelong snob. ‘Nothing infuriates me more than to be treated as an Irishman,’ he complained, pointing out that Connolly was the only Irish surname among those of his eight great-grandparents. He came from a family of professional soldiers and sailors. His own father was an undistinguished army officer, but his father had been an admiral and his aunt had been Countess of Kingston. In 1953, in an anonymous profile in the New Statesman, the critic John Raymond pointed out that Connolly had doctored details of his biography in Enemies of Promise. While the original 1938 (and therefore ‘proletarian’) edition had suppressed his grand and landed connections, they had been elaborately resurrected in the revised edition of 1948, by which time intellectual fashions had changed. Connolly, Raymond noted, was always ‘plumb on target’ in getting such ‘cultural trends’ right: ‘No one has a better knowledge of the poses, the rackets, the gimmicks of English literature over the last quarter of a century.’20
The snobbery started early. Like many leading intellectuals such as Sartre, Connolly was an only child. His mother, who adored him, called him Sprat. Spoilt, self-centred, ugly and no use at games, he found boarding-school tough. He survived first by enthusiastic flunkying of well-born boys. ‘This term,’ he exulted to his mother, ‘we have an awful lot of nobility…one Siamese prince, the grandson of the Earl of Chelmsford, the son of Viscount Maiden, who is the son of the Earl of Essex, another grandson of a Lord and the nephew of the Bishop of London.’21 His second survival device was wit. Like Sartre, he quickly discovered that intellectual ingenuity, particularly the ability to make the other boys laugh, earned him a certain grudging acceptance. He later recorded that ‘the word would go round’-“Connolly’s being funny” and ‘soon I would have collected a crowd’. As court jester to more powerful boys, Connolly got on even at Eton, though there he expanded into the wisdom field: ‘I am becoming quite a Socrates in the Lower Half of the College.’ Known as ‘the tug who’s been kicked in the face by a mule’, Connolly used his intellectual gifts to get himself into the coveted ‘Pop’, and an Oxford ‘Open’ followed almost as a matter of course. His contemporary Lord Jessel said to him: ‘Well, you’ve got a Balliol scholarship and you’ve got into Pop-you know, I shouldn’t be surprised if you never did anything else the rest of your life.’
There was an appalling danger, as Connolly was aware, of this prediction coming true. He was always very perceptive about himself, as about others. He early recognized that he was by nature a hedonist; his aim he designated as not so much perfection as ‘perfection in happiness’. But how could he be happy if, having no inherited money of his own, he was forced to be energetic? Waugh was right to point to his laziness. Connolly himself admitted ‘that sloth by which I have been disabled’. He did little work at Oxford and took a Third. He then landed an easy job as amanuensis to the wealthy writer Logan Pearsall Smith, who assigned him few duties and in effect gave him an allowance of £8 a week, quite a lot in those days. Smith was hoping for a Boswell but doomed to disappointment since Boswellizing requires energetic assiduity. Besides, Connolly soon married a well-off woman, Jean Bakewell, with £1000 a year. He seems to have been fond of her but the couple were too selfish to have a child. There was a botched abortion in Paris, forcing Jean to have a further operation which meant she could never have children; it affected her glands, she became overweight and her husband lost interest in her. Connolly never seems to have developed a mature attitude to women. He admitted that for him ‘love’ took the form of ‘the exhibitionism of the only child’. It meant ‘a desire to lay my personality at someone’s feet as a puppy deposits a slobbery ball’.22 Meanwhile, Jean’s money was sufficient to remove the need for regular work. Connolly’s diaries, which he kept from 1928-37, record the consequences: ‘Idle morning.’ ‘Extremely idle morning, lunch about two.’ ‘I am lying on the sofa trying fo imagine a yellow slab of sunshine spread thickly over a white wall.’ ‘Too much leisure. With so much leisure one leans too hard on everyone and everything, and most of them give way.’23
In fact Connolly was not quite as idle as he liked to make out. He completed his sharp critique of literary fashions, Enemies of Promise, which, when eventually published (in 1938) proved one of the most influential books of the decade. It suggested that he had a natural gift for leading at any rate the more gregarious intellectuals of his generation. When the Spanish war came, he duly politicized himself and paid three visits there; rather like the Grand Tour, it was compulsory among intellectuals of a certain class, the cerebral equivalent of big-game hunting. Connolly had the mandatory letter of authorization from Harry Pollitt, which came in useful when his companion, W.H. Auden, was arrested in Barcelona for urinating in the Monjuich public gardens, a serious offence in Spain.24
Connolly’s accounts of these visits, mainly in the New Statesman, are acute and a refreshing contrast to the field-grey committed prose most other intellectuals were producing at that time. But they indicate the strain he found in carrying the Left Man’s Burden. ‘I belong,’ he introduced himself, ‘to one of the most non-political generations the world has ever seen…we would no sooner have attended a political meeting than we would have gone to church.’ The ‘more realistic’ of them-he instanced Evelyn Waugh and Kenneth Clark-had grasped that ‘the kind of life they lived depended on close cooperation with the governing class.’ The rest had ‘wavered’ until the Spanish war erupted: ‘they have [now] become politically-minded entirely, I think, through foreign affairs.’ But he was quick to note that many on the left had been motivated by careerism or because ‘they hated their father or were unhappy at public school or insulted at the Customs or worried about sex’.25 He drew pointed attention to the importance of literary as well as political merit and commended Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle as ‘the only left-wing critical book to accept aesthetic as well as economic standards’.26
What Connolly was hinting was that politicized literature did not work. In due course, as soon as it was intellectually safe, he proclaimed the demise of ‘commitment’ openly. In October 1939 a wealthy admirer, Peter Watson, devised the perfect role for Connolly: editing a monthly magazine of new writing, Horizon, whose specific purpose was to uphold literary excellence in the teeth of the all-enveloping wartime spirit. From the start it was a striking success and confirmed Connolly’s position as a leading power-broker among the intelligentsia. By 1943 he felt he could afford to write off the 1930s as a mistake: ‘The literature most typical of those ten years was political and it failed both ways, for it accomplished none of its political objects, nor did it evoke any literary work of lasting merit.’27 Instead, Connolly began the process of replacing the intellectual search for Utopia by the pursuit of enlightened hedonism. He did this both in the columns of Horizon and in another highly influential book, a collection of escapist thoughts about pleasure, The Unquiet Grave (1944). In youth Connolly had described his ideology as seeking ‘perfection in happiness’; in the proletarian 1930s he had called it ‘aesthetic materialism’; now it was ‘the defence of civilized standards’.
However, it was not until June 1946, when the war was over, that Connolly actually got down to defining his programme in detail in a Horizon editorial.28 Characteristically it was the sharp-eyed Evelyn Waugh who drew attention to this statement. He had been following Connolly’s doings with close attention, despite all the wartime distractions; later, in his Sword of Honour trilogy he was to lampoon the wartime Connolly as Everard Spruce, his magazine as Survival and his pretty girl intellectual assistants-in real life Lys Lubbock, who shared Connolly’s bed, and Sonia Brownell, who became the second Mrs Orwell-as Frankie and Coney. Now he drew the attention of the Catholic readers of the Tablet to the enormity of Connolly’s programme.29 This list of ten aims, described by Connolly as ‘the major indications of a civilized society’, was as follows: (1) abolition of the death penalty; (2) penal reform, model prisons and rehabilition of prisoners; (3) slum clearance and ‘new towns’; (4) light and heating subsidized and ‘supplied free like air’; (5) free medicine, food and clothes subsidies; (6) abolition of censorship, so that everyone can write, say and perform what they wish, abolition of travel restrictions and exchange control, the end of phone-tapping or the compiling of dossiers on people known for their heterodox opinions; (7) reform of the laws against homosexuals and abortion, and the divorce laws; (8) limitations on property ownership, rights for children; (9) the preservation of architectural and natural beauty and subsidies for the arts; (10) laws against racial and religious discrimination.
This programme was, in fact, the formula for what was to become the permissive society. Indeed, if we leave out some of Connolly’s more impractical economic ideas, virtually everything he called for was to be enacted into law in the 1960s, not only in Britain but in the United States and most other Western democracies. These changes, affecting almost every aspect of social, cultural and sexual life, were to make the 1960s one of the most crucial decades in modern history, akin to the 1790s. Waugh was understandably alarmed. He suspected that doing what Connolly proposed involved the virtual elimination of the Christian basis of society and its replacement by the universal pursuit of pleasure. Connolly saw it as the final attainment of civilization; to others it would end in a pandaemonium. What it unquestionably showed, however, was how much more influential intellectuals are when they turn from political Utopias to the business of eroding social disciplines and rules. This was demonstrated by Rousseau in the eighteenth century and again by Ibsen in the nineteenth. Now it was proved again: whereas the political 1930s, as Connolly remarked, had been a failure, the permissive 1960s, from the intellectuals’ point of view anyway, were a spectacular triumph.
Connolly himself, having set the agenda, played little part in carrying through the revolution, though he survived till 1974. He was not made for long campaigns or heroic endeavours. The spirit might have been willing, at any rate at times, but the flesh was always weak. He coined the phrase, apropos of himself, ‘imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.’30 But the thin Cyril never did emerge. He was an anti-hero long before the word was coined. Greed, selfishness and petty depredations ever marked his steps. As early as 1928, an unpaid laundry bill led Desmond MacCarthy to denounce him as an opportunist and a sponger. Indeed most people who had given Connolly hospitality had cause to regret it. One found what was described as ‘bathroom detritus’ in the bottom of his grandfather clock. Lord Berners discovered a mouldering tub of potted shrimps amid his Chippendale. Somerset Maugham detected Connolly stealing two of his prize avocados and forced him to unpack his suitcases and disgorge. Half-eaten meals were retrieved, weeks later, from bedroom drawers, or bits of spaghetti and bacon rashers marking his place in the host’s books. Then there was ‘the cigar ash dropped with absent malice into the culinary triumph proffered by the wife of a celebrated American intellectual’.31 Or the unchivalrous behaviour during a V-bomb raid over London in 1944 when Connolly-like Bertrand Russell thirty years before-was in bed with a lady of quality. She was possibly the Lady Perdita (later, in real life, Mrs Annie Fleming) described by Evelyn Waugh as figuring in his interests at that time. But whereas Russell leapt out of Lady Constance Malleson’s bed in a gesture of generous indignation at man’s inhumanity, in Connolly’s case the leap was dictated by panic, redeemed by a bon mot: ‘Perfect fear casteth out love.’
Clearly such a man could not lead a crusade for civilization, even had the energy been there. But of course it was not. Sloth, boredom and self-disgust caused Connolly to kill Horizon in 1949: ‘We closed the long windows over Bedford Square, the telephone was taken, the furniture stored, the back numbers went to their cellar, the files rotted in the dust. Only contributions continued inexorably to be delivered, like a suicide’s milk.’ He finally divorced poor Jean and married a beautiful intellectual’s moll called Barbara Skelton. But the union (1950-54) did not prosper. Each watched the other warily. Both, in the tradition of Tolstoy and Sonya, and many denizens of Bloomsbury, kept competitive diaries for future publication. After it broke up, Connolly complained to Edmund Wilson bitterly about Skelton’s diary, which described her relations with him and might at any moment appear as a novel. Meanwhile, Wilson records him saying, ‘she had confiscated and hidden a diary that he has kept about his relations with her. He knew where it was, however, and was going to break in and get it sometime when she was away.’32 Evidently this did not happen, as no such diary has yet surfaced. But Skelton’s was eventually published in 1987 and Connolly was right to be apprehensive about its contents. It provides an unforgettable portrait of the comatose intellectual in supine posture.
Thus, on 8 October 1950 she records: ‘[Cyril] sinks back into the bed like a dying goose, still in his dressing-gown…Sinks further into the pillow and closes his eyes, with an expression of resigned suffering…An hour later I go into the bedroom. Cyril is lying with his eyes closed.’ 10 October: ‘[Cyril] has a long session in the bath while I do the laundry. Go into the bedroom later to find him standing naked in an attitude of despair staring into space…return to bedroom, find C. still gazing into space…write a letter, return to bedroom, C. still with his back to the room propped against the window ledge.’ A year later, 17 November 1951: ‘[Cyril] wouldn’t come down to breakfast but lay in his bed sucking the sheet-ends…He sometimes lies for an hour with folds of sheet pouring from his mouth like ectoplasm.’33
Nonetheless, this upholder of civilized values had laid the egg of permissiveness rather in the same way that Erasmus laid the egg of the Reformation. But the hatching was the work of others, and in the process a new and disturbing element, which Connolly certainly did not foresee and would have deplored if he had, was added to the brew: the cult of violence. It is a curious fact that violence has always exercised a strong appeal to some intellectuals. It goes hand in hand with the desire for radical, absolutist solutions. How else can we explain the taste for violence in Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell and so many other nominal pacifists? Sartre, too; was a man fascinated by violence, dabbling in it beneath an obfuscating cloud of euphemism. Thus he argued: ‘when youth confronts the police our job is not only to show that it is the police who are the violent ones but to join youth in counter-violence.’ Or again; for an intellectual not to engage in ‘direct action’ (i.e. violence) on behalf of blacks ‘is to be guilty of murder of the blacks-just as if he actually pulled the triggers that killed [the Black Panthers] murdered by the police, by the system’.34
The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration. Often it takes the form of admiring those ‘men of action’ who practise violence. Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian. In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole. He always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS.35 Thus the four Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing battalions which were the spearhead of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ in Eastern Europe contained an unusually high proportion of university graduates among the officers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded ‘D’ Battalion, for instance, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence. Stalin, too, had legions of intellectual admirers in his time, as did such post-war men of violence as Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung.
Encouragement or tolerance of violence by intellectuals has sometimes been the product of characteristic loose thinking. Auden’s poem which dealt with the Civil War, ‘Spain’, published in March 1937, contained the notorious line: ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’. This was criticized by Orwell, who liked the poem as a whole, on the grounds that it could only have been written by someone ‘to whom murder is at most a word’. Auden defended the line by arguing that, ‘if there is such a thing as a just war, then murder can be necessary for the sake of justice’-but he nonetheless cut the word ‘necessary’.36 Kingsley Martin, who served in the Quaker Ambulance Unit in the First World War and shrank from actual violence in any shape, sometime muddled himself into defending it theoretically. In 1952, applauding the final triumph of Mao in China, but nervous about reports that one and a half million ‘enemies of the people’ had been disposed of, he asked foolishly in his New Statesman column: ‘Were these executions really necessary?’ Leonard Woolf, a director of the journal, forced him to publish a letter the following week in which he asked the pointed question: would Martin ‘give some indication…under what circumstances the execution of 1.5 million persons by a government is “really necessary”?’ Martin, of course, could give no answer and his wriggling efforts to get off the hook on which he had impaled himself were painful to behold.37
On the other hand, some intellectuals do not find even the fact of violence abhorrent. The case of Norman Mailer (1923-) is particularly illuminating because he is in many ways so typical of the intellectual type we have been examining.38 The first-born only son of a matriarchal family, he was from the start the centre of an admiring female circle. It consisted of his mother Fanny, whose own family, the Schneiders, were well-to-do and who ran a successful business herself, and her various sisters. Later Mailer’s own sister joined the circle. The boy was a model Brooklyn child, quiet, well-behaved, always first in class, at Harvard by sixteen; his progress was enthusiastically applauded by the females. ‘All the women in the family thought that Norman was the cat’s miaow.’ That was the comment of his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, who also noted: ‘Fanny just didn’t want her little genius to be married.’ ‘Genius’ was a word often on Fanny’s lips in relation to Mailer; she would inform reporters, at one of his many court appearances, ‘My boy’s a genius.’ Sooner or later Mailer’s wives became disagreeably conscious of the Fanny Factor. The third, Lady Jean Campbell, complained: ‘All we ever did was go to dinner with his mother.’ The fourth, a blonde actress who called herself Beverley Bentley, was censured (and indeed physically attacked) for making anti-Fanny remarks. However, the wives were themselves an adult substitute for the childhood circle of femininity, since Mailer continued to be on terms with all except one of them after their divorces, arguing: ‘When you’re divorced from a woman, the friendship can then start because one’s sexual vanity is not in it any longer.’ There were six wives altogether, who between them produced eight children, the sixth wife, Norris Church, being the same age as Mailer’s eldest daughter. There were also many other women, the fourth wife complaining: ‘When I was pregnant, he had an airline stewardess. Three days after bringing home our baby, he began an affair.’ The progression from one woman to another was strongly reminiscent of Bertrand Russell, while the harem atmosphere recalls Sartre. But Mailer, while from a matriarchal background, had strongly patriarchal notions. His first marriage broke up because his wife wanted a career, Mailer dismissing her as ‘a premature Woman’s Liberationist’. He complained of the third: ‘Lady Jean gave up $10 million to marry me but she would never make me breakfast.’ He finished with the fourth when she, in turn, had an affair. One of his women complained: Norman just won’t have anything to do with a woman who has a career.’ Reviewing one of his books in 1971, V.S. Pritchett argued that the fact Mailer had so many wives (only four at that date) showed he was ‘clearly not interested in women but in something they had got’.39
The second characteristic Mailer has in common with many intellectuals is a genius for self-publicity. The brilliant promotion of his outstanding war novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was a highly professional job by his publishers Rinehart, among the most elaborate and certainly the most successful campaigns of the post-war period. But, once launched, Mailer took over his own public relations, which for the next thirty years were a wonder and a warning to all-work, wives, divorces, views, quarrels and politics being woven skilfully into one seamless garment of self-advertisement. He was the first intellectual to make effective use of televison to promote himself, staging on it memorable and sometimes alarming scenes. He early grasped television’s insatiable appetite for action, as opposed to mere words, and accordingly turned himself into the most hyperactive of intellectuals, following a course already piloted by Hemingway. What was all this self-promotion designed to serve? Vanity and egoism, of course: it cannot be stressed too strongly that many of the activities of men like Tolstoy, Russell and Sartre, though superficially rationalized, can only be adequately explained by the desire to draw attention to themselves. Then too there was the more mundane purpose of earning money. Mailer’s patriarchal tastes proved expensive. Taken to court in 1979 by his fourth wife, Mailer argued that he could not afford to pay her $1000 a week; he was, he said, paying $400 a week to his second, $400 to his fifth and $600 to his sixth wife; he was $500,000 in debt, owing $185,000 to his agent and unpaid taxes of $80,500, leading the Internal Revenue Service to put a $100,000 lien on his house. His self-advertising was clearly designed to attract readers, and did so handsomely. To give only one example, his long essay ‘The Prisoner of Sex’, attacking feminism and much-canvassed as a result of his marital escapades, appeared in Harper’s in March 1971 and sold more newsstand copies than any other issue in the magazine’s 120-year history.
However, Mailer’s self-promotion also had a serious purpose, to promote the concept which became the dominant theme of his work and life-the need for man to throw off some of the constraints which inhibit the use of personal force. Hitherto, most educated people had identified such inhibitions with civilization-the poet Yeats, for instance, had defined civilization precisely as ‘the exercise of self-restraint’. Mailer questioned this assumption. Might not personal violence sometimes, for some people, be necessary and even virtuous? He reached this position by a devious route. As a young man he was a standard fellow-traveller, making eighteen speeches on behalf of Wallace in the 1948 presidential campaign.40 But he broke with the Communist Party at the notorious 1949 Waldorf Conference and thereafter his political views, while sometimes merely reflecting the liberal-left consensus, became more idiosyncratic and original. In particular, his novel-writing and journalism led him to explore the position of blacks and black cultural assumptions in the life of the West. In the 1957 summer issue of Irving Howe’s magazine Dissent he published a thesis The White Negro, which proved to be his most influential piece of writing, indeed a key document of the post-war epoch. In this he analysed ‘hip consciousness’, the behaviour of young, self-assertive and confident blacks, as a form of counterculture; he explained and justified it, indeed urged its adoption by radical whites. There were, Mailer argued, many aspects of black culture progressive intellectuals should be prepared to examine carefully: anti-rationalism, mysticism, the sense of the life force and, not least, the role of violence and even revolution. Consider, Mailer wrote, the actual case of two young men beating to death a sweetshop owner. Did it not have its beneficial aspect? ‘One murders not only a weak, fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life.’ Since rage, when turned inwards, was a danger to creativity, was not violence, when used, externalized and vented, itself creative?
This was the first carefully considered and well-written attempt to legitimize personal violence-as opposed to the ‘institutionalized violence’ of society-and it aroused understandable anger in some quarters. Indeed Howe himself later admitted he should have cut the passage about the sweetshop murder. At the time Norman Podhoretz attacked it as ‘one of the most morally gruesome ideas I have ever come across’, which showed ‘where the ideology of hipsterism can lead’.41 But very large numbers of young people, white as well as black, were waiting for just such a lead and a rationalization. The White Negro was the authenticating document for much of what took place in the 1960s and 1970s. It gave intellectual respectability to many acts and attitudes hitherto regarded as outside the range of civilized behaviour, and added some significant and baleful items to the permissive agenda Cyril Connolly had proposed a decade before.
The message had all the more impact in that Mailer reinforced and publicized it by his own actions, in public and private. On 23 July 1960 he was tried for his part in a police-station brawl in Provincetown, being found guilty of drunkenness but not of ‘disorderly conduct’. On 14 November he was again charged with disorderly conduct at a Broadway club. Five days later he gave a big party at his New York home to announce his candidacy for mayor of New York. By midnight he was fighting drunk down on the street outside his apartment house, engaging in fisticuffs with various acquaintances, such as Jason Epstein and George Plimpton, as they left his party. At 4.30 am he came in from the street with a black eye, swollen lip and blood-stained shirt. His second wife, Adele Morales, a Spanish-Peruvian painter, remonstrated with him; whereupon he took out a penknife with a 2½-inch blade and stabbed her in the abdomen and back; one wound was three inches deep. She was fortunate not to die. The legal processes which followed this incident were complex; but Adele refused to sign a complaint and it ended a year later in Mailer being given a suspended sentence and probation. His comments in the meantime did not strike any particular note of remorse. In an interview with Mike Wallace he said: ‘The knife to a juvenile delinquent is very meaningful. You see, it’s his sword, his manhood.’ There ought, he added, to be annual gang-jousts in Central Park. On 6 February 1961 he gave a reading of his verses at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center, including the lines ‘So long as you use a knife/there is some love left’; the Director rang down the curtain on grounds of obscenity. After the whole episode was over, Mailer summed up: ‘A decade’s anger made me do it. After that I felt better.’42
There were also Mailer’s more calculated public efforts to push the counter-culture. One of those who had been inspired by The White Negro was the Yippie Jerry Rubin, and Mailer was the star speaker at the huge anti-Vietnam rally Rubin staged at Berkeley on 2 May 1965. He said that President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ was moving ‘from camp to shit’ and he exhorted 20,000 students not just to criticize the President but to insult him by sticking his picture upside down on walls. One of those who heard him was Abbie Hoffman, soon to be the counterculture’s high priest. Mailer showed, he argued, ‘how you can focus protest sentiment effectively by aiming not at the decisions but at the guts of those who make them’.43 Two years later Mailer took a flamboyant part in the big march on the Pentagon, on 21 October 1967, entertaining and provoking the vast audience with obscenities, telling them, ‘We’re going to try to stick it up the government’s ass, right up the sphincter of the pentagon,’ and getting himself arrested and sentenced to thirty days in jail (twenty-five suspended). Released, he told reporters: ‘You see, dear fellow Americans, it is Sunday and we are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam’-defending his allusion by saying that, though not a Christian himself, he was now married to one. This was wife number four.
In effect Mailer brought into politics the language of hip, the voice of the street. He eroded the statesman’s hieratic and a lot of the assumptions that went with it. In May 1968, at the height of the student unrest, a writer in the Village Voice, analysing Mailer’s appeal, wrote: ‘How could they not dig Mailer? Mailer, who preached revolution before there was a movement. Mailer, who was calling LBJ a monster while slide-rule liberals were still writing speeches for him. Mailer, who was into Negroes, pot, Cuba, violence, existentialism…while the New Left was still a twinkle in C. Wright Mills’s eye.’44 But, while certainly lowering the tone of political discourse, it is not clear that Mailer raised the content. His impact on literary life was similar. His rows with fellow authors rivalled, even outstripped, those of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Sartre and Hemingway. He quarrelled, privately and publicly, with William Styron, James Jones, Calder Willingham, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, among others. As with Hemingway, these rows sometimes took violent forms. In 1956 he was reported fighting on the flowerbeds outside Styron’s house. His opponent was Bennett Cerf, whom he told: ‘You’re not a publisher, you’re a dentist.’ In 1971 there was face-slapping and head-butting with Gore Vidal before a Dick Cavett television show; at a 1977 party the script read: Mailer to Vidal: ‘You look like a dirty old Jew.’ Vidal: ‘Well, you look like a dirty old Jew.’ Mailer throws drink in Vidal’s face; Vidal bites Mailer’s finger.45 The television debate which followed the face slapping, which also involved the harmless and ladylike New Yorker Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, developed into an angry Vidal-Mailer discussion of buggery. Then:
Flanner: ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ [laughter]
Mailer: ‘I know you’ve lived in France for many years but believe me, Janet, it’s possible to enter a woman another way.’
Flanner: ‘So I’ve heard.’ [more laughter]
Cavett: ‘On that classy note we will end the show.’
Mailer epitomized the interthreading of permissiveness with violence which characterized the 1960s and 1970s, and miraculously survived his own antics. Others were not so lucky or resilient. Indeed there were some sad casualties of the switch of intellectual thrust away from old-style utopianism and towards the new, vertiginous and increasingly brutal hedonism. When Cyril Connolly published his manifesto in June 1946, Kenneth Peacock Tynan had just completed his first year at Magdalen College, Oxford, and has already established himself as the leader of intellectual society there. Four months later, when the new term opened, I was an awestruck freshman-witness to his arrival at the Magdalen lodge. I stared in astonishment at this tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum-coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet-ring. I was trundling my solitary regulation school trunk. He seemed to fill the lodge with his possessions and servitors whom he ordered about with calm and imperious authority. One sentence particularly struck me: ‘Have a care for that box, my man-it is freighted with golden shirts!’ Nor was I the only one to be struck by this elegant cameo performance. In 1946 Tynan and I were among the few undergraduates who had come straight to university from school. The great majority had been in the war; some had held senior ranks and had witnessed or perhaps perpetrated scenes of appalling slaughter. But they had seen nothing like this. Beefy majors from the Foot Guards were struck speechless. Bomber pilots who had killed thousands in the Berlin firestorms simply goggled. Lieutenant-Commanders who had sunk the Bismarck gazed in awe. With super timing, having dominated his self-created scene, Tynan swept out followed by his toiling bearers.
Behind this strange young man there was (though he did not then know it) an even stranger story. It might have come straight from the pages, not indeed of those Magdalen alumni and heroes, Oscar Wilde or Compton Mackenzie, but from Arnold Bennett. The facts about Tynan’s life have all been carefully gathered by his second wife, Kathleen, and published in a tender and sorrowing biography, a model of its kind.46 Tynan was born (in 1927) and brought up in Birmingham, attended its famous grammar school and flourished mightily there, playing the lead in Hamlet and winning a demyship to Oxford. He thought himself the only, much-adored and indulged child of Rose and Peter Tynan, a draper. His father gave him £20 spending money every fortnight, a great deal in those days. In fact Tynan was illegitimate and his father was what Bennett called a ‘card’, leading a double life. Half the week he was Peter Tynan in Birmingham. The other half, in his tailcoat, top hat, grey spats and handmade silk shirts, he was Sir Peter Peacock, Justice of the Peace, successful entrepreneur, six times mayor of Warrington, and with a Lady Peacock and many small Peacocks in train. The deception only came to light in 1948 at the end of Tynan’s Oxford career, when Sir Peter died, the indignant legitimate family swept down from Warrington to claim the body, and Tynan’s tearful mother was banned from the funeral. It is not unknown for Oxford undergraduates suddenly to discover they are illegitimate-it happened to another Magdalen man, the putative baronet Edward Hulton, who was obliged to have the ‘Sir’ removed from his nameplate-and Tynan responded by instantly inventing the story that his father had been financial adviser to Lloyd George. But the discovery hurt. He dropped ‘Peacock’ as his middle name. Moreover, his mother’s guilt feelings at what she had done to her son help to explain why, from the beginning, she over-protected and spoiled him; indeed, he always treated her like some kind of superior servant.
It was always Tynan’s habit to order people around; he had the touch of the master. At Oxford he dressed in princely style at a time when clothes-rationing was still strictly enforced. In addition to the plum-coloured suit and golden shirts there was a cloak lined in red silk, a sharp-waisted doeskin outfit, another suit in bottle green, said to be made of billiard-cloth, and green suede shoes; he used make-up-‘just a little crimson lake around the mouth’,47 He thus restored Oxford’s reputation for aesthetic extravagance. During the whole of his time there he was easily the most talked-of person in the city. He produced and acted in plays. He spoke brilliantly at the Union. He wrote for or edited the magazines. He gave sensational parties, attended by London show-biz celebrities.* He kept a court of young women and admiring dons. He was burnt in effigy by envious bloods. He seemed to bring to life the pages of Brideshead Revisited, then a recent best-seller, and to add fresh ones.
Moreover, unlike virtually all those who cause a splash at Oxford, he made good in the real world. He produced plays and reviews. He acted alongside Alec Guinness. More important, he quickly established himself as the most audacious literary journalist in London. His motto was: ‘Write heresy, pure heresy.’ He pinned to his desk the exhilarating slogan: ‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ He followed these injunctions at all times. They quickly brought him the coveted shop-window as drama critic of the Evening Standard, and in due course the still more influential drama post on the Observer, then the best paper in Britain. Readers goggled, as the students had once done in Magdalen lodge, at this amazing phenomenon, who seemed to know all world literature and used words such as esurient, cateran, cisisbeism and eretheism.48 He became a power in the London theatre, which regarded him with awe, fear and hatred. He turned Osborne’s Look Back in Anger into a hit and launched the legend of the Angry Young Men. He introduced Britain to Brecht. Not least, he campaigned powerfully for the subsidized theatre which made the Brechtian drama effective. When Britain’s own National Theatre was created he became its first literary manager, 1963-73, and established it with a strong cosmopolitan repertoire: of the seventy-nine plays done there during his regime, most of them his ideas, half were hits, an astonishing record. He was already well-known in the United States, thanks to some superb reviews in the New Yorker, 1958-60; at the National Theatre he established a global reputation. Indeed at times in the 1960s he probably had more influence than anyone else in world theatre; and, as I have argued in this book, the theatre ultimately has more effect on behaviour than any other art.
Nor was Tynan without a serious purpose. Like Connolly, and equally vaguely, he linked hedonism and permissiveness with socialism. In Declaration (1957), the manifesto of the ‘Angries’, he contributed his one considered statement of aim. Art, he insisted, had to go ‘on record; it must commit itself’. But equally socialism ought to mean ‘progress towards pleasure’, and be ‘a gay international affirmation’ (this was in the age before the hijacking of ‘gay’).49 Writing in the year Mailer published The White Negro, he had in part the same aim, of breaking down linguistic inhibitions on the stage and in print. No one in Britain played a bigger role in destroying the old system of censorship, formal and informal. His efforts to do so were punctuated by more traditional political gestures, though even these had a permissive aspect. In 1960, after much manoeuvring, he succeeded in getting a four-letter word into the Observer. The next year he organized a pro-Castro demonstration in Hyde Park, with the help of scores of pretty girls. On 13 November 1965 he achieved his masterpiece of calculated self-publicity when he uttered the word ‘fuck’ on a BBC television late-night satire programme. For a time it made him the most notorious man in the country. On 17 June 1969 he put organized nudity on the general stage with his review Oh! Calcutta! It was eventually performed all over the world and grossed over $360 million.
Yet in destroying censorship, Tynan was also destroying himself. His actual death in 1980 was caused by emphysema, the product of habitual smoking on a weak chest he had inherited from his father. But some time before that he had irreparably damaged himself as a moral being by what can only be called a self-immolation on the altar of sex. His sexual obsessions began early. He later claimed he masturbated from the age of eleven and often vaunted the joys of this activity; towards the end of his life, in a haunting self-characterization, he described himself as a dying species, Tynanosaurus homo masturbans. He also, as a boy, did his best to collect pornography, no easy matter in wartime Birmingham. When he performed his schoolboy Hamlet, he induced James Agate, then the leading critic and a notorious homosexual, to write a notice of the show. Agate did so, and also invited the youth to his London flat and put his hand on his knee: ‘Are you homo, my boy?’ ‘I’m afraid not.’ ‘Ah well, I thought we’d get that out of the way.’50 Tynan spoke the truth. He sometimes enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes and did not particularly discourage the common notion that he was homosexual, believing it gave him easier access to women. But at no point did he have a homosexual experience, ‘never even a mild grope’, as he put it.51 He was, however, interested in sado-masochism. Agate, having discovered this, gave him the key to his own extensive pornographic collection, and that completed Tynan’s corruption.
Thereafter he built up a store of his own. In due course, various landladies and both his wives stumbled across it and were profoundly shocked. This is curious because Tynan never troubled to hide his sexual interests and sometimes proclaimed them. He announced during an Oxford Union debate: ‘My theme is-just a thong at twilight.’ He formed relationships with large numbers of young women at Oxford and usually asked them to present him with a pair of their knickers to hang alongside the whip which graced his walls. He liked voluptuous Jewish girls, especially those with strict fathers and used to corporal punishment. He told one of them that the word ‘chastise’ had ‘a good Victorian ring of retribution’. He added: ‘the word spank is very potent and has the correct schoolgirlishness…Sex means spank and beautiful means bottom and always will.’52 He did not expect either of his wives to submit to such doings, which he associated with sin and wickedness to be guiltily enjoyed. But once he was a power in the theatre there was no difficulty in finding out-of-work actresses who cooperated in return for some help.
Women seem to have objected less to his sadism, which took only a mild form, than to his vanity and authoritarianism. One left him when she noticed that, entering a restaurant, he always blocked her efforts to use the looking-glass. Another reported: ‘The moment you left him you were out of his mind.’ He treated women as possessions. He had in many ways a sweet nature and could be perceptive and understanding. But he expected women to revolve around men like moons around a planet. His first wife, Elaine Dundy, had ambitions of her own and eventually wrote a first-rate novel.* This led to quarrels of a spectacular, rather stagey kind, with screams, smashed crockery and cries of ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch!’ Mailer, no mean judge of marital rows, rated the Tynans highly: ‘They’d hit each other shots that you’d just sit there and applaud like you would at a prizefight.’ Tynan, while reserving the unqualified right to be unfaithful himself, expected loyalty from his spouse. On one occasion, returning from his current mistress to his London flat, he found his first wife in the kitchen with a naked man. Tynan saw that the man was a poet, a BBC producer and therefore wet, and took the bold step of seizing his clothes from the bedroom and hurling them down the lift-shaft. Usually he was not so courageous. After divorcing his first wife, he induced Kathleen Gates, who was to become his second, to leave her husband and live with him. The husband broke in through Tynan’s front door, while Tynan himself cowered behind the sofa. Later the husband caught up with him near her mother’s house in Hampstead; there was a scrimmage and tufts of Tynan’s golden hair, now greying, were pulled out before he got to safety in the house. The second wife’s account continued: ‘For a time Ken and I managed to hold out in my mother’s house. Then we crept into the night. Some distance down the road, Ken swore we were being followed and climbed into a nearby dustbin.’53 Tynan did not relish this forced evocation of Samuel Beckett, a playwright he originally discounted.
The second marriage crumbled like the first on Tynan’s insistence on total sexual latitude for himself, fidelity for his wife. He formed a permanent liaison with an unemployed actress with whom he enacted elaborate sado-masochistic fantasies, involving himself dressing up as a woman, the actress as a man, and sometimes prostitutes as extras. He told Kathleen he intended to continue with these sessions twice a week, ‘although all common sense and reason and kindness and even camaraderie are against it…It is my choice, my thing, my need…It is fairly comic and slightly nasty. But it is shaking me like an infection and I cannot do anything but be shaken until the fit has passed.’54 This was bad enough. Still worse was Tynan’s decision to push aside his career in order to become a pornographer, and an unsuccessful one at that. As far back as 1958 his engagement book contained the notes: ‘Write play. Write pornographic book. Write autobiography.’ In 1964 he formed a relationship with Playboy magazine, though oddly enough they resisted his attempts to provide them with erotic material. It seems to have been Tynan’s optimistic belief that he could turn pornography into a serious art form, encouraged by the meretricious success of Oh! Calcutta! In the early 1970s he tried to enlist a number of distinguished writers in compiling an anthology of masturbation fantasies, but got humiliating rebuffs from, among others, Nabokov, Graham Greene, Beckett and Mailer. Thereafter he became increasingly involved in long-drawn-out but ultimately abortive attempts to produce a pornographic film. For one thing, he could never raise the finance. Unlike most intellectuals, he was not avaricious. Quite the contrary: he was generous, even reckless, a quality he shared with Sartre. When his mother died she left him a sizeable sum of old Sir Peter’s money, which Tynan spent as quickly as he could. When eased out of the National Theatre, the payoff he received was niggardly. He signed such foolish contracts for Oh! Calcutta! that he received barely $250,000 from this hugely successful show. Much of his time in his last years was spent trying to raise funds for a project his wiser friends viewed with contempt and despair. He had doubts himself. He wrote to Kathleen from Provence: ‘What am I doing here churning out pornography? It is very shaming.’ At St Tropez he dreamed of a naked girl, covered with dust and excrement, her hair shaved off, with dozens of drawing pins nailed into her head. At that point, he recorded, ‘I woke up filled with horror. And at once dogs in the hotel grounds began to bark pointlessly, as they are said to do when the King of Evil, invisible to man, passes by.’55 Tynan’s last years, a sinister counterpoint of sexual obsession and physical debility, are movingly told by his widow and make appalling reading to those who knew and admired the man. They recall Shakespeare’s arresting phrase, ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.56
A still more striking casualty of permissiveness, with a stronger note of violence, was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, perhaps the most gifted film director even Germany has produced. He was a child of defeat, born in Bavaria on 31 May 1945 in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s suicide; he was the adolescent beneficiary, and victim, of the new freedoms which intellectuals like Connolly, Mailer and Tynan were seeking to bestow on civilized humanity. In the 1920s the German cinema had led the world. The coming of the Nazis had created a diaspora of its talents, Hollywood getting the lion’s share; and when the Nazi regime fell, the American occupying authorities planted Hollywood cinema on German soil. This epoch ended in 1962 when twenty-six young German film writers and directors issued a declaration of German cinematic independence known as the Oberhausen Manifesto. Fassbinder left school two years later and by the age of twenty-one he had shot two short films. In a German arts world dominated by the shadow of Brecht, he formed a small production collective known as Antitheatre. In its first successful production he himself played Mac the Knife in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Although the Antitheatre was egalitarian in theory, in practice it was a hierarchical, structured tyranny, with himself as despot, and run (it has been said) in the way Louis XIV ran Versailles.57 He used this outfit to make his first successful film, Love is Colder than Death, shot over a mere twenty-four days in April 1969.
Fassbinder turned himself into not only the leading but also the symbolic film maker of the permissive age with astonishing speed. He had great will and authority, and an enviable power of taking fast, firm decisions; this enabled him to make high-quality movies quickly and economically. Critical approval came soon. He did not achieve world box-office success until Fear Eats the Soul (1974), but this was already his twenty-first movie. Indeed in the twelve months beginning in November 1969 he made nine full-length features. One of the most highly rated, both critically and commercially, The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), had 470 scenes and was shot in twelve days. By the age of thirty-seven he had made forty-three films, one every hundred days for thirteen years.58 There were no days off. He always worked, and made others work, on Sundays. In a professional sense he had a fanatical and sustained self-discipline. He would say: ‘I can sleep when I am dead.’
This prodigious output was achieved against a background of personal self-indulgence and self-abuse which makes the flesh creep. His father was a doctor who left his family when Fassbinder was six, giving up medicine to write poetry and supporting himself by running cheap properties. His mother was an actress, later appearing in some of his films. After her divorce she married a short-story writer. The background to Fassbinder’s childhood and adolescence was bohemian, literary, uncertain, amoral and irresponsible. He read a great deal and quickly began to produce creative work, stories and songs. He absorbed the new permissive culture with the same speed and certainty he did everything else. He was, in the new hip terminology, streetwise. By fifteen he was helping his father to collect the rents of his slum flats. He announced he was in love with a butcher’s boy. The father replied-it was characteristically German-‘If you want to go to bed with men, can’t it be with someone from the university?’59 Thereafter Fassbinder pursued with relentless ferocity one of the three great themes of the new sixties’ culture: the uninhibited exploitation of sex for pleasure. As his power in the theatre and cinema world grew, so did his demands and ruthlessness. Most of his lovers were male. Some were married and with children and there were appalling scenes of family distress. Almost from the start there was a hint of sado-masochism and extremism. He drew men from the working class and turned them into actors as well as lovers. One, whom he called ‘my Bavarian negro’, seems to have specialized in wrecking expensive cars. Another, a former North African male prostitute, was homicidal and created moments of terror for Fassbinder’s associates, and indeed for himself. A third, a butcher-turned-actor, committed suicide. But Fassbinder was also interested in women and talked patriarchally of ‘producing a traditional family’. His attitude to women was proprietorial. He liked to control them. In his early days, to raise money for his movies, he used women he controlled to service immigrant ‘guest-workers’, as the Germans call them. In 1970 he married an actress called Ingrid Caven, who believed she could transform him into a heterosexual. The wedding feast turned into a predictable orgy. The bride found her bedroom door locked, and the groom and the best man in her bed. Divorced, Fassbinder eventually went through another marriage with one of his film editors, Juliane Lorenz, but continued his ostentatious homosexual life in bars, hotels and brothels. Yet curiously enough he demanded fidelity from her. During the filming of the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), he discovered she had spent a night with one of the electricians. He created a jealous scene and called her a whore; she tore up her wedding certificate in his face.
Fassbinder also reflected, in his films and lifestyle, the second great theme of the new culture: violence. As a very young man, he seems to have been close to Andreas Baader, who helped to create one of West Germany’s most notorious terrorist gangs, and to Horst Sohnlein, who made incendiaries for the Baader-Meinhof group. His actor friend Harry Baer said Fassbinder often said he was tempted to go into terrorism but told himself that ‘making films would be more important for “the cause” than going out onto the street’.60 When Baader and other members of his gang committed suicide in the Stammheim Prison, in October 1977, Fassbinder shouted angrily: They have murdered our friends.’ His subsequent film The Third Generation (1979) produced the argument that the threat of terrorism was being exploited by the authorities to make Germany totalitarian again, and it aroused fury. In Hamburg a mob beat the cinema projectionist unconscious and destroyed the film. In Frankfurt youths hurled acid-bombs at the cinema that was showing it. Fassbinder usually got state subsidies for his films-that too was a sign of the times-but he made this one out of his own funds: it was a labour of love, or hate.
By this time however he had embraced, and was in the process of being crushed by, a third theme of the new culture: drugs. Tolerance, acceptance of drugs had always been an implicit assumption of the permissive society, especially in its hip vernacular. In the 1960s it became standard practice for intellectuals to sign petitions demanding the liberalization of drug laws. As a young man Fassbinder had earned money by driving stolen cars across frontiers but he does not seem to have become involved in drugs then. He was, naturally, part of the German hip scene. Like Brecht he designed a suitable uniform for himself: carefully torn jeans, check shirt, scuffed patent-leather shoes, a thin, wispy beard. He chain-smoked a hundred cigarettes a day. He ate a great deal of rich food and by his thirties had began to look bloated and frog-like, claiming: ‘Growing ugly is your way of sealing yourself off…Your stout, fat body, a monstrous bulwark against all forms of affection.’61 He also drank heavily: in the United States he would finish a fifth of Jim Beam bourbon and sometimes a second fifth every day. When he decided to sleep he would consume large quantities of pills, such as Mandrax. He does not seem to have taken up hard drugs until he made his film Chinese Roulette in 1976, when he was thirty-one. But then, having tried cocaine, he became convinced of its creative power and used it regularly and in rising doses. Indeed, when filming Bol
wiser (1977), he forced one of the actors to play his part drugged.
Thus events moved to an inevitable climax. In February 1982 he won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival; he hoped to do the hat trick by getting the Golden Palm at Cannes and the Golden Lion at Venice. But he did not get the Cannes prize; instead he spent 20,000 marks there on cocaine and made over the distribution rights of his next film for a guaranteed future supply. He had recently developed an erratic habit of violence towards women. At one point, drunk or drugged, he had become enraged and, for no reason, had hacked a script girl on the shins. At his birthday party on 31 May, a quasi-public event, he had handed his former wife Ingrid an enormous plastic dildo, saying it should keep her happy for a while. His schedule of work and interviews continued but his consumption of drugs, drink and banned sleeping pills mounted. On the morning of 10 June Juliane Lorenz found him dead in bed, the TV-video machine still switched on. A funeral of sorts took place but the coffin was empty as the police were still examining his body for drugs. The moral was so plain and emphatic that it was worth nobody’s while to draw it, though many did. To honour the departed artist a death-mask was taken in the manner of Goethe or Beethoven, and at the Venice Film Festival that September there circulated among the café tables on the Piazza San Marco pirated copies of this gruesome object.
Tynan and Fassbinder might be described as victims of the cult of hedonism. There were those, too, who fell victim to the intellectual legitimization of violence as well. Among them was James Baldwin (1924-88), the most sensitive and in some ways the most powerful of twentieth-century black American writers. His was a case of a man who might have led a happy and fulfilled life by virtue of his achievements, which were considerable. But instead he was rendered intensely miserable by the new intellectual climate of his time, which persuaded him that the message of his work must be hate-a message he delivered with angry enthusiasm. It is further evidence of the curious paradox that intellectuals, who ought to teach men and women to trust their reason, usually encourage them to follow their emotions; and, instead of urging debate and reconciliation on humanity, all too often spur it towards the arbitration of force.
Baldwin’s own account of his childhood and youth is unreliable, for reasons we will come to in a moment. But from the work of his biographer Fern Marja Eckman and other sources, it is possible to give a reasonably accurate summary.62 Baldwin’s background in 1920s Harlem was in some ways deprived. He was, in effect, the eldest of eight children. His mother did not get married until he was three. His grandfather was a Louisiana slave. His stepfather was a Sunday preacher, a Holy Roller, who worked in a bottling plant for very low wages. But despite the poverty, Baldwin was well, if strictly, brought up. His mother said that he always had one of his little brothers or sisters in one arm, but a book in the other. The first book he read right through was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and he read it again and again; its influence on his work, despite his attempts to erase it, was striking. His parents recognized his gifts and encouraged them; so did everyone else. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was no race-conscious defeatism in Harlem schools. The belief was that blacks, if they worked hard enough, could excel. Poverty was never accepted as an excuse for not learning. The academic standards were high. Children were expected to meet them, or be punished. Baldwin thrived in this atmosphere. At Public School 24 his head teacher, Gertrude Ayer, then the only black school head in New York City, was excellent; another teacher, Orilla Miller, took him to his first play and encouraged his writing. At the Frederick Douglas Junior High School, he published his first short story when he was thirteen in the school magazine, the Douglas Pilot, which he later edited; he was helped by two outstanding black teachers, the poet Countee Cullen, who taught French, and Herman Porter. As a teenager he wrote with extraordinary grace and exulted in his progress. A year after he left he contributed an article to the magazine applauding the school’s ‘spirit of good will and friendship’ which make it ‘one of the greatest junior high schools in the country’.63 As well as being an accomplished writer he was also by now an outstanding teenage preacher, described as ‘very hot’. He was admired, encouraged and greatly befriended by senior blacks in the pentacostal-tabernacle circuit. He went on to a celebrated New York academy, the De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, which produced, among others, Paul Gallico, Paddy Chayevsky, Jerome Weideman and Richard Avedon. Again he published his fiction in the school’s superb magazine, The Magpie, and went on to edit it. Again he was befriended by some first-rate teachers, who gave his obvious talents every encouragement in their power.
Baldwin’s later articles in The Magpie reflect his loss of faith. He left the Church. He worked as a porter and elevator boy, then on a construction site in New Jersey, writing at night. Again, there are many examples of his being helped and encouraged by his elders, both black and white. The then leading black writer, Richard Wright, got him the Eugene F. Sax-ton Memorial Trust Award, which enabled him to travel to Paris. He was published in the Nation and the New Leader. His ascent was not sensational but steady and methodical. People who knew him then testified to his hard-working earnestness, his dutiful support of his family, to whom he-sent every penny he could spare. He gave every sign of being happy. His breakthrough came in 1948 when he published a much-applauded article, ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, in the Jewish intellectual monthly Commentary.64 A lot of people lent him money to get on with his imaginative work. A loan from Marlon Brando enabled him to finish his novel of Harlem church life, Go Tell It On the Mountain, which was published to great applause in 1953. He led the life of a cosmopolitan intellectual, leaping straight from Harlem to Greenwich Village and the Paris Left Bank, bypassing the black bourgeoisie completely. He ignored the South. The Negro Problem was not a primary issue to him. Indeed, from much of his earlier and best writing it is impossible to tell that he was black. He stood for integration, in his life no less than in his work. Some of his finest essays were contributed to the integrationist Commentary.65 Its editor Norman Podhoretz later remarked: ‘He was a Negro intellectual in almost exactly the same sense as they were Jewish intellectuals.’66
But in the second half of the 1950s, Baldwin sensed the emerging new intellectual climate, of permissiveness on the one hand and approved hatred on the other. He was, or believed himself to be, a homosexual, and his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), dealt with this theme. It was rejected by his own publisher and he was forced to turn to another, which (he convinced himself) paid him too little. The experience filled him with rage against the American publishing industry. Moreover, he discovered that rage, at any rate from a ‘deprived’ person like himself, was becoming topical, fashionable and just. He expanded it, to include people and institutions he had once held in respect. He turned on Richard Wright and many other older blacks who had helped him.67 He began to pass collective judgments on the white race. He rewrote his entire personal history, to a great extent unconsciously, no doubt. He became yet another intellectual whose autobiographical writings, beneath a deceptive veneer of exhibitionist frankness, are dangerously misleading.68 He discovered he had been a very unhappy child. His father had told him he was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, as ugly as the devil’s son. Of his father he wrote: ‘I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home.’ He claims, when his father died, he heard his mother sigh: ‘I’m a widow forty-one years old with eight small children I never wanted.’ He discovered he was savagely bullied at school. He described Frederick Douglas Junior High School with horror. When he revisited it in 1963 he told the pupils: ‘White people have convinced themselves the Negro is happy in this place. It’s your job not to believe it one moment longer.’69 He declared of his high school that only the whites were happy in it, a claim his contemporary Richard Avedon strenuously denied. He said of the English teacher who helped him: ‘We hated each other.’ He violently and repeatedly denounced books he had once loved, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He attacked the whole concept of the would-be integrationist, middle-class Negro.70 He investigated the South and in the late 1950s became associated with the civil-rights movement, two phenomena he had hitherto ignored. But he was not interested in the Gandhi-like tactics of a Martin Luther King. Nor did he care for the sinewy reasoning of such black intellectuals as Bayard Rustin, who put the strictly rational case for equality with masterly skill. In the atmosphere generated by Mailer’s The White Negro, Baldwin played, with ever-growing vehemence, the emotional card-not least against Mailer himself, telling him he would rather spend his time with a white racist than a white liberal, since then at least he knew where he stood.
In fact Baldwin spent plenty of time with white liberals, in America and in Europe. There was, in fact, nothing he liked more, or for longer, than white liberal hospitality. In the grand old intellectual tradition of Rousseau, he turned its enjoyment into a princely favour. He condescended to accept it. As his biographer Fern Eckman wrote in 1968: ‘While in the throes of creativity, Baldwin regularly progresses from one house to another, rather like a medieval king travelling through his realm, dispensing royal favour by granting honoured subjects the privilege of serving as his host.’71 He invited his friends too, and transformed his host’s establishment into an informal clubhouse, then would leave on the grounds (as he said to one of them) that ‘Your house has become too public.’ As one host put it, in respectful admiration rather than anger: ‘Having Jimmy at your house isn’t like having a guest, it’s like entertaining a caravan.’ The more hatred he generated, the more subservience he received. The echoes of Rousseau are uncanny.
The hatred was very widely dispersed, black liberals receiving even more of it than the white variety. As one of them complained, ‘No matter how free you think you are, Jimmy makes you feel you’ve still got a little bit of Uncle Tom in you.’ At the beginning of the 1960s, Podhoretz asked Baldwin to investigate the new black violence being preached by Malcolm X and his Black Muslims, and offered to publish his findings in Commentary. Baldwin did so but sold the piece to the New Yorker for considerably more money.72 Accompanied by a description of his youthful experiences of racism, it appeared in book form in 1963 under the title The Fire Next Time. For forty-one consecutive weeks it was among the top five titles on the American best-seller list and was translated all over the world. In one respect it was the logical successor to Mailer’s The White Negro, and would perhaps have been impossible without it, But it was a far more influential work, both in the United States and elsewhere, because it was a statement, by a leading black intellectual-hitherto operating within the literary conventions and mode of discourse of Western culture-of black nationalism conceived on a racial basis. Baldwin now gave his rage formal literary expression, institutionalized it, defended and propagated it. In doing so, he set up a new kind of racial asymmetry. No white intellectual could conceivably assert that all whites hated blacks, let alone defend such hatred. Yet Baldwin now insisted that blacks hated whites, and the implication of his work was that they were justified in doing so. Hence he gave intellectual respectability to a new and rapidly spreading form of black racism, which was taking over the leadership of black communities all over the world.
Whether Baldwin really believed in the inevitability of black racism and of a seemingly unbridgeable chasm dividing the races is open to doubt. The young James Baldwin would have denied it strongly. It conflicted with his actual experience-which is why the older Baldwin had to rewrite his personal history. The last twenty years of Baldwin’s life were thus founded on a falsehood, or at least a culpable confusion. In fact he lived most of it abroad, remote from any struggle. But his work was vandalized by the fire he had lit himself, and ceased to be effective. What lived on was the spirit of The Fire Next Time. It reinforced the message of Frantz Fanon’s frenzied polemic, Les Damnés de la terre, and Sartre’s rhetoric, that violence was the legitimate right of those who could be defined, by race, class or predicament, to be the victims of moral iniquity.
Now here we come to the great crux of the intellectual life: the attitude to violence. It is the fence at which most secular intellectuals, be they pacifist or not, stumble and fall into inconsistency-or, indeed, into sheer incoherence. They may renounce it in theory, as indeed in logic they must since it is the antithesis of rational methods of solving problems. But in practice they find themselves from time to time endorsing it-what might be called the Necessary Murder Syndrome-or approving its use by those with whom they sympathize. Other intellectuals, confronted with the fact of violence practised by those they wish to defend, simply transfer the moral responsibility, by ingenious argument, to others whom they wish to attack.
An outstanding practitioner of this technique is the linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky. In other respects he is very much an old-style Utopian, rather than a new-style hedonist intellectual. He was born in Philadelphia in December 1928 and rapidly achieved economic eminence at a number of leading universities: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and so forth. In 1957, the same year as Mailer published The White Negro, Chomsky produced a masterly volume called Syntactic Structures. This was a highly original, and seemed at the time a decisive, contribution to the ancient but continuing debate on how we acquire knowledge and, in particular, how we acquire so much. As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?’73 There are two rival explanations. One is the theory that men are born with innate ideas. As Plato put it in his Meno: ‘There are, in a man who does not know, true opinions concerning that which he does not know.’ The most important contents of the mind are there from the beginning, though external stimulation or experience, acting on the senses, is required to bring this knowledge into consciousness. Descartes held that such intuitive knowledge is more dependable than any other, and that all men are born with a residuum of it, though only the most reflective realize its full potentiality.74 Most Continental European philosophers take this view to some degree.
As against this there is the Anglo-Saxon tradition of empiricism, taught by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. It argues that, while physical characteristics can be inherited, the mind is at birth a tabula rasa and mental characteristics are all acquired through experience. These views, usually in a highly qualified form, are generally held in Britain, the United States and other countries which follow their culture.
Chomsky’s study of syntax, which is the principles governing the arrangements of words or sounds to form sentences, led him to discover what he called ‘linguistic universals’. The world’s languages are much less diverse than they superficially appear because all share syntactic universals which determine the hierarchical structure of sentences. All the languages he, and later his followers, studied conformed to this pattern. Chomsky’s explanation was that these unvarying rules of intuitive syntax are so deep in the human consciousness that they must be the result of genetic inheritance. Our ability to use language is an innate rather than an acquired ability. Chomsky’s explanation of his linguistic data may not be correct. But so far it is the only plausible one produced, and it puts him firmly in the Cartesian or ‘Continental’ camp.75
It also aroused considerable intellectual excitement, not merely in academic circles, and made Chomsky something of a celebrity, as Russell became after his work on mathematical principles, or Sartre when he popularized existentialism, The temptation for such celebrities is to use the capital they have acquired from eminence in their own discipline to acquire a platform for their views on public issues. Both Russell and Sartre succumbed to this temptation, as we have seen; and so did Chomsky. Throughout the 1960s, intellectuals in the West, but especially in the United States, became increasingly agitated by American policy in Vietnam, and by the growing level of violence with which it was executed. Now therein lay a paradox. How came it that, at a time when intellectuals were increasingly willing to accept the use of violence in the pursuit of racial equality, or colonial liberation, or even by millenarian terrorist groups, they found it so repugnant when practised by a Western democratic government to protect three small territories from occupation by a totalitarian regime? There is really no logical manner in which this paradox can be resolved. The explanations intellectuals offered, that they were objecting to ‘institutionalized violence’ on the one hand, and justifying individual, personal, counter-violence on the other (and many variations on the same) had to suffice. They certainly sufficed for Chomsky, who became and remained the leading intellectual critic of US Vietnam policy. From explaining how mankind acquired its capacity to use language, he turned to advising it on how to conduct its geopolitics.
Now it is a characteristic of such intellectuals that they see no incongruity in moving from their own discipline, where they are acknowledged masters, to public affairs, where they might be supposed to have no more right to a hearing than anyone else. Indeed they always claim that their special knowledge gives them valuable insights. Russell undoubtedly believed that his philosophical skills made his advice to humanity on many issues worth heeding-a claim Chomsky endorsed in his 1971 Russell Lectures.76 Sartre argued that existentialism was directly relevant to the moral problems raised by the Cold War and our response to capitalism and socialism. Chomsky in turn concluded that his work on linguistic universals was itself primary evidence of the immorality of American policy in Vietnam. How so? Well, Chomsky argued, it depends on which theory of knowledge you accept. If the mind at birth is indeed a tabula rasa, and human beings are, as it were, pieces of plasticine which can be modelled into any shape we please, then they are fit subjects for what he calls ‘the “shaping of behaviour” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat or the Central Committee’.77 If, on the other hand, men and women possess innate structures of mind and have intrinsic needs for cultural and social patterns which for them are ‘natural’, such state efforts must fail in the end, but in the process of failing they will hinder our development and involve terrible cruelty. The attempt of the United States to impose its will, and particular patterns of social, cultural and political development, on the peoples of Indo-China was an atrocious instance of such cruelty.
It required a peculiar perversity, with which anyone who studies the careers of intellectuals becomes depressingly familiar, to reach this conclusion. Chomsky’s argument from innate structures, if valid, might fairly be said to constitute a general case against social engineering of any kind. And indeed, for a variety of reasons, social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age. In the twentieth century it has killed scores of millions of innocent people, in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China and elsewhere. But it is the last thing which Western democracies, with all their faults, have ever espoused. On the contrary. Social engineering is the creation of millenarian intellectuals who believe they can refashion the universe by the light of their unaided reason. It is the birthright of the totalitarian tradition. It was pioneered by Rousseau, systematized by Marx and institutionalized by Lenin. Lenin’s successors have conducted, over more than seventy years, the longest experiment in social engineering in history, whose lack of success does indeed confirm Chomsky’s general case. Social engineering, or the Cultural Revolution as it was called, produced millions of corpses in Mao’s China, and with equal failure. Though applied by illiberal or totalitarian governments, all schemes of social engineering have been originally the work of intellectuals. Apartheid, for instance, was worked out in its detailed, modern form in the social psychology department of Stellenbosch University. Similar systems elsewhere in Africa-Ujaama in Tanzania, ‘Consciencism’ in Ghana, Negritude in Senegal, ‘Zambian Humanism’, etc.-were cooked up in the political science or sociology departments of local universities. American intervention in Indo-China, imprudent though it may have been, and foolishly conducted as it undoubtedly was, was originally intended precisely to save its peoples from social engineering.
Chomsky ignored such arguments. He showed no interest in totalitarian attempts to suppress or change innate characteristics. He argued that the liberal democracy, the laissez-faire state, was just as objectionable as the totalitarian tyranny, since the capitalist system, of which it is necessarily an organic part, supplies the elements of coercion which produce the same denial of self-fulfilment. The Vietnam War was the outstanding case of capitalist-liberal oppression of a small people who were trying to respond to their own intuitive urges; of course it was bound to fail but unspeakable cruelty was meanwhile being inflicted.78
The arguments of intellectuals like Chomsky undoubtedly played a major part in reversing what was originally a strong determination on the part of the United States to ensure that a democratic society had the chance to develop in Indo-China. When the American forces withdrew, the social engineers promptly moved in, as those who supported American intervention had all along predicted they would. It was then that the unspeakable cruelties began in earnest. Indeed in Cambodia, as a direct result of American withdrawal, one of the greatest crimes, in a century of spectacular crimes, took place in 1975. A group of Marxist intellectuals, educated in Sartre’s Paris but now in charge of a formidable army, conducted an experiment in social engineering ruthless even by the standards of Stalin or Mao.
Chomsky’s reaction to this atrocity is instructive. It was complex and contorted. It involved the extrusion of much obfuscating ink. Indeed it bore a striking resemblance to the reactions of Marx, Engels and their followers to the exposure of Marx’s deliberate misquotation of Gladstone’s Budget speech. It would take too long to examine in detail but the essence was quite simple. America was, by Chomsky’s definition, which by now had achieved the status of a metaphysical fact, the villain in Indo-China. Hence the Cambodian massacres could not be acknowledged to have taken place at all until ways had been found to show that the United States was, directly or indirectly, responsible for them.
The response of Chomsky and his associates thus moved through four phases.79 (1) There were no massacres; they were a Western propaganda invention. (2) There may have been killings on a small scale; but the ‘torment of Cambodia has been exploited by cynical Western humanitarians, desperately eager to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome”’. (3) The killings were more extensive than at first thought, and were the result of the brutalization of the peasants by American war crimes. (4) Chomsky was finally driven to quoting ‘one of the handful of authentic Cambodian scholars’ who, by skilful shifting of the chronology, was able to ‘prove’ that the worst massacres occurred not in 1975 but ‘in mid-1978’, and took place not for Marxist but for ‘traditionalist, racist, anti-Vietnamese reasons’. The regime had by then ‘lost any Marxist coloring it had once had’ and had become ‘a vehicle for hyper-chauvinist poor peasant populism’. As such it ‘at last’ won the approval of the CIA, who moved from exaggerating the massacres for propaganda purposes to actively perpetrating them. In short Pol Pot’s crime was in fact America’s, quod erat demonstrandum.
By the mid-1980s, Chomsky’s focus of attention had shifted from Vietnam to Nicaragua, but he had moved himself well beyond the point at which reasonable people were still prepared to argue with him seriously, thus repeating the sad pattern of Russell and Sartre. So yet another intellect, which once seemed to tower over its fellows, plodded away into the wasteland of extremism, rather as old Tolstoy set off, angry and incoherent, from Yasnaya Polyana. There seems to be, in the life of many millenarian intellectuals, a sinister climacteric, a cerebral menopause, which might be termed the Flight of Reason.
We are now at the end of our enquiry. It is just about two hundred years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind. We have looked at a number of individual cases of those who sought to counsel humanity. We have examined their moral and judgmental qualifications for this task. In particular, we have examined their attitude to truth, the way in which they seek for and evaluate evidence, their response not just to humanity in general but to human beings in particular; the way they treat their friends, colleagues, servants and above all their own families. We have touched on the social and political consequences of following their advice.
What conclusions should be drawn? Readers will judge for themselves. But I think I detect today a certain public scepticism when intellectuals stand up to preach to us, a growing tendency among ordinary people to dispute the right of academics, writers and philosophers, eminent though they may be, to tell us how to behave and conduct our affairs. The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old. I share that scepticism. A dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is-beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice. Beware committees, conferences and leagues of intellectuals. Distrust public statements issued from their serried ranks. Discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events. For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behaviour. Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action. Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.