12
Most people would tremble at the idea of being portrayed to the world by a former mistress. An ex-wife might be sour, but, up to a point at any rate, is in the same boat as her husband. After all, she married the man, and actually bore, or was presumed ready to bear, children by him. An ex-mistress, on the other hand, has nothing to lose, and, in the great majority of cases, the punishment of real or imagined wrongs to gain. Estranged lovers, alas, rarely have much regard for one another, and often an infinity of malice.
Pablo Picasso, in any case, has suffered this fate. Mlle. Françoise Gilot lived with him for nearly a decade, bore him two children, and has now written what I found a quite enthralling account of their life together (Life with Picasso, by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake). Her American collaborator is described on the dust jacket as Paris Art Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor; a truly bizarre role in life which I find difficulty in envisaging. The verisimilitude of the book has been challenged, I know, by critics in a far better position than I to judge. It has been suggested that Mlle. Gilot affects to have remembered a great deal of Picasso’s direct speech, and that the words she puts in his mouth distort, or do not represent at all, views he is known to hold. Nonetheless, greatly daring, I venture to say that Mlle. Gilot’s general account of the kind of man Picasso is in old age, and of how he is liable to expound his work, strikes me as authentic.
She first met Picasso in Paris in May, 1943, when she was a young artist. The Nazi occupation was still in full swing, and the outcome of the war still in doubt. Though known to be an ardent anti-Franco Spaniard, an advocate and leading exponent of, in Nazi eyes, ‘degenerate’ art, and an extreme Leftist (though not then, I think, a Communist Party member), Picasso seems to have suffered no serious molestation, or even inconvenience, at the hands of the occupation authorities. He was even able to have his studio heated - a rare privilege in those days - and just went on painting his pictures, meeting his friends (some of whom, like Malraux, were living in clandestinity), and altogether leading a more or less normal existence without reference to the war and consequent upheavals. Picasso himself, apparently, had no personal inclination to throw in his lot with the maquis or otherwise participate in anti-Nazi activities.
Mlle. Gilot only gradually became aware that Picasso’s interest in her extended beyond her painting. There was, after all, a disparity of some forty years. When she did realise that his intentions were amorous, and what her parents at any rate would have considered dishonourable, she responded in a curious manner; not warmly, one way or the other, but meekly. She was ready to yield, offering no serious resistance and, equally, manifesting no serious passion. This threw Picasso. One can easily see why. To the old particularly, and to an old ram like Picasso more particularly still, a conquest is only worthwhile if it is achieved with some difficulty, apparent or real. If there is no opposition to overcome, then the haunting and enervating suspicion arises that the favours to be enjoyed are available to everyone, and that they are only accorded because the trouble of withholding them is incommensurate with the trivial inconvenience of yielding. This is deeply distressing and disturbing.
Picasso hollered like any outraged moralist. What were we coming to when well-brought-up young girls were ready at the drop of a hat to fall in with the advances of an old fellow like himself? Subsequently, of course, they did become lovers. The first decisive step was when Mlle. Gilot allowed herself to be undressed by Picasso, who then stood apart, carefully and deeply studying her nude form. I find this very touching. The one great passion in Picasso’s life is for visual art, to which everything else - even lechery - must take second place. Only when he had looked his fill in preparation for the many studies of Mlle. Gilot that he was going to make with his brush did he venture to touch.
Mlle. Gilot was induced to move into Picasso’s studio, and thenceforth was rather at his mercy, though by and large she appears to have succeeded in holding her own. They had all the usual quarrels and estrangements which such a relationship involves, and in the end separated, as was inevitable. What we have to be grateful for is the wonderfully clear, perceptive picture of Picasso which the experience of living with him has enabled Mlle. Gilot to provide. A picture of a superstitious, parsimonious, whimsical, maddeningly mischievous and unaccountable gnome of a man, gifted with that inexhaustible fount of vitality which is the necessary and invariable accompaniment of genius. Some of the anecdotes are superb. I like particularly the account of a visit to a bullfight, and the truly hilarious attempt to get invited to luncheon with Braque.
To one reader at any rate, far from denigrating Picasso, Mlle. Gilot for the first time makes him human, comprehensible and even admirable. The boring, unconvincing hero of abstract painting, the equally unconvincing saint and sage of mid-twentieth-century communism, becomes an inspired and intrepid joker who will send an art dealer to London to buy him a hat; who gleefully enjoys the spectacle of the prime targets of his grotesques paying out vast sums for them; and who has a clear, ironical awareness of the artistic cul-de-sac in which he finds himself. Mlle. Gilot describes Picasso working away at the Musée d’Antibes; a place I have visited several times, grieving over the decay, as it seemed to me, of a great talent there manifest. I shall grieve no longer. Thanks to Mlle. Gilot, henceforth I shall see the later Picasso as monkeyish rather than senile, a gargoyle rather than an abyss.
‘The thing that’s wrong with modern art,’Mlle. Gilot quotes him as saying, ’and we might as well say it - it’s dying - is the fact that there isn’t any longer a strong, powerful academic art worth fighting against. There has to be a rule even if it’s a bad one because the evidence of art’s power is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with obstacles - that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shapeless, meaningless -zero.’ He said it, and he ought to know.
Edmund Wilson’s expanded version of his The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, published in 1955 (The Dead Sea Scrolls, 19471969) is, as usual, a pleasure to read. Other writers on this fascinating subject may, for all I know, be more expert and learned than he, but none whose work I have looked at come anywhere near equalling him in clarity and ease of narrative and exposition. The non-scientific and unlearned like myself suffer acutely from the atrocious prose in which sociologists, anthropologists and other such write. What a joy, then, to have Mr Wilson for a guide in a field that all to easily lends itself to pedantry and obscurity!
The story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is now, I should suppose, sufficiently well known. How some Arab boys playing in a cave near the Dead Sea came upon some pots which seemed unusual enough for them to take away and offer for sale. How after much coming and going, complicated by the breaking out of one of the recurrent Arab-Israel wars, it was discovered that these pots contained fragments of manuscripts which once constituted the library of a community of ascetics in that neighbourhood at the time of Christ, probably known as Essenes, though not so described in the manuscripts themselves. How in due course scholars were able to piece the manuscripts together, finding therein texts of the Hebrew scriptures and Psalms, as well as a detailed and exact account of the communities rule and way of life.
As it happens, some eighteen months ago I saw the place where this momentous discovery was made, and was awed by the sight of some of the manuscripts so brilliantly displayed in the Shrine of the Book near the Hebrew University. I also spent some time listening to Professor David Flusser’s tempestuous outpouring of words, just as Mr Wilson describes it, and had the privilege of being taken round the relevant sites by Père Benoit, director of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, where so much work on the Scrolls - notably by Père de Vaux - has been done. Thus for me Mr Wilson’s book had a particular interest and gave particular delight.
An essential element in the doctrine of the Dead Sea community is the notion of there being two opposing ways - a way of Darkness and a Way of Light, Darkness being Falsehood and Light Truth. The Messiah, or teacher of Righteousness, belongs to the Way of light which leads to salvation; the Demon, more frequently called Belial or Beliar, belongs to the Way of Darkness which leads to torment. A Last Judgement is foretold when the Messiah divides the world, and His people, the Elect, are saved and the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of their enemies avenged. Until this happens they must keep themselves holy by means of sacred repasts presided over by a priest and by purification through baptism. In the course of describing all this, Mr Wilson points out, there are three references to ‘living water’ which recall the conversation recorded in the Gospels between Jesus and the woman of Samaria at the well when He speaks of the ‘spring of water welling up to eternal life .’The concept of water as an image of spiritual regeneration is of course expressed in the practice of Christian baptism; Mr Wilson quotes a remarkable passage from the Dead Sea community’s Manual of Discipline which expresses the same concept: ’sprinkling upon him a Spirit of truth as purifying water to cleanse him from all untrue abominations and from wallowing in the spirit of impurity, so as to give the upright insight into the knowledge of the Most High and into the wisdom of the sons of Heaven, to give the perfect way of understanding.’
Such similarities between the Scrolls and the New Testament have been taken as implying that Jesus was strongly influenced by this Dead Sea community flourishing in his time, though there is no reference to it in the Gospel, nor to him in the Scrolls. It has even been suggested that John the Baptist, and perhaps Jesus Himself, may have been for a while members of the community. In John the Baptist’s case this is possible but unlikely; in Jesus’ case highly improbable. Even if it were so, I cannot myself see that it would make any essential difference to the validity of Jesus’ life and teaching, or to the Christian hope of salvation that He lived and died to proclaim.
The historicity of the Gospels, as it seems to me, is something quite distinct from their truth. As myths might be true, and as history false. This is a proposition that many Christians, and not only fundamentalists, would find highly distasteful. These look with some apprehension at the unfolding testimony of the Scrolls, and dread, I dare say, that discoveries may be made casting doubt on essential incidents like the Resurrection or Jesus’ miraculous birth. They might even be troubled by the knockabout turns of Dr. John Allegro of Manchester University, one of the experts engaged in unravelling the Scrolls, who, as Mr Wilson shows, has been responsible for some of the wilder claims on their behalf - as that ‘the names of Jesus and all the Apostles, including Judas, are disguises for the titles of Essene officials, and that...the members of the Sect were ‘diviners’ as well as healers and the Gospels a ‘handbook of witchcraft.’’ Mr Wilson rightly compares such outlandish fancies with the search for hidden ciphers in Shakespeare’s plays. Dr Allegro’s latest suggestion, it seems, is that it is possible to trace the roots of Christianity to ‘a phallic, drug-taking mystery cult,’ and the prophets were on LSD ‘or something very like it. They had visions, they were on a trip.’
Such wild suggestions are only, it seems to me, carrying to its reducto ad absurdom the search for historical truth in the Gospels. In fact, Jesus was as far beyond history as truth is beyond knowledge. One may forage about in history indefinitely, always discovering new slants and re-evaluating the great figures of the past. For everything in time, the perspective changes; we see yesterday differently in the light of today, and then, when today has become yesterday, it, too, is seen differently. All in time is shifting; there can be no fixed history. Reputations rise and fall, the pattern is broken and then reformed. If Jesus is taken into history, then He must partake of this shifting quality of time, and the Christian faith becomes not everlasting truth, but another ideology, seen thus at such a time and thus at another, valid perhaps yesterday, but invalid today and forgotten tomorrow.
Where, then, I ask myself, does the truth of Jesus and his message lie if not in history? One may glimpse the answer in art and literature, which, however insecurely, exists beyond time as history does not. Thus Shakespeare’s Caesar is more like Caesar than Caesar was, and the vision of a Blake reaches into regions which no astronaut will ever explore. We today are imprisoned in history as few generations, if any, have ever been because we only believe in the dimensions of time and the certainty of fact. We have science and no art, sociology and no literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and no Gospel, Jesus and no Christ.
***
In the crack up of a civilisation, as of an individual, there is inevitably a strong element of masquerade. The drunk in the old Punch drawings puts on his wife’s hat, or shakes hand with a lamppost. In the same sort of way, our Western societies lurch and reel toward dissolution to the accompaniment of Marx Brothers-type farce, provided, to a great extent, by the so-called kids, or students. (I say ‘so called’ because, more often than not, the leading role is taken by figures well into their thirties whose student days, if they ever had any, are well behind them.) A favourite scene for such macabre frolics is a court of law, and of course, the media, especially television, ensure the widest possible diffusion. Thus, for instance, the recent proceedings in Chicago against the alleged inciters of the disturbances there at the time of the Democratic Convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey, have had an exceptionally high rating, and their possibilities in the way of public entertainment are by no means yet exhausted.
In this particular case, Judge Julius Hoffman put on as good a funny turn as any of the eight defendants, but for my money the most side-splitting element of all in such affairs is not so much the actual performers as the totally solemn commentator who purports to see in the harlequinade the working out of some tremendous sociological or historical destiny, the superior fall guy who finds, as it were, a King Lear theme in the preposterous clowning of the mechanicals in Midsummer Nights Dream. Here, a high place in the straw-in the-hair stakes must be awarded to Jason Epstein, (The Great Conspiracy Trial) a scion of the House of Random and a pillar of The New York Review of Books, both citadels of Radical Chic. (I thank thee Tom Wolfe for teaching me that phrase!) Though no kid himself, Epstein describes the ribald Chicago proceedings with a portentousness, a concentration of moral indignation, which Gladstone might have envied when he denounced the Bulgarian atrocities, or William Jennings Bryan when he expatiated upon the appalling consequences of teaching the theory of evolution in Tennessee.
On this side of the Atlantic we have, as a matter of fact, been to some extent conditioned for the Epstein treatment by a massive televised dramatisation of the trial in question by the BBC - itself a great engine of righteousness in such matters. At the same time, thanks to a visit by one of the defendants - Jerry Rubin - and his appearance along with some of his entourage, on the English version of The David Frost Show, we have been able to see at first hand something of the routines which brought the house down again and again in Chicago. These consisted, for the most part, of shouting obscenities, squirting a water pistol, smoking pot and calling Frost a plastic man -this last point, as I thought, though true enough, somewhat scurvily put, in that it was Frost’s plasticity which got Rubin and his mates onto the show at all. In Chicago, with Judge Hoffman for Frost, it required a whole plastic legal system to procure exposure for him.
How far the happening was unforeseen, as Frost claimed, is open to doubt, especially as a second studio proved to be miraculously available and in working order when the Rubin gang’s antics had got out of hand.
In any case, their turbulent behaviour could have been anticipated by anyone who has read Rubin’s own offering (Do It!) in which he explains just how important television is to a kid revolutionary. Let me add that DO IT! is as refreshing a change after The Great Conspiracy Trial as an encounter with the Artful Dodger after an evening with Mr Podsnap.
The difficulty with the Epstein approach is that its two purposes are contradictory. The kids must be regarded either as revolutionary associates of the Black Panthers, in which case the accusations made against them in Chicago were substantially correct, or as peaceable demonstrators with no subversive intent, in which case they are not revolutionaries. Epstein’s thesis requires them to be both. Thus, for instance, Bobby Seal, the Black Panther leader indicted along with Rubin and the others, has to appear as a Che Guevara and a Martin Luther King Jr, all in one. His words must be as a clarion call to the barricades and as blameless as a triolet. Even Mr Epstein finds this rather hard going. It is not easy, on any showing, to detect the cooing of a dove in pronouncements like: ‘If a pig comes up to us unjustly, we should bring out our pieces and start barbecuing that pork, and if they get in our way, we should kill some of those pigs and put them on a morgue slab.’
Another of the defendants at the Chicago proceedings, Tom Haydon (Trial) has provided an account of them. It is much shorter than Mr Epstein’s, more discursive and confused, but I still somehow prefer it, as I prefer the roughest Cheddar to anything processed. Hayden, it seems, was one of the founders Students for a Democratic Society, and has played a leading part in student turbulence. He, too, is an ageing kid. The trial, as he sees it, is just one more manifestation of the struggle that is going on between the forces of revolutionary change and the entrenched Establishment, between young and the old, between pot and cigar smokers; between the fuzz whose murderous bullets are ‘unleashed against tender white skin’ and the wearers of the tender white skin - the liberated Yip-pees who have reversed the Fall, sicked up the forbidden apple, and returned to the Garden of Eden, where they summon us all to live.
At the same time, Hayden is assailed with doubts about the consequences of the Chicago trial to its leading participants, of whom, of course, he is one. His personal relationships, he says, shrivelled to nothing during its course. At weekends he would return to Berkley to refresh himself, and then, on Monday morning, ‘drop a pill...to turn on the production machine again.’ He goes on: ‘Our male chauvinism, elitism, and egotism were merely symptoms of the original problem - the Movement did not choose us to be its symbols; the press and government did.’ Only males with driving egos can hope to ‘rise in the Movement or rock culture and be accepted by the media and dealt with seriously by the Establishment.’ In other words, in addition to all his other grievances about the bullets in the tender flesh, and Judge Hoffman, and the ‘special task forces established in the Justice Department to go after the Panthers and other groups,’ etc, etc, Hayden has this additional one - that the Establishment will insist on showering its blessings on his reluctant head.
So, he finds, you begin to make contacts and contracts, you get $1,000 per speech, you are sought after for television appearances. Random House -and he sees it as a decidedly sinister circumstance - ‘not only published Woodstock Nation; it takes part in the put-on with a cover illustration in which its trademark building is shown being blown up.’ Simon & Scchuster likewise offend by advertising Rubin’s book, with his approval as ‘a Molotov cocktail in your very hands,’ as ‘The Communist Manifesto of our era.’ I agree it is disconcerting. Doesn’t it mean, Hayden asks, that ‘the corporate executives and advertisers sense something familiar and manageable in this revolution?’ Alas, yes. In the early days of the Labour Party we used to call this the aristocratic embrace.The horny-handed sons of toil whom we sent to Parliament were taken up by duchesses, took to wearing tails and a white tie, collected decorations and were raised to the peerage. With us, it has always been snobbishness rather than money or mere celebrity, but that was before television. Now, maybe, it’s cash and the press cuttings here, too.
‘At the trial’s end,’ Hayden woefully discloses, ‘we were seriously planning to sell movie rights to big commercial producers, and Abbie [Abbie Hoffman, whose Revolution For The Hell Of It was sold to MGM] was declaring, ‘Let them have Washington, DC; we’re going to take over Hollywood.’ So, to a great extent they have, for what it’s worth.
***
I once asked Norman Mailer why at that time - some five years ago - all the most successful American writers seemed to be Jewish. He said he thought the reason must be that when a traditionally oppressed minority like the Jews achieves a position of social equality, energy and creativity are released in them. On this basis, he expected that quite soon the most successful American writers would be Black. His prophecy has been to a great extent fulfilled. Today, a black writer has much working on his behalf apart from the intrinsic quality of his work - the sense of guilt among his white fellow citizens, for one thing. Literary and other critics are being called in to rectify the villainies of slave traders and the commercial interests they so lavishly benefited.
For my own part, I must say, I find this literature of black saeva indignatio very little to my taste. A case in point is the late George L Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. Like Soul On Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for that matter like Jackson’s own previous volume, Soledad Brother, I find it somehow synthetic and processed. Whether such books are in fact worked on by other hands, put through an editorial sausage machine, or just reflect the stereotypes of Black American revolt, I cannot tell. I suspect the former. The very terms in which they are hailed follow a well-worn pattern, and would be considered excessive if applied to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Eric Sevareid rolled into one. Gregory Armstrong, who contributes a Preface to Blood in My Eye, limits himself, it is true, to claiming that Jackson’s ‘Marxian economics and history rivalled that of most college professors’ - which, after all, isn’t saying much, if anything. Otherwise, he conveys a picture of such heroic dimensions, such sublimity of thought and action, that it quite fails to convince. Incidentally, he spells America with a ‘K’, as is the usage throughout the book, which I take to be some mystical way of indicating that Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Co. had very little to do with the destiny, manifest or otherwise, of the nation they thought they were founding.
This is not to show any lack of sympathy with Jackson; the poor fellow spent most of his life in prison, and died in a fracas in which he may or may not have been the aggressor. The precise reasons for his long detention and circumstances of his death will probably now never be known. He has become part of the contemporary legend, and must, like Che Guevara and Malcolm X, be forever a subject of controversy as to whether he was the blameless victim of white racialist arrogance, or the black hoodlum who applied the same instincts which made him a criminal into being a revolutionary ideologue. Nothing, it is safe to say, in Blood in My Eye, will clear up the point. Jackson’s political theorizing has a very jejune flavour about it, and rings as falsely as the amiable liberal sentiments associated with Uncle Tom. In fact, Comrade Tom’s Revolution might almost provide an alternative title.
The book, as is usual in the genre, proves too much. For instance, if the conditions in prison were so appalling, a sane reader (assuming there are any such) must ask himself how it came about that Jackson was able to study and write, get access to books and stationery, make tapes of his dissertations and proclamations and distribute them, receive the press and give interviews, etc. Again, if it was so inconceivable that Jackson could have killed anybody, why the constant exhortations to kill. For instance:
‘There are many thousands of ways to correct individuals. The best way is to send one armed expert. I don’t mean to outshout him with logic, I mean correct him. Slay him, assassinate him with thuggee, by silenced pistol, shotgun, with a high-powered rifle shooting from four hundred yards away and behind a rock. Suffocation, strangulation, crucifixion, burning with flamethrower, dispatch by bomb. Auto accidents happen all day. People drown, get pole-axed, breathe noxious gases, get stabbed, get poisoned with bad water, ratsbane, germicides, hemlock, arsenic, strychnine, LSD 25 concentrate, cyanide, hydrocyanic acid, vitriol. A snake could bite him, nicotine oil is deadly, an overdose of dope; there’s deadly nightshade, belladonna, datura, wolfsbane, foxglove, aconite, ptomaine, botulism, and the death of a thousand cuts. But a curse won’t work.’
This, I think it will be agreed, is scarcely reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount, and there are plenty of other passages in a similar vein.They do not, however, at all abate the ardour of Jackson’s champions in asserting that so gentle, poetic and loving a man would in no circumstances be capable of the crimes of violence attributed to him.
It seems to me that there is a contradiction here, and one that runs through all apologias for black intransigence. Thus, in his address at a memorial service for Jackson, the Black Panther leader Huey Newton pledged himself and his followers to ‘take the example from George Jackson,’ and ‘in the name of love and in the name of freedom, with love as our guide, we’ll slit every throat of anyone who threatens the people and our children. We’ll do it in the name of peace . . .’ Orwell, who delighted in his concept of a Ministry of Love making war, and a Ministry of Truth fabricating lies, would have enjoyed Newton’s line of thought, arguing, I daresay, that, though his passion to kill might be justified, or at any rate understood, it was surely rather farfetched to see it as a manifestation of love, a cry for freedom and peace.
***
Professor Passmore’s fascinating exploration of the quest for perfection during the last 3,000 tears (The Perfectibility of Man, by John Passmore) takes us from Homer’s Olympus, through Plato, Pelagius and the Enlightenment, HG Wells and the hipster communes of California. Perfectibility is, as he shows, the great will-o’- the-wisp of human life, productive of some of Mankind’s more outstanding achievements, as well as some of its more outrageous follies.
No one, I should have thought, looking honestly into his own heart, could suppose himself capable of attaining perfection in any field or in any respect. The Christian doctrine of Original Sin is thus a more comfortable preposition than perfectibility. Likewise the most superficial study of history would, one might suppose, put paid to any notion of collective perfection: for instance a perfect society, or a perfect educational system.
None the less, the quest goes on; the more ardently, it seems sometimes, when, as today, every circumstance points inexorably the other way. Pacifists pick themselves up from the rubble of two monstrously destructive wars to proclaim yet again their faith in the coming of a reign of everlasting peace. Marxist freedom-lovers, after learning about Stalin’s enormities, avert their eyes from the Kremlin only to fix them with renewed hope on Peking or Havana. And so on. If, as I often suppose, the divine plan is to cure us of entertaining hopes of earthly perfection by demonstrating ever more dramatically their futility, then clearly, the lesson remains unlearnt. The last half century, on any showing, has been notable for demonstrating human inadequacy to a quite exceptional degree; it has also been unusually prolific in prospectuses for various kinds of instant paradise.
Professor Passmore works over this outlandish material with grace and skill. He carries a large load of erudition lightly; his own attitude of detachment and careful moderation suits his theme perfectly. Like Gibbon, he manages to infuse his sentences with a pleasant flavour of irony without seeming to be unduly censorious or contemptuous of the absurdities he so often has to recount. His own conclusions are philosophical. ‘Perfection,’ he writes, ‘is no more to be expected from the destruction of existing social institutions than from their extension and strengthening. The chains which men bear they have imposed on themselves; strike them off, and they will weep for their lost security.’
The pagan gods, he points out, were themselves imperfect, and Plato’s perfectionist hopes were centred on an élite, not on the generality of mankind. Christianity, as it were, brought the extras on to the stage in addition to the stars, though initially it was a strongly anti-perfectionist faith. After all, most of St Paul’s first converts were slaves who, by virtue of their very condition, felt little inclination to envisage participation in a perfect human society on earth. Also, their new faith required them to believe in the imminence of a Second Coming and the millennium, which automatically, for obvious reasons, ruled out any serious concern with short-term Utopian projects. It is interesting to reflect that these two circumstances, which might normally be regarded as disadvantageous - the preponderance of slaves in the first Christian congregations and the mistaken belief that the world would soon end -proved in practice a great asset. Apocalypticism is a far less dangerous error than utopianism. To believe in the forthcoming end of the world wonderfully concentrates the mind, as Dr Johnson said of being condemned to death, whereas to believe that mortal men can create a lasting heaven is a an absurdity which opens the mind to every variety off folly and dishonesty.
Christians, however, as Professor Passmore shows, soon began to ask themselves whether, when they were told to be perfect ‘even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect,’ this was meant literally. Perhaps significantly, it was an Englishman - Pelagius - who insisted that it was. God, he contended, ’has not willed to command anything impossible, for He is righteous; and He will not condemn a man for what he could not help, for He is holy. ’Pelagius’s chief antagonist, who ultimately demolished him, was Augustine, but the Pelagian heresy lived on to produce in his native land some 15 centuries later an amazing crop of freedom-fighting, family-planning, guitar-twanging clerics the like of whom had never before been seen on earth.
If Christianity contributed powerful commandos to the perfectionist forces, the big battalions, the heavy armour and the atomic weaponry came from science. Here Professor Pass-more has a wonderful time indeed. Darwinism lent itself to the ultimate extravagances of perfectionism; if homo sapiens represented the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, what glories might lie just round the corner as this chosen species went on evolving! The doctrine of progress - certainly the most foolish, possibly the most deleterious, ever to be entertained - suggested that change itself, if suitably supported, must always lead to perfection. All that was required was that we should coast along on the tide of our own hopes and desires, and then, infallibly, we should be carried into the harbour of the Heavenly City, there to land and live happily ever after.
The early contributors to this fantasy -the Darwins, the Huxleys, the Herbert Spencers and Karl Marxes even - might be considered as being relatively rational and in possession of their right minds; the last inheritors of it in our own time - the HG Wells, the Marcuses, the Marshal McLuhans and Timothy Learys - as deviating totally from sense. Like Doeg in Absalom and Achitophel
‘Through Sense and Non-sense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad;
And in one word. Heroically mad’
So, in due course, I foresee an epilogue to Professor Passmore’s excellent book, describing how, as faith in perfectibility augmented, the ways and works of men grew ever more imperfect, until, making one last reach in the direction of their own health, wealth and happiness, the darkness fell upon them and their world. Meanwhile, we can make do with the narrative as far as Professor Passmore has taken it, noting his own moderate conclusion that, though Man’s passions are useless if they induce him to see himself as God, they ‘are not useless if they help him to become a little more humane, a little more civilised.’
***
The Care of Devils (by Sylvia Press) first made its appearance in 1958, when it fell about as flat as a novel of its competence and topicality possibly can. This I find somewhat surprising in view of the fact that it provides, with a candour and authenticity I have not come across elsewhere, a blow-by-blow account of the interrogation of a suspected subversive in an American intelligence agency - clearly the CIA - during the ill-omened McCarthy era. Apart from any other consideration, The Care of Devils would seem to me to be of major interest as documentation. It contains, for instance, the only first-hand description I have ever read of what it is like to be harnessed to the ridiculous polygraph, or lie-detector machine -a contraption so redolent of the particular imbecility of this age, with its obsessive belief that everything, including ultimately fornication, can be set up and operated mechanically. Considered just as fiction, The Care of Devils is no masterpiece, but well above the average of many novels which make a big stir in the women’s clubs; as a piece of social history, I found it impressive - vivid, informative, and obviously sincere.
The dust jacket informs us that the authoress, Miss Sylvia Press, was ‘for many years an American intelligence officer here and abroad.’ It thus may be assumed that she and her heroine, Ellen Simon, are approximately one and the same person. Her novel obviously would not have been pleasing - in fact, highly distasteful - to the CIA and its then boss ,Allen Dulles, whose views on the necessity of confirming that intelligence officers remain ‘clean as a whistle’ by means of regular interrogations, fortified by the use of the polygraph, have been stated publicly. The question naturally arises in one’s mind, therefore, as to whether the Agency may not have taken a hand in ensuring that Miss Press’s novel was kept off the bookstands.
My own consciousness of the ineptitude and incompetence of publishers is that I require no theory of outside interference to account for the failure of any novel. On the other hand, I know from experience that intelligence organizations are capable of any folly. As between the incompetence of publishers and the folly of intelligence organizations, I am neutral, and content myself with stating what seems to me to be incontrovertible - viz., that Miss Press’s novel deals with matters of great and, alas, continuing importance, in an interesting and, as far as one can judge, truthful manner, and that nonetheless it seems to have largely escaped the notice of booksellers, book buyers and reviewers alike.
In the last respect, at least, I can belatedly try and mend matters. The story begins with the heroine, Ellen, at work in the Washington headquarters of the CIA. She is clearly a fairly senior and experienced officer, with an assistant of her own. She has worked overseas, we are given to understand, having been recruited into the Agency in the war years when it was the OSS (Ah, those first OSS arrivals in London! How well I remember them -arriving like jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsty old intelligence brothel! All too soon they were ravished and corrupted, becoming indistinguishable from seasoned pros who had been in the game for a quarter of a century and more.) Ellen’s current problem is to decide on the bona fides or otherwise of a defector from the Communists - a problem of whose complexity only those who have had to handle it will be aware; the truth being that the great majority of defectors are actuated by interested, rather than idealistic or ideological motives - money, a girl, that sort of thing - so that, as one is uneasily aware, should the balance of advantage swing the other way, they would be liable to redefect, and in that sense cannot ever be regarded as reliable.
Ellen is convinced - as it turns out, rightly - that her man is a phoney, a point which crops up several times in the course of the narrative. The suggestion seems to be that Ellen’s discovery of the man’s phoneyness is a point against her rather than for her; almost as though her superiors had a stake in his genuineness, resented his exposure, and took out their annoyance on Ellen. In the conditions of panic created by McCarthy in government agencies this is perfectly possible, especially if the defector in question had been somehow sponsored by the Wisconsin Senator’s ribald entourage. Such situations, in any case, are all too liable to arise in intelligence organizations the world over, all of them being abnormally subject to internecine conflict. I know of a case in the war of a very valuable source of information remaining unused because the man who turned it up happened to be personally disliked by a senior officer at headquarters. Again, there is the case of Cicero, the British Ambassador in Ankara’s valet, who extracted from the Embassy safe the full plans and order of battle for the invasion of France and sold them, as it turned out for counterfeit money, to the Abwehr. Himmler was so furious at a rival organization’s pulling off this coup that he arranged for the documents to be pigeonholed and never passed to the military. I often used to reflect, when I was an intelligence officer, that if only we could concentrate on the enemy the insensate hatred we directed at one another, the war would be won in no time.
While still grappling with the problem of the defector, Ellen is called away to the Internal security Department, where, to her amazement and chagrin, she discovers that she is a suspect herself. Then there begins a long, exhausting and distressing process of interrogation, day after day, week after week, in which the whole of Ellen’s life, her love affairs, her friendships, every tiny detail and nuance of her private existence are gone into by her two clottish interrogators. The interest and suspense are well maintained, as is the sense, almost overwhelming at times, of the unspeakable disgustingness of the whole procedure. Ellen, of course, as soon as she realized what was afoot, should have slapped her interrogators in the face for their impertinent curiosity, scattered their precious dossiers about the floor, and otherwise manifested her contempt for them and all their ridiculous, dog-eared tricks - the light shining in her face, the dark mentions of knowing more than they say, the elaborately staged confrontation, etc., etc. Then, with a sigh of relief, she should have got herself a job as a bartender or call girl, something nice and wholesome and fresh, and lived happily ever after. In America and the countries of the West we can still do this; in the USSR they cannot. It is one of the few remaining dividends of what we like to call our free way of life.
Actually, Ellen does nothing of the sort. Racked by anxiety, sleepless, distracted, she endures the humiliating procedure, tries desperately to prove her innocence -though without knowing what she is being accused of -searches through old papers and letters, goes over and over in her mind just what happened on such an occasion, what was said, who was present. She is a willing victim, and could not really be expected to be otherwise. After all, she is in the métier. She has lost her right to protest because she has participated in subjecting others to similar treatment. She, too, has framed the idiot questions, done the idiot research, taken the unpardonable liberty of violating that essential integrity of the person whose safeguarding is the basis of all civilization. The savage is vulnerable to the tribe; the civilized man may proudly claim that as long as he obeys certain specified and known laws, whose contravention carries equally specified penalties, his life is his own. The moment the state allows probing fingers to be intruded there, then barbarism has set in.
Poor Ellen has relinquished her own rights by virtue of her occupation. She has touched pitch, and now is being tarred herself. There she sits, relentlessly being questioned by two fellow Americans about all sorts of matters which have nothing whatever to do with them, or with the CIA, or the United States Government; matters which pertain to herself alone, and can be broached only in the intimacy of love or the ecstasy of faith - in bed or in the confessional. It is terrible to think of such things going on in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial -procedures and practices which are a denial of everything that our history, our religion, our literature and our traditions are supposed to cherish.
People forget that it has all happened so recently. I can just remember my father, before the 1914-18 war, going abroad. For money he had golden sovereigns which were acceptable everywhere; he did not need to take with him a single document. The only country where passports were required was - how significant - Russia. In what is often regarded now as the unenlightened nineteenth century, anyone could come to England who wanted to. To quote the opening sentences of A.J.P. Taylor’s brilliant volume in The Oxford History of England (English History 1914 - 1945):
‘Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and how he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.’
London was full of subversives of every sort and description - anarchists, Communists, crackpots, Karl Marx in person - all busily plotting the overthrow of our and every other government in the world. At the same time, the United States was growing into the richest and most powerful nation on earth by similarly allowing everyone who had a mind to cross the Atlantic to come to New York to try their luck. Did people in those days wake up trembling lest subversives had got into the Home Office, or some diplomat of ours be contemplating defecting to another country? Not at all. Everything suggests that they slept in their beds a good deal more quietly than we do, though MI5 consisted then of at most seven elderly retired officers from the Indian Army, whereas today it is numbered in hundreds and the Secret Service in thousands, and both organizations together, at a rough estimate, cost the taxpayer about the equivalent of the total defence budget in the days of Gladstone. As for America - what the FBI and the CIA dispose of in the way of manpower and public money, God alone knows, but it must be astronomical.
At the end of her ordeal Miss Press’s heroine is fired as a security risk. Instead of having a great ball to celebrate this blessed release, she manages to get admitted to the head man - presumably Dulles - and begs him at least to tell her what she has been found guilty of. He murmurs something about ‘lack of candour,’ but it is obvious that he has not read the report of her interrogation, and that she is in some sort a sacrificial victim offered up to appease Senator McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee. Cut off from all hopes of redress within the CIA, she settles down to write her own version of the affair. The result is The Care of Devils. Incidentally, I should point out that in England she would have been denied even this recourse. With our usual cunning we have devised a splendid instrument for shutting everybody up without expense or the risk of public scandal. This is the Official Secrets Act, which requires every employee in Defence and Intelligence Departments to give an undertaking that he will not disclose any information which comes to him in the course of his duties upon pain of a fine and/or a term of imprisonment. Thus, if Miss Press had worked for British Intelligence she would have been required to submit the manuscript of The Care of Devils to the department she worked for before it could legally be published. There, we may be sure, it would have come to rest.
The question naturally arises as to whether Ellen was guilty. Had she, in fact, done anything wrong? In the novel, she is constantly putting just this question to herself. It is a perfect Kafka situation; she is accused of nothing, yet is tormented alternately by a sense of guilt and of outraged innocence. Her whole moral fabric is corroded away. If she is guilty she must keep away from her friends lest she contaminate them. Anyway, who are her friends? Has she got any? If so, are they accomplices? Or secret enemies who will be brought out to accuse her? With the most extraordinary prophetic vision, in his novel The Trial Kafka foresees that this is going to become the human condition - to be accused of an unknown crime; to be investigated, interrogated, kept under surveillance, pressed to confess, even confessing, perhaps at last executed. Guilty or not guilty? Who can say? Since there is no crime. Only guilt.
Insofar as there was any cogent thought in the sick and vacuous minds of Ellen’s interrogators ,it was, presumably, that the man - Steve Lasker, with whom Ellen had had a love affair and been on a trip to Mexico - had some sort of bad security record which contaminated her. Let us assume the worst - that Lasker had been a Soviet agent, that Ellen in retrospect had vague suspicions of him, and that, because he had been her lover, consciously or unconsciously, she wanted to shield him, and so was sometimes evasive and less than candid in answering questions about their relationship. Is this really so very reprehensible? It is, in any case, a matter which could have been settled honestly and honorably in five minutes by just putting the point to Ellen. This was never done. It was skirted round, hinted at, touched upon, but never put. Right up to the end, and afterward, she had no means of knowing what, if anything, they had against Lasker. Nor, rather surprisingly, did she apparently make any effort, then or subsequently, to seek out Lasker and have it out with him. The central character in the melodrama is never brought onto the stage, perhaps because, if he were to be, the melodrama would turn into farce - which, in a sort of way, Ellen wanted no more than her interrogators did.
It will surely strike future historians as strange that we, who talk endlessly about freedom, who have drenched the world in blood and destruction to liberate so-called captive peoples, who look with a baleful eye at the nightmare of Stalin’s purges, should yet see fit, in the alleged interest of security, to subvert our own ostensibly prized liberties. In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it; that the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to probe our enemies’ resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that the practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves, and that the vast army of Intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences to them and us.
Miss Press’s novel is an excellent antidote to the Bond books, which delight Intelligence pros, as they dazzle the general public, by making an intrinsically sinister and sordid activity seem glamorous, exciting and honourable. The Care of Devils has precisely the opposite effect. Through the characterization of her heroine, herself in the web, and through the manner of her ejection from it, Miss Press shows how an organization like the CIA really works, and what it is about.
The Care of Devils will assuredly not please the pros. From their point of view it has the truly appalling disability of being true.
***
A favourite contemporary illusion is that the only virtuous and interesting people in the world are whores, thieves, junkies, perverts, liars, cheats, and others that used to be considered undesirable characters. On this basis, criminals have a special claim to be regarded with sympathy, if not admiration, and those whose business it is to deal with them - judges, police, prison warders, etc., etc. - become the particular targets of contempt and derision. My own experience, such as it is, suggests the contrary. I have found the conversation of whores even more tedious than that of female dons (whom in some respects they resemble), and criminals I have known have one and all been notable for their insatiable conceit and propensity for lying. However, the public taste points in an opposite direction ,and a considerable literature has grown up designed to exemplify the moral, spiritual and intellectual excellence of the criminal classes.
A classic in this genre is Henri Charrière’s Papillon which, we are told, has already sold a million copies in the French edition, and is now offered in English, in a translation by Mr Patrick O’Brian. It is an account of M. Charrière’s experiences (‘Papillon’ was his underworld nom-de-crime) in prison in French Guiana and Devil’s Island; of his various attempted escapes, and ultimate liberation to literary stardom and the affluence that goes therewith.
GK Chesterton once remarked that the lights of Broadway would look marvellous if only one couldn’t read. Similarly, I might say of Papillon that it would make marvellous reading if only I believed it. Alas, I don’t. Like other such exercises in self-appreciation - Casanova’s Memoirs, for instance, or Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves - it leaves me with an unbridgeable credulity gap. However, a proneness to fantasy is no obstacle to literary repute. Witness TE Lawrence.M. Francois Mauriac finds Papillon true, and ‘a good book in the deep meaning of the word.’ So, like Genet, M. Charrière has a sponsor of impeccable credentials.
In 1931, M. Charrière was convicted of murdering a ponce and sentenced to penal servitude for life. M. Charrière is insistent that the evidence offered by the police was perjured; that the public prosecutor was a malignant brute, and that the jury were ‘12 bastards brought up to Paris from some perishing village in the country . . . small shopkeepers, pensioners, tradesmen’ who couldn’t possibly ‘understand the life you lead in Montmartre or what it’s like to be 25.’ It is significant that no one in M. Charrière’s narrative who, in conventional terms, could be regarded as respectable, has a good word said for him or her, with the exception of an occasional bishop, priest, nun or Salvation Army worker. There are also some lepers who meet with approval, but they perhaps compensate for their respectability by the disfigurements of their disease.
It is not difficult to see why a ‘good old curé’ gets a honourable mention. As a result of reciting ‘Our father which art in heaven . . .’ together, M. Charrière’s eyes filled with tears. ’The dear priest saw them and with his plump finger he gathered a big drop as it ran down my cheek. He put it in his mouth and drank it.’ This amiable gesture led to the following exchange:
‘‘How long is it since you wept?’
‘Fourteen years.’
‘Why 14 years ago?’
‘It was the day Mum died.’
He took my hand in his and said:
Forgive those who have made you suffer so.’’
Such sentimentality, combined -as is invariably the case - with a total absence of humour, gives the book a syrupy flavour. At the same time, the notion that Papillon’s misdemeanours and the punishment they brought him are entirely due to the machinations of others, is highly acceptable. It relieves him of any sense of guilt, and allows the rest of us the luxury of wallowing in a sense of collective wickedness about which we are not called on to do anything except publicly beat our breasts. Everyone is virtuous because everyone is guilty. The same thing was noticeable in the reception of the television programme ‘Cathy Come Home.’ Cathy’s misfortunes,like Papillon’s were seen as resulting from circumstances beyond her control. It so happened that a televised version of Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection’ was being shown at the same time. Here, too, a woman was victim of social injustice, but because Tolstoy was a great artist and Christian it was made clear, additionally, that every human soul, however wronged, carries a private burden or moral responsibility, and is vested with the hope of moral regeneration.
One may be grateful that M. Charrière, unlike Genet, eschews any account of his erotic life while in prison. On the other hand, he exceeds Genet in his descriptions of violence on the part of warders and of the prisoners among themselves. His adventures while on the run are wild and wonderful indeed, and should provide good material for a film script in due course. I liked particularly his experiences with a tribe of Indians who - need I say it? - in their artless goodness and simplicity put to shame the pretensions of more civilised and sophisticated folk. He was fortunate enough to acquire the affection of two of the female Indians - Lali and Zoraima - both of whom he left pregnant on his departure: ‘Farewell, Lali and Zoraima, you incomparable women, so spontaneous and uncalculating, with your reactions so close to nature - at the moment of parting they simply swept all the pearls in the hut into a little linen bag for me.’
In such idyllic circumstances who will question his conclusion that the Indians’wild,savage way of living and protecting themselves taught him something very important for the future - ‘that it was better to be an untamed Indian than a legal official with a degree’?
M. Charrière’s last escape involved his simulating madness in order to get sent to the asylum. One of the devices he adopted was, when the tub of evening soup was brought in, to go over to it and urinate in it. This, he says, ’cast something of a damper on the room,’ which one can well believe. His efforts were successful; he was certified a mental case, and managed thereafter to make off. His final refuge was Venezuela, to whose ‘humble fishermen, intellectuals, soldiers and others’Papillon is dedicated. It is the measure of M.Charrière’s stupendous egotism that the 1939-45 war, which coincided with some of his more striking adventures, by comparison scarcely interested him at all.
Mr O’Brian, not unnaturally, considers Papillon to be a literary masterpiece which has developed a new style of oral prose -a ‘sunlit, rather husky southern voice that you can listen to for hours on end.’ He also considers the book to be ‘a furious protest against a society that can for its own convenience shut human beings up in dim concrete cells with bars only at the top, there to live in total silence upon a starvation diet until they are tamed, driven mad or physically destroyed.’ What the book does not offer is any sort of suggestion as to what should be done about the Papillons of society, assuming that it is considered desirable that any sort of social order and standards of behaviour should be maintained
13
The true purpose of words is to convey meaning, and when this is perfectly achieved -which happens only rarely even in the case of the greatest practitioners - there is a kind of ecstasy. The very humblest and most obscure of scribblers may experience this in some degree when they have managed to string together words so as to produce a collective impact greater than the sum of their separate impacts. Unfortunately, words can also be used to disguise meaning, as musical notes can be untrue and convey discord instead of harmony. There is le mot injust as well as le mot juste.
It is all set forth with great cogency in the famous opening passage of the forth Gospel in which the doctrine of the Logos is expounded. In the beginning, we are told, was the Word; creation itself began, not with a deed, but with a Word, which in due course was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, thereby exemplifying the whole creative process in a nutshell - to put flesh on words so that they may live among us, gracefully and truthfully. This is the true writers charter, valid for all users of words, at whatever level, written or spoken. They have to watch out, though, for the satanic or false Logos whereby the Word dwells among us, graceless and full of falsity. The words we write and speak and think, are as subject to pollution as the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat.
Such word pollution at the present time is particularly strong, and I should say, even more dangerous than other forms of pollution. Polluted air makes us suffocate, polluted water and food make us sick, but polluted words deliver us over to the worst of all fates - to be imprisoned inexorably in fantasy. An iron curtain falls between us and reality. There is hope that the polluted air and water and food may sometime be purified, but once words are polluted they are lost forever, old lexicons are their cemeteries, and turning over the pages is like visiting their graves.
Take, for instance, the word ‘love’, one of the most beautiful there is. Love is a theme running through the highest flights of literature and art and mysticism; the subject, alike, of the incomparable thirteenth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, and of poems like Donne’s The Ecstasy, perhaps the most perfect expression of love between a man and a woman ever to be written. Yet is it not sad to reflect that if I speak of love on any campus between the Berlin Wall and the western seaboard of America, the word will almost certainly be taken as signifying eroticism of one sort or another? In the contemporary estimation, to love is to experience sexual desire, and to make love is to ‘have sex’; Dante is elbowed aside to make room for Dr Kinsey, and the beautiful Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is reduced to the dimensions of Playboy magazine. This is not just a case of distorting a words meaning, but of completely altering it, love and lust being no more interchangeable terms than are hunger and greed. Surely the devil must be a philologist!
Inevitably, the Welfare State, the pattern of our English way of life in recent years, has produced its own rare crop of mot injustes or verbal fraudulence. Since, by definition, the Welfare State is a kingdom of heaven on earth where everyone is happy and no one is wicked, it follows that any deficiencies in people or in institutions must be due to their circumstances, not to any moral or other inadequacy in them. The categories of Good and Evil, therefore, simply do not exist, any more than they did in the Garden of Eden before the fall. There are problems, which can be solved, but no sins which deserve chastisement. Poverty has been abolished, so there are no poor, only under-privileged. If death has not yet been eliminated, soon it will be ;meanwhile, there are terminal cases. As for procreation - where is its sting when there are birth pills to prevent birth and family-planning to prevent families, with remedial abortion to ensure that there are no inexpedient births and remedial euthanasia -called ‘mercy-killing’ - to ensure that no lives are inexpediently protracted? The Welfare State is an earthly paradise constructed out of words bent to the purpose. Will future social historians, I sometimes ask myself, come upon examples of this strange verbiage accidentally preserved like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and try to make sense of it, reaching the conclusion that it must be related to some esoteric cult whose significance is lost in the mists of time?
The same sort of thing has happened to the key words in politics, as George Orwell has so brilliantly demonstrated in two of his essays: Politics and the English Language and The Prevention of Literature and in the passages in Nineteen Eighty-Four dealing with Newspeak and devises like doublethink and blackwhite, whereby the Ministry of Truth carries on the day-to-day manufacture and dissemination of lies, as the corresponding Ministry of Love organises violence and hatred. What Orwell shows with remarkable insight and prescience is that word pollution provides an important adjunct to the establishment and maintenance of authoritarian government, which need not fear subversion when the very words in whose name it takes place -like ‘liberation’, ‘equality’, ‘democracy’ - have been so perverted and falsified that they have lost their true significance and dynamism, being rendered impotent, futile and ultimately ridiculous. By this means, as we have seen, it is perfectly possible to revive slavery in the name of liberation, to institute tyranny in the name of democracy and to enforce privilege in the name of equality - always provided that the requisite words have been suitably processed in advance. Thus we have come to accept People’s Democracies in which people have no rights and play no part in choosing their rulers, to acknowledge liberations enforced at gunpoint that effectively abolish all liberty, and to applaud equality and fraternity in terms of an artificially protracted condition of class-war or soi-disant cultural revolution. So powerful are words, and so sinister the consequences of allowing them to become polluted.
These are instances of the deliberate pollution of words as part of the operation of power-politics in which the capture of key words like ‘freedom’ and ‘self-determination’ and ‘majority rule’ is the equivalent of taking a crucial fortress or commanding height in military warfare. In battles for men’s minds - which is what, ultimately, all wars are about - whoever defines the key words wins.
Word pollution in the context of an ostensibly free society like the countries of Western Europe and the United States, is rather different. In such circumstances meaning can be, as it were, washed away in a great cascade of words- a practice to which demagogues seeking election on a basis of universal franchise commonly resort. Their oratory serves to drown meaning in the same sort of way that in muzak the identity of the component tunes is lost in a drooling flow of inchoate musical sound. In his book Strictly Speaking Ed Newman, himself a wordsmith of experience and repute, gives some choice examples taken from presidential conventions and other demagogic occasions:’ History will record the greatness of his administration. As it is inscribed upon the permanent page, so it is etched in the minds and hearts of a grateful people... Mr Chairman, I proudly rise tonight to confirm a commitment that was wrought in the crucible of another era... Destiny has again marked this man. A man to match our mountains and our plains.’ Even, however, in the field of nomination speeches, normally considered to be impregnably otiose and vacuous, it is possible to trace some shadowy meaning - like poring over the faint markings of an ancient fresco.
It is surely significant that, in his quest for total meaningless, Newman turns, not to politicians in full spate, but to sociologists - specifically Messrs Thomas E. Patterson and Robert D. McLure who made a study of the reaction of voters in the Nixon-McGovern campaign to televised political advertising for the Citizens Research Foundation of Princeton. Their research, Patterson and McLure write, was ‘rooted in a specific psychological theory of attitude organisation and change -the attitude belief model developed by Martin Fishbean.’ In operating this model, they go on, ’measures of the following variables were obtained during each personal interview wave; issue and candidate image attitudes, beliefs about candidate’s issue positions and image characteristics, salience of issues and images, and beliefs about the salience of issues and images to the candidates.’ These words may be said over and over, like a surrealist poem without ever catching the tiniest glimpse of coherent thought or meaning. Sociology has given a new dimension to human incoherence.
The quest for incoherence, very notable in contemporary letters, from Finnigans Wake to the much admired Naked Lunch, is itself a form of word-pollution, and part of the retreat from reality which characterises a civilisation in dissolution. Naturally, this is especially marked in groves of academe, where professors and lecturers gain the favour of students by throwing up an ever denser smokescreen of declamatory words to obscure what are supposed to be their subjects. The great campus pundits of our time all write in strange convoluted sentences, as in this passage, chosen at random from Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: ‘However, if the socially permitted and encouraged release of libido would be that of partial and localised sexuality, it would be tantamount to an actual compression of erotic energy, and this desublimation would be compatible with the growth of unsublimated as well as sublimated forms of aggressiveness...’ When word-pollution reaches such a point as this, that words, far from conveying grace and truth, are just strung together in a pot-pourri of psycho-sociological jargon, becoming a sort of technological mandarin, then surely another Dark Age must be upon us.
To extract meaning from incoherence, order from chaos, harmony from discord -this is what civilisation is about. Meaningful, supple, lucid words are an outward and visible intimation that the secret and invisible civilising process is at work; disorder in words, even more than other forms of disorder, intimates that it has gone into reverse gear. Fiat Nox! replaces Fiat Lux! And the new barbarians shout at their sometime mentors, as Caliban did at Prospero:
‘You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse’.
14
It is now some two decades since I first had the experience of a red-eyed camera closing in on me in a television studio. During these two decades I have spent more time than I care to remember perambulating and holding forth in front of cameras. The impression I formed on that first occasion abides with me still - that the process is essentially fraudulent. I have a pathological distaste for seeing myself on television, but when, for one reason or another, I have to, I am more than ever convinced that the self I see is not me but an image, and the words I speak not mine but an echo. Away filming once, I saw scribbled on a can of film: ’Dawn for dusk.’ Another time, I overheard one of the crew asking: ’Where’s the plastic grass?’ Cinéma verité?
So strong is this impression that I have come to consider the camera the most sinister of all inventions of our time. Why, when there are H-bombs, space-ships and birth pills to choose from, do I plump for the harmless necessary Brownie? Because it is so closely related to the very well-spring of human vanity and narcissism. Purporting not to be able to lie, it falsifies the more convincingly. Making fantasy truth and truth fantasy, it transforms the world into Caliban’s Island, full of sounds and sweet airs, which give delight but hurt not, so that when we wake (if we ever do) we cry to sleep again. Blake, though he lived before the camera, surely foresaw its coming when he wrote:
This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole,
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, not through, the Eye.
Has there ever been a more perfect instrument for seeing with, rather than through the eye, than the camera? And what multitudes of lies it has induced belief in, as it has progressed from bleary daguerreotypes to the latest video product! That strange procession -hand-holding cameraman umbilically linked to sound-recordist, similarly laden, and bearing before him like a phallus a great gun-mike; producer and continuity girl, a large stop-watch dangling from her sweet neck, pacing in unison with the others; the whole cortège treading as delicately as caparisoned horses at a bullfight - may it not prove to be our civilization’s death march?
There is undoubtedly a growing awareness that somehow or other the alleged window on the world provided by television is really a mirror, and often a distorting one at that. Feeling so, people are inclined to hit out in all directions: accusing producers, commentators and cameramen of bias, the controllers of networks of authoritarian tendencies, governments of a censorship itch, subversives of managing to insinuate themselves onto the screen for their own malign purposes, and so on. Though to Vice-President Agnew’s considerable chagrin, it is undoubtedly true that successful television commentators tend to be anarchistic rather than conservative in temperament, my own conviction is that the fault lies predominantly in the camera itself rather than in any of the human agencies. Increasingly, the camera is taking over, to the point that before so very long television production may well, like everything else, be almost wholly automated, with no need for any human participation other than to maintain the machines and programme the computers.
Anyone with experience of making television programmes, of preparing and dubbing commentaries and editing film, will know what I mean. On location, in the studio and the cutting-room, the camera tends more and more to have the last word. I happened, on a tongue-in-the-hollow-tooth principle, to take a look at the second Indian programme in the luckless British Empire series, partly because the subject is one in which I have a particular interest, and partly for the egotistic reason that at one point I was asked to contribute to it, but prudently declined. As far as I could judge, the programme managed to avoid any serious mention of the main factors in the development of British India. It did, however, show a still of Sir Richard Burton, with the information that he translated the Kama Sutra into English. This was followed by an often-used sequence showing priaptic statuary in Hindu temples. A chance to slip in a bit of porn? An anti-Christian missionary jibe? I think not. Just that the footage happened to be to hand. In other words, the camera spoke.
Then out on location. What the camera wants is drama, something to exercise and advertise its own particular expertise. So those pictures from Vietnam of a GI setting fire to a native hut with his cigarette-lighter, or of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot out of hand. They were probably set up, but whether they were or not is as beside the point as whether Jonah really was in the belly of the whale. They were the camera’s truth, and as such, valid. Likewise, one of the most famous pictures of the 1939-45 war, used a thousand times subsequently for documentary purposes, of Hitler doing a little dance of triumph when France fell before his panzers, turns out to be doctored film. The Führer’s actual tread was unremarkable, but in the camera’s version he will dance on through history forever.
Perhaps the most perfect manifestation of the camera’s omnipotence occurred in Nigeria at the time of the Biafran War. A prisoner was to be executed by a firing squad, and the cameramen turned up in force to film the scene. Just before the command to fire was given, one of them shouted ‘Cut!’ His battery was dead, and needed to be replaced. Until this was done, the execution stood suspended; then, with his battery working again, he shouted ‘Action!’ and - bang! bang! - the prisoner fell to the ground, his death duly recorded for the delectation of millions of viewers now and hereafter.
I happened to be on telly-business in Belfast in the early days of the crisis. The place was stiff with cameras, prowling like hungry wolves. At that time, intimations of IRA activities were hard to find, and rather derisory when found. Returning some months later, how different was the scene! IRA men were two a penny, and shots of them drilling, lying in ambush, pointing automatic weapons and peering along gun-barrels as easy to come by as picture postcards of Beachy Head. I wondered then, and wonder still more now, whether any governments which permits the free, unfettered use of television will ever again be able to put down an insurrection or win a war. If the Indian population had been wired for television as we are and the Americans are, would their enthusiasm for the war against Pakistan have survived close-ups of the orphanage their Air Force bombed in Dacca, and interviews with survivors, to accompanying sound-effects? Would the Israelis have remained as whole-heartedly bellicose if, week after week, they had been fed video pictures of the sufferings of Arab refugees dispossessed of their lands and otherwise afflicted? I doubt it.
As for the words - everything has, of course, in any case to be edited down, which makes them as malleable as the pictures. Thus, it has been established that some of the interviews in the much praised programme The Selling of the Pentagon were fitted together in such a way as to give a completely false impression of the sense of what was said. The programme nonetheless was given awards, and continues to be held in the highest esteem. Who can wonder that Mrs Gandhi cut up rough when a French cameraman-producer, Louis Malle, went handholding through India, producing pictures of misery, destitution, cruelty and superstition. More particularly as her dangerous neighbour, China, got prestige showing of purely propaganda film on the same screens by the simple expedient of never allowing foreign camera-crews into the country except under the most rigorous control.
Likewise, the Soviet Government had every reason to congratulate itself on the television compilations shown in the West for the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in view of the fact that, lacking documentary footage, they fell back on extracts taken from Eisenstein’s films of incidents like the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd. Cinema verité again!
Christopher Ralling, a gifted BBC producer, has given expression to his concern about this no-man’s-land between drama and documentary, into which makers of programmes increasingly incline to venture. More ominous and more difficult to pin down is the camera’s capacity to bring happenings to pass to meet its own needs. Like the Hebrew prophets of old, ensuring that things happen in order that the prophecy may be fulfilled. Once, returning to my New York hotel, I saw a little crowd gathered; bearded men and bra-less girls holding placards, a police van near by, and a number of cops, their truncheons out, standing by. Everything set for a demo. What’s happening? I asked, and was told, as though it should have been obvious, that they were waiting for the cameras. I waited, too, and saw them arrive, set up, roll; and then - Action! Placards lifted, slogans chanted, fists clenched. Pigs! Pigs! A few demonstrators arrested and pitched into the van, a few cops kicked; until - Cut! Soon, cops and demonstrators had gone, leaving the street silent and deserted.
The cameras are our ego’s eyes, our rage’s focus; the repository of our fraudulence. Take them into any Negro slum, any university campus, any place of conflict anywhere, and in a matter of minutes trouble stirs. Jerry Rubin, who, viewers may remember, celebrated his appearance on British television by aiming a water-pistol at David Frost and calling him a plastic man, has some relevant words on the subject. Television, he observes, creates myths bigger than reality. Whereas a demo may drag on for hours and hours, ‘TV packs all the action into two minutes - a commercial for the revolution.’ On the television screen, news is not so much reported as created; ‘an event happens when it goes on TV and becomes myth.’ Television, he continues, is a non-verbal instrument. So, turn off the sound, since no one remembers any words they hear; the mind being a techni-colour movie of images, not words. There is no such thing, he concludes, as bad coverage of a demo. It makes no difference what is said; the pictures are the story.
Brooding upon these sagacious observations, I ask myself, not just whether it is possible with television to win wars or put down insurrections, but whether, ultimately, government itself is possible. Frankly, I think not.
15
In 1933 there appeared in the Manchester Guardian, three articles I had written describing a visit to the Ukraine and the Caucasus, then suffering from a severe famine brought on as a direct result of Stalin’s ruthless enforcement of the collectivisation of agriculture and liquidation of the so-called kulaks, or better-off peasants.
For some months previously I had been acting as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, and hearing much talk of acute food shortages. So I decided to go and have a look at the state of affairs for myself. I knew that if I asked for official permission to undertake such a trip, either it would be refused out-of-hand, or I should be provided with a guide who would ensure that I only saw what the authorities wanted me to see, backed up by fraudulent statistics. Such were the conditions under which foreign journalists had to work, and I doubt if they are much different now.
I therefore got the Russian secretary of a fellow-correspondent, AT Cholerton, to buy me the equisite railway tickets, and set forth, making first for Rostov, and breaking my journey from time to time to look round. What I saw was unforgettably horrifying - empty villages, desperately hungry faces everywhere, neglected fields, peasants being loaded into goods-trains as alleged kulaks on their way to the labour-camps in Siberia, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. What I was seeing, I realised, was not just a famine, but amounted to a state of war with the peasants, and the consequent total breakdown of agriculture in some of the most fertile land in Europe.
When I got back to Moscow I wrote it all down, and sent off my three articles by diplomatic bag, obligingly made available, to ensure their safe arrival in Manchester. As I well knew, once they were published my situation in Moscow would become untenable. From being the correspondent of a paper well disposed towards the Soviet regime, and with credentials from Sidney and Beatrice Webb, my wife Kitty’s uncle and aunt, who were among the most abject and uncritical of the regime’s admirers - as Beatrice put it, they were icons in the USSR - I should be seen as a class enemy and anathema, and have my visa withdrawn. How many truths have been suppressed to save a visa! How many falsehoods propagated!
By the time the articles were published I had left Moscow, and no longer had any connection with the Guardian. The response was very much what I had expected - much criticism, and numerous accusations of my being a liar. It was not until Khrushchev’s famous speech at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin that I was exonerated. Khrushchev put the deaths in the famine at five million -and he surely, as an important member of the Ukrainian Apparat, ought to have known - and altogether gave a more drastic account than mine of the consequences of the collectivisation of agriculture. No one, in the light of his revelations, apologised for accusing me of unfair and distorted reporting; the golden descriptions by Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, of granaries overflowing with grain, apple-cheeked dairymaids and plump contented cows, still stood. Indeed, he received several Pulitzer Awards for his reporting from Moscow.
In spite of a certain professional malaise resulting from my sojourn in the USSR, I had every reason to be thankful for it. From my point of view, it had been infinitely worthwhile, enabling me to understand as nothing else would what the Soviet regime was about, how it functioned and what was its impact on neighbouring countries and the world in general.
The dream of the early Socialists, myself among them, that the Russian Revolution would in due course bring about a brotherly, peaceful society which had shed the lure of war and conquest, and the exploitation of the poor by the rich, of the weak by the powerful, was lost for ever. The Soviet regime itself, I came to see, was about power, and little else; the disparity between the apparatchiks and the workers and peasants was, if anything, greater than between the skilled and the unskilled, the employers and the employed in the rest of the world.
As for bellicosity - the first priority soon became building up the defence forces, especially the Red Army, and getting rid of the Old Bolsheviks, the true begetters of the Russian Revolution, by the simple expedient of inducing them by one means or another to confess that they have been working for foreign intelligence services and sabotaging the fulfilment of the Five-Year Plan, and then shooting them. As a good number of them happen to have been Jews, liquidating them touched off a reversion to traditional Russian anti-semitism.
The conundrum that continued to occupy my mind - still does for that matter - was how it came about that some of the most famous and highly esteemed intellectuals or our time, in observing and assessing the Soviet regime, should have displayed a credulity and fatuity that would be surprising in any half-wit or bemused Marxist. Thus, for instance, Bernard Shaw, expressing satisfaction that the Soviet Government balanced its budgets, and that the people of the Baltic States should have voted freely and overwhelmingly for incorporation into the USSR.
Or the venerable Dean of Canterbury, Dr Hewlett Johnson, in spite of the anti-God museums and propaganda, and the persecution of Christian believers, going on proclaiming in the pulpit that Stalin was building the Kingdom of Christ. Or Beatrice Webb, somewhat troubled by my Guardian articles, going to Mr Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, to be put right. It was Mr Maisky, too, Beatrice Webb told me, with great satisfaction, who had been kind enough to go through the galleys of the book - Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - she and Sidney had written about the Soviet regime to ensure that they had made no mistakes.
Surely some future Gibbon will derive great pleasure and satisfaction from describing how the fine flower of the intelligentsia of the twentieth century were prepared to believe anything however outrageous, admire anything however cruel, excuse anything however barbarous, in order to keep intact their conviction that under the auspices of the great Stalin a new, more just, more equitable society was coming to pass.
There an office-holder on some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who once had tea with Gandhi, there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred battles for truth and freedom, all singing the praises of the most ruthless, comprehensive and murderous dictatorship the world has yet seen.
I assumed that after the appearance of my articles on the Stalin-made famine described in them, I should always be refused a visa to enter the USSR. On the one or two occasions that I applied for one, this proved to be the case. Being thus barred, to my surprise, rather saddened me; there still remains something rather wonderful about the country itself and its people. In them, a superb stoicism, a wry, underground humour, a brotherliness in their endurance of the appalling hardships and oppression to which they are subjected. Behind the dreary, cruel proposition of Marx, one seemed to hear the ancient greeting: ’Christ is risen!’
As it happens, despite being on the black-list, I did manage to [re]visit the USSR three times. The first occasion was accidental; I happened to be in Peking, and on an impulse applied at the Soviet Embassy for a transit visa to return to London via Moscow. This was stamped into my passport without any questions being asked, and I spent several days wandering about the streets of Moscow, finding them just as before, with the same nondescript crowd drifting along them. Maybe, I reflected, the only way of ensuring that no changes take place is to have a revolution. Those who bring about the revolution know how easy it is to make one, and so stick furiously to their status quo, like a man in a cold bath who keeps quite still to avoid feeling how cold the water is.
The second occasion was accompanying Harold Macmillan on his visit to the USSR when he was Prime Minister; a guarantee had been given that no accredited journalists should be barred, and this included even me. As it turned out, it was a somewhat ribald outing, and included a visit to a collective farm near Kiev, when the Prime Minister in his speech referred to how long ago a Ukrainian princess married into the English royal family, and went on to express the hope that this amicable relationship might be renewed. The crowds that turn out for distinguished visitors in the USSR always have a top layer of Lubianka men with bulges under their arms - then the GPU, now the KGB, but the same essential personnel. I took a look at their grey, stony faces as the Prime Minister made his point about the Ukrainian princess, and observed in them, not a smile, but a tiny twitch at the corners of the mouth.
The last occasion that I visited the USSR was in connection with a series of TV programmes called A Third Testament, jointly commissioned by Time magazine and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission. I did the commentary, and two of the programmes - on Tolstoy and Dostoievsky - were filmed in the USSR. No difficulty was made about my visa, doubtless because it was applied for in Ottawa, not London.
To describe all the complications and humorous situations that arose in presenting these two great and prophetic writers in the setting of the Soviet regime would require much more space than is available here. Suffice it to say that, quoting them, thinking about them, as it were living with them, gave me very strongly the feeling that out of the suffering, the moral, spiritual and intellectual vandalism that has befallen Russia since the Revolution, will come some great new fulfilment of the genius of the Russian people. As Solzhenitsyn has said, there are no Marxists in the Gulag Archipelago, and in losing freedom there, it is found.