Reader's Choice

BY CHARLES J. ROLO

HELL, we keep hearing nowadays, is just around the corner, and previews of it have become a literary staple. The latest of them — George Orwell’s extraordinary novel, Nineteen EightyFour (Harcourt, Brace, $3,00)—brings to mind what Hobbes wrote, three centuries ago, about conditions in the state of nature: “No arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”The life of man in the totalitarian state of Nineteen Eighty-Four is most of that —with all modern discomforts added: a super-dictator known as Big Brother; “telescreens" which make privacy from the Thought Police virtually impossible; a Ministry of Love furnished with the last word in torture chambers; and related horrors.

Orwell’s inferno — the scene is London, chief city of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania - represents the full flowering of totalitarian logic. Permanent (but limited) warfare preserves the atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. The masses, the despised “proles,”are allowed a pittance of freedom: the Party has made them so abject they are harmless. The lives of Party members are monstrously regulated and depersonalized. “Education” has made even the sexual relations between man and wife a joyless “duty to the Party ; between unmarried males and females so much as a handshake is taboo. For a Party member, anything short of instinctive orthodoxy is “thoughtcrime"; even a “guilty" facial expression, “facecrime,”leads to vaporization.

The semantic chicaneries which contemporary dictatorships have made so familiar have been systematized into a whole new mode of thought, “doublethink,”with ils own language, “Newspeak, the goal of which is so to narrow the range of thinking that unorthodoxy becomes literally impossible. Every term of ideological import has two mutually contradictory meanings. Blackwhite,”applied to an opponent, means that he impudently claims black is white. In the case of a Party member, it means that he loyally believes black is white when the Party requires this; and more, knows black to be white and forgets he has ever known otherwise. The Party’s infallibility is sustained by a continuous rewriting of history and destruction of records.

Orwell’s hero is a disaffected Party member, Winston Smith, employed in llie Ministry of Truth. One day a girl in the Ministry slips him a scrap of paper suggesting a secret meeting. A furtive love affair follows and, inevitably, they are eventually arrested. The last section of the book is even more brilliant and infinitely more terrifying than the interrogation of the Commissar in Darkness at Noon. We see Winston’s will, everything in him that makes a man human, being slowly annihilated until he is a battered puppet stuffed with love for Big Brother and the certainly that, if the Party says so, 2 plus 2 makes 5 — until finally he is fit to be executed.

I doubt if any other novelist has penetrated so deeply and so powerfully into the authoritarian idea and the cult of orthodoxy; and Orwell’s insights, while they apply most literally to Stalinism, have a much wider relevance. Nineteen EightyFour will, I believe, go down in the textbooks as one of the major political novels of our time.

There are signs that U.S. journalism, though the best there is, is tending toward an orthodoxy of its own — toward a belief that it is more patriotic to soft-pedal certain kinds of news than to keep readers well-informed. By and large, editors betray a distinct reluctance to give much play to such issues as “the sublimely shocking American concessions to prominent Nazis,” which John Gunther speaks of in his new book on Europe.

The press’s eagerness to safeguard the public mind is playing havoc with the old-fashioned notion that the press’s function is to report the significant news. Many editors are spoon-feeding the public with what a writer in Harper s recently labeled “all the news that fits the pattern.” The refreshing thing about John Gunther’s report is the emphasis it gives to facts and opinions which do not quite fit, the pattern.

Mr. Gunther confesses that his title, Behind the Curtain (Harper, $3.00), is something of a misnomer. (“Inside Outside Russia” was the alternative.) He was refused admittance to Russia, Rumania, and Bulgarin; on the other hand, he visited Italy, Greece, Turkey, Germany, France, and England. Here are some of the major findings in his report: —

1. The continuing threat of Communism in Italy and Greece is bound up as much with misery as with Moscow (and the Marshall Plan can’t last forever). The conservatives in both countries are increasing the danger by stubbornly opposing reform. “Italy,” says Gunther (and more so Greece), “is doomed — a goner — if it does not decide to liberalize and reform, reform.”

2. The greatest asset of the satellite dictatorships is the masses’ former exploitation by and present hatred of the feudalistic pre-war regimes, and the absence of any tradition of civil liberties (except in Czechoslovakia). Many of the peasants are better off now as a result of the breakup of the great estates. In spite of the devastation of Warsaw, “housing conditions are better there than before the war.”

3. The greatest liability of the satellite regimes is the critical stresses and hardships resulting from Moscow’s insistence on full-speed industrialization and collectivization.

4. Few Americans realize how radical (and paradoxical) are the differences between the countries behind the curtain. Yugoslavia, at daggers drawn with the Kremlin, is “more like Russia than any other” in structure and spirit. Poland, though sandwiched between the Soviet and Soviet Germany, remains “the country the Russians are least sure of.” (Poland’s largest customer is Britain.) Czechoslovakia, where there are fewest Communists, is the most “broken” of the satellites.

5. The Iron Curtain is “full of chinks.” The Western powers, Gunther believes, have missed opportunities to exploit this. He believes too that, “in time, the satellites will want more and more contacts with the West.”

Behind the Curtain vigorously documents the brutalities of Soviet policy and of the satellite regimes, and the appalling harshness of life in Eastern Europe. It contains full and illuminating accounts of the Mindszenty case and the Tito-Kremiin split. Along with sterner matters, Gunther notes such entertaining trivia as that Hungary has an undersecretary “for Sports Affairs,” and Athens a “Monareho-Fascist Bar.”

Mr. Gunther’s books sometimes err through haste and sometimes lean toward superficiality, and he is inclined to be easily impressed even when interviewing unsavory personalities. But there is still, to my mind, no other reporter with anything like his talent for blending fact, comment and personal impression, the thumbnail sketch and the telling anecdote, into a lively and informative story.

Fitting news to the pattern; Stalinist “doublethink" — both are manifestations (radically different, of course, in degree) of that “baneful, disembodied party-spirit “ against which Goethe was in arms throughout his life. “I have found no faith or dogma,” he wrote, “to which I could give my entire assent. ... I dwell in the truth of the five senses.”

In his introduction to Goethe: Wisdom and Experience (Pantheon, $3.75)—a well-organized treasury of prose selections bearing on Goethe’s philosophy of life-the editor and translator, Hermann J. Weigand, writes; “Two attitudes toward life are characteristic of modern man. Either he flounders in skepticism or he clutches at the straw of made-to-order ideologies from which he does not dare to deviate by a hair’s breadth lest he lose his last hold on certainty. By contrast, Goethe, subscribing to no creed and no ideology, felt himself borne along by the current of life in its wholeness. ... He showed an essential trust in life. . . . Some of that same pragmatic faith may come to us through these pages" — an excellent summation of the relevance of Goethe’s Weltanschauung in 1949. “The meaning and significance of my works and of my life,” Goethe wrote, “is the triumph of the purely human.” To read him and read about him— as the several volumes commemorating his Bicentennial invite us to do — is to recuperate for a while from the negativism, the split thinking, the dehumanization of our time.

In addition to Professor Weigand’s anthology, we are offered Ludwig Lewisohn’s two-volume Goethe:The Story of a Man (Farrar, Straus, $10.00) and Berthold Biermann’s handsomely illustrated Goethe’s World (New Directions, $5.00) — both chronicles of Goethe’s life as seen through his letters and autobiographical writings, and the letters and writings of contemporaries. So much is known about Goethe that, as Lucien Price noted in his fine essay in the April Atlantic, “at times the underbrush obscures the giant redwood”— the literary genius. This point applies to both books. By their very nature they show us ihe creator of Faust only in profile, while they bring Goethe abundantly to life as lover, busy administrator, royal favorite, inspired pan-dilettante, European celebrity, and, always, indefatigable correspondent.

Mr. Lewisohn’s volumes contain a far greater quantity of the sentimental and domestic correspondence. Here we find Goethe writing to one of his loves, “Eat the asparagus I send you and think of me”; or enjoining his wife to be a good housekeeper the had a passion for neatness and well-kept household accounts); or asking her to send him such necessities as “a couple of small bottles of eau de cologne . . . some Cervelat sausage.” These intimate letters — there are also some in Goethe’s World — humanize ihe titan (no man is a titan in his billets doux), and make our contact with Goethe extremely close.

Goethe’s greatness, if not his poetic genius, is abundantly mirrored in these two absorbing chronicles — in the correspondence with Schiller; in the impressions of eminent contemporaries (“I have never set eyes on a human being who benefits my very soul so deeply.” “Genius from top to toe; he is possessed.”); in the prodigious range and penetration of his mind; in his complete freedom from meanness, intolerance, and fanaticism.

Goethe had no use for a priori thinking. “General concepts,” he said, were “always poised to make a terrible mess of things.” The foundation of his outlook was that “direct vision of things is everything. . . . My seeing [Ansehauen— looking at] is always a kind of thinking, my thinking itself a kind of seeing.” This “penetration of reality,” as Schweitzer called it, created in Goethe a deep sense of the unity of all forms of life, all aspects of man’s life, within an all-embracing “formative process,” Gestaltung. He saw “God in Nature, Nature in God,” and man as part of Nature. Religion, art, science, “all three are one in the beginning and in the end, although distinct at the center. . . . To have a positive religion is not necessary. To be in harmony with oneself and the whole is what counts.” Goethe’s harmony was hard won. The stormy dualities in him, the triumph over dualism, ihe vitalizing synthesis — all that is in Faust. After what he called his “rebirth” in Italy, in his middle thirties, Goethe wrote (and the words held true right up to his death): “It is indescribable how happy my way of beholding the world makes me. Everything speaks to me, and emerges into the light of day.”

When the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s death was commemorated in the second year of the Marxist nineteen-thirties, the Goethean Weltanschauung seemed to be the naive pantheism of an optimistic old Tory. Now a leading English physicist, L. L. Whyte (The Next Development in Man), finds in Goethe’s account of Gestaltung the revolutionary outline of a theory held by himself and other advance-guard scientists. He sees in Goethe not a symbol of the past but a forerunner of the “unitary man” the reintegrated man —of a not too remote future, in which a “unitary science” will have achieved a synthesis of human knowledge and experience such as Goethe, within limits. achieved for himself.

To be “a new Goethe” was Bernard Berenson’s ambition when he left Harvard some sixty years ago. Mr. Berenson confesses in his Sketch for a Self-Portrait (Pantheon, $3.00). That ambition was perhaps achieved in some measure. This European transplanted as a child to Boston — and now the world’s greatest authority on the art of the Italian Renaissance — comes closer, surely, than any other living American to representing the cultural tradition which reached its full flowering in Goethe.

There are indeed distinct echoes of Goethe in this small, beautiful memoir: Berenson’s infinite delight in the sensuous perception of beauty; the encyclopedic erudition that has quickened and enriched his life; the sense of world citizenship and the sense of “oneness” he has achieved with the surrounding world; the tranquil but vital and productive old age. Sketch for a Self-Portrait is a stirring vindication of the man of culture as “the completest human being,” of art as the completion of life.

“I was horn for conversation,” says Berenson, “not for writing books. To me it has always seemed barbnrous ... to decry talk, real talk, the stimulating exchange of ideas.” Berenson is reputed to be one of the world’s conversational virtuosos. His memoir, in effect, is superlative talk —about great talkers; the penalties of being an art expert; the difference between French esprit and English humor; mystical experience; himself.

It is when Berenson converses with his ego that he is furthest from Goethe and closest to the modern sensibility. The tone is self-depreciatory and self-accusing; “I have wasted too much of myself in at - tempting to establish my position as a monsieur. ... I cannot rid myself of the harassing feeling that I am at best, but a refined and affectionate cannibal.” He blames himself for not having written the books he planned on “the enjoyment of the work of art,” for having let himself be “seduced” into devoting ten years to his famous Drawings of the Florentine Painters, the work that made his reputation: “ You should not have let yourself become that equivocal thing ‘an expert.’” “The spiritual loss was great,” he continues, “and in consequence I have never regarded myself as other than a failure.” In this one thing, his book proves, he is deluded.

When Berenson writes of himself in the present, in his garden in Florence, losing himself in the beauty of “olive-crowned, pine-plumed, Cyprusguarded hills . . . [of a] lichentrimmed tree-trunk as gorgeous as an Aztec or Maya mosaic,” the printed page radiates an extraordinary serenity: “Although I am now well on in old age and perhaps in its last moments, accepting life as it is for worse or for better . . . loving it, rejoicing in it, I feel no anticipated regret, let alone present rebellion at leaving it.After a fashion I have attained Goethe’s promise that what one ardently desires when young one will realize in old age. I am not far from my nirvana ... a feeling of oneness with the landscape, with the house, and all that is therein.” The mystic is also very much the realist —shrewd, witty, thoroughly appealing. It seems to me typical that he should have ended this book on the note of “mystic union,” and closed the epilogue with La Fontaine’s Invocation: “Music I love, and books and all sweet folly/The town, the country, love and cards and wine.”