Reader's Choice
ONE of the minor points that bother me about the new book by James Burnham is the prophetic and alluring title: The Coming Defeat of Communism (John Day, $3.50). It reminds me that, in a previous book, Mr. Burnham predicted the defeat of Russia by Germany and Japan —a disconcerting thought. However, the prophetic aspects of Burnham’s essay are confined to a few final pages; and he has much to say about the struggle with Russia which seems to me of first-rate importance. Mr. Burnham is well schooled in Stalinist tactics, having in the thirties attempted to build a Communist Party in this country independent of the Kremlin. In 1940 he broke with Communism. Shortly afterward he published The Managerial Revolution, followed by The Machiavellians.
The argument of Burnham’s current treatise, reduced to skeletal form, runs roughly as follows: the Western powers are still losing the so-called cold war (Russia’s gains in Asia outweigh its set backs in Europe). The chief reason for this is that U.S. policy-makers are thinking in terms of “preserving peace,” when in effect no peace exists: Russia is actually waging war on the Western powers with all of the means it finds expedient to deploy, and is inexorably opposed to any “adjustment.” We must, therefore, face up to the fact that there can only be one objective for U.S. policy: the destruction of Soviet-based Communism. It is possible, Mr. Burnham believes, that this objective can be attained without total war; and he formulates a plan for an all-out “political-subversive” offensive which might bring about a collapse of the Soviet regime (and would in any case facilitate an eventual military victory).
Ends and means
Burnham’s analytic chapters are penetrating and arresting, and his advocacy of an aggressive antiCommunist. strategy gains weight from the recently published reports of Generals Clay, Bedell Smith, and Howley. The author’s limitation as a strategist —I suspect he considers it his strength — is the narrow Machiavellianism of his outlook.
The dangers of tins approach in combating Communism are indirectly pointed up in a symposium edited by Richard Crossman, a British Member of Parliament, and entitled The God That Failed (Harper, $3.50). Here six prominent intellectuals — Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and Stephen Spender (former members of the C.P.); André Gide and Louis Fischer (onetime fellow-travelers) — relate what drew them to Communism and what turned them against it. All six essays are a timely reminder of something which, at this date and especially in this country, some anticommunist strategists notably Mr. Burnham — take rather lightly: the potent appeal of Communism to the dispossessed and to the naïve idealist distraught by the belief that democracy has betrayed its values. Burnham has virtually nothing to say about the role of misery and the sense of injustice as recruiting agents for Communism; nothing about the role of social reform (in, say, Italy and the Middle East) in the forging of bulwarks against Communism. His chief concern is with “smashing” Communist juntas, plotting with exiles, and cultivating such questionable allies as the feudally-minded Mohammedan oligarchy.
Burnham also shows disturbing signs of wanting to sec U.S. thinking regimented into what he considers the correct pattern. He vigorously condemns publishers and such institutions as the Foreign Policy Association for printing material which has taken an allegedly incorrect line. Elsewhere Burnham tilts indirectly at those troubled by the conduct of “loyally” investigations, and he sneers at the professors who “bleat” about American ideals: that is, who are deeply attached to democratic values. A good deal of what he dismisses, contemptuously, with some such phrase as “liberal sentimentality” seems to me essential to the spirit we are fighting to preserve, and I can’t help wondering just how much his fixation on power differs from the psychology of the Commissar.
Having said this, I should like to siress that a number of Burnham’s prescriptions make extremely good sense and that his book is well worth serious attention. The dilemma it raises is, of course, a familiar one. In this life-and-death struggle we have to be prodigiously tough-minded, but where do we draw the line? To what extent can we afford to cultivate authoritarian allies, and house a part of our ideals in dead storage? To what extent can we afford to subordinate the means to the end?
Five of the contributors to The GodThat Failed answer, in effect, “Not at all.” (Koestler’s position is not so extreme.) All six furnish eloquent testimony to the degeneration that sets in when policy is governed by the primacy of ends over means. The pieces by Silone and Wright are deeply moving confessions, and Koestler contributes a wonderfully interesting slice of personalized history. Mr. Crossman has put together a fascinating and significant volume.
The Battle of Germany
One of Mr. Burnham’s valuable contributions is his forceful exposure of a Soviet tactic to which we have been particularly vulnerable. Periodically, the Russians agree to a minor concession or a trifling compromise; Gromyko puts on a show of cordiality; Stalin talks of peace — and promptly there is a naive upsurge of optimism in the West; articles are written by respectable authorities hailing all this as evidence that “adjustment" is possible; and doubts are renewed as to the wisdom of drastic policy measures.
Additional testimony to the skill and effectiveness with which the Russians have employed the tactic of “good will” is contained in the opening chapters of General Lucius Clay’s account of his four years’ stewardship in Germany. Clay cites several fateful questions which American policy thought it unnecessary to raise in the first phase of the occupation, because of ihe Russians’ convincing — and in the case of some individuals sincere — display of warmth and cordiality. (Those Russians whose good will was not just an act disappeared, of course, as soon as good will had served its purpose.)
Clay’s Decision in Germany (Doubleday, $4.50) is a lengths chronicle of hislory-in-t lie-making, viewed from the top official level. As such its importance to the specialist and the historian is self-evident. So far as the general reader is concerned, it is my unpleasant duty to report that this is ;i disappointingly dull book. The writing, while simple and to the point, is definitely drab and fails to bring out the drama inherent in the General’s story.
On the score of enlightenment, too,
I found the return not up to expectations. Although there is, of course, distinct gain to be had from Clay’s authoritative close-up of the Berlin struggle, this story and its lessons are by now pretty familiar. And when dealing with the more controversial story, of German internal affairs, the General is too diplomatic to be much more than factually informative.
During the past year or so, a number of topflight newspaper correspondents have drawn an alarming picture of the resurgence of authoritarianism in Germany, and have severely criticized U.S. policy on such issues as the denazification of German education, the breakup of cartels, the caliber of some of the Germans we have supported, and so on. General Clay — though he deals with the German internal situation in considerable detail — does not, it seems to me, come squarely to grips with the questions raised by the critics. He sticks pretty closely to the classic official line: namely, to list the positive steps taken, admit inadequacies, and conclude that the balance was not unsatisfactory. An occasional phrase — for instance the remark, buried in a polite thumbnail sketch of Adenauer, that “he is not above using criticism of others to further party interests”
— suggests that General Clay’s opinions are made of much stronger stuff than his text.
In fairness it must be noted that the telling of this particular story raised a serious problem of discretion. Germany is still a crucial battleground, and it is easy to see what capital Soviet propaganda would make of any damaging revelations by General Clay, or of any remarks that might arouse anti-American sentiment among the Germans. If Decision in Germany is not as absorbing as it might have been, the chief reason, I suspect, is that Clay has set out to discharge a rather thankless task: to give us, in the fullest possible detail, a more or less official statement of the record. That he has done with painstaking thoroughness and unfailing modesty.
“Key to the universe”
Back in 1917, when Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was already twelve years old, a physicist remarked to Professor Eddington: “ You are one of three men who understand Relativity Theory.” Professor Eddington looked pained, and was politely assured, “You shouldn’t be embarrassed, you are too modest.” “I am not embarrassed,” Sir Arthur replied. “I am only wondering who is the third.”
By now, Relativity Theory has influenced our whole life, and a rudimentary grasp of its basic ideas and results is within the reach of any educated person. I’m ashamed to confess that, until lately, I had put off grappling with this subject. The decisive stimulus was the recent report of an epoch-making new discovery by Professor Einstein — the New York Times, a stickler for sober headlines, labeled the discovery “key to the universe.” It’s pretty frustrating to be presented with a key to the universe and not to know, so to speak, the first, thing about using keys. To anyone troubled by the same ignorance, I heartily recommend a small book whose timing could not be more fortunate, Albert Einstein: His Work and Its Influence on Our World (Scribner’s, $2.00). The author, Dr. Leopold Infeld, has worked with Einstein for over a decade on problems of Relativity Theory.
Dr. Infeld avoids with conspicuous success the two opposite pitfalls that confront the popularizer of highly abstract scientific theory. He does not “translate" the ideas he is dealing with into homely phrases and glib analogies which give the illusion of comprehension while concealing the core of the problem. At the same time his exposition, judging from my own experience, can be followed without much difficulty even by a reader with a high resistance to scientific ideas.
After reading Dr. Infeld, I turned for comparison to Lincoln Barnett’sThe Universe and Dr. Einstein (Sloane, $2.50), published just over a year ago. Mr. Barnett’s (even shorter) book is more attractively written, and certainly accomplishes its purpose very successfully. Dr. Infeld’s exposition is more systematic.
if opens with a very clear account of the dominant scientific concepts before the Einsteinian revolution and also more thorough and more authoritative. Infeld’s book, in short, is the less “popularized" of the two, and while it is not quite as easy reading as Mr. Barnett’s, it provides a substantially higher return. Both books, incidentally, explain the problem which Einstein is now reported to have solved: the discovery of a Unified Field Theory which provides a bridge between Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory; which encompasses both the phenomena of the atom and of outer space.
The excellence of Orwell
Shortly before his recent death George Orwell, author of AnimalFarm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, received the first. Partisan Review Award “for a significant contribution to literature,” given not for a single book but “for a distinguished body of work.” Orwell’s writing, the Partisan Review observed, “has been marked by a singular directness and honesty, a scrupulous fidelity to experience that has placed him in that valuable class of the writer who is a witness to his time.” This tribute tidily sums up the essential quality of the three pre-war novels by Orwell, all of them very different in subject matter, which have just been published by Harcourt, Brace. Two are reissues: Down and Out in Paris and London ($2.75) and Burmese Days ($3.00). One is new to American readers: Coming Up for Air ($3.00).
The striking thing about Orwell as “a witness” is that, while he experienced fully the sordid realities of his time, he remained miraculously uncontaminated. He was one of the few men who traveled to the far Left without an unconditional surrender to dogma; one of the few who traveled away from it sadder and wiser but free of the guilt-complex that has led so many ex-revolutionaries into new extremes, new rigidities of thought. Orwell retained a rebellious clarity of vision which penetrated to the nastiness that is hidden, hushed up, camouflaged by convention. He was profoundly repelled by the cynicism and ruthlessness of the times; the corruption of language by the “doublethink” of politics, bureaucracy, and business; the pervasive sadism embedded in popular commercial culture (he wrote brilliantly about it in Dickens, Dali and Others). He was repelled, in every fiber, by hate and brutality.
Incapable of fanaticism, Orwell was an original kind of rebel, a dryly witty debunker of every sort of hypocrisy and cant. His outlook attests to an unshakable conviction that there is something infinitely important called “decency” which requires no analysis. One finds, in fact, in Orwell a curiously successful fusion of divergent elements: a brilliantly intelligent journalist, with a remarkable documentary talent; a rather tired, saddened, but unobtrusively active moralist; and just a vestige of what was best in Colonel Blimp.
Orwell was born in India, educated at Eton, and then served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma. His Burmese Days is a damning picture of pukka sahibs and imperial justice, and a wonderfully sharp documentary of colonial life. Orwell presents the Burmese to us with equal sharpness —he is far too honest and intelligent to idealize the underdog. The main threads in the story are the abominable maneuvers of a rascally Burmese politician, and a decaying Englishman’s desperate courtship of a conventionally-minded young girl just arrived from home. Artistically the novel is Orwell’s best, a really distinguished work that seems to me the finest thing in its field since A Passage to India.
Down and Out in Paris and London, though labeled a novel, sounds like a record of Orwell’s lean years after he left Burma. “Here is the world that awaits you if you are ever penniless,” says the narrator, and he takes the reader on a picaresque journey which yields an intimate acquaintance with the slavery of a dishwasher in Paris and the subhuman existence of a tramp in and around London. The book is a very graphic piece of reportage and wryly amusing in spite of the grimness of the material.
In Coming Up for Air, written just before the war, Orwell turns portraitist of the lower middle class. The “ I ” is “a fat middle-aged bloke with false teeth and a red face”; with a nagging wife and a dreary home in one of the hundreds of indistinguishable streets that fester all over the cheap suburbs of London. Exhilarated by a new denture, he decides to take a secret holiday from his family and spend the seventeen pounds he has won at the races on a visit to the little village where he was born. This starts him reminiscing about his childhood, and the novel shapes into a lively personal history which sets in counterpoint the quality of life in England before the First World War and on the eve of the Second. The rich, amusing selfcharacterization of the narrator — vulgar, clear-sighted, and sympathetic — is a masterly achievement.
The general remarks made earlier about Orwell’s writing can be taken as applying with full force to this very able novel. All three books mentioned have strengthened my admiration for Orwell’s gifts and my warm liking for his literary personality.
The life of poetry
Ever since the fracas touched off by the Bollingen award to Ezra Pound, the long-standing controversy over modern poetry has assumed surprising proportions. A good deal of the discussion has been conducted on a dismally low level, and eagerness to denounce the “difficult” poets has been more conspicuous than willingness to grapple with the problem of appreciation. It seems to me quite fatuous to assert, as several writers have done lately, that a number of the best-known American and British poets are deliberately confecting meaningless gibberish on the theory that the less the yokels understand, the more they will be impressed. This is an age-old accusation in the arts, and time has invariably made fools of the accusers.
On the other hand, it’s quite clear that a good many of those defeated by modern poetry are sincere poetrylovers who have given the contemporary product a sympathetic trial. This brings us to the heart of the matter: Why the breakdown of communication between poet and reader? Two recent books, both written by poets —Lloyd Frankenberg and Muriel Rukeyser — are devoted to this problem.
Lloyd Frankenberg offers us Pleasure Dome (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) in the hope that it will “provide a bridge to modern poetry for readers like himself brought up on prose.” I ‘m not too happy about the image of the bridge: one book is not going to provide the poetically benighted with a passage to the poetic paradise across the water. What Pleasure Dome does, rather, is to teach the benighted how to swim. The teaching is straightforward and pleasurable, and it deftly avoids the dangers that attend a venture of this kind: pomposity and condescension.
Modern poetry is intelligible, Mr. Frankenberg declares at the outset. “Its forms and language may be personal but they are not inscrutable.” Why then does it often seem inscrutable? Mr. Frankenberg suggests two main explanations. Firstly (in Keats’s day as in ours), new poetry “ is always more difficult than the poetry of other times.” (This point, is amplified in the author’s analysis of the dynamics of poetry.) In the second place, the contemporary habit of silent reading violates the poet’s intent. Poetry must be heard to be enjoyed: “Poetry is an art of the ear’s discriminations, a heightening of the inflections of prose. Like music, its meanings are conveyed through sound.” (In support of this, Mr. Frankenberg has prepared the Pleasure Dome Record Album, on which eight poets read from their works.)
Having affirmed that modern poetry is intelligible, Mr. Frankenberg devotes the bulk of his book to actual demonstration: he examines the work of five living poets in detail and seven others more briefly. The quotations are frequent and generous: the guide has taken pains not to supplant the landscape. He also reminds us that the landscape must constantly renew itself or wither. “What is usable in the past is not preserved by repetition. Conventions tend to deny tradition. Originality — the exploration of new forms, the discovery of new relationships— becomes tradition. By it the past, reinterpreted, is revivified. ... In the arts discoveries only come from pushing things too far.”
It is to the same shore that Miss Rukeyser brings us in The Life of Poetry (A. A. Wyn, $3.00). Hers is a more ambitious book, a more profound and a vastly more demanding one, which explores the why of poetry as well as the how.
Miss Rukeyser sees a relationship between the “chaos" of our time and the “obscurity” that labels our poetry; there are clusters of events and emotions which require new ways of making them more human, and our poetry has not been good enough to find those ways. This is the author’s one concession to the Philistine, and it is followed by a stern indictment. She attributes the “resistances" to poetry to society’s hunger for uniformity and to its repressive codes, which have impoverished the imagination, have bred fear of emotional truth. The fear of poetry, she argues, is a fear of disturbing self-knowledge, a shrinking from complexity. In its widest aspect, it is the fear of experiment and change.
The Life of Poetry investigates communication in its every aspect, from the symbols and images of modern poetry to the release of aggression through the enjoyment of poetry; from the Blues to television, the movies, the theater, I he dance; from the communications of art to those of science and religion.
Miss Rukeyser believes that poetry activates to something beyond itself, and therefore that it has “uses” — a point which has long shaken the aestheticians and which was luridly spotlighted by the affaire Ezra Pound. Respectfully but scorchingly Miss Rukeyser assails the exponents of the “New Criticism” — who hold that “poetry is words,” an object not a process — as “specialists in dying.” A poem, she says, invites you to approach truth of feeling; invites you to imagine. And you can build the truths, the imaginings into yourself; they will apply to your life; and it is more than likely that they will lead you to thought and action. Miss Rukeyser is not in any way suggesting that we can be “saved by poetry.” Her claim is that poetry can be an “exercise” which makes our response to life fuller, makes us more human.
It is disappointing to have to qualify my welcome of this important and badly needed book. The sad paradox is that Miss Rukeyser trips up on the very problem which she explores with such arresting insight — the problem of communication. The book is written in a non-prose style that blurs the argument with ecstasy, that suggests an emotional shorthand, and presents other discouragements. It is certainly “intelligible.” But the receptiveness it. calls for, and the strain it imposes on the receptive reader, unfortunately limit its appeal. I hope that those seriously concerned with poetry will not be deterred.
MARY O’GRADY by Mary Lavin. AtlanticLittle, Brown, $3.00.
Miss Larin’s short stories and her first novel, The House in Clewe Street, have shown her to be a solidly talented if distinctly old-fashioned writer. Mary O’Grady is a portrait, done in the Victorian tradition, of a poor Dublin family. The book opens at the beginning of the century, when Mary is the young bride of a Dublin streetcar conductor; and it traces the tragic destinies of Mary’s five children over the next three decades. Setting and mores are described with an expert hand, and the reader’s sympathies are engaged by Miss bavin’s devoted and courageous heroine. But the book is overweighted with inconsequential detail and activated by a succession of gratuitous disasters which, however possible in life, in fiction suggest that the author is dealing the cards unfairly.
A WORLD HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES, Vol. I, by Quincy Howe. Simon and Schuster, $5.00.
Beginning in 1900 and closing with the Armistice of 1918, this volume is the first of a projected three-volume history of the first half of the century. Mr. Howe “does not accept or set forth any basic philosophy of history.” His modest foreword explains that the approach is that of a journalist writing “as if" he were dealing with his own experience, and seeking to
capture “the living substance” of the recent past. The author has selected his material very judiciously, and has shaped it into a lucid and absorbing narrative. If his prejudices (every historian has them) are at times discernible — notably in the pages on U.S. involvement in the First World War — they are never conspicuous.
Mr. Howe has, in short, turned out a book ideally suited for the general reader
—sound history which is also good reading. The 300-odd photographs, maps, and cartoons make a fascinating contribution to the text.
TIGER IN THE GARDEN by Speed Lam -
kin. Houghton Mifflin, $3.00.
The defeat of one of the remaining nuclei of the Old South in its cold war with the modern world is the subject of this creditable first novel by an author just turned twenty. Reaching back to 1910, the narrator, a poor and admiring cousin of the aristocratic Richardsons of Louisiana, recalls their onetime glamour and chronicles their progressive decay. The book is notable for the absence of freaks, morons, and extremes of sensationalism which have been one of the specialitiés de la maison of Southern fiction. Mr. Lamkin shows a good deal of skill in creating atmosphere and a distinct ability to keep bis story moving — and the reader with it.