Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

by Christopher Hitchens

  A decade or so ago, becoming aware that Upward was still alive and still writing—and bethinking myself that if I wanted to interview this soon-to-be centenarian and last survivor of his generation, I had better hurry up—I made a voyage to the Isle of Wight, that little diamond-shaped island off the southern coast of England that helps form the natural harbors of Portsmouth and Southampton. In this almost parodic picture-postcard miniature of deep England, Upward had chosen to literally “isolate” himself. The Isle of Wight is where Tennyson came to write Crossing the Bar. It is where Queen Victoria kept her favorite home, Osborne House, and it is where she died in 1901, two years before Upward was born.

  In a vicarage-style house not far from the railway station in the small town of Sandown, Upward received me and led me to a side room. He explained without loss of time that the main rooms of the little home were out of bounds because his wife, Hilda, was in the process of dying there. “I shall miss Hilda,” he said with the brisk matter-of-factness of the materialist, “but I have promised her that I shall go on writing.” Attired in gray flannel trousers, a corduroy jacket, and a V-neck jersey, he reminded me of something so obvious that I didn’t immediately recognize it. On a table lay the Morning Star, the daily newspaper of the Stalinist rump organization that survived the British Communist Party’s decision to dissolve itself after the implosion of the Soviet Union. It is entirely possible that Upward was the paper’s sole subscriber on this islet of thatched cottages and stained glass and theme-park rural Englishness. Seeing me notice the old rag, he said, rather defensively, “Yes I still take it, though there doesn’t seem much hope these days.” When I asked him if there was anyone on the left he still admired, he cited Arthur Scargill, the coal miners’ thuggish leader, who was known to connoisseurs as the most ouvriériste and sectarian and demagogic of the anti-Blair forces in the Labour movement. Yet to this alarming opinion he appended the shy and disarming news that the last review he had had in the Morning Star had been a good one, precisely because it stressed that not all his work was strictly political. “It particularly mentioned my story ‘The White-Pinafored Black Cat.’ ” I inquired if he was working on a story at that moment. “Yes I am.” “And may one know the title?” “It’s to be called ‘The World Revolution.’ ” At this point and in this context, I began to find the word surreal recurring to my mind.

  As so often, this feeling was prompted by a banal detail. Upward, in his flannels and corduroy and jersey, looked exactly like what he was: a retired schoolteacher. And yet, of all the figures detested by his set in the thirties, the schoolmaster was perhaps the most reviled. Auden in particular wrote that he understood fascism because he had experienced an English public school, and in his letters home from Hitler’s Germany he described the place as being run “by a mixture of gangsters and the sort of school prefect who is good at [Cadet] Corps.” But Upward had volunteered for a lifetime of schoolmastering, and of activism in the teachers union. It was as if he had determined to turn away from the magic realism of Mortmere, and concentrate on the quotidian. Confirming this, and sounding very much the schoolteacher, he said to me, “Writing is not a pleasure. It’s a discipline.”

  The beauty of Mortmere as a name is its evocation both of dead and stagnant water and of a slightly macabre name for a bucolic setting. (That it also evokes “dead mother” did not occur to me until I read Katherine Bucknell’s brilliant introduction to the most recent edition.) The Mortmere stories are fascinating because they take the classic English village and people it with psychopaths, revealed in titles like “The Leviathan of the Urinals.” The vicar is a sicko. The choirboy is far from innocent. And as for the squire in the moated country house, or the headmaster … It seems to me that Upward took a conscious decision to rid himself of this hedonism and to become a fiction writer with a mission. In his contribution to Cecil Day-Lewis’s anthology The Mind in Chains, published in 1937, he wrote sternly:

  A modern fantasy cannot tell the truth, cannot give a picture of life which will survive the test of experience; since fantasy implies in practice a retreat from the real world into the world of imagination.

  This repudiation is expressed with equal severity in the trilogy of novels on which Upward worked after he dropped from view, before the Second World War. Collectively titled The Spiral Ascent, and individually titled In the Thirties, The Rotten Elements, and No Home but the Struggle, the novels tell of the distraught life of a Communist schoolteacher named Alan Sebrill, who discovers to his horror that the Communist Party has become insufficiently revolutionary. To give you an idea of how far away we are from the playfulness of Mortmere, the bleak, admonitory subtitle of the second volume is A Novel of Fact.

  But Alan Sebrill has a secret. In addition to being a good Communist, he desires to be a good poet. (Upward had won a prize for poetry while at Cambridge University, but when Auden advised him to give up, he did so without demur.) There is even a desperate hope that Sebrill can fuse the two ambitions. Of the party, he tells himself:

  It was the enemy of his enemies: it aimed at the overthrow of a society which was dominated by poshocrats and public school snobs and which had no use for the living poets. It demanded that its converts should believe not in the supernatural nor in anti-scientific myths but in man. If he joined the Communist Party he might be able to write poetry again. [Emphasis mine.]

  Yes, well of course you know what’s going to happen, but Sebrill doesn’t, and I am not even sure that Upward did. In his memorial poem for Yeats, Auden famously wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” In the world created by Upward for Sebrill, nothing makes poetry happen. And so fantasy keeps on breaking in again, in an unintended way, as the wretched protagonist suffers from hallucinations, nightmares, paranoia, thoughts of suicide, and despair. If Upward had himself hoped to be Maxim Gorky, he ended up vindicating Spender’s comparison of him to Kafka.

  In one respect of “realism,” though, Upward deserves great praise. It is a deplorable fact that the English literature of the 1930s contains scarcely a mention of the phenomenon of fascism. Anthony Powell’s long excursion through the upper crust doesn’t turn up a single Blackshirt (something of a shortcoming in point of verisimilitude, as he might have phrased it). Evelyn Waugh avoids the subject. Graham Greene’s fascists are not English. But for Upward, especially in his first volume of The Spiral Ascent, the miasma of fascism is in the very air that his characters breathe, and a direct clash with the Blackshirts conveys the intense and local reality that this force sometimes possessed in Britain. Upward at least faced what many shied away from.

  I am not sure that this will excuse the langue de bois in which Sebrill’s crisis of Communism is set down. I collect the dates and occasions on which various writers and intellectuals decided to “break” with “the Party,” and these range from the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 to the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. There are some specialized ones as well, such as Eric Hobsbawm’s decision not to renew his party card after 1989. In these annals, Upward stands alone for resigning his membership in 1948, on the grounds that the British Communists were insufficiently Stalinist! It makes him quite a collector’s item. The experience was evidently a shock to his system, as it was to that of his main character:

  He found he could stop his trembling by thinking of Stalin and by speaking the name of Stalin, repeatedly but not quite aloud, much as a religious believer might have called on the name of God. Yet though this was an effective method of suppressing the physical symptoms of his anxiety it did not help him in the least with his writing.

  Understandably. Upward may have been many things, but he was never an ironist.

  Our conversation on politics was likewise arid, but things invariably improved when he discussed his relations with his departed comrades. He had, for instance, recently had a visit from Isherwood’s longtime lover, Don Bachardy (“Yes, I keep in touch with Don”), and at first I had difficulty picturing a friendship between this austere provincial Englishman
and a gay bohemian painter in Santa Monica. But then, Upward had been the first to spot Isherwood’s quirky genius (“even though I didn’t know or realize that he was homosexual”). With the others, the contacts (and eventual reconciliations) were conducted through the medium of … fantasy. In a strange little story called “An Unmentionable Man,” Upward’s rather self-pitying character encounters a former associate who is obviously Stephen Spender, and at first treats him with great bitterness:

  I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the ’thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one of them that didn’t completely ignore me.

  Yet after a few sharp exchanges with “this copiously white-haired broad-shouldered ruddy-faced man,” he abruptly comes to view him as “someone he must not die unfriendly with.” Upward’s accommodation with Auden was, alas, posthumous: He could never forgive him for having called the thirties “a low, dishonest decade,” but carried on a conversation with him in his head, and eventually conceded,

  I ought to have recognized that my indignation was less against the injuriousness of his opinions than against him for holding them. I could not dissociate him from himself as the young poet who for me and for other poets of his generation had been the only potential giant among us.

  Our knowledge of the literary and ideological generation of the thirties is radically incomplete without some awareness of its founding father, or perhaps better say founding brother.

  (The Atlantic, May 2009)

  C. L. R. James: Mid Off,

  Not Right On30

  IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S 1994 novel, A Way in the World, the reader is introduced to a charismatic revolutionary intellectual named Lebrun, who has written a history of a forgotten rebellion in the Caribbean basin, and whose critical powers are able to produce the following admiring response in the part-autobiographical narrator:

  It was as though, from moving to ground level, where so much was obscured, I had been taken up some way, not only to be shown the pretty pattern of fields and roads and small settlements, but also, as an aspect of that high view, had been granted a vision of history speeded up, had seen as I might have seen the opening and dying of a flower, the destruction and shifting about of peoples, had seen all the strands that had gone into the creation of the agricultural colony, and had understood what simple purposes—after such activity—that colony served.

  We rely not merely on internal evidence for the deduction that this is the fictionalized figure of Cyril Lionel Robert James, one of the few Marxist writers of the twentieth century whose work has survived it. In a personal reminiscence, Naipaul recalls meeting his fellow Trinidadian exile in London in 1962:

  It was all immensely intelligent and gripping. He talked about music and the influence on composers of the instruments of their time. He talked about military matters. I had met no one like that from our region, no one who had given so much time to reading and thought, no one who had organized so much information in this appetizing way … it was rhetoric, of course. And of course it was loaded in his favour. He couldn’t be interrupted, like royalty, he raised all the topics; and he would have been a master of all the topics he raised.

  Naipaul is not celebrated for his generosity to fellow authors, especially those hailing from the West Indies, and it is, of course, to be expected that he might take back with one hand what he offered with the other. I myself met C. L. R. James twice, once when I helped to organize a meeting for him at Ruskin College, Oxford, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and once by visiting him in retirement at his home in Brixton, and would certify that Naipaul captures both his extraordinary polymathic range and the slightly cultish aura that later came to surround him.

  On the platform, he had no equal for unscripted pure eloquence; without any demagogy, he spoke about the resistance of the Vietnamese and started hot tears of rage in his audience. In Brixton, he was attended in old age by a devoted group of admirers who seldom if ever argued with him and who treated him like a guru.

  Farrukh Dhondy was himself a peripheral member of this circle, and his biography is in some part also a memoir. It is difficult to think of a better point of comparison and contrast than the one he offers between Naipaul and James. Both men left Trinidad in their youth, both men were magnetized by Britain and became masters of English prose. Naipaul showed little if any nostalgia for his roots, while James felt committed to the struggle for independence and was an early advocate of West Indian Federation. Naipaul evinced scant interest in the history of the region, while James’s magnificent book The Black Jacobins (1938), a study of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave republic, is still considered a founding document in the world of postcolonial studies. The chief resemblance between the two men lies (or lay—James died in 1989) in their shared suspicion of a self-pitying or “black power” or “Afro-centric” worldview. There is also a sense in which both managed to be plus anglais que les Anglais.

  James had been formed in the striving Trinidadian world of the scholarship school and the cricket field. Before he ever saw England, he had developed an admiration for what might be called the public school or Arnoldian ethos. Dhondy has some fun with a moment in Manchester in 1956, when Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot replied to the Labour leadership’s charge of “not playing with the team.” They did so by making sneering references to “straight bats” and “stiff upper lips.” This seemed slightly profane to James, and his shocked reaction, in turn, seems somewhat quaint to Dhondy. However, it put me in mind of what Lionel Trilling once said about George Orwell—that “he must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.” (Orwell, incidentally, was a fan of James’s and praised his 1937 book World Revolution.)

  The two men also had in common an affiliation with the old Independent Labour Party. In James’s case, this arose partly from his cricketing connection. Adopted as a ghostwriter by Sir Learie Constantine, he went to live with him in Lancashire, where the ILP was relatively strong, and soon became part of its Trotskyist wing. Adopted also by Neville Cardus, and composing cricket reports for the Manchester Guardian by day, he evolved into a semiprofessional revolutionary by night. He campaigned for colonial freedom, for intervention against Mussolini in Ethiopia, and for workers’ education. But the imperishable part of his writing in the 1930s and beyond concerns the struggle against Stalinism.

  James had never had any illusions in the Communist Party to lose, and saw Stalin’s Russia from the beginning as a grotesque new form of oppression and exploitation. He translated Boris Souvarine’s seminal book Stalin from the French for Secker and Warburg, and in World Revolution showed how the Communist International had become a depraved apparatus in the service of a pitiless despot. The book reads rather creakily these days, because of its emphasis on Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it contains the most wonderfully scornful review of the Webbs and their shameful Soviet Communism: A new civilization? (from the second edition of which the question mark was famously removed), and is both lucid and prescient about the famine and the treason trials. Again to suggest an Orwellian comparison, one notices time and again that James is moved to anger and contempt by the sheer ugliness and euphemism of the enemy’s prose style. His training in English literature was as useful to him as his apprenticeship in dialectics.

  He recrossed the Atlantic just before the outbreak of war, to visit Trotsky in Mexico and to make contact with his American epigones. This led to a long stay in the United States, a deep involvement with what was still called “the Negro question,” and to more than one passionate attachment. (The tall and handsome James went through white women like an avenging flame, but there was none of the macho vulgarity that one finds described in Naipaul’s narratives of black-white sex, and his former lovers are still loyal t
o him.) By the end of this deep engagement in sectarian politics, he had decided that the entire concept of a “vanguard party” was at fault, no matter who proclaimed it. The pamphlets and polemics of this period are still collector’s items, though the most closely wrought of his political texts, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, is actually an allegorical study of Herman Melville, written while awaiting deportation from the United States in 1953.

  Indeed, Trotskyism’s gain was in many respects literature’s loss. James’s only novel, Minty Alley, is a rather naive account of shanty-town or “barrack-yard” life in Trinidad, but can bear comparison with some early Naipaul (both V. S. and Shiva). His literary capacity was immense; he knew Thackeray’s Vanity Fair almost by heart and later in life prepared a masterly series of lectures on Shakespeare. At all times he upheld the great tradition and was famous for his denunciations of those callow scholars who referred to English literature as “Eurocentric.” (Dhondy has some very telling anecdotes here, of James tossing and goring those young apostles of negritude who came to pay homage to the old revolutionary without troubling to register his attachment to high culture, or his conviction that the “Third World” had much to learn from the “First.”)