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, a
n 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.
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