I had a loose deal with the New Republic which gave me press credentials to poke about whenever I felt inquisitive, and a good understanding with the editor of the Atlantic Monthly that allowed me to travel farther afield and look longer and deeper. And I always had my own work: fiction. The Sunday Times offer to go to Washington and report the Senate Hearing on Joseph McCarthy was a flattering surprise, the first assignment from an English paper. The trouble with writing for any newspaper is lack of space: I feel as if I am talking at top speed in one breath, as I did in “The Most Unheard-of-Thing.”
Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like a devil king for four years. In March 1954, Ed Murrow, the most respected American broadcaster, had the lonely courage to risk a frontal attack on network TV. Nobody else had dared say anything like, “No man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” A Gallup Poll in January 1954 found that 50% of the country supported and applauded McCarthy. The remaining 50% may have been formed by the usual sludge don't-knows and by people who hated and despised McCarthy; in any case, it was a silenced 50%. McCarthy discovered imaginary communists everywhere or, as an extra frill, homosexuals, ipso facto security risks. Red termites were chewing at the foundations of the state and society. He had only to hold up a piece of paper for the TV cameras and announce in his flat nasal voice, “I have a list here,” and lives were truly destroyed. Hundreds of lives. The details of this period are sickening. Reckless with his long easy triumph, McCarthy finally overreached himself when he set out to bully the Army as he had bullied everyone else.
McCarthy's purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity. But Stalin had the full power of the state police to enforce his suspicions and accusations. McCarthy was merely the chairman of a Senate subcommittee, nothing. He derived his power from an American fear neurosis. McCarthyism did not begin or end with the malignant Senator nor the House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthyism is rooted in this national periodic fear neurosis.
Here is a fresh example of that neurosis, neo-McCarthyism, written by a former official in the Reagan White House: “Indeed with its Clark amendment cutting off aid to the pro-Western guerrillas in Angola, and its Boland amendments cutting off aid to the pro-American guerrillas in Nicaragua, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has made itself the silent partner—the indispensable ally—of revolutionary communism in the Third World.1 [My italics]
Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience—war devastating their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question. Politics is their profession, they must know what is happening and what to do about it; the average citizen is busy enough managing his own life. Americans are more apolitical than most people. About half the electorate does not bother to vote in Presidential elections. And America is the biggest island in the world, and the safest. It was always abnormal for people so protected to imagine, with terror, Reds under their beds.
The teaching has been brilliantly successful and now Americans and their leaders are trapped in it. I think, guessing, that this fear neurosis started with the Russian Revolution. Americans, glad to be finished with the 1914–18 war in quarrelsome old Europe, could not possibly work themselves into a frenzy about Bolsheviks, all by themselves. Most of them would not be sure where Russia was, nor care. They were taught. The earliest form of the fear neurosis that I noticed, in the thirties, was called the Red Menace and focused largely on labor organizers and union members. It will not be forgotten that Sacco and Vanzetti were poor working men, of foreign origin, put to death as anarchists.
I think the Truman Doctrine, enunciated by the President as if he had been handed it directly by the Founding Fathers, is the seed from which the post–World War Two fear neurosis has grown. The seed was watered, manured, encouraged to take root and spread over the country by propaganda so hysterical, so ridiculous that it casts doubt on the intelligence of America. It defies belief that, in the heyday of McCarthy, Americans lived with the fear that perhaps the neighbor was a secret communist. Communists among us are out to destroy our freedoms, trumpeted the propaganda. How? Never explained. The fear neurosis was mythical, mysterious; it might as well have been fear of dragons or the evil eye; it bore no relation to real danger.
After 1949, the fear neurosis immediately clamped on to China. There was now a whole new set of American communists to fear and hate because they, by God, wanted to let China destroy our freedoms. How was China going to do it? The taught fear neurosis was untaught, promptly, when Nixon went to China and brought back word that the Chinese did not have three heads and eat their children and we could live in the same world with them. Turn it on, turn it off; a fear neurosis for every season.
The hate-fear of communism, communists, went upmarket after the war, to feed on the educated class. Intellectual and liberal became nasty words. Neurotic fear of an unseen and unknown enemy translated into fear of private opinion, of the unconforming conscience, fear of the stranger—and the stranger was anyone who differed from the surrounding majority. True Americans, clearly, would not do something so unpatriotic as think for themselves. America, in this neurotic vision, is always imperiled by enemies, within and without. The leaders of America have a lot to answer for; it was wicked to instill a fear neurosis into people who, by nature, prefer being amiable and open and had, as Franklin Roosevelt memorably said, “nothing to fear but fear itself.”
McCarthyism was the most acute manifestation of the fear neurosis and it made America nightmarish, sick in the head. Nowadays fear neurosis is institutionalized in the U.S. Government, in the Moral Majority, in countless right wing organizations, in Fundamentalist Christianity; it claims to represent true patriotism and true Americanism, with God's approval to boot. Everybody, outside that circle of fearing fanatic prejudice, is a potential threat to the safety of the Republic and the American way of life. The neurosis people are miraculously well-financed and united. The “liberals,” a suspect category since the Second World War, are not. Of course fear neurosis prohibits sane political argument; honest dissent is easily branded “soft on communism.” If the media and politicians cannot discuss the issues of the times objectively, using common sense, facts, understanding of the complicated real world, without slurs on their patriotism, the country gets a wacky lead. America, the giant power, blindfolded by the fear neurosis, staggers all over the globe meddling, not necessarily with success or in its own interests. No real enemy could damage America as badly as it damages itself by its innate McCarthyism. How I long for someone in public life with the moral and mental stature to free America of the fear neurosis. Fear is bad for people. I am absolutely sure of that.
From the hysteria that poisoned America to the pleasantness of England was like escaping out of a fever ward to the companionship of healthy adults. The two 1955 articles, “It Don't Matter Who Gets in, Dear” and “Spies and Starlings,” read like fairy tales but were true of the atmosphere in England then. Imagine a lazy relaxed general election now. Imagine laughter in the House of Commons. I note, as readers will, that Harold Macmillan was factually wrong about Philby, the spy, but morally right; a man is innocent until proved guilty.
At the end of an all too usual rainy London summer, I wanted a heat stroke and went to Greece, Israel and Italy in August 1956. “The tension” I had heard of, during “Weekend in Israel,” led to October 29, 1956, when ten Israeli Brigades moved across the Sinai frontier, routed the Egyptian forces, reached and halted at the Suez Canal, while on November 5th and 6th, English and French forces began to occupy the Canal Zone. The Suez Crisis erupted in Britain. I have never before or since seen the British in such a fury, violently pro- and anti-Suez. Nobody liked Nasser. The argument was about the rightness or wrongness of atta
cking Egypt, aggression as a crime or a necessity. President Eisenhower pronounced American censure and the whole operation crumbled. I understood the Israelis’ motives and actions and shared their view of Nasser as an incipient Pan-Arab Hitler. The Israelis should have gone it alone, thus warding off the third Arab-Israel war in 1967, and saving thousands of soldiers’ lives on both sides. Instead the futile Suez episode made Nasser a starry hero to the Arab young. The British and French had been ludicrously inept as conspirators and as a military force and would have done well to stay at home. British internecine anger disappeared, no worse than a sneezing fit, when Macmillan became Prime Minister. We settled back into good humor with relief.
For my first visit to a communist country in the late winter of 1958, I prepared by buying gifts for the natives, a big jar of Nescafé and Doctor Zhivago, then famous and forbidden behind the Iron Curtain, and felt quite daring when my suitcase was prodded at Warsaw airport. I had no introductions, could not speak a word of Polish, and stood on the street in front of my Warsaw hotel wondering whether I was a certifiable nutcase. How did I expect to do this job I had assigned myself? For want of a better idea, I walked down the street and saw an art gallery with a window display of paintings like sweet derivations of Chagall. The young, painfully thin artist who happened to be in the gallery at the time had never heard of Chagall. We talked, he invited me to his attic home. I met everyone like that; one handed me on to another. This chain reaction produced “Home of the Brave.” All these young people became instant old friends, I doted on them, there was no strangeness between us and no feeling of age difference perhaps because their experience of life was much harder than mine. A mixture of languages—French, German, English—sufficed. We used to call that “Brigade English” during the Spanish war.
Julek had said that the young were without hope but his vitality, their vitality, disproved his opinion. They gave me enormous hope. These funny, underfed, inadequately clothed, fine-looking kids were a magnificent generation, free and lively in their minds, unafraid. Like all the truly brave, they had no sense of their bravery; bravery was their normal state. I always want to believe in the goodness and courage of the human spirit but rarely, outside war, see its quality tested and passing with high marks. I abominate war and do not deny its reverse side: personal nobility. This haphazard group of Poles afforded me the luxury of admiring. If a generation could grow up as they had, through the cruelty of war and the oppression of government, and be unbroken, generous, tolerant and merry, there was hope for our questionable species.
A few miles from civilized Krakow, Auschwitz stood as a monument to evil, cause to despair for our species. Auschwitz, empty except for a few other silent visitors, horrified me even more than Dachau when Dachau was full of dazed skeletal figures in striped prison clothes, and corpes lay in a stinking yellow outraged pile. It must have been the size of Auschwitz and the aura of that mammoth efficient murder factory. I could not handle my emotions: I wanted to scream and run and I was frozen by shock; I felt that I was going out of my mind. Only by looking. Evil is not banal, as Hannah Arendt suggested. Evil is fierce, stone cold, ruthless and when unchained but organized, as here, it is all powerful. I will never forget Auschwitz; the world should never allow itself to forget Auschwitz. For though it is unique in history and was the handiwork of vilely degraded men and women in one nation, evil has no frontiers.
I wish that those good brave kids in Poland were the norm and the majority of our breed, but they are not. I wish that kindness were a universal human quality, but it is not. And I have no solutions.
1Patrick J. Buchanan, Newsweek, July 13, 1987
THE SIXTIES
Return to Poland
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, August 1960
As for me, to go to Poland is to step through the Looking Glass. The people are superb, but there's also the Red Queen, dressed up as the State now, and I have simple Alice reactions to the State Queen: barking mad and beastly, is what I say to myself. The Polish people are used to the Red Queen, and besides are indestructible. They stay sane and make jokes. On my second visit to Poland I thought I learned more, but in the end I was only sure of what I felt. This would be of supreme unimportance except that I imagine that my emotions are standard, typical, those of anyone of low-average stamina brought up in the Western world and accustomed to such amenities as the lifelong habit of calling your soul your own.
We sat in a charming candlelit cellar in the beautifully rebuilt old town of Warsaw, and it might have been a glamorous restaurant anywhere. The other tables were filled, although this is an expensive place, even on the black-market rate of exchange, let alone on the thieving official rate. I marveled at the girls—fragile pretty creatures, soft-voiced, fair, wearing the new beehive hairdos, modern products of modern hardship who retain a gentleness and grace seldom seen amongst us. The young men looked chipper. The older couples were neat, dark-clad, middle-class bourgeoisie, you would think, dining out on the cook's night off. My companions might have been a tweedy English professor and his delicate wife.
My professorial friend has been in prison sometime or other, for one of the new reasons: these have to do with economics and are pure other-side-of-the-Looking-Glass. I listened to a trial in Krakow where eight men were being judged, under the criminal code, for incompentence in their State-owned cooperative. They could easily have been stupid or inexperienced, but that sort of common-sense interpretation of life is not the way the law works. Whether you lose money or make money, you can always go to jail, if the State wishes. Listening to Poles, you would imagine that to go to jail, to have been in jail, is about on a par with our reaction to a bad case of influenza. Nasty, rotten luck, can happen to anyone, nothing to shout about, something to avoid if possible, and obviously no stigma attaches to it.
Self-pity seems unknown among Poles, and this lack imparts a fine astringent tone to their thinking and conversation. They talk about themselves and the life of their country as if they stood several miles away. I was therefore not surprised to hear my friend point out, with detachment, some valuable accomplishments of the State. He said, “This regime gets no credit, even for the good things it does; the people are so against it because it was imposed from the outside.”
At the end of this journey I tried, within my limited knowledge, to draw up a balance sheet in the only terms I understand—which have to do with happiness, decency, dignity—on the good and the bad in Polish life today. Perhaps no Pole would agree with me. They know what I do not: they know what existence is like in the other satellite countries and in Russia. Compared with what others have got, the Poles think they have something resembling real life.
The State giveth and the State taketh away, and the State gives an amazing amount of what it calls culture. True, the tone of this culture has been so brilliant only since 1956, when the Poles made their national revolution against Stalinism. And true, the State is clamping down again on the rationed freedom and range of the arts. A wise journalist explained this gradually renewed but strongly resented death grip on expression: “I think there are three reasons. The first is economic. We are even poorer than we were a year and a half ago; since there must be saving, some of it must be made on the arts. As to books, we now export more wood because coal didn't turn out well, so there is simply less paper. The second reason is that Poles have been too successful in the arts. Polish films, Polish painting, Polish books have been too much praised in the West. East Germans and Czechs tattle to the Russians; it is very embarrassing for our government, this unorthodox, un-Communist success. Finally, the regime believes that intellectuals of every kind always have to be kept in their place.”
Throughout Poland, there is an enormous attentive audience for the best work that can be done in the theater, in films, in music, in painting, and in writing. Every little provincial town has its theater and orchestra; companies go on tour regularly to the smaller villages; editions of the classics and of good foreign and Polish writers are sold out in a
matter of days; picture galleries are jammed. I would be amazed to find that Alton, Illinois, had a permanent stock company, with a range from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller (and no bilge in between), and played all week, every week, to a crowded theater. But the theater in Katowice, which is a grisly mining town in Silesia, was putting on Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge while I was there, and on a sunny Thursday afternoon you could not get a seat in the hushed house. “Why do they like it, Julek?” I asked. “The public adores it,” he said. “They adore such complicated fantastical problems. It is a nice rest. I think Miller talks too much. Very heavy. The provinces love him.”
And is there any town in America of half a million people, the size of Krakow, which has ten legitimate theaters, one puppet theater, one operetta company, and a philharmonic? While in Krakow, I noticed advertisements for three current plays by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Shaw. A young friend just graduated from the Krakow Beaux Arts, where he studied stage designing, has his first job as one of the designers for the largest Krakow theater, a whopping place with a huge auditorium. He showed me his sketches for the costumes and sets of the next production, Troilus and Cressida: imposing and imaginative warriors’ costumes, which will be made of silvered cardboard, cheesecloth, dyed horse-hair plumes; movable panels to suggest the camp of the Greek army, the battlements of Troy, nothing but painted beaverboard giving a heroic impression of space and power. “It is a very interesting play to the people,” he said, “because of the political allusions.”
This boy earns the equivalent of twenty dollars a month, which means that he lives on scraps, but he is happy because he has the greatest possible luxury, a room of his own. It is a real attic, with a small skylight for air and light, a chair, a table, a cot, a bookcase; and one part of the room is high enough to stand up in. The washing facilities are distant and lamentable. Young Poles have never known even rudimentary ease; for twenty years the main problem has been to eat. They do not think in material terms; our Beatniks would seem luxurious pampered babies to them. The result of never having had money, nor the prospect of having it, is to cherish more fiercely the values of the mind.
The View from the Ground Page 18