They all leave one with the odd impression, even Philby in his early years, that they became Soviet agents faute de mieux. What they needed was something else: a British movement of total opposition to the regime which was both respectable and formidable. They needed a divided Establishment, an alternative regime-in-waiting which they could join. Continental republics know this dualism. In France or Italy, Maclean would probably have been a prominent Communist with a bourgeois lifestyle, and quite possibly a good desk in the Foreign Ministry whose contents he would not have felt moved to microphotograph each night. In Britain, still an ancien régime in this respect, Labour did not offer such an alternative, while the price of CPGB activity would obviously be impotence and ostracism. The spies didn’t see why they should be impotent and ostracised.
The Thirties were a decade of rapid social change and improvement in popular living standards, as well as a time of poverty and misery for many. But Britain remained governed, financed, exploited and largely represented by the upper class. There was no alternative ruling group, waiting in the wings with its own governors, financiers, civil servants, generals and even spooks. Labour was a party which, as far as the student leftist could see, would deferentially leave the old élite in place. The Cambridge spies wanted something else for Britain, something which now sounds absurd: a socialist revolution which would both smash the patrician hegemony to which the spies were such guilty heirs, and restore British greatness and independence. Objectively, we can now see them as Stalin’s pawns. They don’t seem to have taken that view, even with a thrill of masochism. The future spies sought a centre of full-blooded, total opposition to the status quo in Britain. They could find such a centre only abroad, in Moscow.
They really were traitors. Swedish colonels, West German bureaucrats who betray secrets to the East, are not in their league. They usually do it for money, or because they are under pressure or because they have some personal grievance. Nor are their fellow citizens as fascinated by their treachery as the British public are by the tale of the upper-crust spies. Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were doing something more fundamental: they betrayed what their country was doing but by the same act destroyed the way their country did things. After them, the delicate muscle-tissue of the executive, uncritical trust moving in sheaths of class loyalty and schoolmate confidence, never worked so well again. This isn’t to say that state servants do not still use it. They do, but with misgivings and with much greater difficulty. The damage done by the spies here was irreparable in the long run, but if one considers that the old-boy system was overdue for replacement, one could argue that the Cambridge spies betrayed their friends, in this instance, but not necessarily their country.
At the edge of the story, other elements of motive – even stranger – can be sensed. A certain crude psychologism fits, the spies savaging their Patria as substitute for an absent or unconvincing father. But there is another approach. Birth, the accident of birth in the privileged upper tenth of a caste society, imprisoned these men in a cell with the gnawing rat of guilt. Nothing they could do in life would efface the original sin of that unfair birth – except rebirth. Not just the Communist faith but the actual existence of the Soviet Union – isolated, hated, mysterious – glowed to them across Europe as a second chance for themselves as well as for humanity. Cross that snowy frontier, die for the old world, awake purified in a new one clutching ‘a white stone with a new name writ thereon …’
In the end, there is Protestantism, English and Scottish, in these men. Boyle leaves us with the picture of an ageing Burgess in Moscow, slowly picking out on the piano hymn tunes from his schooldays:
My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry
All skilful in the wars …
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress and thy ease.
[1980
A review of ‘The Climate of Treason’ by Andrew Boyle (Hutchinson, London, 1979).
Witness
On the wall of my office, some years ago, I pinned up the postcard reproduction of a portrait. It is the picture of a man in the black robe of a Jesuit, a dark-haired, bearded man a little past his youth whose features are curiously worn. There is something strange, too, about his eyes, a look at once hurt and defiant.
This man is Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, who died of the plague at Trier, in western Germany in 1635. I try to avoid anniversaries, and this is not his – though it happens that I am writing on the day of his death. But some fuss is being made in 1987 because it is just 500 years since the publication of one of the most evil of books: the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which was to become a manual for the great witchhunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was Spee’s fate to become part of that hunt.
He was a Rhinelander and a scholar. In Trier there still stands the old Jesuit college which became the city’s most famous school, now the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium. This school, always a centre of liberal Catholicism, had two well-known pupils whom many citizens would prefer to forget: Karl Marx and Klaus Barbie. Friedrich Spee, in his own times, was a teacher there.
In 1627, when Spee was 36 years old, the Bishop of Würzburg asked the Jesuits to send him a confessor for condemned witches. They chose Spee. In the next two years, he accompanied nearly 200 human beings to the stake, and tried to comfort them. Not all were women. There were also town councillors and priests. There was a blind girl, and there were two children only nine years old. We do not know whether Spee was also present at their interrogations by torture, but it is pretty clear from what he wrote afterwards that he sometimes was.
Spee said that out of all those victims, there was ‘not one whom I could have asserted to be guilty, after comprehensive and sane reflection.’ It is reported that his hair turned grey, although the portrait does not show this. He never described directly what he saw, heard and smelled at the pyres, saying only that ‘it is not good to tell all that I experienced there.’
The nearest that he came to that was by quoting Ecclesiastes. ‘I saw the tears of the oppressed, and I saw that there was no one to comfort them. Strength was on the side of their oppressors, and there was no one to avenge them. I counted the dead happy because they were dead, happier than the living who are still in life. More fortunate than either I reckoned the man yet unborn, who had not witnessed all the wicked deeds done here under the sun.’
In the end, Spee could take no more. The bishop’s men and the city fathers were preventing him from hearing confessions, fearing that Spee would take the victims’ protestations of innocence to higher authorities. He went away, and wrote a book which seems to me an enduring monument to human courage, intelligence and decency, and which helped in some measure to bring the great atrocity to an end in Germany.
The book, which caused a huge sensation when it appeared in 1631, was entitled Cautio Criminalis, or ‘An Essay on the Trials of Witches, Addressed to the Magistrates of Germany.’ Written in Latin, it is made up of 51 ‘Doubts,’ subdivided into ‘Reasons,’ a work whose anger and misery is tightly controlled in philosophical form. In the ‘Cautio,’ Spee systematically demolished every aspect of the trials, revealing all the private vengeances and financial corruption behind them, and denouncing what remains the fundamental contradiction of torture: ‘The accused either confesses on the rack, in which case she is guilty, or she doesn’t confess, in which case she is also guilty because to have withstood such terrible torture she must have been in league with the Devil.’
Although witch-hunting raged on in Germany until the end of the century, Spee’s book was rapidly reprinted and circulated, and in several regions the trials were banned. But the scars on Friedrich Spee were indelible. He returned to teaching and preaching, and became a poet. The ‘Nightingale’s Rival’ gave to Germany a new form of Christian pastoral poetry. They are d
elicate songs of sunlight and countryside, and yet, ever and again, there recur the images of consuming flame, of darkness and abandonment.
Spee went back to Trier, at the height of the Thirty Years’ War. He looked after the wounded, when the Imperialists stormed the city, and nursed the sick in the plague epidemic which followed. He caught the disease, died and was buried in the Jesuit church by the school where he taught.
It makes me angry that although the Malleus Maleficarum has been translated into English – by an English vicar who seems to take a horrid delight in that discharge of woman-hate and cruelty – the Cautio seems never to have been thought worthy of attention in this country. Yet it is Friedrich Spee who should belong to us, not the two bloodthirsty Dominicans who wrote the Malleus.
For this Spee, who redeemed himself, is also guilty, in a very twentieth-century way. How would it go with him if he were charged with crimes against humanity, as Klaus Barbie was? It would be no defence that he acted under Jesuit orders. He took part in the crime, just as certain SS officers at Auschwitz took part not by killing but by soothing and deceiving the victims about their fate.
His case would resemble that of some Auschwitz doctors, who refused to select victims on the ramp but whose work to improve camp conditions – sometimes sincere – only had the effect of making the death machinery run more smoothly. His subsequent rebellion would count in his favour. But no court could encompass the real moral paradox here: that Spee would not have acquired the knowledge and motive required to denounce this crime without participating in it to some extent.
I think Spee knew this, and was strong enough to comfort and carry his own guilt. He never whined, or tried to pose as a hero. Only his choice from Ecclesiastes suggests that, after Würzburg, he wished that he had never been born.
There is a second modernity. Spee fought as a lonely intellectual against a mass madness led by intellect. Professor Norman Cohn, in his ‘Europe’s Inner Demons,’ shows that the witchhunt only took its pandemic form when educated men connected ‘sophisticated’ fantasies about Devil-worshipping covens of flying witches to old peasant beliefs in maleficium–harm done by spells. Then the holocausts began, as bishops and princes mobilised ignorant millions behind a new ideology: the purge of a Satanic fifth column within the gates.
We have seen other purges and holocausts led by ideology. And there have been others like Spee: the handful of men and women who first obeyed Hitler and then defied him, hoping not for life or honour or even personal redemption, but only that, for the sake of a few just men, their city would be spared from brimstone. This forgotten Jesuit, whose portrait – now I look at it again – is illuminated by a red and flickering glow, belongs in a small but good company.
[1987
Critics
Some literary critics aim to wound; few aim to kill. They carry small-arms: a shotgun to sting, a rifle to drill holes in the fleshy part of a chapter. Inflicting pain on their thin-skinned quarry is part of the fun, bombing them out would end the sport.
But the other day I came across the rudest review I have ever read. Rude? It was annihilating. It was a megaton warhead, plunging out of the intellectual ionosphere on its victim, intended to leave – when the roar of detonation and the clatter of falling limbs was over – a silent hole in the ground.
This was a review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled – simply and horribly – ‘A Catastrophic Book.’ Its target was the latest novel by Günter Grass, ‘The She-Rat.’ Its author was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the most awe-inspiring critic in Germany. After wading through his gamma-radiating words, I see why.
He does not just say that he dislikes the novel. The agony would be over far too soon. Reich-Ranicki opens his performance with a heart-breaking elegy for the lost powers of a great writer, once a master of prose. Then he raises the curtain on a tableau of Grass at work, sitting down every morning at his typewriter to struggle with the ghastly certainty that his talent has fled and he has no more to say. ‘Nothing emerges. Ah, how he must have suffered!’
Grass is more to be pitied than his readers, gloats Reich-Ranicki; they will not even throw the book away in disgust but will drop it unread after a few pages. ‘The She-Rat’ could even discredit all modern German literature, the critic sighs: ‘Reading new books is no unmixed pleasure, but the state of contemporary writing is really nowhere near as dire as that of the writer Grass….’
The idea of the novel was worth no more than a newspaper article, perhaps a medium-length lecture. ‘Instead, he strives to transform his lamentably banal views and warnings into an epic’ Grass is worn out, his creative gift is used up, his attempts at fantasy are yawn-inducing, his readers are treated as idiots, his satire is ‘shamingly cheap,’ his political imagery is absurd (‘Does such rubbish deserve comment?’), his prose is ‘lifeless and uninspired,’ his novel has no structure because its component parts are ‘rotten and brittle.’
Enough? Not quite enough for Reich-Ranicki. At the end, thousands of words on, Reich-Ranicki leans solicitously over what was once Günter Grass and sheds a final, scalding tear for his departed greatness. ‘“The She-Rat” is just an empty space, concealed by withered laurels and painstakingly tarted-up with long-faded garlands.’ Thank you, and good night.
Fortunately for literature, Günter Grass is a tough, truculent soul who can look after himself. He may be irritable, but fragile he is not: he will survive Reich-Ranicki. I haven’t read the novel, but I now certainly will. There are some duds on the Grass bookshelf, but nothing suggests that the man has finally lost his enormous fertility of fable and narrative. A less resilient writer, though, might have been silenced by such reviewing for ever.
Oddly enough, Reich-Ranicki has since given a lecture in which he deplored the German critical practice of declaring -every few years – that ‘German literature is dead.’ The worthless, scribbling midgets of the day, as Thomas Mann or Brecht were called in their time, turn out to have staying-power. And yet there are always mighty critics who – in the mood of Germaine Greer preferring no sex to bad sex – declare that the time has come for less literature rather than more.
This reminds me of the London family publishing firm in Anthony Powell’s ‘Afternoon Men’: two elderly brothers whose aim was to find sound reasons for not publishing anything offered to them. I feel for them at moments. Watching the endless procession of new books arriving daily in their Jiffybags for review is as intolerable as watching the endless stream of arriving human beings at a Heathrow terminal. How about… well… putting the whole machine into reverse?
Heinrich Heine warned that where books are burned, they will shortly be burning people. Rosa Luxembourg repeated it. Not all of her prophecies and theories have stood the test of time and misunderstanding (why the current Margarethe von Trotta film presents her as a premature CND pacifist I can’t imagine). Those words, however, came more than 10 years before the Nazi book-bonfires, and more than 15 years before the SS lit the crematoria at Auschwitz. Rosa Luxembourg never said a truer sentence – but I am talking not about book-genocide so much as book-contraception. Something is being swamped under all these hyped-up bricks of printed paper. One can call this process the triumph of universal education. One could also see it as another example of machine getting the upper hand of master.
Karl Kraus, the prince of all central European critics, wrote in 1908: ‘Of the terrible devastation being wrought by the printing press, it is still not possible today to have any conception. The airship is invented, and the imagination crawls along like a stage-coach. Automobile, telephone and the mass dissemination of stupidity – who can say what the brains of the generation after next will be like?’
This thought also occurred to an acquaintance of mine called - let’s say – Szmit, a writer in the People’s Republic of Slobodnia. He was awarded a literary prize, and then invited to go on state television to add his voice – as a decorated man of letters – to the national campaign for the eradication of illiteracy.
/> Szmit, whose view of the Republic was sardonic, passed the hours before the programme in the company of several bottles of plum brandy. On camera at last, he replied to the TV presenter as follows: ‘Comrade, I utterly agree that literacy is the curse of our nation. Literacy hinders the unfolding of the full human personality. Literacy keeps the masses in ignorance, helpless and credulous before unscrupulous demagogues and exploiters. Yes, comrades, let us tour our land with teams of antiliteracy volunteers to stamp out this scourge, this blot, this …’
At this point, they pulled the plug on him. Later, they withdrew the literary prize from Szmit. Not wishing to be outdone, the provincial authorities then fired the headmaster of the school whose hall had been used for the presentation. Unwilling to be found lacking in zeal, the municipality demolished the nice nineteenth-century house in which Szmit had passed the night before accepting the prize. Szmit, although still recovering from typhoid, induced by eating too much of the perch in aspic at the prize banquet, continued to laugh at them all, and is laughing to this day.
I remember discussing with Szmit the old French financial Press before the war. The aim of these Bourse papers was to publish as few copies as possible. They would run off a proof, full of horrible revelation and gossip, and then invite members of the stock exchange to pay to have the print run reduced. On a middling day, one put out a hundred or so copies. On a good day, one published none at all.
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