Today I am to report on two books I have read, for John Butte. It will be a fight. Jack employed me, as a weapon in the battle he carries on with the spirit of the Party—the spirit which he is only too ready to describe as dead and dry. Jack is supposed to run this publishing house. In fact he is a kind of administrator; over him, set over him by “the Party,” is John Butte; and the final decisions about what will and will not be published are taken in the Party H.Q. Jack is a “good communist.” That is, he has genuinely and honestly driven out of himself the false pride that might make him resent his lack of independence. He does not resent, in principle, the fact that it is a sub-committee, under John Butte, in H.Q., that takes decisions he must carry out. On the contrary, he is all for this sort of centralism. But he thinks the policy of H.Q. is wrong; and, more than that, it’s not a question of a person, or a group that he disapproves of; he quite simply states that the Party “in this epoch” is in an intellectual deadwater and there is nothing for it but to wait for things to change. Meanwhile he is prepared to have his name associated with intellectual attitudes he despises. The difference between him and me is that he sees the Party in terms of decades, and even centuries (I pull his leg saying: Like the Catholic Church); whereas I think the intellectual collapse is probably final. We discuss this interminably, over lunches, in gaps of work at the office. Sometimes John Butte is there, listens, even joins in. And this fascinates and angers me: because the kind of talk we use in this type of argument is a thousand miles away from the public “line” of the Party. More, this kind of talk would be treason in a communist country. Yet when I leave the Party, this is what I am going to miss—the company of people who have spent their lives in a certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central philosophy. This is why so many people who would like to leave, or think they should leave, the Party, do not. There is no group of people or type of intellectual I have met outside the Party who aren’t ill-informed, frivolous, parochial, compared with certain types of intellectual inside the Party. And the tragedy is that this intellectual responsibility, this high seriousness, is in a vacuum: it relates, not to Britain; not to communist countries as they are now; but to a spirit which existed in international communism years ago, before it was killed by the desperate, crazed spirit of struggle for survival to which we now give the name Stalinism.
When I get off the bus I realise that thinking about the coming fight has over-excited me: the essence of a successful battle with Comrade Butte is that one has to remain clam. I am not calm; and besides my lower stomach is painful. And I am half an hour late. I am always careful to be on time, to work the usual hours, because I am unpaid, and I don’t want special privileges because of that. (Michael jokes: You’re in the great British tradition of upper-class service to the community, my dear Anna; you work for the Communist Party, unpaid, the way your grandmother would have worked for the starving poor. It’s the kind of joke I make myself; but when Michael makes it it hurts me.) I go at once to the washroom, quickly because I am late, and I examine myself and change the tampon and pour jug after jug of warm water between my thighs to defeat the sour musty smell. Then I scent my thighs and forearms, and remind myself to come down in an hour or two; and I go upstairs to Jack’s office, bypassing my own. Jack is there with John Butte. Jack says: “You smell lovely, Anna,” and at once I feel at ease and able to manage everything. I look at the creaking, grey John Butte, an elderly man with all his juices gone dry, and remember that Jack has told me that in his youth, in the early ’thirties, he was gay, brilliant, witty. He was a brilliant public speaker; he was in opposition to the then Party officialdom; he was essentially critical and irreverent. And after Jack had told me all this, rather wryly enjoying my disbelief, he handed me a book John Butte wrote twenty years ago, a novel about the French Revolution. It was a sparkling, vivid, courageous book. And now I look at him again and think, involuntarily: The real crime of the British Communist Party is the number of marvellous people it has either broken, or turned into dry-as-dust hair-splitting office men, living in a closed group with other communists, and cut off from everything that goes on in their own country. Then the words I use surprise and displease me: the word “crime” is from the communist arsenal, and is meaningless. There’s some kind of social process involved which makes words like “crime” stupid. And as I think this, I feel the birth of a new sort of thought; and I go on to think, clumsily: The Communist Party, like any other institution, continues to exist by a process of absorbing its critics into itself. It either absorbs them or destroys them. I think: I’ve always seen society, societies, organised like this: a ruling section or government with other sections in opposition; the stronger section either ultimately being changed by the opposing section or being supplanted by it. But it’s not like that at all: suddenly I see it differently. No, there’s a group of hardened, fossilised men opposed by fresh young revolutionaries as John Butte once was, forming between them a whole, a balance. And then a group of fossilised hardened men like John Butte, opposed by a group of fresh and lively-minded and critical people. But the core of deadness, of dry thought, could not exist without lively shoots of fresh life, to be turned so fast, in their turn, into dead sapless wood. In other words, I, “Comrade Anna”—and the ironical tone of Comrade Butte’s voice now frightens me when I remember it—keep Comrade Butte in existence, feed him, and in due course will become him. And as I think this, that there is no right, no wrong, simply a process, a wheel turning, I become frightened, because everything in me cries out against such a view of life, and I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I’ve been locked in for years, whenever I’m off guard. The nightmare takes various forms, comes in sleep, or in wakefulness, and can be pictured most simply like this: There is a blindfolded man standing with his back to a brick wall. He has been tortured nearly to death. Opposite him are six men with their rifles raised ready to shoot, commanded by a seventh, who has his hand raised. When he drops his hand, the shots will ring out, and the prisoner will fall dead. But suddenly there is something unexpected—yet not altogether unexpected, for the seventh has been listening all this while in case it happens. There is an outburst of shouting and fighting in the street outside. The six men look in query at their officer, the seventh. The officer stands waiting to see how the fighting outside will resolve itself. There is a shout: “We have won!” At which the officer crosses the space to the wall, unties the bound man, and stands in his place. The man, hitherto bound, now binds the other. There is a moment, and this is the moment of horror in the nightmare, when they smile at each other: it is a brief, bitter, accepting smile. They are brothers in that smile. The smile holds a terrible truth that I want to evade. Because it cancels all creative emotion. The officer, the seventh, now stands blindfolded and waiting with his back to the wall. The former prisoner walks to the firing squad who are still standing with their weapons ready. He lifts his hand, then drops it. The shots ring out, and the body by the wall falls twitching. The six soldiers are shaken and sick; now they will go and drink to drown the memory of their murder. But the man who was bound, is now free, smiles as they stumble away, cursing and hating him, just as they would have cursed and hated the other, now dead. And in this man’s smile at the six innocent soldiers there is a terrible understanding irony. This is the nightmare. Meanwhile Comrade Butte sits waiting. As always he smiles his small, critical defensive smile, like a grimace. “Well, Comrade Anna, and are we going to be allowed to publish these two masterpieces?” Jack grimaces involuntarily; and I realise that he has just understood, like myself, that these two books are going to be published: the decision has already been made. Jack has read them both, and remarked with his characteristic mildness that: “they aren’t much but I suppose they could be worse.” I say: “If you are really interested in what I think, then you should publish one of them. Mind you, I don’t think either is much good.” “But naturally I don’t expect them to reach the heights of critical
acclaim your masterpiece did.” This does not mean he did not like Frontiers of War; he told Jack he liked it, he has never mentioned it to me. He is suggesting that it did so well because of what he would describe as “the capitalist publishing racket.” And of course I agree with him; except that the word capitalist can be supplanted by others, like communist, or woman’s magazine, for instance. His tone is merely part of the game play, the playing out of our roles. I am a “successful bourgeois writer”; he the custodian of the purity of working-class values. (Comrade Butte comes from an upper-middle-class English family, but this is of course irrelevant.) I suggest: “Perhaps we might discuss them separately?” I put two packets of manuscript on the desk and push one towards him. He nods. It is called: “For Peace and Happiness,” and is written by a young worker. At least, that is how he is described by Comrade Butte. In fact, he is nearly forty, has been a Communist Party official these twenty years, was once a bricklayer. The writing is bad, the story lifeless, but what is frightening about this book is that it is totally inside the current myth. If that useful imaginary man from Mars (or for that matter, a man from Russia) should read this book he would get the impression that (a) the cities of Britain were locked in deep poverty, unemployment, brutality, a Dickensian squalor; and that (b) the workers of Britain were all communist or at least recognised the Communist Party as their natural leader. This novel touches reality at no point at all. (Jack described it as: “communist cloud-cuckoo spit.”) It is, however, a very accurate recreation of the self-deceptive myths of the Communist Party at this particular time; and I have read it in about fifty different shapes or guises during the last year. I say: “You know quite well this is a very bad book.” A look of dry stubbornness comes over Comrade Butte’s long, bony face. I remember that novel he wrote himself, twenty years ago, which was so fresh and good and marvel that this can be the same man. He now remarks: “It’s no masterpiece, I didn’t say it was, but it’s a good book, I think.” This is the overture, so to speak, to what is expected to follow. I will challenge him, and he will argue. The end will be the same, because the decision has already been taken. The book will be published. People in the Party with any discrimination will be even more ashamed because of the steadily debasing values of the Party; the Daily Worker will praise it: “In spite of its faults, an honest novel of Party life”; the “bourgeois” critics who notice it will be contemptuous. Everything will be as usual, in fact. But suddenly I lose interest. I say: “Very well, you’ll publish it. There’s no more to be said.” There is a startled silence; and Comrade Jack and Butte even exchange glances. Comrade Butte lowers his eyes. He is annoyed. I realise that my role or function is to argue, to play the part of critic, so that Comrade Butte may have the illusion that he has fought his way through informed opposition. I am, in fact, his youthful self, sitting opposite him, which he has to defeat. I am ashamed I have never understood this very obvious fact before; and even think—perhaps those other books wouldn’t have been published if I had refused to play this role of captive critic? Jack says, mildly, after a time: “But Anna, this won’t do. You’re expected to make a criticism for the edification of Comrade Butte here.” I say: “You know it’s bad. Comrade Butte knows it’s bad…” Comrade Butte lifted his faded, crease-surrounded eyes to stare at me, “…and I know it’s bad. And we all know it will be published.” John Butte says: “Can you please tell me, Comrade Anna, in six words, or perhaps eight, if you can spare so much of your valuable time, why this is a bad book?” “As far as I can see the author has lifted his memories from the ’thirties intact and made them true of Britain 1954, and apart from that he appears to be under the impression that the great British working-class owe some kind of allegiance to the Communist Party.” His eyes flash with anger. He suddenly lifts a fist and crashes it on Jack’s desk. “Publish and be damned!” he shouts. “Publish and be damned! That’s what I say.” This is so bizarre, that I laugh. Then I see how much to be expected it was. At the laugh, and at Jack’s smile, John Butte seems to shrivel with anger; he goes behind barricade after barricade of himself into an inner fortress, staring out of it with steady angry eyes. “I seem to amuse you, Anna. Would you be kind enough to explain why?” I laugh and look at Jack, who nods at me: yes, explain. I look back at John Butte, think, and say: “What you’ve said sums up everything that is wrong with the Party. It’s a crystallisation of the intellectual rottenness of the Party that the cry of nineteenth-century humanism, courage against odds, truth against lies, should be used now to defend the publication of a lousy lying book by a communist firm which will risk nothing at all by publishing it, not even a reputation for integrity.” I am terribly angry. Then I remember that I work for this firm, and am in no position to criticise; and that Jack runs it, and will in fact have to publish this book. I am afraid I have hurt Jack, and look at him: he looks back, quietly, and then he nods, just once, and smiles. John Butte sees the nod and the smile. Jack turns to meet John’s anger. Butte is literally shrivelled with his anger. But it is a righteous anger, he is defending the good and the right and the true. Later, these two will discuss what has happened; Jack will agree with me; the book will be published. “And about the other book?” Butte asks. But I am bored and impatient. I am thinking, after all, this is the level on which the Party should be judged, the level on which it actually makes decisions, does things; not on the level of the conversations I have with Jack which do not affect the Party at all. Suddenly I decide I must leave the Party. It interests me that it should be this moment instead of another. “And so,” I say pleasantly, “both books will be published, and this has been a very interesting discussion.” “Yes, thank you, Comrade Anna, it has indeed,” says John Butte. Jack is watching me; I think that he knows I have made my decision. But these men now have other things to discuss which do not concern me, so I say good-bye to John Butte and go into my room next door. It is shared by Jack’s secretary, Rose. We dislike each other, and we greet each other coolly. I settle down to the piles of magazines and papers on my desk.
I read magazines and periodicals published in English in the communist countries: Russia, China, East Germany, etc. etc., and if there is a story or an article or a novel “suitable for British conditions,” I draw Jack’s, and therefore John Butte’s, attention to it. Very little is “suitable for British conditions”; an occasional article or a short story. Yet I read all this material avidly, as Jack does, and for the same reasons: we read between and behind lines, to spot trends and tendencies.
But—as I became aware recently—there is more to it than that. The reason for my fascinated absorption is something else. Most of this writing is flat, tame, optimistic, and on a curiously jolly note, even when dealing with war and suffering. It all comes out of the myth. But this bad, dead, banal writing is the other side of my coin. I am ashamed of the psychological impulse that created Frontiers of War. I have decided never to write again, if that is the emotion which must feed my writing.
During the last year, reading these stories, these novels, in which there might be an occasional paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, of truth, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguisable private emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling. And I read this dead stuff praying that just once there may be a short story, a novel, even an article, written wholly from genuine personal feeling.
And so this is the paradox: I, Anna, reject my own “unhealthy” art; but reject “healthy” art when I see it.
The point is that this writing is essentially impersonal. Its banality is that of impersonality. It is as if there were a new Twentieth Century Anon at work.
Since I have been in the Party, my “Party work” has consisted mostly of giving lectures on art to small groups. I say something like this: “Art during the Middle Ages was communal, unindividual; it came out of a group consciousness. It was without the driving painful individuality of the art o
f the bourgeois era. And one day, we will leave behind the driving egotism of individual art. We will return to an art which will express not man’s self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West…” to use the useful catchphrase “—becomes more and more a shriek of torment from souls recording pain. Pain is becoming our deepest reality…” I’ve been saying something like this. About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to stammer and couldn’t finish. I have not given any more lectures. I know what that stammer means.
The Golden Notebook Page 41