Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Mais que me sert de m’être tant voué

  Au monument de Thrace et de Samos

  Y murmurant maints magiciens mots?

  Our generation cannot give any clearly reassuring answer. Those of us who still retain at least some interest in the question may be grateful that a writer who, like Sartre, hails from the literary Age of Faith has not really been able to rid himself fully of his illusions. He goes on writing: the Holy Ghost is still in his cellar.

  * The Words.

  COMMUNISTS AND COMMUNISANTS

  It has been a fashion for some years for writers, in England and especially in America, to treat of the appeal of communism to intellectuals as belonging somewhere on the fringes between religion and psychopathology. This is a region to which—curiously —the best guides are supposed to be the ex-Communists: those who, having lost their faith, are thereby deemed to have recovered their reason.

  Mr. Caute, to whom great praise is due, will have nothing to do with hocus-pocus of this or any other kind. In this richly documented and lucid book* he writes, about those French intellectuals who are his subject, in a manner refreshingly free from condescension and from sentimentality. He shows us what reasons—not merely “inner compulsions”—drew them to the party, at given times, and what reasons repelled them at other times. He has no need of the hypothesis whereby the communisant is either madder or more ignoble than the rest of us. True, the communisant intellectual swallows quite a lot, but other intellectuals —the capitalisants, shall we say—have swallowed quite a lot too, as Mr. Caute effectively reminds us:

  The French intellectual, in accepting broadly the Third or Fourth Republic, has had to do so despite Versailles, the domestic policy of the Bloc National, Morocco, Syria, Indo-China, the regime of Chiappe, unemployment, parliamentary corruption, the abandonment of Republican Spain, Munich, McCarthyism, Suez, Algeria. The intellectual may have opposed all these things and he may have openly criticized them. But when weighing up his final allegiance between the Communist party and those parties which defend the status quo (in its most general sense), when deciding whether or not to approve France’s commitment to a power bloc, to the western alliance, to one of the two great opposing systems, he will, if he finally opts for the western system, have to do so despite its defects. This is an elementary point but one often ignored.

  Mr. Caute might well, I think, have illustrated this by reference to the Sartre-Camus controversy. Sartre, with his tendency to toe the party line, whenever it is at all toeable, is often contrasted unfavourably with Camus, seen as a writer of unblemished integrity. This contrast seemed to hold when, in 1948, Camus wrote that Soviet forced-labour camps were no more acceptable than Nazi ones, while Sartre maintained, for over a year, a teleologically suspended silence on this delicate subject. But when it came to something much nearer home—the Algerian War—it was Sartre who spoke out, while Camus’s silence on that subject was broken only by humanitarian utterances of an apolitical character. Moral indignation, and plain political condemnation, he reserved for Soviet imperialism in Hungary. On the whole, if a contrast in integrity has to be made, Sartre comes out of it better than Camus. Sartre after all did eventually (January 1950) recognize and condemn the existence of the Soviet camps. A writer’s integrity, in political matters, does not necessarily vary directly with the square of his distance from the Communist party.

  Mr. Caute’s refusal to indulge in anti-communist cant does not mean that he accepts or ignores communist cant. On the contrary the nature of his subject obliges him to provide a veritable anthology of prose and verse in this kind, oscillating between the sinister and the farcical:

  Aragon (1937) on the Moscow trials: “How silent are the scandalous advocates of Trotsky and his accomplices! They knew very well that to claim innocence for these men is to adopt the Hitlerian thesis on all points. By doubting this point or that point they imply at the same time … that it was not Hitler who burned the Reichstag … in fact they are the advocates of Hitler and the Gestapo.”

  Wurmser (1949) on the Rajk and Kostov trials: “… if Dreyfus had confessed there would have been no Dreyfus affair” (“which,” as Mr. Caute says, “could scarcely be denied”).

  Aragon (1953) on Thorez’s return from Russia:

  Il revient Je redis ces deux mots-là sans cesse

  Tout se colore d’eux après ces deux années

  Il revient il revient il vient il va venir …

  André Stil (1949) on a favourite theme: “It is true, they think, it is well known that everyone has a little of Stalin at the bottom of him, which watches us from inside, smiling and serious, giving confidence. It is our consciences as communists, this internal presence of Stalin.”

  The people who wrote this sort of thing belonged to the inner circle of party intellectuals determined—in the words of their most gifted and most brazen member, Louis Aragon—“to write the Stalinist truth.” The trouble was that the more Stalinist truth they turned out the more they repelled the very people whom it was their business to attract: that considerable number of French intellectuals who were and are generally sympathetic to the Communist party (as the party of the French working class) but are seldom prepared to push sympathy to the point of real or feigned intellectual abdication. Among certain “principles of utility” (of intellectuals to the party) distinguished by Mr. Caute, two are perpetually in conflict. These are the second principle and the fourth. The second principle is as follows: “professional excellence, if possible within the framework of a Marxist-communist philosophy, with the primary object of influencing politically other intellectuals and the educated community in general.”

  The fourth principle is shorter: “political journalism.”

  Mr. Caute shows us the two principles in conflict in many fields and during many phases of the party’s life. One good example is the Lysenko controversy in which party scientists generally either criticized Lysenko or kept silent, while the non-scientists denounced Lysenko, one of them proclaiming that, for a Communist, “Stalin is the highest scientific authority in the world.” Mr. Caute comments: “By shouting in chorus that a new theory about which they knew little or nothing was correct (a) because it would be useful if it were correct and (b) because Stalin said it was, the intellectuals could only devalue their own currency and help to make of their party an object of deep suspicion and even contempt.”

  Yet Mr. Caute’s narrative also illustrates the vitality of the party and its sustained ability to acquire, from each new intellectual generation, at least some of the support lost in the last one. R. H. S. Crossman’s assertion that “the Communist machine has winnowed out the grain and retained only the chaff of Western culture” is, as Mr. Caute shows, “no more than a half-truth.” It is safe to predict that as long as the French Communist party remains the principal working-class party it will continue to attract the sympathy of many French intellectuals, people whose teeth are set on edge by the lies and platitudes of so many Communist leaders and spokesmen, but who are determined not to be driven by these distressing phenomena into an anti-communist, and ultimately anti-working class, position. A man like Sartre, whom Communist leaders have accused at different times of being in the pay of the Nazis and of Wall Street, has retaliated as little as possible, reserving most of his ammunition for use against the richer and more plausible mendacities of the Free World.

  From about 1924 to about 1956 there was, as Mr. Caute points out, between the intellectuals and the workers, “the Stalinist filter.” It was “no more possible for the intellectual to remain true to his vocation as a Communist with a capital ‘C’ than it was for him to desert the ideal of communism with a small ‘c.’ Here,” Mr. Caute concludes, “was the dilemma.”

  The Twentieth Party Congress of the C.P.S.U. in 1956 threw down the Russian image of Stalin, but does not seem to have entirely removed “the Stalinist filter” from the French party. Yet the type of the Stalinist intellectual hatchet-man—sycophant, bully and hack—has inevitably los
t authority and, to some extent, voice. All Mr. Caute’s more Byzantine quotations come from before 1956: most of them are no later than 1953. In present circumstances no foreign Communist party—neither that of Khrushchev nor that of Mao—is in a position to dictate to the French Communist party. Is it possible that that party will shake off the vestiges of Stalinism, and come to speak with a distinctively French accent, thereby solving the particular dilemma on which Mr. Caute ends the present volume?

  The answer can only come in a successor volume: The French Communist Party, 1960–2000. Mr. Caute is still young enough for it to be within the bounds of possibility that he should write that book.

  * Communism and French Intellectuals.

  IV

  IRELAND

  1891–1916

  In the summary historical retrospect which we all acquire at school and probably never quite lose, this period, 1891 to 1916, forms, I think, a sort of crease in time, a featureless valley between the commanding chain of the Rising and the solitary enigmatic peak of Parnell. It was a time in which nothing happened; nothing except (as we find when we look into it) a revolution in land ownership, the beginning of a national quest for a lost language and culture, and the preparation of the two successful rebellions which were, among other things, to tear Ireland in two. Yet despite these momentous events it is not only to us with our memories of school history that the period seems empty: it seemed so to many contemporaries. For James Joyce, as we know, the seething Dublin of 1904 was “the centre of paralysis,” a place in which the maudlin mumbled helplessly about “poor oul’ Parnell.” From its own very different point of view the Ascendancy saw things in a rather similar light: the native Irish and especially the Babus were squabbling interminably among themselves, showing their unfitness for self-government. If England held firm by Lord Salisbury’s doctrine of resolute government—as she did in effect until almost the end of the period—then the essentials of the Cromwellian settlement could be preserved. Jam redit et Virgo, as the Public Orator reminded Arthur Balfour, redeunt Saturnia regna: it was a golden age, a return to order after the hideous Time of Troubles of the Land League, the Gladstonian convulsion and the Plan of Campaign. It was easy—as in the stories, though not in the novels, of Somerville and Ross—to see Irish affairs as comic and therefore essentially static. Indeed one could argue that the most characteristically Irish thing about the old landlord class was its inability to take Irish affairs wholly seriously: just as the caricatures of Somerville and Ross resemble the brilliant frozen social scenes of Ulysses through their intimations of a world both futile and changeless. Somerville and Joyce—if we may sketch the possibility of such a collaboration—saw through the Gaelic League, the G.A.A., the world of the Citizen and the new crooked County Councillors, but they did not see through them to anything in particular or at least not to anything Irish or anything moving and growing. They could have taken to themselves the majestic words of the English statesman of the day: I was never present while a revolution was going on. In a sense indeed, most of the population was absent while the Revolution was going on. What, for example, did the Gaelic League mean to the working people of Dublin? The eventual alliance of Connolly and Pearse implies that it meant something, but just what that potential something was might have been difficult to discover in the Dublin of the early 1900s. And as for the middle class as a whole, there is some reason to believe that on Easter Monday, 1916, the main focus of its interest was not the G.P.O. but Fairyhouse Racecourse.

  If I have stressed the fact that to many contemporaries nothing very important seemed to be going on in Ireland between 1891 and say—for this purpose—1910 or thereabouts, I have done so precisely because many important things were going on, and because these important things cannot be understood unless we feel also something of the weight of indifference against which they were working. The backward glance has a tendency to isolate precursors, in the sense of bold and originating historic figures. It is well to remember that the ordinary men and women of a given time are precursors also—precursors of the ordinary men and women of today. We are heirs not only of the traditions of 1916 but also of other traditions and of that more continuous indifference which flows round all traditions. Those of us who were born since 1916 have almost always been taught to think of ourselves as belonging to the revolutionary tradition; this is commonly the case in the aftermath of successful revolutions. It can do us no harm to remember that what we might call the “Fairyhouse Tradition” is not less persistent, although it does not cut such a figure in the history books. With this at the back of our minds, let us turn our attention to the elements of excitement, change and activity that were at work in the period: the elements that we are accustomed to regard as, in a special sense, historic forces. As soon as we turn in this direction we see, of course, that there was an unusual amount of mental activity, an unusual degree of intensity and self-dedication in the minds, certainly not of the people as a whole, but of quite sizeable groups of people.

  This excitement and dedicated mood had perhaps something to do with the romantic loyalty which the figure of Parnell, and especially his fall, had evoked in many. In the case of the literary revival, Yeats tells us so specifically. We know that Griffith was a Parnellite and that the Revolutionary movement, rather paradoxically, had Parnell among its heroes. The generation that was young in Ireland when Parnell fought his last tragic campaign, or even when the echoes of that campaign still filled the air, had a peculiar mark upon it: a mark that in many took the form of rebellion and rejection—or that of a cult of the hero and of heroism. We ought not to exaggerate the importance of the cult of the Lost Leader but we should be aware of its presence and of its power to take unexpected forms.

  Some of the movements which were now emerging into importance had their beginnings in the Parnellite period itself. One of these, and not the least notable, was the G.A.A., some of whose members, armed with their hurley sticks, formed Parnell’s bodyguard in the last tumultuous meetings. In the nineties and early 1900s the G.A.A. built on the ground cleared by the Land League: that is to say that it organized with faith and enthusiasm the replacement, among the young in many parts of the country, of what had been a servile spirit by a spirit of manliness and freedom. It was a new monument and one not erected by a grateful tenantry. More than the Gaelic League, more than Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein, more even than the Transport and General Workers’ Union and of course far more than the movement which created the Abbey Theatre; more than any of these the Gaelic Athletic movement aroused the interest of large numbers of ordinary people throughout Ireland. One of the most successful and original mass movements of its day, its importance has perhaps not even yet been fully recognized. Not that it has not received its full share of conventional praise; that, many friends ensure. But the tribute which it has not received is the more serious one of sustained critical attention; in this context it is perhaps necessary to say that what I mean by “critical” is not hostile but intelligent and, as far as possible, disinterested and dispassionate. I do not know that it has been remarked that the G.A.A., in effect, carried into what might very broadly be called the cultural field the great principle which had brought the Land League victory in the agrarian struggle: the principle of the boycott. It organized the boycott of policemen, soldiers and those who watched or played what the G.A.A. proudly called “Foreign Games.” In practice (though certainly not in theory) this last ban meant the exclusion of almost all Protestants, much of the Catholic middle class and (as it worked out) the urban working class. In view of the importance which the G.A.A. came to assume in the life of the countryside these exclusions were of considerable social and even political importance. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the merits of that famous ban. It is enough to say that if the G.A.A. did a great deal to bring about the freedom of a part of Ireland, its contribution towards the achievement of Irish unity is much more questionable. But then, one of the significant facts about the period we are cons
idering is that while many Irishmen were passionately concerned about freedom, few gave any thought at all to unity—except of course as a technical term meaning party discipline. One is reluctant to invoke the hypothetical reactions of the great dead, yet perhaps may be forgiven for doing so in this instance: Thomas Davis, who was concerned for unity as well as for freedom, might well have felt that here, in the seemingly not very important episode of the G.A.A. Ban, nationalist Ireland first departed from the spirit though not from the letter of his teaching.

  There were however other movements of the national spirit around the turn of the century which were more clearly marked by the teaching of Davis. The Gaelic League, under the leadership of Douglas Hyde, relied not on an authoritarian structure of bans and exclusions, but on the love of the Irish language and its literature. It succeeded, probably to a greater degree than any other Irish movement in modern times, in crossing that invisible entanglement of religious and social barriers which later was to take material and geographical form with the partition of our country. The Gaelic League in those days seemed to offer a voyage of discovery which was at the same time an escape from a vicious circle of provincial factions. The hope which it held out was so bright that to this day some thoughtful men, trained in that school and imbued with the principles of Davis, believe that the best way to unite Ireland lies through the revival of the Irish language. Even those of us who believe that the view so stated is illusory must recognize, I think, that it contains this important element of truth: such a generosity of spirit as prevailed to a remarkable extent in the early days of the League is the one essential element in any real movement towards Irish unity.