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THE GOD THAT FAILED THE GOD THAT FAILED by ARTHUR KOESTLER IGNAZIO SILONE RICHARD WRIGHT ANDRE GIDE LOUIS FISCHER STEPHEN SPENDER RICHARD CROSSMAN, Editor HARPER COLOPHON BOOKS HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS NEW YORK This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the publisher's consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. THE COD THAT FAILED. Copyright 1949 by Richard Crossman. Copyright 1944 by Richard Wright. Copyright 1949 by Louis Fischer. Copyright 1949 by Ignazio Silone. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Pub lishers,Incorporated,49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N. Y. ..,. First HARPER COLOPHON Edition published 1963 by Harper & Row, Pub lishers, Incorporated, New York. CONTENTS RICHARD Introduction - CROSSMAN, M.P. 1 Part I The Initiates: ARTHUR KOESTLER 15 IGNAZIO SILONE 76 RICHARD WRIGHT 115 Part II Worshipers from Afar: ANDR E GIDE 165 presented by Dr. Enid Starkie LOUIS FISCHER 196 STEPHEN SPENDER 229 v THE GOD THAT FAILED INTRODUCTION Richard Crossman, M.P. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Richard Crossman was born on Decem ber 15, 1907. The son of a barrister, later Mr. Justice Crossman, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took first-class honors in classics and philos ophy. He remained at Oxford as a Fellow of New College for eight years, teaching Plato and political theory, and simul taneously began his political career as a Socialist on the Oxford City Council. In 1937 he became the Labour candidate for Coventrtj, which he won in the 1945 election. In 1938 he became Assistant Editor of the New Statesman and Nation, a position he still holds. During the war he served first in the Foreign Office and then on General Eisenhower's Staff, as an expert on Germany in charge of enemy propaganda. In 1946 he served on the Anglo-American Commission on Palestine, and as a result became the leading English opponent of Mr. Bevin's Palestine policy. He was a member of the Malta Roundtable Conference in 1955 and since 1952 has been a member of the Labour Party Executive. Bibliography: Plato Today, Government and the Governed, Palestine Mission, The Charm of Politics, Nation Reborn. This book was conceived in the heat of argument. I was staying with Arthur Koestler in North Wales, and one eve ning we had reached an unusually barren deadlock in the 1 2 Introduction political discussion of which our friendship seems to consist. "Either you can't or you won't understand," said Koestler. "It's the same with all you comfortable, insular, Anglo-Saxon anti-Communists. You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies-but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about." And with that the talk veered to why so-and-so had ever become a Communist, and why he had or had not left the Party. When the argument began to boil up again, I said, 'Wait. Tell me exactly what happened when you joined the Party-not what you feel about it now, but what you felt then." So Koestler began the strange story of his meeting with Herr Schneller in the Schneidemiihl paper-mill; and suddenly I interrupted, "This should be a book," and we began to discuss names of ex Communists capable of telling the truth about themselves. At first our choice ranged far and wide, but before the night was out we decided to limit the list to half a dozen writers and journalists. We were not in the least interested either in swelling the Hood of anti-Communist propaganda or in pro viding an opportunity for personal apologetics. Our concern was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period-from 1917 to 1939-when con version was so common. For this purpose it was essential that each contributor should be able not to relive the past-that is impossible-but, by an act of imaginative self-analysis, to recreate it, despite the foreknowledge of the present. As I well know, autobiography of this sort is almost impossible for the practical politician: his self-respect distorts the past in terms of the present. So-called scientillc analysis is equally mislead ing; dissecting the personality into a set of psychological and sociological causes, it explains away the emotions, which we wanted described. The objectivity we sought was the power to recollect-if not in tranquillity, at least in "dispassion" and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer. It so happens that, in the years between the October Revo- Introduction 3 lution and the Stalin-Hitler Pact, numberless men of letters, both in Europe and America, were attracted to Communism. They were not "typical" converts. Indeed, being people of quite unusual sensitivity, they made most abnormal Com munists, just as the literary Catholic is a most abnormal Catho lic. They had a heightened perception of the spirit of the age, and felt more acutely than others both its frustrations and its hopes. Their conversion therefore expressed, in an acute and sometimes in a hysterical form, feelings which were dimly shared by the inarticulate millions who felt that Russia was on the side of the workers. The intellectual in politics is always "unbalanced," in the estimation of his colleagues. He peers round the next comer while they keep their eyes on the road, and he risks his faith On unrealized ideas, instead of con fining it prudently to humdrum loyalties. He is "in advance," and, in this sense, an extremist. If history justifies his premoni tions, well and good. But if, on the contrary, history takes the other turning, he must either march forward into the dead end, or ignominiously tum back, repudiating ideas which have become part of his personality. In this book, six intellectuals describe the journey into Com munism, and the return. They saw it at first from a long way oH-just as their predecessors 130 years ago saw the French Revolution-as a vision of the Kingdom of God on earth; and, like Wordsworth and Shelley, they dedicated their talents to working humbly for its coming. They were not disco�raged by the rebuHs of the professional revolutionaries, or by the jeers of their opponents, until each discovered the gap between his own vision of God and the reality of the Communist State -and the conflict of conscience reached breaking point. A very few men can claim to have seen round this particular comer in history correctly. Bertrand Russell has been able to republish his Bolshevism: Practice and Theory, written in 1920, without altering a single comma; but most of those, who are now so wise and contemptuous after the event, were either blind, as Edmund Burke in his day was blind, to the meaning 4 Introduction of the Russian Revolution, or have merely oscillated with the pendulum-reviling, praising, and then reviling again, accord ing to the dictates of public policy. These six pieces of auto biography should at least reveal the dangers of this facile anti-Communism of expediency. That Communism, as a way of life, should, even for a few years, have captured the pro foundly Christian personality of Silone and attracted individu alists such as Gide and Koestler, reveals a dreadful deficiency in European democracy. That Richard Wright, as a struggling Negro writer in Chicago, moved almost as a matter of course into the Communist Party, is in itself an indictment of the American way of life. Louis Fischer, on the other hand, repre sents that distinguished group of British and American foreign correspondents who put their faith in Russia, not so much through respect for Communism, as through disillusionment with Western democracy and-much later-a nausea of ap peasement. Stephen Spender, the English poet, was driven by much the same impulses. The Spanish Civil War seemed to him, as it did to nearly all his contemporaries, the touchstone of world politics. It was the cause of his brief sojourn in the Party and also, at a later stage, of his repudiation of it. The only link, indeed, between these six very different personalities is that all of them-after tortured struggles of conscience-chose Communism because they had lost faith in democracy and were willing to sacrifice "bourgeois liberties" in order to defeat Fascism. Their conversion, in fact, was rooted in despair-a despair of Western values. It is easy enough in retrospect to see that this despair was hysterical. Fascism, after all, was overcome, without the surrender of civil liberties which Communism involves. But how could Silone foresee this in the 1920's, when the Democracies were courting Mussolini and only the Communists in Italy were organizing a serious Re sistance Movement? Were Gide and Koestler so obviously wrong, at the time when they became Communists, in feeling that German and French democracy were corrupt and would surrender to Fascism? Part of the value of this book is that it jogs our memories so uncomfortably; and reminds us of the Introduction 5 terrible loneliness experienced by the "prema�e anti-Fas cists," the men and women who understood Fascism and tried to fight it before it was respectable to do so.