councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 05/04/08/02:16 |
| The Guardian (London)
April 10, 1993 Marx at My Table Saul Bellow learnt about communism from his Russian parents while still in a high-chair. He read Lenin, paid his last respects to Trotsky and hung out in Greenwich Village and post-war Paris. Here he reflects on those days and the end of the cold war. by Saul Bellow WHEN the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 I was two years old. My parents had emigrated from St Petersburg to Montreal in 1913, so events in Russia were on their minds, and at the dinner table the Tsar, the war, the front, Lenin, Trotsky were mentioned as often as parents, sisters and brothers in the old country. Among Jews it was scarcely conceivable that the great monarchy should have fallen. Sceptical older immigrants believed that the Bolshevik upstarts would soon be driven out. Their grown children, however, were keen to join the revolution and I can remember how my father argued in the street with Lyova, the son of our Hebrew teacher, who said he had already bought his schiffskarte. My father shouted that the new regime was worthless, but Lyova smiled - deferential but immovable. He went off to build a new order under Lenin and Trotsky. And he disappeared. Much later, after we had moved to Chicago and I was old enough to read Marx and Lenin, my father would say, "Don't you forget what happened to Lyova - and I haven't heard from my sisters in years. I don't want any part of your Russia and your Lenin." But in my eyes my parents were Russians with agreeable Russian traits. They had brought with them a steamer trunk filled with St Petersburg finery - brocaded vests, a top-hat, a tail-coat, linen ostrich feathers and button boots with high heels. Of no use in the dim Ultima Thule of Montreal or in proletarian Chicago, they were the playthings of the younger children. The older ones quickly and eagerly Americanised themselves in the US and the rest soon followed suit. The country took us over. We felt that to be here was a great piece of luck. The children of immigrants in my Chicago high school, however, believed that they were also somehow Russian, and while they studied their Macbeth and Milton's L'Allegro, they read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well and went on inevitably to Lenin's State And Revolution, and the pamphlets of Trotsky. The Tuley high school debating club discussed the Communist Manifesto and on the main stem of the neighbourhood, Division Street, the immigrant intelligensia lectured from soapboxes, while at "the forum", a church hall on California Avenue, debates between socialists, communists and anarchists attracted a fair number of people. This was the beginning of my radical education. For on the recommendation of friends I took up Marx and Engels, and remember, in my father's bleak office near the freight yards, blasting away at Value Price and Profit while the police raided a brothel across the street - for non-payment of protection, probably - throwing beds, bedding and chairs through the shattered windows. The Young Communist League tried to recruit me in the late 1930s. Too late - I had already read Trotsky's pamphlet on the German question and was convinced that Stalin's errors had brought Hitler to power. IN COLLEGE in 1933 I was a Trotskyist. Trotsky instilled into his young followers the orthodoxy peculiar to the defeated and ousted. We belonged to the Movement, we were faithful to Leninism, and could expound the historical lessons and describe Stalin's crimes. My closest friends and I were not, however, activists; we were writers. Owing to the Depression we had no career expectations. We got through the week on five or six bucks and if our rented rooms were small, the libraries were lofty, were beautiful. Through "revolutionary politics" we met the demand of the times for action. But what really mattered was the vital personal nourishment we took from Dostoevsky or Herman Melville, from Dreiser and John Dos Passos and Faulkner. By filling out a slip of paper at the Crerar on Randolph Street you could get all the bound volumes of The Dial and fill long afternoons with T. S. Eliot, Rilke and e. e. cummings. Toward the end of the 1930s the Partisan Review was our own Dial, with politics besides. There we had access to our significant European contemporaries - Silone, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, Andre Gide and Auden. Partisan's leading American contributors were Marxists - critics and philosophers like Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg. The Partisan Review intellectuals had sided with Trotsky quite naturally, during the Moscow trials. Hook had persuaded his teacher John Dewey to head a commission of inquiry in Mexico. We followed the proceedings bitterly, passionately, for we were, of course, the Outs; the Stalinists were the Ins. We alone in the US knew what a bad lot they were. FDR and his New Dealers didn't have a clue, they understood neither Russia nor communism. Although I now drifted away from Marxist politics, I still admired Lenin and Trotsky. After all, I had first heard of them in the high-chair while eating my mashed potatoes. How could I forget that Trotsky had created the Red Army, that he had read French novels at the Front while defeating Denikin? That great crowds had been swayed by his coruscating speeches? The glamour of the Revolution still cast its spell. Besides, the most respected literary and intellectual figures had themselves yielded. Returning from a visit to Russia, Edmund Wilson had spoken about "the moral light at the top of the world," and it was Wilson who had introduced us to Joyce and Proust. His history of revolutionary thought, To The Finland Station, was published in 1940. By that time Poland had been invaded and France had fallen. Nineteen-forty was also the year of Trotsky's assassination. I was in Mexico at the time, and an acquaintance of the Old Man, a European lady whom I had met in Taxco, arranged a meeting. Trotsky agreed to receive my friend Herbert Passin and me in Coyoacan. It was on the morning of our appointment that he was struck down, and when we reached Mexico City we were met by the headlines. When we went to his villa we must have been taken for foreign journalists, and we were directed to the hospital. The emergency room was in disorder. We had only to ask for Trotsky. A door into a small room was opened for us and there we saw him. He had just died. A cone of bloody bandages was on his head. His cheeks, his nose, his beard, his throat were streaked with blood and with dried trickles of iodine. He is reported to have said once that Stalin could kill him whenever he liked, and now we understood what a far-reaching power could do with us; how little it took to kill us, how slight a hold we, with our historical philosophies, our ideas, programmes, purposes, wills, had on the matter we were made of. It is perfectly true, as Charles Fairbanks has suggested, that totalitarianism in our century has shaped the very definition of what an intellectual is. The "vanguard fighters" who acted under Lenin's direction in October were intellectuals, and perhaps the glamour of this event had its greatest affect on intellectuals in the west. Among political activists this was sufficiently evident, but the Bolshevik model was immensely influential everywhere. Trotsky and T. E. Lawrence were perhaps the most outstanding of the intellectual activists to emerge from the first world war - the former as Lenin's principal executive, Lawrence as the delicate scholar and recluse, a Shakespearian Fortinbras materialising in the Arabian desert. Malraux was inspired by both men, obviously, an aesthete and theorist eager in his first phase for revolutionary action, and manifesting a curious relish for violence in a great cause. It was he who set an example for French writers of the 1940s. Sartre was certainly one of his descendants and many in France and elsewhere modelled themselves upon him, up to the time when he abjured revolution. There was a trace of this also in Arthur Koestler, who so often exposed himself to personal danger, but it was in France between the 1930s until the time of Regis Debray that leftist intellectuals presented themselves in the west as soldiers of the revolution. Some of these people were authentic originals and impressively intelligent (Harold Rosenberg for example). The more clear-headed of the Greenwich Village intellectuals toward the end of the 1930s were beginning to understand that the Revolution was a disaster. Few of them, however, turned away from Marxism. One way or another they clung to the texts that had made intellectuals of them. The Marxist fundamentals had organised their minds and given them an enduring advantage over unfocused rivals educated helter-skelter in American universities. What you invest your energy and enthusiasm in when you are young you can never bring yourself to give up altogether. I came to New York toward the end of the 1930s, muddled in the head but keen to educate myself and, toward the end of the 1940s I had become a contributor to the Partisan Review and a villager. All around us was commercial America. The Village was halfway between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. Its centre lay in Washington Square. From her apartment facing the benches and the elms Eleanor Roosevelt might have seen, had they been pointed out to her, some of the most eminent intellectuals in the country discussing French politics, American painting, Freud and Marx, Andre Gide and Jean Cocteau. Everyone was avid for high-minded, often wildly speculative talk. THERE was indeed much to understand: history, philosophy, science, the cold war, mass society, pop art, high art, psychoanalysis, existentialism, the Russian question, the Jewish question. Yet I quickly saw - or rather (because I don't see quickly) I intuited - that writers seldom were intellectuals. "A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos," Chekhov said, tongue in cheek I suspect. In a more serious vein he wrote that writers "should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics. Absence of lengthy verbiage, of a political-social-economic nature," was one of his rules, and he recommended also objectivity, brevity, the avoidance of stereotypes and compassion. (Ah, for the days before such words had fallen into disrepute.) In Europe writers accepted politics as their absolute. This, as I learned during my Paris years (1948-50), was the thing to do. Nineteen forty-eight was a peculiarly bleak and bitter year. Coal, gasoline, even bread were still being rationed. That Paris was the capital of world civilisation could no longer be taken for granted. French thinkers and writers struggled to maintain pre-eminence. Americans, recently cheered as liberators, were not warmly received, the Right being nearly as hard on them as the Left. The bitterness of defeat, occupation and liberation pervaded post-war Paris. An atmosphere of disgrace and resentment darkened the famous facades and made the Seine (at least to me) look and smell medicinal. This oppressiveness, I was later persuaded, was an early symptom of the cold war. For the time being the French lay helpless between the USSR and the US. The communist alternative, so far as I could judge, held an edge in public opinion, so that you couldn't have your hair cut without enduring torrents of Marxism from the barber. I had come to Paris, as Americans generally did, to be educated, and the general ignorance of the history of the Soviet Union in all quarters came as a great surprise. Reading Sartre I said to myself Chicago-style, "this has got to be a con." A con on my turf was a shade more venial than a lie. I preferred to believe that Sartre's curious behaviour was deliberate. Machiavellian. His hatred of the bourgeoisie was so excessive that it caused him to go easy on the crimes of Stalin. On the intellectual Dow-Jones - if there had been such a thing - his credentials, before I began to read him, would have been comparable to preferred stock. But the facts were readily available, and that he should know so little about them was a great disappointment. He spoke in Marxist style of an oppressive bourgeois ideology, and while he admitted his bourgeois origins, his aim was to create a revolutionary public. Himself an heir of the 18th century philosophers, he would speak to the proletariat as his literary ancestors had spoken to the bourgeoisie, bringing political self-awareness to those who were to be the revolutionaries of today. He asserted that the working man seeking liberation would liberate all of us as well, and for all times. The French Communist Party was an obstacle standing between Sartre and the working class. As for existentialism, he readily conceded that it was a phenomenon produced by the decomposition of the bourgeois carcass. The only public at present available to him came, disgustingly, from the intelligent sector of the rotting bourgeoisie (victims no doubt, but tyrants also). "Were the author an Englishman we should here know that our leg was being pulled," wrote Wyndham Lewis in The Writer And The Absolute, "but Sartre does not smile . . . he is at his wits' end what to do." LEWIS seems wryly sympathetic. And he does here and there agree with Sartre and quotes him approvingly when he declares that we are living in the age of the hoax. "National Socialism, Gaullism, Catholicism, French communism are hoaxes - consciousness is deluded and we can only safeguard literature by disillusioning or enlightening our public . . . Sartre believes all that the communists believe," Lewis concludes, "but he does not wish to convert this collage into a marriage." He says that Sartre was a fellow traveller in the front populaire. "He engaged in a path in those days which leads either to communism or to nothing. It was the neant that he chose." My own guess in 1949 - when I was immature: not young, only, as I now see, underdeveloped - was that French intellectuals were preparing themselves, perhaps positioning themselves for a Russian victory. Their Marxism also reflected the repugnance they felt for the other superpower. There were comparable anti-American sentiments in England. Graham Greene, like many writers (and civil servants) of his generation, abominated the US and its politics. Successive English governments agreed on the whole with the American line, but Greene found ways to transfer part of the odium at least from London to Washington. On our side of the Atlantic he had a big following. Educated Americans, establishment haters, dearly loved to see our society and its official policies loused up. "The main enemy is at home," was Lenin's wartime slogan. Of all his ideas it may well be the most durable. When I revert to those times I can take no pleasure in having spotted the errors of Sartre et al. I am disheartened rather by the failure of all these aspirations for justice and progress. I can understand that as crisis succeeded crisis no one wanted to surrender to passivity. It is sad to watch so much ingenuity invested in leaky theories. Behind the Iron Curtain, experiencing totalitarianism, directly, people had a clearer orientation. In the west there was a certain opinion-consumerism. One asked oneself, what shall I think of that? Sidney Hook in his autobiography scorns the Partisan Review intellectuals, the respectable Left. His description of them makes them look like small business types, importers of foreign specialities in a highbrow artistic mall. Mere talkers, Hook thought, they had no taste for real politics. Moreover, they believed that the second world war was an imperialist war exactly like the first. Since they were not the kind of Leninists who aimed to lead a putsch in Washington, their analyses of England and Germany did bring to mind the theologians of Lilliput. A stalwart "cold warrior", Hook's account of their confused Marxism is, four decades later, still edged with bitterness. But the fact that we can do nothing does not preclude wanting to be right, and everyone was then intent on the one true position. "I had to turn my heavy guns on Dwight Macdonald and the others," Hook told me later. But no one has ever examined the connection between helplessness and holding the right views. Following contemporary events is in a way like reading history. To read history is essential, but what in actuality can we do about it? The novelist Stanley Elkin in an essay called The First Amendment As An Art Form asks, "Who in old times ever held anything so uncalled for as an opinion? . . . History, history really was, still is, the agenda of activitists. The rest of us, you, me, the rest of us are mere fans of a world view and use the news like theatre - episodes, chapters in some Sabbath soul serial." He goes on to say that if we don't have the gift for effecting change we have "the solace of criticism." Granted, activists like Hook made a difference. Their contribution to victory in the cold war can't be measured but must be acknowledged. It was Hook, taking Hook as representative of any number of thinkers and activists - Hook, not Sartre, whose views prevailed, and should have prevailed. And what Elkin does is to report accurately on the state of opinion in a democracy like ours. What we need to consider is the combining of theorising with effectiveness. I give Hook full marks for the wars he fought and admire him despite his evident lack of sympathy with my way of looking at things. He was the active, not the contemplative sort, not so much a philosopher as an ex-philosopher. On one of the last evenings I spent with him he told me that philosophy was no more. I asked what the PhDs he had educated were doing with themselves. They were working in hospitals as ethicists, he said. That didn't make him unhappy either. I don't think that the end of the cold war signifies that theorising is bankrupt. To obtain a clear picture of the modern project, to give the best possible account of the crisis of the west is still a necessity. POLITICS as a vocation I take seriously. But it's not my vocation. And on the whole writers are not much good at it. The positions they take are generally set for them by intellectuals. Or by themselves, insofar as they are intellectuals (eg. the case of Sartre). Those anti-communist intellectuals and publicists with whom I have agreed on issues of the cold war, though they tend to be high-toned and swollen with cultural pride and suffisance, are often philistine in their tastes. Their opposite numbers on the Left are, in this respect, a mess entirely. These are the basics, the first principles of modernity, of the Enlightenment conviction that this is what would be best for most of us. The objectives of Lenin's revolution never materialised in Russia but they are all about us here in bourgeois America, says the philosopher Kojeve. But in the process everything worth living for has melted away. My case against the intellectuals can be easily summarised: science has postulated a nature with no soul in it; commerce does not deal in souls and higher aspirations - matters like love and beauty are none of the business; for his part, Marx too assigned art etcetera to the "superstructure". So, artists are "stuck" with what is left of the soul and its mysteries. Romantic enthusiasm (resistance to bourgeois existence) was largely discredited by the end of the 19th century. The 20th inverted Romanticism by substituting hate for love and nihilism for self-realisation. Intellectuals seem to me to have turned away from those elements in life unaccounted for in modern science and which in modern experience have come to seem devoid of substance. The powers of soul which were Shakespeare's subject (to be simple about it) and are heard incessantly in Handel or Mozart have no footing at present in modern life and are held to be subjective. Writers here and there still stake their lives on the existence of these forces. About this, intellectuals have little or nothing to say. Here I have no choice but to go overboard. Russia's oriental despotism comes from the past, and the sympathies generated by those who fought for their lives against it have little to do, I suspect, with this present world of ours. Our American world is a prodigy. Here, some of the perennial dreams of mankind have been realised. We have shown that the final conquest of scarcity may be at hand. Provision is made for human needs of every sort. In the US - in the west - we live in a society which produces a fairy-tale superabundance of material things. Ancient fantasies have been made real. We can instantaneously see and hear what is far away. Our rockets are able to leave the earth. The flights we make are thoughts as well as real journeys. This is something new, this can make us tremble for the humanity we miss in everything we see in the incredible upwelling of inventions and commodities that carries us with it. We can't say whether this humanity has been temporarily diminished or has gone for good. Nor can we tell whether we are pioneers or experimental subjects. Russia is perhaps done with tyranny and privation. If it develops a free market and becomes a union of commercial republics, it will have to do as we have been doing all along. Kojeve hints that we are irreversibly trivialised by our unexampled and bizarre achievements, so that neither life nor death can now be grasped. He seems to accept Nietzsche's appalling vision of the degenerate "Last Man". I myself believe that everything that can be imagined is bound to be realised at least once - everything that mankind is capable of conceiving it seems compelled to do. These, for better or for worse, are the thoughts the end of the cold war suggests to me. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho