No More Learning

This period in
America produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture of a
Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains, would be much dimmer
than it is. But most people who have studied his work have come away with a feeling that
he might have done something more. He gives all the while a strange impression of being
about to say something and then funking it, so that LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the
rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and much more coherent book.
Significantly, he starts his autobiography by remarking that a man’s inner life is
indescribable. We do not know what he would have said — it is just possible that the
unprocurable pamphlet, 1601 , would supply a clue but we may guess that it would have
wrecked his reputation and reduced his income to reasonable proportions.


POETRY AND THE MICROPHONE (1943)

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary
programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by
contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot, Herbert Read,
Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund
Blunden, D. H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the
people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote out-
flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to explain here, but I
should add that the fact that we were broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our
technique to some extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed
at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by
anything that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we



could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an
excuse to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air.

If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but don’t share your
cultural background, a certain amount of comment and explanation is unavoidable, and
the formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary
magazine. The editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what to
put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else suggested
another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem itself, read in a different
voice, preferably the author’s own. This poem naturally called up another, and so the
programme continued, usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two
items. For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A
programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could be given a
certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a single central theme. For
example, one number of our imaginary magazine was devoted to the subject of war. It
included two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s “September 1941 “, extracts from a
long poem by G. S. Fraser (“A Letter to Anne Ridler”), Byron’s “Isles of Greece” and an
extract from T. E. Lawrence’s REVOLT IN THE DESERT. These half-dozen items, with
the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well the possible
attitudes towards war. The poems and the prose extract took about twenty minutes to
broadcast, the arguments about eight minutes.

This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather patronising, but its advantage
is that the element of mere instruction, the textbook motif, which is quite unavoidable if
one is going to broadcast serious and sometimes “difficult” verse, becomes a lot less
forbidding when it appears as an informal discussion. The various speakers can
ostensibly say to one another what they are in reality saying to the audience. Also, by
such an approach you at least give a poem a context, which is just what poetry lacks from
the average man’s point of view. But of course there are other methods. One which we
frequently used was to set a poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes’ time
such and such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a minute, then
fades out into the poem, which follows without any title or announcement, then the music
is faded again and plays up for another minute or two — the whole thing taking perhaps
five minutes. It is necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless to say, the real



purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from the rest of the programme. By this
method you can have, say, a Shakespeare sonnet within three minutes of a news bulletin
without, at any rate to my ear, any gross incongruity.

These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great value in themselves, but
I have mentioned them because of the ideas they aroused in myself and some others
about the possibilities of the radio as a means of popularising poetry. I was early struck
by the fact that the broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it does not merely
produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but also on the poet himself. One must
remember that extremely little in the way of broadcasting poetry has been done in
England, and that many people who write verse have never even considered the idea of
reading it aloud. By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all
regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise
attainable in our time and country. It is a commonplace that in modem times — the last
two hundred years, say — poetry has come to have less and less connection either with
music or with the spoken word. It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no more
expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is expected
that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling. Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have
almost ceased to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the common
man has come to be taken for granted in any country where everyone can read. And
where such a breach exists it is always inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry
as primarily something printed, and something intelligible only to a minority, encourages
obscurity and “cleverness”. How many people do not feel quasi-instinctively that there
must be something wrong with any poem whose meaning can be taken in at a single
glance? It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be checked unless it again becomes
nonnal to read verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how this can be brought about except
by using the radio as a medium. But the special advantage of the radio, its power to select
the right audience, and to do away with stage-fright and embarrassment, ought here to be
noticed.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of ONE. Millions may
be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or
ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is
reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone



who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably
sympathetic, the audience HAS NO POWER OVER YOU. It is just here that a broadcast
differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking
knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always
obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in
practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the
stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known
as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid
embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will
always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who
can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same
difficulty — the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one — that makes it impossible
to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do
not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something,
and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with
a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The
element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the
only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse
aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man:
also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By
that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already
exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

However, what is happening at the other end cannot be disregarded. It will be seen that I
have been speaking as though the whole subject of poetry were embarrassing, almost
indecent, as though popularising poetry were essentially a strategic manoeuvre, like
getting a dose of medicine down a child’s throat or establishing tolerance for a persecuted
sect. But unfortunately that or something like it is the case. There can be no doubt that in
our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in
which the average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly
exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word “poetry”
would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed out, a breach of
this kind tends to widen simply because of its existence, the common man becoming
more and more anti-poetry, the poet more and more arrogant and unintelligible, until the



divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature,
although in fact it belongs only to our own time and to a comparatively small area of the
earth. We live in an age in which the average human being in the highly civilised
countries is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of affairs is generally
looked upon as being incurable by any CONSCIOUS act, and on the other hand is
expected to right itself of its own accord as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With
slight variations the Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell you this,
and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness amid which we live has spiritual
and economic causes and is not to be explained by the mere going-astray of tradition at
some point or other. But it does not follow that no improvement is possible within our
present framework, nor that an aesthetic improvement is not a necessary part of the
general redemption of society. It is worth stopping to wonder, therefore, whether it would
not be possible even now to rescue poetry from its special position as the most hated of
the arts and win for it at least the same degree of toleration as exists for music. But one
has to start by asking, in what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could be. But on second
thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an
appreciable amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally known and
quoted and forms part of the background of everyone’s mind. There is also a handful of
ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the
popularity, or at least the toleration, of “good bad” poetry, generally of a patriotic or
sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if it were not that “good bad” poetry
has all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It
is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual language — all this to a very
marked degree, for it is almost axiomatic that bad poetry is more “poetical” than good
poetry. Yet if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before writing
this I have been listening to a couple of BBC comedians doing their usual turn before the
9 o’clock news. In the last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces
that he “wants to be serious for a moment” and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic
balderdash entitled “A Fine Old English Gentleman”, in praise of His Majesty the King.
Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort of
rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there would be a sufficient
volume of indignant letters to stop the BBC doing this kind of thing. One must conclude



that though the big public is hostile to POETRY, it is not strongly hostile to VERSE.
After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty
limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with untelligibility,
intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name
creates in advance the same sort of bad impression as the word “God”, or a parson’s dog-
collar. To a certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of breaking down an acquired
inhibition. It is a question of getting people to listen instead of uttering a mechanical
raspberry. If true poetry could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it
seem NORMAL, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably seemed
normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some deliberate
effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge.
T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back
into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might
have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been
completely explored. “Sweeney Agonistes” was perhaps written with some such idea in
mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a
revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its
technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why
such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine
the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the
stuff that does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and conclude that it
is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls
up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three
of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped
trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the
use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something
inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and
transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under
the control of governments or great monopoly companies which are actively interested in
maintaining the STATUS QUO and therefore in preventing the common man from
becoming too intelligent. Something of the same kind has happened to the cinema, which,
like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is



fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar. More and more
the channels of production are under the control of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy
the artist or at least to castrate him. This would be a bleak outlook if it were not that the
totalitarianisation which is now going on, and must undoubtedly continue to go on, in
every country of the world, is mitigated by another process which it was not easy to
foresee even as short a time as five years ago.

This is, that the huge bureaucratic machines of which we are all part are beginning to
work creakily because of their mere size and their constant growth. The tendency of the
modem state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every
state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an
intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. The modern state needs, for example, pamphlet-
writers, poster artists, illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song
composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists, bio-
chemists, mathematicians and what not. The British Government started the present war
with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of
it; yet after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political
history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC and even
those who enter the armed forces tend to find themselves after a while in Public Relations
or some other essentially literary job. The Government has absorbed these people,
unwillingly enough, because it found itself unable to get on without them. The ideal,
from the official point of view, would have been to put all publicity into the hands of
“safe” people like A. P. Herbert or Ian Hay: but since not enough of these were available,
the existing intelligentsia had to be utilised, and the tone and even to some extent the
content of official propaganda have been modified accordingly. No one acquainted with
the Government pamphlets, ABCA (The Army Bureau of Current Affairs. ) lectures,
documentary films and broadcasts to occupied countries which have been issued during
the past two years imagines that our rulers would sponsor this kind of thing if they could
help it. Only, the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and
forgotten corners there are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a
despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition,
bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete. The striped-trousered ones will rule,
but so long as they are forced to maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia will have a
certain amount of autonomy. If the Government needs, for example, documentary films,



it must employ people specially interested in the technique of the film, and it must allow
them the necessary minimum of freedom; consequently, films that are all wrong from the
bureaucratic point of view will always have a tendency to appear. So also with painting,
photography, scriptwriting, reportage, lecturing and all the other arts and half-arts of
which a complex modem state has need.

The application of this to the radio is obvious. At present the loudspeaker is the enemy of
the creative writer, but this may not necessarily remain true when the volume and scope
of broadcasting increase. As things are, although the BBC does keep up a feeble show of
interest in contemporary literature, it is harder to capture five minutes on the air in which
to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned
music, stale jokes, faked “discussions” or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may
alter in the way I have indicated, and when that time comes serious experiment in the
broadcasting of verse, with complete disregard for the various hostile influences which
prevent any such thing at present, would become possible. I don’t claim it as certain that
such an experiment would have very great results. The radio was bureaucratised so early
in its career that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been
thought out. It is not certain that the microphone is the instrument by which poetry could
be brought back to the common people and it is not even certain that poetry would gain
by being more of a spoken and less of a written thing. But I do urge that these
possibilities exist, and that those who care for literature might turn their minds more often
to this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been obscured by
the voices of Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels.


W B YEATS (1943)

One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connection
between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be
explained in sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such
connection there must be. One knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like
Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though HOW one knows it is not
easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection between his
wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of life. Mr Menon is



chiefly concerned with the esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats’s work, but the
quotations which are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how
artificial Yeats’s manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as
Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in
fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an
archaism or an affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:


Grant me an old man’s Frenzy,

My self must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.

The unnecessary “that” imports a feeling of affectation, and the same tendency is present
in all but Yeats’s best passages. One is seldom long away from a suspicion of
“quaintness”, something that links up not only with the ‘nineties, the Ivory Tower and the
“calf covers of pissed-on green”, but also with Rackham’s drawings, Liberty art-fabrics
and the PETER PAN never-never land, of which, after all, “The Happy Townland” is
merely a more appetising example. This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats
gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce
phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly
overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that
poets do not use poetical language:

How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,

Beyond hearing or seeing,

Or Archimedes’ guess,

To raise into being
That loveliness?

Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like “loveliness” and after all it does
not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort
of raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems.



For instance (I am quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD:


Once when midnight smote the air
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by;

Even like these to rail and sweat,

Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready made and
produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in this short poem there are six or
seven unnecessary words. It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.

Mr Menon’s book is incidentally a short biography of Yeats, but he is above all interested
in Yeats’s philosophical “system”, which in his opinion supplies the subject-matter of
more of Yeats’s poems than is generally recognised. This system is set forth
fragmentarily in various places, and at full length in A VISION, a privately printed book
which I have never read but which Mr Menon quotes from extensively. Yeats gave
conflicting accounts of its origin, and Mr Menon hints pretty broadly that the
“documents” on which it was ostensibly founded were imaginary. Yeats’s philosophical
system, says Mr Menon, “was at the back of his intellectual life almost from the
beginning. His poetry is full of it. Without it his later poetry becomes almost completely
unintelligible. ” As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the
middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation,
disembodied spirits, astrology and what not. Yeats hedges as to the literalness with which
he believed in all this, but he certainly dabbled in spiritualism and astrology, and in
earlier life had made experiments in alchemy. Although almost buried under
explanations, very difficult to understand, about the phases of the moon, the central idea
of his philosophical system seems to be our old friend, the cyclical universe, in which
everything happens over and over again. One has not, perhaps, the right to laugh at Yeats
for his mystical beliefs — for I believe it could be shown that SOME degree of belief in
magic is almost universal — but neither ought one to write such things off as mere
unimportant eccentricities. It is Mr Menon’s perception of this that gives his book its
deepest interest. “In the first flush of admiration and enthusiasm,” he says, “most people
dismissed the fantastical philosophy as the price we have to pay for a great and curious



intellect. One did not quite realise where he was heading. And those who did, like Pound
and perhaps Eliot, approved the stand that he finally took. The first reaction to this did
not come, as one might have expected, from the politically-minded young English poets.
They were puzzled because a less rigid or artificial system than that of A VISION might
not have produced the great poetry of Yeats’s last days. ” It might not, and yet Yeats’s
philosophy has some very sinister implications, as Mr Menon points out.

Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of his life,
and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach
Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern world,
science, machinery, the concept of progress — above all, of the idea of human equality.
Much of the imagery of his work is feudal, and it is clear that he was not altogether free
from ordinary snobbishness. Eater these tendencies took clearer shape and led him to “the
exultant acceptance of authoritarianism as the only solution. Even violence and tyranny
are not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become
perfectly acquiescent to tyranny. . . . Everything must come from the top. Nothing can
come from the masses. ” Not much interested in politics, and no doubt disgusted by his
brief incursions into public life, Yeats nevertheless makes political pronouncements. He
is too big a man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he foretells in a
justly famous passage (“The Second Coming”) the kind of world that we have actually
moved into. But he appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be “hierarchical,
masculine, harsh, surgical”, and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian
Fascist writers. He describes the new civilisation which he hopes and believes will arrive:
“an aristocratic civilisation in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical,
every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few
men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God
dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made
law. ” The innocence of this statement is as interesting as its snobbishness. To begin with,
in a single phrase, “great wealth in a few men’s hands”, Yeats lays bare the central reality
of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up. The merely
political Fascist claims always to be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance
that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason. But at the same time he
fails to see that the new authoritarian civilisation, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or
what he means by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces, but



by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters. Others
who have made the same mistake have afterwards changed their views and one ought not
to assume that Yeats, if he had lived longer, would necessarily have followed his friend
Pound, even in sympathy. But the tendency of the passage I have quoted above is
obvious, and its complete throwing overboard of whatever good the past two thousand
years have achieved is a disquieting symptom.

How do Yeat’s political ideas link up with his leaning towards occultism? It is not clear
at first glance why hatred of democracy and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing
should go together. Mr Menon only discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible to
make two guesses. To begin with, the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is
one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that “all this”,
or something like it, “has happened before”, then science and the modem world are
debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It does not much
matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be
returning to an age of tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook. If the universe
is moving round on a wheel, the future must be foreseeable, perhaps even in some detail.
It is merely a question of discovering the laws of its motion, as the early astronomers
discovered the solar year. Believe that, and it becomes difficult not to believe in astrology
or some similar system. A year before the war, examining a copy of GRINGOIRE, the
French Fascist weekly, much read by anny officers, I found in it no less than thirty-eight
advertisements of clairvoyants.
Secondly, the very concept of occultism carries with it the
idea that knowledge must be a secret thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the
same idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of universal suffrage,
popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a
predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the
profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.

No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different times many different
opinions, some enlightened, some not. Mr Menon repeats for him Eliot’s claim that he
had the longest period of development of any poet who has ever lived. But there is one
thing that seems constant, at least in all of his work that I can remember, and that is his
hatred of modern western civilisation and desire to return to the Bronze Age, or perhaps
to the Middle Ages. Like all such thinkers, he tends to write in praise of ignorance. The



Fool in his remarkable play, THE HOUR-GLASS, is a Chestertonian figure, “God’s
fool”, the “natural born innocent”, who is always wiser than the wise man. The
philosopher in the play dies on the knowledge that all his lifetime of thought has been
wasted (I am quoting from memory again):

The stream of the world has changed its course, And with the stream my thoughts have
run Into some cloudly, thunderous spring That is its mountain-source; Ay, to a frenzy of
the mind, That all that we have done’s undone Our speculation but as the wind.

Beautiful words, but by implication profoundly obscurantist and reactionary; for if it is
really true that a village idiot, as such, is wiser than a philosopher, then it would be better
if the alphabet had never been invented. Of course, all praise of the past is partly
sentimental, because we do not live in the past. The poor do not praise poverty. Before
you can despise the machine, the machine must set you free from brute labour. But that is
not to say that Yeats’s yearning for a more primitive and more hierarchical age was not
sincere. How much of all this is traceable to mere snobbishness, product of Yeats’s own
position as an impoverished offshoot of the aristocracy, is a different question. And the
connection between his obscurantist opinions and his tendency towards “quaintness” of
language remains to be worked out; Mr Menon hardly touches upon it.

This is a very short book, and I would greatly like to see Mr Menon go ahead and write
another book on Yeats, starting where this one leaves off. “If the greatest poet of our
times is exultantly ringing in an era of Fascism, it seems a somewhat disturbing
symptom,” he says on the last page, and leaves it at that. It is a disturbing symptom,
because it is not an isolated one. By and large the best writers of our time have been
reactionary in tendency, and though Fascism does not offer any real return to the past,
those who yearn for the past will accept Fascism sooner than its probable alternatives.
But there are other lines of approach, as we have seen during the past two or three years.
The relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs
investigating, and Yeats might well be the starting-point. He is best studied by someone
like Mr Menon, who can approach a poet primarily as a poet, but who also knows that a
writer’s political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but
something that will leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work.



ARTHUR KOESTLER (1944)


One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which
it has been dominated by foreigners — for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce,
Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national prestige and
examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that
England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as
political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has
arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading
novels, autobiographies, books of “reportage”, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets
can ah be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the
same emotional atmosphere.

Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux,
Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative
writers, some not, but they are ah alike in that they are trying to write contemporary
history, but UNOFFICIAL history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied
about in the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans. It may be
an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book dealing
with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still seems worth reading six months
after publication, it is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers,
over the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political literature, but
they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value, and very little of historical value
either. The Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of
its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Gennany, Soviet Russia,
Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia — all that these and kindred subjects have
produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which
propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few
reliable guide books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance,
FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English writer to
whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In Europe, during the past
decade and more, things have been happening to middle-class people which in England
do not even happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I mentioned
above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to



engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles,
many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with false
names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in
activities of that kind. England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-
camp literature. The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion,
torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of,
but it has made very little emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in
England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. There is the
attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is the attitude of uncritical admiration, but very
little in between. Opinion on the Moscow sabotage trials, for instance, was divided, but
divided chiefly on the question of whether the accused were guilty. Few people were able
to see that, whether justified or not, the trials were an unspeakable horror. And English
disapproval of the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal thing, turned on and off like a
tap according to political expediency. To understand such things one has to be able to
imagine oneself as the victim, and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be
as unlikely an accident as for a slave-trader to write UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.

Koestler’s published work really centres about the Moscow trials. His main theme is the
decadence of revolutions owing to the corrupting effects of power, but the special nature
of the Stalin dictatorship has driven him back into a position not far removed from
pessimistic Conservatism. I do not know how many books he has written in all. He is a
Hungarian whose earlier books were written in Gennan, and five books have been
published in England: SPANISH TESTAMENT, THE GLADIATORS, DARKNESS AT
NOON, SCUM. OF THE EARTH, and ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE. The subject-
matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages
from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five books, the action of three takes place
entirely or almost entirely in prison.

In the opening months of the Spanish civil war Koestler was the NEWS CHRONICLE’S
correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937 he was taken prisoner when the Fascists
captured Malaga. He was nearly shot out of hand, then spent some months imprisoned in
a fortress, listening every night to the roar of rifle fire as batch after batch of Republicans
was executed, and being most of the time in acute danger of execution himself. This was
not a chance adventure which “might have happened to anybody”, but was in accordance



with Koestler’s life-style. A politically indifferent person would not have been in Spain at
that date, a more cautious observer would have got out of Malaga before the Fascists
arrived, and a British or American newspaper man would have been treated with more
consideration. The book that Koestler wrote about this, SPANISH TESTAMENT, has
remarkable passages, but apart from the scrappiness that is usual in a book of reportage, it
is definitely false in places. In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the
nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the rest of the book is too
much coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even
look as though they had been doctored for the purposes of the Left Book Club. At that
time Koestler still was, or recently had been, a member of the Communist Party, and the
complex politics of the civil war made it impossible for any Communist to write honestly
about the internal struggle on the Government side. The sin of nearly all left-wingers
from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-
totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so. He came
much nearer to saying it — indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to do so — in his
next book, THE GLADIATORS, which was published about a year before the war and
for some reason attracted very little attention.

THE GLADIATORS is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is about Spartacus, the
Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves’ rebellion in Italy round about 65 BC, and any
book on such a subject is handicapped by challenging comparison with SALAMMBO. In
our own age it would not be possible to write a book like SALAMMBO even if one had
the talent. The great thing about Salammbo, even more important than its physical detail,
is its utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself into the stony cruelty of antiquity,
because in the mid-nineteenth century one still had peace of mind. One had time to travel
in the past. Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be escaped from,
and if one bothers with history it is in order to find modem meanings there. Koestler
makes Spartacus into an allegorical figure, a primitive version of the proletarian dictator.
Whereas Flaubert has been able, by a prolonged effort of the imagination, to make his
mercenaries truly pre-Christian, Spartacus is a modem man dressed up. But this might
not matter if Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory means. Revolutions always
go wrong — that is the main theme. It is on the question of WHY they go wrong that he
falters, and his uncertainty enters into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic
and unreal.



For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly successful. Their numbers swell to a
hundred thousand, they overrun great areas of Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive
expedition after another, they ally themselves with the pirates who at that time were the
masters of the Mediterranean, and finally they set to work to build a city of their own, to
be named the City of the Sun. In this city human beings are to be free and equal, and
above all, they are to be happy: no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no floggings, no
executions. It is the dream of a just society which seems to haunt the human imagination
ineradicably and in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless
society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once existed in the past and
from which we have degenerated. Needless to say, the slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner
have they formed themselves into a community than their way of life turns out to be as
unjust, laborious and fear-ridden as any other. Even the cross, symbol of slavery, has to
be revived for the punishment of malefactors. The turning-point comes when Spartacus
finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and most faithful followers. After
that the City of the Sun is doomed, the slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last
fifteen thousand of them being captured and crucified in one batch.

The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of Spartacus himself are never
made clear. The Roman lawyer Fulvius, who joins the rebellion and acts as its chronicler,
sets forth the familiar dilemma of ends and means. You can achieve nothing unless you
are willing to use force and cunning, but in using them you pervert your original aims.
Spartacus, however, is not represented as power hungry, nor, on the other hand, as a
visionary. He is driven onwards by some obscure force which he does not understand,
and he is frequently in two minds as to whether it would not be better to throw up the
whole adventure and flee to Alexandria while the going is good. The slaves’ republic is in
any case wrecked rather by hedonism than by the struggle for power. The slaves are
discontented with their liberty because they still have to work, and the final break-up
happens because the more turbulent and less civilised slaves, chiefly Gauls and Germans,
continue to behave like bandits after the republic has been established. This may be a true
account of events — naturally we know very little about the slave rebellions of antiquity —
but by allowing the Sun City to be destroyed because Crixus the Gaul cannot be
prevented from looting and raping, Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If
Spartacus is the prototype of the modem revolutionary — and obviously he is intended as
that — he should have gone astray because of the impossibility of combining power with



righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure, acted upon rather than acting, and
at times not convincing. The story partly fails because the central problem of revolution
has been avoided or, at least, has not been solved.

It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book, Koestler’s masterpiece,
DARKNESS AT NOON. Here, however, the story is not spoiled, because it deals with
individuals and its interest is psychological. It is an episode picked out from a
background that does not have to be questioned. DARKNESS AT NOON describes the
imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately
confesses to crimes which he is well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness, the
lack of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the story is told, show the
advantage, when one is handling a theme of this kind, of being a European. The book
reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have
made it into a polemical tract. Koestler has digested his material and can treat it on the
aesthetic level. At the same time his handling of it has a political implication, not
important in this case but likely to be damaging in later books.

Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did Rubashov confess? He is
not guilty — that is, not guilty of anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin
regime. The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed to have engaged are all
imaginary. He has not even been tortured, or not very severely. He is worn down by
solitude, toothache, lack of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous
questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to overcome a hardened
revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done worse to him without breaking his spirit.
The confessions obtained in the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:

1 . That the accused were guilty.

2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats to relatives and friends.

3 . That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit of loyalty to the
Party.

For Koestler’s purpose in DARKNESS AT NOON 1 is ruled out, and though this is not
the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must add that what little verifiable evidence



there is suggests that the trials of the Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the
accused were not guilty — at any rate, not guilty of the particular things they confessed
to — then 2 is the common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for 3, which is
also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his pamphlet CAUCHEMAR EN
URSS. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot find in his own mind any
reason for not doing so. Justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning
for him. For decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party now
demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he had to be
bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his decision to confess. He feels
superior to the poor Czarist officer who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov
by tapping on the wall. The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that Rubashov
intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his “bourgeois” angle, everyone ought to stick to
his guns, even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think right.
“Honour is to be useful without fuss,” Rubashov taps back; and he reflects with a certain
satisfaction that he is tapping with his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is
tapping with a monocle. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is “looking out upon black darkness”.
What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion of good and evil, for the sake of
which he can defy the Party and endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also
hollow. He has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being
perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the Party in Nazi Germany, he
has got rid of disobedient followers by betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough,
if he has any inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of his boyhood when he was
the son of a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he is shot from behind, is the
leaves of poplar trees on his father’s estate. Rubashov belongs to the older generation of
Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and
of the world outside Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young GPU man who
conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical “good party man”, completely without
scruples or curiosity, a thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have
the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a blank sheet when the Party got
hold of it. His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.

One cannot, I think, argue that DARKNESS AT NOON is simply a story dealing with the
adventures of an imaginary individual. Clearly it is a political book, founded on history
and offering an interpretation of disputed events. Rubashov might be called Trotsky,



Bukharin Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks.
If one writes about the Moscow trials one must answer the question, “Why did the
accused confess? ” and which answer one makes is a political decision. Koestler answers,
in effect, “Because these people had been rotted by the Revolution which they served”,
and in doing so he comes near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad. If one
assumes that the accused in the Moscow trials were made to confess by means of some
kind of terrorism, one is only saying that one particular set of revolutionary leaders has
gone astray. Individuals, and not the situation, are to blame. The implication of Koestler’s
book, however, is that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin: or rather,
only better in that his outlook is still partly pre-revolutionary. Revolution, Koestler seems
to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter into the Revolution and you must end up as
either Rubashov or Gletkin. It is not merely that “power corrupts”: so also do the ways of
attaining power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society BY VIOLENT MEANS lead
to the cellars of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble
Stalin if he had happened to survive.

Of course, Koestler does not say this quite explicitly, and perhaps is not altogether
conscious of it. He is writing about darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon.
Part of the time he feels that things might have turned out differently. The notion that so-
and-so has “betrayed”, that things have only gone wrong because of individual
wickedness, is ever present in left-wing thought. Later, in ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE, Koestler swings over much further towards the anti-revolutionary
position, but in between these two books there is another, SCUM OF THE EARTH,
which is straight autobiography and has only an indirect bearing upon the problems
raised by DARKNESS AT NOON. True to his life-style, Koestler was caught in France
by the outbreak of war and, as a foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly
arrested and interned by the Daladier Government. He spent the first nine months of war
mostly in a prison camp, then, during the collapse of France, escaped and travelled by
devious routes to England, where he was once again thrown into prison as an enemy
alien. This time he was soon released, however. The book is a valuable piece of
reportage, and together with a few other scraps of honest writing that happened to be
produced at the time of the debacle, it is a reminder of the depths that bourgeois
democracy can descend to. At this moment, with France newly liberated and the witch-
hunt after collaborators in full swing, we are apt to forget that in 1940 various observers



on the spot considered that about forty per cent of the French population was either
actively pro-German or completely apathetic. Truthful war books are never acceptable to
non-combatants, and Koestler’s book did not have a very good reception. Nobody came
well out of it — neither the bourgeois politicians, whose idea of conducting an anti-Fascist
war was to jail every left-winger they could lay their hands on, nor the French
Communists, who were effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage the French war
effort, nor the common people, who were just as likely to follow mountebanks like Doriot
as responsible leaders. Koestler records some fantastic conversations with fellow victims
in the concentration camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class Socialists and
Communists, he had never made contact with real proletarians, only with the educated
minority. He draws the pessimistic conclusion: “Without education of the masses, no
social progress; without social progress, no education of the masses”. In SCUM OF THE
EARTH Koestler ceases to idealise the common people. He has abandoned Stalinism, but
he is not a Trotskyist either. This is the book’s real link with ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE, in which what is normally called a revolutionary outlook is dropped,
perhaps for good.

ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE is not a satisfactory book. The pretence that it is a novel
is very thin; in effect it is a tract purporting to show that revolutionary creeds are
rationalisations of neurotic impulses. With all too neat a symmetry, the book begins and
ends with the same action — a leap into a foreign country. A young ex-Communist who
has made his escape from Hungary jumps ashore in Portugal, where he hopes to enter the
service of Britain, at that time the only power fighting against Gennany. His enthusiasm
is somewhat cooled by the fact that the British Consulate is uninterested in him and
almost ignores him for a period of several months, during which his money runs out and
other astuter refugees escape to America. He is successively tempted by the World in the
form of a Nazi propagandist, the Flesh in the form of a French girl, and — after a nervous
breakdown — the Devil in the form of a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst drags out of
him the fact that his revolutionary enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in
historical necessity, but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in early
childhood to blind his baby brother. By the time that he gets an opportunity of serving the
Allies he has lost all reason for wanting to do so, and he is on the point of leaving for
America when his irrational impulses seize hold of him again. In practice he cannot
abandon the struggle. When the book ends, he is floating down in a parachute over the



dark landscape of his native country, where he will be employed as a secret agent of
Britain.

As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this is insufficient. Of course it
is true in many cases, and it may be true in all cases, that revolutionary activity is the
result of personal maladjustment. Those who struggle against society are, on the whole,
those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy people are no more attracted by
violence and illegality than they are by war. The young Nazi in ARRIVAL AND
DEPARTURE makes the penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with the left-
wing movement by the ugliness of its women. But after all, this does not invalidate the
Socialist case. Actions have results, irrespective of their motives. Marx’s ultimate
motives may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that his conclusions
were false. In making the hero of ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE take his final decision
from a mere instinct not to shirk action and danger, Koestler is making him suffer a
sudden loss of intelligence. With such a history as he has behind him, he would be able to
see that certain things have to be done, whether our reasons for doing them are “good” or
“bad”. History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by
neurotics. In ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE Peter’s idols are overthrown one after the
other. The Russian Revolution has degenerated, Britain, symbolised by the aged consul
with gouty fingers, is no better, the international class-conscious proletariat is a myth. But
the conclusion (since, after all, Koestler and his hero “support” the war) ought to be that
getting rid of Hitler is still a worth-while objective, a necessary bit of scavenging in
which motives are almost irrelevant.

To take a rational political decision one must have a picture of the future. At present
Koestler seems to have none, or rather to have two which cancel out. As an ultimate
objective he believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to
establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious
heretics for hundreds of years. But his intelligence tells him that the Earthly Paradise is
receding into the far distance and that what is actually ahead of us is bloodshed, tyranny
and privation. Recently he described himself as a “short-term pessimist”.