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PARTISAN REVIEW
ogy at hand was Communism, and its practice was based precisely on
the postulate that insisting on a formal accord between ideals and
action was a silly prejudice, the only truth that mattered being the
permanence of the Party and of the Socialist Fatherland behind it.
Throughout the process, there was never time to indulge in the
search for Cartesian clarity. It was not even a matter of choosing the
lesser evil, but whatever the choice (and because one was too passionate
to remain inert), of following a certain course of action. Which one,
was finally a question of what people one liked best, what kind of lan–
guage one preferred to hear spoken. The essential value was loyalty,
not truth. Hope too, of course. What came was a form of lesser evil:
the Fourth Republic and another emergency: the cold war, with its
imperative choice between "the gray and the black." "Thinking it
over" seems, again, to
be
out of the question.
It is not unimaginable that the boy I saw in Toulouse in 1940 was
one of the students who, after the publication of
Darkness at Noon
in
French, wrote Arthur Koestler three letters whose content Denis de
Rougemont, in a recent article, summarizes as follows: "Sir, I consider
your description of Stalinism accurate. As a consequence, I am becoming
a member of the Communist Party. What I was looking for was,
ill
fact, precisely that kind of discipline, and efficacy."
It is not unimaginable either, however, that the young man in
question would today agree with the remarks I heard recently from a
friend of mine, an intellectual who, after having taken a heroic part
in the Resistance, has completely withdrawn from any political activity,
works hard to earn a living by writing short stories and articles for the
illustrated weeklies, and, at the same time,
is
curiously bent on develop–
ing a morality of his own and, so to speak, for his own consumption.
"The first thing I have to say is that I consider myself an average man,
a man, that is, without any direct contact with such things as first prin–
ciples and truth. More particularly, I consider myself incompetent in
matters of government policies. As an intellectual I might, at times,
feel more ambitious. But I have a wife and two children, and support
them producing literary contrivances which I
try
to render as harm–
less as I can, and which have no connection with serious values.
If
I
did not consider that
this
compromise
is
incompatible with the pursuit
of moral and intellectual truth, I would be a hypocrite. But
if
I simply
resigned myself to mediocrity and conformism, I would be a coward.
What can I do then,
if
not try to be honest, carry on a kind of per–
sonal resistance against the inertia of the everyday? Trying to be honest,
I have adopted the principle of never going in words beyond what I
