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PARTISAN REVIEW
Shields Goldsborough, whose incredible Foreign News section had built
up Mussolini and Franco. For many years now the Lucepapers, while
they have favored Chiang Kai-shek, General MacArthur, and the Re–
publicans, have also been consistently favorable to civil liberties and ra–
cial equality and have opposed McCarthyism. The real trouble with
Time
and
Life,
as with other big-circulation organs, is cultural rather
than ideological. They are edited according to superficial formulae de–
signed to sell not capitalism but papers. In a sense, they are
too
demo–
cratic: they try so hard to titillate and entertain a mass audience that
they cannot tell much of the truth. Not because they suppress it, but
because it hardly ever happens to fit the Procrustean bed of their tech–
nique. How can
Time
get very close to reality when every story has to
be
tailored and tortured into a little drama, with an angle, a climax,
an arresting lead, and a "kicker" at the end? Or when, to make the
news "vivid," issues are systematically reduced to personalities, so that
one learns that Eden wore a derby and Dulles chainsmoked but not
what the conference meant.
The chief evidence, however, that Mr. Wertenbaker gives of Baron's
fall from grace is his mean-spirited suspicion of Soviet Communism.
When the publisher asks Berkeley, the "point-of-view" character in the
book and as muttonheaded a progressive as I have encountered since
the Wallace campaign, apropos a colleague accused of having been a
Soviet spy, "How do you know what a traitor is?", Berkeley replies: "In
your guts. That's what they're for." This reply is a stylistic and intellec–
tual epitome of the
book.
A clause beginning with "in" doesn't quite fit
as an answer to "how." And guts are to digest food, not to think with.
It was the Nazis who did their thinking with their blood, and it isn't
much better to think with one's stomach. Viz. :
Berkeley's attitude toward Russia, like that of many of his country–
men in high places and low, had developed less through the intellect
than through the generous emotions. He had little real knowledge on
which to base an intellectual judgment; all he could believe with cer–
tainty was that Russia's leaders would go to any length to preserve what
they had won by revolution. When he compared the noble professions
of that revolution with its assault on man's painfully built moral struc–
ture, he could not but feel that the ideal had been degraded almost
past redemption. But when he read how bravely millions of people were
suffering and dying to save it, when he read into the actions of the
Russian rulers a greater tolerance of democratic ways, he could not
but hope that the ideal might yet be redeemed, and that the two great
revolutionary nations [i.e., the USA and the USSR] might pursue sim–
ilar ends,
if
not in similar ways, at least with a similar regard for
human dignity.
