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events, he came out against the Soviet leaders, not merely because
of their
actions in
Hungary, but because they represented "thirty years
of
lies
and ossification."
All
of a sudden he was aware that in Hungary
"terror and stultification had prevailed for twelve years"-but his
long
interview in
L'Express,
in which he formulated his break with the
Party, shows no trace of realization of the obvious fact that his own
support of the Party during the Stalin-Zhdanov era had made him part
of the very "stultification" he was now denouncing. Instead, he de–
clared with professorial assurance that the Marshall Plan was responsible
for the Iron Curtain (without regard for chronology, which does not
confirm this), and that Raymond Aron, according to an entirely un–
confirmed and false word-of-mouth report, had welcomed the Hun–
garian tragedy as a confirmation of his anti-Communism. It was in
those terms, then, without a trace of modesty, that the most prominent
of the fellow travelers broke with Communism. It must be said, how–
ever, that behind these all-too-fluid, all-too-cheap phrases there pulsated
a genuine anger. Sartre sensed that reality had destroyed his theories.
There is also something tortured about the break of the Catholic
novelist and most widely read polemicist of France, Fran<;ois Mauriac,
who, speaking for the Right in his struggle against a reactionary North
African policy, had no enemies among the Left. He had accepted mem–
bership in the executive body of the Communist-directed France-Soviet
Society, and declared in an interview that even though the Russians
could not understand his political essays they had already advanced
so far that they could understand his novels. Now he has resigned
from that society, and has described his two actions-his joining and
his resignation-not as episodes in his personal biography, but as two
turning points in the history of the entire postwar period.
There is a world of difference between the evolutions of the heads
and pens of the "great writers," and the less publicized genuine inner
transformations being effected among many young intellectuals, whose
spiritual home was not fame, but the party as an actually experienced
community. Many have undergone a change of heart these days whose
names do not appear in print; in those w!'J.o write, the style enables
us at once to distinguish a genuine and deep experience from a mere
pirouette, a polemical shift. And it is professed Communists rather than
fellow travelers in whom the transformation is at once a real change
of heart and an enrichment. Here we could mention many names,
which would, however, mean little to the non-French reader. Instead,
let us concentrate on a document that deserves to be included as a
new and significant chapter in the book
The God that Failed.
It comes
