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PARTISAN REVIEW
huge gesture of individuality against the blank and passive anonymity of
mass society.
It has created a kind of moral freemasonry. In the weeks follow–
ing, one was always hearing "Were you on it?" or "How far did you
go?" The "it" never had to be explained. There was a strange moral
and emotional solidarity among the marchers. It had nothing to do with
politics and a great deal to do with the emotional pressures in England.
The Aldermaston march was the most effective and binding release of
resentment against bureaucratic inanity that has occurred in a decade
almost entirely given over to resentment and protest.
Of course, the exhibitionists made the most of the occasion. Last
year the poet I mentioned earlier in this letter organized a little group
which marched under a banner inscribed "Friends of Christopher Logue
Unite." None of them, apparently, saw the joke. This year certain young
ladies from Chelsea-the Debutante-Intellectuals again-dressed them–
selves up in cossack hats and marched barefoot, sucking pipes, in front
of a battery of press cameras. Mercifully they were rare, though numer–
ous enough to gain the march a kind of publicity that has almost per–
suaded the organizers not to stage it again next Easter. Alas, even the
hydrogen bomb is not an effective deterrent weapon against certain
compulsive neuroses.
But there was one official recognition of the vast crowd who
gathered in Trafalgar Square. A few days later in the House of Com–
mons Aneurin Bevan promised to stop nuclear tests if and when the
Labour Party got back into power. His statement could hardly have
come later in the day, but it was better than nothing. Some weeks after
that, however, came the local elections for Borough Councils. Through–
out the country, the vote swung heavily in favor of Conservatives–
perhaps for the first time since Suez. So Labour gauged the strength
of feeling about the H -bomb too late to make any difference. Weare
back where we started, with merely a public protest to the country's
credit. In all fairness to the Conservatives, there are no British atomic
tests being carried out at the moment.
A. Alvarez
