LONDON LETTER
249
and the great rally in Trafalgar Square. Success has already
brought problems. The right wing of CND is politicking inside the–
Labour Party with alI the danger of corruption and of watering
down its principles that involves. The left wing, led by Bertrand
RusselI, has split off and formed a Committee of 100 which advo–
cates civil disobedience. The Committee includes Lindsay Ander–
son, John Braine, Reg Butler, Shelagh Delaney, Augustus John,
Christopher Logue, John Osborne, Michael Scott, and Arnold
Wesker. It hopes to get at least 2,000 volunteers to pledge them–
selves to civil disobedience, and, at this writing, it plans to begin in
February with a mass sit-down outside the Ministry of Defence.
The whole spirit is idealistic, moral, and Utopian. But the problem
is itself absolute, involving the possible end of life on this earth,
and so a Utopian approach may be the appropriate one. Also The
Authorities, Eastern or Western, have not come up with any solu–
tions that inspire confidence--that recent episode
in
Colorado,
when the radar signals indicated a nuclear attack and only the
notion of the officer in charge that there may have been a mechani–
cal failure prevented the dispatch of a counter-blow-this sort of
thing doesn't make one feel easy about the practical arrangements
of those in power.
An American girl married to an Englishman recently told me
that what she missed at parties here was general discussion: "It's
always either gossip or shop. They place each other too welI. In
America, we don't know who's who and so we have to make con–
tact through ideas." (I would add that peculiar British suspicion of
ideas, the heritage of centuries of empiricism, shopkeeping and
muddling through.) I thought of this, and also of the American
'thirties, when I attended a discussion last fall at that center of
anti-establishment drama calIed, Englishly enough, the Royal Court
Theatre. The topic was "Political Theatre--Yes or No?" "Yes"
was upheld by Lindsay Anderson, a prominent left wing stage di–
rector, and Arnold Wesker, author of
Roots
and other plays. Two
other playwrights-John Mortimer and Robert Bolt-were supposed
to
say
"No'.' but didn't quite make it; they kept edging over to the
more fashionable "Yes" position. The chairman, who was Kare!'
Reisz, a film director
in
the mode of Wesker's working-class realism,
