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G. S. FRASER
erally interesting, or more easily briefly discussable, as did also the
pieces on
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
and Marilyn Monroe. What
struck me as odd and interesting about these pieces was again the need
to judge, to re-try, as it were, Hiss and Oppenheimer, who had already
been tried, not to say punished, and to confirm Hiss's condemnation,
and to give Oppenheimer a kind of half-acquittal: he ought not to have
been starry-eyed about the Soviet Union during the Second World War,
even though official propaganda was starry-eyed, even though President
Roosevelt, at Yalta, say, might have seemed starry-eyed too.
It
was
Oppenheimer's business to be wiser and more far-sighted than his
Government, even though the amount of time he could spare for thinking
about politics in the forties cannot have been high. I was struck both
by
Mrs. Trilling's courage in declaring against Hiss, when to do so must
have made her very unpopular among what she would call conformist
liberals; and yet struck also that she did not consider what seems to me
the most interesting possibility, that Hiss really was a fellow-traveler,
and that Chambers knew it and (a new fanaticism being just as un–
scrupulous as an old one) had no hesitation in framing him. She talks
in these essays about "Communism," the abstraction, as being "intoler–
able," and I wondered whether it had occurred to her what terribly
plausible cases can be made out against Judaism, Christianity, Islam as
"intolerable." Carlyle in
The French Revolution
asks whether Egalite
Orleans had no virtue: "Yes, virtue enough to stay alive in the world for
forty-seven years." The Soviet system has had virtue enough to stay
alive in the world for forty-seven years and I wondered whether, in her
rigorous need to judge, Mrs. TriIIing had made allowance enough for
the basic virtue-a certain coherence or toughness-that must be al–
lowed to all systems and attitudes that have the mere power of persisting.
It seemed odd that she should write a long article on the Profumo
case--out of a need to judge British decadence, I think--out of mere
newspaper information. Here is something, which I learned quite
by
accident the other day, which might slightly shift her perspective: Mr.
and Mrs. Profumo have recently been devoting the best part of their
time to social work in England, among underprivileged young people, of
an arduous, useful, and totally unpublicized sort. Mrs. Trilling seems
to
have this need to judge, and to judge absolutely, even where she
admits that she is not specially qualified: she is asking herself whether
Marilyn Monroe in the fullest sense committed suicide:
I am not a psychiatrist and I never knew Marilyn Monroe,
but it seems to me. . .
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