WRITERS AND POLITICS
369
of the Moscow trials. We had the humility to believe that for writers
to be involved in politics was itself a fall from grace. To us part of
the hideousness of Fascism was that it produced anti-Fascism, involving
disinterested artists in interested politics. Reading Auden's poem on
the death of Yeats, in 1939, "Intellectual disgrace/Stares from every
human face," I think of the whole politically involved intellectual life
of that decade, disgraced with ideologies.
However, ,our English and American idea that the intellectuals
should only take political sides in situations providing moral contrasts
of inky black and dazzling white has its disadvantages. For one thing
there is something unserious about a seriousness which is made condi–
tional on things being so serious.
After all, the shining emergent Causes-Spain, the Bomb, Viet–
nam-do have chains of further causality stretching before and after.
That the intellectuals only have time for them when they have be–
come moral scandals might seem to indicate that they do not have
time anyway. The English and American political-unpolitical intel–
lectuals sometime have the look of the gadarene swine hurling them–
selves down the steepest slope: the gadarene swine being of course
in the latest apocalyptic fashion. The cause evaporates when the
crisis in its immediate emanation has passed. The long term causes
of the Cause find few among the English and American intellectuals
to interest them.
In France the intellectuals are, as it were, more or less in
continual session like the British House of Lords. They are sometimes
irresponsible, nearly always narrowly legalistic in their interpretations
of a political line (with that deceptive French "logic") but their con–
cern with politics is sustained and (despite Clive Bell and Roger Fry)
not thought to dishonor their art. They do not have to prove that in
attending a conference about peace or freedom, they are being serious,
whereas the English and Americans are under pressure to show that
when they do take up a cause, they do more about it than travel to
nice places. His biographers note that Julian Bell dismissed "in a few
satirical phrases" the International Writers' Congress which was held
in Madrid in the summer of 1937, while he was driving an ambulance
on the Brunete front. I happened to attend the Congress of Intellectuals
myself and also to have described it satirically (in
Warld within
Warld)
though without Bell's justification that I was carrying a gun
or driving an ambulance. But I don't think any but English and
Americans would have thought that a meeting of writers in Madrid
when shells were falling was a despicable exercise. The French would
