370
STEPHEN SPENDER
have seen it as a useful part .of
a.
larger strategy .of help for the
Republican cause, as useful, in its way, as being at the frDnt, though
nDt
so courageDus and praisewDrthy. They alsD serve who only sit
and talk.
The authors .of two books which I have been reading recently
seem
tD
me
tD
take the difference between the situatiDn of the French
and the AnglD-American intellectuals insufficiently into acc,Ount:
The
Reactionaries
by John Harrison,
tD
which I have already referred, and
Writers and Politics
by Conor Cruise O'Brien.8
O'Brien is at his brilliant best when he is discussing French
writers: e.g., the shift in Camus' earlier revolutionary position to the
resigned pessimism of
La Chute,
written when he refused to take sides
over the Algerian War. O'Brien analyzes the relations of Camus with
the general current
.of
French-intellectual life with a precisiDn which
reads like a description of the modifications caused to some receiving
instrument by the electrical impulses passing thrDugh it.
O'Brien quite rightly derides those critics who discovered
Camus
to be ".objectively revolutionary," employing what he calls "the con–
venient principle: 'I know what he thinks: it doesn't matter what
he thinks he thinks.'"
Since he has such insight into the fallaciousness of this principle,
it seems strange that, .on occasion, he employs it himself. In the essay
on Dwight Macdonald
(A New Yorker Critic)
he argues that Mr.
Macdonald in giving up his "socialist past" and writing abDut "masscult,"
"midcult" and the rest fDr
The New Yorker
in effect (and regardless
of what Macdonald may think he thinks) subscribes
tD
the policy of
that magazine, which is a pr.ojectiDn .of the views
.of
its advertisers.
This is the "objective" argument squared.
The New Yorker
is as object
to its backers, and Dwight Macdonald is as object to
The New Yorker.
The insidious nonpolitical policy of
The N ew Yorker
as it operates
subliminally on the mind of Dwight Macdonald works like this:
you could say
almost
anything about Mark Twain, James
Joyce, James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, James Cozzens, Colin
Wilson, the English or revised Bibles, or Webster's
New Inter–
national Dictionary-tD
list most .of Mr. Macdonald's sub–
jects-without causing a
N ew Yorker
reader or advertiser tD
wince.
If,
however, your favourite author happened to be Mao
Tse-tung and Fidel CastrD and you tried to say so in
The
N
e~
,r
orker,
then you would be going "against the American
gram and you would not be likely
tD
gD very far.
3 WRITERS AND POLITICS. By Conor Cruise O'Brien. Alfred A. Knopf.
$4.95.
