WRITERS AND POLITICS
371
This is really a variant of the "objective" argument:
The New
Yorker
is not filled with articles in praise of Mao Tse-tung because
of the invisible thought-control of the advertisers. But supposing, after
all, that
New Yorker
writers don't admire the prose of the Chinese and
Cuban dictators? Should
T he New Yorker
nevertheless contain a quota
of opinions praising it just to prove to Dr. O'Brien that
The New
Yorker
is free from the pressures to which he thinks it is subject? Or
supposing that Dr. O'Brien had suggested some different writers whom
New Yorker
writers would praise if they were free agents-say Hitler
and Trujillo? One only has to suggest this to see the bias of the argu–
ment. Dr. O'Brien is playing on the reader's secret guilt about China
and Cuba. There are I think false steps in O'Brien's attack on Dwight
Macdonald. In the first place, Macdonald was never a party line
socialist revolutionary, he was just a lone rebel all by himself. He
was a highly individualist rebel against American capitalism who
sought allies among Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites. In discussing
him as though he had reneged from revolutionary socialism (perhaps-–
because he is such a nice fellow-without realizing he was doing so),
Dr. O'Brien fails to mention the important statements made by Mac–
donald when he gave up his magazine
Politics,
that in the complexity of
the postwar situation he no longer found it possible to take up clear
positions. He found, as did many other survivors from the simplicist
world of the thirties, that politics had become extremely complicated
and that it was no longer possible to see them in black and white.
O'Brien's case against Camus seems stronger than that against
Macdonald, because the early Camus wrote within the context of the
ideas of the left-wing French intellectuals. Camus' attitude toward
Algeria certainly separated him from Sartre and his followers. It is
plausible then to regard him as abandoning a path followed by leftist
French writers. With Macdonald though, all one can say is that an
independent thinker whose thoughts when he was young were anarchistic
later had other thoughts about other things. The new thoughts were
about culture and not about politics. One mayor may not agree with
them, one mayor may not regret that Macdonald stopped having
things to say about politics, but to say that he changed the content
and the direction of his thinking to suit
The New Yorker
is misleading.
Mr. John Harrison's reactionaries are W. B. Yeats, Wyndham
Lewis, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Harrison knows that
to prove that they are really reactionary, it is not enough to show that
they occasionally labeled themselves so. However he does not altogether
avoid the dangers implicit in compiling lists of their reactionary pro-
