WRITERS AND POLITICS
doing anything "unfair" to an opponent. . . . Whereas for my
own part . . . I can't feel the slightest qualms about the
notion of doing anything effective, however ungentlemanly
and unchristian, nor about admitting to myself that certain
actions would be very unfair indeed. . ' .'
l81
and he ends the same letter with a sentence that is surely very revealing:
I don't feel, myself, as
if
I could ever be satisfied to do any–
thing but produce works of art, or even nothing but leading a
private life and producing works in the intervals.
I do not quote these passages because I
think
them characteristic of
Cornford and Bell (in fact they are hysterical outbursts out of char–
acter) but because of the light which- paradoxically-they throw on
the relationship of the thirties generation with an older one. This
balances the violence of the reactionaries supporting Fascism in the
name of art, against the violence of the leftists prepared to sacrifice
art to the cause of anti-Fascism.
The reactionaries cared passionately for past values. Their nos–
talgia misled them into sympathizing with whatever jack-booted cor–
poral or demagogue set himself up in defense of order. As the history
of Ezra Pound shows, the results of this could be tragic. But they did
put literature before politics, and their first concern was to preserve the
civilization without which, as they thought, neither past nor future
literature could survive. They did not, as the anti-Fascist writers did,
abandon or postpone their literary tasks. For the anti-Fascists allowed
themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be persuaded that civilization could
only be saved by action: the logical consequence of this attitude was
to put writing at the service of necessity as dictated by political leaders.
There was, then, the paradox that the reactionaries who were on
the side of the past, the dead, had to live for the sake of literature,
whereas circumstances drove the most sincere anti-Fascists-men like
Cornford, Bell, Fox and Caudwell- to death as absolution in a cause
which they had made absolute. The reactionaries wrote out of their
tragic sense of modern life. The Cornfords and Bells lived and died
the tragedy.
