BERNARD CRICK
277
England, though with much intermittent world traveling on the
lecture and conference circuit, albeit now a very critical admirer of
his new homeland as shown in a brilliant and prescient series of
essays in the early 1960s on national character and national decline
(now extracted and retitled "The Lion and the Ostrich"). And the
self-consciously big books began:
The Trail of the Dinosaur
(1955),
The
Sleepwalkers: A History ofMan's Changing View ofthe Universe
(1959),
The
Lotus and the Robot
(1961),
The Act of Creation
(1964),
The Ghost in the
Machine
(1967),
The Case of the Midwife Toad
(1971),
The Roots of
Coincidence
(1972),
The Thirteenth Tribe
(1976), and
Janus: A Summing
Up
(1978). Why, then, has he not summed up ina full-scale auto–
biography, rather than this compromise volume? Or at least
completed the series of the autobiographical books,
Dialogue With
Death
(1941),
Scum
of
the Earth
(1941),
Arrow in the Blue
(1952), and
Invisible Writing
(1954)? He anticipates this obvious question, saying
that despite the pressure of friends and publishers, his life ceased
after 1940 to be a "typical [sic
1
case history of a central European
member of the educated middle class born in the first years of our
century," and therefore ceased to be "of any public interest." The
, nonsequitur is startling! Even if we grant that the Anglicization,
indeed Atlanticization , of such a typical central European bourgeois
is of no public interest, the comment must be made that the
professional writer slides from 'one sense of
public
to another, from
his own former life as a public activist into what about him may be
interesting to his reading public, publicly interesting. This is a cross
that great men have to bear. Before 1940 he was predominantly, but
far from exclusively, interested in public, political affairs; and "after
1940" (although most certainly he predates the change of emphasis),
predominantly interested in strange, difficult, and important
borderlands of psychology, physiology, biology, and philosophy.
But his shift of emphasis was far from exclusive: witness "The God
That Failed" essay; his attempt in 1946-47 to found a "League for
Human Rights" with Gollancz, Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and
others; his roles in P.E.N., UNESCO, and the Campaign for Cul–
tural Freedom; his attacks on national and military misuse of atomic
power; and his prominent role in the campaign in Great Britain for
the abolition of capital punishment. Surely he cannot seriously mean
that there is no public activity worth writing about after 1940, that
the earlier connection between public life and private life (virtually
forced on the prewar European intelligentsia) is severed by settling
in Britain? What he really means is that his private life comes to be
more valuable to him than public, political activities, and that he
