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PARTISAN REVIEW
ion in Harlem and Bloomsbury restates a scruffy little incident in a
backward state "in ideological form":
Smiles represented international finance, the subjugation of the
worker, sacerdotalism; Ishmaelia was black, collective security
and democracy and the dictatorship of the Proletariat was
black. ... A subscription-list was opened in London , and
received support in chapels and universities ; wide publicity was
given to the receipt in Ishmaelia of three unused penny stamps
addressed to the President by "a little worker's daughter in Bed–
ford Square ."
That charge against the intelligentsia is much like Orwell's in his
celebrated essay on the literary thirties, "Inside the Whale" (1940),
where he quotes a line from W.H. Auden's poem "Spain" (1937)–
"The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder"–
remarking that "it could only be written by a person to whom
murder is at most a word," adding that Auden's amoralism is "only
possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else
when the trigger is pulled." That jibe at Auden's emigration to New
York in January 1939 with Christopher Isherwood was to be echoed
shortly afterwards by Waugh in
Put Out More Flags
(1942), composed
on a troopship , where he calls them Parsnip and Pimpernel. Pre–
sumably Isherwood was Parsnip, as he had a face like that , and
Auden Pimpernel, since he had saved Thomas Mann's daughter
from the Gestapo by contracting a Platonic marriage with much the
same honorable ends in view as the Scarlet Pimpernel. Running
away from a national crisis was conduct that Orwell and Waugh saw
as one.
The large political difference remains. But it may not be too
late to argue that Waugh's reputation for right-wingery , which
Orwell and many since have credited to him, has been a trifle over–
done. In
A Tourist in Africa
(1960) , for example, a travel book written
long before hostility to apartheid was mandatorily fashionable,
Waugh bluntly calls it "racial insanity," since it "fantastically
choose[s] pigmentation as the determining factor"; and he calls
black/white "a preposterous frontier." His mind was conservatively
antimodern rather than right-wing. Still less would he have been at
home today in the new right. Racism is dotty and "rather modern,"
he concludes , meaning Victorian , and his reasons show how distinct
his view is from anything widely prevalent today. Waugh is against
racism because he
isfor
discrimination, and racism, in his view, be-
