BOOKS
AMBIGUITIES OF FELLOW TRAVELLING
THE FELLOW TRAVELLERS. INTELLECTUAL FRIENDS OF
COMMUNISM. Revised and Updated Edition.
By
David Caute. Yale
University Press. $45.00.
The Fellow Travellers
was first published in 1973 with the subti–
tle, Postscript to the Enlightenment.
It
documented thoughtfully a remarkable
if distasteful chapter in Western intellectual history: the unrestrained
admiration of the Soviet Union under Stalin on the part of important and re–
spected Western intellectuals. The book also included a brief chapter on Mc–
Carthyism entitled, ''The Witch Hunt," which dealt with the persecution of
American communists and fellow travellers. (Subsequently Caute developed
this chapter into a book on the same topic,
The Great Fear: The Anti-Com–
munist Campaign under Truman and Eisenhower,
published in 1978.)
Unhappily, the new edition largely retains the structure of the old ex–
cept for the removal of a chapter on McCarthyism and the addition of brief
chapters on Vietnam and Cuba; the chapter on China has been substantially
expanded. Part Three remains somewhat unfocused and retains the chapter
entitled "The Reckoning," dealing almost exclusively with Sartre; in turn, the
chapter entitled "The Cold War" remains in part a foray into McCarthyism,
in part a description of political conditions after World War II, and includes a
discussion of Ilya Ehrenburg, "Russia's leading fellow traveller" ), bewilder–
ingly enough put into the same conceptual category as Western naifs living in
open societies.
As
is always the case when a first editions is reprinted
"revised and updated," the reviewer and reader are curious to know what
prompted the new edition and in what way do the revisions and updating
make it different from the original one?
In an exceedingly short preface to the new edition, the author ostensi–
bly undertook to explain. But there is little explanation to be found, only off–
the-cuffhints and allusions. Thus the chapter on China was expanded given
the abundance of new material and perhaps also because "there was never
any excuse for romanticizing.....the Cultural Revolution."
As
to the chapter
on Vietnam, there is a one-paragraph discussion of Vietnam in the preface
which notes that during the sixties and seventies it became a "burning issue,"
but there is basically no explanation for why Caute decided to chronicle
