STEPHEN KOCH
33
1929, Willi assigned his man to be administrator and agent-in-place at
Universum Bucherei,
his book club in Berlin. The Left Book Club was
more or less a cookie-cutter version of
Universum Bucherei.
The front men, of course, were English: John Strachey, Harold Laski,
and Victor Gollancz. Of this trio, Strachey was a witting agent; Victor
Gollancz almost certainly so, and Laski a very sophisticated innocent.*
With Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the intensely ambitious Strachey became
the leading publicist for Stalinist intellectual chic of England and front
man for the Anti-War International.
Strachey's biographer says Strachey invariably consulted with Harry
Pollitt and "the British communist party" before making his selections for
the LBC. No doubt, but Harry Pollitt was a notoriously rough diamond.
He knew nothing about the rarified literary and intellectual politics in
which the Left Book Club trafficked. The man who really understood
these matters was Katz, and from its very first listing the Left Book Club's
agenda was a direct reflection of the current concerns of Miinzenberg's
Paris office, which Katz ran: a book by Rudolf Olden - a longtime
Miinzenberg collaborator - and a British translation of Malraux's
Days of
Contempt,
which had been written to order for Miinzenberg with the
steady "assistance" of two Otto Katz minions, Manes Sperber and Willi
Bredel. Besides this, under a number of pseudonyms ("O.K. Simon")
Otto also wrote a number of the club's featured, though long-forgotten,
selections.
So Otto was at the least a tutelary spirit for the LBC, and probably
more.
The name - Left
Book
Club - misleads a little: Like
Universum
Bucherei,
it was much more than British communism's bookshop by mail.
It
was how Stalinist opinion was "networked" in England. The Club of–
fered Miinzenberg's familiar array of camps and conferences and propa–
ganda tours of the USSR, and it organized the usual cadres for directing
*
That John Strachey was a witting member of the Soviet apparatus seems to me plainly
demonstrated by his position in the Anti-War International, and Strachey's action (as de–
scribed by John Lehmann in a letter to Andrew Boyle), at the time of the attempt to re–
cruit Lehmann for work in espionage during the Viennese propaganda campaign of 1934.
(See
The Climate
of
Reason
by Andrew Boyle. London: Coronet (revised edition), 1980,
pp.lOS-106.) But few observers would doubt Strachey's deep involvement at this late date.
The case of Gollancz is perhaps more controversial. During the years of the LBC, Gollancz
was at the very least a fellow traveller who was very reliably responsive to the needs of the
Parry, and to Strachey's direction. My guess, based on two recent studies, is that he was
more than that (see
Intellectuals
by Paul Johnson. New York: Harper and Row, 1988, and
Victor Gollancz: A Biography
by Ruth Dudley Edwards. London: Gollanca, 1987).
